Jason’s trembling hands. The other reached inside his jacket and
reappeared, holding the compact shape of the deadly Glock directly at
Jason’s head.
Jason looked up and saw the gun.
“I’m afraid that you’re not calling anybody.” DePazza’s eyes never left
Jason’s face.
Transfixed, Jason watched DePazza reach up to his face and rug at his
skin. The elaborate disguise came off piece by piece. In another
moment, next to Jason sat a blond-haired man in his early thirties with
a long aquiline nose and fair skin. The eyes, though, remained the same
blue and chilling. His real name, although he rarely used it, was
Kenneth Scales. He was a certifiable sociopath, with a twist.
He took great pleasure in killing people, and reveled in the details
that went into that terrible process. However, he never did it
randomly.
And he never did it for free.
CHAPTER NINE
It had taken the better part of five hours to contain the fire, and in
the end the flames retreated of their own accord after having consumed
everything combustible within their long reach. The local authorities
were grateful only that the conflagration had raged in an empty,
secluded dirt field.
A National Transportation Safety Board “go-team,” outfitted in their
blue biohazard protective suits, were now slowly walking the outside
perimeter of the crash while smoke billowed skyward and small pockets of
obstinate flames were attacked by diligent teams of firefighters. The
entire area had been cordoned off with orange and white street
barricades behind which a number of anxious area residents stood and
stared in the typical mixture of horrified disbelief and morbid
interest. Columns of fire trucks, police cars, ambulances, dark green
National Guard trucks and other emergency vehicles were stacked along
both sides of the field. The EMTs stood next to their vehicles, hands
in their pockets. Their services would not be needed other than as
silent transports of whatever human remains, if any, could be extracted
from the holocaust.
The mayor of the nearby rural Virginia town stood next to the farmer
whose land had received this most terrible intrusion from above. Behind
them, two Ford pickup trucks sported “I survived Pearl Harbor” license
plates. And now, for the second time in their lives, their faces
carried the horror of sudden, terrible and massive death.
“It’s not a crash site. It’s a goddamn crematory.” The veteran NTSB
investigator shook his head wearily, removed his cap emblazoned with the
letters NTSB and wiped at his wrinkled brow with his other hand. George
Kaplan was fifty-one years old with thinning, gray-edged hair that
covered a wide head; he carried a small paunch on a five-foot-seven-inch
frame. As a fighter pilot in Vietnam, then a commercial pilot for many
years, he had joined the NTSB after a close friend had crashed a
two-seater Piper into the side of a hill after a near miss with a 727
during a heavy fog. It was then that Kaplan decided he should do less
flying and more work trying to prevent accidents.
George Kaplan was the designated investigator in charge and this was
absolutely the last place in the world he wanted to be; but,
unfortunately, one obvious place to seek preventive safety measures was
at the scene of aircraft accidents. Every night members of the NTSB
crash investigative “go-teams” went to bed hoping beyond hope that no
one would have need of their services, praying that there would be no
reason to travel to distant places, to pick through the pieces of yet
another catastrophe.
As he scanned the crash area, Kaplan grimaced and shook his head again.
Starkly absent was the usual trail of aircraft and body parts, luggage,
clothing and the millions of other items that routinely would be
discovered, sorted, cataloged, analyzed and papered until some
conclusions could be found for why a 110-ton plane had fallen out of the
skies. They had no eyewitnesses, because the crash occurred in the
early morning and the cloud cover was low. It would have only been
seconds between the time the plane exited the clouds and when it struck
the earth.
Where the plane had penetrated the ground, nose first, there now existed
a crater that later excavation would determine to be approximately