The instant that the rotund man turned his head away, Snake, in one motion, pushed Jenny through the metal detector and placed the sweatshirt, with the gun in it, on the pa.s.s-though shelf. He stepped quickly through the detector right behind Jenny and picked up the sweatshirt; this took maybe two seconds. By this time the rotund man had turned his head back and was looking past Snake, to the next person in line.

"Step through, please!" he said.

"Bag check!" said the X-ray woman. She was pointing at the metal suitcase. "Bag check!" said the rotund man, to the stern woman, who was watching the businessman turn on his laptop. When he was done, she pointed at the metal suitcase at the end of the conveyor belt and said to Puggy, "Is this yours?"

"It's mine," Snake said. He was right behind Puggy, letting him feel the gun in his back.

"Bring it over here and open it, please," the woman said.

"Do it," Snake said to Puggy.

Puggy lifted the suitcase onto the table. He unlatched the four latches and raised the suitcase lid. The stern woman looked inside, saw the steel canister, the black box with the foreign writing, the bank of switches.

"What is this?" she asked.

"Garbage disposal," said Snake.

"A garbage disposal?" asked the stern woman. This had not been covered in security-checkpoint training.

"It's portable," explained Snake.

The stern woman hesitated for a second. She thought about calling for her supervisor. But she also thought about what had happened the last time she'd asked him to look at something she thought was suspicious: It had turned out to be a latte machine, and the supervisor had chewed her out for letting the line back up. The supervisor had been hearing from his supervisor; there'd been a lot of complaints lately from pa.s.sengers who had missed, or nearly missed, their flights because of delays at security.

As the stern woman was thinking about this, the X-ray woman called out, "Computer check!" Another potentially deadly laptop was coming down the belt.

"Computer check!" echoed the rotund man. Pa.s.sengers were still streaming through the metal detector. The checkpoint was backing up.

The stern woman looked at the line, looked at the suitcase, looked at Snake, "You'll have to turn it on," she said.

Snake studied the interior of the suitcase. On the black box next to the metal cylinder were three switches, which Snake figured were some kind of security system, to protect the drugs or emeralds or whatever was in there. He reached down and flipped the first switch. Nothing happened. He flipped the second. Nothing. He flipped the third. Some digital lights started blinking under a dark plastic panel on the bottom left corner of the box. They said: 00:00 The stern woman frowned at the blinking zeroes, then at Snake.

"It's got a timer," he explained. "Like a whaddya-callit. VCR."

"Computer check!" called the X-ray woman.

"Computer check!" echoed the rotund man. The laptops were stacking up.

"OK," said the stern woman, waving Snake's party away. Snake closed the suitcase, not noticing, as he did, that the digits had stopped blinking and were now registering: 45:00 And then: 44:59 Snake latched the suitcase, then jabbed Puggy. "Move it," he said. Puggy picked up the suitcase, and the little party headed down the concourse toward the planes. Behind them, the stern woman turned her attention to the next pa.s.senger, a pension actuary who was already, without having to be asked, turning his computer on, knowing that this was the price that a free society had to pay to combat terrorism.

43:47 Monica trotted through the automatic doorway into the main concourse, darting her eyes back and forth. She was hoping to see another officer, but as bad luck would have it, all the available airport police had been summoned to the extreme other end of the large, semicircular concourse, where trouble had flared at the Delta counter. It had started when a Delta agent had informed a would-be pa.s.senger that he would not be permitted to board his flight with his thirteen-foot python, Daphne, wrapped around his body. The pa.s.senger, attempting to show what a well-behaved snake Daphne was, had placed her on the counter. As the Delta agent and the nearby pa.s.sengers backed away in terror, Daphne had spotted, on the floor a few feet away, a small plastic pet transporter containing two Yorkshire terriers named Pinky and Enid. In a flash, she had slithered off the counter and was snaking toward them, as screaming pa.s.sengers frantically scrambled to get out of her way, clubbing each other with boxes of duty-free liquor.

Within seconds, Daphne had wrapped herself around the pet transporter and was trying to figure out how to get at Pinky and Enid, whose terrified yipping inspired their devoted owner, a seventy-four-year-old widow with an artificial hip, to overcome her lifelong fear of reptiles and flail away at Daphne's muscular body with a rolled-up Modem Maturity magazine, until she was tackled from behind by Daphne's owner, who was no less devoted to his pet and had also played linebacker at the junior-college level.

Within a minute, the Delta end of the concourse was in near-riot mode, with virtually the entire airport police force sprinting in that direction, walkie-talkies squawking. Thus, when, a few minutes later, Monica entered the concourse at the other end, looking for reinforcements, she saw none.

