Marc Cameron - Act of Terror

Ronnie brightened. Maybe it was Quinn. “Dark hair, heavy five o’clock shadow?”

“No,” the nurse said. “Sorry.”

“Did he give his name?”

Beverly shook her head. “Sorry. I can ask him if you want. Looks kind of mean, though.”

Why would a cop be sitting outside her room? Could she trust him? She kicked herself for not memorizing Palmer’s cell number.

“No,” she said. “I’ll be okay. I just need some rest.” Ronnie swung her feet off the edge of the bed as soon as Beverly shut the door behind her.

“You can do this, chica,” she whispered, pausing long enough to let her head stop spinning.

She winced as she peeled back the sticky tape holding in her IV. Stumbling, and using the bed rail for support, she rifled through the drawers, settling for a cotton ball and piece of tape to stop the weep of blood from the back of her hand.

Thankfully, she found some clothes hanging in the closet-faded jeans, a black cashmere sweater, and a pair of Nike runners. She shucked off the thin, backless gown and ripped into the unopened packages of socks and underwear. Somebody was looking out for her.

Gingerly, she reached behind her back to touch her wound. She was surprised to find two more bandages, slightly larger than the first. Of course, the doctors had had to go in and repair the damage. One of the incisions was wet with blood from her exertions. She shrugged. Couldn’t be helped. She’d probably just pulled a stitch.

Tara Doyle, the “Queen of West Texas Bitches,” had to be stopped. And since she couldn’t trust anyone, Ronnie would do it herself.

She’d just zipped her jeans when the plainclothes cop walked in on her. He had blond hair and a wild, street-hardened look on his face-not much different than the boys in the caves where she’d been stabbed. He wore a white dress shirt with an open collar. A navy-blue sports coat covered the swell of a pistol on his belt. Ronnie had never seen him before, but there was something vaguely familiar in his eyes.

“Oh no, no, no, young lady,” he said, walking toward her with a raised hand, as if he was directing traffic. “You’re not going anywhere.”

“Can you put her down in the ball field?” Quinn said into his headset. Thibodaux sat across from him, strapped in to his seat forward of the cargo bay on V22 Osprey.

The pilot, a balding man with smiling blue eyes, turned to glance over the shoulder of his green Nomex flight suit. “I can set her down in the middle of Times Square if you want me to.” His name was Jared Smedley, an Air Force Academy squadron mate of Quinn’s. Smeds had gone on to flight training after the academy, graduating at the top of every class he took. He’d been a flight instructor for the last three years and had been brought in from the Eighth Special Operations Squadron at Hurlburt Field, Florida, to fly overwatch and rescue during the wedding. He gave a thumbs-up to his copilot, a waif of a girl with a blond ponytail hanging out below her flight helmet. She returned the gesture.

He had the swaggering confidence of a pilot and the skill to back it up. Quinn had always found it impossible not to like the man.

Capable of straight or vertical flight, Smedley’s aircraft, the tilt-rotor V22, made insertion possible in areas like Manhattan and Governors Island.

Quinn’s Bluetooth earbud chirped. He moved the boom mike of his headset away and tapped the device. It was Palmer.

“Homeland Security facial recognition just got a hit on an NYPD security camera on Mott Street. Looks like the doctor is buying cigarettes at a newsstand. I’m sending a still to your phone now.”

Quinn took the BlackBerry off his belt.

“Who’s the guy with him?” he asked, turning the screen to show Thibodaux.

“Look at that mop,” Thibodaux scoffed. “He’s Elvis’s evil twin.”

“Don’t know,” Palmer said, an edge to his voice that Quinn could feel. “We have intel that Badeeb’s wife is hiding out in a flophouse off Bowery. Looks like they’re heading to meet up with her.”

“Roger that,” Quinn said. “We’re about to touch down at a ball field in lower Manhattan. It’ll take us about ten minutes to get there on the bikes-”

Dust and leaves flew outside the windows as the huge rotors began to lower the Osprey onto the center of the baseball diamond. One of the two crewmen in the back told them to stand by and activated the lowering mechanism on the ramp at the rear of the bird, giving them a quick exit with their bikes.

Quinn stood from his seat along the bulkhead, working to release the straps on Mrs. Miyagi’s candy-apple-red Ducati 848.

“Don’t forget, Jericho,” Palmer said. “We need to take Badeeb and his wife alive. See who the other guy is. Do me a favor and try to keep from killing him.”

“If at all possible, sir.” Quinn nodded.

“Make damned certain it is possible,” Palmer said. “I’m pretty sure the president will go against my advice and come to the wedding no matter what the Secret Service or I say. He keeps reminding me that the terrorists have won if they get to dictate where we do and do not go…” There was a sudden blip on the phone-another call. “Hang on a minute…”

Quinn and Thibodaux sat, geared up and ready, on their bikes. The heavy rear ramp lowered the last few inches with an agonized hydraulic whine. Dust and litter swirled into the back of the aircraft as Palmer came back on the line.

“Jericho? You still there?” His voice was breathless, heavy.

“I am,” Quinn said, feeling a rise in the pit of his stomach.

“Jericho,” Palmer said. “It’s about Garcia.”

Tara Doyle wiped the airmen’s blood off her hands and threw the wad of paper towels in the trashcan. A swatch of red painted the chest of her flight suit and the V of her neck. She didn’t bother with that. The smell of blood helped her focus on the matters at hand.

Her entire life, at least from the time she was nine years old, had been lived for the next few hours. The years of study, the decades of pretending to love her adopted family, to care for this country of dogs-it all led up to her actions this one night.

“I will cut the throat of the whore that is the United States of America,” she chuckled out loud to the cavernous hangar. “With one of her very best airplanes…”

Walking toward her jet, she had a fleeting thought of Jimmy. He’d been a toddler when her American parents had taken him in from the Indian reservation in Montana, too young to know she too was adopted. A good confidant-he’d caught her crying on so many occasions and come in to console her without once asking her why. She shook the thought from her mind. None of that mattered now. He was one of them, nothing more than a means to an end, someone to vouch for her citizenship and make her background more believable. She had to remind herself of that. Jimmy Doyle deserved to die like the rest of them-

“Major Tara Doyle, YOU ARE UNDER ARREST!” A muscular Air Force OSI agent wearing khaki 5.11 pants and a black ballistic raid vest stepped from behind the wheels of a nearby F-22 Raptor, Sig Sauer pistol at high ready.

Doyle spun, fillet knife in hand, but Ronnie Garcia rose up from her hiding spot behind the aircraft tug and hit her in the face with a crescent wrench.

The queen of West Texas bitches fell like a sack of wet sand. Garcia winced from the exertion, gritting her teeth against the searing pain in her back.

Moments later, the brightly lit hangar swarmed with OSI agents in black vests and thigh holsters. Everyone present had personally worked with Quinn and, for one reason or another, had his complete trust.