Chapter 4

She searched every inch of the interior of the plane, even though she didn’t think the door lock had been tampered with. The fact was this guy knew his way around planes and around airports. And he was ruthless. She couldn’t estimate what exactly he was capable of.

She especially checked out the control panel because an incendiary device would likely be attached to the electrical system. Turn something on, and boom! She didn’t find anything, but she wasn’t sure if that was because nothing was to be found or because her nemesis was smarter and more careful than she was capable of.

Helen went outside and walked around the plane, examining its underbelly as best she could—and every other part, to whatever extent possible. Then she called over the mechanic she had used the day before and asked him to make sure everything was in proper order.

“I had a look at it yesterday,” he objected churlishly. “Where did you go? You don’t even need to be refueled, do you?”

“What do you care?” she snarled. “I’m paying you for it.” Then it struck her. Fuel! The fuel! That was a great way to kill someone—with contaminated fuel—like by diluting it with water or home heating oil. She climbed up to the fuselage, unlocked the fuel cap, and peered into the filler hole. She couldn’t tell a damn thing. It was dark in there.

She glanced down to see the mechanic on the ground looking up at her in a very odd way.

“You can tell by the indicator on the control panel how much fuel you have, lady,” he advised.

“Oh, advanced avionics,” she exclaimed sarcastically. “How innovative!” There was no way to drain the tanks and start from square one that she could think of. It wasn’t done. Yes, occasionally you did dump some of your fuel, preferably over the ocean, to lighten your load or to minimize a fiery crash. But she had never heard of emptying your ferry tanks while you were on the ground.

She stuck her head in the tank again, trying to judge the color of the liquid down there, since aviation fuels are tinted. Well, it smelled okay. A nice, full bodied jet fuel odor. What the hell! She decided to trust it.

Helen found the FAA exactly where the building is located in D.C.—on Independence Avenue, Southwest. The offices housing this arm of the U.S. Department of Transportation come as no surprise to anyone who has had a brush with bureaucratic Washington. They are labyrinthine.

Helen tramped the endless corridors, trying to find room 1102 and Dennis Malloy, the man who had signed the reports from the FAA on the missing planes.

Perhaps the skyjackings didn’t seem like much to officialdom, which had vastly bigger matters with which to cope, she mused, but five jet planes were missing—at an aggregate cost of about four million dollars. And worse, two or more people were dead—seven in all, if one were willing to give voice to the probabilities. Further, the pattern was a threatening one. Some lowlife had succeeded in five aircraft thefts, so would likely continue on his merry way with more.

What was the end destination of the planes? she considered. Iraq? Iran? Angola? Serbia? Certainly a country where they wouldn’t look very hard at an aircraft’s ancestry.

Helen had been trotting about on the eleventh floor for some minutes now. Logically, number 1102 belonged along this row. But wouldn’t it be just like the federal government to place 1102 on an entirely different floor? Yes, it certainly would. She stopped a civil servant in a bow tie and shirt sleeves for a consultation. He looked around, pondering the facts. “Actually, I think 1102 is on the other side of the building, but the building doesn’t go through. You have to walk down to ten, walk over to the other side and walk up to eleven.” He shrugged acknowledging that it did seem silly, but there it was.

She thanked him, followed through on his suggestion, and before you could say, “four more years,” entered the appropriately marked doorway. She asked the receptionist for Dennis Malloy and was told to take a seat and wait.

Helen sat in one of the two available chairs and read a DoT magazine that reveled in the complexities of the revised alcohol testing regulations for interstate truckers and similar folks who worked for companies licensed by the DoT.

In a few minutes, another coatless civil servant appeared before Helen in the doorway, but this one wielded a full-length tie of unobtrusive design.

“What can I do for you?” asked the middle-aging, probably middle-income FAA inspector, with an air of having no time to do anything for her at all.

“Dennis Malloy? I called this morning and they said that you would be in,” explained Helen, as if this were a reason for her showing up. She stood and extended her hand, and he took it, shaking it mechanically, yet efficiently. The handshake satisfied her. She hated when someone didn’t really come to grips with you—pathetic, she always thought.

Having pumped her hand up and down, Malloy gazed at her blankly.

“I’m Helen Robbins,” Helen went on. “I’ve been asked by Henry Viscotti at the Private Plane Pilots Association to investigate the matter that your office is looking into at this time.” She gave him a Significant Look, trying to let him know that she didn’t want to continue until they had a modicum of privacy. “The jets,” she prodded. His eyes were like pinpoints, but he didn’t respond. “The missing jets,” she added softly.

