The flight from Groom Lake to Las Vegas was only a short haul.
Adams held Lynn as the aircraft touched down on what he knew would be the north-west runway of McCarran International Airport, adjacent to the Janet Terminal.
They stayed hidden behind the crate as the Boeing taxied along the runway, gradually slowing as it circled and then came to a halt at its final resting place.
‘Come on,’ Adams said, leaving the confines of their hiding place and heading straight for the wheel housing, Lynn right behind him.
He opened the small hatch and slipped through more easily this time. He stopped at the top of the wheel strut to help Lynn through. Once out, she turned and closed the hatch. Still hidden within the wheel housing, they were out of sight of anyone on the runway, and also gone without a trace from the cargo area in case anyone should check it now the plane had landed.
Adams’ mind calculated what to do next. The night crew would be deplaning any minute, and then the airport’s service crew would be at the plane, refuelling it and preparing it for flying again. Timing would be everything.
He slowly turned himself upside down, his legs clenched around the landing strut to support his weight, keeping his hands by his side, so that only the top of his head would be visible if anyone was watching as he lowered himself to see what was going on around the aeroplane.
A set of stairs had already been brought to one side of the aircraft, nearest to the large white terminal building. On the far side of the terminal was a huge parking lot; and beyond that, the super-hotels and casinos of the Strip, the colossal black glass pyramid of the Luxor just opposite.
He heard an electric engine from the other side, and turned to see a service wagon coming across the runway towards them. Adams didn’t move a muscle, realizing that with the light as it was, only movement would give away his position, unless someone came right up to the wheel housing and looked straight at him.
He continued to watch as the first sets of feet started to descend the steps, and then as a service crew got out of the wagon, extended a ladder from the top of the vehicle, and entered the plane through the rear service hatch.
Realizing that everyone’s attention would now be on their own particular job, he spun his body back round, nodded to Lynn, and descended the strut, sliding straight down on to the tyre. Looking up to check that Lynn was with him, he then dropped from the top of the tyre to the runway tarmac.
Lynn joined him moments later, and he grabbed her hand and ran with her to the far side of the service wagon, using it to block the view of anyone in the Janet Terminal. They edged round the vehicle to the far side until they were at the rear.
Adams took another visual sweep of the area, gesturing with his head towards the parking lot just thirty metres away across the runway. Lynn looked across and nodded.
Adams turned to her and mouthed silently, ‘Three… two… one… go!’
Together they sprinted as fast as they could across the dark paving, running in the direction of the thick shadow of the plane’s fuselage cast by the powerful terminal floodlights. They covered the distance in five seconds, arriving at the fence line breathless, adrenalin coursing through their systems. Adams was sure they had remained undetected but every second that passed made them more of a target.
‘Up and over,’ he said to Lynn, and she turned to the fence, bending one leg and placing her foot into Adams’ cupped palms, which he then pushed upwards, boosting her up to the top of the fence. She grabbed at the top, pulled her body across and over, and dropped gracefully to the other side.
Adams backed up a couple of feet and then launched himself at the fence, swinging up and over in one smooth motion. He landed in a crouch and turned back to look through the fence, to see if their escape had been seen by anyone. But nobody had turned towards them. The Area 51 workers were making their way into the terminal building like sheep into a pen, the service crew continued to buzz around the plane doing the jobs they were paid to do. The busy main terminal buildings were far over to the south-east; the north-west corner was deathly quiet by comparison, almost like a private airfield all on its own.
It was clear that their presence had not been noticed, and so Adams and Lynn backed away from the fence, straightened up and turned to face the parking lot, just another couple returning to their car. And then, arm in arm, they headed towards the unmanned exit.
Ten minutes later, they had crossed Haven Street and Giles Street, made their way through the parking lot of Motel 8 Las Vegas until they had emerged on to South Las Vegas Boulevard, the fabled ‘Strip’. They crossed the wide, busy thoroughfare, and headed north until they reached the Luxor’s gigantic pyramid, the world-famous hotel and casino that Adams had spotted from the wheel strut of the Boeing.
Anywhere else on earth, a couple entering a casino just after seven in the morning might have caused a few raised eyebrows; in Vegas, however, such a sight was as natural as night following day. It was a true twenty-four-hour culture here, and some of the regulars literally spent every hour of every day of their stay behind the slot machines or at the roulette tables, betting their life savings on a roll of the dice.
As they entered the one hundred and twenty thousand-foot casino floor, they were amazed by the hustle and bustle around them, hundreds, maybe thousands, of people swarming from gaming tables to slot machines and back again. It was chaos, pure and simple.
Adams turned to Lynn and smiled. ‘It’s perfect.’
John Ayita was a man with a number of concerns, none of them minor.
Ten of his Shadow Wolves were dead, including his team in San Francisco and the Najana brothers. In fact, as far as he was aware, there was now only him and Stephenfield left.
He hadn’t heard from Adams since he and Lynn had gone to pick up the test results from DNA Analytics. He could only assume that the Bilderberg Group had somehow found and captured them, and forced them to talk. What else could have happened?
And yet he couldn’t believe Matt would have talked, not the great ‘Free Bear’. Maybe Lynn then? Or maybe they’d just used drugs on them; Ayita knew it was impossible to resist certain types of truth serum. Either way, his men had been wiped out by Jacobs’ Alpha Brigade, and he was on the run for his life.
He had had to abandon his warehouse headquarters and go deep into hiding, and he knew that Stephenfield would be doing the same.
He was in a bar in downtown Salt Lake City, downing a beer and considering his next move, when his cellphone rang. It was a clean phone, as he had rid himself of his other units for fear that he could be tracked, but he had rerouted those numbers to his new phone.
After a moment’s consideration, he pressed the answer button, although he didn’t say anything.
‘John?’ He heard Matt Adams’ voice coming through the line, speaking in the Lakota language, but he still did not answer. He was glad Adams was still alive at least, but didn’t know whether he could trust him. Maybe he was making the call under duress. Or maybe his voice had been sampled and was now being simulated by a computer. He had no idea.
‘Look,’ the voice continued in Lakota, ‘I can’t talk over an open line, we need to meet.’ Ayita considered the use of the tribal language. If Adams was being forced to make the call, why use the language? It made more sense that he was aware that calls could be monitored and was using Lakota as it was so hard to translate.
‘When and where?’ Ayita asked finally.
By the afternoon, Ayita was in a motel room with Adams and Lynn, just off Highway 80 outside Carson City. Stephenfield was with them too, Adams having also managed to make contact with the only other surviving Shadow Wolf.
Security arrangements had been made carefully, none of the parties entirely trusting the other, but eventually the meeting had been made, and each person explained their part in what had happened.