The Tenth Circle (10 page)

O’Hare Airport, Chicago: Twenty minutes earlier

“One of those days,” air traffic controller Jane Plezak said, chewing on a straw.

“When is it not one of those days here?” her shift supervisor, Gus Kincannon, grinned from behind her.

“I don’t know, today seems especially …”

“Especially what?” Kincannon asked when Plezak let her remark drift off.

“I don’t know.”

“Last time you said that, the baggage handlers walked out.”

“That’s right.”

“And the time before, a 747 clipped a commuter plane during taxi.”

“I remember.”

“So what’s it going to be today, Jane?”

Her hourly five-minute break over, Plezak returned all her attention to her screen filled with countless blips over a dark circular depiction of the skies above O’Hare. A maddening assemblage of icons with associated flight numbers that was mind-boggling in its congestion and complexity. Plezak had learned to get past that by disciplining herself to focus on her grid and her grid only, and the ability to segment the screen before her was all that kept her sane through her shift on difficult days like this.

“Jesus Christ,” Kincannon mumbled.

“What?”

“Down on the tarmac, looks like a fuel truck racing an Airbus.”

“Must be Bob Semple,” Plezak said, mouthpiece covered but eyes still locked on her screen. “Man’s committed to breaking the record for most planes refueled in a day.”

“I’m glad I fly out of Midway,” Kincannon told her, referring to the smaller airport on the other side of the city.

Down on the tarmac, Bob Semple had just topped off a United Dreamliner and was rushing to do the same for one of the airline’s commuter fleet. Traffic backup, bad even by O’Hare standards, had left dozens of fully loaded planes stuck at their gates, with engines still running to keep the passengers inside warm on the frigid January day. His dashboard-mounted gauges indicated he still had three-quarters of his tank.

Semple was just starting to turn toward the line of planes parked at their gates, angling for the ninety-seater, when he heard, more like felt, a gurgle. At first, he thought it might be his own stomach rumbling, then passed it off as too much air gathered in his pump line. Nothing of concern.

Until the flash came.

Gus Kincannon saw it from the O’Hare tower, but Jane Plezak noticed nothing amiss until the air burst accompanying the explosion that hit the glass with the power of a hurricane-force wind. The whole tower seemed to buckle, its occupants too far away from the explosion to hear its fury, although all could feel it and see the flames blowing outward into the air, swallowing everything in their path.

Bob Semple’s truck ruptured into a thousand flaming projectiles rocketing everywhere, badly damaging the planes farthest out and catching the nearer ones on fire. The fuel tanks of the two parked at the nearest gates exploded in secondary blasts, flames seeming to spread forward from the tails until each was totally consumed.

As his controllers frantically rerouted their planes circling in anticipation of landing, Gus Kincannon couldn’t take his eyes off what looked like a jagged trench dug across the tarmac, spreading outward from a cylindrical crater carved by the initial explosion and disabling three major runways. The scene, awash in black smoke that clung to the air like tar, was catastrophic, impossible to imagine, much less witness. Surreal, unreal. The product of a nightmare.

One of those days
, he remembered Jane Plezak saying just a few moments before.

London

Zarrin wasn’t surprised when the big man took the stool next to her in the Heathrow bar, because she’d spotted him watching for her as soon as she entered the airport’s international terminal.

“Tell me something,” she greeted, not bothering to turn the big man’s way, “are all Israelis named David?”

“You know the routine,” the man smirked, his experience showing in coarse hair that was as much salt as pepper.

She had spent the minutes waiting for his expected appearance studying herself in the bar’s mirror behind the shelves of bar and high-end brands. Her long, wavy black hair looked more limp than she was accustomed, sprinkled with strands of gray near the temples that the dim lighting of the bar concealed. So too it disguised the fatigue present in her eyes. Still bright and vital, but droopy, as if she was always ready for a nap. The concert the night before had taken a lot of energy and, nearing forty now, Zarrin needed more time to fully recover. Her other chosen avocation, one she excelled in just as much, was a young person’s game. Even this particular David was growing too old for it, but the Israelis stayed active in the field longer. Life treated hunters easier.

