He grabs the two passenger lists we haven't used from Perez, and hands them to Crane without looking at them. I don't offer up the older two.
"You're on 7 now, permanently.," he tells Perez. "Next time I catch you at 2 or Bradley it will be a suspension. Report to main today, they're behind on data entry and can use your help."
The ever professional Perez says a simple, "Yes, sir." Then, "What about the lists, sir."
"Crane is staying. He'll check them."
"Thank you, sir."
I start to walk to Perez when he points a stubby hairy finger at me. "You go home."
"Sir?" I do my best Perez impersonation, and my best politely puzzled expression. His first ever acknowledgment of my existence is not going well.
"
Go home
. That's an order. Terminal 7 starting your next shift."
"Yes, sir."
"Your worst crime," he's ignoring me and talking to Perez again, "may be making this new reservist think that this was good police work."
I want to say something, but it would end my brief career as a reserve officer, so I walk toward the men's room. The three of them exit, stage left, and I hop over to Lufthansa, get my artifact, and thank the Fraulein, who, it turns out, is from Van Nuys.
The package gives me bad vibes, I know it's evil, but not exactly how. I meet Jen for Italian food, and then eat her for dessert back at my place. I don't tell her I got sent home early by the principal, or that I have evil hiding in the back of my closet. After we're asleep, Fog Dude tries to tell me something, but Halloween puts an end to him before he can get even one word out. I love that cat.
Perez isn't at the terminal in the morning on my way to Kona, McConnell and Johnson are. Johnson tells me that the captain decided to extend Kiana's stay at main, and even took her phone away for the day. My fault, really, I should not have told her to hold back, though I would not have evil tissue paper in my closet if I hadn't. I send Kiana an I'm sorry text.
I ask him if he knows anything about the incoming passengers at Bradley yesterday. He says that he doesn't, and confides that there was a massive security camera failure yesterday, all video at Bradley before noon was lost. Which means no video of any of the arriving persons of interest, no video of Perez and I being yelled at, but also no video of me removing the whatever it is.
Opening the tissue would violate protocol, so I just let it sit. My fingerprint training, limited though it is, assures me that we won't get anything from the tissue, which was probably the point, and there may be all sorts of things on the inside that could be disturbed by opening.
Saturday night I'm home, only to confirm that my girlfriend has been spending time with my partner. Jen picks me up at dispatch, and spends the trip home, plus half of sex, telling me about Perez's week. Strangely, Jen blames me for Perez's exile to paperwork, but she says Perez is adamant it's her own fault. I take the better part of valor, and say nothing.
In the morning, she reminds me that she told me months ago about a trip to D.C. to visit the big boys, starting Tuesday. I ask her if she's driving, she replies that she's drinking. Five hours on an airplane. She'll be a vegetable by the time she gets to the east coast. The worst part is she's not even flying my airline.
Thoughts hit me that I can't tell her, or Perez, but make the light smile.
Perez is at my parent's house for dinner. She and Jen hug like long lost sisters. It takes some doing, but I get Kiana alone on the back porch and tell her what's in my closet. She hugs me like I'm a long lost sister. Then she loses herself in thought. It's one of the things I like about her, and about me. Neither one of us feels the need to talk if we don't have something to say. Finally, she looks at me.
"I agree there's no point in looking for prints. What would you say to running it through an x-ray machine tomorrow?"
"I'd say, what time and which machine?"
"Seven a.m., checked baggage area for Terminal 7. I somehow got another week at main, so I have to be there by eight."
"I'm sorry, my fault." I am, and it is. I hope I sounded as sincere as I feel.
"No it's not. They should care about what's going on in their airport. And, even if it was, the package more than makes up for it." She pauses. "Have you told anyone else about it?"
"No."
"Good. Don't." This time it's withholding evidence, not information, but she's a bear locked onto the bee hive, and she's not letting go until she gets the honey. Hardens my resolve to carry out my latest secret plan. Just then, mom calls us to eat.
Drop Jen off at work, and then head over to the airport. The TSA guys are willing to do anything Perez wants, probably even dive through the x-ray machine. We get a nice clear view of what's under the tissue, which creates more questions than it answers.
It looks like a spray nozzle, but not the kind you'd use to water plants at home, more the fire department type, only it's maybe 8 inches long, with three small valves of different sizes at one end, which combine into one nozzle on the other, with a square two inch segment in the middle, the rest of it round. That's it. No obvious markings, nothing else in the box. Perez hands it back to me and tells me to hide it.
"Go," she says, "Don't get caught." There's a worried look in her eyes, "Air Force, it's more than our jobs if we mess this up."
"We're not going to frak this." She hits my arm and I leave.
I also make a decision. If it's going to get someone in trouble, it ought to be me. Sitting in the parking lot, I carefully cut the tape that's holding the tissue closed, and remove what looks to be a heavy brass fitting, shiny and new. I put it on the floor in front of my seat.
Starbuck and I head for the Long Beach public library, not for books, but so I can surf the Internet without anyone knowing it's me. My trips to Korea have not been just for the exercise. Thanks to Captain Amos, I started thinking about doing something in Iran, but as a first ‘change the world' exercise, Iran is too complicated. I can't fly supersonic over land without leaving a trail of tears, or at least shattered windows, behind me. I don't want to spend seven hours getting there and seven hours getting back, plus I need to leave here in the dark and be there in the dark. My entry level operations, I believe, need to leave no trace back to the good ol' US of A.
North Korea is cleaner. It's an easy two hour flight from LA, and better yet, a quick hour from Hawai'i. It's five hours earlier there, so a 1 a.m. departure from Kona gets me in at 9 p.m., and I'd have about three hours with a return just before sunrise. Now if I can just identify the nuclear weapons sites and figure out what to do about them, I'm set.
