Sting of the Drone (31 page)

“Erik’s on his way back now. He’s missing Dougherty’s funeral. He’ll get into McCarran in a few hours. He’s in a rage. Wants to know how his wife could go missing and no one knows how or where,” Sandra said.

“Well, because somebody spray-painted several security cameras lenses,” Dugout said. “Otherwise I’d have video of her leaving the building. All the Sheriff can say is that her car is still out front of the building and there were signs of a struggle in her office.”

“He also wants to know why somebody from the Inspector General’s office contacted him seeking an appointment,” Sandra added. “He’s going to feel like the world is really closing in on him.”

“I think that is what somebody has in mind,” Ray suggested. “The problem is I don’t know who that somebody is and all the leads we have suggest it’s narcotraffickers, Ukrainians and Pakistanis. And that just makes no sense. Besides, what narcotrafficker is good enough to orchestrate all of this?”

“I don’t know. It’s all coming at me too quickly and I don’t understand even what ‘all of this’ is,” she said. “I’m going to go home and shower, take a nap. Come by later, we can grab some dinner before we come back in for the Kill Call.”

After she left, Ray and Dugout sat for a moment, each thinking, neither talking. Then Ray, his voice subdued, began what he was good at, asking questions. “So, have the FBI gotten anywhere further with the Portland-Boston case?”

“Not a lot,” Dugout answered. “The RAW, the Indians, say that the guy who is on the CBP photo, the guy who our Embassy gave a visa to, doesn’t really exist. He had one of those new foolproof Indian identity cards, but nobody knows how. They’ve stepped up security big time on the T in Boston, even checking people’s bags.”

“And the server you traced him using in Texas?”

“It’s in Dallas, at a Colo, you know, colocation center, data center to you, but it’s a cloud service provider and they allow anyone to establish an account on line, with a credit card, and get a virtual server. Guess what? The credit card number comes back to an offshore bank account and a dead end. Everything on the server is encrypted with a mil grade code. I can’t figure out where we go from here.”

“Neither can I,” Ray admitted. He was not used to being stumped, not for this long. The pieces of the jigsaw were on the table, at least some of them were, but he couldn’t visualize how they came together. He closed his eyes and tried to clear his mind, but it kept racing, racing but going nowhere. “They shouldn’t just be checking bags and adding cops on the subways in Boston. Simultaneous could be two or three cities. That was the old al Qaeda pattern. I’ll call the Bureau.”

“Simultaneous could also mean a train here, a plane there, a packed shopping mall days before Christmas,” Dugout said.

“Yeah, it could mean almost anything, almost anywhere. So do we issue a national warning, ‘It’s Christmas and bad people are plotting to do something, somewhere’? That would be really helpful,” Ray said. “If we still had the color-coded threat system, we could make it red for Christmas. Glad I don’t have to make that call. How many more shopping days till Christmas?”

“Five. Can I ask you a philosophical question?” Dugout said.

“Oh, God, really? Now?” Ray replied. He dropped his head between his knees, ran his fingers through his thick hair, and then looked back up at Dugout. “Fire away.”

“It’s that old one about Ends and Means. How do you deal with it so well, all the time? I mean, without it changing who you are, without the line of what you are willing to do sliding too far off into the really bad side. How do you know when it has?” Dugout asked. “You seem to deal with it pretty well.”

Ray looked at the flat screens for a moment, then back at Dugout. “It used to be the Front Page Rule: assume it will be on the front page of the
Post
someday and only do it if you could stand that level of exposure. But it’s amazing what has been on the front page without any real consequences: torture, illegal wire taps, black sites. No one goes to jail. No one even gets fired. So I don’t know anymore. I guess it’s like art or porn, I know it when I see it. I know what I think is art. Others have to judge for themselves. Do you think I have been putting too much emphasis on the ends and playing a little too loose with the means? Because if so, tell me.”

Dugout shook his head, “No, no I don’t. I think we are pretty well still inside the Good Zone. I just think we need to step back every once in a while and reset the compass, keep things in perspective.”

