Runaway Model (26 page)

"We don't have to do anything." Roberto's brown eyes held Bryce's blue ones. "We just let nature take its course."

"We can't do anything." That was Johnston. "There are too many ways out. We're five men, and New York is the center of the universe. We can't begin to block off every possible exit."

Roberto again. "But we don't have to. Nobody's going to allow a visibly-impaired eighteen-year-old boy to board a commercial flight. Nobody's going to allow him to board a train. Imagine trying to sneak him on a passenger ship. It's not gonna happen, Mr. Auburn. The authorities will detain them. Kyle will be in custody within hours."

Wilton, the drug warrior, laughed. It wasn't a pleasant laugh. More like a snort. "You two Army guys have a higher opinion of the authorities than I do. I can assure you that drugged-out waste cases cross international borders every single fucking day."

"This dude's an amateur. He'll fuck it up." Johnston. "Maybe he'll get into Canada but he'll fuck it up there. He won't reach any fucking monk's cave in fucking England. Not gonna happen."

Wilton: "Computer man here says he might not be all that fucking amateur. And even if he is, civilians waltz across the Canadian border all the fucking time. Somehow they end up with documents and they're able to fly out of Halifax like everybody else."

There was a little silence.

Wilton pressed his advantage. "We have to assume the target has a plan to get where he needs to go. It's our job to fuck up the plan. We can't rely on the police to do our job for us."

Bryce didn't know who to believe. But Wilton seemed to make the most sense. And he seemed to have persuaded Roberto.

Fuck.

It all seemed so fucking helpless.

So here he was, a man with 500 million dollars, driving in fucking circles right now because he had no fucking idea what to do next.

A snippet of "Turn Down For What."

Stoney patted his pockets. Pulled out the phone. Kyle's phone. The screen was dark.

Stoney's pockets were still singing.

His cell wasn't at the bottom of The Pond.

Stoney had both phones.

The rocker tugged his iPhone out of his jeans. He seemed too dazed to think anything of the fact that he suddenly had two. "Marshall. Yeah. Yeah. Where the fuck are you, man? I called you an hour ago. The fuck you didn't get my call? Bryce Auburn's people picked me up. Yeah. The fuck?"

Stoney had both phones.

Roman Nigel did give back Stoney's phone.

Bryce didn't really know Kyle the Klepto. He knew, in theory, that Kyle had been a thief. He knew Kyle had stolen the star sapphire ring.

But he hadn't considered that Kyle might actually be a gifted pickpocket.

And a gifted pickpocket could also put things back.

Somehow Kyle had lifted his own phone back from Nigel and planted it on Stoney.

Stoney's greasy hair flopped forward as he leaned over to ask Arnold where the fuck they were.

Bryce took Kyle's cell. Hit the button. The lock screen was gone. A Google maps image came up instead.

A rural airstrip somewhere in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. Bryce had never heard of it.

Didn't matter. It was where they were going. It was the only bread crumb Kyle had left for them to follow.

Bryce knocked Stoney aside to shout almost directly into Arnold's ear. "Teterboro. Fucking now. Right fucking now."

"Wait. First drop me off at my suite at the Four Seasons. It's less than fifteen minutes out of the way," Stoney said. "My people have a medic waiting there. I need to get checked out for my concert."

"Fuck your concert," Bryce said. "Do your people have guns, or are they just bullshit?"

"Some of them have a license to carry in New York," Stoney said. "Marshall Daniels is in charge of all that."

"Tell Mr. Daniels that if he wants in on the action, he's welcome to call me for directions. Otherwise he can stay the fuck out of my way. We're not stopping for anything or anybody."

"You're kidnapping me?"

"We can dump you out on the street right here if you insist, Mr. Rockland. I don't give one shiny tiny fuck about your narrow ass, your music, or your concert. Kyle needs help. And you're not gonna slow me down. Not fifteen minutes. Not fifteen seconds. Not gonna happen at all."

"Oh." Stoney had the grace to look ashamed. It was the drug cocktail. He was always a beat behind. "Sorry, mate. You're right. We don't have time to lose. I weren't thinking, innit?"

The rocker said something into the phone.

A squawky sound of someone trying to argue on the other end.