It is totally amazing what you can learn on the Internet. Buildings, pictures, what everyone thinks is going on there all laid out for the normal person to read and print. One building particularly interests me, because it sounds as though the equipment that's supposed to be in it is critical, was the hardest to get, and would be the hardest to replace.
I leave with 52 pages of printout, and a plan to go put my eyeballs on the real thing tomorrow from Kona.
We have a comfortable flight to the islands, followed by a wild afternoon of body surfing, all seven of us, just to change things up. Feeling frisky, I head to the roof of the hotel after dark, tickle the molecules, and head up into the darkness. I find an empty spot on the coast, miles from any hotel or house, take my clothes off, and leave them under a lava rock.
I ask Pele's forgiveness as I use her lava molecules to hurl myself out over the ocean, starting slowly, but rapidly speeding up to several thousand miles per hour. I know where I am going, and track on it without thought. An hour after departure, I am sitting naked in the dirt on a tree covered hill, looking down at a large industrial facility.
A wire fence surrounds the compound, maybe 10 feet high with razor wire at the top, guard towers at the four corners and mobile guards within the perimeter. A central building dominates the complex, from the pictures I know it's about 200 feet on each side. It's made of concrete, and which has to be several feet thick. There are a number of smaller support buildings, but they are of no interest, save one. There are electrical lines running into the site, and what I believe to be a back up generator inside. I would have to shut both down.
I want to take that building out, not get caught, and not implicate my country. For all my belief in my creativity, I have only had one idea, and it involves China. There is an airbase just across the border, there from the 1940s to provide support to the war effort. My theory is simple. Salt the Korean site with something from the Chinese airbase which will implicate someone other than the red, white, and blue.
It takes me 15 minutes to get from point A to airbase B, and another couple minutes to find what I was looking for. How appalled governments must be that pictures of all their secret facilities are available for anyone to see. Just as the picture indicates, there are racks of aircraft bombs sitting out in the open, no obvious guard or camera coverage. After all, who is going to get into this area, through the fence, and pick up a 10,000 pound bomb rack to steal? Me, that's who.
Back to Kona, then back to LA, then back to my other problem, eight dudes at the airport.
Chapter 13
It's Thursday and I should walk or bike LAX, but I have a better idea. At least I think it's a better idea, but with me you never know. If today is a normal Thursday, the new normal, not original normal, four individuals will shortly be deplaning in the Bradley terminal, and head into the city. I intend to follow them and find out where they are going. I don't tell Perez because she would probably tell me not to do this, but I know things about me that she does not. Like I'm a dumbass. So I call in, explaining I have been called in to my real job, stuff some stuff into my backpack, and head north toward the airport in my car. I try to call Perez anyway, but she's on voice mail, so I leave her one about keeping her chin up.
The first two bad guys are supposed to arrive about 8:22, but my phone app tells me the flight is 20 minutes late. Starbuck and I park at the FreshBurger on Sepulveda, waiting. Last time, they got to Customs toward the end, and in total, took about 40 minutes to exit. A little before they should appear, we head over to Bradley pretending we have someone to pick up. On our second loop they appear, well dressed in their expensive suits.
They bypass all the standard transportation and start walking east toward the other terminals. I can't stay with them in my car, but I loop the entire airport, praying I won't miss them exiting, entering, or whatever, and they won't spot me. I get lucky, they're getting into a white cargo van in front of the Terminal 2 baggage claim, just as I am stuck at the stop light directly before Terminal 1. It has to make a loop to get out, so I can stay well behind it and follow. My camera is on the passenger seat, and I get a clear shot of the license plate.
The van stays left, and gets into the lane for the 405 North. This time of day traffic is flowing, but slowly, so staying a few cars behind it is easy. They exit onto the 10, heading toward east. It's a half hour today in moderate traffic when we get downtown and the van exits onto the surface streets. I luckily keep one car between them and me, and drive past when they turn into the Marquis. Nice. There's a parking garage at the bank across the street. I run across Flower Street as fast as my normal little legs can carry me.
They must have checked in on-line because they are already headed for the elevators, and without super powers, I manage to get there just as the doors close. Dumbass. If I had a brain, I would have waited outside and watched. How could I have forgotten about the glass elevators? The whole fucking hotel is one big piece of glass, the elevators famously are clear glass and outside the hotel, and I am inside trying to look through steel and concrete blocks. From the lights, I am able to determine that the car stops on floors 17, 22, 27, and 29. They are on 27.
The list of things I know that I can't explain how I know is longer than the list of things I don't know that I can explain or can't explain that I do know. I know they are on 27.
The Starbuck's in the Marquis is nice, free wi-fi, so I plunk myself down at a table and read my newspapers, then wander over to the coffee shop for a quick lunch, then back to Starbuck's for the afternoon. Finally, the elevator bell signals the correct eight men, who walk out the back door into the parking garage. I jump up, run out the door, across Flower, and into the bank lot to retrieve Starbuck. The bad guys are not visible, but I assume they are ahead of me, so I hit the 10, and sure enough, just before the exit onto the 405 southbound, I catch up with them. Keeping a couple cars between us, they exit on Century and enter the LAX turnaround. Stopping at Terminal 2, four men exit, and four drive off.
I exit the airport behind them, and turn onto Sepulveda while they cruise down Century. I make a quick left to park in the garage next to FreshBurger, return to my ereader until the expected time for Air Canada 550 to depart the gate, then I switch on my scanner and listen until I hear them given clearance to taxi. I put the scanner away, grab my backpack, and walk toward the market across Sepulveda as fast as I can. Big parking lot, no cameras.
