Chapter 1

He was a Sunday flyer, it was true, but he had been licensed for more than fifteen years and was proud of his skills. He liked being able to say to their friends, “Why don’t you come with us to Florida this weekend? Barbara and I are flying down in our private jet. I’m the pilot.”

The airport at Sandhurst, Pennsylvania wasn’t too far from the house—about twenty minutes. Today, he was on his way for a short hop only—over to Atlantic City. He wasn’t going gambling, no. He was an attorney; this was business, a rather large real estate closing for a client.

He approached the gate leading to the field and the guard recognized him and waved him through. Security was supposed to check IDs, of course, but nothing ever happened at Sandhurst, and besides, he tipped the guards a couple of hundred each at Christmas, so they ought to recognize him.

He walked over to the hanger where he had a talk with the mechanic who looked after his Beechcraft Starship. The little beauty was tuned up and ready to go.

The owner patted his craft before he boarded her. Flying was a thrill for him, each and every time, even still. He had it as good as the president of the United States, able to jet wherever he wanted, whenever he cared to. Only he got to fly the plane, which was one better.

He strapped in, ran through the checklist, and taxied off down the runway, as he chatted cheerfully with Dave in the tower. Up, up, and away, we gonna fly all day. He zoomed aloft, headed for the clouds, and what a perfect day for the flight. Once again, he was knock, knock, knocking on heaven’s door.

Behind, in the cabin, he heard a noise and was gripped by a sudden anxious concern. Was something loose in there, rattling around? He listened. Silence. He relaxed. But there, he heard it again, closer now.

Suddenly, the door to his private little paradise swung open. He turned around, astonished, and stared straight into the eyes of a male interloper. “Who are you?” he gasped. But still, he wasn’t as afraid as he might have been, since the well-dressed stranger gave him a friendly smile and nod. There must be a mistake.

The intruder seemed about to explain and approached a little closer to the pilot so that he could be better heard. He bent his body down to the pilot’s and reached out to touch the jet craft’s owner gently on the thigh.

There was a sting and the attorney-flyer saw, as if from a distance, that he had been stung with a syringe.

The stranger still smiled as the flyer passed out. He eased the inert body from the pilot’s seat onto the floor and settled himself into the comfortable brown leather chair. He ascertained that everything on the control panel read just as it should, then checked out the flight plan. No problem. He flew on. The day was indeed a beautiful one.

He glanced down at his captive, not expecting much in the way of movement. There was none. Less than half an hour later, as they approached the Atlantic City Airport, the skyjacker set the plane to autopilot, on a course that passed well out over the ocean.

He dragged the body of the flyer from the cockpit and into the cabin, where he let the attorney rest a moment. The door was tightly closed, and the air pirate struggled for a second in opening it.

The thief braced himself against the side of the craft as the wind whipped in. He then took hold of the pilot’s form and inch-by-inch maneuvered the airplane’s owner through the door, and finally, completely over the threshold.

The body tumbled into the wild blue yonder, plummeting, but not as quickly as the inexperienced might expect. Wind currents tossed the man up as well as down as he fell, despite his solid weight.

Still living, yes, but not for long. The intruder worked at the door again, sealing it closed, then went back to the controls of the plane to bring it down for a landing in Atlantic City—just about right on schedule.

After letting the phone shrill three long rings, Helen Robbins jumped up to get it before the answering machine would. She didn’t have to, obviously, and actually it wasn’t even her phone—the number was Eric’s—but she never was able to resist picking up a demanding telephone.

“Hello,” she mumbled, her mouth still full of the roast beef and Swiss cheese sandwich on which she chewed.

“Eric Ryder, please,” requested a commanding male voice. Well, certainly the caller would ask for Eric. This was, after all, his phone, and not her place to answer it at all.

“He isn’t here,” she told the man. “I’m his associate. Maybe I can help you.” She wasn’t Eric’s associate, in all honesty, although she did associate with him as his fiancé and newly installed roommate, but, anyway, she was curious to see what the caller wanted.

“Mr. Ryder is an investigator?” the voice at the other end asked hesitantly.

“We’re security consultants and investigators,” Helen corrected. Or at least that was how Eric billed himself nowadays. And she had worked in security and sort of in investigations herself. In fact, she probably had every bit the background Eric did—maybe more.

“I have a problem,” stated the man.

