by Jean Heller
Then several white Chevy Tahoes appeared. Every member of the ground crew that had directed the Saudi plane to its parking spot was loaded into the SUVs and taken away.
“Wonder what that’s about,” Mark said.
Still, nobody stirred from the plane.
“What are they waiting for?” I wondered aloud.
“Not Customs,” Mark said. “If they were subjected to Customs it would have been when they landed in Washington.”
“Where are their limos?” I asked. “If their ground transportation is late, these guys could behead someone right on the tarmac.”
As if they’d heard me, seven limos came around a hangar and pulled up beside the plane, followed by a large bus that looked large enough and elegant enough for a Jon Bon Jovi tour.
“A limo for each prince?” Mark suggested.
“And a bus for the staff and security,” I said. Then I added, “Is it strange that there’s no official greeting party? Not even a City Hall contingent?”
“The Saudis seem to think something’s wrong, too,” Mark said.
I looked around my binoculars and saw that three men had left the plane and were standing on the landing at the top of the rolling stairway. They looked around as if their surroundings were not what they expected. A man in a business suit at the bottom of the stairs went half way up to have a conversation with the three, who were probably security.
When the man turned to look at the limos, I recognized him as Paul Nagi, the NSA mole inside the trafficking operation. Nagi must have reassured the security personnel that all was well because the three men from the plane continued past him, down the steps to the ground. They stopped and waited on the tarmac, watching everything.
Nagi continued up the steps and stood in the open door of the aircraft, shaking hands with each of the seven princes who emerged. Then he disappeared into the plane’s interior, and I did not see him again.
Each of the princes got into his own limo. Each was alone. A small crowd then got off the plane and went to the bus. Nagi was not with them. The final group was all male. Either wives and families had been left at home or in Washington. Given the purpose of the Chicago trip, that didn’t surprise me.
Once everyone was settled in, the procession should have started moving. I assumed the drivers were waiting for a police escort. Maybe that’s what they expected, but that definitely wasn’t what they got.
We watched, speechless, as a swarm of black-clad and heavily armed people, who seemed to appear out of nowhere, surrounded the seven limos and the bus. The limo drivers’ doors were yanked open. Each driver was pulled out and shot, replaced by two attackers, one behind the wheel and one in the back seat with a prince.
At the same time, a dozen black-clad people surrounded the bus and began shooting at the windows. The weapons were silenced, but Mark and I heard the thump of each round. When every window was shot out, the attackers stormed the bus, guns thudding. We heard terrified screams. We heard infuriated shouts. We heard barked orders.
Then we heard silence.
The eight vehicles were driven away.
The only sign they’d been there were shards of glass on the concrete.
And seven dead bodies on the ground.
61
Neither of us said anything, too stunned to react immediately.
But we moved very quickly when a voice behind us asked, “Seen enough?”
We turned and found the NSA’s ubiquitous Mason Cross standing behind us, holding a Glock aimed in our general direction. He was flanked by two men who appeared to be SWAT team members, though their uniforms had no identifiers. Both wore helmets with dark-tinted faceguards, and I wondered for a moment how well they could see in the pre-dawn light. Well enough, I supposed, to kill us with their M4 semi-automatic carbines or the Glocks on their belts.
Mark had his own Glock with him. The last thing I wanted was a firefight.
“Get up,” Cross ordered.
“Why?” I demanded. “So you can dispatch us the way you killed those people on the tarmac? What’s the sense in getting up if I’m just going to fall down again?”
“We have no intention of shooting you,” Cross said. “We could, of course, change our minds. Please stand up.”
As I turned my back to pick up my binoculars, I realized my digital voice recorder was still in my hand, its voice-activation technology still running. It was the same size and design as a USB thumb drive, so if I was searched, it might be overlooked as harmless. I slipped it into my pocket, the action covered by the motion of standing up.
“I’ll take your weapon, Mr. Hearst,” Cross said.
Marked looked to me and I nodded. No sense fighting this, whatever this was.
“The camera, too,” Cross added.
“Wait a minute,” I protested. “You can’t do that. It’s my personal property, and we are on public property. You have no legal standing to seize anything of ours.”
Cross waggled his gun at me. “This is all the standing I need.”
“You admit, though,” I said, “that you are seizing personal belongings on public property.”
“Oh, be quiet, Ms. Mora. You can be very tiring.”
“Screw you, NSA,” I said. “I should have brought charges against you for assaulting me in my house. I still could. And now you’re threatening me with a gun while you conduct an illegal seizure. You’re in no position to sling insults.”
He turned back to Mark. “The camera. Now.”
Mark sighed and handed it over. Then he reached under his jacket and handed over his Glock, still holstered.
“Now your cell phones.”
We handed them over.
“I presume we’ll get all of this back at some point,” Mark said.
“Presume nothing,” Cross said. This guy was really getting on my nerves.
He pocketed Mark’s gun and handed the camera to one of his sidekicks, who extracted the memory card. The man searched the camera bag then returned both the camera and the bag to Mark.
I was glad we were allowed to keep the bag. I had a second digital voice recorder inside that also looked like a USB thumb drive. It was turned off but would serve as a backup if the one in my pocket ran out of juice.
“Now let me tell you what’s going to happen,” Cross said. “We are going handcuff you, Mr. Hearst, and put you in the back seat of your car with one of these gentlemen. The other will drive. Ms. Mora, you will be handcuffed and ride with me.”
“Where are we going?” I asked.
Cross ignored me as his men secured our hands.
“Out of curiosity, Mr. Cross, how do you intend to explain those seven dead bodies on the tarmac down there?”
