Kitty Hawk

by Roland Smith

  She turned around to look at X-Ray again, expecting to see their surveillance genius arguing with his computer, but he wasn’t. He had straightened his glasses and had flattened his white hair. He was staring at her through his thick lenses.

  “It’s no good,” he said. “There were two many trees, too much distortion in the stream. I have no idea what happened after they got out of the Tahoes. Dead end. We need to get a look inside that car.”

  “How?”

  “We can do a drive-by with concealed cameras, but it will have to be timed absolutely perfectly. We’ll have to pass them as they are passing under lights. The more services at the exit, the more lights. Our first shot is about ten miles ahead, but we’ll have to come up on them easy so we don’t spook them.”

  “Pull over,” Vanessa said. “I’ll drive.”

  Uly pulled onto the shoulder. They changed places and were back on the highway within seconds. Vanessa gunned the van until they saw the Tahoe’s taillights again, then eased off the pedal. She glanced over at Uly. He was cracking his neck and seemed happy to be riding shotgun. She looked in the rearview mirror. X-Ray was scrambling around in the back, assembling equipment.

  “You ready?” she asked.

  “Not yet,” X-Ray said. “But I will be by the time you make the pass. It’s kind of old technology. I should have thought of it before, instead of screwing around with that drone stream for so long. We’d be way ahead of the game right now.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Vanessa said.

  “Yes it is,” X-Ray insisted. “I’m the one that asked Boone to get the drone. Sometimes the old way is best. We should have spent our time putting tracking devices on those vehicles, but no, I wanted to try a drone out. Stupid!”

  X-Ray was far from stupid, and it was Vanessa who had flown and crashed the drone, but she let him drone on. She had known Raymond Brock for nearly fifty years and had worked with him all over the world. She had seen this selfrecrimination bit several times before and knew he needed to get the mistakes of the past few hours out of his system before he could focus his formidable intellect on the problem at hand.

  “Stupid!” he repeated.

  Then it was over. Just like that. He took a deep breath and gave her a smile. “You better keep your eyes on the road or you’ll crash the van too.”

  She returned his smile in the rearview mirror. “You just snap your photos and let me worry about the driving.”

  “Not photos. Video. I set up two cameras on the right side. I can control them with the computer, but they’re nothing special, cheapos. You’ll have to pass them slowly, but fast enough so they don’t get suspicious. After we get the video, we’ll be in front of them, which is a problem. They’re not likely to forget this van. It will be hard to get behind again without them noticing.”

  Vanessa was well aware of how difficult it was to tail someone with one vehicle. Especially a vehicle that was looking for a tail. To do it right, you needed a minimum of three vehicles. Five or six would have been better. One vehicle was bad. One that looked like the intellimobile was very bad.

  “Leave that to me,” she said with more confidence than she felt. What she hoped was that the video would prove Bethany and Malak weren’t in the car and she could hang a U-turn and rush back to I-95. She looked over at Uly. “Don’t look at them as we drive by. You’ll scare them. Act like you’re asleep.”

  “I will be asleep,” Uly said.

  Walk Away

  I got a little bored watching the GPS and satellite images of Hurricane Jack, which we seemed to be driving right into, so I kicked Croc out of the passenger seat and joined Boone up front. Croc jumped up on the sofa and gave me the one-blue-eye glare before curling up and going back to sleep.

  There were a pair of taillights about three hundred yards in front of us, which I assumed belonged to the Tahoe. The trees along the road were whipping back and forth as fast as the wiper blades. Boone had both hands on the steering wheel.

  “You okay?” he asked calmly as if controlling the coach in this wind was the easiest thing he’d ever done.

  “I guess,” I said. “I mean, I’m tired and a little nervous and …” I didn’t want to tell him about the itch. I’d never told anyone about the itch. How do you tell someone about something that you don’t understand yourself?

  Boone glanced at me. “And?”