Stoney swiped a red button to end the call.

"I'm in," Stoney said. "Let's do this."

Before they entered the tunnel, Bryce called his pilot, Vernyn Carter, to make sure the jet was ready to go. All fueled up. An open flight plan filed.

"I'm gonna need a destination, boss," Carter said.

"I'll have to give you GPS coordinates." Bryce read the numbers off Kyle's cell.

"Really? A Pine Barrens airstrip? Are you sure we can put the bird down there?"

How the fuck would Bryce know? "I think so. Can you check it out?"

"I wouldn't take off until I did, boss." A long silence that seemed to go on forever. Then: "It's got a long enough runway. Barely long enough but I can do it in this bird. I wouldn't want to try anything larger. That's assuming the airstrip's actually maintained. Supposedly it's been abandoned since 911."

"Supposedly?"

"It's rural. Very rural. I imagine it gets flights coming and going under the radar. Meth traffickers. Even weed. The feds are too busy fighting fires on the Mexican border to shut down the traffic from Ontario."

"So you're guessing it's well-maintained enough to let us land?"

"Meth traffickers don't want to go down in flames any more than the rest of us. Probably. I'll make a circle before I land but yeah. Probably."

Bryce thought. "How likely is it that a plane capable of making a transatlantic nonstop would depart from that airstrip?"

"Not possible, boss. We'd make two refueling stops ourselves. One in Canada. One in Iceland. A smaller plane? If they want to cross an ocean, they're making a connection to another aircraft somewhere. Maybe in Canada. Probably Canada."

Bryce put away the phone. Stoney had slumped against his shoulder, his eyes closed, his hair in unwashed strings that would leave a spot on Bryce's jacket. Roberto, Johnston, and Wilton all had an amphetamine glitter in their eyes, but they seemed alert.

"Any reason to think this Roman Nigel can fly?" Roberto asked.

"Not that I know of." Bryce had read Arnold's files on Nigel over and over again. "I tend to doubt it. It's an expensive hobby for a schoolteacher."

"He'll want to fly into Canada as low as possible," Wilton said. "Keep under the radar. Flying low in a small craft is the most dangerous kind of flying. Especially at night. So he's got to have a trained pilot. Maybe a contact from the drug trade. We don't know his history but if it smells like traffic, it's probably traffic."

They pondered that thought for a moment. Canada's population was heavily concentrated on its southern borders. There were millions of acres of unpopulated tundra in the north. If Nigel got that far, they'd lost him. A former drug trafficker who still knew expert pilots would also know how to get false passports and other identification documents, not just for himself but also for Kyle.

At that point, all Nigel had to do was pay off his pilot, pick up a land vehicle to drive to the commercial airport of his choice, and board a flight back to the UK. "A cave or summat" wasn't much of a clue when you were talking about a land honeycombed not just with natural caves but countless old mine shafts going back to the early days of the Industrial Revolution.

If Nigel got Kyle on that plane, he might keep the boy forever.

Bryce couldn't let that happen.

"He'll have the one pilot," Roberto said. "Nobody else. He doesn't think he needs an army. He has no reason to think we know where he's going. No reason to think we can get there in time if we did know."

"So we're up against two men," Bryce said. "One of them a pilot. One of them a schoolteacher who has been out of the game for a decade."

"It doesn't seem like a fair match, does it?" Johnston was smiling. "I've done dozens of extractions against tougher opponents than this."

"Don't count your chickens," Wilton said. "He's still got the hostage."

***

"S
o what's the plan?" Bryce looked at Roberto and Johnston, his Army operations experts. Everybody was drinking espresso. The double-shot of caffeine was all-important now that they were in the air.

Roberto's porcelain cup looked silly in his huge hands. But there was nothing silly about the expression on his face. "We go with the assumption that Roman Nigel is driving a ground vehicle to the airstrip. Even with a three-hour lead, we'll beat him there. Barely."

Bryce glanced over at Stoney, who was slumped unconscious on the jet's leather couch. He hated to think of Kyle knocked out like that. "And if the assumption is wrong? If he has air transport? A chopper or something like that?"

"We don't need to plan for that," Johnston said. "In that case, there's no plan. He's already gone, boss."

