Dark Zone by Stephen Coonts Page B

to lock the door. There was a bar at the side; she pulled it down and there was a loud click.
    A second later, the plane began to roll. Lia scrambled to get into a seat. Pain thundered through her skull as the aircraft accelerated and then lifted upward.
    The cabin lights flickered on when the airplane leveled off. There were only twenty or so rows in the aircraft; Lia sat in the last.
    A curtain separated the passenger compartment from the forward cabin and cockpit area. She moved up one row and then another and another, debating with herself whether to go forward into the cockpit or not. Surely the plane was being flown by someone sent to rescue her. But she remained afraid, and her thumping heart prevented her from getting up again after she reached the third row from the front.
    The curtain parted. A short balding man with a thick black beard and mustache entered the passenger area, grim-faced behind his glasses.
    “Fashona,” she said.
    At first, the word seemed to come from someone else. Then the information flooded into her brain.
    Ray Fashona. A Desk Three associate who’d worked with Lia and Tommy Karr and Charlie Dean in Russia.
    Fashona!
    She tried to shout it, but her voice would come only as a whisper. “Fashona!”
    “Hey,” he said. He walked past her down the aisle to the back where the boarding ramp was located. She got up, and when he returned she threw her arms around him. “Fashone.”
    “Come on, Lia, you know I hate being called Fashone. It’s Fashon-a,” he said. He put his hands on hers to let him go, but she wouldn’t. “Tommy started that. He thinks it’s funny. He thinks everything is funny.”
    “Oh, God, Ray,” she said. “Oh, God. Thank God.”
    “Yeah. Him and Rubens. He paid those Russians who picked you up a fortune to sit on their butts for the last two days in case something got messed up. They had to dump a bag of money at the airport to—supposedly. I think they probably just pocketed it.”
    “Oh, God, Ray. Thank you. Thank you.”
    “Look, I gotta go fly the plane. The Russians’ idea of an autopilot is a two-by-four against the yoke, you know what I mean? Come on up front with me.”
    “OK.”
    She released him and followed him to the cockpit, where she sat in the first officer’s seat. He fished around near the center console and came up with a headset for her.
    “Better snap yourself in,” he told her. “Lot of turbulence. We’re going to land on Hokkaido, the northern island of Japan. From there I don’t know what the Art Room has in mind.”
    Lia leaned her head back gently against the seat, hoping that the soft cushion might ease some of the pain in her head. It didn’t.
    But it was going to be OK.
    “Hey, you sure you’re all right?” Fashona asked. “They said you had a tough time.”
    “Yeah.”
    Fashona turned and looked at her. “You don’t sound like yourself.”
    “Well, who do I sound like?” she said sharply.
    “Now you sound like yourself,” said Fashona, turning his attention back to the controls.
    She closed her eyes, hoping for sleep and praying that Fashona and his aircraft weren’t a dream.

14

    “Who is Gordon Kensworth?” asked Rubens as he paced in front of the Art Room.
    Sandy Chafetz looked up from her console a few feet away. “We’re working on it. The credit card account belongs to someone else completely, a Vefoures in France. It may be a phony—the account seems to have been dormant for a little over two months, and then was used to pay for the fare from France and rent the hotel room.”
    “Why was he worth murdering? What else would he have given us?” asked Rubens. He meant the questions rhetorically, but Chafetz ventured an answer, suggesting that perhaps the people whose message system he’d stumbled onto resented it.
    “That would go without saying. But it would have been easier to deal with him in France,” said Rubens.
    There were other questions, many other questions—one of the Web sites had been