She did not like the sound of that. ‘Is it going to be a fast take-off?’
‘You need to get to New York in a hurry! Are you ready?’
Nina gulped, crossing her arms protectively over her stomach. ‘Yeah,’ she said, dry-mouthed.
‘Then hang on to your butt . . . I mean, your hat, ma’am.’
The engines rose to a shriek, even through her helmet’s soundproofing – then a thunderous crackling roar joined the cacophony as both afterburners ignited, raw fuel pumping into the jet exhausts and blasting out of the twin nozzles in a spear of flame. The F-15 shot forward like a rocket. Nina gasped as she was thrust back into the seat. The acceleration of an airliner was nothing compared to the jet fighter’s, and the G-forces kept building as the plane hurtled along the runway. Almost before she could register it, the Eagle was airborne, Ciampino dropping sharply away, and the pressure on her body grew even stronger as Fox pulled the nose up to what felt like the vertical. ‘Oh my God!’ she squeaked.
‘Are you okay?’ Fox asked.
‘I don’t know! What are we doing, ten G?’
‘Only about two, ma’am.’
‘Two!’ she cried. ‘Is that all?’
‘I deliberately kept it low on account of your condition. But I can ease off if it’s too much.’
‘Please, be my guest. I’m not supposed to ride roller coasters while I’m pregnant, and this doesn’t seem much different!’
‘I guess I won’t be showing off any barrel rolls for you, then.’
Her glare bored through the rear of his seat into his skull. ‘No thanks.’
Fox chuckled, then had another exchange with air traffic control. The F-15 eased out of its climb, Nina looking out of the cockpit’s side to find with surprise that the fighter had not even gone steeper than forty-five degrees in its ascent, never mind vertical. Rome receded below, the Vatican clearly visible at its heart. ‘Okay,’ he told her, ‘we’re going to a cruising altitude of forty-five thousand feet. I can’t go supersonic until we clear the Italian coast, and I’ll have to drop back below the sound barrier while we fly over France, but once we reach the Atlantic, I’ll put the hammer down.’
‘How about that,’ she said quietly, putting her hands on her bump and speaking to its resident. ‘Most people don’t get to fly supersonic in a jet fighter in their entire lives, but you’ve done it before you’re even born.’ A smile, mixed with a sigh. ‘I really, really hope your life isn’t as interesting as mine.’
She leaned back as the F-15 banked and headed west.
Travelling at supersonic speed turned out to be surprisingly unexciting. The Strike Eagle’s breaching of the sound barrier was marked with a jolt and a split-second burst of vapour whisking past the cockpit, but the flight afterwards felt no different from that preceding it. Their traversal of the Mediterranean seemed to take only minutes, then the plane slowed to make a high-altitude pass over south-western France before the empty grey curve of the Atlantic appeared ahead. Fox accelerated again, continuing for twenty minutes at full speed before slowing once more to rendezvous with a hulking KC-135 tanker aircraft. The manoeuvres required to link the two planes for refuelling did nothing for Nina’s stress levels, but Fox made the connection with practised ease, and before long the F-15 was on its lonely way again.
With nothing but ocean far below, there was little sense of motion. The unchanging view and the constant rumble of the engines, added to Nina’s general exhaustion, soon became soporific. She drifted into sleep, waking as the plane juddered. ‘What was that?’ she said, blinking in alarm.
‘Nothing to worry about,’ Fox replied. ‘We just caught some turbulence from the Extender.’ She leaned to look past him, seeing another KC-135 growing larger ahead. ‘We’re about to gas up again. Once we’re done, it’s non-stop all the way to New York.’
‘How long will that take?’ she asked, shocked that she had managed to sleep through the second refuelling.
‘Just under an hour. Oh,’ he added, ‘and if you look back and to your left, there’s something I think you’ll want to see.’
She craned her neck to peer back over the F-15’s wing. ‘There’s another plane!’ A sleek grey shape was approaching, its twin tails suggesting that it was a second Eagle.
‘That’s right. It’s not one of ours; it’s a Saudi bird. It set off before we did, and from what I’ve been told, it’s hauled ass at the redline the whole way to catch up, on the direct orders of the Saudi king himself. I was actually ordered to slow down a bit, because you both need to land at the same time.’