Ray looked at the flat screens and out, through the one-way window, to the floor of the GCC, with its row upon row of drone pilots. “The data bases, the drones, these are really powerful tools. You’re right, we shouldn’t get too jaded about using them. They’re for special situations. In the wrong hands…” He stood up and walked to the door.

“They’re the only tools we have that work,” Dugout said. “Where are you going?”

“To the airport to meet Erik when he comes in. He’s going to need some more help,” Ray noted.

39

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 20

36TH STREET AND RACE STREET

WEST PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA

“Are you alone in the apartment?” the voice on the phone asked.

“Shit, yah. Alone in the building. Everybody has gone home for the semester, but me,” the Drexel student said. “Where are you?”

“Outside your door. Please open it.”

The two men put on ski masks just before the door opened. They carried a box, gift-wrapped for Christmas. “Here is your present,” the taller man said when the door opened. “Let us come in and explain how to use it.”

The three men sat at the small table in the living room–dining area. The taller man in the ski mask explained. “You sit on a bench in the station. In the main hall, but over by the food stands on the Market Street side. You unwrap the gift, like you can’t wait until you get home. Inside is a remote controlled racecar in a lot of packaging. Take the toy, just the car. Throw everything else and the packaging in the waste bin. The plastic explosives are in the packaging. As you walk away, hit the horn on the car and you will start the timer. You will have twenty minutes to be somewhere in public, somewhere on a surveillance tape when it goes off. Do not let on that you know what happened. Be confused looking.”

“That’s not much explosive,” the student said.

“It’s concentrated, compacted. Feel how heavy it is,” the man suggested. “And here is the first part of the money. Untraceable bills, all one hundreds. Count it out.”

“It’s good,” the student said after several minutes of counting. “When?”

“Not tonight. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe the next day. Very soon. We will give you two hours’ notice. Now, we have to get going.”

“More Christmas presents for Santa to deliver tonight?” the student asked as he walked them to the door.

“Exactly,” the shorter man said as they walked out.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 20

TERMINAL FIVE, LONDON HEATHROW AIRPORT

LONDON, UK

He followed the signs for passengers in transit. There were too many passengers, he thought. Even the newer Terminal 5 was too crowded. He had designed his flights so that he did not need to change terminals. He had taken a puddle jumper from Tortola to St. Kitts and then a BA flight nonstop to Heathrow. Now he would take a BA flight out to Dubai, never leaving the In Transit area in Terminal 5.

Within the vast BA Terminal, he took the train from Concourse C over to Concourse A, following the purple Transit Passengers signs. Then he saw the security checkpoint.

“But I am just in transit,” he said to the woman in the information booth. “And I am staying on British, staying in Terminal Five. Why do I need to wait in line?”

“Sorry, sir, everyone in transit has to go through security,” she said in a singsong voice. “It’s the rules, love.”

He felt the sweat again. British security was good and they probably had data ties to the Americans and maybe even the Australians. He knew that his Australian identity was solid. He had used it many times. He told himself to relax, again, and exhale. The line was mercifully short.

“Where are you coming from?”

“St. Kitts.”

“Going where?”

“Back home, Melbourne, via Dubai.”

The Immigration man in the cubicle typed into his computer. Now was the moment of truth, Bahadur knew.

“Thank you. Next,” the officer yelled out and handed him back his boarding pass and passport.

Bahadur moved quickly to the Duty Free Shopping area in the main part of the Terminal. Concourse A was just a walk away. He walked in and sat down at a bar off the main hall and ordered a scotch, neat. He had two hours to kill.

It was forty minutes later that the officer at the booth Bahadur had gone through was handed the picture on a “look out” flyer. As his supervisor began to move along, the officer called him back.

“Are you absolutely certain?” the supervisor asked.

“Positive, sir. Within the hour,” the officer explained. “Said he was going home to Australia, via Dubai.”

“But this man they want has an Indian passport,” the supervisor noted.

“Your flyer says it’s a false Indian document, sir.”

“When does the BA flight to Dubai leave?” the supervisor asked into his microphone. “Right. Switch me over to the Armed Police desk.”

