Jet lay still in the crawlspace, ears searching for any hint of movement in the corridor below. A door had slammed on the opposite end, far from the room where she was being held captive, but there had been no further sounds for a full minute. She rubbed her wrists where the cuffs had abraded her skin and, after confirming that there were no signs of life beneath her, made her move.
She pried up a square and slid it to the side, lowered her legs through the gap, and dropped silently to the floor. She glanced back up at the gaping hole in the ceiling and then took off at a sprint, making for the distant door that led, hopefully, to freedom.
Jet had nearly made it when a shout echoed from behind her – the familiar voice of the fat cop, this time beyond agitated.
“Stop or I’ll shoot!”
She wrenched the door open and threw herself through it, not waiting to see whether the cop was bluffing. She landed hard on a stairwell landing and was faced with her first difficult decision: up or down. When the cops had brought her into the terminal, they’d been on the ground floor, which meant that the down option likely led to a basement – potentially promising if it held a series of maintenance and equipment rooms she could vanish into, but also a possible dead end from which there was no escape.
Her decision made, she bolted up the stairs to the next landing and pushed the door open. Another hall, this time lined with administrative offices. Two young men holding documents gaped at her open-mouthed from a doorway as she raced by, covering the span in moments, and disappeared through another door.
Jet found herself back in the terminal, on a second-floor section with first-class lounges, bars, gift shops, and retail stores catering to travelers. She slowed as she neared the escalator, hoping to blend in with the other passengers on the steps, but abandoned that idea when the cop’s whistle shrieked through the terminal, causing everyone’s heads to swivel as one toward the source of the sound.
She pushed a woman out of the way, leapt onto the stainless steel dividing platform, and slid to the bottom, landing on her feet. Jet was running flat out the moment she hit the ground, making for the exit, ignoring the puzzled stares of the few police near the ticket counters, who clearly hadn’t been briefed about the officially sanctioned kidnapping underway.
The whistle pierced the air again, and she changed course for the nearest entry doors, closer than she would have liked to where the fat cop was charging at her down the escalator, but she didn’t want to risk one of the other cops playing hero and getting involved in the chase while she was still inside the terminal. She cleared the glass doors and tore straight at a seventies-era Peugeot coupe, the nearest car in sight. A tall, earnest youth in fashionably distressed jeans and a blue sweater was placing a suitcase on the curb as a young woman looked on appreciatively. She was tiptoeing to kiss him when Jet knocked him aside and slid behind the wheel.
“Hey!” he yelled, too surprised for a critical moment to react with anything but an outraged cry. By the time he was moving toward her it was too late, and Jet had popped the clutch and was driving off, trailing exhaust and poorly combusted fuel.
The rearview mirror was cracked, as was the windshield, and she cursed her luck at having commandeered the most decrepit car in Pristina. The engine felt like it was only firing on two of its four cylinders, and her worst expectations were confirmed when she floored the accelerator and felt nothing for her effort but increased vibration and a howl from the hood like a wounded mud cow.
Jet was clearing the airport grounds when she spotted the first police lights behind her. She needed to get off the main road immediately or she’d be dead meat, thanks to French automotive engineering. She turned onto a single-lane frontage road and slammed her palm against the horn as an overloaded lorry bore down on her in a slow-motion game of chicken, only to be rewarded by an anemic quack that would have shamed a sick duck. Jet twisted the wheel at the last possible second and gritted her teeth as the side of the big truck sheared away her side mirror and most of the paint on the driver’s side in a shower of sparks. The truck tore off the old car’s rear bumper as a parting gesture, and then she was beyond it, shaken but unharmed.