The Ghost Pattern (7 page)

...17

...Sunday, May 1, 3:03PM PDT (UTC-7:00 hours)

...Tom Isaac’s Residence

...Laguna Beach, California

...Four Days Missing

She stood in front of the whiteboard again, staring at the only thing written on it. XA233 and a question mark, that was all, scribbled at the center top of the board.

Alex paced Tom’s den nervously, sipping her fifth French Vanilla brew of the day and occasionally glaring at the almost completely whiteboard on the wall. Tom sat quietly, slouched in his chair, appearing entirely absorbed in his reading of the latest edition of
TIME
magazine. He hadn’t spoken a word in almost an hour, nor had he looked at her.

She’d heard about authors having writer’s block in front of a brand new, white, untouched manuscript page, but never in front of a whiteboard. Although the psychology could very well be quite similar.

Argh…damn this fucked-up shit to hell and back!
Alex thought.
I’m babbling here, wasting time. I need to think. I need to come up with something.

“Tom?” she called. “Can I interrupt your reading for a minute?”

He smiled and put his magazine down. “Absolutely, my dear. What can I do for you?”

“Let’s bounce some ideas around, what do you say?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” he said with a smile. “I was running out of good stuff to read, you know.”

She chuckled.

“I—I just need to let some steam out, for now. Just for a few seconds.”

“OK, let’s hear it,” Tom replied all serious, but with a parental smile in his eyes.

She paced the room a little more before speaking, then spoke in a high-pitched, machine-gun rhythm, showing how frustrated she was.

“How in the red fucking hell am I gonna find the goddamn plane that no one else can find? This is not a case, or a challenge; this is insane! I can’t be expected to—to deliver on this!” She stood right in front of Tom, with her fisted hands firmly stuck in her jeans pockets.

“Seems to me you’re afraid of failure, and you’re presenting me with a disclaimer, a waiver of liability or something,” Tom replied quietly.

“No…What I meant was…Well, yes, I guess I am. And? What if I am? You find that absurd?” She sounded argumentative, ready to fight, her frustration taking over.

“I never said that, now did I?” Tom said, his voice taking that kind, fatherly tone that always helped her get grounded and be prepared for anything.

“No, you didn’t,” she admitted, aware she was blushing and hating it. Lately, her brain had misfired a lot.

“OK, so consider it signed,” Tom said and winked.

“Consider what signed?”

“The waiver of liability. You are off the hook if you fail. Isn’t that what you wanted to hear?”

Now she was blushing big time, her face burning red and seeding tears of embarrassment at the corners of her eyes.
Damn!

“You really see right through me, huh?” she found the courage to ask.

“Like reading an open magazine,” he acknowledged, rapping his fingers humorously on the cover of
TIME.

“OK, so I need some improvement in that area,” she admitted and smiled widely.

Tom nodded his approval, then frowned a little and asked, “Why did you take the case, Alex?”

“Huh?”

“Why didn’t you express your regrets to Blake, and send him on his way?”

She bit her lower lip, thinking hard. Great question. Tom was making an interesting point.

“I guess I thought I could help. I thought I should at least try,” she said in a weak, unsure voice. “I thought I had some ideas, but…”

“Then what changed?”

“Nothing, really. I just…well, I’m just having a moment of self-doubt, I guess,” she conceded with a tentative smile, feeling her mind become clear again.

“Is it over, then? Your moment of self-doubt?”

“Yes, thank you,” she said, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, sipping more coffee.

“OK, then, let’s find us that goddamn plane, as you like to call it.” He threw her a blue dry-erase marker.

She caught it and turned toward the whiteboard.

“This is what we know,” she said, and drew a vertical line on the board to create a column, then labeled it “Known.” She added the information in the form of a bulleted list.

• 423 passengers
  
• 18 crew
  
• Tokyo to San Fran
  
• Took off on time
  
• All communication normal before it disappeared
  

“These are the coordinates where they think it crashed,” she added, transcribing those from a handwritten note she had in her pocket. Then she added the word
manifest
in the “Known” column.

“We have the manifest?”

“Yeah. Lou grabbed that yesterday from the airline’s system. He was able to break through their security in less than ten minutes; I was impressed.”

“So, what do you want to do next?”

“Start from the manifest,” she said, her voice firming as she regained her self-confidence. “We looked at it yesterday and this morning, but we need more than human eyes and brains to draw any conclusions.”

