“Come with us,” one of them hissed in his ear.
“Where?”
“You’ll know soon enough.”
They had his arms now and were moving him quickly out into the snowy street. He didn’t have to wonder where the KGB thugs were taking him. He knew.
Lubyanka Prison.
Hawke twisted his head around, looking for Anastasia. She was standing where he’d left her on the steps, looking down at him, both hands to her face, terror in her eyes.
“Find the American!” Hawke cried out to her. “The one I told you about at the Metropol!”
He felt a blow to the back of his head and then nothing more. His last thought before he went out was that on the airship, he’d managed to give Anastasia the assumed name Harry Brock had registered under at his hotel.
Harry would find him. Help him.
Maybe.
50
Fancha was singing when the lights went out. She was singing “A Minha Vida,” her biggest hit from the Green Island Girl album, which had just gone platinum. The dinner crowd was really with her, she could feel it, and so she went ahead with the beautiful song, singing in the dark, thinking this lighting thing was just some kind of a dramatic flourish by the very flamboyant Russian stage director named Igor. She’d seen him backstage before the show started, sipping vodka from a flask with one of the musicians.
Or maybe it was just a temporary power outage aboard the giant airship?
They were sailing far out over the Atlantic now, just north of Bermuda, she thought. Past the point of no return, like in her favorite John Wayne movie, The High and the Mighty. She’d been afraid of flying ever since she’d seen it, but she still loved it, still found herself whistling the haunting theme song now and then.
When she ended the song, there was a lot of applause and even shouts of “Brava! Brava!” from some of the French and Italian people onboard. Had to be the smartest audience she’d ever performed for, most of them Nobel Prize winners, after all. And Vice President McCloskey’s wife, Bonnie, was sitting right up front by the little stage, clapping louder than anybody.
She took a deep bow, even though nobody could see her.
The sudden darkness was startling and complete. It was a moonless night, and even though there were big windows in the ship’s ballroom, she couldn’t see much other than the silhouettes of the three hundred or so people in the audience. They were mostly all seated at tables of four or more, but a large number of couples were still circling the dance floor, the small band onstage behind her going into an unfamiliar riff.
Dancing in the dark?
People just kept clapping, probably thinking, lights go on, lights go off. Happens all the time on shipboard, right? A lot of liquor had been consumed at the cocktail reception and a lot of wine at dinner. She didn’t drink herself, but later, she’d remember that she still wasn’t scared at that point, thinking it was all sort of fun.
“If someone will light a candle, I’ll sing another song,” she said to a ripple of nervous laughter.
Someone called out, “‘Ave Maria’!”
She began to sing the beautiful aria, feeling the power of her instrument, waiting for the violinist to catch up.
Then the lights came back on.
And someone screamed.
The terrorists, for that’s what they were, had entered under the cover of darkness, but many were still pouring into the room from every doorway. They were all dressed in heavy boots and black combat fatigues, but it was the guns everybody was looking at. They all carried big, complicated-looking assault rifles, cradled in their arms like babies, but they had multiple layers of weapons, sashes of bullets, flashy knives, all kinds of smaller guns holstered to thighs or sticking up from belts.
The thing that really spooked her was the gas masks. They all wore black insectlike gas masks pushed back on top of their heads.
Gas? Then she saw the fat man come in with the two canisters on his back. The baker. The one from the birthday party. The one who’d brought the bomb inside the cake. The baker stood beside the muscular blond guy, another face she thought she recognized from the party, the security guy. He seemed to be the leader. He was shouting orders and threats at the frightened, terrified passengers. People were too shocked to panic yet, but husbands were searching for wives, people were speaking rapidly to each other, considering what to do and abandoning strategies instantly, paralyzed with fear, realizing the utter uselessness of their plans.
“Attention!” the blond man yelled, raising his rifle above his head and waving it about. “You are now all hostages of the Chechen Liberation Front. Do exactly as you’re told, and no one will die. Disobey my orders, and you all will be killed. We are now flying at five thousand feet. For any one person who disobeys orders or causes trouble, five passengers, chosen at random, will be thrown out of the airship.”
Oh, Stokely, she thought, feeling her whole body tremble. Oh, baby, where are you now?
The blond guy, the leader, kept shouting orders, making threats. She remembered his name suddenly. Yuri.
There was a commotion on the dance floor, where people were moving and sliding against each other, everybody knowing that at worst they were dead, at best they were at the beginning of a long ordeal. A husband and wife were arguing now in the middle of the crowd, and she heard the woman scream at her husband, “Do something, God damn you! Do something!”
Fancha heard herself saying into the microphone, “Everybody try to stay calm. Do what they say, and we’ll be okay.”
But the woman who wanted action slapped her husband hard across the face and turned from him, pushing through the panic-stricken crowd on the dance floor, shoving people, trying to move toward the leader. People were slipping and falling, scrambling to get out of her way.
“Stop right there,” Yuri said, seeing that she was headed for him. He pulled a large.45 automatic and aimed it at her head.
“Kill me!” she said, shouting at the top of her lungs. “Go ahead and kill me, you fucking bastard!”
“Stop now, I warn you!”
“Remember United Flight Ninety-three, asshole? That’s me! That’s who I am!” She looked around at the crowd behind her, her eyes wild, and said, “Let’s roll!”
She kept pushing forward, ignoring the gun pointed directly at her. When she broke through the perimeter of the crowd and was maybe six feet from the blond guy, one of the nearby terrorists, who couldn’t have been more than twenty, stepped forward with his knife and slashed her throat, almost severing her head, the blood gushing out onto her white evening gown.
She collapsed to the floor in a heap. The crowd was stunned for a moment but then started screaming in renewed panic, pushing one another out of the way, thinking there had to be some kind of escape, still some way out of this nightmare.
As Fancha desperately looked around for a way out, shots were fired. She didn’t see who was shot, because right then the lights went out again.
The leader was screaming at them to get on the floor, now, or they would all be killed. This time, people listened, and she could sense them diving to the floor. In the darkness and pandemonium, her eyes began to adjust. And Fancha saw her escape.
There was a small backstage area behind the velvet curtains. A door back there led to the kitchen, and from the kitchen she knew she could find her way to the main staircase and down one deck to her cabin. She silently stepped around the musicians, who seemed rooted to their chairs, and slipped through the tiny gap in the heavy velvet curtains. It was totally dark and deserted backstage, but she could see a thin strip of light beneath the door to the kitchen.