Jet (9 page)

“Like a pig headed for slaughter,” the driver agreed, and the men laughed. Jet didn’t react. Better that the fat idiot thought she was harmless. If he was chartered with her security, she was as good as free. But then an idea occurred to her, and she gave them a shy smile.

“Is that the look your mother gives you when you screw her? Or do you save it for little boys?” she asked, in passable Albanian.

The guards couldn’t help but chuckle at the anger that flitted across the cop’s face. His eyes bugged out and his expression twisted into an ugly grimace. “Pretty funny, aren’t you? Let’s see how good your sense of humor is when the Russians get here,” he snarled, leaning into her.

“God, don’t you people ever brush your teeth?” she said. “Smells like a cow’s ass.”

The cop reached out and gripped her arm, squeezing so hard she almost cried out. Good. He was fuming, and she’d learned something important: they were waiting for some Russians who hadn’t arrived. That meant she had time. How much, she didn’t know, but from how dumb the cop looked and how easily she’d gleaned that bit of data, it wouldn’t be hard to provoke him again and find out.

“Let’s go, hot pants,” the cop growled, pulling her toward an unmarked gray metal door.

“Hey. You need to sign for her,” the driver said, waving a document.

The cop exhaled angrily, took the guard’s pen, and scrawled a signature and date across the bottom before handing it back to him. “There. Anything else?” he demanded.

The guard tilted his head and eyed them. “You make a lovely couple,” he said, and the pair sauntered off, ribbing each other like schoolboys, laughing now that their job was done.

The cop unbolted the door and pushed Jet through, and then manhandled her down a short hall to a locked room. He fumbled with a key, still gripping her like he was trying to break her arm, and then unlocked it and swung it open.

“Welcome to hell,” he said with an evil grin.

“Can’t be any worse than your breath.”

She thought for a moment he was going to hit her, but he managed with visible effort to get himself under control. “I hope they skin you alive.”

“I need to use the bathroom.”

“You can crap on the floor for all I care.”

“Oh, is it your dinnertime already?”

He retreated before his instinct to swing at her got the better of him, locking the door behind him as he left. She’d considered killing him while he was proximate, but decided it would be easier to escape cleanly if he thought she was safely locked away.

She looked around the room and moved to a plain metal desk in one corner that looked like a castoff. Her impression was confirmed when she opened the drawers and found them empty. Thinking furiously, she knelt down and examined the underside for anything that might help her, but came up empty.

Jet studied the ceiling before climbing onto the desk and reaching overhead to push on the ceiling tiles. They moved easily, as she’d suspected they would, and she felt along the edge of the rim. Metal. With any luck, sufficiently strong to support her weight.

She dropped from the desk and crossed to the light switch mounted on the wall by the door. She flipped it off, and the room plunged into darkness. Jet waited as her eyes adjusted and felt her way back to the desk. Standing on it again, she peered up into the cavity she’d opened and saw dim light filtering through from the area of the hall.

Pulling herself up into the space between the drop ceiling and the structure above with her wrists bound proved challenging but not impossible, and seconds later she was crawling carefully along the metal grid, avoiding the tiles, using the frame to support herself. She resisted the urge to sneeze from the dust and stopped when she reached a ventilation duct.

Reaching to one of the wires holding the false ceiling in place, she worked at one end until it snapped off, leaving her with several inches of stiff, rusting wire in her hand. She bent one end and slid it into the handcuff lock and, after shifting it around for half a minute, was rewarded with a snick. She pulled the cuff free and repeated the job on the other one, and then continued toward the hall light, keenly aware that she was on borrowed time.

Matt strode down the tree-lined street a block from Hannah’s school, eyeing the windows of the parked cars for anything unusual as he approached. The area was congested with vehicles, parking spots at a premium during business hours in mixed zone areas like this one, which would make getting in and out of the school without being observed difficult.

