Do it my way.
Bewildered or just plain numb, passengers plodded along like sheep. If they wished to fly there was no alternative but to submit to the will of the officious security agents who squawked and scolded like so many angry blue jays, steadfast in their own moral superiority. Such power always brought oppression — and under oppression the weak had no choice but to give in to despair or fight back. The man from Pakistan had taught him that.
Though Tang had been born to Hui Chinese parents and raised under the tenets of Islam, he had never heard of Ramzi Yousef. The man from Pakistan had explained that in 1994 Yousef had smuggled nitroglycerin and other components on board a Philippines Airline flight from Manila to Tokyo. Using a simple Casio watch as his timer, he’d assembled his bomb in the bathroom while in flight. He’d placed the bomb under a seat in the life vest compartment and then gotten off the plane in Cebu. The device had exploded on the way to Tokyo, blowing a Japanese sewing machine maker in half and ripping a hole in the floor. Security technology had progressed since then, but as the man from Pakistan explained, so had the technology of making bombs.
Tang felt the knot in his stomach grow as Lin put her camera bag on the X-ray conveyor. To her right, in an adjacent line, a red-faced passenger began to argue with his TSA overlord about a water bottle filled with vodka.
Most of the security staff on scene converged around the sputtering drunk, leaving Lin to pass through the scanners without a hitch. Relief washed over Tang as she retrieved her camera bag from the belt on the other side of the X-ray. She turned to wave, a hollow look of resignation weighing heavily on her sallow face.
The detonator was in.
Chapter 4
Quinn pressed the phone tight against his ear, straining to hear over the wind and roaring motor.
“Hello,” he shouted.
“ ‘Mariposa’ hasn’t called in.” The caller started right in without introduction — par for Quinn’s former boss, even though he hadn’t spoken a word to the man in two months. There was a tense note of despair in the man’s voice that Quinn had never heard before.
It was Winfield Palmer, national security advisor to the recently assassinated president, Chris Clark. A West Point alumni and confidante of Clark, Palmer had served with him in various posts from their military academy days, including director of national security and then national security advisor. As such, he’d recruited Quinn as a blunt instrument, a sort of hammer to be employed when more diplomatic or traditional means failed.
Now, under the new administration, Palmer was unemployed and followed everywhere he went.
Living under constant surveillance, he had resorted to layers of security with his communication — proxy servers, shadow e-mail accounts, remote log-in to computers located in various safe-sites around the world, burner phones — and, of course, code. Mariposa, the Spanish word for butterfly, was the code name he’d chosen for Emiko Miyagi, Quinn’s martial arts instructor and friend. The name signified something beautiful and delicate. Miyagi was one, but certainly not the other.
“How long has it been?” Quinn asked.
“Five days,” Palmer said, uncharacteristically silent.
Both Quinn and Palmer knew Miyagi was 115 pounds of highly skilled badass warrior woman. Quinn, a more than talented fighter himself, had tasted defeat at her hands each and every time they had sparred. If she hadn’t made contact in five days, she was in serious trouble.
“Maybe she’s close to something?” Quinn offered.
“Maybe,” Palmer said, hollow, unconvinced. “She gave me a name last time we spoke. I have ‘Sonja’ looking into it now.”
“That’s good,” Quinn said, nodding to himself. “She still has resources.” “Sonja” was Palmer’s code name for CIA agent Veronica “Ronnie” Garcia. Apart from hair color, the buxom, sword-wielding fantasy heroine Red Sonja was a perfect ringer for Garcia — who also happened to be Quinn’s girlfriend. At least she had been, before he’d dropped off the grid. Quinn was smart enough to know that girlfriends needed care and feeding — and he’d been around to do neither for nearly half a year.
“Maybe she can get us something to go on,” Palmer said. “I don’t mind telling you, though, I’m worried.”
Behind Quinn in the boat, Ukka shouted from his position at the tiller. “Nearly there!”
Quinn gave the Eskimo a thumbs-up to show he understood, and then turned back to the phone. “Listen, I’ve got to go. Things are heating up out here.”
“Anything that I can do?” Palmer said, more out of habit from the old days than any ability to actually help. Even with his little ad hoc resistance movement, as a private citizen in suburban Virginia, there was nothing he could offer Quinn in Alaska beyond good wishes.
“No,” Quinn said, careful to not to use military trigger words like negative and affirmative that might trigger closer scrutiny from the NSA. “Looks like I’m burned, though. They’ve sent what looks to be contractors.”
“Contractors?” Palmer said. “That’s not good.”
“Yeah, well,” Quinn said, “they’re three down from when they started. Watch yourself. Looks like the gloves are off.” Quinn ended the call. He made certain the phone was on silent — a ringtone at the wrong moment could get him killed.
Twenty meters away, Ukka took the skiff out into the current to make a wide turn back toward the bank. The white crosses in the cemetery on Azochorak Hill ghosted in and out of the fog above them. They were coming in downriver, about a quarter mile from the village proper. Quinn traded his float coat for a more neutrally colored Helly Hansen raincoat he’d found in the borrowed skiff. The jacket was tattered and stunk of fish and mildew, but its olive green would be far less noticeable against scrub willow or even the open tundra. He slung the MP7 over his shoulder and stuffed the cell phone and the dead man’s radio in the pockets of the raincoat. He stood at the rail, ready to jump and run as soon as the bow touched gravel.
Cut, broken, and bruised to the point he could barely walk, let alone run, Quinn had come to Mountain Village one step ahead of US authorities. The marshals had taken him off their Top Fifteen wanted list for all of about ten minutes, until someone in the new presidential administration had caught wind of it and insisted he be made a priority. Thankfully, a deputy named August Bowen, an acquaintance of his from his boxing career at the Air Force Academy, had been assigned the case. Bowen had been in Japan and knew much of the truth about Quinn, so he dragged his feet as best he could. Still, Top Fifteens were worked by many hands. Quinn had to keep his wits about him to keep from getting captured — which under the present administration would surely mean a speedy trial and quick backroom execution.
He’d made too big a splash in Japan to stay there, leaving a wide and lengthy trail of bodies in his wake while looking for the assassins responsible for shooting his ex-wife. Even with friends in Japanese law enforcement, security footage of his face had already made it onto every news feed and blog in Asia, branding him the murderer from the US who typified the Japanese view of American bloodlust and gun craziness.
It killed him that he was too banged up to follow leads to Pakistan. He’d lived much of his life gutting it out through the pain. But this time was different. Miyagi took him to a doctor in Japan who asked few questions and patched him up well enough to travel. When Quinn argued or tried to do too much, she reminded him that “though a concentrated mind could pierce a stone, it was a long process.”