Free The Stolen Gospels by Brian Herbert

commands transmitted via GPS and voice recognition modules to the flight systems.
    The steps clicked back into place against the fuselage, thus sealing the passenger compartment. Dixie Lou heard the faint but shrill sound of jet engines, then distant sirens, which got louder by the moment. Looking through a porthole she saw the blue lights of a police car as it raced along a road parallel to the airfield.
    “They aren’t after us,” Dixie Lou murmured to herself. She watched the car as it kept going.
    Lori sat in a shoulder harness on the seat behind her, injured from being struck with the handgun by Dixie Lou. Blood matted her forehead and temple. Her eyelids twitched, and her mouth turned down in apparent displeasure.
    “It won’t be long,” Dixie Lou promised, though she didn’t think Lori could hear her. “We’re taking the polar route.”
    The jet was rolling ahead, gaining speed. Through the porthole, Dixie Lou saw they were on the runway.
    The injuries on Dixie Lou’s hairline and neck had stopped bleeding, but blood had caked around them. She thought about how disarming her own appearance was, with a gentle, kindly smile and eyes that could exude compassion . . . if she wanted them to. It was all camouflage, concealing her deadly purposes.
    Through a porthole, she watched the lights beside the runway blur as the jet gained speed. She felt a sudden thrust which pressed her against the back of the seat, and an emptiness in her stomach. They were airborne. The jet banked and flew north over Elliott Bay, with the tall, illuminated buildings of Seattle and the Space Needle visible out her window.
    Built of composite materials, the plane incorporated the latest military stealth features into its design, so that it did not absorb or reflect natural light, thus reducing its detectable radar signature. It also emitted very little infrared radiation, noise, or vibration.
    She glanced back at Lori. The girl’s face was turned toward her, and the generous lips, which previously had been downturned in displeasure, now turned up a little, almost in a smile.
    Maybe she knows something I don’t , Dixie Lou thought.
    She looked at her watch. A few minutes after eleven.
    * * *
    Lori dreamed she saw a brilliant point of light approaching her from space, with a dark, barely visible presence behind it . . . following the light. The linked entities drew closer.
    She felt paralyzed, unable to move.
    The girl cried out in terror, but no one heard her.
    * * *
    A while later she woke up, with an intense headache. Events were hazy to her, and nightmarish. Gunfire . . . men in uniforms . . . Had it really happened? She wasn’t sure. Where was her mother?
    She experienced a queasy feeling in her stomach and had the gradual, increasing impression that she was on an airplane. In the low light she thought she confirmed this, making out the outlines of a cabin interior and portholes. But through the nearest window she saw distant stars, and no lights below, only an inky blackness that gave her an odd sensation, as if she were in space, far from earth. That didn’t seem possible. This had to be a jet. She heard the smooth drone of what she thought must be engines.
    “Mom?” she called out. “Are you here?” She struggled to free herself from the safety restraint, but with her muddled thoughts couldn’t figure it out. Touching wounds on her forehead and temple, she winced in pain.
    A noise up front caused her to look that way. A hatch opened in the forward bulkhead, and a dark form emerged. The person turned and opened a cupboard on one side of the aisle. With the forward hatch still open, Lori saw it was Dixie Lou Jackson. Beyond her, through the hatch, a bank of green-and-orange lights blinked, colors like those on the dashboard of the van, like those on the strange sword-cross design on the bulkhead.
    It all happened , Lori thought, as a dismal, sinking realization came over her.
    She searched in the illumination of the forward