Out beyond the fence, there was another glint, like that of sunlight on a piece of mica. Flickering like a signal. There was someone out there, he realised. He stood up awkwardly, quickly, and grabbed up the rucksack and the other equipment from the sofa. He had to hurry.
Fraser sat across the aisle of the Learjet from Mclntyre, his sense of being an unwelcome travelling companion undiminished by the hours of the flight. The FBI agent regarded him with a hostile suspicion that seemed to increase in proportion to the crumbling of his professional loyalties. Fraser was adept at patient silence and was prepared to wait Mclntyre out. Gant lay ahead of them, and Fraser was almost certain that Strickland was tied to Gant by an invisible thread. He was sure that Mclntyre knew Strickland well enough to be able to locate him. That was information that would have to be bought… Mclntyre had not yet opened his shop for business.
The great plains over which they had flown, sprinkled with the occasional lights of cities and towns, were giving way to the western mountain ranges; that bulldozed rim of the continent beyond which lay the fantasy of California. Kansas City's lights were long behind the aircraft and Colorado loomed, together with the deserts of the south-west. Chris, Mclntyre's young, naive assistant with the shining face and clear eyes, sat ahead of them, poring over maps, keeping in telephone contact with the surveillance team around the Vance Aircraft factory complex outside Phoenix. He was drinking prissily at a glass of 7-Up. Fraser was sharing Mclntyre's bottle of bourbon. The cramped passenger cabin was dim-lit.
Fraser glanced through the tiny porthole beside him, back towards the first faintness of dawn which seemed in pursuit of them. Ahead of the plane, the blackness was filled with bright, frozen stars.
He realised Mclntyre was studying him from beneath heavy eyebrows, his eyes narrowed, folded into the creases of flesh around them. Fraser had murmured the temptations of a large salary, a bright future… in exchange for Strickland, at the same time fending off Mclntyre's intense curiosity regarding his prospective employer Strickland's employer. He'd had to shrug in voiceless admission at Mclntyre's realisation that both he and Gant wanted Strickland because of the two downed 494s. Mclntyre's value and the price of the information he could supply had risen in moments, like some wild stock exchange barometer in response to rumours of tax cuts. Mclntyre had realised his true worth.
The man smiled conspiratorially. Greed was working in him like an acid. Fraser was satisfied.
The handset in Chris' armrest warbled and the young man snatched it up.
At once, his shoulders were tense with alarm and surprise, alerting Mclntyre. The melting ice in his glass spilt on to his lap as he lurched upright. He picked up his own telephone as Chris gestured earnestly.
"Mclntyre," he snapped.
"Sir we have kind of a problem here," he heard from the surveillance team's leader.
Tell me," he growled.
There's an airplane being prepared flight checks, that kind of thing, ref uell—"
"Where's Gant?" Mclntyre sensed his own shortwindedness, as if he had exhausted himself in a race, only to lose at the tape. He glanced heavily across at Fraser, who continued to sip like a woman at his bourbon and feign no more than mild interest.
"Where is the asshole!" Mclntyre bellowed.
"Sam picked him out, in the people around the airplane. He went aboard, we think—"
"Why didn't you call me?" This time the shock-wave of his rage seemed to unsettle Fraser. Chris was staring at him over the back of his seat, his phone still pressed to his cheek, like a man watching his house burn down. It was slipping away.
"You just watched while all this was happening?" Spilt 7-Up from Chris' glass bubbled like acid on the aisle carpet.
"While the guy just walked on to a plane?"
"Sir, we couldn't be sure what was going down! You ordered us to wait for your arrival—"
"Your ass is in the fireplace, Kennedy!" The asshole even had the right name to be a genuine, made-in-America prick!
"Get in there — now! Arrest Gant and anyone who gets in the way!"
"Sir." The response was pinched off by urgency and dislike.
Mclntyre slammed down the handset. He had wanted Gant to himself, had told them to hold off until he arrived. He'd wanted to grin into the asshole hero's shocked, defeated face as he read him his rights.
He quashed the perception of his error and the momentary flush of its possible enormity as if it had been a glimpse at a foreboding X-ray plate. Then glowered at Fraser, whose features at once settled into immobility. Chris turned away.
Mclntyre looked out of the window.
They had to stop Gant, stop him flying out, getting away The Learjet seemed, to his boiling impatience, to be suspended in some geostationary orbit between night and the pursuing day. There was nothing he could do… They had to stop Gant For Kennedy, sweeping the binoculars across the Vance Aircraft site, there remained a moment when Mclntyre's panic seemed unwarranted, even ridiculous.
The morning breeze whirled dust, the runway was empty, the first windows to catch the rising sun gleamed back innocent light.
Then the nose of the small jet sniffed out of the hangar below him.
Kennedy watched the airplane emerge, easing itself into the first dawn sunlight. Its movement mesmerised.
'-anyone who gets in the way!"
"Sir."
He heard Mclntyre break the connection. The sun was climbing into the wing mirror of the car against which he leant. Dazzled he flung the earphone away from him as if it burned his hand. Suddenly, the situation was slipping away from them, accelerating like the airplane below; it was fully visible now, turning on to the taxiway, making for the main runway.
A noise startled him into issuing orders. Someone shunted a round into a Bullpup shotgun close to his ear.
"Move it!" he shouted, plucking up the car intercom.
"Go, go, go! Biles, get your car down there, head him off block the runway!"
He climbed into the passenger seat of his car as it accelerated wildly over the lip of the outcrop from which the surveillance team had watched the Vance Aircraft site for most of the previous night. The windscreen in front of his eyes seemed to possess its own urgency, joggling and eager, breaking up the landscape as if he was seeing it reflected in the broken fragments of a mirror. The two other cars followed him down the slope.
He tugged the pistol from his shoulder holster and checked it. Don, the driver, was flinging the steering wheel from side to side like a kid playing a video game in an arcade. The executive jet was sliding as smoothly as if on ice towards the main runway. It seemed to be moving in a different element from the car, with greater confidence.
The mirrors were blind with dust. The car lurched and flew for an instant as it hit the road, then Don swung the wheel viciously again to right it, the tyres screeching. It was no more than a hundred yards and a few seconds before they turned into the open main gates of the site. If he screwed up here, he knew Mclntyre — a continentally renowned bastard would make him pay for the rest of his career.
The other two cars skidded and lurched through the gates behind them, and immediately Biles' car peeled away, making directly for the runway.
Don was heading their car towards the main administrative building.
It could all be too late' Head for the runway, Don!" he bellowed, changing his mind. Gant must be kept on the ground, the runway had to be blocked. The car swerved and then shimmied off the paved road on to desert sand. Ahead of them, Biles' car was streaking forward, seeming to tow behind it an impenetrable cloud of dust. Kennedy lost sight of the airplane's ghostly whiteness in the shadow of the surrounding mountains. His disappointment was as violent as if he had already seen it lift away from the ground.