‘And who’s aboard it?’ she asked, smiling because she already knew the answer.
‘I’ll switch radio channels so you can talk to them yourself.’
Brief electronic chatter in her headphones, then she heard a familiar voice. ‘Ay up, love.’
‘Ay up yourself,’ Nina replied with a huge grin. ‘So I guess Dalton came through for you too.’
‘Most of this came from the Saudis,’ Eddie told her. ‘Funny how they roll out the red carpet when you save their holy city from being gassed. Are you okay?’
‘Yeah. I just hope we can get to New York in time to do something – and that we actually can do something.’
‘Got to try, haven’t we? Won’t be setting much of an example for the kid if we don’t.’
‘Maybe, though when most parents worry about being a good role model it’s usually about whether they eat too much junk food, not how many terrorist attacks they’ve stopped!’ She watched as the other fighter drew closer. ‘Huh, I just realised something.’
‘What?’
‘What I’m doing – it actually fits with Revelation. The woman who took refuge high in the wilderness was pregnant, and according to the text she was given “two wings of a great eagle”. I’m pregnant, this wilderness is about as high as you can get, and this plane is an Eagle! Maybe there’s something to the prophecy after all.’
‘Hope not,’ Eddie said. ‘Wasn’t she called the Woman of the Apocalypse? That’s what we’re trying to avoid!’
‘Ah. Yeah. Good point. That’s what I get for trying to be smart.’ The other F-15 was now near enough for her to make out the figure in its rear seat; she waved at him, getting the same gesture in return. The sight made her smile, before her mood fell again. ‘Do you think we’ll be able to stop him?’
‘Course we will,’ said Eddie. Even over the radio, he had recognised the gloom in her voice and adopted a more upbeat tone to counter it. ‘We stopped Simeon and Anna; we can find Cross too.’
‘You stopped Simeon,’ she pointed out. ‘The only reason Anna didn’t kill everybody in St Peter’s Square is because Cross tricked her. Yes, I found her, but I didn’t reach her in time. If her statue hadn’t been a fake . . .’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ he insisted. ‘It’s the results that count. You know how you said you’d been seeing a shrink to figure out if everything you’d done was worth it? Well, this proves it is. We saved thousands of lives today – and Christ knows how many more in the past. We’ve stopped wars, Nina. You’ve stopped ’em. And yeah, I know we’ve both lost people we cared about because of it . . . but we might have lost a lot more if we hadn’t. Like you told me in the tunnel, this is what you do. And it is all worth it.’
Nina smiled, accepting his words as truth and feeling that a weight had been lifted from her. ‘Thanks, honey. I didn’t need to pay for a shrink after all, did I?’
‘Just call me Dr Frasier Chase.’ She could almost see his grin even across the gap between the two fighters.
The aircraft moved into position behind the KC-135, Nina’s the first to connect to the refuelling boom extending from beneath its tail. The procedure was completed quickly and cleanly. The Saudi F-15 then took its place before both Eagles, now fully fuelled, dropped away from the tanker. ‘You ready?’ Eddie asked.
‘Not entirely, but . . .’ Nina took a deep breath, then gave him a thumbs-up. ‘Let’s make everything worth it.’
br /> The F-15s ignited their afterburners. Side by side, they raced into the empty sky.
37
New York City
The two military jets touched down at LaGuardia airport, much to the surprise of observers and the infuriation of those waiting to land as the airspace was cleared for their arrival. Nina and Eddie were quickly ushered to a waiting helicopter, taking a moment to embrace and kiss before boarding. Seretse was waiting inside the cabin. ‘Welcome home,’ he said, shaking their hands.
‘Good to be back,’ Nina replied. ‘Although I really, really need a pee! Four hours strapped into a chair is no fun at all.’
‘Some people pay good money for that,’ Eddie said with a smirk as he took his seat. ‘Any news on Cross?’
Seretse shook his head. ‘Nothing yet.’
Nina fastened her seat belt as the chopper wound up to take-off speed. ‘Are we going to the UN?’
‘No, Brooklyn.’
‘Brooklyn? What the hell’s in Brooklyn?’
‘A surprising amount,’ Seretse replied with a faint smile. ‘I know that as a lifelong resident of Manhattan, you may find that difficult to comprehend.’
