Pilot Error (25 page)

She didn't understand. "But it's okay, we're safe now."

"No, we're not." Luke glared at Dirk. "Are we, Bulldog?"

"Luke," Micki chided, "stop it." She glanced at Dirk, expecting him to show no comprehension, but instead she found him looking none too pleased.

"You and I need to have a little talk, Hardigan. About what you know, and who else knows it."

Part of Micki's world caved in. "You? But...? Dirk, please tell me you're not the one behind all this?"

"I'll explain everything to you later," Dirk said, still focused on his more dangerous adversary. He signaled over her shoulder and Reynolds appeared at the back of the van.

"I think you'd better explain it to me now," she insisted.

Instead of answering, Dirk turned his attention to Reynolds. "Where's the dog?"

The fat little man grinned in a way that tore at Micki's gut. "At the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico by now."

Dirk swore under his breath.

"What are you so upset about? I just saved you the trouble of shooting the damn mutt yourself."

"Dirk, you wouldn't!" But when he avoided her eyes, Micki knew that was precisely what he had in mind. "Who are you?" she asked in a low voice, unable to accept that this was the real Dirk; the man she never knew.

Her question drew his gaze back to her, but his eyes had gone cold. "Take her," he ordered.

"Dirk!"

"C'mon," Reynolds said, roughly reaching in to grab her arm. Apparently, he hadn't taken her earlier threat to heart, because the last thing Reynolds expected was the first thing Micki promised she would do. They hadn't taped her feet together like they had with Luke, so as the fat little man tried to manhandle her out of the van, Micki raised her right foot and drove a well aimed kick right between the uprights.

Reynolds howled in agony, and fell back clutching his injury with both hands.

"That one's for Fizz," she said stonily.

"Damn it, Micki," Dirk said angrily, starting to turn to reach for her as well.

Luke was the one she locked gazes with in the confined space of the van, as he shouted, "Get out of here!"

Dirk's hand tightened around her arm even before she could think about moving.

She struggled. "Let me go."

"Carl!" Dirk called for back up.

"Let me go, Dirk!" Micki fought against him, and then squirmed even harder when he wouldn't release her. "You lied to me. For the last three years you've lied to me. Just so I'd fly your damn merchandise to a non-existent aunt in Miami. And what about my plane, huh? Did you put cheap bogus parts in my plane, too? How long have I been flying around in a deathtrap? How many innocent tourists' lives have I put at risk?"

"Micki, I never—"

"You killed Razor!"

That statement had the same effect as if she had physically hit him with a brick. Letting her go, Dirk fell back to sit on the floor of the van beside Luke. His belligerent expression toppled into a beseeching one; he was begging her to forgive him.

"It was an accident. I never meant for Razor to die. I've been using these parts for years and nothing's ever happened. You believe me, don't you?"

"No, I don't believe you! You killed him!" Feeling all the grief and the anger well up inside her again, Micki lashed out with her fists, hitting him square in the chest again and again. "He was our friend, Dirk! Our friend! He trusted you..." But she lost power somewhere during the third or forth swing, and instead she withdrew one hand to her face in an effort to hold back her tears. "And you killed him..."

Sometime during her emotional outburst, a recovered-but-still-smarting Reynolds had returned to the rear of the van. "I say we lock her in the hold with the rest of the cargo, and decide what to do with her at 30,000 feet."

"Micki, sweetheart..." Dirk began, ignoring Reynolds.

She responded to his quiet tone, looking up at him through a curtain of tousled hair. His eyes were still silently pleading for her forgiveness, but how could she possibly forgive him for all that he had done? How could Dirk have turned into such a monster without her seeing it? She had been intimate with this man. She had thought that she had known him inside and out, that she could trust him, depend on him, lean on him if the need arose. How could she have been so blind?

"Jurgensen?" Reynolds asked, impatient for Dirk to dictate her fate.