“What do you mean?”

“We were able to figure out the passengers’ nationalities and final destinations, their dates of birth and genders, but that’s about it. We need more. Lou is modifying a piece of software he wrote to extract background information on all passengers and crew, and then we can look for commonalities, for anything we can find. It’s pattern recognition software he’s adapted for any type of data,” she added, seeing how confused Tom looked. “It will extract deep background on all passengers, then compare the data and look for things they have in common.”

She paused for a few seconds, seeing how Tom looked at her pensively, creases forming on his forehead, right above his bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrows.

“I am grasping at straws, I know,” she added.

“No, you’re not. This is the best way to start. Who else is helping you?”

“Steve is helping Blake deal with everything.”

“Good. What do you expect to derive from the manifest analysis?”

“If anything other than a crash has happened to XA233, then it must have been intentional. Even if the plane made an emergency landing due to some failure, someone would have found it by now. We would know. I’m hoping that the manifest will give us a hint as to what, or who, had XA233 in their crosshairs, and why.”

Tom leaned forward, his interest piqued.

“When do you expect that to be completed?”

“The manifest analysis should be done by the end of today. Then we’ll look at commonalities and formulate scenarios. At that point, Lou will run his adapted pattern recognition software and get deeper data, but that might take some time.”

She took the marker and wrote a new column heading, “Scenarios.”

...18

...Monday, May 2, 4:12PM Local Time (UTC+10:00 hours)

...Undisclosed Location

...Russia

...Five Days Missing

Dr. Theo Adenauer pushed his food around with his spoon, too deep in thought to be aware of how hungry he was, or to register the annoying sounds made by the aluminum spoon scraping against the aluminum plate.

For the third time in as many days, they’ve been served cabbage. Chopped, boiled, and tasteless, with about zero nutritional value. He had to admit that today’s serving tasted better due to the clever Dr. Fortuin, who played in the lab a little and came out with salt, chunks of salty deposits on the bottom of a Petri dish, but edible salt nevertheless.

Fortuin had joked while handing them the salt, saying that he’d graduated from biochemistry and pharmacology to molecular gastronomy, and was committed to get them some oil and some protein next.

Theo looked at his prison mates, scrutinizing them one by one. How different people were! Some took their abduction really badly, cried a lot, or let themselves spiral into worry and depression. Lila Wallace, their flight attendant, was one of those. Dr. Teng, for understandable reasons, considering his family was in the test subject population, was another. Dr. Chevalier, who had held on bravely for a couple of days, was coming apart, thinking of her husband with advanced coronary artery disease.

Others were calm, probably keeping their feelings bottled inside, or engaging the use of reason and logic to fight the feelings of terror and absolute powerlessness brought by what was happening to them. Drs. Mallory and Davis were like that. Calm, composed, holding it together, at least on the surface.

Finally, Drs. Fortuin, Bukowsky, and Crawford were irritatingly accepting of the entire situation, applying the precepts of positive thinking to the point where he wanted them slapped back into reality. Yes, people, even if you’re still alive now, that doesn’t mean you couldn’t be dead the next minute!

And then there was him, struggling with the huge burden of guilt he felt, so overwhelming he couldn’t even breathe sometimes. To be responsible for the abduction of hundreds of people, for the death of Dr. Faulkner and who knows how many more to come…He didn’t know how he could live with that burden, even if they somehow made it out of there alive.

Because it was him, Dr. Theo Adenauer, who the Russians had hijacked the plane for; he knew that for sure. After all, he was the world’s highest regarded expert in molecular psychopharmacology and transitional addiction. Whom better would they choose if they wanted a psychotropic drug formulated? It was him they put in charge of the research team. That Russian doctor, Bogdanov, knew exactly who he was and what his lifelong work was about.

The latest antidepressant that had hit the market, the first one in history to reduce suicide risk in patients by more than 90 percent, was his formulation, the result of five years of research. The pharmaceutical company had valued it at more than four billion dollars within a week of the drug obtaining FDA approval for release in the United States. Yes, whom else would they have hijacked the plane for?

His head hung low and deep ridges formed around his mouth, underlining the tension in his lips. He was no longer proud of his professional achievements. It was the first time in his life he’d felt such overwhelming guilt. Shame. Despair.

