Chris Mooney - World Without End

The plane banked hard right; the floor tilted back and Conway lost his balance. He let go of the stun baton and tried to grab the pilot's headrest, missed it, and then tried to grab onto something, anything.

He slid out the door like trash being spit from a chute. The last thing Conway saw before being swallowed by the sky was the altimeter reading: 9,500 feet.

On his back with his arms and legs outstretched, the wind roaring past his ears, Conway twirled and twirled and twirled through the blue sea of sky. Everything was spinning.

Get your bearings, quick.

He closed his eyes. A moment later the world stopped spinning. The wind pushed against his back and roared past his ears. He tucked his knees into his chest and then wrapped his arms around his legs so that he looked like a meteor hurling toward the earth. Using his weight, Conway rolled forward onto his stomach and in one motion stretched out his arms and straightened out his legs, tucking his feet back. Through his wind goggles he saw the stretches of dead green fields. He pulled the cord and with a loud whoosh! and a hard yank was pulled back into the air. Conway was floating now.

The Cessna flew away from him, heading east back to the skydiving school, the building looking as small as a Monopoly piece. Con-way navigated his way toward the school.

Dixon'sfine, he told himself. By now, the IWAC surveillance team knew something had gone wrong with the operation and had moved the Hazard Team into position to rescue Dixon-probably had the goddamn school secured. The IWAC team could pinpoint Dixon's location anywhere on the planet through the GPS transmitter placed inside his watch.

And what if Angel Eyes has removed the watch?

There were the transmitters placed inside Dixon's shoes, belt, and wallet. His location could be pinpointed; he couldn't just vanish.

And what if IWAC doesn't know Dixon is in trouble?

Conway felt a cold wave of panic move through him.

You said it yourself. This guy has a habit of making things disappear.

What if he No. The IWAC team had to know.

And -what if they don't, Steve? You heard what the pilot said: "Get rid of his watch." Then the cameraman Paul responded, "I fried it. No way can they hear us." Angel Eyes knows about you, Steve, and he knows about IWAC and the teams that's why his men removed your watch. The fact that he kidnaped Dixon means one thing.

Angel Eyes was going to use Dixon to break into Praxis and steal the military suit.

Pasha.

Conway felt his body grow still, his mind replaying what had just happened in the plane.

If they knew about me, then they know about her. About the rest of us.

Conway needed to land. Quick.

Two hundred miles away from the skydiving school, Martin Spader, dressed in a white T-shirt and jeans, sat at a circular table at a coffee shop inside the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. A blueberry scone lay uneaten on a white plate and a copy of the Wall Street Journal lay spread across the table. Spader pushed the eyeglasses back up his nose, his ears covered by a pair of headphones attached to the Walkman clipped to his belt, and drank his coffee while he read the newspaper. Every once in a while he would look up from his reading and scan the area around Terminal D, the inconspicuous camera installed inside the glass frames transmitting the images to the white telephone-repair van parked in the airport lot.

Pasha's voice came over the headphones: "Martin, turn your head to the left right there, stop."

A short, burly Portuguese man with black hair combed straight back on his skull, early thirties, sat hunched forward on a chair, reading a copy of the local newspaper, the Austin Ameru.in Statesman. He wore pleated khaki pants and a dark-blue, silk short-sleeve shirt printed with dozens of white figures of big-breasted women riding surfboards.

The man scratched the day-old growth along his chin, the brown eyes beneath his uni-brow shifting back and forth over the people in his personal space as if they were about to perform a lewd act.

Inside the back of the news van, Pasha Romanov leaned back in her chair, her attention focused on a monitor. The guy looked like a dark little… Elf, a voice said.

Pasha propped her left elbow up on the chair arm and massaged her bottom lip with her index finger and thumb, her eyes locked on the monitor. Three men, all part of the airport surveillance team, sat with her.

"What is it?" Rick Bernard asked. He sat next to her, staring at the same screen but watching her out of the corner of his eye. He enjoyed watching Pasha enjoyed thinking about what it would be like to be pressed against her bare skin, how she would taste. The ways he could make her moan. She wasn't classically beautiful, but banging her, he knew, would be a blast.

Pasha had sensed this, of course. She could smell Bernard's mouth-wash and the expensive cologne he wore, not a hair out of place, not a blemish or wrinkle or scar on him. He probably detested sweating and getting dirty the kind of guy who should have played Ken and lived with Barbie in their dream house.

Pasha said into the microphone, "Martin, the dark little guy in the blue Hawaiian shirt who looks like a reject from The Sopranos… yes, him. Keep your eye on him." Then Pasha turned to Bernard and said,

"Zoom in on the guy's face. When he looks up, take a picture and run it through the database."

"You know this dude?" Bernard said, working the controls.

Pasha's brain worked visually; memories, even ones dating back to her early childhood, were stored like filmstrips, bright and vivid. She was especially good with faces.

"I've seen him somewhere before," Pasha said.

"Where?"

Pasha's eyes never left the monitor.

"He's CIA."

In the back of the van the three pair of eyes turned to her. They waited for her to elaborate. She didn't.

On the monitor, the Elf looked up in Martin Spader's direction.

"Got it," Bernard said. Click-click-click and a snapshot of the man's face was loaded onto another monitor. The computer scanned the dark man's face and with the click of a mouse button Bernard sent it off through the air back to Praxis, where the computer would search a specialized CIA database for a match. Facial-recognition technology had been used at the last Super Bowl. Each person who entered the stadium had their faces scanned and run against a database of terrorists. As usual, the technology had fueled the Big Brother paranoia of several privacy groups.

"Print me a copy of his picture," Pasha said.

The van filled with the whirring hum of the color printer spitting out paper. Pasha kept her attention on the monitor, watching the Elf.

Where did she know him from? Her mind couldn't retrieve the connection, but it was there, she could feel it; all she needed to do was wrestle it free.

She needed air, needed to be moving.

Pasha reached across Bernard, getting a stronger whiff of his cologne, and grabbed the thick sheet from the paper tray.

"I'm going to take this to Hazard."

"That's at the other end of the lot," Bernard said.

"Let me fax it to them."

"I want to hand deliver it. Fax a copy to Bouchard." He was at Delburn, monitoring the operation.

"You think something's going to go down, don't you?" Bernard asked.

"It's too early. Maybe when Stephen arrives with Dixon." Pasha looked at her watch; Stephen and Dix were probably jumping right now.

"Call me on my phone if you get this man's face," she said and exited the van.

Outside now in the aching heat, blinding white sunlight beamed off the car roofs, hoods, and windshields. Pasha put on her sunglasses. The dark lenses cut the glare. Under her black blazer, a white silk shirt was already sticking to her skin.

Why is that little man's face familiar? Or was she just spooked from the conversation with Bouchard?