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A moment later, a man wearing a cap, sunglasses, headphones, and a reflective vest appeared in the doorway. He nodded at Marie, who slipped out.
“What’s going on?” Sylvia asked.
Hugo squeezed her hand. “Stay here.” He rose and walked toward the baggage handler, who nodded at him.
“There’s a disturbance at security check,” the man said in French. He was probably the Spartan Guard from Ottoman, based on the Turkish accent. “I can’t enter the public areas of the terminal.” He gestured to his uniform. “Marie is going to assess.”
“You think it’s someone coming after us?”
“It sounds like a fool objecting to taking off his shoes.” The man shrugged. “But we must be cautious.”
“What’s happening?” Sylvia asked.
The worry in her voice made his heart hurt. Hugo returned to her, urging her back into her seat. “There’s something happening at the security check. Marie is going to investigate, but that man is one of us, and he will take her place as guard until she comes back.”
Hugo looked out the window in time to see Lancelot, Eric, and Nikolas disappear into the far-right garage-style door used by the baggage handlers to access the ground floor of the terminal, and the baggage belts and storage areas that weren’t accessible to the public. They’d made it across the bare expanse of the tarmac, into the cover provided by the building.
From there they’d use an employees-only maintenance hallway to move quickly through the building without ever entering the public part of the airport. The ambulance would be waiting at the curb, away from most other vehicles because the gates at this end of the building weren’t in use by any airlines at this time of day.
Once Alicia and Nikolas were in the ambulance, Lancelot and Eric would come back to the plane. They’d wait a few minutes, and then they’d grab Sylvia’s luggage. Then he, Sylvia, Eric, Lancelot, and Marie would enter the airport, mingle with the other arriving passengers, go through the requisite checks and passport controls, and then exit and wait to be picked up like all the other passengers, except their car would be armored.
Sylvia sagged in her seat as the stretcher with her former mentor disappeared into the terminal building. Hugo kissed the side of her head.
“We have a few minutes,” he whispered.
Sylvia turned to him, eyes widening, her lips parting, exposing the wet, coral interior of her mouth.
Hugo touched her cheek. “Come here and I will kiss you.”
“Can we do that? I mean, without Lancelot?”
“Can we? Of course. It might make him mad.” Hugo waggled his brows.
“Sexy, ravish-us-in-punishment mad, or hurt-feelings mad?” Sylvia asked.
“The first one.”
“Plane make-out!” She leapt out of her chair, into his lap. There was a bit of forced frivolity to the moment, and Hugo knew they were both thinking about, and worried about, Lancelot. He suspected Sylvia wanted the closeness, the comfort of being held in his arms, more than anything. Still, a little make-out session would distract them both from their fears until Lancelot was back. Hugo grabbed her ass, hauling her hips against his abdomen as she straddled him so he could bury his face between her breasts. Sylvia’s left hand tangled in his hair and she giggled.
Then the bomb detonated.
The ground shook, the plane rocking hard to one side, as if they’d hit turbulence, but they were on the ground.
Sylvia screamed as she was thrown off-balance. She would have flipped over the arm of the chair and fallen into the aisle if Hugo hadn’t wrapped his arms around her.
The shock wave had preceded the sound of the detonation by fractions of a second. The sound of the blast was nearly physically painful—a horrible pressure against his ears and lungs.
Hugo held Sylvia tight, but turned to look out the window of the plane in time to see the right end of the terminal building collapse.
* * *
He couldn’t hear. Actually, he could hear—a horrible ringing that would have given him a splitting headache if a chunk of flying concrete hadn’t already taken care of that.
Bomb. Just like in Rome. Bellator Dei.
The mastermind had known they were coming. Known they had Alicia.
Lancelot knew he was at least partially in shock because minus the ringing ears and a vague burning feeling in his right leg, he wasn’t hurting too bad. He was lying on his stomach in the ground-level service area of the Isle of Man airport. He’d landed partially on a large coil of yellow hose. To his left, a line of open-topped baggage carts waited to be driven out to newly arrived planes.
