Shadow Knight's Mate (14 page)

Those eyes narrowed, and without a moment's hesitation the man swung his right fist, catching Jack in the jaw. Jack was already skidding, trying to stop, and the punch knocked him straight to the ground. He lay there looking groggy and moaning.

Denim Man returned his attention to Arden, with an angry expression not all that different from the leer that had shaped his features a moment earlier. “So you must—” he began, reaching for her.

She hit him with her stiffened fingers in the solar plexus, just below the breastbone. She encountered muscle, hard and unyielding. This man only resembled Jack superficially. Under the clothes he was a very trained fighter.

The blow stopped his breath for a moment, but he grinned at her and caught her hand. His other hand came up quickly, aimed at her chin.

And then Jack, who lay flat on his back, his legs stretched out between his standing attacker's legs, simply brought his foot up as hard as he could. It made a satisfying crunch. The man was
wearing some sort of protection, like a catcher's cup, but Jack had good leverage and his foot drove the cup up into the man's crotch, almost as effectively as if the man had been wearing nothing. Denim Man grunted hard and crouched instinctively, trying to protect himself.

And Jack brought both his knees back against his chest and kicked out into the man's gut, just as Arden swung her stiff hand at his neck, hitting his windpipe.

Both blows were effective. For a moment the man hunched, trying to protect himself everywhere at once, then collapsed.

“Hurry.” Arden was already on top of him, going through his pockets. She found an ID case in a jacket pocket and pulled it out. “Look.”

Jack did. He saw his own picture and name on a California driver's license. The picture looked more like him than the imposter did. He noted the address, in Riverside, sure it was fake but memorizing it anyway because he couldn't stop himself. Arden didn't find anything else useful except a ticket and boarding pass that weren't for a flight to Miami at all, but for theirs to London. “Liar,” she sneered at the unconscious man.

Jack stared down at the face that was not quite his. He had an urge to kick the man in the head, stomp on his ribs. The urge made no sense at all. It was totally instinctive. This was his replacement, which made Jack unnecessary. Self-preservation made him tremble with the desire to smash this thing into unrecognizability. The same urge those people felt when looking at replicas of themselves growing in pods.

“Let's take him—” he began, while Arden said, “Is there anybody—” and they both knew what the other was going to say. Jack wanted to get the man some place where they could interrogate him, but Arden didn't think they had the time, and wondered if they could just immobilize him some place where some of their people could pick him up later.

During the second that they evaluated each other's plans, both became unworkable. Two uniformed and armed security guards suddenly stepped into the alcove from the terminal, looked
down at the man on the ground who had obviously been attacked, shouted, “Hey!” and began going for their guns.

At the same time there was a clicking sound and a door at the other end of the short alcove unlocked and opened. A much beefier maintenance man came in, gaped at the scene, and stood blocking the door.

Arden was still crouched down on the floor, where she'd been going through Denim Man's pockets. Her face a mask of distress, she said, “Help me, please! He's diabetic!”

The three men reacted completely differently, which Jack noticed in less than a second. One security guard paid no attention to what Arden had said, continuing to go for his gun. The other froze for a moment, uncertain. And the maintenance man started forward, looking only at the man on the ground.

That told Jack everything he needed to know. The two security guards were confederates of the fake Jack, in on the subterfuge. One of them still had some humanitarian instincts, or maybe, just maybe, he was authentic, as the maintenance man seemed to be.

“Listen to her!” Jack snapped, and kicked the fake guard in the hand. Then he grabbed the maintenance man's arm, pulling him forward. He was a big guy, already moving forward, and his momentum turned into a lumbering fall. He sprawled into both security guards as Jack grabbed Arden's hand and said, “This way!”

She was ahead of him, already leaping toward the closing, locked door through which the maintenance man had come. Arden caught it just before it clicked back into place, and she and Jack slipped through it, quickly closing it behind them. Something slammed into it just as it closed. A fist hammered on it.

They were in a service corridor of bare steel walls, carts, tools, and discarded signs. Without speaking to each other Jack and Arden raced in the direction of their own gate. As they ran they had to jump over thick cables in places, some of which seemed to connect nowhere. It was a little scary to see how haphazard this place looked behind the scenes.

“We can't get on that flight,” Arden panted. Jack had been tipping back and forth, but she made up his mind.

“We can't not! They want to trap us here. We've got to take off.”

“It's already boarding,” Arden said, and he had no clue how she knew that.

There was pursuit behind them. They both began opening doors along their way, trying to leave false trails. One of the doors turned out to be to a closet. As Jack thought about ducking into it he glanced into the closet and saw clothes. A maintenance worker's gray coverall and cap. He grabbed them.

“What—” Arden began, then shut up. “Out that way,” Jack said, pushing her, and she went out a door. Jack lingered. He could no longer hear anyone following him. They must have figured he'd done the smart thing by now and gotten out of this confining tunnel. Showed how stupid they were, thinking him smart.

“We're going to continue our boarding of Flight 1549, overnight service to London's Heathrow Airport. This flight is about three-quarters full, so please use all the seats available. If your carry-on luggage won't fit in the overhead compartment, please ask a flight attendant…”

The passengers all glared at her spiel, one they had heard their whole lives. They crowded toward her like carnivores around a wounded zebra, ready to pounce.
Assholes,
the flight attendant thought.
Do you think you'll get there any sooner just because you get on the plane first?
The worst thing about a flight attendant's job was too many alpha types on airplanes, wanting to push ahead of everyone else even if there was nothing to be gained by it. The flight attendant lengthened her speech a little just to raise their collective blood pressure. She plastered a smile on her face.

Then the rush began. They thrust boarding passes at her, crowding almost shoulder to shoulder. She smiled at each one as she held the pass under the laser light that registered the passenger's name and seat.