Zarrin finally glanced at him, up toward his face looming over her. “Except you look more like Goliath.”

“That’s why they sent me. So we could have this discussion in an airport terminal free of weapons.”

“But I’m never free of weapons, David, am I?”

The Israeli smirked again. “As long as I can see your hands …”

“I can see yours too,” she told him. “And I know how good you are with them.”

“Another reason why they sent me. Figured that might even out the odds a bit.” David checked her drink, watery with melted ice now in a tall glass.

Squeezing an icy glass alternately with her left hand and right had become a ritual for her as of late, because it helped control her symptoms. She would do it on the plane every hour, or at least every other, as well.

“We can’t let you go to the United States.”

“Maybe I have a concert to perform, or a personal appearance to keep.”

“We checked. You don’t. McCracken’s been a great friend to Israel. He’s off-limits.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“When you think about it, I’m actually doing you a favor.”

“How’s that?”

“Saving your life. Something to thank me for. You think you’re the first to go after Blaine McCracken? He’s left behind a trail of bodies longer than the road to Damascus.”

“He’s a relic, a dinosaur. Old now, past his prime.”

David turned on his stool all the way to face her. “You need to go home. I can’t let you get on that plane. Go back to your piano. Live out your life to standing ovations and rave reviews. Take your bows and early retirement as someone who has something to retire to. Live to play another day, Zarrin.”

Zarrin shrugged and reached for her glass, ended up knocking it over to the floor where it smashed, spraying chips of ice and glass shards across the floor.

“See what I mean,” David smirked.

Zarrin eased herself off the stool with napkin in hand, stooping to collect the fragments. Her hands rebelled at first. But, as she had when playing Tchaikovsky the night before, she pushed her very will into them, controlling her fingers along some jerry-rigged neuro-network of her own making.

She looked up at David. “I’m going to ask you to simply leave and forget we had this conversation.”

“I can’t do that.”

Zarrin rose from her crouch, retaking her stool. “I suppose I couldn’t either.”

Before David could respond, she jerked her hand out sideways, burying a dagger-sharp shard of glass she’d broken off into his windpipe. There was very little blood, no spray at all, and Zarrin twisted the shard around a bit to make sure the job was done, clamping a hand on the big man’s shoulder to hold him in place as he wheezed, quickly bleeding out internally.

But then her hand locked up, wouldn’t let go. Seemed to hold there for an eternal moment before her mind regained control and willed the fingers to open, enabling her to slide her hand away and ease David downward so his face was resting on the bar’s wooden surface. His chest moved in shallow jerks, lungs stealing what little air they could grab, the time between motions already lengthening.

She slid away, careful to keep her face angled downward so the bartender wouldn’t notice. It had been too close this time, much too close to suit her psyche or make her fit for such conditions to engage a man as deadly proficient as Blaine McCracken.

David had known that just as much as she did.
But he didn’t know everything, not even close
, Zarrin thought, not realizing her cell phone was ringing.

Sunnyside Yard, Queens, New York

“Don’t piss me off, MacNuts, or I may turn you in for the reward money,” Captain Seven said, his voice turned raspy by the heavy dose of smoke he’d just sucked into his lungs.

“There’s a reward?”

“Figure of speech,” the captain winked, inhaling another long drag off the marijuana blunt rolled into a cigar wrapper that smelled of cinnamon and grape as it burned.

His gray hair dangled well past his shoulders, hanging in tangles and ringlets left to the whims of nature, as if he used the rain as a washbasin. The captain wore a Grateful Dead tie-dyed T-shirt under an old leather vest that was fraying at the edges and missing all three of its buttons. So faded that the sun made it look gray in some patches and white in others. His eyes, a bit sleepy and almost drunken, had a playful glint about them. And when he uncrossed his arms with the still-smoking marijuana blunt in hand, McCracken noticed his T-shirt featured a peace sign with
MAKE LOVE
above it and
NOT WAR
below.

“You said it was important, MacNuts,” said Captain Seven. “You didn’t say it was this important.”