"s.h.i.t," she said. She turned and saw Matt, Anna, and Eliot right behind her, with Nina just coming through the door.

"OK," said Monica. "We're gonna split up and look for them. I'll take that side"-she gestured left-"you all go that way. If you see them, you keep an eye on them, but don't approach them, and, Matt, you come running and find me. Got it?"

Matt and Eliot nodded.

"OK," said Monica, turning left and plunging into the concourse traffic flow. Matt turned right, with Eliot and Anna a step behind, and Nina trotting after. Nina's main concern was not being left behind. The other four, as they scanned the crowd, were all troubled by variations of the same nagging thought: What if they were in the wrong place?

42:21 Air Impact! Flight 2038 for Freeport was a two-engine propeller plane with a seating capacity of twenty-two people. It had no flight attendant, and was too small for a jetway; to board it, pa.s.sengers walked down a stairway from the concourse gate, then across the tarmac about thirty yards to where the plane was parked.

There were supposed to be two Air Impact! employees working the gate that evening, but neither of them had shown up, which meant that the pa.s.sengers' tickets were being taken by the baggage handler, a man named Arnold Unger who had joined the Air Impact! team after being fired from two other airlines for suspected baggage theft. Unger had worked the same no-break double shift that had seriously undermined Sheila the ticket agent's desire to be Employee of the Month. He'd been keeping his spirits up by swigging from a bottle of Bacardi rum that he'd swiped from a cruise pa.s.senger and kept hidden under the stairs. He was eager to get Flight 2038, Air Impact !'s last of the evening, on its way, so that he could go get really hammered.

It figured to be an easy flight. Most of the scheduled pa.s.sengers had missed their connecting flights into Miami because of the bad weather in Chicago. Unger had loaded just eleven bags onto the plane. When he came up the stairs into the waiting area and punched up the pa.s.senger list on the computer, he found only eight names, half of which, he noted with mild interest, were John Smith. There were four pa.s.sengers in the waiting area; these were two couples, retired postal workers and their wives, all originally from Ohio, now living in Naples, Florida. They had driven across the state that afternoon to take advantage of the bargain Air Impact! fares on flights to the Bahamas, where they planned to play keno. They were anxious to get out of Miami International Airport, which they regarded as the most foreign place they had ever been, including Italy, which they had visited once on a group tour with other retired postal workers.

They looked up expectantly, as Unger, wearing grimy dark blue shorts, a blue short-sleeved work shirt, work boots, and kneepads, propped open the door to the stairwell. He picked up the receiver of a wall-mounted phone, punched in a code, and said, in a booming voice, "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Air Impact! Flight 2038 to beautiful downtown Freeport is now ready for pa.s.senger boarding through this door right here. We'd like to begin our boarding tonight with ... "-he pretended to look around the almost-deserted waiting area, then pointed at the retirees-"YOU lovely people!" The retirees shuffled over and gave him their tickets. He told them to go downstairs and head out to the plane. They asked him how they would know which plane. He told them it was the plane that said Air Impact! in great big letters on the side. They did not like his tone one bit.

It was now ten minutes before the scheduled departure, and Unger was thinking about closing the door, when Puggy, lugging the suitcase, entered the waiting area, followed closely by Snake and Jenny, followed by Eddie. They moved in a tight, strange-looking little clot over to Unger. Snake handed Unger the tickets.

"Ah," said Unger. "The John Smiths."

Snake gave Unger a don't-f.u.c.k-with-me stare. Unger responded with an I-don't-give-a-s.h.i.t shrug. His feeling was, whoever these people were, they were soon going to be not his problem. He gestured toward the doorway.

"Plane's downstairs," he said.

The clot went down the stairs, with Unger closing the door behind them and following them out to the tarmac. He gestured toward the plane, where the retired couples, complaining loudly about not getting any help, were ascending the narrow fold-down stairway at the rear of the plane, slowly and laboriously, as though it were the last fifty feet of the Everest summit.

Unger followed Snake's clot to the plane. When they reached it, he reached for the suitcase, telling Puggy, "I'll take that."

Snake grabbed Unger's arm. "It goes onna plane," he said.

"I'm gonna put it on the plane," said Unger. "You get it back in Freeport."

"I mean it rides with us," said Snake.

"Can't," said Unger. "Too big. FAA regulations."

Snake reached into his pants pocket, pulled out a wad of bills, and handed them to Unger.

"Lemme give you a hand with that suitcase," Unger said. As Snake watched him closely, he grabbed the suitcase-d.a.m.n, this thing was heavy-and manhandled it to the folding stairs. He was a strong man, but he just barely got it to the top. He left it just inside the doorway opening.