“Of course,” she agreed. Who didn’t? Her problem right this minute was that she didn’t have a job and wanted one. That was one of her problems, anyway. The other matter she had on her mind…well…

“Let me start over. I’m Henry Viscotti, executive director of the Private Plane Pilots Association.”

Helen’s ears pricked up. “Oh, Henry Viscotti. I know who you are,” she blurted out. “I’m a member of the association. I flew with the Air Force. Now I fly when I can. When I can afford it, that is. I need to get those hours in. I was up out at Stewart Field, just last Sunday. What can I do for you?” She relaxed. Whatever Viscotti’s glitch was, she could handle it. The matter was in her ballpark. She could do the job.

Her effort to pick up the investigation for herself didn’t mean she was stealing work from Eric, she decided. He was off on an assignment and wouldn’t be back for a couple of days, at least. By then, she’d have this situation all cleared up. Taking the job really wasn’t a whole big deal. She and Eric were going to be married, after all. And he was hardly about to support her himself. She needed to earn a living, too.

“Do you want to discuss the investigation over the phone?” she asked. “Wouldn’t it be better for us to meet in person?”

“I’m flying up to Boston in the morning,” he responded. “But I can stop by at La Guardia on my way. Can you meet me there?” She assured him she could, and he told her where she would find him.

There, she had a job. Getting work never was that difficult for her, she had to admit. She took up the second half of her roast beef and cheese sandwich—just the sort of thing that Eric would make fun of her for eating. He liked to eat, but he regarded food, like everything else, with some suspicion. He knew that some evil was lurking in a sandwich like this, trying to do him in—if not now, then somewhere down the line.

She wondered again if she was doing the right thing. Oh, not about the job for Viscotti, but about marrying Eric. Men were so strange, so unpredictable, really, and Eric was one of the more peculiar of the species. He could be difficult, truculent, stubborn, opinionated. But that wasn’t the problem. She could be that way, too. The question was—did she really know him well enough? She had seen a policewoman on television the other day talking about the abusive male. You never actually knew which man was going to turn out to be a wife beater, maybe even wife killer, the detective claimed.

Many of these pathological types start the relationship with the most perfect of courtships. The woman never could be sure.

That was to say, in most cases, you couldn’t tell what kind of a person a man really was, until you were in too deep to bail.

If Eric was going to turn out to be a bastard with women, Helen would like to know that toot sweet. He had cheated on her once already—a very bad sign. But he had cheated on her with his ex-wife Michelle, which made Helen feel the offense was almost pardonable. Old habits die hard. Then too, he had been guiltily penitent. And they hadn’t been engaged yet when that had happened.

She debated the matter, drank a Radegrst—a Czechoslovakian beer—and lay on the sofa reading the June issue of Grenade, the one periodical to which her beloved faithfully subscribed. “Win a Ruger Mini-14,” the cover seductively coaxed. Did Eric, like the publisher of the magazine, believe that a certain senator had been shameful in promoting a Russian military recruitment video and calling the U.S. military “emasculating”? She hoped so. She had no politics, but a guy who’d never served had no business supporting the Russian military above their own.

The phone rang. This time, the sound was from her own phone, and she picked it up immediately. The caller was Eric, who sounded as if he were using a tin can set to call in on. “Is this a bad…ime? What time is it there…way?”

The big hand was on four in the afternoon, she told him. The time must be quite late in Moscow. No, she wasn’t doing anything, wasn’t up to anything at all. He wasn’t coming right back home, was he? “Don’t you…iss me…ney?”

“Fervently,” Helen answered and sent kissing noises into the telephone, making him laugh. Naturally, he thought she was being sarcastic. She guessed she was trying to be. Joking around was better than admitting that she really did miss him, liked him to be nearby for her to cozy up to. No, she wasn’t about to tell him anything like that.

In the morning, she borrowed his brand-new Honda to drive to the airport. Well, he had to expect that she would want some way to tool around since she was stuck up here in Port Chester, away from the city. She wasn’t the best driver in the world, however. Strange maybe for a pilot, but her mind wandered sometimes on the road. Today, she tried to pay better attention. He would kill her if she wrecked the car.

Or would he? She didn’t know. That was part of it. She hadn’t even known him a whole year.

He wouldn’t yell, she decided, but he would stare at her for a while, then go around feeling low. Anyway, she’d feel terrible if she got even a small dent on his lovely new car, and, worse, she’d have to pay to get it fixed.