He let out his breath in a long, heavy sigh. “All right. Come into my office,” he acknowledged.

He stepped over the threshold he had tried so diligently to guard, led her to his cubicle, and offered her a utilitarian, government-issue chair. She sat, he sat, and each looked at the other expectantly. Finally, Helen spoke up again. “I was wondering if the autopsies had been completed and whether anything unusual had showed up,” she remarked.

“Oh, I really couldn’t share information like that,” Malloy replied. “Not until someone at a higher level releases it.”

“Oh, well, what could you tell me?”

“Not anything at this time, to be honest. That’s the way the government is run, you see. All policies, procedures, paperwork, data, and determinations must be ushered through channels. You people in private industry can’t imagine what it’s like.” He cast a gaze skyward.

“I’m not in private industry,” she corrected him. “I’m working freelance, trying to make a little money. I more or less had to leave my job last month and I’ll soon be broke.”

“Excuse me?” said Malloy.

“Can’t you give me at least one clue or something?” she begged. That was the difference between her and some other guys who might investigate this case. She was willing to make a jackass of herself.

“Really,” answered Malloy. “I can’t. My hands are tied.”

“Why don’t we go get some lunch?” Helen offered, inspired. “It’s about that time.”

Malloy frowned. “I don’t think you’d like it where I go,” he rejoined somewhat disdainfully. “And don’t think you can bribe me.”

“I had no such thought,” she refuted. “I eat just about anything though and actually, I’m starving. I got up at five and had a muffin, but that was seven hours ago.”

“Well, you must be hungry,” agreed Malloy, seemingly shocked at her situation. “I eat very carefully though,” he warned again. He looked at his watch and appeared to be thinking, then gave her a look of grave calculation. “There’s a health food restaurant near here, where I have brown rice and vegetables.”

“Great,” she responded enthusiastically, bouncing out of the chair lest he have a second to reconsider. “That’s exactly how my boyfriend eats. He’s a bullheaded Taurus. What are you? May I call you Dennis? I’m Helen, as I said.” She looked around. “Do you have a jacket? It’s a little nippy out there without one. Spring’s late this year.”

Dennis Malloy was such a purist that he didn’t eat tofu because he believed it blocked a person’s calcium metabolism. “Some people say the soybean is a scavenger,” he added.

Helen wasn’t sure how a bean could go around gobbling up—whatever—indiscriminately, but perhaps he was right.

“You ought to have the stuffed shitake mushrooms as an appetizer,” he went on. “Incredible. And they’re so good for you too. They do bolster the immune system.” Helen ordered the Stuffed Shitake and pushed the plate toward Dennis when they came, so he could share the order.

“You don’t know what working for the government is like,” he began to grumble at once, now that they were settled cozily at the table together. “So stultifying.”

“I do know,” she answered. “The government was my only long-term employer.”

“Which agency?”

“Defense,” she told him.

“Pentagon?”

“Langley—and various air bases.” She smiled.

“Oh, I see.” He got it, and smiled, too. “Tons of guys at the agency are former Air Force.”

“I have to earn a living, Dennis,” she said suddenly, desperately. “I’ve worked at so many different jobs. If I fail here, I’m just washed up.” Of course, she could always teach at a flying school, fly a traffic helicopter for a radio station, fly a private plane for a corporation, go back to executive protection, or even try for another information security job. All of those possibilities had their allure.

“We can work together on this one,” she tried to convince him. “I’m out in the field and you’re on the inside, gathering the data. We both earn credit with our respective employers when we solve this thing. I’ve already interviewed John Rotz’s widow and Steve Falon, the man Rotz was to meet the day he disappeared.” She shook more soy sauce onto the rice to add a bit more flavor.

“Don’t overdo it on the tamari,” Dennis interrupted. “That’s the high sodium bottle.”

“We’ll have to invite you to dinner in New York when my boyfriend gets back,” Helen said. “You have a similar outlook on food.” She sprinkled some sesame seeds from a shaker onto her plate.

“They found something unusual in the blood chemistry,” Dennis conceded.

At first, Helen thought he was still speaking about the curious metabolic effects of the food they were eating, but then she realized with excitement that he was talking about the autopsies. He was spilling the beans. She didn’t make any sudden moves, so as not to distract him.

“They also discovered needle marks on the bodies, so the pathologist thinks that they were given a shot of something to knock them out. But the victims didn’t die from whatever was in their bloodstream. They died as a result of a fall from a great height. But the technicians have to perform further tests to verify all this. Naturally! It’s the government.”