“Do you think they’re looking for us?” Dr. Bukowsky said, chewing vigorously his half-cooked cabbage with added salt.

“Who?” Gary Davis asked.

“You know, the people who normally search for missing planes,” Bukowsky replied. “Don’t they have crews, teams who search for planes? There’s always someone…A plane doesn’t just disappear, and no one’s looking, right?”

Theo Adenauer put his plate down noisily. He hadn’t even eaten half his food.

“No one will come rescue us, because no one is looking,” he said.

“What do you mean?” Gary Davis asked, blood visibly draining from his face. The American was so impressionable.

“If the plane appears to have crashed in the Pacific, that’s where they’ll be looking,” Theo replied, “for bodies and debris, not for people to rescue. Not for us.”

“So…you’re saying there’s no hope?” Dr. Chevalier’s voice reached a high pitch, conveying her desperation and anguish in just a few words.

Dr. Bukowsky reached out and grabbed her hand, trying to comfort her. Tears started running on her face, and her hands started shaking uncontrollably, as she muttered, “It can’t be…It can’t be…”

Mein Gott…
Theo thought. He should have known better than to eliminate all the hope these people had, even if it was built on a false, delusional foundation. Some bedside manner he had.

“There’s always hope, Marie-Elise, you know that. Life is a mystery,
ja
? You don’t know what’s going to happen next. Correct?”

“I definitely didn’t know what was gonna happen when I boarded the damn flight,” Dr. Crawford said bitterly. “But I, for one, ain’t giving up hope, no matter what
he
says,” she added, pointing at Adenauer. “They’ll come looking, don’t worry. You’ll see.”

They chewed silently for a little while, as he studied them some more. His victims, all of them, suffering through hell.

His fault.

...19

...Monday, May 2, 10:32AM PDT (UTC-7:00 hours)

...Tom Isaac’s Residence

...Laguna Beach, California

...Five Days Missing

Tom’s den looked more and more like a war room, and the air was getting stuffy, hard to breathe. The walls, long since stripped of their artwork, were covered with sticky notes, a six-foot wide wallboard, and flipchart paper. Two laptops took the small table. Alex and Lou kept their heads close together, looking keenly at the screen of one of the laptops.

“See?” Lou said. “This is how it appears. It gives categories of commonalities with other passengers or crew. Crew names are in blue, the rest are in black. And whatever pattern the software sees, it will add as parameters after the name, with numbers indicating occurrences.”

“Got it,” Alex replied.

“Not me,” Steve said. “Let’s walk through an example.”

“Sure,” Lou replied. “See this guy? Mark Atchkins? After his name, you have San Francisco (47), engineer (5), married (219), two children (98), 47 years old (19). That means he’s from San Francisco, like 47 other passengers, he’s an engineer, just like five other individuals, and so on. Got it?”

“Yes, got it, thanks,” Steve replied. “Do we think age, number of kids, marital status are relevant?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Alex said. “Good thought, Steve. It clutters the results. Even location, I don’t think it’s that relevant. But I’d love to see income bracket.”

“All right,” Lou replied. “Give me a few minutes to reconfigure.”

“Can you summarize the data somehow? Scrolling through 441 names like this would take forever.”

“On it, boss,” he replied with a wide smile, and started to type.

Alex sprung off her chair and took a rolled-up sheet of paper from the corner of the room.

“Steve, will you please help me hang this?”

“Sure, what is it?”

“The biggest map they could print at the local print shop,” she replied, handing him a couple of pushpins and unrolling the four-foot wide print. They grabbed the corners of the printout and stretched on their toes to pin it as high up on the wall as possible.

“There, excellent,” she said, then grabbed a bunch of blue pushpins. “Let’s map XA233’s flight plan.”

She browsed the Internet a little until she found a site that showed all the main flight routes. She started pushing pins into the map to match the flight route shown on the Internet, all the way to its destination, San Francisco. It wasn’t a straight line. The flight routes were smooth curves, arcs, optimized distance against the Earth’s curvature. When it came to flight routes, the shortest distance between two points was not a straight line.

From Tokyo all the way to its destination, XA233 was supposed to be above water. No land anywhere in its flight path; just a massive expanse of blue water. The closest XA233 was supposed to come to land was within 100 miles or so of the Aleutian Islands, but the plane had never made it that far.
Damn…

She scribbled on a sticky note, “Verify flight path,” and then stuck it on the whiteboard. Then she took a handful of red pins, put one in Tokyo, a second pin where the plane was last seen on Tokyo ATC radar, and another one at the coordinates where the plane had presumably crashed. The last red dot was a little south of the designated flight route, causing her to frown.

