Deep black by Stephen Coonts & Jim DeFelice

Author:Stephen Coonts & Jim DeFelice [Stephen Coonts & Jim DeFelice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction:Thriller
ISBN: 9780752859019
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2004-06-03T07:00:00+00:00

30

The third site Dean and Lia checked was a civilian airport. Several new Fokkers sat amid a smattering of older Russian types in neat rows beyond the terminal building. When they found the Helix they saw it had been plumbed for crop dusting. Lia took several photos of it with a digital camera about the size of a cigarette lighter. Back in the truck, using her handheld computer she compared it to pictures of the Helix that had inspected the crash site. They didn’t seem to be a match, though the program she used on the handheld would only say the results were inconclusive.

By now it was early evening. A Western-style motel sat near the airport. They went there and took two rooms, then had dinner in what amounted to a cafeteria on the basement level. Lia had to go outside to get the phone to work. Dean sat at the table sipping a vodka, the first alcohol he’d had since getting the assignment. He rolled the liquor around his tongue, letting the sting loosen his sinuses.

The mission Hadash had sent him to do was over. The plane was obviously destroyed, and sooner or later the material they’d loaded into the Hind would be returned to the States for analysis to prove it.

That was all he was here for. Hadash had said something along the lines of “you’ll just be a tourist.”

Or a baby-sitter. They needed one.

Not really. Lia was a bit much, and Tommy Karr had rubbed him the wrong way, a little too easygoing for his own good, Dean thought—but they were competent in their own way, comfortable with technology in a way Dean would never be.

Not that he was a Luddite, for christsakes. What the hell was a stinking Luddite anyway? Some sort of nineteenth-century English revolutionary worried about losing his job to a machine. Which Dean definitely wasn’t.

Dean watched as two young men came into the room with overloaded trays of food. They were loud, obviously drunk; he couldn’t understand what they were saying, but it was obvious they were pretty full of themselves. Both wore track pants and Nike basketball shoes; their shirts were opened several buttons down and they had rows of gold chains around their necks.

“Credit card thieves,” Lia said, sliding in across from him. “They broker numbers.”

“How do you know?”

“You figure things out after a while. Karr’ll meet us in the hotel. Let’s go get some sleep.”

Upstairs, he had started to go to the room across the hall when she opened her door. She grabbed the sleeve of his sweater.

“Where are you going?”

“Get some z’s.”

“We stay together. Don’t look at me like that—one of us sleeps, the other stands guard. We sweep the room first.” She took her handheld out and slid a small silver bar into an expansion slot at the top. “Talk,” she told him.

“About what?”

“Your sex life. Just talk.”

Dean began reciting the alphabet. Lia held her computer in two hands and swept up and down the walls, looking a little like a supplicant worshipping the god of hideous wallpaper.

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