We loaded the munition on board ourselves, because there was no spare crew to help us. There was one pilot and no steward. Standard practice, in the rendition business. Better deniability. We figured the munition was about the size of a fat guy, so we strapped it upright in a seat of its own. Then we all three sat down, as far from it as we could get.
Ninety minutes out I went to the bathroom, and after that I steered the conversation back to rendition. I said, “These planes are modified, you know. They have some of the electronic interlocks taken out. You can open the door while you’re flying, for instance. Low and slow, over the water. They threaten to throw the prisoner out. All part of softening him up ahead of time.”
Then I said, “Actually, sometimes they do throw the prisoner out. On the way home, usually, after he’s spilled the beans. Too much trouble to do anything else, really.”
Then I said, “Which is what we’re going to do with the munition. We have to. We have no way of destroying it before we land, and we can’t let it suddenly reappear in the U.S., like it just escaped from the museum. And this is the perfect setup for corroboration. Because there’s three of us. Because we’re going to get questions. He needs to know for sure. So this way I can swear I saw you two drop it out the door, and you two can swear you saw it hit the water, and you can swear I was watching you do it. We can back each other up three ways.”
Which all made sense, so we went low and slow and I opened the door. Salt air howled in, freezing cold, and the plane rocked and juddered. I stepped back, and the guy from Special Branch came first, sidewinding down the aisle, with one of the transport container’s straps hefted in his nicked and scarred left hand, and then came the munition itself, heavy, bobbing like a fat man in a hammock, and then came Carter, a strap in his right hand, shuffling sideways.
They got lined up side by side at the open door, their backs to me, each with a forearm up on the bulkhead to steady himself, the munition swinging slackly and bumping the floor between them. I said, “On three,” and I started counting the numbers out, and they hoisted the cylinder and began swinging it, and on three they opened their hands and the canvas straps jerked free and the cylinder sailed out in the air and was instantly whipped away by the slipstream. They kept their forearms on the bulkhead, looking out, craning, staring down, waiting for the splash, and I took out the gun I had collected from the bathroom and shot the guy from Special Branch in the lower back, not because of any sadistic tendency, but because of simple ballistics. If the slug went through-and-through, I wanted it to carry on into thin air, not hit the airframe.
I don’t think the bullet killed the guy. But the shock changed his day. He went all weak, and his forearm gave way, and he half fell and half got sucked out into the void. No sound. Just a blurred pinwheel as the currents caught him, and then a dot that got smaller, and then a tiny splash in the blue below, indistinguishable from a million white-crested waves.
I stepped up and helped Carter wrestle the door shut. He said, “I guess he knew too much.”
I said, “Way too much.”
We sat down, knee to knee.
Carter figured it out less than an hour later. He was not a dumb guy. He said, “If the warhead was a dummy, he could spin it like entrapment, like taking a major opponent out of the game. Or like economic warfare. Like a Robin Hood thing. He took a lot of bad money out of circulation, in exchange for a useless piece of junk. He could be the secret hero. The super-modest man.”
“But?” I said.
“He’s not spinning it that way. And all those people died of cancer. The Robinsons, and the Donnellys, and the McLaughlins.”
“So?” I said.
“The warhead was real. That was an atom bomb. He sold nuclear weapons.”
“Small ones,” I said. “And obsolete.”
Carter didn’t reply. But that wasn’t the important part. The important part came five minutes later. I saw it arrive in his eyes. I said, “Ask the question.”
He said, “I’d rather not.”
I said, “Ask the question.”
“Why was there a gun in the bathroom? The Special Branch guy was with us the whole time. You didn’t call ahead for it. You had no opportunity. But it was there for you anyway. Why?”
I didn’t answer.
He said, “It was there for me. The Special Branch guy was happenstance. Me, you were planning to shoot all along.”
I said, “Kid, our boss sold live nuclear weapons. I’m cleaning up for him. What else do you expect?”
Carter said, “He trusts me.”
“No, he doesn’t.”
“I would never rat him out. He’s my hero.”
“Gerald McCann should be your hero. He had the sense not to use the damn thing. I’m sure he was sorely tempted.”
Carter didn’t answer that. Getting rid of him was difficult, all on my own, but the next hours were peaceful, just me and the pilot, flying high and fast toward a spectacular sunset. I dropped my seat way back, and I stretched out. Relaxation is important. Life is short and uncertain, and it pays to make the best of whatever comes your way.
Michael Connelly and Dennis Lehane
Red eye
From FaceOff
2005
As a practice, Harry Bosch did his best to stay out of tunnels, but as he came out of Logan Airport a tunnel was unavoidable — either the Ted Williams or the Sumner, take your pick. The rental car’s GPS chose the Williams, so Harry drove down and deep under Boston Harbor. The traffic backed up at the bottom and then completely stopped as Bosch realized that the timing of his red-eye flight from L.A. had landed him in the heart of morning rush hour.
Of course, the tunnel was much bigger and wider and was well lit in comparison to the tunnels of his past and those of his dreams. He was also not alone in his predicament. The passage was wall to wall with cars and trucks — a river of steel under the river of water, only one of them flowing at the moment. But a tunnel is a tunnel and soon the chest-tightening feeling of claustrophobia took hold. Bosch started to sweat and impatiently honked the horn of his rental in impotent protest. This apparently only served to identify him as an outsider. The locals didn’t honk, they did not rail against that which they could not change.
Eventually, traffic started moving and he finally emerged, lowering his window to let in the fresh air. He made a mental note to find a map and then chart a way back to the airport that did not include going through a tunnel. Too bad the car’s GPS didn’t have a No Tunnels setting. He would have to find his way back to the airport on his own.
The LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit’s travel protocol called for Bosch to check in with the local authorities immediately upon arrival in another city. In this case that would be the District E-13 offices of the Boston Police Department in Jamaica Plain. This was the district that included the address Bosch had for Edward Paisley, the man whose DNA Bosch had come to take — surreptitiously or not.
Bosch, however, often trampled on the official cold case protocol. He usually followed his own protocol, which involved getting the lay of the land first and maybe putting an eye on his quarry — then going in to meet and greet the local constabulary.
Bosch planned to check out Paisley’s address, maybe get a first look at him, and then check into the room at Courtyard by Marriott he had reserved on Expedia. He might even take a short nap after check-in, to make up for the lost sleep on the flight out. In the early afternoon he would go to District E-13 and tell the captain or major in charge that he was in from L.A. on a fifteen-year-old cold case murder. He would then most likely be paired with a divisional detective who had fallen from favor with command staff. Squiring around a visiting detective following a lead on a 1990 cold case was not a choice assignment.