She huffed. ‘Funny man.’
‘But the regional headquarters of the Secret Service are located there,’ the diplomat went on, ‘and they are in charge of security outside the United Nations complex, so that is where we are going. Hopefully you will be able to provide them with useful information.’
‘Let’s hope.’ She looked out of the window. The helicopter cleared the boundary of LaGuardia, heading south-west across the relatively low-rise sprawl of Queens towards Brooklyn. The towers of Manhattan rose on the far side of the East River. Her home; but it was again under threat.
The flight did not take long. The chopper touched down in Brooklyn Heights’ Columbus Park, a convoy of black SUVs waiting to whisk them to the Secret Service offices a short distance away on Adams Street. Seretse took a phone call as they arrived. ‘Air Force One has just landed at JFK,’ he told Eddie and Nina as they went inside. ‘In light of the threat, President Cole will be taken to the United Nations by helicopter rather than in a motorcade.’
‘That’s good,’ said Nina, relieved.
‘A number of the world leaders are travelling there by road, though,’ he continued, dampening her mood. ‘They are still at risk.’
Eddie shook his head. ‘If Cross hates the UN so much, he’ll make the attack when they’re all there. They’ll be like his Pokémon – gotta catch ’em all.’ Seretse and Nina exchanged puzzled looks. ‘Oh, come on. Nina, you’ll have to learn something about pop culture once the baby’s born!’
‘I can’t wait,’ she lied. ‘You’re right, though. He’ll want all the kings of the world to witness the fall of Babylon – and if he can kill them afterwards, so much the better to bring about the apocalypse. But he’ll probably have a hard time getting close enough to do that.’
‘No probably about it,’ said a new voice. A broad-shouldered, harried-looking bald man in his fifties marched to meet the group, the coiled cable behind one ear giving away that he was a member of the Secret Service. ‘Dr Wilde, I’m John Talsorian, USSS special agent in charge of diplomatic security at the General Assembly.’
‘USSS SAIC?’ said Eddie. ‘That’s a lot of esses.’
Talsorian gave him the briefest of dismissive glances. ‘Mr Seretse, good to see you again. If you’ll come to the briefing room?’
‘You sound confident about your security,’ said Nina as they headed through the building.
‘The place is locked down,’ he replied firmly. ‘We were already on high alert even before this threat warning, and now it’s been taken to maximum. Nobody can get within three blocks of the UN without being checked by either the Secret Service or the NYPD. The FDR drive is closed, NYPD river patrol has the East River fully covered, and we’ve got helicopters flying circuits watching all the rooftops. Beyond that, if anything tries to breach the city’s airspace, there are Air National Guard F-16s ready to scramble from Atlantic City; they can intercept in six minutes.’
‘What about submarines?’ Eddie asked him, deadpan. ‘A mini-sub could get into the UN basement through the old fire hydrant pipes. I know, ’cause I was there when it did.’
Talsorian’s expression was now one of outright contempt. ‘Who are you again?’
‘This is my husband, Eddie Chase,’ Nina said. ‘And you should listen to what he has to say – well, most of it. He’s already saved thousands of lives just this morning, so he knows what he’s talking about.’
The Secret Service agent seemed unconvinced, but he said nothing, instead bringing the group into a crowded room. Roughly half its occupants were in conservative dark suits, the others in tactical gear. A pair of large screens mounted on one wall displayed a map of the area around the United Nations complex – and a photograph of Ezekiel Cross. ‘All right, listen up,’ said Talsorian as he stood before the screens, facing his agents. ‘This is Nina Wilde; you may have heard of her, she’s a famous archaeologist, but right now that’s not important. What matters is that she has information about the man we’re looking for. Dr Wilde?’
Nina was taken aback by the brusqueness of his introduction, but the agent was clearly already under pressure, and there was a time factor involved. She regarded the image of Cross, which she estimated was at least ten years old, possibly from his CIA file, before turning to her expectant audience. ‘Okay, I’ll tell you what I know. This man is called Ezekiel Cross; he’s an ex-CIA agent turned religious fundamentalist, who was responsible for the gas attack in Antigua that killed almost a hundred people. He tried and failed to carry out an attack on a much larger scale in Mecca earlier today. He also used a similar attack on the Vatican as a decoy; I believe that his real target is the United Nations.’
