Pinnacle Event

23

Not flying over Iran added a few miles to the flight, but this was one of the King’s private planes that could fly over eight thousand miles without touching down for fuel. They could make it to Hong Kong without a full fuel load. As he explored the cabins and amenities on the aircraft, Ray wondered how many electronic intelligence services would be tracking the aircraft: the Saudis, the Russians, the Chinese, the Israelis, obviously the Americans, and the Brits. The Paks and the Indians would take note when the aircraft went through or near their air space. How many of them would wonder why the King of Jordan was flying to Hong Kong? How many would know that he was actually in his palace near the Red Sea planning the moves involved with dumping yet another Prime Minister?

“Finding everything all right?” It was the blonde flight attendant, or rather one of them. She was Dutch. The other one had said she was Estonian. “We’ve made up the bed in the rear cabin and, if you are going to try to sleep, I can give you some Ambien,” she said.

“Oh, no, thank you,” Ray replied, “I’ve sworn off the stuff. Better off being jet lagged and groggy. Besides, I prefer the natural method. Do you have any single malt?”

“There are three bottles of the Macallan twenty-five-year-old,” she said.

Of course, there were. With a bottle retailing at a little under a thousand dollars, Ray Bowman found himself wondering why you would need three bottles on any flight.

He shuddered at the thought of the sleeping pill and the memory of his own Ambien horror three years earlier. He had woken, or semi-woken, in the middle of the street three blocks from his condo in Foggy Bottom, naked. He had no idea how he had gotten there, but later deduced he had sleepwalked from his bed after taking an Ambien to deal with jet lag.

In one very quick instant, he had calculated his options: skulk back home through back alleys, where he might be arrested as a lurking rapist; saunter nonchalantly down the brick sidewalks, acting as if he were some protesting nonconformist; or run as fast as possible, hoping that no one would notice that he had no trunks on. He chose the jogging option and, since it appeared to be deep in the middle of the night, and he ran faster than he ever had in his life, a blur of a six-foot-two man with very white, hairy skin, he had made it to the town house without seeing another human and, more importantly for his career, not being arrested for indecent exposure. There he had another moment of fear stabbing at his stomach, as his hand went to his pocket for the keys.

Another flash and he remembered that the backup key was in the dirt around the little fir tree in the giant pot. Later as he sat on his deck, wearing running trunks, watching the sun begin to turn pink the distant sky over Maryland, he sipped a twelve-year-old Balvenie single malt and told himself he would never again use Ambien.

“That would be great. The Macallan. Three fingers, neat,” he told the Dutch woman.

As he sipped the liquid mahogany, he thought how well he was dealing with the fact that there were people trying to kill him, people whose identities he did not know. He had focused instead on the more important fact that those same people were probably trying to kill a lot more people than just him, that they were even at this moment probably moving nuclear warheads into place in some great cities.

When they did that, there was no way of knowing what the consequences would be beyond the immediate disaster area. They would, however, be momentous and negative. And when exactly they would do that, Washington thought in its collective, classified wisdom, was sometime in the next week, the last week of the presidential election campaign. He tried to find hope in a scenario in which the Hong Kong meeting would reveal that some of the new Trustees knew who had bought the nuclear devices. Just a lead, that was all he needed, a thread that he and Dugout, and Dugout’s machines, could pull on.

The Gulfstream had climbed to forty-two thousand feet as it headed out of the night and the Arab Gulf into the Indian Ocean, racing toward the sun.

He sipped the single malt and thought of what was waiting ahead when the Gulfstream touched down. He knew the last Police Commissioner of Hong Kong, but not his replacement. At least the new guy had agreed to meet with him. What a story the Commissioner was going to hear.