Top Ten (31 page)

Now the madman had him wondering. Thinking. Trying to guess where he was going with this. From deveining to situations...

“You are not who you pretend to be,” Michaelangelo said, switching the weapon from right hand to left so as to retrieve something from inside his long coat. When he produced the piece of paper and deftly unfolded it with his fingers Mills knew what he was talking about. “You are not number five.”

Mills stared at the bulletin. Ten men upon it. Ten faces. Or, more properly, ten likenesses. Ten likenesses, some with X’s through them. This was his scorecard. And what Mills knew he was getting at was that he had been bumped from the lineup.

“Am I right, Agent Donovan?”

Mills gaze flared. Jesus! How much had Jack Hale told him?

“You are not a worthy member of an exclusive club, as we both know, but you are important. Important because of what you have on that plane.”

Mills let it sink in for a moment, the thought of this thing and that thing, together, combined, madness and the madman, and he began to shake his head.

“Oh yes,” Michaelangelo said. “Oh yes.”

Mills understood. If the madman had simply wanted what he had on board, he could have had it already. All it would have taken was one more bullet. But he didn’t just want it—he wanted it taken from here.

“No way,” Mills said. “Not a chance.”

Michaelangelo refolded the bulletin and slipped it back in his coat. “I think chance has nothing to do with it. It is a certainty that you will help me.”

“Not on your life,” Mills said, and watched the madman’s hand come back out of the unseen pocket fisted around something.

“It is not my life you need to worry about,” Michaelangelo said, and flipped something from his hand to the bloody ground at Mills’s feet.

Mills looked down and saw in the diffused glow of the moon precisely what lay at his feet. A single poker chip.

Then another joined it. And another. And when Mills looked up again the madman was flipping chip after chip toward him.

“You maniac...if you...”

“Who has all the chips, Agent Donovan?” Michaelangelo asked. “And the cards as well?”

“Where is he?” Mills demanded, stepping bravely toward the madman. “
WHERE IS HE?!
”

Michaelangelo reached out, dropping the remaining chips and grabbing Mills roughly by the hair, putting the gun to his cheek for good measure. “Do you want to see him?”

“Dammit, where is he?” Mills pressed, bravery having nothing to do with his demeanor. Fear all of it. All but a small part that was becoming rage.

Michaelangelo pulled Mills’s face close to his, into the shadow of it. “Let’s go have a look, shall we?”

*   *   *

She caught sight of the tall tail of the aircraft over the brush and moved toward it at an angle, hearing voices as she did. Small voices. Too small to make out, to identify. But there were more than one. Two people were conversing. Two people were
alive
.

But which two.

Twenty yards further on the thicket began to thin, to both front and sides. To the left she could make out the dark strip of clear earth that was the lane far beyond where she’d left her car. To the right was the plane, most of which she could see through breaks in the foliage.

And she could see more than the plane. Enough to make her heart leap and her fingers flex around the grip of her weapon.

Damn...

He had him! Michaelangelo had Mills!

She steadied herself in a crouch and brought her weapon up, trying for a solid aim. But how good was her aim at, what, thirty yards? With a pistol. A pistol just like the one Michaelangelo had planted against Mills’s head. That she could see clearly. Could she hit her target and not her target’s victim? Could she take him out with one shot? A head shot? Before he could squeeze off a round?

Could she?

She didn’t know. She couldn’t know.

Ariel lowered her weapon a bit. Lowered it and watched as Michaelangelo walked Mills toward a pair of decaying bui—

“No,” she whispered aloud, seeing what was there, parked on the far side of the buildings. Just the back of it she could see, but the back was enough. How many K cars were still on the road?

She thumped her knee with a fist and tried to think. Think how she could get ahead of Michaelangelo. How she could get ahead of him now when he had what he wanted.

But did he have what he wanted? she wondered, and her gaze tracked right toward the Piper parked on the runway.

*   *   *

Michaelangelo dragged Mills past the old hangar and service building, almost around the corner. But then almost was enough. From where Mills now stood he could see the car. The old Dodge. His pop’s car.

“Damn you, if you...”

