Germ

Near the end of the alley, she moved out from the wall in a wide arc. She pictured the area to her left: the tarmac in front of the last hangar, an open space leading up to the parked planes, then the jet. To her right, far past the hangar she'd just exited, were the terminal buildings and . . . She didn't want to think about what else they might find crumpled on the ground before the hangar doors. Atropos would be on the left. She braced herself for action as more and more of the area on the left side of the opening came into view.

Fully expecting to find the assassin pressed like a malicious shadow against the hangar wall, she poked her head out of the alley, drew it back in fast. Clear. Hesitating only slightly, she glanced in the other direction. Despite their situation, some of the tension she'd been holding in her neck and shoulders drained away—Atropos had not deposited Allen's twisted body on the tarmac. She found hope in that.

She signaled for Stephen to join her. When he had, they stepped into the open together. They saw it at the same time—

The Cessna.

Beyond the parked planes, it was taxiing over to the runway.

"Oh no!" She was too shocked to say anything else.

Stephen said it for her: "Allen! Atropos is taking him!"

She ran—not directly for the plane, but straight out from the alley, parallel to the jet. She would cross the tarmac and meet up with it at the runway. Far off to her left now, it would have to come back in her direction to take off. She tried not to think, only to run.

Amazingly, Stephen kept pace, then actually pulled ahead. The jet's speed increased as it turned onto the runway. Neither of them saw the wide expanse of grass that separated the parking and maintenance tarmac from the runway. Stephen hit the edge of it first and went down in a tumbling mass of dirt and grass and groans. Julia hurdled him and pushed harder. She was on a direct trajectory to intercept the plane in about twenty seconds.

She squeezed her fist, feeling the gun. The jet picked up speed fast.

She wasn't going to make it. She leaped over a runway light and hit the pavement just ahead of the jet. In seconds it would pass.

Do something!

She leveled her pistol and sent a volley of lead into the cockpit windshield. Little plumes of glass dust marked her direct hits—

Then it streaked by: whining jet engines piercing her skull, gusts of turbulence slapping her face.

She ran after it . . . ten yards . . . twenty . . . No use.

"Nooooo!" she wailed. She watched it become airborne, grow smaller, and disappear.

sixty-five

Pain . . . blinding . . . screeching . . .

Unbearable.

Allen's right shoulder felt as though a knife had been plunged into it. Flames of agony fanned out from it in hot waves, causing perspiration to erupt from his pores, drenching his hair, stinging his eyes.

He slowly swung with the movement of the jet. Handcuffs ripped into the flesh of his wrists and lower hands as the weight of his body attempted to slip his hands through the cuffs, slung over a hook in the cabin's ceiling. Streaks of blood ran down his arms. He would have used his legs to support himself had they not been hog-tied and pulled backward by a rope that looped around his neck. Relaxing his legs, allowing them to droop, pulled the noose tight against his trachea. So, through the maddening pain, through the bouts of light-headedness, he held up his legs.

But nothing compared to the excruciating pain in his shoulder. Atropos had nearly wrenched his arm off when he'd seized him outside the hangar, yanking and twisting it high behind his head. Certainly, he had torn it from its socket. Delirious, Allen pictured an anatomical chart showing the head of the humerus pulled free of the glenoid cavity, the rotator cuff crushed, the coracohumeral ligament snapped. Meticulously detailed, those charts were coldly indifferent to the suffering they described. Dangling by his arms now was like probing a gunshot wound with a shovel.

The heavy punching bag Atropos had knocked from its hook in order to hang Allen like a side of beef rolled lazily across the carpeted floor toward him. He squeezed his eyes shut and gritted his teeth. He braced himself for the jolt of fresh pain that would ignite within his shoulder when the bag bumped his knees, which were, he guessed, about six inches off the floor. After a minute, he opened his eyes to see that the bag had reversed directions and was resting against what looked like a black body bag. Vero, Allen thought. He remembered hearing that the assassin had taken the corpse.