Panting, Unger came back down the stairs. He looked past Snake, toward the terminal.

"Where's your friend going?" he asked.

Snake whirled. Puggy, who had been right next to him, was gone. Snake looked back toward the terminal and saw the stocky shape disappearing through the doorway.

"Motherf.u.c.ker," said Snake, furious, squeezing Jenny's arm so hard that she cried out. "That punk motherf.u.c.kER." He spun back to Unger.

"When's this plane leave?" he said.

"You wanna go back and get your friend?" asked Unger.

"No, I want this f.u.c.kin' plane to leave right now," said Snake.

"It'll leave soon's you get on and the pilots finish the preflight," Unger said. "Five, ten minutes."

"Get on," Snake said to Eddie. Eddie was looking back to where Puggy had disappeared.

"Snake," said Eddie, "I don't think this is ... "

"I said get on the plane," said Snake, using his sweatshirt-gun to prod Eddie exactly the way he had been prodding Puggy. Eddie turned slowly away from the terminal and trudged up the stairs. Snake shoved Jenny up after him. They had to step over the suitcase to get into the aisle.

Unger walked around to the front and signaled to the pilot to slide open his side windshield panel. When the pilot did so, Unger said, "You're set to go."

"What about the guy who ran back to the terminal?" asked the pilot. "He forget something?"

"Nah," said Unger. "Looks like he just changed his mind." Unger almost said something else then, something along the lines of, You got a weird pa.s.senger back there, but decided not to. He'd seen weird people get on planes before; South Florida was full of weird people. This guy was definitely carrying drugs or some d.a.m.n thing. But Unger viewed that as somebody else's problem. It was late, time to get to drinking, and besides, he didn't know this flight crew, a couple of young guys who'd just been hired to replace a couple of other young guys who'd gotten fed up with Air Impact! and quit. Unger, stepping away from the plane, gave the pilot a thumbs-up sign.

CHAPTER twelve

35:08

Puggy was trotting away from the Air Impact! gate area, trying to decide what to do. His main thought was to get away from the crazy man with the gun, to just keep going, get out of the crowded, scary, alien airport. But he was also thinking about the girl back there. She was scared to death of the crazy man, Puggy could see that, and he could also see that she was right to be scared to death of him. Puggy thought he should tell somebody about her. But who? Puggy didn't like cops-he'd had bad experiences with cops-but he wished there was one right here that he could tell about the girl.

Ahead, he a saw a counter with two agents, a young man and an older woman, standing behind it, counting pieces of paper, doing the final paperwork on a Miami-to-Philadelphia flight that had been delayed nearly three hours. He hesitated, then went up to the counter. The young man looked up.

"Yes?" he said, not pleasantly.

"Um," said Puggy. "There's ... I need to ... "

"I'm sorry," said the young man, who was clearly not sorry, "this flight is closed. No seats, OK?"

"No, there's a guy down there," said Puggy, gesturing back toward the Air Impact! area. "He has this girl."

"Sir," said the woman agent, even less pleasantly than the man. "We have to get this flight out of here right now, OK? So whatever it is, we don't have time for it."

"He's makin' her go," said Puggy. "He has a ... "

"We don't have time for it right now, sir," said the man, and he went back to counting pieces of paper, and so did the woman, both of them shaking their heads at how rude people could be.

34:02 "So what's the plan?" said Baker. "We get in there and sound the alarm?" The rental car was weaving through traffic on the airport Departures ramp.

"Negative," said Greer. "Like I said, the more people know, the more likely we have people getting killed. So we keep it quiet unless we absolutely have to."

"So how're we supposed to find them?" asked Baker.

"We find them because, number one, they're gonna be moving slow, schlepping that suitcase," said Greer. "Number two, what I know about these scuzzb.a.l.l.s from our friend back at the Jolly Jackal, they are not gifted in the brains department. Plus they got hostages. They are definitely gonna stand out in the crowd."

"I dunno," said Baker. "This airport, it can be hard to stand out."

33:34 In front of the Delta counter, two police officers were trying to revive Daphne's owner. He had resisted efforts by officers to pry him off the dog-owning widow, and finally one of them had clubbed him with a heavy-duty four-cell flashlight, rendering him, for the moment, unconscious. This was bad, because the police needed him to subdue Daphne, who had abandoned her fruitless efforts to get at Pinky and Enid and let go of the pet transporter. She was now surveying the rapidly growing mob of gawkers, thinking whatever it is that large, hungry snakes think.