“Lou? How sure can we be of these flight routes, or even the crash coordinates?”

“Huh? Not 100 percent, that’s for sure. Let me poke around a little in Universal Air’s servers, see what I can find.”

“I want to understand how they came up with those coordinates for the crash. They didn’t find any wreckage there, right? So…what are we missing? Is it a projected point based on the last confirmed set of coordinates?” She clenched her fists and stuck them firmly on her hips, and ground her teeth, letting out a groan of frustration. The she started pacing the little room, absently avoiding table corners and chairs. “Shit…there’s so much we don’t know about these planes. We have more questions than answers.”

The door opened and Tom walked in, carrying a tray with coffee and cookies, followed by Blake.

“I come bearing treats and bringing friends,” Tom started to say, then abruptly changed his tone and subject. “How can you guys breathe in here? Steve, crack open that window, will you? Whew!”

Alex turned and gave Blake a scrutinizing look. He looked a little better, some of the despair in his eyes having been replaced with a shred of hope. He wore one of Tom’s checked shirts, a complete departure from his typical dress style.

“Blake, are you sure you want to be here for this? It could get difficult for you to hear.” Alex asked, a little worried.

“Yes, Alex, please. Don’t shut me out. I’d go crazy.”

“OK, that’s understandable,” she replied, then turned her back to all of them and started analyzing the map.

How is a plane’s position tracked from ground control?
Lamely
, she thought, remembering her conversation with Claire about the need for planes to have GPS tracking and a sensor array at least at the level of those installed in common vehicles.
Lamely or not, but how?

She turned toward the team, and saw them all seated at the table, with their eyes on her, all except Lou, who typed quickly and quietly on his laptop’s keyboard.

She took a sip of steaming coffee, a Turkish recipe Claire liked to make, brewed over an open flame. It was poignant and strong, and made to wake up the dead, as she liked to say.

“All right, let’s treat this as if it were a murder case—or a kidnapping, not sure yet,” she added quickly with a faint apologetic smile. “We’ll do full victim backgrounds,” she said, then cringed when she saw Blake’s reaction to her choice of words. She corrected herself, “We’ll do full passenger and crew backgrounds, and establish commonalities.”

She took another gulp of coffee, already feeling the effects of Claire’s special brew on her brainpower.

“Let’s talk scenarios,” she said, grabbing the blue dry-erase marker and focusing on the respective column on the whiteboard. “The scenario in which the plane actually crashed in the Pacific doesn’t interest us, so I will write it down here, then cross it out, so we can stop thinking about it.” She stroked through the word “crash” with a thick blue line. “If XA233 really crashed, there’s nothing we can do. So we’ll simply ignore that scenario. Any objections?”

No one said anything. Lou lifted his gaze briefly from his computer screen to signal his quiet approval, while Blake mouthed a silent thank you.

“Then what else do we have?” Alex continued. “If a commercial jet doesn’t make it to the final destination, doesn’t emergency land, and doesn’t crash or explode in mid-flight, there’s only one scenario left.” She wrote a word in all caps on the whiteboard. “HIJACK.”

The room fell completely silent, as if everyone there held their breaths. Lou had stopped typing, and everyone watched her intently.

“Two hijack scenarios I can think of right now,” she added, as she wrote, “for money, and for political reasons.”

“To your point, Alex, could this plane have made an emergency landing somewhere, due to some technical issue?” Steve asked.

Blake shook his head in a silent no.

“Highly unlikely,” Alex replied. “It’s been five days; the crew would have made contact by now. And someone would have communicated the emergency to ground control before landing, wherever that ground would have been.”

“But there’s been no ransom call, right? Do we know for sure?” Steve pressed on. “Officials aren’t exactly open about these things, you know.”

“None that we know about,” Alex replied. “And Lou’s been looking.”

“I’ve been checking the airlines, and talked to some friends in the FBI. There’s nothing that we know of, not a whisper of anything.”

“But there could be some hostage negotiation going on that we don’t know about.”