Micki tore her gaze away and glared at the fat little man instead. She didn't want Dirk's sympathy, or his mercy, or his excuses. She just wanted him to pay for what he had done to Luke's little brother.

"Take her," Dirk ordered with a rough edge to his voice. "Lock her in my office, and then help me with Hardigan."

After her adrenaline rush, Micki had no gumption left to fend off Reynolds as he grabbed her the second time. Jerking on her arm like he meant to tear it from her shoulder, he dragged her out of the van and pulled her limp body against his own.

"My pleasure," he hissed in her face.

***

Dirk's office was the same design as hers—a ten-by-twelve glassed in area built into the back of the maintenance hangar. Shut inside that see-through cell, Micki pressed her hands to the tempered glass, and watched Reynolds and Ponytail drag Luke out of the van and manhandle him toward...

Her gaze shifted to the middle of the large and otherwise empty hangar. The Curtiss C-46 Commando was an impressive sight, a slice of aviation history come to life, an old tail-dragging military transport with a hundred foot wing span and a pair of 18-cylinder radial piston engines.

Stirring herself from her reverie, Micki hammered on the inside of her glass cage as the confiscated camera bag was dumped at Dirk's feet. Ponytail patted down the prisoner, and then obediently handed over Luke's wallet and Smartphone. Dirk barked something she couldn't hear in Luke's face, waited for an answer that was not forthcoming, then reached out and tore the beaded chain from around Luke's neck.

After a quick study of the dogtags that identified Luke as US Navy, Dirk angrily shouted in his prisoner's face again. When he again received no answer, he tossed Luke's belongings into a metal drum that already held a bunch of other cellphones, then dropped to one knee to examine the contents of the camera bag.

The plastic bag of fake gold watches was the first thing he withdrew. Exchanging a furious look with his subordinates, Dirk tossed the bag of counterfeit merchandise to Reynolds. Next he dragged out Luke's digital SLR camera with the monster lens still attached, and a smaller pocket sized point-n-click. Dirk evidently knew precisely what he was looking for, because he quickly extracted a tiny blue plastic square from each camera and pushed them into the palm of a waiting henchman. Micki guessed that the blue squares must be some sort of digital film; a hunch that was confirmed a moment later when the man crossed to Dirk's maintenance workbench and destroyed both with a hammer.

The last items Dirk found in Luke's bag were in the side pocket; the folded photocopies that Luke had shown her last night. After studying them in turn, Dirk pulled his cigarette lighter from his pocket and lit one corner. He held them for a moment as they burned. Luke watched sullenly as the curled and scorched paper was dropped into the metal drum with the confiscated cellphones. There was a brief flare up as the small flame combusted with an ignition source, followed closely by several loud pops of exploding batteries, destroying the electronics so that they could never be traced. Flicking his head at the burning drum, Luke said something that made Dirk laugh.

The expression on Dirk's face as he spoke a brief reply was one that made Micki shudder. Observing the proceedings from her glass prison, she watched Dirk kick the camera bag away and motion toward the C-46 behind them. It was time to get back to business. Still, it took both Reynolds and Ponytail to drag their bound prisoner to the cargo door near the rear of the plane. Catching sight of her watching him, Luke yelled something that was impossible to hear behind her wall of soundproof glass.

Indignant, Micki put her hands on her hips. If he was trying to tell her to escape then he could forget it. What did he think she was doing in there with all her pounding? Her nails? The office door was securely locked from the outside, and the desk lamp she had thrown at the glass had simply rebounded without making so much as a scratch. The phone on Dirk's desk, like the marine band radio atop his file cabinet, had been disconnected somewhere outside.

With a sigh of pure frustration, Micki watched as the men stopped at a ladder that extended down from the C-46's high side door. Her doubt as to how they were actually going to get their uncooperative passenger onboard, short of carrying him, was quickly resolved when Reynolds produced a switchblade from his shirt pocket and cut through the duct tape binding Luke's ankles. Dirk went up the ladder first, disappearing inside the old cargo plane like he'd been sucked into a black hole. It was the threat of Reynolds' purloined Beretta at the base of his skull that made Luke begin an awkward climb without the use of his hands, which were still cuffed securely behind his back.

