Backhouse wasn’t the only one grappling for a solution during freefall. Her bravado was only pissing everyone off at a time when she needed to keep them talking. As a cop who had experience in hostage negotiations, Heat knew that the longer this played out, the better the odds they had to survive it. So, Nikki shifted her approach, not merely stalling to prolong the agony, calmed the conversation, and tried to forge a sympathetic connection.
“Let’s all take a step back and look at what’s happening here, OK?” she began. “Wilton, I think we all feel like this is a knot we’ve got to untie, right? You said yourself that you’re trying to ad-lib your way out. We all know you’re a smart guy, but if you admitted it, I’m guessing every step you’re taking feels like you’re only pulling the knot tighter. Look around at this moment. Is this working for you?” She took it as a hopeful sign that he actually did survey the tableau. He scanned the two people before him, bound and bleeding, then his volatile accomplice, a problem to be dealt with later; then he looked down at the Mossberg shotgun in his gloved hands. He came back to stare at her, and she urged, “Come on, let’s figure a way out of this. Let me help.” Nikki saw in his eyes a hint of the weary dog-chasing-its-tail regret she had witnessed in so many perps caught in a situation gone south. They were a long way from done, but that small opening could be the first step to a resolution.
But then he shook the moment off. “There may not exactly be a proven metric for this but, no, I think this has a shot.”
“Fuck yeah!” said Maloney.
All Nikki could say to herself was “Fuck.”
“We’ll have to see.” Backhouse spread his arms wide to frame the vast crash hall. “I came up with doing this here for a couple of reasons. First was just panic, I’ll admit that. I couldn’t have bodies or residue of same at my rental in Queens. But this place…” He surveyed the space again, this time with too much attention on that car on the launch mechanism. “This could be a win-win.”
“That, I’m not getting,” said Heat.
“It won’t be your problem. But since you wonder,” he wiggled the fingers of his blue gloves. “I was never here tonight. I’m going to tie your crash to Tangier Swift.”
Rook asked, “How?” Then he braced for another shoulder blow that didn’t come.
“Not sure. For now, I’m thinking that drone back at my place is somehow going to turn up hidden on Swift’s yacht. Or maybe in his car.”
Maloney’s face lit up. “I can make that happen.” Nikki tried to mask her disdain for the ex-cop who could probably do a TED Talk on how to salt crime scenes with phony evidence.
“Seems viable,” said the professor, more to himself than anyone else. “And if it doesn’t nail Swift, I tried.” He shrugged. “You improvise, you get solutions. It’s the power of instinct.”
Backhouse left them to wait in Maloney’s charge while he dashed off to the control booth. From the sure moves he made up there, Heat could tell he had observed or even supervised test launches before. Certainly, at least one—Fred Lobbrecht’s earlier in the week. Backhouse left the booth and knelt behind the car at a cream-colored steel patch bay that had an octopus of cables running from it, then down through holes in the floor, accessing the hydraulic propulsion system in the basement. After he had connected several leads and snapped four toggles in succession, he stood. The forensic engineer spoke matter-of-factly, but his voice echoed across the immaculate white floor of the hangar. “Locked and loaded,” he said.
The muzzle of a gun, either her own 9mm or the Smith & Wesson M&P Compact .40 Heat saw in Timothy Maloney’s shoulder rig, poked hard enough into her back to make a bruise. “You heard him. Let’s get this done.” Beside her, Rook stumbled forward from the rough shove he got as encouragement.