A chilling thought.

"We always make plans based on what we can do. Not on what we can't. That's just good Army training," Roberto said. "If it makes you feel better, in this case I believe what we can plan for is also the most likely scenario."

"I think so too," Johnston said. "He's almost got to be driving a land vehicle to the airstrip. He's been out of the game too long. If he starts involving multiple pilots, he attracts too much attention."

"I agree," Wilton said. "The fucker can take the risk for one pilot, maybe one pilot he knows well from back in his glory days. But two pilots? One of them taking off from the New York area? Probably Teterboro itself?" He shook his head.

"The guys at Homeland Security might not notice, but the druglords would. They'd think it was a new player trying to push themselves into the game. They wouldn't know he's just transporting one kid. It would look like too much action for that. They'd think he was moving product. And he knows too much to bring that down on his head. Are we agreed on that? This dude's experienced?"

"Yeah. So." Bryce tried to relax. His men seemed to think they had it under control. And they were the experts. "So. We'll get there first. We'll get in position. We'll have an overwhelming show of force. And we'll negotiate from there."

Of course they were making a lot of assumptions.

If Nigel had a larger team than they expected...

If Kyle was wrong about where they were going...

If Kyle was seriously hurt...

If Kyle was already dead...

Stop it
, Bryce told himself.

Roberto had it right. They'd have to plan for the things they could do something about. No use planning for the things they couldn't.

***

D
arkness. The next time Kyle blinked awake, he was in the suicide seat of a dark sedan in a dark tree-lined landscape. Nigel was driving.

Nobody in the back seat.

Stoney was gone.

Manhattan was gone. Long gone. They didn't even have street lights out here.

He hadn't said good-bye. Or maybe he'd said good-bye and just didn't remember it thanks to the drug. There was a large gap in his memory. Was Stoney even still alive?

Kyle felt around for his mobile. He thought he remembered taking it back from Nigel. But he didn't have it now.

His head didn't throb exactly. It was more like he had the theoretical idea of pain. He knew that he hurt but it was off in the distance somewhere.

"Go back to sleep, lad," Nigel said.

"Fuck off, you wanker." But there was no force behind the words. Kyle blinked off again.

***

N
o lights at the airfield. Of course there were no fucking lights. There was a bit of gray not as black as the black of the endless swamp, and that was it.

Carter splashed a beam of light over the scene. He talked to Bryce—and by extension everyone in the cabin—over the jet's public address system. Everybody except Stoney Rockland was peering out one or another of the jet's windows.

"There's no tower. I'm not picking up any ground crew on the radio. Not sure there's anybody down there but I can see another small aircraft at the end of the strip. Looks like it might be an old Cessna Citation I/SP."

Bryce was around enough showboating petro-millionaires to know his small aircraft, even some of the discontinued models. The I/SP was a single pilot aircraft. A small reassurance that their pregame analysis wasn't too far off the mark.

"Can we still put down?"

"It'll be tricky but I can do it."

Stoney had to ask. "Is there a chance we'll be shot at while we're trying to land?"

Nobody answered him. Ask a stupid question. At least the rocker was conscious now. Bryce thought they probably wouldn't need him. But if they did, it would be to liaise with Marshall Daniels' team—and he'd need to be awake for that.

The pilot circled the airstrip. There didn't appear to be any ground vehicles. Just an empty stretch of unpaved rural road leading to the strip itself. Pine barren swamp all around.

Definitely a limit to how many people could actually be in place. But those people would know they were here. A jet is not a quiet beast.

And those people wouldn't be on their side. Marshall Daniels' crew would be driving in. The rocker couldn't afford to charter a private jet at the drop of a hat. It wasn't 1969 any more. B-list musicians like Stoney Rockland didn't earn that kind of money.

Carter had left the PA system open. Now they could all hear the crackle of incoming from the cockpit's radio.

"This is private air space, you fucker. We don't refuel here. Go away."

"I have an emergency," Carter said. The pilot's voice was calm. Professional. "I can't make it to another airstrip. I'm going to land now. You have a legal requirement to let me put down safely."

"Land on the fucking road. There's a wide area a few miles to the east."