Chapter 18

“I don’t think I can do this,” Dennis said, panicking as Helen tried to pull him through the door of the Bell helicopter poised on the roof of the downtown Roanoke federal building. “I’ll drive and meet you there.”

Helen tugged. He pulled back. She released him and he nearly fell. This time he got in without prompting. The others boarded behind him and the copter lifted up. “I love this,” Helen commented, looking out at the night-lit countryside and what she could see of the natural landscape looming below. “There’s something about a helicopter ride.” Dennis had his eyes closed. She took his hand. “That Avilla’s a card. He certainly had a good head-start on us.”

“Does he have plutonium in that box, do you think?” shouted Morgan against the noise of the overhead whirling.

“Yes!” Helen and Garcia answered in unison.

“Aren’t we there yet?” pleaded Dennis, who was trying to control his fear by opening his diaphragm with hearty gulps of air.

“You ought to get this thing of yours looked into,” suggested Carlis. “It could be like a phobia. Sometimes, you know, you might have to take a helicopter. After all, you do work for the FAA.”

Lights blazed everywhere as they made their approach. Theirs was the only craft taking off or landing, but Helen could see airport personnel and emergency services workers bustling about in an absolute frenzy. Outside the perimeter, she spotted a beehive of television reporters held in check by cops in uniform.

A Department of Energy helicopter was parked near where the ATF/FAA/Helen Robbins’ contingent touched down and a few brisk-looking technicians were unloading Geiger counters and other gear. Two were already suited up in white, radiation-safe space suits, a freakishly unsettling sight.

“Hey, maybe we should borrow some of those outfits,” Carlis said. He smiled as if being witty, but he appeared discomforted by the sight of men preparing to deal with nuclear materials.

“Oh, thank God, we’re here,” said Dennis. “A plutonium bath will be a welcome relief after this ride.” He staggered out onto the runway and Helen had to chase after, pulling his head down so he wouldn’t get sucked into the maelstrom created by the still flapping blades.

Police officers down the tarmac a way checked the group’s identifications, making sure that they were cleared for inside the crisis zone. Vehicles displaying flashing red lights crowded near an airliner poised on the runway with its door flung open. Technicians lounged around a set of stairs nearby at the ready.

A local cop with a bullhorn stood on the edge of the crowd and Helen strode up to him. “I’ll talk to the skyjacker,” she declared snatching the thing. “He knows me.” She forgot for the moment that she had killed his nephew and had precipitated his escape from justice by advising him to give himself up.

“Robert,” she called out over the mechanical aide. “It’s Helen. Let the passengers go and you can take the plane wherever you want.”

The cop hastily pulled the bullhorn away from her. “Lady, I’m the negotiator. You aren’t authorized to make any deals for us.”

Miffed, she walked closer toward the plane, until another officer stopped her. She turned around and located her friend Dennis in the crowd of concerned officials. “I’m going to offer to fly the plane with him,” she told Dennis. “It’s the only way to go. If he’ll give up the passengers, I’ll get on. The mathematics are in our favor, don’t you think?” She saw that Garcia was listening with an expression of disagreement on his face. “I’m not trying to be a hero,” she added. “I just think that this will work.”

“I’ll go with you,” decided Dennis. “I’ve given myself up for dead any number of times this week. I suppose once more can’t hurt.”

“No.” She shook her head. “There’s no reason for that.” She smiled a little sadly. “I should have let you stay in Roanoke to drive your car back to D.C. I don’t know how you’re going to get it now.”

“He can come back with me on the helicopter when this thing is over,” offered Morgan, who had come up behind them. Dennis didn’t look any too pleased at the prospect.

“Can someone make that cop give me the bullhorn again?” Helen asked.

Avilla agreed to let all but thirty of the passengers go if Helen would come on board. He began to let people off the plane immediately, until a couple of hundred upset vacationers had fled down the steps. The emergency workers who greeted them seemed frustrated by the victims’ apparent total health and wellbeing.

Something was strange about the mix of passengers flooding out, however. Helen had her eyes open for the children, but none emerged—no crying babies, no subdued and anxious eight-year-olds, no awkwardly frightened teens.

No mothers and no children, only the type of hostage usually kept on board in a hijacking—the young, fit males—filed off, their great relief in high evidence.

