McCabe had recruited, someone from his antiterrorist days with the army. The bearded man watched Laurel closely. He never spoke much and when he did she could always hear the disdain he held for women of any religion or country. A man losing his faith was a nasty thing to watch.
“At what speed did you set the charge to go off?” she asked, watching the blue and white Learjet start moving.
She had nervously waited as the Mechanic-the name he was known by in every police agency in the world- placed a one-ounce charge of C-4 explosive near the aluminum rim of the nose wheel of the jet.
“The charge will detonate at one hundred knots, a split second before the jet reaches takeoff speed. That should be enough to send the plane off course and cause it to crash before liftoff. I have done this before. You may not wish to watch.”
Laurel smiled and pulled her silk windbreaker closer around her upper body.
“Are you kidding? This is what I live for,” she said. She was disgusted that the bearded Mechanic would even suggest such a weakness. She turned away and watched the Learjet taxi toward the runway. “You need to have faith in women, my friend. Your old ways of looking at things have never made you any true friends among your own kind. James and Daddy will be proud. They won’t be using this Mr. Compton to coordinate anything having to do with the Moon. I’m afraid they’ll have to get someone else.”
She was so excited that she could barely keep her legs still.
As the Learjet taxied further into the misting gray fog of Hobby Airport, the cell phone inside Laurel’s windbreaker rang. She shook her head, not wanting her glee at what was about to happen disturbed. Her blue eyes were glowing in anticipation. Her father’s eyes had glowed that morning too, though what she was feeling was anticipatory wonder and excitement and what her father had been feeling was pure anger at not being able to control everything around him. Finally, she realized that the only people who had this particular cell phone number were her father and James McCabe, her Mr. Smith. She angrily tore into the coat pocket and ripped the phone free. She opened it hard enough that the Mechanic standing next to her heard the cover crack.
“What?” she hissed into the phone.
“Laurel, what are you doing?” a voice asked.
“I’m doing what you would do if you were here,” she said into the phone. “And you know what, James? I’m a little busy at the moment.”
“Listen, tell me what you’ve done, quickly.” McCabe’s voice was calm and precise.
“I’m helping you and Daddy, just like you taught me to do.”
“Slow down and listen to me. If you are planning on hurting Compton and his team, you’ll not be doing us any favors. Do you understand?”
“But-”
“Laurel, right now we have the advantage. We know about him, but he has no idea who we are. Stop whatever it is you are doing, right now.”
McCabe’s voice was so calm and measured that Laurel was taken off guard. She felt embarrassed and humiliated at having thought this was something that would have made her part-time lover and her father proud of her. She lowered the phone and looked at the Mechanic, who was still wiping his hands on the red rag and sneering at her.
“Disarm the charge,” she said, not looking directly at the bearded man but at the distant jet as it rounded onto the runway. The man saw her face go slack, and the vitality she had displayed only seconds before had drained away. For the first time he saw through the young woman’s expensive exterior and the ugliness that he saw was shocking. He nodded his head. Her eyes narrowed and she watched as the Event Group Learjet spooled up its engines to full takeoff power.
“You realize that the charge will be discovered when the mechanics check the aircraft?”
Laurel, instead of replying, just tossed the cell phone at the Mechanic, not caring if he caught it or not, and then she turned angrily away and stepped out into the misting air.
“Yes?” he said into the phone.
“Can you undo what you have arranged with that aircraft?” McCabe asked.
The Saudi-born Mechanic reached into his coveralls’ front pocket and brought out a small transmitter. He hit the single red button on its face.
“It is done,” he said into the phone.
“Now listen closely. You are never to engage in any wet work without my explicit confirmation of action. You are never to allow Laurel to… compromise herself again. She, like her father, needs to be protected. Do you understand?”
“Completely.”
“Now, I assume you used a remote device on Compton’s aircraft, yes?”
“This is correct,” the Mechanic said. He watched Laurel as she stared after the streaking Learjet on the runway.
“Do you have the ability to track the device?”
“Up to three thousand miles. I am tied into the Faith-” The man stopped himself before saying the name of his employer. “I am patched through a reliable satellite service.”
“Track-only for now. Gather your equipment and alert your ground personnel. We have duties in Russia and then down south in French Guiana.”
The Mechanic closed the phone without saying anything. He watched as Laurel fixed on him with a look of hatred and failure.
“You will have to fly home commercially, madam,” he said. “Or hire a plane. I have been ordered to another area of opportunity.”
Laurel stood in the light rain and stared at the Mechanic. Her hair was drenched and her beautiful features were obscured by the stringy strands of hair.
“It must be hell for a man like you to lose your faith in yourself,” she said. “So many of your brothers have been martyred and here you are, worse than your onetime enemies. Taking money from the people you once professed to despise, who you would have killed in a minute. You are worse than sad, and you hate me because I am a woman.” She took a step toward the Mechanic. “Well, at least I have the courage of my convictions. You have nothing. I expect McCabe knew what he was doing when he hired you. You just may make that martyrdom yet, but don’t expect your promised virgins in the afterlife. From what I understand they don’t reward cowards.”
The Mechanic watched her smile a lunatic’s grin as she turned to leave. He knew that she was right about him. For a man once feared by the Zionists and the entire Western world, he was a skeleton of his former self. A man who thought his brothers in Afghanistan were weak and without conviction, enough so that they thought him unstable. He was banished from the movement forever and now he found himself in the employ of pigs, the very same people he had sworn to annihilate. Laurel Rawlins’s words about achieving martyrdom echoed in his head and then just as quickly disappeared.
He turned away from the woman and watched the Learjet climb into the sky. Then he looked down at the remote device in his hand. He safed the system and placed it in his pocket to check the GPS later for the final destination of the aircraft. He smiled as he saw the landing gear retract on the expensive Learjet and pointed a finger at the plane. He made a motion as if he were pulling a trigger.
“Another time, my friend. Another time.”
5
The jointly managed space facility run by the Russian Federal Space Agency and the Russian Space Forces was located 124 miles from the Aral Sea. Since the heyday of the Soviet space program, Baikonur Cosmodrome had seen occasional fits of activity, but since the Russian president openly declared that his countrymen would make an attempt at the investigation on the lunar surface, the facility had seen activity on a massive scale. Forty thousand workers had flooded into the old buildings in Kazakhstan, making the area near the sea once more a viable force in
