Deadly Dozen: 12 Mysteries/Thrillers (290 page)

Normally, United States Secret Service agents were assigned this duty, and in fact there would be a Secret Service presence in the tower at Logan, but, as with government agencies everywhere, money was tight, so the bureaucrats in charge had elected to use their own people to patrol the area immediately surrounding the president in Boston, farming out the chore of monitoring the BCT to their brethren at the FBI.

As an agent with relatively low seniority, Kristin had inherited this duty, meaning she would spend the next twelve hours or more drinking coffee, eating way too much food that was way too unhealthy, and fending off the advances of air traffic controllers. It must be the temperament required to control airplanes, she thought—being responsible for giant aluminum tubes hurtling at each other at dizzying speeds all day, each with hundreds of people on board. Her limited experience with male controllers had been enough to convince her that they all thought they were God’s gift to women.

The exception, she thought as she took a tentative sip of her coffee and was pleased to discover it tasted perfect – she felt better already – seemed to be Nick Jensen.

Although they had talked for only a few minutes and the conversation had been all business, Nick seemed more humble than the typical controller, which she thought was strange because she had been told he was one of the best. But then again, finding out your wife had been murdered would certainly shake you, so maybe he was still in shock from that tragedy.

Kristin walked out of the donut shop and slid into the front seat of her car. She started toward the facility and found herself looking forward to seeing Nick again. She had reviewed the roster of controllers who would be working at the BCT when she arrived and noticed his name.

Jeez
, she thought,
what does it say about me that I’m looking forward to seeing the poor bastard whose wife just got killed?
She shook her head in disgust but couldn’t help how she felt.
Doesn’t matter anyway. It’s
going to be all business for both of us. Maybe sometime when he’s gotten over the trauma of losing his wife, we might be able to see each other socially. Who knows?

She swung off the access road and headed toward the security building at the edge of the BCT property. The guard shack was constructed from the same puke yellow bricks that had been used to erect the facility itself. She wondered whether the federal government had gotten a discount on the masonry because of its hideous color. Based on her personal experience with government service, it seemed unlikely since they never seemed to buy anything at a discount, but why else would anyone have intentionally used such a nasty shade of mustard? It was off-putting, the architectural equivalent of a grimace.

As she questioned the mental acuity of the BCT’s designer, she pulled up to the gate in her seven-year-old Monte Carlo and waited for the security guard.

Finally the rent-a-cop slouched through the door, his uniform wrinkled and filthy, with what looked like a big piece of fabric ripped off the sleeve and hanging down at his elbow.

Very strange.

Kristin had been here several times in the past, and each time previously the guard had been waiting at the door to the security building when she arrived, uniform creased and shoes shined, standing erect in an almost military fashion.

It was a big deal to these security guys to have the FBI or the Secret Service on the premises, and normally they responded in a manner very much
un
like the way this guy was acting. Kristin began to feel uneasy. Something smelled wrong.

She reached slowly under her light jacket for her service weapon, concealed in a small shoulder holster resting against the side of her breast under her left arm, but as she did so, the guard drew his own gun and jammed it into her left cheek, stopping her hand’s progress immediately.

“At least you have a little bit of sense,” the man said not unkindly, “but you definitely don’t want to put your hand anywhere near that peashooter you have under there, or I’ll be forced to blow your pretty face into a thousand tiny pieces. I guess I don’t have to tell you it won’t be so pretty then.”

“Who are you?” Kristin asked evenly.

The man smiled. “What makes you think I’m not the security dude?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe the fact that you look like a goddamned slob and handle yourself like the town drunk on a Friday night.”

The smile disappeared, and he shoved the gun into her face again. The pain blossomed. “Move your cute little ass over,” he barked.

She slid across to the passenger seat while he lowered his bulky frame into the driver’s side, his weapon never leaving its target.

He relieved her of her gun, waved an ID in front of the card reader to raise the gate, and drove into the parking lot.

Kristin watched the man warily, waiting for a chance to grab his weapon or shove open her door and roll out of the slowmoving car. “Maybe you’re unaware of this, but you’re interfering with a federal law enforcement official in the performance of her duties. What you’re doing will earn you a long stretch in prison with some very unpleasant people. It’s not too late to stop and avoid any really major problems. I suggest you give that some serious thought.”

The man laughed good-naturedly, not exactly the response Kristin had been going for. “Interfering. That’s a good one. If I blow your fucking head off right here where you sit, would that be considered interfering, too?”

Kristin said nothing, just glared at the man as he wheeled her car into a slot next to a large dark vehicle, the two cars looking lonely and lost in the huge, mostly empty lot. Far across the pavement, much nearer to the BCT entrance, four other vehicles sat in a neat row, presumably the cars belonging to the employees working the Saturday night mid shift. One of them was probably Nick Jensen’s.

The man shut down the engine and pocketed Kristin’s keys. “Get out,” he commanded, so she did. Then he walked Kristin across the lot and into the BCT, his gun pressed firmly against her spine the entire way, as if she might forget he was holding it.

She didn’t forget.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

The beeping noise signifying that Nick’s ID card had successfully unlocked the door to the ETG lab was even louder than he had feared. It was magnified a bit by the fact that the big building was almost completely empty. It sounded like someone had depressed the trigger on an air horn. He knew if any of the terrorists had heard it he would likely be dead within the next five minutes.