The police had a problem. Obviously, they could not allow this creature to remain loose in the airport. Just as obviously, they could not risk trying to shoot it with all these civilians around. That meant that somebody had to capture it, but its owner was currently out cold, and none of the police officers present wanted any part of trying to apprehend Daphne manually. As one of them put it, "What're you gonna do? Slap handcuffs on it?"

And so, for the moment, it was a standoff. On the one side stood the police, trying to hold back the crowd; on the other side stood, or, more accurately, coiled, Daphne. An officer had radioed headquarters to request that an animal-control unit be dispatched to the airport immediately, but he had just been informed that the closest such unit was tied up with a major traffic jam on Le Jeune, involving goats.

33:17 "Where are the police?" Anna was asking, her voice right on the edge of hysterical. "How can there not be any police ? "

"We'll find some," Eliot said. "There have to be some around here." But he was wondering, too. There were always police here.

Eliot and Anna were trotting through the crowd a few steps behind Matt, with Nina bringing up the rear. Their search was becoming more desperate by the second as they realized how many people were in the airport, how many concourses, how many gates.

They came to a security checkpoint, where at least two hundred people were waiting in two lines to pa.s.s through the metal detectors into the flight concourse. Matt, Anna, and Eliot separated and moved up and down the lines, scanning the faces. No luck. They had just started moving down the main concourse again when they heard Nina cry out. They turned and saw Nina running back toward the checkpoint, calling a name that sounded like "Pogey." Matt was the first to see where she was going.

"It's the little guy!" he shouted. "With the beard! From the house! The guy who carried the suitcase!"

Anna and Eliot saw Puggy then, on the other side of the security checkpoint, trotting toward Nina, a look of wonder on his face.

"Matt," said Eliot, "go find the lady cop. We'll stay here with this guy. Run." But Matt was already sprinting through the crowd.

29:32 "You said Delta, right?" asked the driver.

"Delta," said Henry.

Henry and Leonard were in a U-Drive-It Rental Car shuttle bus approaching the main terminal. They had flagged down the bus-actually, they had stepped in front of it, forcing it to stop-on the airport access road, after abandoning their rental car and hiking through the ma.s.s of stopped traffic on Le Jeune. The bus driver had at first been reluctant to open the door, but Henry had persuaded him by pressing a twenty-dollar bill against the windshield.

Henry and Leonard were hot and sweaty and not in a good mood. Every minute or so, Leonard shook his head and announced to the other bus pa.s.sengers, who were carefully not looking at him, "f.u.c.kin' goats." Henry, though more restrained, was also fed up with this frustrating, nonproductive trip. He'd decided that once they got their boarding pa.s.ses for the Newark flight, he was going to call his Penultimate contact and tell him that, sorry, but they could find somebody else to kill Arthur Herk, because he, personally, was never coming back to this insane city, where every time you try to execute somebody in a careful, professional manner, another shooter shows up, or the police show up, or a dog attacks you, or some maniac jumps on you out of a tree.

"Delta," the driver said, stopping the courtesy bus and opening the door.

Henry and Leonard got off, with Leonard pausing to tell the bus driver, by way of a farewell, "f.u.c.kin' goats."

As the bus pulled away, Henry and Leonard looked through the automatic gla.s.s doors to the terminal. It was packed with people, some of them running. From somewhere inside came the sound of a woman screaming.

"Now what?" said Henry.

"Whatever it is," said Leonard, "it can't be any worse than goats."

28:49 "C'mon," said Snake. "C'mon, let's f.u.c.kin' go, here." He was talking mainly to himself, but the postal retirees, sitting four rows ahead, in the front of the Air Impact! plane, could hear him, and they did not approve of his language.

In the c.o.c.kpit, separated from the cabin by a half-open black curtain, the newly hired Air Impact! pilots were going through their preflight checklist. They looked to Snake to be, based on zit count, maybe seventeen years old, although in fact they were both twenty-three. Their names were Justin Hobert and Frank Teeterman, Jr., and they had been close friends since elementary school, when they'd discovered that they both pa.s.sionately loved airplanes. They had taken a lot of s.h.i.t in junior high for continuing to build model airplanes when all their friends had become interested in t.i.tty mags.

Justin and Frank had remained single-mindedly obsessed with aviation, and their social lives had suffered. But they felt that it had all been worth it, because, after years of lessons and study, they had become commercial pilots, and tonight they were going to fly together professionally for their very first time. They could not believe their good fortune; most airlines made you fly for years with more experienced pilots. Sure, the pay at Air Impact! was not great-$14,200 a year-but the important thing was, they were flying. They were wearing new pilot shirts and new pilot pants, and they were in command.