True Fiction (Ian Ludlow Thrillers #1)(2)

Jenkins grasped his sidestick and hit the disconnect button, too. But the autopilot didn’t disengage and his sidestick wouldn’t respond, either. It didn’t make any sense. He felt his heart drop into his stomach like a sandbag.



Thane saw the plane in the distance, heading his way like an obedient dog returning to its master. He typed in a new heading: 010 degrees.



The captain and the first officer were both pulling hard on their sidesticks, desperate to get a response, when the aircraft inexplicably turned east toward the high-rise hotels of Waikiki and began a fast, steady descent. The action meant more to Jenkins than an unexpected and terrifying navigational change. It was the cold touch of an unseen hand.

“Tell the tower we have an emergency,” Jenkins ordered Shoop and continued to hit the autopilot button while he wrestled with the sidestick. “I have the aircraft.”

The captain wasn’t saying he had regained control. He was stating that he was now the only one attempting to fly the plane. This acknowledgment prevented two people from trying to fly the plane at the same time.

But that was exactly what was happening.

“Mayday, Mayday. TransAmerican 976 is declaring an emergency,” Shoop said, his voice cracking. “We are not in control of the aircraft.”

“But someone is,” Jenkins said.

Shoop looked at him, baffled. “What do you mean?”

“We leveled off before the turn. That’s a decision, not a computer glitch.”

The captain was right about that.



The plane was heading straight for Waikiki. Thane could see it from where he was sitting. So could the tourists on chaise lounges around him. The tourists were getting to their feet, staring at the sky. Even the kids in the pools were beginning to realize something was very wrong. All eyes were fixed on the plane. Nobody noticed what was on the assassin’s MacBook screen. He tapped the up arrow on his keyboard, increasing the plane’s airspeed to 350 knots.

Now the people on Waikiki Beach could see and hear the plane coming in fast and low, only a hundred feet off the ground. Thousands of people on the sand scrambled in sheer terror, with no idea where to go. Thane saw the mass panic from afar. It reminded him of when he was a kid and liked to drop lit matches into anthills.



In the airplane’s cockpit, Shoop was frozen by the sight of the rapidly approaching Honolulu skyline in front of him. But for Captain Jenkins, time slowed down and his mind cleared, even as the frantic air traffic controller was screaming “Pull up! Pull up!” in his ear and the altitude alarm wailed. He was focused on the problem. The autopilot had control of the plane. Someone had control of the autopilot. How could he stop it? The answer was so simple.

Kill the technology.

Jenkins hit a slew of buttons, shutting down all of the plane’s computer systems. The system reverted to manual control and then he was flying an old-fashioned stick-and-rudder airplane. He felt the sidestick come alive in his hand like a startled, pissed-off animal.

“I have the plane!” he yelled.

Jenkins pulled back the stick, lifting the plane into a steep climb. But he didn’t see any blue sky in front him. All he saw was the twentieth floor of the Hyatt Regency. It was too late.



The fuselage plowed right through the center of the hotel in an enormous fireball and the aircraft’s wings were sheared off by the adjoining buildings. A chain reaction of explosions erupted as the flaming wreckage and toppled buildings spread the destruction inland. A massive, roiling cloud of fire, glass, and rubble sprawled out in all directions, covering the beach and sending people rushing into the water in a futile effort to escape the devastation.

The ground beneath Doric Thane shook as if the long-dead Diamond Head volcano were about to blow. Panic broke out among the people around him, which he thought was stupid, since they were obviously a safe distance from the crash and the death cloud. Instead, they should have been celebrating their good luck.

The assassin closed his MacBook, tucked it under one arm, and got to his feet, observed by no one amid all the senseless screaming and crying. He picked up his cocktail and was pleased to discover that it hadn’t lost its chill. He walked casually away, his back to the terrified tourists and the carnage, and sipped his lava flow. It was cold and sweet.

This was how to kill people.





CHAPTER TWO

Seattle, Washington. July 17. 3:00 p.m. Pacific Standard Time.

The impeccably tailored Tom Ford tuxedo fit Clint Straker’s muscular, six-foot frame like a second skin and showed no sign of the two knives and the garrote sewn into the lining. He was one of the two hundred guests at a garden party on the back lawn of international shipping magnate Martin Hung’s massive lakefront estate. They were all there to honor Hung on his fifty-fifth birthday. Straker was there to make sure Hung didn’t celebrate his fifty-sixth.

“Hung may be the leader of the world’s largest sex slavery ring but you have to admire his beautiful home and its feng shui,” said Kenny Wu, Straker’s local contact and the man who’d secured him an invitation to the party. Wu’s tuxedo was one size too big for his bony body and made him look like a ridiculously overdressed scarecrow. “See how the house is tucked into the hillside and faces the water? That creates an unobstructed path for the chi.”

Straker’s gaze was on a beautiful Asian woman in a white dress so sheer that she might as well have been wearing nothing at all. “Chi?”