Morgan almost didn’t see him. Boyle, blood-drenched, had staggered to his feet, machete in hand. He was breathing in wheezing gasps, and his eyes were wide like a cornered animal’s. With an inhuman scream, he raised the machete and charged. Alex screamed.
Morgan, with no time to think, grabbed the first thing his hands found on the wall—a pitchfork. He swung it to parry Boyle’s attack, but the man didn’t stop. His own momentum impaled him on the rusty tines of the pitchfork. They broke through his flesh and pierced him upward, from his gut into his chest. The machete dropped to the ground. He let out a weak grunt, gurgled, and tipped over onto his side, twitching, the pitchfork still sticking out of his torso.
Crying again, Alex fell into Morgan’s arms.
“It’s okay,” he said, holding her tightly. “It’s okay. Everything’s okay now.”
“Daddy,” she said, sobbing, “can we go home now?”
“Yes, honey,” he said, as he heard distant police sirens approaching. “We can go home.”
CHAPTER 48
Edgar Nickerson looked out the plane’s window at the fields far below. They were over—what?—Alabama? Tennessee? In any case, it was flyover country. He looked for Vinson to ask him, but Vinson was up in the cockpit with the pilot.
For the past hour or so, Nickerson had been replaying the same scene in his head, again and again—Cobra, bloody and tied to a chair, right in front of him. Except now, in the vision in his head, there was no offer. This time, Nickerson didn’t leave, didn’t entrust Natasha with the task of killing him. Instead, Nickerson himself killed the agent, each time a different way—a bullet to the head, a knife to the gut, a length of pipe, a two-by-four.
He tried to suppress those thoughts and relax. Fine, Boyle was out, and the CIA had some dirt on him. So what? They wouldn’t go public with it, not the CIA, and in this business, it was the votes that counted. And fine, that goddamn McKay would get her law passed. After the assassination attempt, she had a Swiss bank’s worth of political capital. Yes, that would hamper his influence in Congress and probably necessitate that he sever all his dealings with Acevedo. And even if, in the worst-case scenario, this shit did go public, he’d be gone long before they could grab him, and he’d live out his days in a tropical paradise with more money than he could count. And as worst-case scenarios went, how bad was that, really?
His reverie was interrupted by a sinking feeling in his gut. The plane was losing altitude, fast enough for him to notice. He was about to shout for Vinson when the man emerged from the cockpit, calmly strapping himself into a parachute.
“What’s going on?” demanded Nickerson, gripped with fear. “Is the plane going to crash?”
“Yeah, ’fraid it is,” said Vinson, without looking up from adjusting the ties on the parachute.
“What did the pilot say?”
“Pilot’s dead,” said Vinson. “And the autopilot is a couple of seconds away from getting fried.”
“What? Then what are you waiting for? Give me a parachute!”
Nickerson got up from his seat, but before he could take a step, Vinson drew his gun.
“You want to stay in your seat.” He motioned with the firearm, and Nickerson sat back down.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Don’t take it personally, now, boss. It’s just business.”
“Who’s paying you? How much? I’ll double it!”
“Sorry, Ed, but you can’t pay me enough. You’re out. History. And I’m not hitching my wagon to a dead horse.” Vinson pulled down the lever to the cabin door, braced himself, and with a heave, opened it.
A buzzing alarm rang, and the emergency lights tinted everything red as air rushed out, sending loose sheets of paper and cups flying; then the roaring wind began, a hurricane inside the tiny jet’s cabin. Vinson, holding fast on to a hand strap, gave him a little wave, and then he was gone, out into the blue expanse.
The plane bucked wildly. Nickerson held on, white-knuckled, to his armrest, tying to remember the emergency positions on the card he never read. Then the plane pitched into a nosedive straight down, lifting him from his seat so that he was held down only by the seat belt, so hard that he wondered whether the force might be enough to break every bone in his body. Squinting his watering eyes, he glanced out the window just in time to see the ground, so close, he could make out individual branches on the trees, reaching up at him like a giant hand swatting him out of the sky. Nickerson closed his eyes and hoped that it would be quick.
CHAPTER 49
Morgan and his daughter were brought back to CIA headquarters in handcuffs while a team stayed back to analyze the scene. They had to practically pull Alex away from him when they separated them for one-on-one questioning. Morgan went over the story in detail and produced Natasha’s chip along with the password to access it. Then they locked him up in a holding cell, only to return a short while later to get him for further interrogation. Finally, they locked him up and left him in holding overnight.