Tom Savage - Mrs. John Doe

“No way,” Nora said. “I’m coming with you. There are at least four people in there, not to mention Mr. Cowper, or whoever, and his employees. You can’t take them all alone, but two of us may be able to cause some sort of a distraction.”

She looked over at the wet face of the young man beside her, into his eyes. He clearly didn’t like the idea of her getting that close to the action, and he knew her husband would have a fit, but he must have seen the wisdom in her words. After a brief moment of doubt, he nodded. “All right, but stay close.”

The two trucks had cleared the runway, heading toward the drive. As they passed Mustapha at the car beside the hangar, one of the drivers tooted his horn and waved to him. Mustapha waved back. The trucks rolled by the woods where she and Josef knelt, the sound of the engines fading as they reached the main road, turned, and drove away.

Josef rose to his feet and crouched down, leaning forward. Wincing in pain, he ran swiftly, smoothly out of the trees, heading straight toward the back wall of the hangar, the rain pelting him as he moved. Nora was behind him, gun in hand, imitating his crouch and his smooth running motion. It was tricky enough to sprint in this low position through a virtual curtain of water, but her progress was even trickier because she kept her gaze riveted on the man standing beside the car twenty yards to her left. His back was to her, but all he had to do was turn his head a few degrees and he would see them.

Josef had reached the building, and Nora was nearly there when a blinding flash of lightning washed over the landscape, immediately followed by a deafening crack of thunder. Mustapha moved his umbrella, looking upward for a moment, but he didn’t turn around. Nora almost crashed into her companion, but he held out a hand to steady her. They sank to their knees and huddled against the wall, brushing the rain from their eyes and hair with their free hands as they gasped for breath.

The metal door was right beside them. Josef handed her his pistol, leaned toward her, and whispered, “Keep a lookout.” She nodded, and he rose to his feet, studying the door and the frame around it. Nora looked down the length of the wall, noting with relief that Mustapha and the car were now out of sight around the corner. Still, she watched that corner, just in case, as her companion went to work.

“No wires,” he muttered, pulling a set of keys from his pocket. “But get ready to run, in any case.” He selected something long and thin, clearly not a key, and inserted it into the lock on the doorknob. Mere seconds later, he carefully pushed the door open a few inches. They waited, but no alarm sounded. Nora shifted her attention from the far corner of the building to the door, where Josef already had his upper body through the opening. He pulled back and turned to her.

“Okay, five men and one woman, in a group, near the office in the front left wall. Howard, Gamal, the man and woman from Tripoli, and two locals. Two planes, some barrels and crates, a workspace with tools, not much else. The nearest barrels are on our immediate left. Follow me.”

He took his pistol back from her, pushed the door open a few more inches, and crawled inside. Nora followed, moving awkwardly on her knees. The wet SIG Sauer was freezing in her hand, but she didn’t relax her grip. She crawled forward in darkness, blinking as her eyes adjusted. Josef’s hand came out of the dark to touch her shoulder, and she stopped. They were kneeling behind a big cardboard barrel, the kind people packed with housewares for shipping. It was at the end of a row of barrels lined up along the back wall of the hangar. Josef reached past her and carefully pushed the door shut.

Now she became aware of the overwhelming noise. It seemed to be coming from everywhere in the dark around her, vibrating in the corrugated walls, and it took her a moment to locate its source some forty feet above her head. If every cymbalist from every symphony orchestra in the British Isles were here in this hangar, practicing their art in unison, they couldn’t have produced a din as loud as this: hard, steady rain on the vast tin roof of a huge, hollow metal structure. She peered around the barrel at the room in front of her.

The two small planes stood in the center of the space, the closer one a twin-engine with the name Cowper Aeronautics on the side. The farther craft was a sleek red biplane with silver propellers and intricate wire riggings between the wings. She’d only seen planes like this in newsclips of aerial stunt shows or old movies about World War I.

The front wall beyond the planes wasn’t really a wall; it was two huge, roll-up metal portals for the aircraft. Both doors were down now, with only wet darkness visible beyond their wide windows. Nora leaned around the barrel and craned her neck to see the far left side of the building. The six people were there, in a pool of light from a hanging fixture. As she watched, Bill Howard handed a credit card to one of the two men she’d never seen before. Both men were tall and thickly built in matching dark jumpsuits, and they looked nearly identical except that the one who took the card into the glass-enclosed office had white hair and a droopy white mustache, whereas his twin had brown hair and a droopy brown mustache. The Cowpers, she decided, father and son.

She could feel the man beside her tensing, and she glanced over at him. He was studying the dark space along the back wall near where they crouched. She squinted, barely making out a long plywood worktable covered with objects: an electric saw, a power drill, hammers, smaller tools, a crowbar. He was formulating a plan, but Nora had no idea what it might be. She was about to lean over and ask him what he wanted to do when the older Cowper came back with a receipt.

The incessant rain above drowned out the sound, but Nora followed the pantomime. Everyone smiled and shook hands. Then Bill Howard led Nassim Gamal and his assistants over to a door facing the runway beside the rolling metal portals. They went out into the rain, and the Cowpers headed into the glass booth. The father sat down at a desk, and the son got busy with mugs and a pot of tea or coffee.

Josef’s actions were swift and economical. As Nora watched, he crawled over to the worktable and reached up, grasping the crowbar. Then he ran silently forward in his crouching position, directly toward the office. Staying under the sight lines of the windows, he scurried over to the office doorway at the side of the structure. It was open, the door resting back against the hangar wall.

The two men inside became aware of the presence in the doorway and turned. Nora heard a shouted “Hey!” as Josef swung the door shut, slammed the hasp into place, and thrust the crowbar down into the hole for a padlock. She hadn’t even noticed the office door or the hardware attached to it, but Josef was trained to take in every detail of his surroundings before he moved, and that was precisely what he’d done.

The Cowpers were now locked inside the office. They both began to shout, the younger man throwing himself against the door as the older one banged on the glass. From her position, their unholy racket was drowned out by the rain on the roof, but she remembered that Mustapha was just on the other side of that wall. If he heard the sudden noises…

Josef turned toward her. “Come on!” He pulled his pistol from under his jacket and headed for the front door. Nora was just about to rise and follow him when the door suddenly flew open. She watched as Josef stopped short, confronted by the huge, bearded man who now stood framed in the doorway, the umbrella in one hand and a gun in the other. The umbrella clattered to the floor. The two men faced each other ten feet apart, weapons aimed, and they fired simultaneously.