  I stared at the distant taillights, debating whether I should tell him or not, when a call came in. He tapped his earpiece to take it, then immediately tore the Bluetooth out of his ear and nearly lost control of the coach.

  “What happened?” Angela shouted.

  I turned around. She was at the kitchen table, clutching the laptop. Croc was getting up from the floor, glaring at the back of Boone’s head as if he had dumped him from the sofa intentionally. Boone stabbed a button on the steering wheel and we caught Felix over the speaker in mid-sentence …

  “… caught fire. Stepped on my cell.”

  He was yelling, which is probably why Boone had yanked the Bluetooth out of his ear.

  “You’re shouting,” Boone said in a normal voice. “We can’t understand you.”

  This was followed by a pause long enough for Angela to join us up front. She squatted between us with the laptop. “His cell phone is offline,” Angela said quietly. “I wasn’t keeping track of the phones. Sorry.”

  “No worries,” Boone said, then turned his attention back to Felix. “Are you there?”

  Felix responded using one sentence per page.

  “Yeah.”

  “Barely hear you.”

  “Explosion messed up ears.”

  “Explosion?” Boone asked.

  “I’ll start from the beginning.”

  Even from the beginning, it was a little hard to follow. The good news was that Malak and Bethany weren’t in the Tahoe. The bad news was that the Tahoe had blown up along with the four terrorists and part of I-95.

  “Found red, blue, green wires on the battery.”

  “Pulled green.”

  “Boom.”

  Felix was calling from a pay phone at a Cracker Barrel restaurant a couple of miles north of the explosion. The blast had blown out his eardrums and he had caught on fire. He wrecked his phone stamping his jacket out. He said his hearing was coming back. He was going to steal another car and head south.

  “Take me a while.”

  “Sirens going by.”

  “I-95 will close.”

  “Have to go around.”

  He was talking loudly, but he wasn’t shouting anymore.

  “What about exposure?” Boone asked.

  “We’re good.”

  “I think.”

  “They thought I was a country bumpkin trying to help them.”

  “When they told their handler I was under the hood, they were told to take me out.”

  “I guess.”

  “Ghosts didn’t know they were driving a bomb.”

  “Wouldn’t have let me under the hood if they had.”

  “Mistake.”

  A mistake for them, I thought. Boom.

  “Vanessa? Ziv?” Boone said. “Are you picking this up?”

  We waited for a response. There wasn’t one.

  “Keep me posted, Felix,” Boone said. “Try to get your hands on another cell.”

  At two-thirty in the morning he meant steal someone’s cell phone. I doubted the Cracker Barrel sold them.

  Boone looked at Angela. “Get on your phone and try to get in touch with Vanessa and Ziv. Keep calling until they answer. Tell them what’s going on.”

  “What is going on?” Angela asked.

  I wasn’t exactly sure what was going on either. Felix had been shouting in a shorthand that only Boone seemed to understand.

  “The terrorists are bundling the mission,” Boone said. “Or at least the people running them are bundling. The Tahoes aren’t just there to throw us off track. They’re bombs. Probably all four rigs are, including the one haul
ing Bethany and Malak. The wires Felix saw led to a remote trigger and a tracking device. We’re not the only ones watching the Tahoes. They’re on their way to targets. He’ll probably blow them at the exact same moment, pulling law enforcement away from whatever he plans to do with Bethany, unless we can defuse them first.”

  “We have to stop them,” Angela said.

  Boone shook his head. “That’s the last thing we want to do. Felix got away with it because they broke down before he showed up. If we take out another Tahoe, whoever’s running this dance will be onto us. Ghost cell operatives aren’t suicide bombers. They’re going to park the Tahoes and walk away. We need to follow them to their parking places and disarm the bombs after they walk away.”

  Apparently I was going to add defusing car bombs to my spy repertoire.

