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:'Concerns your friend Dirk Pitt."
"Something happen to Dirk?" Loren asked anxiously.
" Persons unknown blew up his car. Lucky for him he wasn't inside at the time. Close, though. Walking toward it when he stopped to talk to a friend. According to District police, another couple of minutes and they'd have swept him up with a broom."
Everything caught up and jammed behind Loren's eyes. It was all happening too fast for her to accept. The mad events splashed behind her eyes in a complexity of color, like scraps making up a backwoods bed quilt. The seams were pulling apart in all directions. She grasped the only thread that seemed to hold.
" Sal, listen carefully. Call Dirk and tell him I need-" Suddenly a shrill buzzing sound flooded her eardrum. "Can you hear me, Sal?"
The only reply to Loren's question was the interference. She swung around to complain to the communications girl, but she was gone.
Instead, there were two stewards, or rather two wrestlers in stewards' uniforms, and the first officer. He opened the door to her booth and bowed curtly.
'Will you please come with me, Congresswoman Smith. The captain would like to talk to you."
THE PILOT SET THE HELICOPTER on the ground at a small airport on the Isle of Palms near Charleston. He went through the standard shutdown procedure, running the engine at low RPM's until it cooled down. Then he climbed out, lined up one of the rotor blades and tied it to the tail boom.
His back and arms ached from the long hours in the air, and he did stretching exercises as he walked to a small office next to the landing pad. He unlocked the door and stepped inside.
A stranger sat in the tiny lobby area casually reading a newspaper. To the pilot he looked to be either Chinese or Japanese.
The newspaper was lowered, revealing a shotgun with a pistol grip and twin sawed-off barrels that ended barely four inches in front of the shells.
"What do you want?" asked the pilot stupidly.
"Information?"
"You're in the wrong place," said the pilot, instinctively raising his hands. "We're a helicopter ambulance service, not a library."
"Very witty," said the Oriental. "You also carry passengers."
"Who told you that?"
"Paul Suvorov. One of your Russian friends."
"Never heard of the guy."
"How odd. He sat next to you in the co-pilot's seat for most of yesterday."
"What do you want?" the pilot repeated, the fear beginning to crawl up his spine.
The Oriental smiled wickedly. "You have ten seconds to tell me the precise destination where you flew Suvorov and two other men.
If at the end of that time you feel stubborn, I shall blow away one of your knees. Ten seconds later you can bid goodbye to your sex life." He enforced his request by releasing the safety on the shotgun. "Countdown begins . . . now."
Three minutes later the Oriental stepped from the building and locked the door. Then he walked to a car parked nearby, climbed behind the wheel and drove toward a sandy road leading to Charleston.
The car was barely out of sight when a torrent of orange flame gushed through the thin roof of the pilot's office and spiraled into the white overcast sky.
Pitt spent the day dodging reporters and police detectives. He hin in a quiet pub called the Devil's Fork on Rhode Island Avenue and sat in a cushiony leather seat in a quiet corner staring pensively at a half-eaten Monte Cristo sandwich and a third Manh;ittan, a drink he seldom ordered.
A pert blond waitress in a micro-skirt and mesh stockings stopped by his table. "You're the most pitiful person in the place," she said with a motherly smile. "Lose your best girl or your wife?"
"Worse," said Pitt sadly. "My car."
She lain a look on him reserved for Martians and weirdos, shrugged and continued her rounds of the other tables.
Pitt sat there inly stirring the Manhattan with a cherry, scowling at nothing. Somewhere along the line he had lost his grip on things.
