Day Zero (20 page)

 

Q
uinn hung his head out the window of Lovita’s borrowed Pontiac, thinking of how many times he’d ridden this road on a motorcycle. Die-hard riders often called other vehicles cages. The little Pontiac was a perfect example of why. Thankfully, the passenger window was completely gone, allowing some escape from the stale odor of fast food trash—and some creature that had crawled up inside the air vents and died.

It was not quite seven in the morning but the sun had already been up for three hours and the Chugach Mountains glowed with the brilliant golden-green of summer. Joggers and bicyclists moved steadily through the crisp Alaska morning down the paved pathway between the Glenn Highway and Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson. There was a time Quinn had thought of becoming the OSI detachment commander here at JBER. His parents pushed for it. Kim certainly wanted it. Heaven knew he owed Mattie a little more of his time. But for some reason, that normal, move-up-the-ranks-and-become-the-boss portion of his career just wasn’t meant to be so the det co thing never materialized. He was an Air Force Academy alumnus, a Fulbright Scholar, and spoke five languages. Out in the world he could have been described as a renaissance man. But he was just rough enough around the edges that he always felt like a bit of a thug compared to the other Air Force officers in garrison. He supposed he just wasn’t cut out for it. Lately, it had been difficult to comprehend what he was cut out for except for slitting the odd throat now and then. It sure wasn’t being a father—no matter what patriotic platitudes he spouted to Lovita about having something to fight for.

His mind had covered a dozen different scenarios for his arrival at the airport by the time they passed the National Guard Armory—known as the “Green Banana”—between Eagle River and Anchorage. He had never been the nervous sort. When he made a decision, he followed through, leaving the outcome to God or fate or whatever great cosmic dice game was in control of his destiny. But that was him. When it came to his daughter, he was capable of worrying a hole in his gut.

Quinn’s greatest worry was that his parents had been followed out of DC and a crowd of IDTF agents or contract killers would swoop down on them as soon as he set foot in the airport. If by some miracle his parents were able to get Mattie to Alaska unimpeded, there was the high likelihood that some other passenger, a TSA officer, or even a US Customs agent might recognize Jericho from having grown up with him. Nearly 300,000 people called Anchorage home, but the small-town feel made it difficult to go to a store or restaurant without running into someone who knew him.

Five months of heavy black beard had made him look like a pirate. He’d trimmed it back to a more city-acceptable length before leaving the hangar that morning. Lovita said it gave him “ambiguous ethnicity.” He wore a ball cap pulled down low and black Wiley X shades that he hoped were all enough to camouflage his identity.

Traffic was heavy with morning commuters along the Glenn, but Lovita took C Street through midtown and hung a right on International Airport Road across from Baily’s Furniture Store. He’d met plenty of pilots who scared him to death when they got behind the wheel of a car, but Lovita, a village child who rarely drove anything larger than a four-wheeler, handled the car as if she’d grown up driving in a city much larger than Anchorage.

His head still out the window, Quinn caught the flowery sweet scents of birch and balsam poplar as they neared the airport. The air was still crisp enough that no one questioned the fact that Quinn was wearing a black motorcycle jacket. A Vanson Enfield, the jacket was heavy leather but old and worn enough to fit like a comfortable baseball glove. It wasn’t armored like his customary Aerostich Transit Leather, but that one had been cut to ribbons back in Japan.

Lovita pulled up next to the curb at the North Terminal and put the car in park. She turned to look at him, smiling softly.

“I think I would make a good government operative,” she said, out of the blue.

Quinn cocked his head to one side, studying her face. The traditional tattoo notwithstanding, she was probably right.

“I think so too,” he said. “Give me a call after this is over. I can introduce you to some people.”

“Be careful, Jericho Quinn,” she said, as if his name was all one word. “I need to keep you as a contact.”

Her voice was even huskier than usual, her eyes red as if she’d stayed awake much of the night. She was an incredibly tough human being, but coming within inches of crashing into a mountainside was enough to work on anyone’s emotions.

She leaned across the seat to give him a hug. The smell of cigarettes and some sort of musky perfume she’d found back at the hangar was a welcome cover for the odor of the Pontiac.

“Thanks for flying Air Lovita,” she said.

“Yeah, well, thanks for saving my life.” Quinn turned to grab his duffel from the backseat. “You flying back tonight?”

She nodded. “Got a Costco run, then fish to cut when I get back,” she said simply. Good-byes over, she waited for him to shut the door, then pulled away without another word.

The North Terminal was the older portion of Ted Stevens Airport. It wasn’t quite as swank as the newer, main terminal across the way, but it did have a huge stuffed polar bear in the waiting area outside security—the part of the airport Quinn most remembered as a child. It was also the terminal for US Customs and international flights arriving and departing Alaska.

The Alaska flight from DC had arrived an hour earlier at the South Terminal, but Quinn was already inside by the time his parents had retrieved their bags and hopped a shuttle to the north side of the airport. Quinn didn’t see any tail, but if there was one, it wouldn’t matter at this point anyway. He’d known Kim wasn’t coming, but his heart sank a little when she didn’t get off the shuttle with everyone else.

Mattie bolted to him as soon as she came through the door. It had been half a year since she’d seen him last, beside her mother’s hospital bed. It was a lot for an adult to handle, let alone a seven-year-old girl.

