New York and then an hour or so up the Merritt by limo to Darien—she pulled the airport book her mother’d bought her out of her bag and opened it. It was named after that famous artist Da Vinci but her mother told her it was about secret codes or something.
“You are interested in numerology?” the boy said, pulling his headphones off and looking at the book. College. Definitely college.
“What?” she said. Like she was annoyed at having her reading interrupted. Like she read books. As if.
“Numbers. Their hidden meanings.”
“Oh. Yeah. Fascinating.”
“Me, as well.” He smiled. Nice grill. Straight and pearly. Big brown eyes. Long, long lashes.
“That’s what this is about? Numbers? Jesus Christ. This is a math book?”
“It’s what everything is about. Flight 77. You see? A mystical number. Powerful. Or, this row number we are this moment sitting in. It’s 76. A very important number for you Americans, is it not?”
“76? You mean, like, the gas station? Or, what?”
He just looked at her and then went back to what her dad called the thousand-yard stare.
“My boyfriend gave me this book,” she said quickly. “You should see him. What a babe. He looks exactly just like JFK. Identical.”
“Which one?”
“Which one?”
“Yes. The president? Or, the airport?”
“What?”
The seat belt sign pinged off and the bitchy British Airways stewardess said in her bitchy British accent that they could get up if they wanted to but stay out of the aisle so they could get their crappy carts up and down and keep the belt fastened loosely when they were in their seats because there was some storm or other down in South China.
Get up but stay out of the aisles? Unfasten your seat belt but keep it fastened? Hello? Is this woman two toys short of a Happy Meal, or what?
“Excuse me, please,” the hottie-tottie brown-eyed boy said, taking his cheesy plastic shaving kit out of his made-in-Taiwan special backpack. He turned his back and unzipped it like he didn’t want her peeking and put his MP3 player inside it. As if she cared about what was in his stupid shaving kit. “I must use the restroom, please. Urgent.”
Oh. Like she cared. He was going to shave? Brush his teeth? It was way more information than she needed. Why didn’t he just say he was getting up? She’d use the restroom herself and fire up some more leaf but you couldn’t even smoke weed in there anymore. She knew, believe me. She’d tried.
Urgent? What could be urgent? Yuk.
Flight 00
THE MINUTE JOHNNY ADARE STEPPED OUT OF THE COCKPIT and into the upper galley with the little doctor in tow, everybody started calming down. It was the uniform, he guessed, and the famous Adare smile he’d inherited from his dad. He’d gotten laid with both so many times he couldn’t remember. It had taken every ounce of self-control he had to stay away from the Bambah for the last three days. He’d watched the lassies land, climb on the buses, and head for the hotel. Not one of them much over twenty-five, none of them exactly drop-dead gorgeous, but what the hell. At any rate, they had not been chosen for their looks.
“Don’t even think about it,” Khalid had told him, the two of them standing by the hangar watching the stream of young women climb up the steps of the buses to the hotel. Yeah, yeah. So, he hadn’t ever gone over to the hotel but that didn’t mean he ever stopped thinking about it. Ever.
“Sorry, ’bout the bumpy ride, ladies,” Johnny said on the intercom phone in his pilot voice. One of the prerequisites for the Pasha’s death squads was that they all had to speak perfect English, so that made it easier. He had a vague idea of what this was all about but he’d learned long ago that it was a lot easier not to ask a lot of questions. Just shut up and fly the bus, Johnny. He’d learned that lesson long ago from Khalid.
“Just a few potholes in the sky,” he continued. “That’s all. We’ll be flying a little lower than usual for a while, until we get through this stuff, but it shouldn’t be much longer. Then, we’ll climb to our normal altitude. We’re expecting a smooth ride to L.A. today. Everybody sit back and relax. As soon as we can, we’ll be serving you a light breakfast. Thanks.”
He sounded funny, he thought, hanging up. Ten years with the Pasha. Christ, he’d almost forgotten what a real airplane pilot sounded like.
He nodded thanks to the cabin crew, the Pasha’s three beautiful private hostesses seated on fold-downs in the upper galley, two of whom he knew very well. He smiled at them, hung up the phone, and motioned Soong to follow him down the spiral stair. The abbreviated main cabin, six seats abreast, was full of some very nervous female passengers. But, just as it had topside, his appearance on the main deck had a calming effect. That, plus the fact that Khalid had disobeyed orders and turned all the interior lights on and climbed high enough so that the wave tops were no longer threatening to reach up and pull them from the sky.
He flashed his smile, pausing here and there with a brief word of reassurance. He and the doctor were headed all the way aft to what little of the Pasha’s private quarters hadn’t been turned into auxiliary fuel tanks. About halfway back, he noticed an overhead panel hanging down. The engineer who, at the last minute, had replaced all the oxygen canisters with the ones Soong had brought aboard in his black suitcase, had neglected to fasten it properly. Johnny smiled at the three women as he reached over them to snap the panel back into place. They all smiled back. Hell, they were all smiling now.
He started aft. Where was that little bugger?
“Heads up! Doc! I thought you said it was important,” he called to him. The guy was still leaning over to talk to one of the travel agents in a tight white Gap T-shirt. She did have a pair that would pop the pennies off a dead Irishman’s eyelids, he’d noticed. The doc was practically drooling on her. Scratch the practically.
“Sorry, sorry,” he said, and came toddling after Johnny, holding onto seat backs as if he really wanted to keep from falling into somebody’s lap.
Adare closed the beautifully carved door behind them, leaned his back against it and shook out a cigarette. He snicked a match with his thumbnail and, for once, it worked. The warmly lit cabin was certainly stunning, but familiar. He’d spent a lot of time back here entertaining the hostesses when the boss wasn’t aboard. He went to the liquor cabinet and poured himself two fingers of Jameson’s Irish whiskey. His last official voyage. One for the road.
“So?” he said, rolling the delicious whiskey around in his mouth before swallowing. “What’s up, Doc?”
The doctor was lighting up, too. He’d taken one of the Pasha’s Baghdaddies from the inlaid box next to the leather sofa. His hand was shaking so badly he could barely hold the match.
“We must do an in-flight test,” Doctor Soong puffed nervously. “Very important. Sooner the better.”
“In-flight test?” Adare said. That didn’t sound good. “You’ve got to be joking, man. A test of what?”
“No-no,” Soong said, putting a bony little hand on his arm to reassure him. “Not to worry. Only the emergency oxygen system, Johnny.”
Johnny?
Adare’s right arm shot out and he slammed the man up against the bulkhead. His ribs felt like chickenbones. And Johnny felt like snapping them. This little shit had definitely gotten Johnny’s Irish up.
“I want somebody to call me Johnny, I let them know. And you, you miserable little bugger, are at the very back of a very long fuckin’ queue. You better tell me what the bloody hell you’ve done. Last-minute changes to my airplane, Doc, I don’t like ’em.”
“Please! The cockpit has its own oxygen supply, no?”
“What of it?”
“And, the cockpit itself has an airtight seal?”
“Jesus Christ, man! Are ye flat crazy? What have ye done to us?”