That would be just like Avilla. He was the sort of bastard who would keep on board those even the most hardened terrorists allowed off first. She hoped she was simply imagining that this was the way things were.

Helen took the Beretta out of her purse and handed it to Dennis. “A little something to remember me by,” she said. “Take the extra clip, too. But if I do get out of this alive, I want my gun back. I’ll buy you another memento in its place.”

Dennis reacted as if suddenly struck by the danger Helen was walking into. He grabbed her and gave her a little hug. “You’ll be back,” he told her in a tone that meant he thought she wouldn’t be.

Garcia was at her elbow. “I’m coming with you.” He handed his gun to Carlis and spoke to him briefly in Spanish.

“We’ll hug when you get back,” Carlis said, punching Garcia on the arm. “Semper fi, mi amigo, semper fi.”

Helen marched forward and Garcia trotted to catch up to her. She glanced around at him and nodded, then came up to the flight of stairs, which had been pushed in place in front of the 747 entry. A few passengers were still coming out, then Avilla appeared in the doorway. “We didn’t need those people with us anyway,” he shouted down to Helen and Garcia.

She clearly noted a manic light in his eye. At first, she thought this condition was caused by a drug of some type, then she realized that mania was a primary part of his pathology. The hyper-excitement was always there, underlying everything he said or did—a sort of hysteria that had now burst forth as a total adrenaline rush and disconnection from the reality of his situation.

“You can come on board,” he invited Helen loudly, “but leave your friend behind.” He indicated with his gun that Garcia was to stay away.

“I’m part of the deal,” Garcia called up. He opened his jacket and showed his empty holster. “I’m not armed, but I am coming with you.” Then he spoke again in Spanish to Avilla.

Helen was really getting tired of all this macho Hispanic stuff, as she interpreted it. In her view, even though Garcia was on the opposite side of the law, he had to play an instinctive male bonding game with Avilla by showing that they shared a linguistic and cultural tie.

While this tactic annoyed Helen, it delighted Avilla, who laughed a little too brightly and told Garcia he could come up the stairs.

When Helen and her ATF sidekick stepped into the cabin, she saw it was as she had suspected—the remaining hostages were all women and children except for a few men who looked as if they had heart conditions or some other physical debility.

The adult passengers stared at Helen and Garcia in hope and fear. The little children were crying into their mothers’ skirts or were mute with fright. They didn’t know what was happening, but they knew it was bad. Avilla pulled the door closed as soon as Helen and Garcia boarded.

She had known what to expect in the way of hostages, but Garcia recoiled in shock and disgust. She felt his reaction although he didn’t say a word. He was more than angry. Even criminals were supposed to abide by certain basic rules of civilization.

“Open your purse. I want to see if you have your gun,” Avilla told her. She opened it, dug around, and showed herself to be virtuously free of armaments.

“Let’s roll,” Helen commanded Avilla crisply. “You have your multiengine license. I suppose that makes you the captain.”

“This gun, not my license, makes me the captain, my dear. Along with about two pounds of plutonium.”

She walked forward to the cockpit, Avilla close behind her, keeping half his attention on the hostages. She peeked in at the crew seated tensely in their stifling little kingdom, then shook her head. “Let them fly the damn plane wherever we’re going, Robert. They’re trained on this thing. I’ve never flown a 747 before.” She could fly it, of course, but the regular fliers were more in tune with the large bird.

He laughed at the enormity of her joke—whatever he supposed that joke to be. “Don’t worry. I wasn’t going to let you fly it. I don’t trust you at all. But I most certainly did want you on board tonight.” His crazy eyes glinted with venom.

She gave the pilots a sympathetic nod and backed out of their domain. “I wouldn’t have missed this flight for anything, Robert,” she said evenly, without fear, and settled herself in a seat at the front of the aircraft. She wanted to be up here, in order to monitor whatever was going to happen.

The one thing that gave her some sense of comfort at this moment was the belief that she had made the right choice in coming on board. That alone kept her from being frightened. She glanced back from her first-class seat to the hostages and Garcia, who talked in soft tones to his fellow passengers, reassuring them.

She looked again toward the cockpit and saw Avilla standing in the doorway holding his gun, a semiautomatic. He stared straight at Helen without blinking or altering the expression on his face as her eyes met his. She smiled back at him, as if at a friend with whom she was taking a planned and pleasant journey. He was genuinely insane. Of that, she had no doubt.

