the rest of the factory.
Cole stood, then hurried from the room and across the edge of the factory floor.
He was nearly blinded by the dark.
Fear tightened his chest. He had to take baby steps.
As his eyes adjusted, Cole distinguished a dark minefield of shattered glass, pieces of twisted metal, broken boards with exposed nails and drums filled with unknown liquids. The scratching sounds and squeaks of small living things scurrying near him made his skin crawl.
He tried to get a sense of the layout, a sense of direction.
The factory windows were at least ten feet from the floor, so trying a window wouldn’t work. Cole decided to stay close to a wall and follow it, hoping he would come to a door. Taking a moment to get his bearings, straining to see in the darkness, he slowly began navigating his way around stacks of pallets, crates, abandoned lathes and heavy motors smelling of oil, rubber and hydraulic fluid.
As he got closer to the wall, he was certain he’d glimpsed a metal railing for stairs. It looked like a landing and a door. Cole inched his way toward the stairway. He grew more certain it was a door out. His hope rising, he tried to hurry when the air exploded with the metal rattle of a steel bucket crashing a great distance.
He’d stumbled and kicked it.
Cole froze.
Cole headed for the landing and the door.
Before he could answer he was moving fast along the wall until he spotted a set of metal stairs leading to a darker, lower level. There was a handrail; he seized it and as quickly as he could descended the stairs.
He nearly gagged at the smells of feces and sewer.
Holes in the floor above allowed for dim, diffused light.
Cole recognized the shapes of drums, a network of pipes and the outlines of massive generators.
His pulse pounding, Cole spotted the shape of a door on the other side of the section. Hurrying toward it, he felt the odd sensation that he was flying,
Brushing water from his eyes, Cole lifted his head to the gloom above, realizing he had fallen into a deep pit.
45
Aleena woke stiff, sore and a little disoriented.
The two sleeping pills she’d taken earlier, to adjust to New York time, had put her out. Her body was bouncing gently in her window seat as her Boeing 747 encountered turbulence a few hundred miles out of Newark.
She yawned, snuggled under her blanket and gazed at the clouds.
As wisps of memory assembled in her brain, a chime sounded.
The captain announced that they would soon begin their descent into Liberty International Airport. He estimated an early arrival at the gate at 10:15 a.m. local time.
“As for the local weather, it’s a clear morning and seventy-four degrees.”
Aleena had to pee.
She contorted her way around the two other passengers in her row, inhaling the locker-room reek of the cabin air. The flight was full. The smell of the tiny lavatory was overpowering with industrial-strength freshener. While washing her face, Aleena returned to her dilemma.
She met her fearful reflection in the mirror.
She brushed her teeth, changed into fresh clothes, returned to her seat and fished out the music box again, wondering and worrying about its significance.
“It’s very pretty,” she said.
Aleena nodded and closed the box.
She put it away and glanced down the cabin, forcing herself to think of something, anything, else. But her stomach slowly knotted when she spotted the raised portion of a broadsheet newspaper. As a former reporter, she identified it as the
Murder-Kidnap Case Stirs Terror Fears at UN Meeting in New York.
Aleena bit her bottom lip.
She grappled with her problem until the landing gear lowered with a hydraulic groan into the air rush and locked with a thump.
The ground blurred and the runway gently met the jumbo in a smooth landing. After it came to a full stop, Aleena gathered her bags and waited her turn to file off of the plane.
She used the mundane process to mentally repeat her memorized emergency contact number, starting with the area code 718. If anything went wrong with the delivery she was to call the number for instructions.
As the plane cleared, she fell in with other passengers making their way through the terminal toward U.S. immigration where she joined the enormous line for non-U.S. citizens.
There would be a long wait.
Six other international flights had arrived, four of them 747s, one from Singapore, a flight from Tokyo and four from Europe.
Joost had once told her that whenever possible he strategically booked flights for her that were scheduled to land during an airport’s busiest hours. That’s when agents were usually overwhelmed. It increased the chance of less scrutiny entering a country.
She could not know that today, at Newark, scrutiny was intensified.
The delay arose because the Office of Enforcement at U.S. Customs and Border Protection headquarters in Washington, D.C., was acting on intelligence from the FBI through Homeland Security to tighten inspections, especially at all entry points for New York City. Alert status was already high because of the UN gathering. The abductions, the murders and the discovery of evidence tied to a potential terror plot had pushed security even higher.
Lines moved with glacial speed.
Finally, the U.S. immigration inspector waved Aleena to his desk and received her passport. Coming from the