The madman’s hand pressed down hard on Mills head, forcing him to his knees. “Stay there.”

Mills watched as Michaelangelo went to the back of the car, keeping his weapon on him, and drew a set of keys from his pocket. A second later the lid popped up and the madman reached inside. With a heave he pulled something out, hesitating briefly before coming around the car once again with Arlo Donovan in his grasp.

“Pop,” Mills said from his enforced genuflection. His father was bound and gagged, hands tied before him and a strip of tape over his mouth. His eyes were wide. Wide with fear, Mills knew, and the rage inside him boiled.

“You know each other, I believe,” Michaelangelo said.

Mills did not take his eyes off of his father as he said, “You don’t know how lucky you are he’s alive.”

“I do, actually. Because I am certain now that you will help me. That you will take me and your precious cargo where I choose to go.” Michaelangelo paused just long enough to shift his aim from Mills to the side of Arlo’s head. “I am correct, am I not?”

Still Mills looked only at his father, his teeth clenched as his head moved in a slow, deliberate nod.

The gun came away from Arlo’s head and aimed once more at Mills. “Good.”

Finally, Mills looked to the madman. “But let me tell you one thing. One very true thing. If one hair on his head is hurt, if he doesn’t walk away from here alive after we’re gone, so help me I’ll fly you and me and that thing onboard into the ground. We’ll crash and burn. Do you understand me?”

Michaelangelo chuckled. “We have a deal. Get up.”

Mills did, facing his father now. “You’ll be okay.”

Arlo Donovan couldn’t speak right then, but his eyes said all that needed to be said.
No. Don’t do it. Don’t go with him.
They were all things Mills wished desperately could become reality, but this was not a time for wishes. For him, at this moment, it was a time for sacrifice. True sacrifice.

If the madman was stupid enough to believe that he wasn’t going to plow into a field somewhere regardless, then let him. At least his pop would be okay. His pop would be alive.

“Move,” Michaelangelo said, and after a last look Mills turned away from his father and back toward the Piper, the madman following him close with the weapon pressed to his back.

Arlo Donovan took one step forward and watched. Watched as his boy walked off with the killer.

*   *   *

Just outside the cabin door Michaelangelo took Mills’s collar in a fisted grip and pressed the gun hard against the back of his head, stopping him from entering. “Would you do me a favor?”

Mills eyes angled back toward the madman. “What are you talking about?”

“Would you kindly ask your friend to step from inside the plane?”

Mills brow bunched down with confusion. “What friend?”

“Your lady friend.”

No lower did he think it could go, but Mills’s heart sank to its foundation as he looked back to the Piper, back through it’s door to the darkened cabin within and said as calmly as he could, “Ariel?”

*   *   *

Shit...

She was crouched in the small space just inside and aft of the door, hugging the fuselage and planning,
hoping,
for one quick headshot as Michaelangelo came through the opening. No
Freeze
. No
You’re under arrest
. No warning. Just a squeeze on the trigger and put an end to him.

That had been the plan.

Shit...

But the plan was in the dumper.

How? How did he know?

“Did you think you could hide in the shadows, my dear lady? Did you?”

She listened to him talk to her from outside. Listened and wondered if he had somehow seen her as she sprinted from cover while his attention was on hauling Arlo from the trunk. Had he seen her then? Caught a glimpse?

Did it matter how?

“My dear, I live in the shadows. It is my world. You can’t hide in
my
world
from
me.”

What now? she asked herself. What the hell could she do now?

She knew. And she hated it.

Mills saw her first, crouching into the doorway just feet from him, her weapon held grip-first in surrender. She looked at him, her face calm but seething below, and then she looked above him to the man who could see in the shadows.

“Toss your weapon to the ground,” Michaelangelo instructed her, and she complied. The pistol thunked metallically off the concrete and came to rest near Lionel Price’s still body. “If you have any more weapons it would be prudent to—”

“I don’t have a backup piece,” she told him, sharing the truth that she wished was a lie.

“Good,” Michaelangelo said. “But you do have something else, I hope.”

Ariel chewed at the inside of her lip. “What?”

