The Courier: A Ryan Kealey Thriller (37 page)

He was squinting through a pair of dark sunglasses as Brown steered them toward the slowly taxiing aircraft. He wasn’t nervous; he was energized. After all these years, it reminded him of the feeling he had waiting behind that outpost on the bluff, waiting for the U-boat to leave its pen.

The world vanished. There was just him, the target, and whatever happened to come between them, things that had to get pushed away or eliminated. Not killed: destroyed, including the moral plumb that told him he should feel revulsion.

He remembered Bill Donovan’s words.
We didn’t start this. We didn’t ask them to be there. This is on their head.

They were coming up to the nose of the seaplane, the coral blue-and-white bird that seemed so clean, so innocent.

The boat throttled down and drifted sideways to a gangplank that was lowered steeply from the open hatch. A uniformed oil employee with a logo on his cap and wings on his lapel waved and smiled down at him. Largo smiled up and waved back. Clearly, this was not the man he needed to see.

The boat sidled up to the lowest rung and, helped by Brown, Largo held the tablet in one hand, gripped the handrail with the other, and made his way up. It was strange to feel rubber grips under his feet. For—God, how many years?—all he’d felt was his worn foyer carpet.

“Hello, sir,” the flyer said in thickly accented English.

“Welcome to the United States,” Largo replied jauntily as the man helped him aboard. He tugged off his sunglasses but did not put them in his pocket. He did not want to make it appear as if he intended to stay. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the relative dark of the cabin. He peeked into the cockpit, waved back when the pilot waved at him. Largo assumed that people were always nice to customs agents. He turned back to the cabin. “Missing some furniture,” he said.

“This is a convertible aircraft,” the copilot replied. “We had some large deliveries to make at a drill ship before coming here.”

The man handed Largo the customs declaration. It was a single sheet, presumably truthful as far as it went. These boys had nothing to declare.

Largo saw a man rise from his seat and bow toward him. Largo nodded back.

“The gentleman?”

“A guest of our chief executive,” the copilot said. “There is his luggage.” He indicated a steamer trunk standing in the tail of the cabin like the centerpiece of a shrine.

“Only what he needs for his stay,” Largo said, looking at the sheet.

“That is correct,” the copilot said pleasantly. He handed over three passports.

Largo looked at them. He glanced up at the man in the cabin and walked toward him. There were no seat-backs to hold on to, so he steadied himself by taking short, careful steps.

“He doesn’t speak English,” the copilot said. “Is there something I can help you with?”

“No,” Largo said. “I just want to walk through here to say I did. Doesn’t look good if I go back to the boat so soon.”

“Cover your ass,” the copilot laughed.

Even foreign pilots knew everything they needed to know about Washington
, Largo thought. But there was one thing he did not know. Largo Kealey wasn’t Washington.

Largo looked closely at the man. He had a dour and serious expression, despite a strained effort to smile. Largo had paid careful attention to the photograph in the passport. The face before him was exactly the same. It wasn’t just the same man, it was the same in virtually every detail. The length of his beard. The touch of gray along the temple. The dark, tired circles under the eyes. He was sure if he looked under a magnifying glass he’d find the same cut on the man’s forehead that he saw there now.

The passport had been made within the last twenty-four hours.

Largo looked at the man and nodded, smiling. The man was a few inches taller than he. He was of fairly slender build, but he had the chest of a moderately devoted weightlifter. There was something in his pockets. A gun, perhaps, in one. A cell phone, possibly, in the other.

Largo’s eyes went to the trunk. If he asked the man to open it, that was probably the same as telling the man to shoot him at point-blank range.

“I’m sure everything is all right,” Largo said without turning from the passenger. “You picked him up off an oil platform or drill ship, didn’t you?”

“A drill ship,” the copilot said.

“Yeah, that fuel smell gets on you.” Largo smiled. “You need to take a shower!” he laughed, poking the man in what he thought was the gun.

The man jumped back as if he’d been slapped, his eyes wide. Largo did not take the time to process his reaction or to regroup. He put his fists knuckle-to-knuckle and charged like a linebacker. He expected what happened next: the man went back a step before bracing himself, then grabbed him with both hands. That left Largo’s hands free. In the moment it took for the man to wrestle him back, before the copilot could reach them, Largo’s hand was inside the man’s jacket. His fingers fumbled on something plastic—not a gun. A cell phone.

The passenger screamed angrily and swung Largo around. Largo held onto the pocket, brought his right hand up to steady himself on the lapel, and got his fingers around the top of the phone. He let himself be thrown against the side of the cabin.

The phone was exceptionally heavy and had a distinctive odor, like the cow patties he used to encounter in the French countryside. It was an IED. The other phone must be the trigger. Without this—and judging from the ferocity of the man who was trying to pull it from his hands—the bomb was useless as a bomb. But it was still useful as a source of radiation.

Largo curled into a tight ball on the floor of the cabin. He looked at the trunk as the man screamed and the copilot arrived and both men tried to wrestle him to his back.

It was there. It was
back
. He felt it.

