The Coffin Dancer (Lincoln Rhyme 2)

It stopped abruptly.

Percey shrugged.

An instant later, she heard a voice shouting beside her, "Pull up! Go higher! Now!"

Roland Bell's hot breath was on her cheek. He was beside her, in a crouch, brandishing his cell phone.

"What?"

"There's a bomb on! Altitude bomb. It goes off when we hit five thousand feet."

"But we're above--"

"I know! Pull up! Up!"

Percey shouted, "Set power, ninety-eight percent. Call out altitude."

Without a second's hesitation, Brad shoved the throttles forward. Percey pulled the Lear into a ten-degree rotation. Bell stumbled backward and landed with a crash on the floor.

Brad said, "Five thousand two, five one five . . . five two, five thousand three, five four . . . five eight. Six thousand feet."

Percey Clay had never declared an emergency in all her years flying. Once, she'd declared a "pan-pan"--indicating an urgency situation--when an unfortunate flock of pelicans decided to commit suicide in he

r number two engine and clog up her pitot tube to boot. But now, for the first time in her career, she said, "May-day, may-day, Lear Six Niner Five Foxtrot Bravo."

"Go ahead, Foxtrot Bravo."

"Be advised, Chicago Approach. We have reports of a bomb on board. Need immediate clearance to one zero thousand feet and a heading for holding pattern over unpopulated area."

"Roger, Niner Five Foxtrot Bravo," the ATC controller said calmly. "Uhm, maintain present heading of two four zero. Cleared to ten thousand feet. We are vectoring all aircraft around you . . . Change transponder code to seven seven zero zero and squawk."

Brad glanced uneasily at Percey as he changed the transponder setting--to the code that automatically sent a warning signal to all radar facilities in the area that Foxtrot Bravo was in trouble. Squawking meant sending out a signal from the transponder to let everyone at ATC and other aircraft know exactly which blip was the Lear.

She heard Bell say into his phone, "Th'only person got close to the plane, 'cept for me and Percey, was the business manager, Ron Talbot--and, nothing personal to him, but my boys or I watched him like a hawk while he was doing the work, stood over his shoulder the whole time. Oh, and that guy delivered some of the engine parts came by too. From Northeast Aircraft Distributors in Greenwich. But I checked him out good. Even got his home phone and called his wife, had them talk--to make sure he was legit." Bell listened for a moment more then hung up. "They'll call us back."

Percey looked at Brad and at Bell, then returned to the task of piloting her aircraft.

"Fuel?" she asked her copilot. "How much time?"

"We're under our estimated. Headwinds've been good." He did the calculations. "A hundred and five minutes."

She thanked God, or fate, or her own intuition, for deciding not to refuel at Chicago, but to load enough to get them to Saint Louis, plus the FAA requirement for an additional forty-five minutes' flying time.

Bell's phone chirped again.

He listened, sighed, then asked Percey, "Did that Northeast company deliver a fire extinguisher cartridge?"

"Shit, did he put it in there?" she asked bitterly.

"Looks like it. The delivery truck had a flat tire just after it left the warehouse on the way to make that delivery to you. Driver was busy for about twenty minutes. Connecticut trooper just found a mess of what looks like carbon dioxide foam in the bushes right near where it happened."

"Goddamn!" Percey glanced involuntarily toward the engine. "And I installed the fucker myself."

Bell asked, "Rhyme wants to know about heat. Wouldn't it blow the bomb?"

"Some parts are hot, some aren't. It's not that hot by the cartridge."

Bell told this to Rhyme, then he said, "He's going to call you directly."