I was flying a dying aircraft when a voice came through a secret frequency—the brother I’d buried seven years ago whispered, “They needed you to take the blame.”
Chapter 4
“That can’t be there,” Riko whispered. His words came out small and broken. “We’re over the Atlantic. There is nothing within a hundred miles of us except weather and — and that is not a passenger aircraft — ”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t answer. I was watching the fighter slide closer the way a shark slides closer, unhurried, patient, taking its position off our left wing like it had been flying there my whole life, and in a terrible way it had been — in my head, in my dreams, in the last radio transmission I’d ever played in a darkened barracks room until the battery died, the one where a voice I’d buried six feet deep said Falcon Two, break! and meant don’t look at me, don’t come back, save yourself.
The fighter came in so close I could see the intake glow, the belly tank, the smudge of oil beneath the forward fuselage — and then the canopy, and the silhouette inside it.
A pilot. Dark helmet. Turned toward us slowly, like a man turning to face a window he has walked past a thousand times.
He raised one gloved hand and tapped twice against the glass.
Tap. Tap.
Follow me.
That was the signal. That was Daniel’s signal, the one he’d used on the ground at Morón when we were kids with silver wings, sneaking out to the flight line to look at the jets at midnight, tapping two fingers against his own breastbone and saying “This is how you know it’s me, Two. Two taps. Like a heartbeat.”
Riko saw my face and went very still. “He’s signaling us. What is he signaling us?”
The radio crackled again. Now the voice was different — softer, older, with a weariness underneath it that I recognized the way I recognized my own hand.
“You were told Daniel Mercer died that night, Falcon Two. You were told a lot of things.”
Tears were running down my face. I don’t remember when they started. I remember only that my voice, when I found it, was steadier than I would have believed possible.
“Prove it.”
The fighter pilot’s head tilted, almost surprised. Then he reached up, one hand leaving the stick for an instant — a casualness that could only be real, could only be him, the most arrogant, careless, brilliant flyer I ever flew against — and he pulled the oxygen mask away from his face.
Even through the darkness and the rain-streaked glass and the seven years that had carved new lines around his mouth and across his brow, I knew the face.
Daniel Mercer.
Older. Scarred. Alive.
And smiling. Smiling the way he’d smiled the morning of the last flight, the way he’d smiled across the intel briefing table when Whitlock had walked in and said “You two are going to be my last great show” — the same smile, on a face that ghosts are not supposed to have.
Then every light in our cockpit went black.
Not one at a time. All at once — the amber nav screen, the standby instruments, the overhead panel warning lights, the dim blue glow of the center console, the tiny LED on the guard radio. The black was total, swallowing the cabin behind us too, the sudden absolute dark of a theater between scenes, and through the sudden silence I heard the sound of three hundred strangers somewhere behind me going perfectly quiet, the way animals go quiet when the power behind the world falters.
Riko’s voice, high and tight in the dark: “I have no attitude. I have nothing. Maeve — ”
“Breathe,” I said. “Don’t touch anything. I’ve got it.”
I didn’t have it. I had a yoke, a seat, a darkness, and a daughter asleep four thousand miles away. But I heard, through the dying static of the guard radio, the last transmission of the night cutting through the black like a blade:
“Now you’re going to learn why your government needed you to believe I was dead.”
Then the static died, and there was only the dark, and the hum, and the impossible stillness of three hundred hearts beating at the same frightened tempo in the belly of a steel bird that had just lost its eyes.