Maybe less than five.

Maybe a lot less.

He crept into the dark room and closed the door behind him, being careful to make as little noise as possible. The irony of trying to close a door silently after the loud electronic wail was not lost on Nick, but he figured there was no point in taking unnecessary chances. Even if the intruders had heard the short burst of noise, maybe they wouldn’t be able to track down where it had come from when they came to investigate.

Nick shuffled backward in the dark until the backs of his legs came in contact with the console in front of the training scopes. The room was long and narrow, maybe thirty feet by eight feet, so he didn’t have far to go. He stood motionless and counted to one hundred, listening to his heart thudding in his ears. It sounded so loud that he figured they might be able to find him based on that noise alone.

After two or three minutes, when no one came bursting through the door with guns blazing, Nick began to relax. He decided they had not heard the buzzing of the card reader after all. He risked turning on the interior light; there was no point in sneaking in here if he was just going to cower like a cornered rabbit. He had work to do.

The plan—Nick knew calling his idea a plan was giving it a lot more credibility than it deserved, since it was really not much more than a vague notion forged out of desperation—was to reprogram the radar scopes out in the ops room to show computer-generated traffic rather than actual live traffic. He would run a training scenario on the TRACON scopes in hopes of confusing the gunman.

Nick knew there were plenty of holes in his so-called plan. The biggest one was that although it was technically possible to run an ETG feed onto the ops room scopes, he didn’t have the slightest clue how to do it. He was no computer genius; in fact, Lisa had handled all of the routine maintenance on their desktop at home as well as both of their laptops.

Then, if he even figured out how to force the fake targets on to the live scopes, he had to find a way to let Fitz know the plan, so his friend could transmit on radio frequencies that weren’t in use. There was no point in forcing the phony traffic onto Fitz’s scope if Air Force One was going to call on the actual radio frequency and ask what the hell was going on.

And
then
, even if he managed to figure a way around all of those problems, there was the small issue of what would happen to the president’s plane if the BCT was suddenly off-line. The Boston Air Route Traffic Control Center—the facility controlling the high-altitude traffic throughout New England that would be handing Air Force One over to the BCT—could not simply give up the airplane without having accomplished a radar handoff.

A
radar handoff
was the term used when one controller told a controller working a different sector, either via automated methods or over a landline, that the airplane in question had been radar identified, and the receiving controller was prepared to accept separation responsibility for that aircraft. Until a handoff had been achieved, which would obviously never happen if the radar scopes at the BCT were no longer displaying live traffic, Boston Center would not be able to permit Air Force One to enter BCT’s airspace.

Under Nick’s hastily conceived scenario, the president’s plane would get diverted to another airport if Boston Center could not accomplish a handoff and if they were unable to raise the BCT on any of the available landlines to transfer control of Air Force One. There would be hell to pay until everyone figured out what had happened, but at least the president, not to mention everyone else on board Air Force One, would still be alive.

There was another glaring drawback to Nick’s desperate plan, too. It didn’t necessarily ensure that anyone inside the BCT would survive—quite the opposite in all probability. But if nothing else, at least the terrorists’ assassination plan would be thwarted. That was the best-case scenario, the result Nick was hoping for if everything proceeded smoothly. He tried not to think about the fate of himself and Fitz and Ron.

Now, though, standing inside the ETG lab, fearing that an armed lunatic might come smashing through the door at any moment and shoot him, Nick reached the conclusion that even his minimal level of optimism had been groundless. The plan was falling apart before he could even get it rolling.

Nick had no idea how to reprogram the ETG scopes.

He desperately tried to remember the layout of the room. Fully certified controllers, unless they suffered an operational error—a situation where two airplanes were permitted to get closer to each other than standard separation allowed, known in controller parlance as a “deal”—only visited this room for refresher training on various emergency scenarios, none of which had ever involved trying to prevent a group of ruthless terrorists from blowing up Air Force One.

Nick had never been charged with an operational error, so he had not had occasion to spend very much time at all in this strangely shaped room. In fact, he could not even remember the last time he had been in here, but he was quite certain he had merely sat back and half dozed while the controller with the lowest seniority in the group ran the emergency scenario.

Nick had a vague notion that there was a set of operator manuals stored in a small bookcase on the far left side of the room. He hoped the set of books included a programming guide that would walk him through the steps to necessary accomplish his task.

He searched frantically through the detritus of dozens of training sessions, finding discarded partially written training sheets, a couple of pens, even a half-full cup of old coffee with a chunk of greenish brown mold floating in the middle like a tiny island. There was a computer—you couldn’t go anywhere in the modern world without running across a computer, Nick thought—but the manuals he thought he remembered were nowhere to be seen.

Nick swore under his breath and felt a bead of sweat trickle down the back of his neck. Time was rapidly running out, and he was no closer to putting a stop to the president’s assassination than he had been when the terrorists had first stormed the BCT, an event that felt like it had taken place days ago, rather than the hour or so it had actually been.

He had been dreaming anyway if he thought he could piece together some sort of MacGyver-like phony traffic scenario that would fool the guy holding the gun to Fitz’s head. He had heard the man tell Fitz that he was more than a little familiar with ATC procedures and phraseology. He probably would have seen through the ruse immediately, and then things would have been worse than they were right now. If that was even possible.