Bahadur was still at the bar, reading a two-day-old
Times of India
when he sensed something happening. He looked halfway up from his paper and saw two pairs of police with automatic weapons standing about ten feet apart in the passageway beyond the bar.

At almost the same instant, he felt a strong hand grabbing his left arm. Bahadur used the bar stool to swing around quickly, and his boot to push up between the plainclothes policeman’s legs. He leaped from the stool and drove his head straight into the second detective’s stomach, causing him to drop his handgun. Bahadur grabbed the weapon and fired two rounds at the first officer’s head. He rolled on the floor and let off another round at the second man, the man whose gun he was using, hitting him in the stomach. The three shots sounded like explosions in the low-ceilinged airport bar. He heard screaming in the hall and a man yelling, “I have it.”

Then there was a much louder noise as the armed police sergeant fired six shots from the hallway into the bar, into the man on the floor with the gun, moving the shots up from the bottom of his torso and ending at the top of Bahadur’s head. The screaming grew louder in the hallway and in the bar, and the stampeding away from the shooting turned Heathrow Terminal 5 into chaos.

“How did he think he could ever get away, Sarge?” the younger armed policeman asked as he and the three other men with assault weapons entered the bar.

“He didn’t think he could get away, Jeremy, but he also didn’t want to be taken alive,” the sergeant said. “You’ve just seen suicide by police, he made me become a killer, but he didn’t give me much choice.”

40

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 20

SPECIAL OPERATIONS ROOM

GLOBAL COORDINATION CENTER

CREECH AFB, NEVADA

“Did you get any sleep?” Sandra Vittonelli asked Colonel Erik Parsons as she, Ray, and Dugout entered her office.

“How could I,” he replied. “Not with Jen out there, somewhere. And we don’t even know if she’s alive or dead.”

“The FBI profiler believes she is alive,” Ray offered. “She thinks the kidnappers plan to use Dr. Parsons in some way to get to you. Killing her would serve little purpose.”

“The FBI guys are nice, but they don’t have a clue about what to do next, not a single lead,” Erik said.

“I read their reports,” Dugout commented. “Seems Jen’s cell is missing. What kind of mobile did she have?”

“The new iPhone,” Erik answered. “I got it for her birthday.”

“Yes!” Dugout said, punching the air. “But you guys never added the remote activation antenna and software to some of the Predators.”

“We didn’t do what?” Sandra asked.

“You can’t remove the battery from the iPhone like you can on most mobiles,” Dugout explained. “So it’s never fully dead, even when it’s off. It still leaks a little juice from the battery to keep the clock going and on the new iPhone it also powers the Find My iPhone app when the phone can link to an open WiFi network. It’s a fix from earlier versions of the app. It’s designed to find stolen iPhones even if the thief never turns the device on. It doesn’t search for a cell tower because that would drain the battery, but every hour it looks briefly for a WiFi network and when one sends out a ping to the Finder app, it will send back an ack packet, an acknowledgment, with its coordinates.”

“So, how does that help us?” Erik asked.

“Simple, we add the new antenna and software to a bunch of Preds over Vegas and establish open WiFi networks from them. We activate her Find My iPhone app and broadcast that out over the WiFi nets. If her device is still in one piece, it will get the message and will beep back its location. If we have two Preds up that can get the signal, we can triangulate to within a few feet.”

“Let’s get going,” Erik said.

Ray held up his hand, gesturing to slow down. “It’s very unlikely that the phone is still where she is.”

Sandra was picking up the drop line to Flight Ops. “Maybe, but it could give us a lead, like maybe some fingerprints.” She looked up at the aircraft status screen. “I need techs to work on the four Pred trainers, add an antenna and download some software updates. How long will that take?”

“I’m piloting,” Erik insisted.

She hung up the landline. “They’re calling in the ground tech guys. If they push it, we could have them ready to launch around sundown.”

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 20

ONE CENTER PLAZA

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

“Got him,” Bobby Gallagher yelled as he burst into Judith Wolosky’s office.

“Who, Mister Big? The Indian guy? Where?”

“London, in the airport. He’d just flown in from the Virgin Islands and he was carrying an Australian passport,” Gallagher said.