  Smoke and Mirrors

  Officer Ziv flashed the police light and gave the Tahoe a blast of the siren. The driver didn’t hesitate. The Tahoe immediately slowed down, eased onto the shoulder, and came to a stop.

  “Malak and Bethany are not inside,” Ziv said. “If the president’s daughter was in the backseat, the driver would have at least hesitated.”

  Eben nodded in agreement.

  “We will make this quick,” Ziv said. “I will take the driver’s side, ask them a couple of questions, then let them go.”

  Letting terrorists go was not something Ziv was used to, but in this case it was the right call. If they killed them, the mission would be blown. They got out of the Rover into the wind and the rain, which seemed to be letting up a little. Ziv walked up on the driver’s side. Eben took the passenger side. Both men held flashlights in their left hands. Eben had his gun in his right hand, held close to his body so they couldn’t see it beyond the flashlight beam.

  Ziv matched Eben’s movement step for step, shining the bright light into the windows as he approached. There was a man and woman in the backseat, another man and woman in the front. The women were clearly not Malak and Bethany. As he passed the rear end of the Tahoe, he made a swift movement with the ice pick in his hand, and the left taillight blinked out.

  The driver’s window slid down as Ziv walked up to it. He put the ice pick in his pocket so his right hand would be free for his gun. A woman was behind the wheel.

  “Is there a problem officer?” she asked with a pleasant smile.

  Ziv returned the smile and answered with his best southern accent. “May I see your driver’s license and vehicle registration, ma’am?”

  As she fished in her purse, he shined his light on the three passengers. They were all in their early to mid-thirties. They were completely relaxed. They smiled. Not a shifty eye among them. He would not have guessed in a million years that any of them were terrorists. It was disturbing. Now that he knew that Malak and Bethany were not inside, he wanted to leave, but if he didn’t make the stop look legitimate they would become suspicious.

  The woman handed him her license and registration. Her name was Alex Finn, she was thirty-two years old, and resided in Bethesda, Maryland. It could be her real name and real address, or it could be fake. At this point it didn’t matter.

  “I wasn’t speeding,” Alex said.

  “You were a little over the speed limit, ma’am,” Ziv said. “But that isn’t why I pulled you over. Your left taillight is out.”

  “It is?” Alex seemed surprised.

  Ziv nodded. “Bad night to have a taillight out. Low visibility. Could cause an accident. Do you know that you’re heading into a hurricane?”

  “Yes,” Alex said. “We’ve been listening to the reports on the radio. We have a meeting tomorrow in Norfolk. We work for an architectural firm in Virginia.”

  That information jibed with the vehicle registration. The Tahoe belonged to an architectural firm.

  “I doubt your meeting is going to happen tomorrow,” Ziv said. “Norfolk is getting battered.”

  “We were just talking about that,” Alex said easily. “It’s too late to turn back. We were talking about checking into a hotel up ahead until morning.”

  “That’s a good plan,” Ziv said. “Before you head out tomorrow, get that taillight looked at. It’s probably just the bulb.”

  Alex gave him a bright smile. “No ticket?”

  Ziv thought about shooting her where she sat, but instead he returned her smile and tipped his hat. “Not tonight, ma’am,” he said. “Drive safe.”

  ◊ ◊ ◊

  As Ziv was telling his carload of terrorists to drive safely, Vanessa was driving past her carload of terrorists. She had timed the pass perfectly, starting it just as the Tahoe reached the brightly lit exit area. She drove by slowly but steadily, careful to keep her eyes on the road without a glance to her right. True to his word, Uly was slumped in the passenger seat sound asleep. As she went by, her cell phone rang, but she ignored it, not wanting anything to interfere with her concentration. When she got by the Tahoe, she increased her speed slightly to give them the impression that she had been going faster during the pass than she actually was. She eased back into the right-hand lane fifty yards ahead, where she could keep track of them in her side-view mirrors. She felt herself smiling with satisfaction. It had been decades since she’d had to make a move like this.

