“Sir, please step back. Let them do their work.” One of the cops in uniform starts to push me back.

I can see the ragged edge of a weak pulse as it blips across the screen, like a car on a cold morning trying to start.

“Is he going to make it?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” said the paramedic. “Internal bleeding, sucking chest wound. Got his heart going but we gotta get him to the ER now. Let’s move. Check that belt across his chest. Make sure it’s tight. Who put it on?”

“I did,” said the female nurse. “With help from the man standing behind you.”

“You guys did a good job,” he says.

Four of the firemen lift the body board with Herman on it as one of the paramedics holds the bag with the IV in the air so that gravity can continue to feed fluid into Herman’s body. “Keep pressure on that wound.”

“Sir!” One of the uniformed cops is standing behind me. “Did you see what happened? The nurse over here says you were the first one on the scene.”

“He was already down when I got here,” I tell him. “But I know who did it.”

“Who?”

“A man named Liquida,” I tell him. “A Mexican contract killer who works with the drug cartels.”

“Can you spell the name for me?” he says.

“It’s not his real name. It’s what he goes by, an alias,” I tell him. I spell it for him.

“How do you know this man did it?”

“Because Herman told me.”

“So you knew the victim?” he says.

“He works for me. Scratch that,” I tell him. “Herman Diggs is my friend.”

“I’m going to need a detailed statement from you, and some identification,” says the cop.

“I don’t have time right now,” I tell him.

“You’re gonna have to make time,” he says.

I try to tell him about Thorn, the fact that Herman was following him, that he apparently escaped from the garage, about the jet down in Puerto Rico. And that unless I’m mistaken, something major is about to happen here in Washington. “There is no time to talk,” I tell him. “We need to move and move quickly to find Thorn.”

The cop looks at me like I’m crazy. He tells me to calm down, to give him my name and address, or perhaps better yet, we should go downtown where they can get a more detailed statement. He asks for my driver’s license, some ID.

There is no time for this. Thorn is on the loose. So is Liquida, and Joselyn is back in the room, alone.

I tell the cop to give me a minute, that I have to make a phone call and to get a signal I’m going to have to go over by the door.

He says fine, tells me not to leave, and turns his back for a moment.

I walk over toward the kiosk at the entrance and take out my cell phone. It is spotted with blood and scratched where I tossed it on the concrete. I call Joselyn’s cell number to tell her what’s happened. The call goes directly through to her voice mail. Either her phone is turned off, or it’s busy, or else…

FORTY-SIX

Two hours after the fiery wreckage splashed into the Atlantic, and eleven hundred miles to the northwest, the phantom FedEx 727 passed over the outer continental shelf just a few miles north of Cape Hatteras.

Ten minutes later Ahmed and Masud saw the coastline as it passed beneath them somewhere near Virginia Beach. They could see the mouth of the Chesapeake yawning directly in front of them.

Suddenly the onboard VHF radio came to life. “Squawk 1423, this is Potomac air traffic control. Please identify yourself.”

“Take over.” Ahmed turned over the flight controls to Masud, reached over, and flipped the switch on the radio. “Potomac, this is FedEx flight 9303, on route from Rafael Hernández Airport in Puerto Rico bound for Newark Liberty Airport. We’re showing a serious hydraulic problem, requesting permission to land at Reagan National.”

“Flight 9303, this is Potomac air control, say again? Are you reporting an in-flight emergency?”

“Affirmative,” said Ahmed. “We have shut down starboard engine overheating and show loss of hydraulic controls. Requesting permission to land at Reagan National.”

Ahmed looked at Masud, who glanced over at him.

“Flight 9303, this is Potomac. Descend to eighteen thousand feet and await further instructions.”

Ahmed reached over and pushed the throttle controls all the way forward. He goosed their speed to just over six hundred miles an hour and told Masud to maintain their present heading and altitude. They were on a beeline flying directly toward downtown Washington, D.C.

Ahmed knew that air traffic control would never clear them to land at Reagan National Airport. The tactic now was to stall for time. The plane was nothing more than an aerial platform for the fuel-air thermobaric bomb tucked away in the ramp of the airstairs in the rear. In order to deliver it to the target, speed and elevation were everything.

Ahmed did some quick calculations in his head. They were roughly a hundred and twenty miles out; at six hundred miles an hour, ten miles a minute, they only had to stall for twelve minutes to reach the target, and not even that if they could maintain altitude. At their current altitude with its front-end canard controls and big rear fins, the bomb had a glide range of almost thirteen miles.

“Potomac air control to flight 9303, you are instructed to descend to eighteen thousand feet, do you read?”

“Potomac, this is flight 9303. We are having problems with flight surfaces due to hydraulic failure. Trying to descend at this time,” said Ahmed.

“This is Potomac air control. How serious is the emergency?”

Ahmed looked at Masud, shrugged his shoulders, and smiled.

“Potomac, we’re not sure at this time. We are having some difficulty with flight controls.”

He muted the radio for a second. “Descend. We’ll give them two thousand feet and then report more problems,” he told Masud.

It was as if the bottom fell out of the plane. They dropped quickly down to twenty-three thousand feet.

“This is Potomac air control. One moment.”

The air defensive zone around Washington had been beefed up and expanded following the attacks on 9/11. The no-fly zone had been extended out to a radius of between fifteen to seventeen statute miles from the Capitol and the White House. But politicians had already compromised the system, and the military had tipped their hand concerning their willingness to use dire tactics in the event of aircraft violating the zone.

At one point the governor of Kentucky had accidentally wandered into the defensive zone in a private plane, which had caused the entire Capitol to be evacuated.

It was the problem with Washington. Wherever there were people of wealth and power, you could expect that rules would be broken. It was one thing to shoot down a commercial jetliner with a few hundred tax-paying drones on board, all strapped into their seats so they couldn’t even pee for the last hour of the flight. It was another to fire on a jet-powered ego container taking members of Congress to some lobbyist-paid junket. And around Washington, odds were that if you shot down a plane, there was more than a fair chance it might have somebody important on board.

Ahmed was banking on all of this, vacillations, indecision, and delay just to get the nose of the 727 under the tent. All he needed was just a few miles inside the no-fly zone, and at ten miles a minute that wouldn’t take long.

“Flight 9303, this is Potomac control. You’re being diverted to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Dover tower has been advised of the emergency. They have facilities and a long enough runway to allow a landing if your brakes fail.”

Masud gave Ahmed a worried look.

“Potomac control, this is flight 9303. We may not be able to make Dover. We’re having problems with the rudder controls, a lot of vibration.”

“This is Potomac control, are you sure your starboard engine is shut down? Radar control shows your current speed at approximately 520 knots.”