“Possibly.” Dee grinned as she waved with her free right hand.
“Hallelujah! Get me out of these things!”
Dee unbuckled the strap from her other arm, then released Jessie from her restraints. Jessie jumped to her feet and went to the front left aircraft boarding door. She moved the large lever from left to right.
The door didn’t move.
“See?” Dee said. “I think it needs power.”
“No. These doors use compressed gases. A bottle of nitrogen makes it work.”
Dee looked at her curiously. “How do you know so much about this?”
Jessie knelt and examined the floor panels. “I told you, they used Airbus equipment in Afghanistan. For a while, I worked at the base machine shop when I was serving there.” She pried loose a floor panel in front of the door. “This one isn’t bolted down. The crew probably just left it that way after they mothballed this plane.”
Jessie frowned as she looked down into the floor compartment.
“What do you see?” Dee asked.
“Not much that makes any sense to me…But I do see two loose hose ends. And some other loose parts rolling around in there. It looks like this plane was at least partially stripped. It’s a mess. Nothing but—” She inhaled sharply. “Wait!”
“What is it?”
Jessie pulled out a steel canister with a yellow tab on top. She rested it on the floor. “This may be the nitrogen.” She pulled out the hose ends. One of them had a yellow valve screw; one was red. Jessie attached the yellow hose to the canister screw top.
A mild hissing sound came from the door for a few seconds, then silence.
They both stared at the canister for a moment.
“That’s it?” Dee asked blankly.
“No idea. I didn’t say I was an actual mechanic. I just saw other people working on these things.” Jessie stood. “Okay, back up. I’m going to arm this door and pull the lever.”
“What will that do?”
“Assuming this works, the door will open by itself. If there’s still a slide in here, it may deploy. If there isn’t, we may have to jump, tuck, and roll. Got it?”
“That’s a lot of ifs.”
“It’s all we’ve got. It’s going to make some noise, so we’ll have to get out the second we can.”
Jessie opened a cover and pulled down the switch to arm the door. She turned back to Dee. “Ready?”
“Do it.”
Jessie pulled down the door lever, and then…
Nothing.
“Shit,” Jessie muttered.
A moment later, the hissing sound returned.
“What’s happening?” Dee asked.
The door slid open!
With a deafening whoosh, the escape slide instantly inflated and shot into the darkness.
“Now!”
Dee jumped onto the slide and crossed her arms in front of her. Jessie was a second behind.
They tumbled down the slide and landed in a heap on the desert floor!
* * *
Kendra’s Toyota
“Noah Calderon?” Lynch gave a low whistle of disbelief. “Are you sure?”
Kendra nodded. “Pretty damn sure. It became clear when I heard the audio reconstruction your Swiss technical group did. Not even then until I went over and over it and finally I realized what I was hearing.”
“You recognized her voice?”
“No, I’m sure I’ve never heard it before. But I recognized the pattern of her voice, the suppressed consonants, the slightly elongated vowels, trace of a singsong lilt at the beginning of the sentences…It’s the pattern of someone from the northeast United States who has also spent several years in extreme northern England.”
“As opposed to moderately northern England?”
“Totally different sound.”
“You’re not joking.”
“No, it’s a sound I recognized in another voice lately. Someone who was born in Connecticut but spent several years attending a private school in Newcastle upon Tyne in northern England.”
“Noah Calderon.”
She nodded. “It’s really too close to be a coincidence.” She paused. “And there were other things…Remember how Jessie said that Noah had been taken care of by servants all his life wherever he was sent?”
“So?”
“If he was in partnership with this woman, they must have been very close, and they would have had to establish a relationship.” She paused. “And I know where they established that relationship. It was all on that call we listened to just now. Noah and his parents are American. So is this woman. Noah has traveled on the Continent; so has this woman. Possibly with him.” She went on. “But one place I’m certain she was with him was near his school in England. He attended that private school for a few years as a youngster, and I can tell by intonations in her dialect that she spent at least that amount of time there, too. I doubt if she was a teacher, though she sounds well educated. So that leaves a guardian of some sort who was paid to watch over wild Noah and keep an eye on him while he was at school.” She was frowning as she tried to put it together. “Of course, it’s all guesswork. She might be a relative, but I believe she was a servant.”
“You’re certain of all this?”
“I can’t be certain. Not yet. How could I be? But I’d bet it was him. Their nuances, intonations, phrasing, are like mirrors. They can probably finish each other’s sentences. They’ve been together a long time.” She paused before adding grimly, “Besides, there’s something else that cinches it.”
“What?”
“Pull up the pictures of Dorset’s body on your phone.”
Lynch pulled up the photos and swiped his finger across the screen. “Any one in particular?”
“A good shot of his face.”
After a few more swipes, Lynch held up his phone. “Got it.”
“Look at his upper cheeks. See a faint bruising there?”
He increased the image size. “Very faint.”
“It’s the same mark left by the lower edge of Noah’s stupid night-vision goggles last night. I just realized it when I started to think of all this in terms of him. He said there’s only a few of those in existence. He must have loaned them to his men who were charged with finding and plucking Jessie from the water.” She glanced quickly at his face. “If I’d had any doubts before about his involvement, it ended when I thought about that bruise. Maybe I’d accept the possibility of one coincidence linking him to the crime, but not two.”
Lynch sat in silence for a moment. “It all makes sense. When you make the jump to Calderon, there’s even a reason for his demand for that twenty-five-million-dollar ransom.”
She nodded. “Access. It immediately made him part of our team. He was there for most of the key moments of our investigation. Both money drops, but also the planning and coordination that went into them. It gave him an inside line on what we were doing and thinking.”
He was frowning. “The tracking chips on the money bands…”
“I don’t care about that right now,” she said impatiently. “We can figure it out later. Who knows what a paranoid nutcase like Noah would be thinking? All that matters is that we know he’s the one who took Dee and Jessie and that we have to go after him.”