It was difficult to escape custody when you were taken into custody while in low Earth orbit. Dragonelle had learned that the hard way. No quick-change masks and Mission: Impossible disguises on space cruisers - or on the landing strip, for that matter. Not that it mattered when you had N-Tek-issue cuffs on your wrists and ankles and three secret agents watching you like the proverbial hawks.
So Kat wasn't surprised that Dragonelle had been hauled off to prison, nor that they'd managed to keep her there. She was surprised that Dragonelle was being flown into one of D.C.'s airports. On a clandestine, very hush-hush private flight, of course, but letting a known terrorist of Dragonelle's stature anywhere near the nation's capital seemed kind of stupid.
Oh well. Helps me out, Kat thought, watching the small jet taxi down the runway. Standing beside her, Mr. Boring Suit Spy was looking quite bland and middle-aged, and a little bored himself. She kept the smirk off her face with considerable effort and ignored the small, guilty knot in her stomach with the same.
Wait a few minutes, she wanted to tell him; I'll give you all the excitement you can stand.
The jet slowed to a stop and the stairs were lowered. Kat and the spook hustled across the tarmac; she was on board before the engines whined down. Inside, it looked like any other private, corporate jet: lots of beige, lots of leg room. The only flaw in the image was the heavily restrained woman in a bright orange prison jumpsuit and the five heavily armed marshals guarding her.
"Wait," Kat said. "Something about this looks familiar. Oh, yeah - you in handcuffs. How's prison? Get any tattoos?"
"Well, well. Agent Ryan," Dragonelle said, darkly and dryly amused. "My money was on Steel. I didn't know you had so much... influence."
"You learn something new every day." Kat elbowed past one of the guards to stand directly in front of the terrorist. She and the dragon weren't archfoes, except as their loyalties made them; that aforementioned little space fiasco had been their one encounter. Didn't mean they didn't hate each other. "Here's something else: I need your help."
"Now, that is new." She tilted her head, black eyes narrowing beneath the lame but permanently attached gold plate on her forehead. Downside to those cybernetic implants - no upgrades for fashion. "Whatever could it be?"
Kat, despite not caring one whit about the state of her fingernails, began to minutely examine them all the same. "I need to find John Dread in a hurry. I've got ten bucks says you know where he is."
Dragonelle's eyes narrowed further to dangerously glinting slits, but the amused tone remained. "If I knew, you'd be among the last to find out, Ryan."
"Uh-huh." She glanced at the spook, standing like portly statuary behind the security team, then back at Dragonelle. "What if I told you that I need you to show me where he is?"
The other woman's face went carefully blank. After a momentary pause, she said, "That might be different."
She shoots, she scores. As predicted. Freedom was an awfully big carrot to dangle in any prisoner's face, and Dragonelle had been desperate to get to Dread before his disappearance and/or demise.
Kat was getting a heck of a lot of practice at disguising her smug triumphs. This one she masked with a casual nod at the marshals and a yet-more casual, "How about we finish this conversation on a different plane? Flight to... Paris, maybe?"
"Paris is very nice this time of year," Dragonelle said mildly. She made no move to resist the marshals as they undid enough of her restraints to let her stand and walk (more like shuffle) towards the open air. She didn't make any move to escape, either, as the whole parade trooped down the stairs. Instead, ever the chameleon, she looked suddenly small and meek and delicate beneath the orange suit and metal chains.
Yeah, the dragon was all innocent vanilla - a docile, gentle lamb. When she wanted to be.
Kat wasn't fooled. Neither was anybody else. They were all expecting Dragonelle to bolt as soon as her feet hit the tarmac.
They weren't expecting the plane to detonate in a fiery whoosh behind them. They weren't expecting smoke bombs to go off all around. They weren't expecting someone to slice through Dragonelle's restraints with a pen laser, grab her, and sprint towards the grassy swath on the other side of the runway.
And they for sure weren't expecting that someone to be Kat Ryan.
"Is this your idea of a joke?" Dragonelle asked as they ran.
"Only a cosmic one." Kat resisted the urge to glance over her shoulder at the fireball, the choking, blinding clouds of dense white smoke, the alarms and sirens and chaos. In a few seconds the marshals would stagger clear, figure out where they'd gone, and start shooting; she wanted to see how soon bullets would be zinging towards her, but at the same time, she really didn't. Instead she pulled her silver N-Tek headset out of her pocket and slipped it on. "Berto! Fire it up!"
"I can't believe I'm helping you do this," Berto's voice muttered in her ear.
The Hawk suddenly melted into view, engines winding up and canopy sliding back. Kat closed the last few meters and jumped into the pilot's seat without looking to see if Dragonelle would follow.
Dragonelle, having half a brain, jumped into the back seat.
Kat flipped the switches and pushed the buttons that reactivated the manual controls. "Well, you're all done now, Martinez. How's things?" she added, not wanting to say, Is Josh dead yet from nanoprobe failure or what? in front of a woman who would've done a jig to hear it.
"The same," he said tersely. "Move fast. And vaya con Dios."
Kat twisted around to look at Dragonelle occupying the rear of the jet and snorted. "Not on this flight."
Berto disconnected; she tugged the headset off again and closed the canopy. The stealth mode reactivated as soon as it snicked shut and she stopped worrying about getting shot. "Please fasten your seatbelts and grab the airsick bag. Our express flight to Paris is taking off."
The VTOL kicked in nice and smooth, like the Hawk hadn't been collecting dust in UN Secretary General Mari Kaita's embassy's garage since the FBI shutdown, like it hadn't given her fits flying it down from NYC that morning after her red-eye flight up to the Big Apple - making her almost late to her 7:15 AM meeting with Jeff's old CIA friend.
Who, she could see as they ascended, was standing on the tarmac with the angry and embarrassed marshals (not to mention every firefighter, cop, and paramedic in Virginia and Maryland), no doubt trying to figure out how she'd slipped all that plastic explosive past security.
I rock, she thought, not unhappily. And her guilty conscience tacked on, Yeah, OK - but now you're breaking the law.
"Come over to the Dark Side after all, Ryan?" Dragonelle said behind her, voice rippling with amusement, curiosity, and just a hint of homicidal desperation.
Kat rolled her eyes. "Right. Because I want a metal plate in my head, too."
Dragonelle hmphed.
"The plane's set to explode if anyone except me tries to pilot it," Kat said, getting the preliminaries out of the way. "DNA scan - you know. There's a change of clothes under the seat if you want to lose the Little Miss Federal Penitentiary look."
There was rustling as Dragonelle moved around, and then a sharp noise of displeasure. "Pink? I'd rather wear orange."
The dragon had taste; Kat had to give her that. Still - "Orange makes you look fat."
"Hmph."
