SIX
Dilara Kenner struggled to keep the unconscious helicopter pilot’s head completely out of the water, but the waves crashing over them made that impossible. At least the survival suits were buoyant. The best she could hope to do was make sure that he didn’t float away. The copilot, a baby-faced blond named Logan, tried to help, but his arm was broken, so it was all he could do to keep from inhaling seawater.
She had lost sight of the other passengers, four men who looked like they were oil workers on their way out for a three-week stint on the rig. They had been swept away by the waves, so she wouldn’t be getting aid from them, either. Before she and Logan stopped talking to conserve their energy and to avoid swallowing more seawater, the copilot had told her that the oil platform had no helicopter. The nearest one was two hours away in St John’s.
It seemed hopeless, but Dilara had thought the same thing when she ran the Los Angeles marathon. The idea of running 26 miles without stopping was too daunting, an apparently impossible task. But if she focused on putting that next foot down, she eventually reached the end.
So she focused her mind not on waiting for the helicopter to arrive in two hours, but instead on keeping herself alive for the next minute. The most pressing problem distracting her was the water that was seeping into her survival suit, which had snagged on a jagged piece of metal as she escaped the sinking helicopter. She could feel her limbs starting to numb.
“I’m getting tired,” Logan said after ten minutes of being pummeled by the waves. “I think my suit’s losing flotation.”
Dilara was on the ragged edge herself, but she knew that giving up was death. “You’re going to make it, Logan. Don’t waste your breath talking. Just keep your head up.”
“Fog’s coming in. Won’t see us.”
“I don’t care. They’ll find us.”
“My legs are cramping.”
“Logan, I’m holding up your pilot and me,” she said, trying a different tactic. “Are you saying you can’t keep up with a girl?”
Logan saw what she was doing and smiled weakly.
“Good,” Dilara said, seeing that her little pep talk worked. “You’re not wimping out. I like that.”
“I’ll be here as long as you are.”
“That’s good to hear. I didn’t come all this way to give up now.”
The terrible irony of the crash was that she thought her entire ordeal was almost over when the crash had happened. Sam and his cryptic words had just been the start of it.
The idea that Sam had been poisoned seemed ridiculous to her. The thing that nagged at Dilara was that Sam was an expert in pharmaceuticals, so if anyone would know he was being poisoned, it would be him. But why would someone want to poison him? She wanted to believe him, but the whole story was incredible.
What convinced her was an incident that happened on the way back to her apartment.
She had noticed a hulking man in a black trench coat on the shuttle bus. He had looked at her several times, and Sam’s words echoed in her mind.
She thought she was just being paranoid but nevertheless asked the bus driver to stay by her car until she safely drove away. She drove out of the lot onto Sepulveda, a six-lane boulevard leading from LAX to her studio in Santa Monica. The traffic was relatively light going north, so she had the left lane all to herself.
A large black SUV pulled even with her tiny Toyota hatchback. The SUV suddenly swung over and bashed into her car, pushing it into the oncoming lanes.
The SUV had deliberately waited until the other direction was full of traffic. Dilara slammed on the brakes and tried to resist the SUV’s push, but it was twice as heavy as her own vehicle. A pickup truck was heading right at her, and instead of continuing to resist, she hit the accelerator and swung the Toyota as far to left as she could. Screeching tires and honking horns erupted around her. It was only through luck that she merely grazed the pickup and weaved her way through the rest of the traffic before skidding to a halt in a strip mall parking lot.
The SUV sped off, leaving a tangle of vehicles and rubber smoke behind it. Dilara guessed that the SUV had followed her from the airport. The windows had been tinted, so she couldn’t see if it was the man in the trench coat, but the occupants must have been cohorts of the businesswoman who had poisoned Sam.
The possibility that people were trying to kill her had rattled her. She quickly drove away, her hands trembling on the wheel. She kept it together long enough to make sure she wasn’t being followed before she found an empty parking lot where she could sit and let the shakes run their course.
She could just blow it off and return to her normal life as if Sam were loony, but her gut was telling her that what Sam told her was not the rambling of an old person with dementia. People were trying to kill her. She had no proof, but she was sure of it. If she went on as usual, she’d be dead within a day.
Eventually, her tremors subsided enough for her to drive. She tried going to the police, but that had been a dead end. The detective she spoke with took her statement, an extended version of the one she’d given at the airport, but she could tell he thought her story was ludicrous. Her friend, Sam Watson, hadn’t really died of a heart attack, but had been poisoned? Billions of people’s lives were at risk, and someone had deliberately run her off the road to get her out of the way? Even to her, it sounded crazy. But all she could think of was the SUV deliberately ramming her and Sam’s words.
Dilara couldn’t go back to her apartment. It was the logical place for her pursuers to wait for her. If she couldn’t go home, she was on the run, and she always would be until she could figure who was after her and why.
Dilara went to the closest branch of her bank and withdrew every penny in her account. Credit cards were too easy to track, and finding Tyler Locke would require travel.
Gordian Engineering hadn’t been hard to track down. She went to a library and looked them up on the Internet. The company’s named derived from the Gordian Knot, the impossibly complex tangle cut by Alexander the Great. Apparently, Gordian was the largest privately-owned engineering firm in the world, one that provided consulting services to everyone from Fortune 500 corporations to the US military. Each of its senior engineers were partners, reminding Dilara of a law firm. The company’s specialty was failure analysis and prevention, and the web site cited dozens of areas of expertise — vehicle and airline crashes, fires and explosions, structural failures — the list went on and on.
She used the site’s search engine to find Tyler Locke. His title was Chief of Special Operations, and his experience was impressive. Majored in mechanical engineering at MIT. PhD from Stanford. Former captain in the US Army commanding a combat engineering company. Expert in demolition, bomb disposal, mechanical systems, accident reconstruction, and prototype testing. Impressive credentials.
Dilara had never heard of the term “combat engineer.” A military web site told her that they were the soldiers who build bridges and fortifications, clear landmines, and defuse bombs, all while under enemy fire. She looked for a more comprehensive service history for Locke, but she couldn’t find out how long he had served or in what war, just that he’d been decorated with multiple medals, including the Silver Star and Purple Heart. With his background and experience, it sounded like he’d been in the business for 35 years. There was no photo, but she imagined a bald, paunchy man in his fifties wearing a white short-sleeved shirt and pocket protector.
It would be too easy for Locke to dismiss her story over the phone. She had to see him in person.
When she found out he was on an oil rig in Newfoundland, she thought it was a great place to meet — thousands of miles from LA, no easy access for the people after her. She’d had to reserve her seat on the helicopter ahead of time — a requirement to fly out to the rig; she couldn’t just walk up to the counter and buy a ticket to a private oil platform — but otherwise she was as careful as she could be not to leave a trail. She flew into the airport in Gander — a 150-mile bus trip from St. John’s — just in case they were waiting for her at the St. John’s airport. Then she got to the heliport only in time to don her survival suit and board the helicopter.
