My head spun a bit as the FBI helicopter lifted off from the beach by the boardwalk where Varjan had shot me high in my Kevlar vest.
The bullet at short range had been enough to knock me down and out.
But not for long. I’d come around within seconds and saw Carstensen, Mahoney, and a small army of Atlantic City police officers swarming past the bullet-ridden corpse of the Hungarian assassin.
They’d tried to make me lie still and wait for the medics, but I refused and was getting woozily to my feet when Philip Stapleton, Victorious Gaming’s director of security, staggered up to us. His face and suit were covered in blood. He held a wad of bloody napkins to his head.
“Arrest him,” Carstensen said.
“No,” Stapleton said. “I had nothing to do with this.”
“Arrest him and his bosses,” she snapped.
“They’re gone,” Stapleton said. “That’s why I came to you. They left me there for dead. I came straight here after they left.”
“Where’d they go?” Mahoney demanded.
“The airport,” Stapleton said. “They have a jet.”
“Arrest him anyway. Get him to a hospital.”
“No! Believe me. I served my country. I love my country. I would never…I faked being unconscious in there. I heard everything they said. Everything.”
Which is how Stapleton came to be sitting in the jump seat across from me and Mahoney, his wrists in handcuffs, and an FBI SWAT medic working on his head wound.
“Talk,” Carstensen said.
Stapleton didn’t stop talking as we picked up speed, and the pilot attempted to call the air traffic control tower at the Atlantic City airport. I admit to being fuzzy on that flight, but everything the security director was saying fit with what we’d suspected.
The pilot called out, “Are they in a Gulfstream?”
“Yes,” Stapleton said. “Don’t let them off the ground. They can fly more than six thousand miles in that thing.”
“That’s them,” the pilot said. “They are taxiing toward the runway and ignoring air traffic control orders to turn about.”
“Move!” Carstensen shouted.
The pilot juiced the chopper to its limits, one hundred and forty-five miles an hour. Then he dropped speed and swung the bird past the airport tower.
The Gulfstream was just making the turn onto the runway when the pilot flew over the top of the jet, passed it, and hovered broadside over the runway. The jet kept coming. Carstensen slid back the side door of the chopper. Five FBI SWAT agents aimed automatic weapons at the cockpit and the pilot.
The jet stopped. The engines died. The jet’s pilot put his hands up.
We landed. The SWAT officers surrounded the jet.
“This is the FBI; open the door and come out with your hands up,” Carstensen said over the helicopter’s loudspeaker. “Now.”
Two minutes later, the airplane door slowly opened and let down the staircase.
Austin Crowley came first, blinking nervously behind his thick glasses, the fingers of both hands interlaced on his head. Crowley’s partner, Sydney Bronson, had his hands up but was openly defiant.
“What the hell is this?” he cried after agents grabbed Crowley and slammed him facedown onto the tarmac. “Why are you—”
Two agents dragged him off the staircase, threw him down beside his partner, and restrained his wrists behind his back.
I looked at Carstensen, who nodded and said, “All yours, Dr. Cross.”
“Austin Crowley, Sydney Bronson,” I said. “You are both under arrest for conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States.”