“I don’t remember saying anything.”

“Eyes are the window to the soul, man, window to the soul. And yours look about as pained as I’ve seen anyone not bright enough to improve their mood with some high-end hydro.”

“There’s not a drug in the world that can manage that right now, Captain.”

McCracken had no idea what the captain’s real name was, only that he had gotten this one thanks to behavior, eccentricities, and intelligence that had led one military commander to call the eccentric tech whiz a visitor from the seventh planet from a distant galaxy.
Captain
, accordingly, wasn’t a real military rank. Even though he’d never spent a day in boot camp or wearing a uniform, his efforts along with his scientific knowledge and creativity had saved countless lives. Captain Seven had been one of those on the forefront of using technology as a prime weapon against opponents of all levels, starting in Vietnam where he’d been assigned to further the efforts of McCracken and others in Operation Phoenix.

To reach the captain’s “home,” McCracken had made his way through the tight cluster of train cars packed into Amtrak’s Sunnyside Yard that ran along the lower length of Queens. Constructed in 1910, it had once been the largest locomotive storage yard in the world, occupying almost two hundred acres at one point. Today, it featured an amalgamation of mothballed engines and passenger cars overgrown with weeds sprouting from beneath their track beds and still-active train cars awaiting use when overflow or repairs demanded. Many, if not most, of the cars stored there might never leave the yard again, including two interconnected rusted-out relics located just short of an overpass and perched against a heavy steel fence, beyond which stood a ten-story self-storage facility.

Blaine had found the captain not in those cars in which he lived, but in an area of Sunnyside Yard hidden behind both a curve and an assortment of rusted steel corpses of train cars stacked off the tracks. The area looked utterly innocuous, perfect staging ground for the many experiments Captain Seven continued to carry out either on his or the military’s behalf.

Today, those experiments seem to involve what McCracken had first thought was a swarm of bees, but now realized was something else entirely.

“Mini-drones,” the captain said, flailing at the air briefly before snatching one for Blaine to see. “That’s what I call them.”

“Surveillance?” McCracken asked, holding the light, bee-like device up for closer inspection.

“Not quite. Allow me to demonstrate.” With that, Captain Seven hit a single button on a small remote, pointing the device toward a clothesline assemblage layered over the worst-dressed scarecrow ever. “Time to let my bug-thing go.”

“ ‘Bug-thing’?”

“Haven’t come up with a fancier name yet.”

McCracken opened his fingers and the marble-sized bug-thing took off like a jet, straight for Captain Seven’s horribly attired scarecrow. Impact came with a blast powerful enough for McCracken to feel the aftershock ripple from even forty feet away. When the smoke cleared, there was nothing left of the scarecrow except for a few stray patches of an old denim jacket.

“Vintage Levi’s, MacNuts,” the captain proclaimed, approaching to better view the effects of the blast. “Always like to see my old shit go to a worthwhile end.”

“Miniature flying bombs,” McCracken said, shaking his head in amazement.

“I like that. Think I’ll call them ‘bug bombs’ instead. They key on temperature so I made sure to heat up the scarecrow to a comfortable 98.6.”

“Why didn’t the bug bomb just zero on me?”

“Ah, you noticed!”

“I’m still standing here, aren’t I?”

“Proximity,” the captain explained. “My bug bombs don’t arm until they’re twenty feet from whoever’s wielding them, the controller. So as long as you don’t move much and the target, or targets, are a reasonable difference away, just cover your ears.”

“Targets plural?”

“Artificial intelligence, MacNuts. My bug bombs automatically veer to the next available target when they read another on a course identical to theirs. Pretty simple shit, actually.”

“For you anyway.”

Captain Seven gave him a longer look. “And what about for you?”

“You remember my kind-of-son Matthew?”

“I remember he’s got a son of his own now,” the captain said, as if seeing something in Blaine’s eyes.

“Hopefully,” Blaine said, leaving it there.

“What brings you here again?” the captain managed and took another hit from his blunt.

“The word
Croatoan
mean anything to you?”

“Holy shit,” Captain Seven said, coughing the smoke out.