A thunderstorm cracked wildly with twenty minutes to go before the scheduled landing.
With the small girl bound and gagged in the trunk of the stolen car, Paolo sat off a farm road across a small poured-concrete bridge to the east of, and with a good view of, Washington Memorial Airport ’s landing strip. He’d rigged the car’s jack to make it look as if he were dealing with a flat. In fact, he could drive away, leaving the jack behind if needed. By car, he was less than five minutes from the tarmac and the sole hangar. On foot, they would have to cross a farmer’s field, ten to twelve minutes if the girl stayed on her feet; but this option would allow him to abandon the stolen car in the woods along the creek and thereby limit the evidence connecting the kidnapping to this airfield. He waited. Which would it be? He’d been told the pilot had his cell number.
He couldn’t get the image of the girl out of his mind: dripping wet head to toe, caught between the motel bed and the TV, a stunned look of surprise as he came through the door.
He’d waited for her to say something. And she, him.
Finally, he broke the silence. “Get out of those clothes and dry yourself. You’ll catch cold.”
She turned around and headed for the bathroom.
“I need you to do something for me,” he called after her.
She stopped just outside of the bathroom and turned to face him as if expecting more from him.
“It’s the duty of every prisoner to attempt escape,” he said. “Once,” he added, “and only once. I’d have done the same thing.”
“I want my mommy.”
This stung him but he said, “I’ll hurt you if you do that again. Hurt you bad. Count on it. But no one’s going to kill you, Penny. Least of all me. That’s a promise.”
The kid never flinched. “I want my mommy.”
“Get out of those clothes. The motel has a washer/dryer. You can wear one of my T-shirts.”
“I don’t want to.”
His eyeball had swollen and blistered to deformity. Yellowish fluid leaked in bursts down his cheek. For a moment his eye would actually feel slightly better; then the stinging would return, escalating to unbearable pain, and then it would squirt out its foul juice, and the cycle would repeat itself.
“I need you to do something icky,” he told her. “Something’s in my eye, and it has to come out.”
“I don’t like icky things.”
“Neither do I. But you’re going to have to do this.”
A few minutes later she had changed and opened the door for him. Her clothes lay in a heap by the front door-all but her socks, which she refused to take off. She wore his Oakland Raiders T-shirt like a dress.
He mopped up the bathroom floor with a towel and had her sit on the counter while he held his damaged eye open to the bright light.
He described the melted contact lens and pointed to it. “You’re going to have to pinch it, and pull it off,” he instructed. “I tried, but I couldn’t see what I was doing.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Yeah, you can.”
“No, I can’t.”
“You act like this, and you’re going back in the closet. You help me out, and there’s ice cream and cartoons.”
“What if I hurt you?”
“You’re going to hurt me, but it’s not your fault. Just pinch and pull, okay?”
“It’s disgusting.”
He tried to think of other kids he knew-kids who lived on the Romero compound. He said, “What if it was a kitty cat with something in her eye? Would you help the kitty?”
A reluctant “Yeah?”
“So forget it’s me. Pretend it’s a kitty cat, and you’re the only one that can help it, the only one who can save it. Can you do that?”
“Maybe…”
“We’re going to do this now. You and me. Ready?”
“I guess.”
“Okay.” He pried open his bad eye, gritted his teeth, and watched as the two little fingers converged, blocking what little sight he had.
A moment later he screamed. It stuck to her finger like stubborn mucus, and when she shook it off it landed on the bathroom floor, a little glob of yellowish goo.
“I got it!” she said. “I got it.” Without thinking what she was doing, she almost hugged him, then shrank back.
“You got it,” he said, swallowing a scream. His one good eye met hers, and for a moment, neither knew what to say.
The assigned hour of 2:37 P.M. growing near, Paolo checked his watch repeatedly, his good eye rotating from the distant airfield to the airspace above the field, to the rearview mirror, and back again. He’d covered the injured eye with an athletic headband worn askew on his head, a makeshift eye patch.
Arrangements had been made immediately after reporting he’d lost all sight out of the eye. He’d hoped Philippe might simply decide to send him a partner, possibly with some medical supplies, so that he could complete the original assignment. The jet coming either meant anxiety over the hostage situation or a loss of faith in him, so he looked ahead to the landing sick with nerves. His future was in the hands of others, the outcome a plane ride away, and Paolo felt desperately out of control.
The first car he saw could have been nothing. It pulled off the two-lane road on the north side of the airstrip and into a dirt turnout in front of a farmer’s maintenance shed or hay barn. When no one climbed out, Paolo kept his eye on it.
But it was a second vehicle, a dark four-door much like the first, that got his heart pounding. If he had it right, and he wasn’t sure he did, he’d seen this same car already. It had driven past the airstrip’s entrance. Now it had backtracked and entered. It drove up to the strip’s only hangar, where a man wearing a sport coat climbed out. A moment later the hangar’s electronic door opened slowly, and then this car pulled inside, meaning there was a second man behind the wheel.
Before the hangar door came fully shut, Paolo had his motor going. He rocked it off the jack and backed up across the small bridge. He took a rural road south, into farm country, having plotted this course as an escape route in advance. It was hilly and wooded out here, an easy place to lose a tail if necessary. He drove fast, but not too fast, his one good eye jumping from the road ahead of him to the road behind.
Cops or feds, it hardly mattered: Philippe had been clear about what he should do should anything go wrong.
Radio silence-no phones, no attempts to contact the compound. No e-mail. No faxes. He was on his own, his only assignment to get the little girl to the compound as soon as possible.
Crossing the stream for the second time, Paolo slowed and tossed his cell phone out the window into the water, ending any possibility of triangulating his location. It landed with a small splash.
He and the girl were on their own now. Bad eye or no bad eye, he had an assignment he intended to carry out. He felt strangely relieved. By the grace of God he’d been given a chance to redeem himself, to prove his worth.
He crested a hill, already planning how to replace the stolen car in case it had been reported. He tried not to think of the implications of what he’d just witnessed at the airstrip, how close he had come to being caught.
Tried not to think of what he’d do if Philippe ordered him to kill the little girl.