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  Ashira was nodding and smiling lightly. She patted Moishe Lavi’s hand and started to get up before adding as an afterthought:

  “Oh, may I borrow your laptop for a few minutes? I want to compose my thoughts, and I’m out of battery.”

  “Of course,” he replied, handing over the machine. “Just close my word program. I’ve already saved my things.”

  “Thank you. As we approach the end of this, I want to hold your hand.”

  “You shall,” he said, the seriousness of his tone flipping the last tumbler into place in Ashira’s mind.

  She rose to her feet, a bit unsteadily, moving to a window seat on the opposite side, and opened the laptop, pretending to type while keeping a close eye on Lavi. But as she probed deeper into the computer and its programs, the effort became more frantic and equally unproductive. There was nothing overt, and whatever he had been writing was well protected with a password she couldn’t seem to break. Even the keylogging program she had clandestinely installed months ago was reporting nothing, which meant his countermeasures to thwart exactly what she’d been trying to do were very effective.

  Finally sitting back and pretending to wipe a tear from her eye, she faced the fact that she had nothing left to try. He had defeated her. No evidence, no programs that could be even remotely connected with seizing control of an airliner, and not even assurance that Moishe Lavi was the party responsible for their plight—although she was certain that was the case.

  As she prepared to turn the machine off, a tiny icon she didn’t recognize appeared in the lower margin of the screen, and she double-clicked on it, triggering a routine official screen with the Israeli flag. What was clicking away in the left corner, however, caught her eye. Two digital clock readouts, one counting up, the other down, the digits changing every second.

  She peered closely at the elapsed time, 06:08:23, and calculated backwards to the start of the flight, some eleven hours in the past. Where would they have been six hours ago at around 500 miles per hour?

  The calculations in her head were simple, and she ran them twice more to be sure. Somewhere off the coast of Ireland, most likely, and somewhere around the time the aircraft had turned around without the pilots’ knowledge.

  Still, that could be coincidental.

  The second digits were counting down, reading 00:53:49, and she felt a deep chill rising up her spine with the realization that it must be the time to crossing the Iranian border with Iraq. They had fifty-three minutes, and the only reason for the two clocks she could imagine was Moishe Lavi keeping track of what he’d started.

  It was true, she concluded. Somehow a cabal of his followers had cocked and loaded the gun, and he’d pulled the trigger!

  She loosed a final try, a series of known passwords trying to pry open the door to whatever this electronic vault was, knowing just as surely as she had to try, he would have made certain it couldn’t be undone.

  In her entire life—even as a baby in Russia before her parents immigrated to Israel—Ashira had a reputation for being incredibly tenacious. She never quit.

  But perhaps for the first time in her adult life, she felt herself involuntarily relax in the face of certainty: There was nothing else she could do now. Life was to be measured in minutes, and the choices were no longer hers.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  St. Paul’s Hospital, Denver, Colorado (10:20 p.m. MST / 0420 Zulu)

  The image of faces filtering through a deep fog had come and gone in the previous hours, but Gail Hunt still wasn’t putting it together.

  And she was so tired!

  Suddenly, however, a face she absolutely recognized coalesced in front of her. Steve!

  What was Steve Reagan doing here, she wondered, along with the suddenly crystalline question of where, exactly, was “here”? He was saying something, and she tried hard against a sea of weariness to listen. A question maybe?

  Gail forced her eyes back open. He was still there, smiling it seemed. Good ol’ Steve! She could always depend on him. She opened her mouth to acknowledge him, but there was no sound.

  She tried again, understanding at least some of what he was saying, the words very distant at first. How am I? she echoed in her mind. I don’t know … how AM I?

  “Fine!” she managed, the startled expression on Steve Reagan’s face confirming her voice had worked.

  But now he was pushing her. Something about numbers or codes in her desk safe. Triggering codes. De-triggering codes. In my safe? Steve should know better, she thought. Never keep … in safe.

  She slipped away into a drifting sleep, but his voice tugged her back.

  Gail opened her eyes again and tried hard to focus. Steve seemed determined to know about codes in her safe.

  “Never in … my desk safe,” she replied, not realizing the words were coming out as more of a slurred whisper than a statement. Or, had she put them there? No, only her notes. Notes in the desk safe. Maybe notes with test codes, but not real ones. Whole damn thing far too important to trust to a physical safe that could be opened. But their bird was in the desert. No need for the codes until next week.

  “So,” he was articulating. “The right codes were NOT the ones we found in your desk safe?”

  Why, Gail thought, would they be looking inside her desk safe?

  “Not in my safe,” she said again. “Codes always in … master computer.”

  She wanted to sleep, but he wasn’t letting her, and for a moment she felt a flash of irritation.

  “What happened to me?” She asked suddenly, the words far more clear than before. “Where … is this?”

  Steve leaned over and talked about an accident on the way to Estes Park. Her accident. Her car. So it wasn’t a nightmare. It had been real.