“The planes. Did they ever turn up?” she asked with a cautious mix of curiosity and disinterest.

“One was found in El Salvador. That’s all we know for certain, so far.”

“Drugs,” she said excitedly. “It’s got to be drug runners.”

Dennis smiled. “Except that drug runners don’t go from here to there. They travel the other way around.”

“Ah, but this group needed planes registered in the U.S. that they could fly back into the country without suspicion.”

“Right.” He nodded and smirked. “No suspicion when they arrive in a plane that was taken in a skyjacking and that everyone in the FAA is on the alert for. Not to mention a few other agencies.”

“Yes, but they can alter the identifying numbers and the registration papers,” she disagreed. Then, perking up, she asked, “We’re working together, right?”

“Oh, I can’t,” refused Malloy. “I have nearly fifteen years of service. I really can’t afford to be fired. Being a civil servant is something like being an indentured servant.”

She flew back to the Westchester County Airport. After flying in and out of two of the busiest airfields in the Northeast lately—National and La Guardia—this landing was routine and relaxed. Not only was she close to home—yes, Port Chester was home—but she hoped this would be a way of outfoxing the killer who had made that chilling threat on the phone last night. Was it only last night?!

The airport certainly was not a throng-filled one. Helen had to call a cab and wait ten minutes at the gate before one came. She would have had a quick drive home in Eric’s Honda—if she hadn’t inadvertently lost the use of it.

She asked the taxi to let her off a couple of blocks from home, simply in case Eric hadn’t gone to Florida. He was unpredictable enough to show up there this afternoon, and she didn’t want to have to explain right off why she was arriving in a cab.

But when she came walking up toward the apartment building, Eric wasn’t who she saw lurking in the doorway. Instead, a stranger—a well-built, athletic-looking guy in a nicely cut suit—stood outside the building reading the buzzers. He didn’t seem like a fellow tenant’s dinner guest, either.

Something about his build, the way he carried himself, told her he was a professional. And she would have bet her entire bank account—which didn’t amount to a very large gamble—that the man was wearing a gun.

He had been sent by the skyjacker, or he was the skyjacker—that was her inevitable conclusion.

The stranger appeared about to press a buzzer—only appeared to be, mind you, but he didn’t. Instead, he waited as one of the residents emerged from the building, kindly holding open the door to the man who had come to blow Helen away. People could be so thoughtful!

Helen hurried up to the complex entrance as the grating shut behind the intruder. She waited thirty seconds before opening the door with her key, then walked in and up the emergency stairs, after noting that the elevator was in transit. Climbing stairs was good exercise, she found. She ought to do it every day. Lucky for her that she and Eric only lived on the fifth floor.

The door was going to make a noise when she entered into the hallway, she realized, so she exited the stairwell at four and caught the elevator on the way down, forcing it back up to five. At five, she stepped out cautiously, Beretta in hand. She kept her arm down and hand beside her, so that she wouldn’t appear armed if anyone else was in the corridor.

She had not been mistaken about the stranger, who stood ahead of her, directly in front of her apartment door. He was listening at the door, no doubt trying to determine if there was any activity inside, and exactly what that activity might be.

Helen came up behind him, slowly and quietly, then held the gun to the back of his head. “Down on the ground,” she ordered in an ice-cold voice. Her heart pounded violently, probably from the walk up, she decided. Why would she be afraid? She was the one holding onto the 9-millimeter pistol.

“Put your hands behind your back,” she repeated. “Put your hands behind your back.” She had seen this on Cops, on TV. But unfortunately, she realized, she didn’t have any handcuffs to put on the guy, and she wasn’t entirely sure that she wanted to call the actual police to take charge of the matter. The situation was a little too complicated for that.

“I’m a friend of Eric’s,” the man protested as he followed her orders. “In fact, I’m a government agent—ATF.”

She came alongside him cautiously and frisked him, a technique also acquired mainly from watching television. See, things were to be learned from the medium.

Instead of a gun, she came across his wallet. She pulled it out and flipped it open to his identification—a picture of this guy looking grim—as well he might—with the words Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives emblazoned across the card. Still, she had also seen stuff in the news about phony cops. She was of two minds on this one.

“I’m still holding the gun on you, but you can get up. Where do you know Eric from?”

The ATF agent sat up, glanced at her with a sardonic expression on his face, and smoothed back his hair. “You must be Eric’s girlfriend,” he guessed wildly.

“Why would you say that?”

