The air instantly catches his chest, pushes him up. His head whacks the underside of the Loach. The hooks squirm in the tiles. Judd uses all his strength to lever himself downwards, his cauterised wound aching from the effort.
Both hooks rip free and Judd is swept backwards —
He slams both hooks down as hard as he can, drives them deep into the tiles. He stops dead and his arms jolt. It feels like his shoulders will pop their sockets. He pulls himself flat then raises his head, sees the viewports are now three metres away. Three metres!
He twists the right hook from the tile, slams it down at an angle. It bounces off. ‘Come on!’ He swings again, angles it. It cuts into the tile. He drags himself forward. He yanks the left hook free, lunges forward, drives it down. It slices into the tile and he wrenches himself forward again.
‘You seriously believe the White House was involved in 9/11?’
Henri regards Rhonda. ‘Just the one with the power, the one pulling the strings. Edgar. His president didn’t know, didn’t understand much of anything, as it turned out. He was kept in the dark to maintain plausible deniability.’
‘How could you possibly know this?’
‘The same way I found out who hired us for the job in the first place. I followed the money.’
It hadn’t been quite that simple. Dirk and Nico had kidnapped an upper-level manager at the Department of Defense and tortured him until he gave up his access codes to the encrypted files on the DoD servers, after which he was killed, his severed body parts dumped in the Potomac and, surprisingly, never found. Even with unfettered access to the servers it took six months of forensic investigation before they could locate the funds that bankrolled 9/11. It had cost just over three hundred and twenty million dollars to stage and they traced it to the office of the vice president.
‘So you’ve done all of this, to what, kill someone who used to be the vice president?’
‘Not kill. He won’t be at his house in Virginia. He’s travelling to South-East Asia today. Only his family will be present.’
‘You don’t want to kill him?’
‘I want to take away his life without killing him. I want to destroy his community, his home, his family, irradiate it with something terrible that can never be washed away, deliver him a sadness he can never escape, just as he did to me and so many others.’
Rhonda looks incredulous. ‘You blame this man for your wife’s death, yet you’re about to do the same thing to God knows how many others.’
‘What I will do pales in comparison.’
‘But still, why do it?’
‘Because the truth must be known.’
‘Come on, don’t dress it up as anything other than revenge.’
‘Of course it’s revenge, but it’s more than that. The world must know what happened and the man responsible must be held accountable for it. If innocent people are hurt along the way, well, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.’
‘You’re quoting Star Trek at me? Seriously?’
He can’t help but smile. It’s like arguing with his wife.
‘And why use my shuttle? Why not just fire a missile at his house and be done with it?’
‘Because it must be a grand gesture so people take notice. And what grander gesture is there than destroying the space program, one of the few institutions your country still has pride in?’
‘I gotta tell you this “grand gesture” will be lost on pretty much everyone but you.’
‘No, it won’t, because you will tell the world the truth. You will be my conduit.’ He reaches into the backpack that sits on the chair beside him and extracts a small Sony camcorder.
Rhonda looks at it. ‘You’re going to film me?’
He nods. ‘Then upload it to the net with the satellite phone. It will be online before we reach our target.’
‘I won’t do it.’
‘Oh, I think you will.’ He pulls a satellite phone from the backpack.
She glares at him. ‘I won’t.’
‘Then I will instruct my men to visit your parents when this is over. They live in that little Michigan town near the Canadian border, don’t they? Port Huron. Seventeen Baker Street, Port Huron, if I’m not mistaken. Sky-blue house, one garage.’
Rhonda flinches.
‘You will tell the world the truth, including where all the files detailing Edgar’s conspiracy can be found. And they will listen to NASA’s golden girl, the one who would have been first on Mars.’
‘They’ll know you forced me.’
‘Of course, but they will still hear the truth.’ Henri turns back to the controls.
Corey watches Judd drag himself towards the viewports.
The Australian scans the instrument panel. Their altitude is fine. They’ve only just reached 6000 feet and the Loach’s ceiling is over 15000, though the air gets too thin to breathe above 8000 so he needs to watch that. No, his concern is the Galaxy’s acceleration. The Loach is quickly approaching its maximum speed of 225 knots.
They have a couple of minutes at most. After that Corey won’t be able to keep up. ‘Hurry up!’ Corey shouts it, even though he knows Judd can’t hear.
47
Rhonda doesn’t know if she believes Henri’s stories of the 9/11 conspiracy but she’s certain of one thing — Martie Burnett did. She had lost her mother when the second plane hit the World Trade Center. Martie might have been one of the smartest women at NASA but she was also deeply Mississippi, southern, where ‘an eye for an eye’ was an accepted form of Old Testament-style justice. Over the years she had sometimes spoken, in vague terms, about taking revenge on those who had killed her mother. Rhonda now understood why.
The ‘get him talking thing’ hadn’t worked as Rhonda planned. The Frenchman had talked but he’d also looked at her the whole time. He now stares out the windscreen, seemingly lost in thought. She needs to get him speaking again but not about anything that will make him turn around. She goes with a technical question that, she hopes, doesn’t warrant eye contact. ‘How do you expect to fly this thing through US airspace without getting shot down?’
‘The trick is to be in US airspace for as short a period as possible. We’re going to fly over the North Pole, approach across Canada’s Eastern Territories…’ He doesn’t turn around.
It’s time to straighten, tense, roll. She draws her right arm as far down the flight suit’s sleeve as it will go, straightens it at the shoulder, tenses it and rolls it backwards. The pain is just as she imagined. She reminds herself not to scream and waits for the arm and shoulder to bid each other adieu.
It doesn’t happen. She stops tensing and draws in a rough breath, lets the pain subside. The Frenchman continues talking. She straightens her right arm again, tenses it, rolls it backwards.
It pops out of its socket.
The pain is imperious. Her arm is now at what seems like a 45-degree angle to her shoulder. She bites her bottom lip to stop any sound involuntarily escaping her throat and works fast. Within the suit she drags her right arm back, then up, and bends her hand back to clear the top of the sleeve.
Her wrist gets caught on it because there’s no power in the movement. She pushes again. Bright slivers of pain dance before her eyes.
It flips past the top of the sleeve and drops in front of her stomach. She breathes out, feels perspiration tickle her forehead.
The Frenchman continues: ‘We didn’t have any trouble when we took the Galaxy so I’m not expecting any this time.. ’
Rhonda gives herself three seconds to let the pain subside. One. Two. Three. It doesn’t subside, not even a little. She lifts her hand, searches for the suit’s zipper. Her fingers brush the metal teeth. She pushes her arm upwards.