Viscotti met her near where the small planes took off and landed, by the gate, since she didn’t have proper ID to get onto the field on her own. He led her into the lounge where the pilots sometimes hung out between their flights. The room longed for a refurbishing or at least to have its floor swept and sofa pillows plumped. The place had seen better days. But the space was only for the pilots, who generally weren’t the same individuals as the owners. If the lounge had been for the folks with the bucks, the atmosphere might have been a different story.

They were the only two in there today, and Viscotti offered to buy her a coffee from the machine. Helen frowned, but she accepted. She had been in too big a rush this morning before she’d left the house to have a cup. She needed the fix.

Viscotti was sort of a handsome older guy, the kind Helen sometimes felt curious about. The older men could be mellow and romantic, in a way that younger guys hadn’t thought of yet, but they could be such assholes, too. The worst of them were hyper-inflated male chauvinists, always astonished when a woman put them down, or challenged their authority. At least the younger guys weren’t surprised when something like that happened. The young guys had learned to, perhaps only on the surface, be defensive about their inevitable assumption of superiority.

“You’re a lovely young woman, Helen,” Viscotti began. The comment was probably her fault, for thinking him good looking.

She blinked and waited for him to go on. When he didn’t, she seized the conversation. “I’m licensed as a private investigator in New York State.” She actually was, although she had never done more than search for people who had skipped out on their debts.

He smiled at her, so she continued. “I served in the Air Force for ten years and I’m a licensed flight instructor—multi-engine.” She stopped. She could go on and list her license to carry a concealed weapon and so on, but she was beginning to feel somewhat silly.

Anyway, he was still smiling at her. “You said you had a problem,” she accused abruptly.

Viscotti immediately stopped smiling. “I’m telling you this in the strictest confidence, because this mustn’t leak out, certainly not to the press. The FAA inspector general has a full team that has already started the groundwork on this.” He paused, waiting for Helen to react.

He was so somber that she wanted to say something silly, like “Mum’s the word,” but instead she nodded with a solemnity exactly equal to his own.

“Several small planes have been hijacked,” Viscotti pronounced dramatically. “That is, or so we think. No actual hijackings have been reported, but somehow or other the planes seem to have disappeared. The pilots, and in one case, a passenger, have never been heard from again. Well, except for the two bodies that have shown up in the last few days.”

Helen grunted. “Dreadful,” she observed. “Security isn’t that good at most of the fields, especially the small ones,” she piously added. “Despite the FAA regulations.”

“No,” Viscotti agreed. “We see a lot of slackness out there.” He gazed off in the direction of the heartland and waved a hand toward those little airfields, then returned his glance to her.

“I’ll need more details, of course,” she continued. “Names, times, dates, flight plans, and so on.” This would be somewhat different from skip tracing, she realized, which was tracing the willful, and still living, “skipper.”

She wondered how much Eric had gotten paid for his last investigation. Had he told her? He never seemed to discuss actual sums he had in hand, only money that he’d like to make. He wasn’t cheap however, she was glad to say, although he did sometimes seem to be a little short for the moment.

“The board insists that we hire our own investigator,” Viscotti went on. “This matter is a primary concern to our membership and they’re going to be angry that the information wasn’t released to them at once. But of course, at this point, the FAA inspector general doesn’t want to go public with the news. She thinks any leaked information will make the investigation that much harder. From the association’s point of view, on the other hand, we don’t want it to seem as if we did nothing but wait—once this does become a matter of public record, later on. That’s why we need our own investigation.”

“Are you hiring me?” asked Helen casually, as if her heart weren’t already pounding with the excitement of the chase, and the prospect of earning a few dollars.

“Maybe.” Viscotti smiled appealingly again. “Don’t get me wrong, but where is Eric Ryder? He’s the one who was recommended to me—by an ATF agent, as a matter of fact.”

“Eric Ryder is in Moscow,” Helen responded unhelpfully. “Anyway, he’s not a flyer. I am. I know my way around an airfield and I’m the one who can do the job.” She thought a minute. “I can start right away. If you give me all the information you have. And an airplane.”

How much she was paid didn’t even matter, she realized, if she was given a plane to fly. She needed to fly a certain number of hours a year to retain her active status. And if there was anything that wasn’t cheap, that was fuel—especially jet fuel.

Most of the time she got by on her charm and old connections with people—guys mostly—who flew for some corporation or other and who would let her take over for a trip or two. But times were tough in a lot of ways, and the friends from her Air Force years had fewer jobs to share out with her—even when she did the run for the flying time and let them keep the total payment.