  “Can I walk?” she asked, startling both Steve and someone standing by him. Maybe a nurse. No. Couldn’t be a nurse. The woman wasn’t wearing a white uniform, just something with bunnies on it. But did nurses wear uniforms any more?

  “No paralysis! You’ll make a full recovery, but you were down there in the wrecked car for days.”

  She tried to nod, but the effort hurt. Maybe pain was good, though as she thought about it, even more pain began to make itself known, and that wasn’t fun. She wasn’t into pain, as she’d been fond of telling those who wanted her to lift weights and work out more.

  “Gail!”

  Once again she had drifted off, and this time Steve was talking about the passwords to the master computer, and an airplane full of passengers somewhere in trouble, and they needed her codes. Why would some airliner need her codes? We’re an invisible black project. We don’t exist. They don’t need my damned codes!

  But Steve was insisting, and if it had been anyone but Steve she would have snapped at him. Couldn’t he see how tired she was?

  “Let me sleep,” she said, her eyes closing again, trying to push away the voice which was emphatically saying something about running out of time.

  Suddenly she was back in a beautiful field under a clear blue sky, motioning to a lover to hurry with the buttons he’d been undoing on her blouse, and realizing with a surge of pleasure that it was Steve.

  Building 4-104, Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado Springs (10:32 p.m. / 0432 Zulu)

  “That’s all? That’s all you guys can come up with?”

  Dana Baumgartner searched the eyes of the hastily assembled team of engineers pulled from their homes to find a way to do what they had labored to prevent: Physically disconnect the airborne unit that was the entire focus of the black project they were legally required to protect.

  “Those were the specifications, Colonel!” one of them said in a pleading voice. “We worked long and hard to think up every way some desperate hijacker could try to disconnect us and thwart all of them.”

  “Yeah,” an owlish-looking engineer interjected. “Like burying the relays for the flight controls where no one could reach them, or … or …”

  “I get it, guys,” Dana replied. “But we’v
e got less than an hour, and if we can’t get the disconnect code, we’ve got to tell those pilots how to disable the system.”

  “Sir, it can’t be done!”

  “You can’t cut power to the box, even?” Dana asked.

  “Especially not that, sir. It could be catastrophic because of the different relays, sequences, and power source changes that would result.”

  “I want you to stay here and keep thinking, keep working on it, just in case. Don’t approach it from the position that it’s impossible. Approach it from the idea that you left out something … left a backdoor, a way to knock it off. I refuse to hear that it’s impenetrable! Just do it. We have a lot of lives at stake, as well as the efficacy of this program and your jobs.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  The White House (12:40 a.m. EST / 0440 Zulu)

  Safely ensconced behind bulletproof glass in the front guardhouse, the well-trained officer who had greeted Will Bronson and Jenny Reynolds after they tumbled out of their rental and fast walked the distance to his window was used to random citizens wobbling in off the street to ask—sometimes demand—to the see the president. Some were drunk, some high on God knew what, some dangerously deluded or sufficiently hostile to trigger an armed response. But seldom had he seen ID cards from NSA and DIA pushed under the window without a concurrent appointment.

  Carefully matching the pictures on the IDs with the faces in front of him, the officer keyed the speaker.

  “Who do you want to see, and why don’t I see an appointment?”

  “Because,” Jenny said, as close to the microphone as she could get, “This has just emerged as something only the White House can handle. It is a matter of national security, it is extremely urgent, it involves a hijacked, American-flagged airliner about to invade Iranian airspace, and we have the codes that can stop a tragedy that could result in the deaths of everyone aboard.”

  “Who do you want to see?” The officer asked again, evenly, fully expecting to hear the word “president” in the answer.

  “The chief of staff or the duty officer in the Situation Room, even if you have to get them out of bed. We have less than forty minutes, and this is no joke.”

  “Stand by, please,” was the response, and within less than five minutes a man they judged to be in the Secret Service detail had arrived to escort them through a metal detector and a quick pat down, and then to a tiny office somewhere on the first floor.

  “You folks remain here. Someone will be back with you.”

  “Wait! Wait a minute!” Jenny had sat down for a few seconds before leaping up. “That airliner will be in Iranian airspace in … if I calculate it correctly … less than thirty minutes, and something terrible is going to happen if the pilots haven’t regained control.”

  “Ma’am, you’re preaching to the wrong choir,” the agent said.

  “I’m trying to tell you how urgent this is! Every second counts!”

  “Yes, ma’am. I get it. Stay here.”

  The door closed behind him, and Jenny knew instinctively someone would be standing on the other side to make sure they didn’t leave unescorted.

  “It’s too late, Jen. We’ve done the best we could,” Will said, his face a mask of defeat.

  “If they don’t get their asses in gear, I’m afraid we’re going to be left in limbo until it is too late,” Jenny said, pacing back and forth while Will stood, looking helpless.

  “We don’t even know if your code is right.”

