Sanborn died with her eyes open, her once bright face purple and taut with terror.
Beg rolled the thin cord around the two grip sticks on either end and stuffed it back in the pocket of his loose jacket. He shoved the dead woman so she toppled over into the passenger seat, her arm trailing into the floorboard on top of a Wendy’s hamburger sack. Grabbing her purse so the incident would look like a robbery, he walked quickly down the shadowed street.
A block away he ducked down the alley behind a CVS drugstore. Earlier that day, while Sanborn had been away, he’d taken an envelope containing the illicit photos of her and Drake from under her mattress. In her purse, he found the thumb drive that was surely her backup. For a blackmailer, she was highly unsophisticated.
Beg snapped the thumb drive into an adapter on his smartphone and scrolled through the contents. He shook his head at the woman’s stupidity. The files weren’t even password protected. The metadata showed the photos had been printed twice-that accounted for the set mailed to Drake and the set he’d found hidden under her mattress.
He scrolled through the photos again, looking at each one carefully. He was glad he’d killed Sanborn without spending any time with her. She was a whore and he had no use for that sort of woman.
He took the thumb drive out of his phone and dropped it to the pavement, crushing it beneath his heel. His mind wandered to the jasmine scent of Veronica Garcia as he dialed Badeeb’s number. She was a woman he would soon spend some time with. His crooked mouth perked at the thought.
Badeeb picked up. “Peace be unto you,” he said. The sound of him exhaling a lungful of cigarette smoke fluttered on the other end of the phone.
“And to you,” Beg said, pressing on with business lest the doctor spend the next ten minutes on their greeting. “I took care of the problem with the photographer.” He was careful not to use Hartman Drake’s name on an open phone line.
There was a long pause. “Cleanly, I trust.”
Beg shook his head, sighing. “Of course,” he said. There was no truly clean way to kill another human being. “In any case, your man is free to pursue his goals without her interference.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
7th Fighter Squadron Langley Air Force Base, Virginia
T ara Doyle leaned against a flat, diesel-powered aircraft tug and watched the weapons being loaded onto her aircraft. She toyed with a crescent wrench while she sipped a can of Pepsi. It was against hangar protocol to drink soda this close to the aircraft, but the two airmen loading ordinance were more interested in stealing glances at her chest than anything she might be doing to bend the rules.
It was still hours before her flight, but she’d already donned her olive drab Nomex flight suit. Normally loose, it was known as a bag by those in the business. Tara had found one a size too small that showed off the round swell of her buttocks. A full-length zipper ran from the crotch to the neck. She unzipped it down to her belly button and tied the long sleeves around her slender waist to keep it up like a pair of pants. Her metal dog tags dangled on a chain over the chest of her skintight T-shirt, drawing attention to the fact that she’d worn no bra. She wanted the airmen’s focus anywhere but their job.
Tracy, a chubby kid with a mop of dark hair that pushed Air Force regulations, drove the weapons lift. He sat idling next to the aircraft, a load of bombs partially under the plane. The F-22 had to be loaded from the opposite side in order to clear the open bay door. Arlow stood beside his partner, scratching his buzz cut and pursing baby-face cheeks as he looked over the paperwork.
Doyle dropped the wrench on the deck of the tug and walked over to sidle up next to him. Men reacted in one of two ways to such direct attention. Arlow didn’t disappoint her. He gulped, looking her direction, trying-and failing-to keep his eyes off her breasts.
She threw her head back to drain the last of her Pepsi. It exposed the delicate lines of her neck and tightened the shirt against her body. She let her left arm drape over the top of her head, exposing the small tuft of dark hair under her armpit. Her real mother had never thought to shave there and Tara vowed not to bow to the vain American custom. It had made her the object of derision during gym class growing up. Air Force flight surgeons raised surprised eyebrows every year during her physical, but never actually asked anything. She was happy to be an outcast. It made her remember what the Americans had done to her father and brother… and the way they’d defiled her mother before they’d cut her throat.
Whether or not the young airmen found an unshaven woman attractive, they were certain to find it exotic-and in her experience, that was all a man needed to become hooked like a fish. Tara gritted her teeth behind a tight smile. Her chest shuddered with a mix of excitement and revulsion.
“Something wrong, Airman?”
“Nope.” Arlow shook his head, blinking as if to clear something out of his eyes. “I… I mean… you’re goin’ out hot tonight… By that I mean your airplane, ma’am… I don’t mean you personally…”
“Calm down, Airman. I know I’m the queen of West Texas bitches-but I don’t bite…” Her smile turned coy, perking up on one side. It made her physically ill, but she knew how to play a man. It had even worked on Dr. Badeeb, many times.
Arlow swallowed hard and looked over his sparse mustache to consult the clipboard in his hand. “I got you down here for a full complement of four-eighty cannon rounds. I get that.” The M61A2 machine gun fired at a rate of a hundred rounds per second, giving her roughly five one-second shots.
Airman Arlow continued. “You got two Slammers and two Sidewinders. I get that too.” He called the AIM 120 and the AIM 9M/X missiles by their nicknames. “What I don’t get is the GBUs. I’ve never loaded out live bombs for an over-watch run on home soil.”
Tara pitched the empty soda can toward a fifty-five-gallon oil drum used as a trash barrel. She purposely missed and it clattered to the gleaming white hangar floor.
“I know,” she said, bending over slowly to pick up the can. She felt like her suit was about to split. She could feel his eyes on her.
“Weird, huh?” she said. “They got Speedo running air-to-air tonight during the big soiree. I’m working air-to-air and air-to-ground. I suppose the big heads that think all this up are worried about waterborne attacks on the island-especially with all the talk of moles and traitors on the news.”
Arlow shrugged, his eyes locked on Tara’s white T-shirt. “Makes sense, I guess.” He was from a little town outside Houston and though he blanched every time she got near him, she knew he considered his fellow Texan an ally. “Anyway, we’re loadin’ the stuff written on the orders. It’s just odd, that’s all. He tossed the clipboard on the seat of the aircraft tug. “Eight GBU 39s coming your way, ma’am…”
He pulled on a pair of gloves and went to help his chubby partner finish the load-out.
The GBU 39 SDB or Guided Bomb Unit/Small Diameter Bomb weighed just two hundred and fifty pounds. Its lethality radius was roughly the size of a tractor trailer-not particularly large considering the awesome firepower of the F-22. Doyle had already programed the guidance systems to home on four specially designed transmitters-strategically placed. They were accurate enough to fall within fifteen meters of their intended destinations-and for human targets that would be close enough.
Tara arched her back against the tug, closing her eyes to prepare herself for the next move.
Flying “slick,” in stealth mode, the Raptor was literally wrapped around its weapons system. All four missiles and eight bombs were tucked in the aircraft’s belly, out of sight behind the bomb doors. Speedo would check his own bird, but leave Tara to check her ordnance. The captain who had forged her orders was one of them. That left Airmen Arlow and Tracy as the only loose ends that might show up in the short term.