Reynolds and Ponytail followed him up and, like Dirk and Luke before them, were instantly consumed within the dark interior of the C-46's hold. Realizing that this sudden lack of supervision was the perfect opportunity for her to instigate a breakout, Micki desperately looked around the office again. Unfortunately, there wasn't anything there now that would spell freedom, that hadn't been there five minutes ago.

She was stuck.

Several long minutes passed before Dirk and his cohorts reappeared, alone, immediately raising her concern about what had transpired within the hold. One by one they climbed down the ladder, completely indifferent for any need to guard their prisoner, which really started to make her fret.

Oh God, did they just... kill him?
It was obvious they intended to use that plane; did they also intend to dump Luke's lifeless body out over the ocean, where it would never be found?

On the hangar floor, Reynolds spoke to Dirk as he put something inside a small, white, flip cover box that he carried. From the negative shake of Dirk's head, she knew he didn't like the suggestion one bit. But Reynolds insisted, and when Dirk reluctantly looked up at her, trapped in his office like a bee in a jelly jar, Micki's blood ran ice cold. Reynolds was still running his mouth but she didn't need to hear the words to understand the context. They were discussing her—more precisely, what to do with her. Would they dispose of her like they had just disposed of Luke?

Much to her horror, Dirk lowered his gaze from hers and slowly nodded in agreement to whatever Reynolds was saying. Without glancing up, perhaps because he was unable to look at the betrayal on her face, Dirk started toward her.

The icy hand of terror that took Micki by the throat almost overwhelmed her. Instinct drove her back from the door, the only way in and out of her cell. It was only the file cabinet in the corner, pressed against her back, which stopped her from clawing her way out right through the metal wall. She waited, not daring to breathe, until the door was finally unlocked and opened.

Six-foot-three of taut muscle and sinew effectively prevented any possibility of bolting. Dirk had one hand behind his back, and he looked at her for a long, indecisive moment before speaking. "Sweetheart, I'm truly sorry."

Finally, Micki found her voice, so tiny and afraid that she hardly recognized it as her own. "What are you...? Dirk?"

"I'm sorry it has to be like this," he continued. He took a step toward her, the hand still behind his back, but stopped again. "But we have to leave, and we have to leave now."

"Where... are you going?"

Dirk suddenly smiled, the same lopsided grin that once had brought a warm flutter to her insides. How was it possible that the murderer who stood before her was the same man with whom she had once shared all the fires of her passion?

"We," he corrected. "We are going to start a new life, Micki. Someplace where no one can touch us. You'll have everything you've ever wanted."

That was the last thing she expected him to say. "What?"

"I love you—"

Correction: that was.

"—and I'd never willingly let anything bad happen to you," Dirk said, bringing his hidden hand around to the front.

Micki admitted he'd been wise to conceal this from her. He knew of her dislike for needles, and the nasty-looking syringe he held was enough to instantly make her palms clammy.

"No," she pleaded, meeting his eyes again.

Dirk closed the space between them with a determined stride. Reynolds appeared in the doorway, wearing a satisfied smirk and cutting off any thought of escape.

"It's just a sedative," Dirk insisted. "It'll make you sleep until we get there."

"No, don't!"

Quick as a striking snake, Dirk grabbed her arm. "Help me," he called to Reynolds, who holstered the Beretta in his pants and moved to assist holding her down. "I don't want to hurt you, Micki, but I will if you fight me."

"NO!"

Dirk pushed up the sleeve of her gray jogging suit while Reynolds pinned her arm from her wrist to her elbow. A quick squirt of liquid dribbled down the needle a moment before it pricked into the rigid blue vein in the crook of her arm.