The driver from the U.S. Consulate was waiting, as promised. Kat let him carry her bag as she followed him through the sparkling new airport terminal to the exit. She wondered if the men who had tried to shanghai Robert MacCabe were watching and knew she had been with him.
The whole thing seemed surreal. Had MacCabe not been someone of substance — someone whose reputation she already knew — her diagnosis would be raving paranoia. But wait a minute. What, exactly, DO I know about Robert MacCabe?
The thought was cut short by the sight of two Asian men standing to one side of the exit from the secure area, both wearing dark suits, both watching her. Kat kept her eyes straight ahead as she passed, straining to see with her peripheral vision what they were doing, certain their eyes were tracking her.
A hundred feet away, she stopped and looked over her shoulder at the men, who quickly averted their eyes just as the two young women they had apparently been waiting for emerged from the secure area, waving and smiling. Seconds later, laughing and talking, the two couples walked past Kat without a single glance.
She snorted softly to herself and shook her head. Real good instincts, Kat. MacCabe’s paranoia is rubbing off.
She turned to the driver and gestured him on, wishing she were still on the 747 next to MacCabe in first class.
CHAPTER 6
First Officer Dan Wade hesitated by the forward main-deck galley and glanced back, trying to maintain contact with the eye candy moving up the stairway, an attractive young woman wearing a black leather miniskirt slit partially up the back, tantalizingly matched by the seams on her dark stockings. He tried to turn away before Britta could catch him looking, but it was too late.
“Danny! Get your eyes off my passengers!” she kidded, as he tried to look innocent.
“I was just worried she might be cold in that dress she’s almost wearing.”
“Yeah, sure, President Carter.”
“What?” Dan asked, not comprehending the reference.
“You remember: ‘Ah had lust in mah heart’? You’re in lust. A girl can tell.”
“More accurately, a mother superior,” Dan mumbled.
“I heard that!” Britta shot back.
The station manager had handed a sheaf of flight papers through the door before closing it, and Bill Jenkins, the only male flight attendant, handed them in turn to the copilot. Jenkins, round-faced, balding, and good-natured, was a thirty-year veteran putting triplets through college. He frowned at the papers. “How’s the weather doing, Dan? It was looking ugly out there a while ago.”
The copilot nodded, arcing a thumb toward the ceiling. “In an hour this place will be roiling with thunderstorms, so we need to get the flock out of here.”
“In the vernacular, of course.”
“Of course.” Dan smiled back.
“You fellows up there on the bridge do realize,” Bill Jenkins continued, “that we’ve got a bigwig trade delegation aboard tonight, including some big-city mayors?”
“We heard. Captain Cavanaugh and I were trying to calculate how much lift the additional hot air could give us.”
Jenkins laughed as he pointed toward first class. “We lose an engine, let me know, and I’ll ask them to make speeches.” He winked at one of the female flight attendants, who winked back as she watched the copilot climb the stairs. Dan was in his early fifties, newly divorced and on the prowl.
On the flight deck some fifty feet above ground level, Captain Pete Cavanaugh toggled the Engine Start switch for the right outboard engine. The driver of the tug four stories below slowed the 747–400’s backward movement from the gate. Dan Wade, in the right seat of the two-pilot cockpit, checked the engine gauges and radioed the ground controller for taxi clearance before looking at Cavanaugh with a grin.
“You’re sure you’re awake enough for this?”
“Oh, give it a rest, Dan!” Pete said with mock disgust. “I wasn’t sleeping the entire layover.”
“Worst antisocial act of hibernation I’ve ever witnessed,” Dan said, shaking his head sadly. “I couldn’t even get you out of the room for dinner yesterday.”
“I love thirty-six-hour layovers, okay? No yards to mow, no phones to answer, no grandkids or cats to wake me up at seven A.M., and no copilots to give me a hard time. My only job is to rest. So, how about that Before Taxi checklist?”
“Roger. How about that Before Taxi check?”
Pete grimaced. “Ten thousand comedians are starving in Los Angeles…”
“And I’m trying to be funny. Okay. Stand by for the checklist,” Dan replied. The entire southern sky lit up in a massive display of lightning. “By the way, we do have our taxi clearance when the tug lets us go, which I hope is soon, because I’d sure like to beam out of here before that weather arrives.”
“Beam out?” Pete rolled his eyes. “Lord, please deliver us from Trekkies.”
The click of the public-address system echoed softly through the cabin as Britta swung onto the stairway to descend to the lower deck. Pete Cavanaugh’s voice filled the cabin. He sounded and looked the part of the seasoned captain, she thought. Deep, calm, steady, and reassuring. The senior captain stood over six foot two, thin as a rail, his perpetually smiling face crowned with a mane of silver hair, carefully cropped in Julius Caesar-style. Britta smiled to herself. She considered Pete unflappable in the air. A wing could come off and he’d probably order coffee on the way down.
Dan, on the other hand, was more excitable and kinetic. Funny and friendly and slightly overweight, his inadvertent trademark — and the bane of his existence — was his thick, somewhat wavy dark hair and his incessant attempts to keep it under control. No matter how hard he tried to contain it under his pilot’s hat, a lock or two always seemed to escape and curl up somewhere around the hat band, giving him a slightly avant-garde appearance. Women seemed to love his slightly disheveled lost-puppy manner. When Dan Wade, at five foot nine, and Pete Cavanaugh flew together, the Mutt and Jeff contrast caused heads to turn.
Britta reached the bottom step just as Pete finished his greeting. Ten hours of flight time ahead to Honolulu, he’d said, with routine weather on a routine flight. The passengers were settling into the sumptuous environs of the main first-class section as she moved through it. Coats and shoes had already come off and the personal TVs installed at each seat were in use now that the usual life-vest-and-evacuation demonstrations had been done. The aroma of leather filled the air.
“Did you get a blanket, Sir?” Britta asked a distinguished-looking man in the first row; he smiled and nodded. She moved aft, her eyes scanning the passengers for fastened seat belts and any looks of discontent.
A well-dressed black woman with dreadlocks and an infectious smile looked up and beamed at Britta. The woman was busily plumping up several pillows beyond their normal capacity.
Britta glanced toward the rear of the cavernous aircraft, judging whether she had time to walk the entire cabin. I’ll make the time, she decided.
Alice, Jaime, and Claire, all old friends, were buttoning up the forward galley as Britta moved through business class and into coach, letting her eyes range over the passengers. She noted the forty-five-person tour group headed back to the States after a ten-day excursion of China, most of them tired but smiling. The tour director caught her eye and waved from across the cabin.