  She turned, a finger in the air suddenly. “What do you bet the White House has a Wi-Fi system?”

  “Probably. With passcodes I’m sure.”

  “Which I’ll bet I can crack!”

  She was already pulling out her laptop and firing it up, balancing it in her lap with the paper containing the unlock code on the keyboard, her finger nervously tapping the side of the machine as she anxiously waited. “Come on, come on, come on!”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  Mojave, California (8:40 p.m. PST / 0440 Zulu)

  Jaime Lopez, Esquire, had finally reached his personal breaking point. Getting away from Ron Barrett and his manic little group in the dusty airfield office was no longer a desire. It spelled survival. Beyond the embarrassment of a serious, senior attorney pretending to be surprised hours before, when the two federal agents couldn’t locate Pangia’s Airbus on their ramp, the past few hours of waiting for the next shoe to drop had been a special agony. As general counsel, his purposeful deception with the agents had been so beneath his dignity, if not unethical. But then, again, the whole day had been such an unmitigated disaster, it hardly mattered. A few more random indignities seemed trivial.

  True, there was something very fishy about the agents’ story and the speed with which they had appeared, and more than likely they were lying about being from the Transportation Safety Administration. But whoever they were, their presence spelled deep trouble.

  Jaime had endured the tense atmosphere of Barrett’s vigil as they monitored the media’s sketchy reports on the fate of Pangia Flight 10, everyone present aware of the elephant on the table—the question of whether they would still have jobs when the smoke cleared. But for some reason, the one horrific possibility Jaime could not let go of was the idea that Carl Kanowsky, the employee who had dispatched the wrong jet, was some sort of clandestine operative. The two agents had said as much after one of them spent a half hour in another room with Kanowsky’s file.

  “We think,” he told Jaime as they were leaving, “… that the Kanowsky name is an alias, and whoever he really is, the mission he was on required him to get hired by your company. We checked his address. It’s empty desert.”

  There had been no time to look into the quality of the due diligence checking of Kanowsky’s application, but on top of all the other worries about massive looming liability for Mojave Aircraft Storage, the thought that they could have stupidly hired a terrorist made his blood run cold.

  Jaime finally made excuses and broke away from the group just before ten, leaving the rest of them glued to CNN. He sat down in an adjacent office and read every line of Kanowsky’s folder and application. The overall liability of the company might well turn on the contents, but there was nothing whatever that would have waved a flag at even the most skeptical of interviewers. The agents had said the address was a vacant field, but it was suspicious that they seemed to know that almost instantly. Jaime used the map program on his iPad and carefully typed in the address that Kanowsky had given, watching with a sinking feeling as the map zoomed in on a vacant patch of desert on the eastern edge of Lancaster, just as they’d indicated.

  Yet, he had an almost irresistible need to see it for himself. Despite a pounding headache, an empty stomach, and an aching thirst, Jaime climbed into his car and peeled out of the parking lot.

  It took a little over twenty minutes to motor south down the Sierra Highway to the outskirts of Lancaster. The address was along East Avenue “I” in the 4000 block, several miles to the east of town, and Jaime’s GPS announced he had arrived as he pulled to a halt alongside a pitch dark, featureless desert landscape.

  Kanowsky’s address had a “#3” added, which would indicate an apartment, but there were no buildings of any sort that he could see peering into the nighttime void.

  In fact, only one light was out there, he noted, something that looked like no more than an LED bulb, maybe a hundred yards or more to the north.

  Comfortable with the desert, Jaime got out of the car and took the flashlight he always carried, playing the light ahead of him to avoid any random rattlesnakes as he picked his way carefully toward the light, skirting desert brush and tumbleweeds as well as an outcropping of barrel cactus. The land was mostly flat, but it descended suddenly into a small depression, and parked in the middle of the miniature arroyo was an ancient trailer, the smallest model Airstream had ever made, with a beat up old Ford pickup parked alongside.

  The light was coming from inside, visible through a dusty window. Jaime tri
ed to peer in, but the illumination was too weak and the window too dirty and opaque to make out anything but vague shapes inside.

  He knocked on the door and waited, but there was no answer. He tried again, and was weighing the advisability of trying the door when suddenly it swung open, revealing a disheveled, coughing man in shorts and a stained t-shirt, holding a tissue, the stubble of a week-old beard on his face. Kanowsky was supposed to be sixty-two, but the unkempt man before him with sunken eyes and parchment skin looked like he’d just emerged from a sarcophagus.

  “So who are you?” the man managed, trying several times to clear his throat, his voice clearly unused for some time.

  “I’m Jaime Lopez, from Mojave Aircraft Storage. Are you Carl Kanowsky?”

  The man looked up at him through sad eyes, his expression one of utter defeat.

  “Yes. Am I fired?”

  “For … what?”

  “Missing work. I have no phone anymore. I asked my neighbor last week to let you guys know I was really, really sick, but … I guess he didn’t.”