biggest plane here — a Boeing 747, she guessed, given its size and shape. There were no markings or printed words on the side of the plane, nothing to indicate what kind of aircraft it was.
Keats asked her to stay in the car for a moment. He got out and jogged over to the other two agents to have a private conversation.
What had happened back at the hotel was painfully fresh in her mind but she had managed to tuck it away by keeping busy. Focused. Now, waiting alone in the warm silence of the car, the wind roaring outside, wanting to blow everything clean, her thoughts flashed to Coop and she wondered if he was waiting for her to return or if he had said screw it and left to catch a flight back to London. She pictured him inside the airport talking to Amanda what's-her-name, making plans for when he returned in between exchanges of 'I miss you' and 'I love you'.
Keats came back and opened her door, and when she stepped out the wind slapped her face, which thrust Coop into the back of her mind (but not too far back; she could still see his face, and his anger, and hear him say: 'I was the one who waited for you.'). Keats didn't hand her off to the agents. He took the metal staircase and she followed, the railing cold beneath her hand and the wind whistling past her ears.
She stepped inside a semi-dark cabin. Two men dressed in white were fast asleep in the first rows of seats, paramedic kits resting on the floor near their soft-soled white shoes. The remaining four rows of leather seats were empty, and another Secret Service agent stood in front of a closed door that, on an ordinary plane, would separate the first-class passengers from the commercial herd.
But this plane wasn't ordinary. The door, made of heavy steel, had a magnetic lock that required a code.
Keats punched in the code, and, as he held open the door for her, he said, 'Sergey's on the lower deck. Go straight down and you'll see a set of stairs to your left. Take them all the way down. I'll join you in a bit.'
Darby thanked him and stepped into a luxury cabin worthy of the president's private plane, Air Force One. The first section, with beige carpeting and soft lighting coming from several lamps, had comfortable leather chairs and seats. They were empty, as was the leather chair bolted to the floor behind a nicely sized executive mahogany desk. Thick pale curtains covered part of the plane's windows. The others had blinds, all drawn, and on one she saw a presidential seal.
Maybe this was Air Force One. Not the current one the president used but possibly a retired model that had been appropriated by the Bureau. Made sense. She remembered Sergey saying the plane stored lab equipment and a place this size could certainly accommodate a full-sized forensic lab.
The next part of the plane appeared to be a conference room. More empty leather sofas and chairs; more empty desks, only these were much smaller than the one in the previous room. A flat-screen TV hung on one wall, tuned to CNN. Anderson Cooper's lips were moving but no sound came from the speakers.
Making her way to the back, the warm air smelling of coffee and stale food, she wondered if Casey, Sergey and the others slept here. Probably, as the plane clearly served as the base of operations. The place was packed with high-tech equipment, secured phones and computers, video-conferencing monitors.
Darby passed what she guessed had to be the 'presidential bathroom' — gold fixtures and a roomy shower. She turned on the light and stepped inside to examine her face in the mirror, saw blotches of mascara. She ran the hot water and scrubbed her face with soap and several paper towels.
A high-pitched scream came from somewhere deep in the plane.
66
Darby straightened, water dripping down her face as she listened to a young woman crying and pleading for help.
Darby grabbed the hanging towel and quickly dried her face. A final check in the mirror and then she moved out, heading down the aisle on her far left.
The young voice screamed a single word:
'Daddy.'
Jack Casey sat in the gloom, his back to her and his attention focused on a flat-screen monitor mounted on the wall across from his chair. The film playing on the screen had been recorded by a video camera equipped with night vision; his daughter, Sarah, was bathed in a green ambient glow of light. She wore the same clothes as those in the photographs — jeans and a white tee smeared with her blood — and she stood shaking and crying behind some sort of prison cube made of Lucite or Plexiglas.
She wasn't in danger of suffocating — several holes had been drilled through the walls for air — but she was in danger of being bitten by the dozens of eight-legged creatures crawling above her.
The spiders moved and scattered across a separate rectangular cube mounted against the ceiling. The people who had captured her had installed a sliding bottom, one operated by a lever situated outside the young girl's clear cell. A scarred, grimy hand clutched the lever. With a flick of the wrist, the ceiling — well out of the girl's reach — would disappear and drop the venomous spiders down on her.
Darby's mind filled with images of Mark Rizzo's body. Saw the necrotic bite on the man's forearm caused by a Brown Recluse. She saw at least one on the screen, and another one that Perkins had identified as a Tunnel Web. Their bite is extremely painful, Dr Perkins had said. Their venom carries atraxotoxin, which disrupts neurotransmitters. The victim experiences muscle twitching, severe nausea and vomiting.
Sarah Casey pounded on the clear plastic, screaming at her father. Her right little finger was gone, severed above the knuckle. There's going to be no way to attach it, Darby thought, approaching the empty chair next to the profiler. Too much time had passed, for one, and, given the blackened stump on the swollen right hand, she suspected, with a nauseating intensity, that the wound had been crudely cauterized with something like a blowtorch to stem the bleeding. If it had, the nerves had already been damaged.
Casey had a highball glass on his lap. He wasn't drunk — not yet, his eyes were too clear when he looked up and focused on her — but he was well on his way. He had put a serious dent in the bottle of whiskey sitting on the table to his left. The bottle was more than half empty.
Casey picked up the remote and paused the video. He seemed to be waiting for her to say something. She felt like telling the man how deeply sorry she felt about what was going on. No, he wouldn't want that. Stick to business.
'Did Sergey tell you about the tattoo I found on Mark Rizzo's lip?'
He nodded.
'I found another one tonight,' she said. 'On the chest of the former cop who worked on the Charlie Rizzo investigation.'
'The cop from Nahant who got shot?'
She nodded. 'John Smith.'
'Interesting.'
Clearly — understandably — Casey's attention was on the video. On his daughter. She decided not to fill him in yet on her conversation with the Harvard professor.
Darby took the empty chair. 'Sergey told me this video was on the USB drive.'
'Yep.'
'Anything else?'
'Just this. The USB drive is downstairs. The computer whiz kids are scraping through it right now, seeing if they can find some digital fingerprints or something. Another group is analysing the video frame by frame, trying different light sources to see if anything jumps out.'
He polished off the rest of his drink, the melting ice cubes rattling in the glass. He reached for the bottle, and Darby glanced at the image frozen on the screen: Sarah Casey pounding on the clear plastic, lips stretched back in a howl of pain and terror.
'How much time does she have?' he asked, pouring himself another drink.
'That's a question you're much better suited to answer, isn't it? You know these people — '
'I meant her finger. How much time until a surgeon can reattach it?'
'I'm not a surgeon.'