He’d already circled the block once on his bike before leaving it in a tight spot next to a dumpster in the alley that ran behind the buildings, where hopefully it would go unnoticed if there was anyone watching for him. It didn’t feel like there was, but he knew he was rusty, and just guessing the coast was clear wouldn’t cut it. He knew from experience that you could be right ninety-nine times out of a hundred, and it was the one error in judgment that would kill you. He didn’t have the latitude to be wrong today – not with Hannah hanging in the balance.

High clouds drifted across the azure sky, shielding him from the sun as he neared the school and continued past it. To anyone who might have had it under surveillance, he’d be nothing more than a disinterested pedestrian talking on his cell phone. The device was a useful prop as he carried on a muttered conversation with himself, the sort of thing a preoccupied businessman would naturally be focused on as he made his way to a meeting.

Once past the school, he turned the corner and ducked into the alley that ran behind the buildings and proceeded without hesitation to a fire escape ladder suspended from a platform a story above the street. Using a move that Jet had taught him, he took a running start at the brick wall and seemed to run up the side before flinging himself at the lowest rung and locking onto it with his hands.

He pulled himself onto the platform and climbed quickly, painfully aware of his years as his entire body protested the exertion. At the third story he stopped and glanced down the length of the empty alley to confirm that he hadn’t been spotted, and then continued up to the flat roof and dragged his body over the lip onto the gravel and tarpaper surface.

Panting, he pushed to his feet and traversed the long, narrow surface until he was standing next to the school, staring down at it ten feet below. He considered trying one of Jet’s rolling tumble maneuvers but opted for a slower descent using a drainpipe. There was no point in showing up for Hannah looking like he’d lost a fight with a bear, and he was already scraped up enough from his climb. Once on the school roof, he took cautious steps toward the rooftop door, swatting away the grime that had rubbed onto his jeans and jacket.

When he was satisfied that he was as clean as he could get absent hours in a laundromat, he tugged at the knob until it eased open with a protesting screech, and found himself staring down into a storeroom filled with dusty children’s classroom desks. Matt crept down the stairs and to the door at the far end of the room and then stopped, listening through the wood. Hearing nothing, he eased it open and moved into the hall, the classroom doors lining it all closed.

The receptionist looked up, startled, when he appeared in the foyer opposite her desk.

“I’m here to pick up Hannah,” he said. “I called this morning.”

“Oh, yes, of course. But I’m a little tied up right now,” she said, indicating the blinking switchboard.

“Which room is she in? I don’t have a lot of time. No offense.”

“Ground floor, classroom three. The numbers are painted over the doorways.”

“I can find it. You told her teacher?”

“Yes.” The woman looked at the blinking lights.

“Go ahead with your calls. I’ll be in and out in a snap.”

Without waiting for a response, Matt strode down the corridor to where toddlers’ voices were vying with each other for attention. He knocked on the door and waited, and then a woman he recognized from the orientation meeting he and Jet had attended only a few months earlier opened it, an expression of resigned patience in place.

“Mrs. Krauss, nice to see you again. I’m here for Hannah. I’m her father, Adrian.”

“Oh, right.” She turned to the children and waved Hannah over. “Hannah, honey. Papa’s here.”

Hannah came running over, dragging her backpack behind her, and Matt picked her up and smiled at the teacher. “Thanks so much. I’ll let you get back to class. Looks like you’ve got your hands full.”

Matt moved down the hall toward the reception area, sensing Mrs. Krauss’s disapproving stare burning into his back. When he heard the door close, he stopped and then retraced his steps to the stairs, and took them two at a time while whispering to Hannah. “Don’t make a sound. We need to sneak out of here, okay? Like the old days.”

Hannah nodded and pursed her little lips. Matt telling her to stay quiet was nothing new – when they’d been on the run it had been a constant imperative.

“Mama?” she whispered.

“We can’t talk right now. Shhh.”

“Okay.”

He carried Hannah through the storage room and up the rickety stairs to the roof, and then to the drainage pipe, where he had her wrap her arms around his neck for a piggyback ride as he clambered up the drainage duct. Once on the roof of the adjacent building, he resumed carrying her, pausing only to peer over the rim at the street below for any signs of pursuit.