“If it’s about money, wouldn’t Blake know by now?” Tom asked. “Adeline would have been a prime target in that case, right? I’m sorry, Blake, I didn’t mean—”

“It’s OK, Tom, don’t apologize,” Blake cut him off. “You’re right. And they would have called me, I guess.”

“Then it’s political?” Steve asked. “If it’s political, what would they be looking for?”

“We can’t even formulate that until we know who they are,” Alex said, as she wrote UNSUB on the board, using the abbreviation for
unknown subjects
common for many law enforcement agencies. “Depending on who the UNSUB are, they could ask for the release of incarcerated terrorists, or the withdrawal of American troops from who knows where. They could be looking for military or diplomatic action against their enemy, and so on. It could be anything. In that case, the officials would keep this matter highly confidential. After all, America doesn’t negotiate with terrorists, remember? The public would be frantic at the thought of sacrificing 441 people to maintain such a statement.”

“Yeah, we’d have no way of knowing,” Tom said. “What do you want to do next?”

“I’m going to ignore what I don’t know, like what they’re looking to gain from the hijacking, and focus on finding them.” She wrote on the whiteboard. “No matter who the UNSUB are, this is a crime, and crimes follow the rule of
means-motive-opportunity
. We know nothing about motive, so we’ll ignore that for now. Let’s focus on means, the opportunity—how they grabbed it—and then we’ll figure out on why XA233 was the UNSUB’s best opportunity. Why XA233 and not any other plane? What made it special?”

She paced what little room she had in front of the whiteboard, then added, “I’ll need an aviation consultant of sorts, to teach me how someone would be able to hijack a Boeing 747-400 and leave no trace. I want to start focusing on the means, while Lou is deep-diving into everyone’s background to understand the opportunity.”

“Consider it done,” Tom replied. “I’ll find someone ASAP.”

“Thanks,” she said, then she turned toward the map, looking at it intently. She was too close, and the map print was huge, taking almost the entire wall. She took a few steps back, not taking her eyes off the map, and suddenly, her blood froze. “Oh, my God…” she whispered.

“What?” Blake asked, and everyone else locked their eyes onto her.

“What do you see here?” Alex asked, pointing a laser dot onto the main piece of land visible on the map, west and northwest of the flight path.

No one replied. She took the laser pointer and underlined the letters S, I, and A, printed in large, bold font on the section of the Asian continent that had been caught in the printed map section. “Russia! This is Russia, people, right here! Just a couple of hundred miles from this plane’s flight path! In 747 flight time, that’s nothing!”

They all stared at her quietly. No one followed her chain of thought yet.

“I’m adding a third scenario, guys, I have to,” she said, then went to the whiteboard, and wrote the letter V under the two other scenarios.

“Alex,” Tom said, “are you sure? I know you’re—”

“Obsessed?” Alex fired right back. “Is this the word you’re looking for, Tom?”

“N–no, I wanted to say, umm…motivated,” Tom replied hesitantly.

“What am I missing?” Blake asked.

“V is a Russian terrorist, the leader of the network you helped me track down. But him? We never caught him.” Alex said, turning her attention to Blake. “He’s a brilliant mastermind, and his plans are not the ordinary terrorist agenda; they are majestic somehow. It’s as if the entire world is that bastard’s playground. I’ve been trying to nail him for a long time, but I don’t even know his name, just his initial, V.”

“Alex, we talked about this,” Steve intervened. “You can’t make all your cases about V. You will screw up. It clouds your judgment.”

“But what if it’s a viable scenario?” Blake pushed back. “I, for one, trust her judgment, clouded or not. That’s why I’m here.”

“Blake, you don’t understand,” Steve continued. “She’s completely—”

“Obsessed,” Alex cut him off, laughing bitterly. “OK, yes, maybe I am. I don’t think any of us are safe until that son of a bitch is dead and buried, maybe not even then. But I also know I can’t ignore a plausible scenario, no matter how much I would just
love
for Tom and Steve to not think me obsessed.”

Silence fell heavy among them. Steve broke it first, saying in an apologizing tone, “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

She turned to Tom and said, “Tom, I need Sam to join us.”

“Boss?” Lou said, lifting his eyes from the computer screen for the first time in minutes. “Look!” He turned his screen toward her and highlighted a name with his mouse.

“Oh, crap,” she reacted. “Here’s the opportunity. One of the XA233 pilots has a Russian name.”