Page 70 of Radar

“I would have quit the hunt when AWG disbanded if I weren’t terrified by what was coming.” Xander reached up to tug the fur flaps on his hat down to cover his ears. “Ugly to admit, but there it is.”

“I’m sitting here with a box of donuts in front of me, trying to smother my anxiety in carbs. I’m telling you, my hair is falling out as we speak. If we survive, I’m going to be fat and bald, but I’ll also be a happy man. Okay, so back to Adele. We have a team in Singapore that will add Orest to their watch list if she’s delayed getting there.”

“Adele’s in the air?”

“Yeah, even flying out of D.C., she should still beat Orest to Singapore,” Hiro said. “Right now, Orest is at the Fairbanks airport with you. No idea why he headed out of Lumberjack around zero-four-hundred. And heads up, the pathologists believe that York got a hefty dose of palytoxin, but there’s no way to prove it, which is the genius of using palytoxins. You don’t want Orest to target you. We can’t lose anyone else. Our team is small enough already. We’ve verified Orest checked in for thetrip to San Francisco, and he’s through security. Boarding was called.”

“Go back. How’s York doing?” Xander asked.

“Coming along. York told me that if he lived through open heart surgery to die in Armageddon, he’s going to kill me.”

“Sounds like he’s rallying,’ Xander said. “Did he give you the codes?”

“Not surrounded by the nurses, he didn’t, and then he was out again. Crossing our fingers that York is conscious long enough that we can clear the room isn’t a great strategy, but it’s what we’ve got,” Hiro said. “Listen, Orest boarded. Once he takes off from Fairbanks he has a seven-hour flight. It’s a tight connection between landing in San Fran and taking off again. He doesn’t have time to leave the airport for any side adventures, especially with that being an international flight.”

Xander scanned the parking lot, watching as a car pulled up and a woman exited, reaching into the back seat for her baby. “You checked to make sure Orest didn’t materialize another carry-on case?”

“We did,” Hiro said. “He checked a suitcase. He had nothing more in his hands.”

“He made it through security from D.C. to Newark with whatever was in the case. He was screened.”

“We’re aware. And interestingly, everything in that Newark carry-on must have been carefully chosen for its reaction to the acid because the entirety turned to a glob, then hardened into a rock.”

“I wonder which researcher figured that out for him.” Xander could feel his face turning red with windburn. He hated this kind of cold.

“Orest has a graduates degree in chemistry. He probably thought of it as a fun project to put that together.”

“All right, that’s out of my hands. I’m not tracking Orest,” Xander said. “Tell me about Elyssa, what’s going on there?”

“She’s flying back to D.C. with a layover in Chicago.”

Xander looked at his ticket information. It was a straight shot to D.C. “Do I get in first?”

“She beats you by like an hour and a half. With the flight mess out of Canada, it's possible that her layover will be longer than that. You don’t have to deal with any of that. Once you’re on, you take a nap and wake up on the East Coast, and you lose three hours, so your body clock should be good and misfiring from all the time zone hopping you’ve been doing.”

“Hiro, I need to get to D.C. first.”

“And how do you suggest we do that?”

“Delay her plane,” Xander said.

“Delay the plane?” Hiro slurped his drink. “Okay, I’ll bite. How do we do that, hotshot?”

“I don’t know, call in a bomb threat?”

“I’d lose my job. You want me to make a bomb threat to an American airline? Are you out of your mind?”

“It could be less than that. It could be a call reporting that you suspect the pilot is impaired. They’d have to do something about that. Figure out another pilot to stick in his seat.”

“We can’t crap up someone’s career,” Hiro said.

“Would it really mess up someone’s career? I mean, how? He takes the breathalyzer and a blood test, and if it comes back positive, we did a service to the passengers. If it comes out negative, and he looks confused that anyone accused him of drug use, then off he flies. The blood test doesn’t take that long. It might give me enough time to get East Coast first.”

“Keep talking your nonsense,” Hiro said. “I’m looking into something other than blowing up the pilot’s career.”

“It’s possibly a woman’s life we’re talking about. Look, we watch and see if the pilot has an issue. If they do, we send theairline’s president a little note saying, ‘Hey, the world was about to catch on fire, and we thought this was an easy remedy, our bad.’” It felt good to make up some plot line that might happen in one of the thrillers he liked to read, where a maverick hero might just get on the phone and pull crap like that and not suffer any consequences.

“You’re making that joke because you’re scared for Elyssa. I get that. Listen, about your first idea, the bomb threats, have you read the news?” Hiro asked.

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