Chapter 9 - The Tarmac Confrontation
The Black Hawk didn't circle. It plummeted out of the storm clouds like a falling anvil, utilizing a tactical combat descent that flared thirty feet above the private runway.
The downdraft from the four massive rotor blades was a hurricane of pressurized air and pulverized rain that slammed into the tarmac with violent force. The fuel truck driver threw his hands over his head and fell to his knees. The Mercedes SUV rocked on its suspension.
"Go! Go! Go!" the crew chief roared, sliding the cabin door back.
FBI tactical operators poured out of the helicopter in two coordinated stacks, their weapon-mounted lights carving blinding white beams through the downpour.
"Federal agents! Get on the ground! Do not move!"
Derek dropped his briefcase instantly. The impact popped the latches, scattering hundreds of high-denomination Bahamian and American bank notes across the wet concrete, where they were whipped into the night air by the rotor wash.
He fell to his hands and knees, sobbing, burying his face in the pooling water.
Patricia, however, didn't drop.
True to her monstrous, pathological arrogance, the matriarch stood her ground against the hurricane of rotor wash, her designer trench coat soaked through, screaming at the top of her lungs into the blinding tactical lights.
"Do you know who my family is?" she shrieked, her voice shrill and cracked. "My father was a state senator! My brother is a federal judge! You touch me and I will have every single one of your badges stripped before sunrise!"
I walked through the line of tactical operators.
The rain plastered my hair against my forehead, the gold major’s oak leaf on my collar catching the strobing blue lights of the county sheriff vehicles that were now barreling through the airfield's security gate, sirens blaring.
Patricia’s screams died in her throat as I stepped into the light.
Her jaw dropped. The venomous defiance in her eyes flickered, replaced for the first time by a sickening, gut-wrenching terror.
"Hannah?" she whispered.
I didn't stop until I was eighteen inches away from her. The smell of her expensive French perfume was sickening, mixed with the stench of jet fuel and ozone.
"Your father was a senator, Patricia," I said, my voice carrying over the dying whine of the jet engines. "Your brother is an appellate judge. But neither of them can save you from a federal indictment for espionage, child endangerment, conspiracy to commit murder, and treason against the United States."
"You... you can't prove anything!" she spat, though her lip was trembling violently now. "Derek was the one who signed the leases! Derek was the one who managed the accounts! I was just helping my son!"
"Shut up, Mom!" Derek wailed from the puddle at her feet. He was shaking uncontrollably, his hands cuffed behind his back by an FBI operator. "Shut up! They know! They found the safe! They found the insurance policy!"
Patricia looked down at her son with a disgust so cold, so pure, it made my stomach turn. "You weak, sniveling coward. I should have left you in that house instead of the girl."
Before the words had completely left her mouth, my hand moved.
I didn't strike her. That would have given her lawyers an avenue to claim brutality.
Instead, I reached out, grabbed the lapels of her soaked designer coat, and ripped the heavy gold chain and family heirloom pendant from around her neck with a sharp, violent snap.
Tucked into the lining of her coat was a slim, carbon-fiber case.
I pulled it free and opened it under the flashlight beam.
Inside was Lily’s original birth certificate, her Social Security card, and three micro-SD cards containing the cloned military security certificates.
"Officer Bell," I said without looking back.
Bell stepped forward, holding a pair of heavy steel handcuffs. "Right here, Major."
"Take this woman into custody," I said, shoving Patricia toward him. "Process her through the federal holding facility in Norfolk. No phone calls until her primary arraignment before the magistrate."
Bell grabbed Patricia’s wrists, wrenching them behind her back with satisfying finality. The metallic *click* of the ratchets was music against the roar of the rain.
"You'll burn for this, Hannah!" Patricia screamed as she was dragged toward the back of a police cruiser. "You'll burn for this! We will tie you up in court until you don't have a penny left!"
I ignored her. I walked over to where Derek lay on the concrete, pinned beneath an operator's boot.
I knelt down in the water beside him.
He looked up at me, his face swollen from crying, his hair matted with tarmac grime. "Hannah... please. You loved me. We built a life. Lily needs her father..."
"Lily doesn't have a father," I said, looking into the hollow, cowardly eyes of the man I had slept beside for seven years. "Her father died the moment he walked out of that house and left a four-year-old child to starve in the dark."
"I was trapped!" he sobbed. "You don't know who was funding the offshore account! If I didn't deliver the chips, they were going to kill me!"
I leaned closer, my voice dropping to a whisper that only he could hear over the wind.
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"Then you’d better start talking to the FBI, Derek," I said. "Because the federal penitentiary at Florence, Colorado, is the only place on earth where those men won't be able to reach you."
***