“The gun, the paranoia. I’d say you two were a perfect match.” His eyes shone. He was a good-looking guy; she couldn’t help but notice.

She dropped the hand with the gun back down by her side. “What are you doing here?” she demanded.

“I sent Eric a client. I wanted to find out what happened.”

“Haven’t you ever heard of calling first?”

He stood up and adjusted his clothing, not that anything was mussed. The ATF agent smiled at her, and it was like a hundred-watt bulb turning on. Whew! She tried hard not to react.

“I called and left a couple of messages saying that I’d be by. I was in this neck of the woods anyway, so I dropped over. I didn’t expect to be treated with such…hospitality.” His smile miraculously brightened, an unimaginable event.

“You can come in,” she decided. She didn’t put the gun away though, which she could tell he noticed with some amusement. She gave him the key to unlock the door, rather than struggle with it herself while holding the gun. They entered the apartment.

The place was a mess, a terrible mess, as if the windows had been open last night and the high storm winds had blown directly through here. She guessed she had left it kind of slovenly. She began to pick up. “Sit down,” she offered. “Would you like an Eastern European beer?

“Well, in an effort to bolster the economy of some emerging, former communist country, yes. I’m John Garcia, by the way.”

She got him the last Radegrst and took a Zima for herself. She was nothing if not eclectic.

Helen handed him the bottle opener, cleared a chair and sat down in it, placing the Beretta on a nearby table. “Who was the client?” she asked.

“Oh, I don’t think you and I need to discuss that,” he retorted with a touch of superiority, either governmental or masculine—she wasn’t quite sure which.

“We should if the client was a man named Henry Viscotti,” she insisted.

She saw that her comment had shaken him by the way he shifted his posture and took a swig of the beer. “Eric told you about it,” the ATF agent suggested.

“To be perfectly candid, I answered Viscotti’s call and took the case myself.” She was pleased with herself for dropping that bombshell with such aplomb, although once the words were past her lips, she realized she had made a terrible mistake. He’d tell Eric. Eric was now bound to find out that she had stolen a client from him. “Don’t tell Eric about it though,” she begged instantly.

“This isn’t a joke,” Garcia informed her grimly. “The men who hijacked those airplanes are dangerous criminals.”

“And I appear to you to be a pushover?” she asked. She had, not three minutes ago, gotten the drop on this guy, himself. “Who are those guys? I mean, how do you know how dangerous they are? What’s the story?” Garcia seemed nervous now, upset.

Helen wanted to stroke his head soothingly and tell him everything would be all right.

“I steered this to Eric because I knew he can handle himself, although this isn’t a business for anyone on the private side. It’s something only the government should be handling.”

Helen thought of her friend Dennis at the FAA and his opinion of government investigations. “The feds are too bureaucratic to really deal with things like this,” she declared.

He looked at her. “Oh Christ,” he said. “What have I unleashed? I meant to derail an investigation by Viscotti’s association and now I have some girl in trouble.”

“Watch what you say,” she told him. “You’re so insulting. This is 2021. Not only am I not a girl—I’m a woman—but I can deal with this as well as you or Eric can. Trust me.”

“They’re gunrunners,” Garcia said. “And not just arms dealers, either. They’re revolutionaries. In case you wondered why those tired old socialists in Guatemala are showing up with shiny Ak-47s, it’s because of these guys.”

Helen was excited. She had been on the job only two days and had been handed a big chunk of the solution already! “Thanks,” she said appreciatively. “That’s helpful.”

“Helpful,” he exploded. “I’m trying to persuade you to give up the idea of following an investigation.”

“Oh, no, this is terrific,” she disagreed. “It’s really becoming tremendously entertaining. Look at it this way…I have my own private jet to fly around in any time I want, and I don’t even have to ferry passengers or cargo. I’m in a position to match my wits against not only some notorious bad guys, but against some highly trained government agents. I even receive some recompense for doing all that. Why would I walk away from a deal like this, simply because you have some outdated notion in your head of what a woman might be capable of?”

At the same moment those ferocious boasts were running out of her mouth, a picture appeared in her mind of what had happened last night after she had received the threatening phone call. She had raced to put her clothes on with every intention of running up to Westchester for Eric’s protection. The memory burned, and Helen flushed.

She, who was a master at flicking away such thoughts and images, sat with this one for a moment longer than she was comfortable with. She then looked at Garcia and gave him a soft smile that belied that self-confident flood of words. She sat quietly a while, musing.

“What else can you tell me about the skyjackers?” she inquired at length.