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?