Largo exploded from their grip and palmed the cell phone and slammed it hard into the floor of the cabin. He did not feel the pain of the beating, of the lonely years, of the fear he had always felt. His old mind and his young mind were one, a confident and contented whole with his beloved May lovingly between them, providing his best happiness. He saw her face, vivid and alive, as the IED exploded.

 

 

Clarke was sitting in one of the speedboats with two other men—the radiation specialist with a Geiger counter and a sharpshooter. He was watching the seaplane through binoculars, saw the orange-white flash before he heard the boom. He watched as the side of the aircraft blew out near the waterline on the port side. Pieces of the aircraft somersaulted through the air like boomerangs while other pieces were blown across the river like monstrous water bugs. The man who had gone out with Largo was in the water, knocked over by the force of the blast.

“Move out!” Clarke shouted without looking away. “Geiger?”

“Normal,” said a voice behind him.

“Let me know if that changes,” he said as the boats pulled from the harbor.

In the seconds after the blast Clarke went from believing that something had gone wrong to feeling that perhaps something had gone right. He continued to peer ahead, against a strong headwind, and saw two men in uniform leap from the open hatch of the plane. They joined Brown in the water. The office manager had just grabbed onto his boat, which was still upright, and was attempting to pull himself in.

“Reading?” Clarke yelled back.

“Normal,” said the steady voice.

The aircraft was listing, the port wingtip dropping slowly but steadily toward the river; the hole was low enough so that the natural flow of the water was spilling over the ragged edge. Clarke was in the center boat, and he signaled for the crew on the vessel to his left to enter as soon as they arrived. They knew what they were looking for, and in what order: a container of unknown size, shape, and volatility; a terrorist; and an older operative. He signaled the other boat to recover the pilots. They were treading water; Brown had pulled a little distance away to give the assault team room. While the other two speedboats waited in the reserve, Clarke got on the radio and ordered the sharpshooters on both banks to be alert: they were not to shoot unless they heard a cry to God or saw a cell phone in the hands of a Middle Eastern individual.

“Reading?” Clarke shouted back.

“Not elevated,” the man with the Geiger counter replied.

Clarke didn’t know what he hoped. He was glad there did not appear to be any danger but he would have welcomed a slight uptick to show it was onboard.

Boaters were watching, motorists on both banks were slowing, pedestrians were gawking and pointing and probably making innumerable cell phone videos. This clearly was not a drill, and it alarmed him that people were just standing there. What happened to civilian preparedness? It was a $45 million dollar line item for Washington, D.C., and environs in the Homeland Security budget.

The boarding party reached the boat moments ahead of Clarke. The boat sidled up to the aircraft, the team using suction cups to hold them to the hull against the rush of the water. Four men went inside, two entering and two covering. Clarke ordered his own boat to pull up beside the first boat.

The lights were still on in the seaplane, though they were flickering. Clarke leaned toward the boat so he could see inside. There was a trunk lashed to a wall in the back. The cabin had been cleared of everything else, save a single seat that was burned and bobbing in the water . . . along with what was left of two torsos. Limbless, ripped open, bobbing. The airmen’s helmet-cameras would record the scene to verify the result of the explosion. The foam was pink with blood; the starboard wall was red with it. The white interior around the hole was smoky gray and there were black holes everywhere around the epicenter—some pockmarks, others like little craters. Flesh and pieces of fabric were burned onto the wall, spread irregularly across the entire area.

“Recover the trunk!” Clarke yelled.

He did not think it was volatile. The IED had blown up outside. As long as the radiation specialist didn’t sound the alarm, they were okay.

The plane was listing more, the wingtip underwater. There were groans and scraping sounds that echoed loud through the empty interior. As the boarding party fixed a portable flotation device to the trunk—an inflatable float tube with rubber straps—Clarke motioned for the men on the perimeter to join them. With a total of eight pairs of hands inside they were able to work the trunk out against the current. By the time they reached the hole they were practically walking on the port side wall. It was a relatively simple matter to push the trunk through the hole and secure it between Clarke’s speedboat and the one suctioned to the exterior.

Clarke looked back at the man with the Geiger counter. The man gave him the OK sign. It wasn’t exactly regulation, but it was the right gesture for the moment.

They were okay.

The pilots were already on their way to shore, bound with plastic restraints, as the rest of the group started back. Clarke watched the trunk to make sure the flotation device could handle it. The tube rode very low in the water, the skin strained with air pressure, but the straps were secure around the trunk and also attached to eye hooks on the speedboats. The radiation specialist held the Geiger counter close by, making sure the bobbing and surging didn’t cause anything to open inside.

It would be justice, of course, to let the thing sink . . . back from where it came. But they needed to open the trunk, confirm the device was there, then figure out what to do with it. Ignore it lest they terrify the populace at how close they came to disaster? Or use it as propaganda to show what Iran had done with their find?

He couldn’t worry about that now. All he wanted to think about was the veteran who had neutralized the threat. He turned and looked at the seaplane as it sat angled in the river, one wing angled at eleven o’clock skyward.

Clarke threw it a sharp salute. “Thank you,” he added softly as the speedboats reached the base.