Free Total Control by David Baldacci Page A

belt on and felt something jab him in the side. He pulled his SkyWord pager from his belt and looked guiltily at it. What if it had been his wife calling earlier? He looked at the tiny screen and his face suddenly registered disbelief.
    Flashing across the screen, the pager's headline feature told the story of a terrible tragedy: Western Airlines' early morning Flight 3223 from Washington to L.A. had crashed in the Virginia countryside; there were no survivors.
    Jason Archer couldn't catch his breath. He tore open his black metal case and frantically reached for the phone inside.
    DePazza's voice was sharp. "What the hell are you doing?"
    Jason handed DePazza the pager. "My wife thinks I'm dead. Oh, Christ. That's why she was calling. Oh, my God." Jason's fingers fumbled over the phone case, trying to open it.
    DePazza looked down at the pager. He read the digitized headline and the word "Shit" silently passed between his lips. Well, this would only accelerate the process slightly, he thought. He didn't like to deviate from the established plan, yet clearly he had no choice but to do exactly that. When he looked back up at Jason, his eyes were cold and deadly. One hand reached over and snatched the cellular phone from Jason's trembling hands. The other reached inside his jacket and reappeared, holding the compact shape of the deadly Glock directly at Jason's head.
    Jason looked up and saw the gun.
    "I'm afraid that you're not calling anybody." DePazza's eyes never left Jason's face.
    Transfixed, Jason watched DePazza reach up to his face and rug at his skin. The elaborate disguise came off piece by piece. In another moment, next to Jason sat a blond-haired man in his early thirties with a long aquiline nose and fair skin. The eyes, though, remained the same blue and chilling. His real name, although he rarely used it, was Kenneth Scales. He was a certifiable sociopath, with a twist.
    He took great pleasure in killing people, and reveled in the details that went into that terrible process. However, he never did it randomly.
    And he never did it for free.
    CHAPTER NINE
    It had taken the better part of five hours to contain the fire, and in the end the flames retreated of their own accord after having consumed everything combustible within their long reach. The local authorities were grateful only that the conflagration had raged in an empty, secluded dirt field.
    A National Transportation Safety Board "go-team," outfitted in their blue biohazard protective suits, were now slowly walking the outside perimeter of the crash while smoke billowed skyward and small pockets of obstinate flames were attacked by diligent teams of firefighters. The entire area had been cordoned off with orange and white street barricades behind which a number of anxious area residents stood and stared in the typical mixture of horrified disbelief and morbid interest. Columns of fire trucks, police cars, ambulances, dark green National Guard trucks and other emergency vehicles were stacked along both sides of the field. The EMTs stood next to their vehicles, hands in their pockets. Their services would not be needed other than as silent transports of whatever human remains, if any, could be extracted from the holocaust.
    The mayor of the nearby rural Virginia town stood next to the farmer whose land had received this most terrible intrusion from above. Behind them, two Ford pickup trucks sported "I survived Pearl Harbor" license plates. And now, for the second time in their lives, their faces carried the horror of sudden, terrible and massive death.
    "It's not a crash site. It's a goddamn crematory." The veteran NTSB investigator shook his head wearily, removed his cap emblazoned with the letters NTSB and wiped at his wrinkled brow with his other hand. George Kaplan was fifty-one years old with thinning, gray-edged hair that covered a wide head; he carried a small paunch on a five-foot-seven-inch frame. As a fighter pilot in Vietnam, then a commercial