A Heartbeat Away - Michael Palmer [76]
“I can.”
Fink took out his phone.
“Cain, it’s Fink. You read me?”
“I’m here,” Cain answered.
“Can you run a license plate for me?”
“Give me the numbers.”
Fink kept the Taurus in view while he recited the plate numbers to Cain. The Taurus had pulled back onto the road and was continuing west on Route 156. A few minutes later, Fink’s phone beeped.
“The car is registered to the Kalvesta lab tech Melvin Forbush,” Cain said. “What’s going on?”
Fink explained the situation.
“Follow him. The no-fly zone tells me enough about security. Getting to Rhodes is going to take some planning.”
“Roger that.”
Fink increased the plane’s altitude, but not so much that he lost sight of the car as it traveled past Garden City and turned south onto U.S. 50.
“Anything of interest on Fifty South?” Fink asked.
Ramirez checked his map and said, “The only thing between here and Cimarron is Garden City Regional Airport.”
“Well then,” Fink said, “it looks like we’ll be returning the plane sooner than we planned.”
CHAPTER 33
DAY 5
11:00 A.M. (EST)
Angie’s odyssey from Denver was something of a nightmare. Engine problems delayed the flight for several hours, and then canceled it altogether. By the time she arrived in Midtown Manhattan it was nearly eleven in the morning. She used the time before her noon meeting with Sliplitz to buy some toiletries, makeup, a large Giants T-shirt, and a pair of yellow sweatpants, which she packed inside the carry-on she had borrowed from Melvin.
She slept in short bursts on the flight from Denver, awakening damp with perspiration from dreams reliving her clandestine departure from Kalvesta. The adventure began with a problem—Melvin reported that all vehicles leaving the compound were being inspected. After scouting the search procedure for more than an hour, he came up with a plan based, not surprisingly, on something he had seen in a movie.
The key was timing. In fact, she and Melvin practiced their maneuver half a dozen times in a secluded corner of the parking area. They were down to less than ten seconds beginning to end when she finally proclaimed they were as good as they were going to get.
First, Angie, holding an armload of blankets as an excuse in case someone stopped her, concealed herself against the wall of the bungalow closest to the main guard post. Melvin, positioned by the hood of his Taurus, waited for the trunk to be checked and closed, and then began coughing violently, and crying for help. Academy Award–worthy, he would later call his performance.
“My asthma!” Melvin called out, pounding on the hood. “I’m choking.… Inhaler … in glove compartment.… Help me!”
The soldier conducting the inspection set aside the mirror he had been using to examine the underside of the car, and raced to Melvin’s aid. At that moment, Angie moved quickly across the fifteen-foot space separating the bungalow from the rear end of the Taurus. Keeping low, she unlocked the trunk with Melvin’s spare key and opened the trunk eighteen inches. Then she shoved in the blankets and followed them through the small opening.
“Damn,” she murmured reverently, when she felt the car accelerate and realized that Melvin’s plan had worked.
Six miles in the trunk—that’s what Melvin told her it would be. Six short miles before he felt comfortable they would be clear of the facility and any patrols, and he could get her out and into the passenger seat. Despite being propped with pillows and the blankets, and having tested the space out, Angie felt the gnawing pangs of claustrophobia set in the moment she closed the trunk from the inside.
There had to have been a better way, she was thinking one moment.
I can do this, she was thinking the next.
Her discomfort would have been even more acute had she known that five minutes out, Forbush’s cell phone had lost any signal.
By the time they had passed what Angie felt had to be the six-mile