The line wasn't halfway through when a maintenance worker appeared at the flight attendant's shoulder. “Sorry, Jane, spot check. It's not registering on board.”

“What? What do you mean, not registering? They've all beeped—”

“But they haven't recorded,” the maintenance man mumbled. He wore a cap and kept his head down, already messing with her scanner. “We're going to have to get all those passengers back off and run them through again.”

The line groaned, a big sound in the late-night airport, following by mutters that sounded threatening.

“No, please,” the flight attendant said urgently, under her breath. She was about to explain further to the maintenance guy when the next passenger in line thrust her boarding pass at them like a sword. She was a pretty young woman, but not at the moment, with her features contorted by anger.

“I'm in a hurry, miss,” the bitch snapped.

The maintenance man barely glanced at her as he said, “Then maybe you shouldn't slow us down while we're trying to do our jobs.” In that moment he became the flight attendant's hero. The angry young woman's jaw dropped, she had no response, and a few of the passengers behind her even grinned at how effectively the man in the coverall had shut her up.

“There, I think that's got it,” he said a moment later, becoming
everyone's
hero. He took the angry young woman's boarding pass (two of them, as a matter of fact, though no one noticed), scanned it (them), said, “Yup,” just like Clint Eastwood, and disappeared into the departure tunnel.

The bitch turned in the doorway, holding everyone up, glaring at the crowd, saying, “Wait, I dropped my ticket.” People tried to push past her but she was immovable until someone grabbed the ticket folder off the ground, thrust it at her, and she went through into the boarding tunnel.

Which had given Jack time to discard his maintenance worker's coverall and cap and join the line of boarding passengers. Arden caught up to him and said under her breath, “Thanks. You just made me the most hated person on this flight.”

“You probably would have accomplished it on your own anyway. But I'd advise you not to drink anything that flight
attendant offers you.”

But the ruse had worked. Arden's and the fake-Jack's boarding passes had been scanned, and anybody watching the departing passengers would not have seen Jack boarding the plane. If anyone checked the computer records later they would show that the imposter had boarded the plane and Jack had been left behind in Houston.

He hoped someone would be dumb enough to fall for that. It was going to be a long flight.

Jack had never been able to sleep on an airplane. He wasn't afraid of flying, exactly, he just didn't believe in it. He knew the theory—the shape of the wings, speed plus lift, all that aerodynamic theology—but his body still knew it made no sense that an object this heavy, carrying so many people and tons of luggage, could remain aloft. At least not without his concentrating very hard, keeping the plane in the air through mental effort.

“Why don't you play your game?” Arden asked. She had noticed the hand-held player that Jack had clipped to his belt, through all this.

“I can't get on-line up here. That's the only way it's interesting for me any more.”

“Playing with strangers?”

Jack nodded. “Trying to figure out an opponent when you have no clues about him or her except the way he or she plays. In fact I've played a few times when I'm pretty sure the opponent was several people taking turns.”

“Or a schizophrenic.”

“Even better.”

Arden settled back with a magazine. Even with their business-class seats made into mini-beds, Jack couldn't relax. Too much on his mind. Hanging up here in the air, giving his enemies hours to prepare for his arrival in London, set any kinds of traps for him they could devise, or simply have him arrested for assaulting Denim Man and stealing his identity—which had been Jack's to start with, but he might have a hard time explaining that—any
of these was a possibility. All that kept him edgy, even after the double bourbon and water he'd ordered from the smiling flight attendant. Arden had glanced at her thirstily but then declined, with thanks.

“This was a bad idea,” he muttered.

“I believe I said let's not get on board, but you overruled me. Anyway, it's too late now. It'll be fine. I'll probably have to save you again once we land, but I'm getting good at that.”

Jack lay there groggily next to her, thinking that maybe she had rescued him too easily. Maybe these had been ploys designed for Arden to gain his confidence. He needed to pay careful attention to her, she might be leading him straight to destruction. But if that was the goal, Jack's death, that could have been accomplished by just
not
letting her save him. So either she was on his side after all or she was an opponent with something more devious in mind than his mere destruction.

So his thoughts circled and barked at each other. After awhile, for rest, he replayed the conversation with his mother. He pictured her standing in the kitchen of their home in Fort Wayne, with the three windows and the yellow curtains, then realized that he was picturing his mother younger than she was now, and that the kitchen might well be a different color by now. He hadn't been home in a while. But he did stay in touch. It had been more than half his short lifetime—he was twenty-six—since he had lived with his family, but they still grounded him in reality.

The mental idyll didn't last long. Inevitably he began worrying again about the reception he would face when he landed, and about the woman lying beside him. He also thought about her grandmother, the Chair, and what plans she had for him. Jack tried to remember how long it had been since he had trusted someone. Far too long. But he was lucky, he always had his family.

Arden glanced at him as if he had spoken. So he did. “Where are your parents?”

She gave the strangest answer to this commonplace question he'd ever heard: “They're dead, I think.”

He just lay there blinking at her, thinking he had mis-heard, or that she hadn't heard his question right. Arden stared overhead. In a soft voice, as if to herself, she continued, “At least I'm pretty sure Mom is. She would have gotten in touch with me by now otherwise. Dad…” Her voice trailed off as if that one word said worlds.

Jack looked at her profile: smooth cheek, straight, strong nose, one clear blue eye, not meeting his. “You were estranged?”

Arden laughed very quietly. “We were never—what's the opposite of ‘estranged'?—we were never really connected. I used to think that's how all fathers were, kind of—well, not there, robotic.”

“Caught up in business?” Jack was good at reading people, beyond good, but he was getting nothing from Arden except sadness. He didn't have a clue to her thoughts. Maybe she could stop the subliminal signals people give off. At any rate, there was very little emotion in her voice.