“Handcuffs...”

After a hesitation she reached slowly behind to her belt and came back with a gleaming pair of cuffs dangling from one finger.

“Good,” Michaelangelo said. “I think we will be needing those. Now...” He gave Mills a shove toward the plane, and he turned back to look with Ariel at the madman with the gun pointed at them. “...let’s all take a trip.”

Thirty Four

Pilot, Princess, and Prize

At the point of a gun they’d boarded the Piper, and under the same threat Mills had taken his place in the left seat and started the plane’s two engines. Behind him, in the Piper’s stripped-out cabin, Ariel was left with the madman. And to his front...

...to his front, as the xenon landing lights blazed to life and bathed what was left of Sugarpine’s runway in a hot white glow, he saw his father. Standing there next to his car in the partial shadow of the crumbling structures, hands bound but looking as though they were locked in prayer, his eyes squinting at the glare thrown his way. Squinting to watch, to witness, as his boy left him once more. For what was likely the last time.

And then Mills could lay eyes on his father no more. His gaze dropped to the instrument panel, to the gangs of lights and displays and dials come to life. It was hardly a pre-flight to be proud of, but for this trip it was all that was necessary.

But was that really true?
he wondered, glancing over his shoulder to the stripped out cabin behind. To Ariel, crouched low against the bare inner fuselage, her head barely at window level and her eyes set upon the madman who held a gun at her with one hand while running the other gently over the dull metal case that was strapped to the Piper’s cabin floor. She was here. With him. With them. With it.

Could he still do it? Could he still just take them all up a few thousand feet and nose the Piper into the sweet Georgia earth? Could he do that to
her
?

Dammit
, he swore silently, cursing her in thought. Cursing her for being there. For getting there. For somehow getting there. For being a complication.

He hated complications. Hated them.

But he didn’t hate her. Couldn’t hate her.

“How secure is this?”

The question caught Mills off guard, and he looked from Ariel to the madman who had posed it. “What?”

Michaelangelo tapped the dull metal case with a single, long finger. “How securely is this fastened down?”

Five straps anchored to ten metal hardpoints on the Piper’s exposed metal floor—that thing wasn’t going anywhere. Pilots hated things that weren’t bolted down, and if not that strapped down, because in any turbulence...

“Very,” Mills answered, truncating his line of mental reasoning. Stopping a memory coming. Of happenstance. He didn’t want to go there now. Didn’t need to relive that now. Didn’t need to revisit the image of his dead wife launched about the cabin of a jumbo jet and coming to rest as still and lifeless as a rag doll at his feet. No, he didn’t need to think about that at all.

Not at all.

“Very good,” Michaelangelo said, and swung one of the steel handles affixed to the case away from its silver-gray body. “Here, please.”

He was looking now at Ariel. Ariel and the cuffs she held in her hand.

“One end here, the other on your wrist,” Michaelangelo instructed, gesturing with Jack Hale’s pistol. “Your right wrist.”

He was smart, she saw. Up close and personal she saw. Making her cuff her strong hand. Her gun hand.

“Now, please,” Michaelangelo prodded, and the pistol’s aim settled on her face. “Right hand.”

Ariel hooked her wrist up with a expert strike just above the joint, the cuff circling the narrowest part where arm met hand and latching itself with a solid set of clicks.

“Tight, please.”

Her free hand squeezed down on the restraint, pushing a few clicks past where it had set, until it was almost painfully tight against her skin.

“And to the handle.”

Again she followed his direction, and with a final loud snap she was anchored to the box marked with Cyrillic characters. She tried not to think about what was inside. There was enough to worry about without throwing that in as well.

“Very good,” Michaelangelo said, then held his hand out to her, palm up. Waiting.

“What?” Ariel asked, but she knew. Knew because he was smart. Because he would not overlook that.

Michaelangelo’s mouth approximated a smile, his teeth baring and rigid cheeks swelling. “Your keys, my dear.”

Ariel slapped herself mentally for even
hoping
that he would overlook that one small, crucial detail, and fished her key ring from the pocket of her pants. She handed it over, but her captor was not yet satisfied.