His blood froze when he spotted a dark SUV parked across the street and three men getting out of it. He watched as one pointed at the school and the other two made their way toward the front entrance as the third followed their progress from near the rear bumper.

He’d seen enough. They needed to get out of there. His assistant, Eric, had probably shown up for work and been interrogated. He didn’t know where Matt lived, but Matt had mentioned the school to Eric, and Eric had met Hannah.

Which in the hands of a motivated interrogator would be enough.

The return to the alley couldn’t happen fast enough for Matt, and he had to shush Hannah again twice as they made their way down the fire escape. Once in the alley, he put her down and she faced him, tiny hands on her hips in a way that reminded him of her mother. Her eyes flashed as she asked her question.

“Where’s Mama?”

“We’re supposed to meet later,” Matt said, which was technically not a lie. In the event that Kosovo was compromised, they’d agreed on two possible rendezvous points, the first in front of the art museum in town, and if they didn’t make contact either via cell or a message from the café across the street, he’d head to the storage unit they kept as an emergency measure. It was stocked with a vehicle and supplies, and after dark they’d make for the border and wait for each other in Romania, a country with even more primitive infrastructure than Kosovo and consequently less chance of being tracked.

Matt beelined with Hannah to the scooter, and after pulling Hannah’s backpack over her shoulders and fitting the helmet on her too-small head, he started the engine and tore away, the little engine’s whine of complaint at the extra weight following them all the way down the alley and onto the larger boulevard that led to the bank.

Jet lay still in the crawlspace, ears searching for any hint of movement in the corridor below. A door had slammed on the opposite end, far from the room where she was being held captive, but there had been no further sounds for a full minute. She rubbed her wrists where the cuffs had abraded her skin and, after confirming that there were no signs of life beneath her, made her move.

She pried up a square and slid it to the side, lowered her legs through the gap, and dropped silently to the floor. She glanced back up at the gaping hole in the ceiling and then took off at a sprint, making for the distant door that led, hopefully, to freedom.

Jet had nearly made it when a shout echoed from behind her – the familiar voice of the fat cop, this time beyond agitated.

“Stop or I’ll shoot!”

She wrenched the door open and threw herself through it, not waiting to see whether the cop was bluffing. She landed hard on a stairwell landing and was faced with her first difficult decision: up or down. When the cops had brought her into the terminal, they’d been on the ground floor, which meant that the down option likely led to a basement – potentially promising if it held a series of maintenance and equipment rooms she could vanish into, but also a possible dead end from which there was no escape.

Her decision made, she bolted up the stairs to the next landing and pushed the door open. Another hall, this time lined with administrative offices. Two young men holding documents gaped at her open-mouthed from a doorway as she raced by, covering the span in moments, and disappeared through another door.

Jet found herself back in the terminal, on a second-floor section with first-class lounges, bars, gift shops, and retail stores catering to travelers. She slowed as she neared the escalator, hoping to blend in with the other passengers on the steps, but abandoned that idea when the cop’s whistle shrieked through the terminal, causing everyone’s heads to swivel as one toward the source of the sound.

She pushed a woman out of the way, leapt onto the stainless steel dividing platform, and slid to the bottom, landing on her feet. Jet was running flat out the moment she hit the ground, making for the exit, ignoring the puzzled stares of the few police near the ticket counters, who clearly hadn’t been briefed about the officially sanctioned kidnapping underway.

The whistle pierced the air again, and she changed course for the nearest entry doors, closer than she would have liked to where the fat cop was charging at her down the escalator, but she didn’t want to risk one of the other cops playing hero and getting involved in the chase while she was still inside the terminal. She cleared the glass doors and tore straight at a seventies-era Peugeot coupe, the nearest car in sight. A tall, earnest youth in fashionably distressed jeans and a blue sweater was placing a suitcase on the curb as a young woman looked on appreciatively. She was tiptoeing to kiss him when Jet knocked him aside and slid behind the wheel.