“I’ll get you a fizzy. How about you put those eyes and ears back together in case we need them?”
He rose, stretched, wandered back to the galley already crowded with cops raiding the AC and friggie.
She walked back to the cockpit and into e-speak. She tuned it out, paced up and down the aisle as she worked on various scenarios.
It all depended on where. Urban setting or rural? Populated or open? Would he have a hole or have to rabbit again?
Did he know how close they were on his tail?
She caught part of the cockpit conversation that sounded like regular English.
“If you can give me a ninety-second hold, I’ll have a lock on him.”
“We think we can give you a full two minutes, if he doesn’t make a sharp change. We’re over the ocean, right? He’s likely to keep cruising. Last echo he was at fifteen thousand, so he’s flying low.”
“And slow compared to us at forty-five thousand. We’ll be on top of him within ten minutes, by my calculations.”
“When you are, we hook with ground control’s POS, boost the bounce, get the steady hold.”
“He could change course, he could do that.” She recognized Roarke’s tone, the one where he spoke more to himself than the person next to him. “Tip south for Italy or Spain, Greece. Or do a fly right over western Europe, Poland, Russia. But as he’s going now with these spot checks? Ireland’s best bet.”
“No place like home?”
“I suppose even he might think so.”
Eve went back to Abernathy, sat. “He’s going to contact his mother if he hasn’t already. He may give her some sort of rendezvous. You need to have her picked up.”
“We’ve no charges.”
“Aiding and abetting. Come on, Abernathy, finesse it. If nothing else, put a shadow on her. She’s selling her house. He’s selling his. She’ll know where to meet him. Box her in.”
She walked back to the cockpit. Peabody walked in behind her.
“Brought you guys some eats. Got you a mocha latte, McNab.”
“My best girl.”
“We got egg san with ham and cheese,” she told Eve. “You want?”
“No, I’m good.” She pointed McNab back down when he started to get up. “Keep the chair. You’re more use to him than I am in here.”
“We should be over him inside two. I’m dropping altitude to get a better lock.”
Eve felt the shuttle dive, simply closed her eyes. Nothing made sense about being thousands of feet over an ocean.
It was insanity. The human race was just bat-shit crazy.
“Holding at thirty thousand. Let’s see what you’ve got, Ian.”
“One sec. Captain, Callendar, we’re going green.”
“Gotcher back,” Callendar told him. “Cap?”
“Right there. Count it down.”
Roarke gave them the ninety seconds, the sixty, and at thirty, McNab tapped a series of keys on his portable. “Calling that echo in ten, nine, eight …”
“There he is,” Roarke murmured. “Nicely done, very nice indeed. Let’s hold that. Just hold that.”
He did something with the instruments that made things flash and beep—and Eve’s stomach drop again.
“Go green!” McNab shouted.
Eve didn’t know what she expected. Maybe an explosion. Because couldn’t another bat-shit crazy person flying thousands of feet above the ocean just crash right into them?
Or those air pockets in the sky that made everything wobble and shake. They could shake something loose.
Or—
“Ten more seconds,” Roarke muttered. “Give me ten more bloody seconds.”
“We’ve got it. Lock it up, Roarke. Lock the bastard.”
“I will, by Christ. Just …”
He twisted some dial, and for some reason, McNab hooted again.
So did Feeney and Callendar.
“Locked. He’s locked,” Roarke said.
She heard it—a slow, steady beep—and when Roarke tapped an instrument, she saw that blip—slow and steady.
“That’s him?”
“That’s him. And we’ve got a solid signal. This course, his longitude and latitude, it’s likely Ireland. Add the rest in—his mother, his contacts—it’s most likely.”
“Do you think he’ll actually try to land in Dublin?”
Roarke shook his head. “He’d know somewhere outside the city, a private strip, a smuggler’s way. Now he’s shifted course a time or two, but that’s for evasion—and it’s wasted speed and fuel. We’ll get wherever he’s going ahead of him. I just have to pin that down, and Ireland, Dublin’s the best I have at this moment.”
“Well, it’s better than the whole freaking world. What’s the flight time from here?”
“For us, to near around Dublin? A bit under two hours. If I go back up, less.”