Lynne Heitman - The Pandora Key aka The Hostage Room

“Magnificent, isn’t he?”

I whipped around to find Cyrus Thorne right behind me, squarely in my personal space. I hadn’t sensed his presence at all. I took a step away from him. He looked different from when he’d been next to me in the car. The lighting in the cabin made his hair look more ginger than gray. He had changed out of a suit and into khakis and a golf shirt. It gave him a trim silhouette and didn’t diminish in any way the attitude that the appropriate way to greet him was with a salute.

“It’s very impressive,” I said. “Where did it come from?”

“I had a bet with my partner.”

“Who won?”

“I lost the bet, but Tony died winning.”

“That must have been some bet.”

He didn’t seem to hear. “This is my tribute to him.”

I looked down at the inscription plate. “For Tony Blackmon.” Below the name, all it said was “Get some.”

It reminded me of what someone, probably Felix, had told me about Blackmon. I looked at Thorne. “Your partner was a marine.”

“The best who ever lived…a good partner.” He didn’t exactly get misty-eyed, but there was sadness in his face as he looked at that eagle. It made him seem gentler.

“Let’s go up front and talk.” He turned and moved forward to the main cabin. We settled in at one of the tables, across from each other.

Thorne had a bag of cough drops sitting on the table next to him. He unsheathed one, popped it into his mouth, and peered at my head. “Do you need medical attention? Tatiana can help if you do. I have some experience as a field medic. I can do some things in a pinch.”

He had a tinge of the South in his voice. If he were a car, he would have been a pickup truck, only tricked out with all the best military gear, especially battle armor. He seemed very well defended.

“I’ve already taken care of it, thank you.” Something had occurred to me. “Who’s flying the plane?”

“My copilot. Do you know who I am?”

“You’re Cyrus Thorne, cofounder of Blackthorne and king of a vigilante army.”

He seemed to like that. “That’s very colorful. But I am no king, and we are not a vigilante army. I am a humble servant of the great and glorious country of the United States of America.”

“Weren’t those your fellow patriots firing on us at the Novotel?”

“They were overenthusiastic, I’ll agree, and flawed in their tactical approach. We’ll have to do some work on that.” He looked around for Tatiana and nodded. She pulled an electronic organizer from her pocket, got out the stylus, and started tapping away. Turned out she was a ninja flight attendant and personal assistant. Cyrus turned back to our conversation.

“You did a good job handling a bad situation. I’m impressed.”

“That was my goal, to impress the people who were trying to kill me.”

He popped another cough drop. They were cherry, and he didn’t suck them. He crunched them. Even sitting between two aircraft engines, I could hear him grind them to dust with his molars. “If they had been trying to kill you, you would be dead. Unfortunately, the target got away. That’s why we’re talking now.”

“The target?”

“You know that I’m talking about Max Kraft.” He put his arms on the table and leaned forward. “Let’s be a little more direct in our communication.”

“Sure.” I sank a little deeper into my club chair. “Because we only have eight hours ahead of us.”

“We should be able to get our business resolved well before we land in Boston, and I enjoy flying the plane.”

“All right, let’s do it. What do you want from me, and what happens if I don’t give it to you?”

His gaze settled on me in a way that said he wasn’t used to being the one answering the questions, but he would humor me. “Blackthorne is a preferred contractor to the U.S. government. We’ve worked for every branch of the military and multiple other departments and agencies. Most of the work we’ve done lately has been for the intelligence community.”

“I guess that makes you a spy for hire.”

“That’s simplistic.”

“I thought we were doing simple and direct.”

“You do have a mouth, don’t you?”

I just looked at him. I was locked up with him in an aircraft at 35,000 feet. There were at least three of them onboard to one of me. I was unarmed-Kraft’s Baretta was one item that had not been returned-and something told me the captain and Tatiana weren’t. If they wanted to hurt me, there wasn’t much I could do. My attitude was about the only thing in the situation I could control.

He pulled a worn leather attaché onto the table and dug out a pair of utilitarian reading glasses and a file. He opened the file and perused it. “You’re a private investigator from Boston, Massachusetts. You flew to Paris last night on Majestic Airlines. You sat in seat 4B. You were staying at the Hyatt in room 1200. Your partner is Harvey Baltimore, also of Boston. You’ve been partners for three”-he turned the page-“almost four years. Before that, you worked for Majestic.”

“You checked me out.”

“I’m in the information-gathering business.” He took off the glasses and leaned back. “Your partner seems quite taken with his ex-wife. I find that to be charming. It says here that he’s ill.”

“That’s a pretty thorough report.” Tatiana, leaning against the bulkhead behind Thorne, shifted. I looked at her, and she offered a half-smile. Was there no end to this woman’s talents?

“It’s what we do,” Thorne said.

It was what he planned to do with it that concerned me. “What do you want?”

“You like simple.” He closed the file and took off his glasses. “Here it is. Max Kraft is a dangerous man. It is my job to find him. I want you to do it for me. Arrange a meeting with him so that we can intercept him. We’ll take it from there.”

“Kraft didn’t strike me as particularly formidable.”

“He has classified information. He’s threatening to declassify it in the New York Times.”

“You would kill him for that?”

“No one will print his story. We’ll see to that.” He waved his hand, as if the New York Times were some insignificant fly to be swatted away. The idea that he might really be able to do it was disturbing.

“If you can squash his story, then what are you so worried about?”

“Hoffmeyer.”

“Stephen Hoffmeyer? From Salanna 809?”

“Yes.”

I sat back and did a couple of small side-to-side swivels. Hoffmeyer, the dead guy who wasn’t dead, which made Frank the crazy guy who wasn’t crazy. Now I really had to focus. “Was Hoffmeyer CIA?”

“Hoffmeyer was with the Agency. Four years ago, he stole highly classified documents. He had them with him when the flight was hijacked. When we found out he was on the plane, beepers went off all over the world. At that point, we had a bunch of hostiles in possession of some of the country’s most sensitive information. We don’t know exactly what happened in the course of that hijacking, but we thought Hoffmeyer had gone down in the final assault. We thought the files had died with him. There are indications now that both the files and Hoffmeyer survived.”

“Kraft has the files?”

“Max Kraft has those files. Our primary objective is to get them back. Our secondary objective is to make sure Hoffmeyer and the files never meet again.”

“What would Hoffmeyer do with them if he got them back?”

“Sell them to the highest bidder, which will certainly include enemies of the United States. I’ll tell you right now that will not happen. I won’t let that happen.”

“Is this more of that need-to-know information that I don’t get to know? Because right now, I’m not taking anyone at his word.”