justified. He sat there in the departure lounge which had been assigned to his KLM flight, and twitched. The passengers' baggage had already been X-rayed and metal detection done at the entry to the Duty-Free area. At least Burt was in no imminent danger of being caught with this stuff on him. But shortly they would get on the plane, and in seven hours they would be back in the States, and Burt would get off the plane and be caught with this stuff…
You never could think worth a lick.
Burt sat there and burned hot with rage. Why me? Why are they doing this? I was doing what I was told.
Plainly they counted on me to do as I was told.
But why? Why hire a courier and then throw him away after he's done what he was supposed to do?
Burt stared out the plate-glass window revealing the broad expanse of Schiphol Airport, all that green grass under a blue sky, all incredibly flat. Why-
He could just see himself getting off at Reagan, going through customs. And then getting caught. There would be a big deal: look at this, look what we found in this kid's luggage. All the faces turned accusingly toward him, all the eyes staring-
And then, as he saw the eyes, as the sweat of humiliation and fear broke out on him again, Burt also saw something else. The eyes, the attention… and someone else slipping away in the middle of it all.
I'm not the important one on this plane! I'm just a distraction!
Someone else here has something much more important than I've got. They're going to get through when I don't
Suddenly it was obvious. If Burt got caught, then whoever was on the plane and was carrying something much more important, much more valuable or more seriously contraband, would slip on by, be out, be gone, while Burt was still being strip-searched and flashrayed and probably just about turned inside out. Whoever this person was would have to be carrying the stuff in their cabin baggage, or on their person. They couldn't afford to have to wait to claim their luggage. It would be someone who only had carry-on.
Burt looked at his fellow passengers in near-despair. He didn't have any baggage to check, himself, and so hadn't had to stand in line at check-in and see who had checked their baggage in and who hadn't. And everyone here had some kind of carry-on with them. It was hopeless….
Hopeless. And frustrating, knowing that right here with him, one of these people had something really illegal or dangerous, and they were going to use Burt to cover their escape, and get him caught instead.
An irrational impulse to start grabbing people and shaking them, one by one, and shouting, 'Why are you doing this to me!' washed over him and almost immediately passed. That would be really stupid. Get him caught right now, probably. A bad idea. Yet at the same time, the urge to confront the person who was doing this to him, just by looking at him or her, would not go away.
Crazy idea.
Nonetheless, for lack of anything better to do, in the face of that DELAYED sign and the thought of his last few hours of freedom, Burt started to do it. He decided that he was not going to be obvious about it. But he was going to look every single passenger on this flight in the eye, and let them know that he knew what they were doing, what was going to happen to him. One of them would have to get the message. If the other two hundred or however many of them thought he was a little crazy, so be it. But he was going to have this last small satisfaction.
Burt started moving gently around the departure lounge with the overnight bag slung nonchalantly over his shoulder, positioning himself in one spot or another, and looking at people, systematically, starting near the door through which they would all board their plane, and working his way toward the door through which people entered from the main concourse. That was so he would be able to look at all the people inside, and when he'd looked into the eyes of every one of them, he could do the last ones in by standing at the entry door as they came in.
Burt made a game of it, working not to be obvious about it. Mostly people looked at him, bored, and let their eyes drift away. A few stared back, then lost interest. It went on that way for about fifteen minutes, as Burt moved as unobtrusively as he could from one spot to another, meeting the eyes of his fellow passengers, studying them all for signs that this person was the one who was going to betray him.
And then, maybe a hundred and fifty people along, he noticed something odd. There was a man in a long leather trench coat, a piece of clothing that Burt immediately envied, so that his glance at the man lasted longer than it might have otherwise. But as the man turned, he avoided Burt's eyes. And as Burt tried to make eye contact with him again, not being obvious about it, but just persisting, it slowly became obvious to Burt that this man would not meet his eyes under any circumstances. He would not even look in Burt's general direction.
It got to be more than a coincidence, as Burt casually drifted around the lounge, positioning himself here and there, and watched what happened. There was just no way to get the man to look at him at all. No matter where Burt might stand, the man in the brown leather trench coat, the man carrying the brown leather briefcase, the dark-haired man with a very ordinary face, simply was always looking somewhere else. Trying to get this guy to see him was like trying to look at the back of your own head without a mirror.
The uncertainty started to become certainty, and the certainty started to become triumph. That's him, Burt thought. This is the one. No one else. Somehow he just knew he was right.
The certainty made him almost giddy with relief. All right, he thought to himself, severely. It was almost his father's tone of voice, but newly made his own. Let's think this through. Don't get all excited too soon. Fine. So this is the guy. What are you going to do about it?
Burt withdrew behind a nearby pillar and looked at the man, while trying to seem as if he had his attention bent elsewhere. The guy had a briefcase, pretty much like anybody else's. Fine, but there could be all kinds of things inside a case like that. Burt thought of the diamond he had seen being weighed for that young guy back at the stall. That gem alone could have been worth tens of thousands of dollars. Five or six of those, tucked away in a briefcase full of important-looking papers, or hidden in some part of the briefcase less obvious-that could be very, very serious money.
But whatever he was carrying, he wanted nothing to do with Burt. That was all that mattered. Now all Burt had to do was figure out what to do with the information
'Figuring out' isn't your strongest suit, my boy, he heard that old familiar voice saying, amused, triumphant. Burt frowned. We911 see about that…
Chapter 10
Shortly thereafter, Megan flagged her system as 'busy' to all callers and got ready to lie in wait. It had taken some doing. 'This is my operation,' she said. 'It's my friend. I want to be in at the end!'
'There's nothing for you to do, Megan,' Winters had said. 'Leif is going to handle it.'
'If I don't get to watch it go down,' Megan said, 'I'm going to-' Then she stopped, for she didn't know what she was 'going to.' And it was foolish to try to threaten this man. For one thing, she intended to be working with him some day, and for another, it made her sound juvenile.
Megan shut up and just looked at him.
Winters just looked back for a moment. 'Oh, all right,' he said at last. 'There's a place you can sit and watch… with a few hundred other people.'
'A few hundred?
'This case calls for an unusual amount of oversight/' Winters said. 'As you'll see. Come on, I'll drop you where you need to be. Once you're put there, stay put! I'll be off making sure the surveillance is all in the right places, with the supervisory personnel from Breathing Space and the other jurisdictions all in place. And, by God, after all this they'd better be-'
Megan went with him, her heart racing.
Leif was sitting in the plaza in the same spot he had been in yesterday, drinking an orange juice and twitching. And without any particular fanfare, the man came walking across the sunny plaza, past the big bear sculpted out of blond wood that stood down at that end of the plaza, and stepped into the shade of the umbrella that sheltered Leif's table. Vaud just stood there for a moment, looking down at him thoughtfully. Then, 'Prompt,' he