Talsorian cleared his throat impatiently. ‘Dr Wilde, my people have already been briefed – we know all this. We need you to tell us something we don’t know. Like: where is he now? How is he planning to make the attack?’
‘I . . . don’t know,’ she admitted, his tone immediately putting her on the defensive. ‘I can tell you that even though he has associates, at least four other people, I think he’ll try to carry it out personally. He wants to watch Babylon fall, see the Biblical prophecy he’s obsessed with come true—’
The agent interrupted her. ‘You think? Do you know for sure? You’re not a profiler.’
‘No, I’m an archaeologist—’
‘This isn’t ancient history. This is happening right now, and we need concrete information.’
‘The only concrete in here’s inside your skull,’ Eddie snapped.
Talsorian didn’t even look at him, merely pointing in his direction. ‘Remove him.’ A pair of burly men in tactical gear advanced on the Englishman.
Eddie raised a hand in warning. ‘I wouldn’t.’
‘Agent Talsorian,’ said Seretse placatingly. ‘Mr Chase may also have useful information. If you could please hear them out?’
Talsorian scowled, but gestured for the two agents to return to their seats. ‘Okay, then. Let’s have it. What can you tell me about Cross’s associates?’
‘Ah . . . not much, I’m afraid,’ Nina said. ‘He has a bodyguard, a big guy called Norvin; his pilot, Paxton—’
‘Norvin? Is that a first or last name?’
‘I don’t know. But they’re all American, and I can’t imagine it’s a common name. And there was another man called Hatch, I think.’ She described them as best she could, Eddie adding his own recollections.
‘Got a hit on Paxton,’ said a female agent, tapping on a laptop. The pilot’s photograph flashed up on the big screen beside Cross. ‘Daniel Aldo Paxton, age thirty-nine, ex-USAF, qualified to fly pretty much anything.’
‘That’s him,’ Nina confirmed.
The agent kept typing. ‘Not enough info to narrow down the others.’
‘Is that all you’ve got?’ Talsorian asked Nina. ‘Well, i
t’s something, I guess. Okay, get Paxton’s picture out there alongside Cross’s, and see if you can find a link between them and those other names. All right, let’s get back to it.’ The agents stood and began to file from the room. ‘Mr Seretse, Dr Wilde . . . Chase, thanks for your help.’
‘Wait, that’s it?’ said Eddie. ‘That’s all you want from us?’
‘That’s all you’ve got,’ he replied. ‘Unless you’ve any other insights? Some sort of Da Vinci Code thing from the Bible telling us where he’s going to strike?’
‘I’m afraid not,’ Nina told him.
‘That’s what I thought. Okay, I’ve got work to do. Mr Seretse, I’m heading back to the UN – you’re welcome to join me.’
Seretse gave Nina and Eddie an apologetic look before replying. ‘Thank you. That would be most helpful.’ He turned to the couple. ‘I am sorry. After all the effort involved in bringing you back here . . .’
‘It’s okay, Oswald,’ said Nina. ‘We did what we could.’
Eddie gave Talsorian an annoyed glare as the Secret Service man spoke to the agent with the laptop. ‘Even if some dickheads apparently don’t want our help. So now what do we do?’
‘We could go to the UN and help look for Cross,’ suggested Nina. ‘I know it’s a long shot, but . . .’
Seretse shook his head. ‘I am afraid that will not be possible. You do not have security clearance. After all,’ he reminded the archaeologist on seeing her surprise, ‘you no longer work for the United Nations.’
‘So there’s nothing else we can do?’ said Eddie.
‘Unfortunately not. Hopefully you have done enough already. You foiled the attack in Mecca, and from the failed attack in Rome realised that Cross’s true target was the UN. That may be enough.’
‘Only if you find him,’ Nina said unhappily.
‘I have to have confidence that we will,’ said the diplomat, drawing in a weary breath, ‘because the alternative is too terrible to contemplate.’ Talsorian called his name. ‘I must go. All I can suggest for now is that you return home. Although I would also suggest taking a route that gives the United Nations as wide a berth as possible. The traffic in Manhattan will be quite appalling.’