Although she knew nothing at all about Avilla’s type of mental illness, her hope was that by giving him cues that said that she and he were buddies, he might come to believe the message she was sending out.

One of the things she did understand about psychology—because of her former profession as an executive protection specialist—was that hostages often form a positive attachment to their kidnappers. She wanted to work this so-called “Stockholm Syndrome” in reverse and cause Avilla to become dependent on her, his captive, for emotional sustenance. The one major sticking point in this hastily conceived strategy was that Avilla, odds were, had already developed a well-defined transference reaction to Helen—and a highly negative one at that. No doubt he perceived her as the abusive parent on whom he was trying to wreck vengeance with all his bad-guy shenanigans.

The engines were revved up and the plane moved slowly toward its take-off point. All this negotiating had consumed quite a lot of time, and as Helen glanced at her watch, she saw it was nearly two in the morning.

Her heart beat a little faster now, in anticipation of the challenge that lay ahead. She tried to remember if her father had ever taught her and her sister and brothers how to pray. No memory came to the fore, so she attempted picturing God holding herself and the other passengers and crew on a piece of twine. She smiled. As if her smile had triggered something deep within him, Robert Avilla let out a long, malevolent string of sounds that some might call laughter, but that struck Helen as the shriek of a vicious, wild, and wounded beast.

They had been in the air quite some time with pretty nearly nothing happening. Avilla had seated himself across the aisle from Helen in First Class. The senior vice president of Bedlam hadn’t calmed down, exactly, but his madness had entered a quiet, nearly comatose stage.

So long as nothing occurred to unsettle him, Avilla seemed content to fly on into the night. How long they would fly or where they were going, Helen had no idea. To her knowledge, the skyjacker had not stated a country of destination.

In fact, she imagined he had plotted a fairly conventional southerly course for the crew to follow and that he would wait until the last minute to tell them the exact global position at which he was aiming. She supposed he wanted to fly to Mexico, and she hoped he had enough sense to realize this plane couldn’t land on the mountainside where she had barely squeaked in with her little business jet. Well, he was crazy, she guessed, but he hadn’t so far shown that he was the least bit stupid.

She must have dozed off, because when she opened her eyes again, it was just going light. They were still in the air. She tried not to shift in her seat, because if Avilla was sleeping, she didn’t want to wake him up. She turned her head to look. Sleeping! Fat chance! He stood in the doorway of the cockpit, staring at her again, as if he had been positioned there since the night before. He was an eerie guy, all right. He must work at it! She gave him her most reassuring smile.

“How did Ernesto die?” he asked her suddenly.

“He fell out,” she answered. “He opened the door, but maybe he hadn’t given Joan enough of the drug. She moved and he tripped over her. I tried to reach out to him, but I was too late. I wanted to save him. I just couldn’t.”

“He was my son,” Avilla said in all seriousness.

Oh, sicko. She hadn’t wanted to hear that at all. Yeah, she had hoped he would reveal his secrets to her, but this wasn’t a tale she wanted in on.

“His mother died.” He laughed. “I killed her actually. My sister brought Ernesto up as her own.” He smiled, not at Helen, but at ghosts in his past. “My sister is a stupid bitch though. Very low class. You can’t imagine. I did what I could to give Ernesto some understanding of the world. The truth is, if you are smart enough, you can be the one to make all the rules.”

Helen tried to look interested, even impressed.

So Maria Sedone hadn’t been Peno’s mother! And yet, hearing what Peno’s origins were didn’t afford Helen any relief at all. The words “I killed her, actually” resonated unpleasantly inside her head.

She could feel the plane begin to make its initial approach to wherever they were headed. She looked out. Early morning had swept across a mountainous terrain beyond which displayed little but sand. If the country wasn’t Mexico, as she had guessed, it was close enough. Now, she must prepare to do something to justify her presence on this ride. She had to bring Avilla’s terrible nonsense to some sort of peaceful conclusion. She glanced back toward the hostages. Garcia, like Avilla had been earlier, stared straight at her with intensity. This generated a much warmer feeling in her, however, than Avilla’s gaze had.

“Is that the last of the plutonium?” she asked her captor, nodding at the box beside his foot. “I mean, did you sell a lot of it over the years?”