“You can fly me to Boston,” suggested Viscotti. “We’ll talk about it. I have business there. Then either you can fly me back to New York and we’ll say good-bye, or you’ll fly me down to Washington and then you can have the CitationJet.”

CitationJet! “Whose plane is it?” Helen asked, somewhat in awe of his casual disposition of a rather pricey piece of equipment.

“The plane is yours, in part,” answered Viscotti. He grinned. “The jet belongs to the association.” His grin widened. “But membership dues didn’t pay for that baby. It was kind of a gift from Cessna. A write-off for them and a good piece of advertising.”

“Then what will you fly?” asked Helen, as if this would leave him to wander the countryside on foot.

“I have a Piper Chieftain of my very own.” Viscotti laughed proudly.

They boarded the aircraft without further delay, and he gave her the nickel tour, presuming she was familiar with the plane’s specifications. She plopped into the pilot’s seat. The cushioning had a nice and homey feel, as if someone had been doing a lot of dancing in and out of airfields in this machine.

Viscotti handed her his pilot’s book, and she began running down the checklist, preparing for takeoff. She was glad she had just flown on Sunday. Truth be told, you could get a bit rusty, quickly. That’s why the FAA was right in insisting that a pilot fly a certain number of hours every year.

Viscotti regarded Helen with amusement as she went about her business, but he let her alone to do all the work involved in getting them into the air and headed for Boston.

Maybe she would stop by and see her parents when she was there, if she had the time. No, never mind. Her mother would want to nag her about details of the wedding. The wedding. The date was set for August 6th, nearly a year to the day since she had met Eric. Helen’s eyes misted over sentimentally, and she was insensible for a moment of Viscotti’s fingers pressing on her knee.

“Don’t mess with the pilot,” she advised him snappishly. He took his hand off, but not immediately. First, he stroked her flesh once gently, to let her know what she was missing by being so dismissive. She wasn’t worried that she was getting into anything she couldn’t handle, however. Which brought to mind the fact that she had her 9mm Beretta right here in her purse. That was interesting. Talk about careless airfield security. And at a big field like La Guardia, too. Smuggling a weapon on board wasn’t too difficult. Was that how the skyjacker or skyjackers had accomplished their mission?

Later, in Washington, he let her photocopy the relevant files at the association’s offices, which were down the road, not too far from National. “We’ll let you start out—on a trial basis, let’s make it,” said Viscotti. “I’ll need reports at least a couple of times a week. You can bill us for expenses, but I’ll review the bills pretty carefully, so don’t go overboard. You can take my card for fuel, but you’ll have to pay the airport fees up front on your own. I’ll need a tight accounting.”

“Yes, sir. Captain, sir.” She laughed.

Viscotti looked at her admiringly. “You ought to smile more often,” he remarked. He looked into her eyes. “There’s no need for you to fly right back to New York, is there? I’d like you to stay over, at least for dinner.”

The brightness remained stretched across her face. “I’ve got to dash,” she told him. “Lots of work to do.” She waved the photocopies in front of him, then flashed him a smile to soften the rebuff. “Thanks for the plane.” He’d find that in her report, too. He hadn’t even looked at her identification before handing everything over to her, including his organization’s private jet. Jiminy!

By the time she landed back at La Guardia, she was bushed. A lot had gone on. Her mind was racing. She hadn’t expected everything to move quite this quickly.

She secured the plane as best she could, but she agreed with Eric’s usual assessment that private planes should all have a security sensor system that could be monitored by the pilot from wherever she was. That would prevent anyone’s tampering with the plane or stowing aboard undetected.

She walked away from the jet but paused to look back. That was her brand-new baby. Not really hers, but just as good as.

She decided to drive into the city, where she had kept her apartment in case she and Eric broke up and didn’t get married, after all. Driving to Manhattan was closer than driving all the way back up to Port Chester. She’d put Eric’s car into a garage, like the considerate girlfriend that she was.

Eric’s car. Where the hell was it? Oh, my God! The Honda was gone! She panicked and ran to the Port Authority police officer posted at the gate.

The officer had heard that a car had been towed away there earlier in the day, he told her. Maybe that was the one she was talking about. He shrugged.

Helen looked toward where the CitationJet sat on the tarmac. She could make out only the plane’s outline in the approaching twilight.

She had exchanged one means of transport for another. Even Eric would understand that, really, she had gotten the better of the deal.