  Tracking devices take half the skill and all of the fun out of tailing someone, she thought. How do you tail someone when you’re in front of them? She glanced at the Tahoe’s headlights and her smile broadened as she answered the riddle. With smoke and mirrors.

  If it turned out that Bethany and Malak were in the Tahoe, she had two ways to get back behind the vehicle. She could take an exit with an immediate on-ramp and drop in behind them after they passed. Or she could very subtly slow the intellimobile over several miles, letting them creep up on her until they couldn’t stand it anymore and blew by her. She preferred the latter method to the former, because it would be their choice, and therefore they would be less suspicious about the old van behind them. Her tailing strategy was interrupted by X-Ray.

  “Got ’em,” he said. “All four of them turned to watch us pass.”

  “Bethany and Malak?”

  “Not even close. Four kids. Two girls. Two boys. Twenty-year-olds, maybe younger. I’ll run facial recognition on them and see if something pops, but you can definitely turn this rig around and floor it back east. The targets aren’t in this Tahoe. I just wish I’d thought of this sooner. We could have eliminated them a hundred miles ago.”

  Vanessa glanced at the GPS. The next exit was a little over three miles ahead. Her cell rang again. This time she answered.

  “Thank God!” Angela said.

  Pass

  “I have Vanessa!” Angela shouted.

  She had been trying to reach the other two teams for ten minutes and we were beginning to think something bad had happened to them.

  “Ziv and Eben are calling in too,” Angela said.

  “Put them all on speaker,” Boone said.

  “The footage from the rest stop was a bust,” Vanessa said. “But we just did a drive-by and got some vid. The Tahoe had four kids in it, looking like they’re out for a joyride.”

  “It is the same here,” Ziv said. “We had a good look at them. They were older than Vanessa’s group, but they are definitely not the people we are looking for. We are heading back your way.”

  “You need to turn around and reacquire them,” Boone said. “Right now. Are you still in pursuit, Vanessa?”

  “After a fashion. They’re following us, but I can change that. What’s going on?”

  Boone told them about Felix and the bomb. Halfway through his briefing, there was the screech of tires and what sounded like a car accelerating. I figured it was Eben turning around and making up for lost time.

  When Boone finished, Ziv said, “We will catch up to them and take them out.”

  “Negative,” Boone said. “I want you to follow them. No confrontation. No interference.”

  “Is Felix okay?” Vanessa asked.

&n
bsp; “A little singed, a little deaf,” Boone answered. “I think he managed to get rid of the terrorists cleanly. Accidents happen when you’re hauling a bomb around, but we won’t get away with it again. The ghosts aren’t suicide bombers. Their motto is ‘live to kill again.’ I think the other two will park their rigs near high-value targets and walk away. That should give you some time to disarm the bombs before they go off. Is that clear, Ziv? Eben?”

  Both men said yes, but they weren’t enthusiastic yeses.

  X-ray chimed in. “They’ll know we’re onto them when the bombs don’t explode.”

  “Hopefully by then, this will all be over,” Boone said. “I doubt they’re going to detonate the bombs in the middle of the night when no one is around. They’re going to want casualties. A lot of them.”

  “I’ve never disarmed a bomb,” Ziv said.

  “Nor have I,” Eben added.

  “I’ll walk you through it after I see what we’ve got,” X-Ray said. “They probably all have the same triggering and timing system.”

  “Probably?” Ziv said.

  “I’ve disarmed a hundred bombs and I still have all my appendages,” X-Ray said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “That’s easy to say when you’ll be walking us through it well out of the blast zone,” Eben said.

  “Let’s get back to the real problem,” Vanessa said. “We could be hundreds of miles away from you, Boone, by the time the targets reach their destination. That’s going to leave you on your own.”

  “Not exactly,” Boone admitted. “I’m sure Felix will get some wheels, if he hasn’t already. And John Masters will be meeting up with me somewhere down the road.”