Uncharted The Fourth Labyrinth - By Christopher Golden Page 0,107

mind.

“Drop the knife or I will shoot you,” Drake said.

The copilot didn’t even acknowledge them. Instead, at the mention of the knife, he glanced down at the gleaming blood-streaked blade, eyes wide with recognition. His face slack and expressionless, he slashed his own throat.

“No, damn it!” Drake shouted, reaching for the copilot with his free hand.

The man crumpled to the ground, twitching, blood pulsing from his wound. The cut was deep and long, blood vessels severed. There would be no saving him.

Henriksen stared slack-jawed at the two dead men even as the hull of the plane screamed around them, air currents twisting the craft, dipping it even harder to starboard. Any second, the plane would begin to dive.

Drake tucked away his gun and dived for the pilot’s seat. He grabbed the stick and held on, trying to keep the plane from shaking apart around them.

“Please tell me you know how to fly an airplane,” Henriksen said.

Drake didn’t spare him a glance as he replied. “Does ‘sort of’ count?”

19

Tyr Henriksen seemed capable of wielding his wealth like a scalpel or like a club, depending on the circumstances. Either way, the man clearly was used to smoothing the path of his life with money. But no matter how rich he was, he could do nothing to hurry the Nanjing police. When a handful of Americans and a filthy rich Norwegian made an emergency landing at the local airport with two dead men on board, the cops were going to have questions.

Any other day, the boredom drilling into Drake’s brain would have had him on the verge of screaming. But considering that a couple of hours earlier he had landed a jet, talked in to the runway by air traffic controllers whose entire English vocabulary seemed to have been learned from old Tom Cruise movies, all he really wanted was a beer. Not that he blamed the air traffic controllers for not speaking his language—he was in their country, after all. But the first time one of them called him “Maverick,” he had pretty much assumed he was going to die.

Not dying, in contrast, had made his day.

They’d left Santorini just after eight p.m.—two in the morning, Nanjing time—and the flight had taken just under twelve hours even with the unfortunate murder/suicide interruption. Now looking out the windows of the airport security office, Drake could see the shadows growing long as the daylight turned late afternoon gold. The clock read just after five p.m.

Jada had curled up on a sofa and fallen asleep—adrenaline hangover, he figured. Corelli sat on an uncomfortable-looking plastic and metal chair across from Drake, hands in his lap. He looked like a waxwork dummy of a 1940s movie gangster, Jimmy Cagney’s bulkier brother. Or a robot someone had shifted into the idle position.

Through a glass partition, Drake could see Henriksen and Olivia standing in sullen silence as Nanjing police, airport security, and a dark-suited representative of the Chinese government argued with representatives from the Norwegian and American embassies. The copilot had been a paid assassin or a terrorist, the diplomats were insisting, bent on the murder of a prominent and wealthy businessman. Henriksen and his people were lucky to be alive; they shouldn’t be treated as victims.

That was essentially how the argument was going from the snippets of it Drake had heard through the glass and through the door when security agents went in and out. The real conflict going on in that room had to do with the guns that had been found on the plane. While Drake had been trying not to crash the aircraft, Corelli had gathered all the weapons from their bags, wiped them down, and hidden them inside a food service cabinet. Now Henriksen and Olivia were insisting that they knew nothing about the cache of guns and that they must have belonged to the copilot assassin. The Chinese authorities were having difficulty believing that one killer would need half a dozen guns, but the representatives from the U.S. and Norwegian embassies were putting the pressure on. Drake had a feeling that it wouldn’t be long before they were allowed to leave, though not without the government putting some kind of surveillance on them. It was going to be an interesting night.

Drake stood and walked toward the exit. Corelli frowned, shattering the notion that he might be a robot, and watched his progress. A pane of glass was set into the metal door, and through it Drake could see a pair of guards in