She buried her face in his chest, squeezing him until her arms shook.

“I missed you too, Sweet Pea,” Quinn said, glancing up at his father. He mouthed the words “How’s Kim?” so Mattie couldn’t hear him.

Pete Quinn took a deep breath, putting a hand on the little girl’s shoulder. “Can you help Grandma with the luggage, sweetheart?” he said. “I need to talk to your dad a minute before y’all go.”

Mattie looked up, arms still locked around her daddy’s neck.

“We’ll just be a minute.” Jericho hugged her one more time before peeling her away.

Mattie nodded and dutifully went to stand with her grandmother, a tall woman with deep brown eyes and silver-gray hair she liked to call “Arctic Blonde.”

Pete Quinn’s large gray eyes held the same look they had one winter when Jericho and Bo were boys and he’d told them their favorite dog had been eaten by a pack of wolves.

“What is it?” Jericho said, bracing himself for the worst.

“She banged her leg pretty bad when those guys tried to get her and Mattie in the van,” he said. “I think she’ll be fine, but doctors are worried about blood clots. She’s in the hospital at Bethesda. I know you’re worried, son, but Bo is with her night and day. Your friend Jacques is pulling security and helping out more than seems humanly possible. He’s a good man. I like him.”

“Me too,” Quinn said. “But he’s got his own family to worry about.”

Quinn’s mother handed him the folder with Mattie’s passport and the visas Thibodaux had given her. Quinn gave her a hug at the base of the escalators leading to the second level and through security, apologizing for turning her into a mule for forged documents. She gave him a tense smile, tears welling in her eyes.

“Don’t cry, Mom,” he said. “Dad always said God counts a woman’s tears and blames them on us guys.”

The matriarch of the Quinn family smoothed the front of her light Windbreaker. “Well,” she sniffed, “if that’s the case, you boys are going to have a lot of explaining to do someday.” She gave him a kiss on the cheek before gathering Mattie in for one last hug. “Now remember,” she said. “Your name is Mattie Hackman. Don’t forget that.”

“Ten-four, Nana.” Mattie grinned, giving a little mock salute.

Jericho shook his father’s hand. “I wish you’d let me make some calls. I’ve kind of turned you into a target over here.”

The elder Quinn shook his head. “Have you seen the fish runs this year? I have a boat to tend and a crew who depends on me. We’ll be so far out in the ocean, nobody’s going to bother with us.”

“Don’t you fret over us.” Quinn’s mother waved off any thought of worry. She seemed soft, but Quinn knew she was tough as barbed wire underneath the façade. She had to be to be married to his dad and raise the two boys she’d been given. “We’ll be fine.”

“All right.” Jericho sighed. “I don’t like it, but there’s nothing I can do about it now.”

His mother gave him a half grin. “Those are the exact words I used when you told me you were taking up boxing.”

Since they were taking an international flight, Quinn produced a notarized letter at the security checkpoint, signed by Kimberly Hackman, giving him permission to leave the country with their child. Kim had signed it, and Bo had used his charm to get one of his girlfriends to notarize it. The heavyset TSA officer, who was all of twenty-four, had still quizzed Mattie with some halfhearted questions and consulted with his most recent Amber Alerts and NCMEC Missing Children photos to make sure Quinn wasn’t stealing his own child. Thankfully, he worried more over that than checking out their false identification. The ID was plenty real. It was, in fact, manufactured by the government and presumably off the books. But allegiances changed and unless Miyagi or Palmer had printed the passports themselves, someone else knew of their existence. Quinn had never worried about it before, but Mattie’s presence added an entire new level of tension.

When they finally made it past security and were sitting at the gate, Quinn found himself mildly surprised that he wasn’t dog piled by law enforcement. Still half an hour away from boarding, passengers crowded around the podium so they could be the absolute first to board. Quinn suppressed a smile in spite of his nerves. It was easy to see why airline personnel called such impatient passengers “gate lice.”

Mattie had calmed down quickly, as she always did, and now sat listening to music on her iPod. A multitasker at seven, she swung her legs off the edge of her chair while she flipped through the pages of her Lemony Snicket book. Her mother had been shot, her father was a fugitive, and armed men had tried to shove her in a van just hours before, but she appeared to share Quinn’s ability to compartmentalize and carry on in the face of events that would cause other people immobilizing stress. She’d not skipped a beat in giving the TSA agents her fake name, jabbering away with just enough details about their long-planned vacation to Russia. Quinn couldn’t help but wonder how many other traits she’d inherited from him—and worried over how much of a problem this special talent at lying would be when she hit her teens.

He took a deep breath and willed himself to be as calm as his daughter. The next big hurdle would be clearing Immigration and Customs once they reached their destination. If anything, Russians were known for their convoluted bureaucracy. He’d been through plenty with Aleksandra Kanatova and he knew she was trustworthy enough to keep up her end of the plan. But even with her help, the odds were overwhelming that they would run into all manner of problems entering the country—even on clean passports.

Quinn consoled himself with the idea that the twelve-hour flight would give him time to rest and make plans. The plane would stop in Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula first, then Vladivostok, before continuing on to Moscow, where he’d have to make first contact with Russian immigration officials. He hoped Kanatova would be there and waiting.