“Quite a lot,” Avilla conceded. “But it wasn’t what you might imagine at all. It wasn’t a conspiracy involving dozens of operatives or anything like that. My procedure was simple commerce, conducted in the most basic fashion—propositions, payoffs, backs turned, goods handed over. Nothing elaborate, nothing out of the ordinary. But you have to understand, this was weapons grade plutonium, so while my obtaining the ore was on a fairly straightforward basis, the resale of the material was the complicated part.” He was boasting, as she had invited him to do the night before. Or two nights ago, to be more accurate.

“I took some time to figure my tactics and then I involved Ernesto in my scheme.” Avilla smiled at the memory of it. “Ernesto became a revolutionary chieftain with contacts in the leftist world throughout the globe. Our little theatrical amused us both so much. We had good times together, he and I. Then we decided that disrupting this country’s civil aviation system would be a great lark and would bring Ernesto tremendous status in his new world.”

Avilla’s eyes pierced Helen’s own. “You killed him, didn’t you? I know he didn’t trip. You’ve been the one thorn in our side, the impediment that’s made all our dreams come crashing down. I told him to kill you from the first when Janet Rotz told me you had come around asking questions. But, instead, you were the one who murdered him.”

“You knew Janet Rotz?” Helen exclaimed.

How the madman loved pulling surprises. “John Rotz was the Beaumont attorney,” he said triumphantly. “We were fellow flyers, you see. And by keeping in touch with the widow, I could track any progress in the FAA investigation. Happily, they made no progress at all. Then you came along.”

She tried to look modest, and the actual fact of things was that she hadn’t uncovered diddly squat on her own. Most of what she had found out had been handed to her by the ATF—Garcia, that was. That probably meant John had been terribly indiscreet in telling her as much as he had. Maybe he liked her. She resisted the urge to turn around and look at him again. She tried not to smile to herself, either, not wanting to give the wrong signal to Avilla.

Avilla, however, disappeared into the cockpit. Helen could hear him arguing with the crew. She stood up and made her way toward the cockpit. “Robert,” she called, so he wouldn’t think she was sneaking up on him.

He turned around, but he had taken over the pilot’s headphones and was standing behind him, communicating with some flight controller down below somewhere.

“He wants us to land out there,” the pilot, gesturing, spoke up. “We’ll all be killed if we try to land on top of that pile of rocks and vegetation.”

Helen looked down. It was true. Avilla had flipped out further than she had imagined. There wasn’t even the most rudimentary landing strip out there. This was a 747, but even a propeller plane would bump itself to pieces if it tried to land in the area the pilot had pointed out.

Avilla barked coordinates at the flyer, taking him on a holding pattern around the same general vicinity. The problem, of course, was that they had been traveling for hours. They had enough fuel left to get them somewhere else, but nowhere any too far away.

As Helen stood there, Avilla shouted new coordinates to approach some imaginary runway. The coordinates were definite, but no safe landing space was in evidence as they swung around.

The pilot followed directions, but he refused to take them down. He flew over the field indicated and then wheeled out again in frustration, bringing the airplane around pretty much to where they had been minutes before.

When they came full circle this time, a genuine airfield began to emerge. Below, they could see men running, pulling some sort of a tarpaulin off of the area. As the men folded the camouflage back out of the way, the fliers saw not a crude, hard dirt field below, but a tarmac of the most traditional sort—a nicely paved plot of land with room to set down even a bird as big as this one. A look of triumph and smug satisfaction settled over Avilla’s visage and the feeling of relief in the pilot’s little kingdom was palpable. They might all die later, but they weren’t going to do it as they landed here and now.

Helen retreated into her first-class refuge, buckled her seat belt, and gazed down as they came around again, this time for the genuine landing try. The lower they came, the more clearly she could make out the site they approached. This was a regular airport, going by the number of planes parked near the hangers. So many lovely planes. So many new and costly corporate jets.

There on the edge of the field, she spotted her own little CitationJet, which she had so recently abandoned on a mountainside, fleeing Peno and his thugs.

God had pulled her to this spot on his trusty thread, Helen understood. He wanted her to have her airplane back. This was the meaning of the word “destiny.”

Even the heavily armed soldiers at the edge of the landing field were not going to stop her.