“What dead bodies?” Cross asked.
Mark and I turned in unison, our eyes falling where we had seen seven limo drivers fall minutes earlier. The asphalt was empty and clean. No bodies. No blood.
I heard Mark mutter, “What the hell?”
I turned back and looked at Cross. His face disclosed nothing.
“Let’s go,” he said.
We were put in the designated vehicles and started away from the airport.
In front of us, the sun was rising on an otherwise beautiful day.
It took nearly ninety minutes to make our way back into the city in rush-hour traffic. It didn’t completely surprise me that we wound up in an underground parking facility at the Federal Building on South Dearborn in the Loop. I figured it would be either there or a marshy burial site in northwestern Indiana.
Four dour plainclothes men dragged Mark and me out of our vehicles. The two SWAT members, or whatever they were, drove the vehicles away somewhere. Cross and his new cronies escorted us to an elevator that slid down four floors. We walked through three corridors and into a chilly room that looked like a cross between every police interrogation room I’d ever seen on TV and a conference room designed by IKEA.
The conference table was a heavy plastic made to look like faux blonde wood
. Six molded plastic chairs of the same color rested in various disorganized stances around the table. The chairs didn’t even have wheels, just cheap metal skids that probably maneuvered okay on the milk chocolate brown Linoleum floor.
The windowless room also had two sofas that appeared not to have been cleaned since Al Capone sat on them.
I wondered if I could stand in a corner for as long as Mark and I were held.
My camera bag landed on the conference table. Our cell phones and Mark’s gun remained missing.
Our wrists were freed. One of our jailers returned several minutes later with bottles of water and an assortment of snacks that probably had been lodged in a vending machine for a year or so.
“Not my idea of a hearty breakfast,” Mark said to our waiter. “I don’t suppose you have any coffee worth drinking.”
The man left without answering. But in fairness, he returned a half hour later with tall cardboard cups of coffee and a little bag containing sugar, artificial sweetener, and a non-dairy creamer. There also were thin wooden stirrers that might, if wielded expertly, put someone’s eye out, but generally were not weapons-grade implements.
We offered our sincere thanks and took the coffees black.
That was the last we saw of another human being for more than two hours. I was getting seriously angry.
Then a U.S. Marshal showed up.
“Either of you need a bathroom?” he asked.
We both said yes. He let us decide who went first. Gentleman that he is, Mark deferred to me.
When both of us were back in the IKEA room, as I’d taken to thinking of it, I asked, “When do we get our one phone call?”
The Marshal left without giving me an answer.
Mark snatched a bag of pretzels, the healthiest item on the table, tore it open, and offered me some. I shook my head. He stretched out on one of the sofas, his head on the arm, and began to munch.
“You know you could get cooties from that,” I said.
“The pretzels?”
“No, the couch.”
“I better not. I’ll sue.”
“Good luck with that,” I said.
Another three hours went by. Mark and I said very little to one another. We couldn’t be sure the room wasn’t bugged, and we didn’t want to take a chance.
The U.S. Marshal in training to wait tables at Applebee’s brought us an array of cheese sandwiches and little plastic cups of potato salad, along with a half dozen soft drinks, both sugared and diet. He stood for a moment, waiting for a response.
I picked up one of the plastic-wrapped sandwiches.
“You’re from the CIA, aren’t you?” I said.
“I’m a U.S. Marshal,” he replied.
“I meant the Culinary Institute of America, not the spy place.”
He left.
“I think you hurt his feelings,” Mark said.
I replied, “I can only hope.”
The food gave both of us the strength to sustain our growing anxiety and anger. We’d been held for nearly six hours without having committed any crime we could think of, without knowing why we were locked up, and without having benefit of legal counsel.
Mark began shouting at the wall that held a framed pane of what we presumed was one-way glass.
“This has gone on way too long,” he yelled. “Either read us our rights and charge us with something, or let us go. And if you’re charging us with something, we damned well have the right to lawyers. If this goes on another five minutes, I’m going to start picking up these cheap-assed chairs and throwing them through your one-way glass. Enough already.”
He lifted his wrist and started calling out expiring seconds.
Just before the one-minute mark, Cross and Colter walked into the room.
“Why don’t you both sit down and relax?” Colter said.
“How the hell are we supposed to do that?” I asked. “Nobody knows where we are. We both have jobs. We both have animals at home needing attention. And neither one of us has broken any laws. You have no reason and no right to hold us.”
“Nice speech,” Cross said. “Actually, both of your offices know exactly where you are. Mr. Hearst, your dog is with the neighbor who looks after him when you’re away and Ms. Mora isn’t available. Ms. Mora, your cats are being cared for by the lady who lives across the street. Satisfied?”
“Not even close,” I said. “I demand to know what’s going on and what it was we witnessed this morning. How the hell many people did you wind up killing? What happened to the Saudis? Where are those eleven children? And how long are we going to be forced to stay here?”
“You are going to be here a while longer,” Colter said. “You’re not under arrest. You won’t be charged with anything. We’re waiting for a situation to play out. Once it’s over, you will be asked to sign a set of papers. Then you will be released.”
“We’re not signing anything without lawyers,” Mark said.
“You’ll have them,” Cross replied. “Meanwhile, we’ll feed you. We’re bringing in cots, blankets, and pillows. You’ll have to accept our hospitality for the night.”
“What happened to the bodies at the airport?” I asked.
“What bodies?” Cross said, sounding bored with the question.
“The seven men your guys hauled out of the limos and shot,” I snapped back.
“Never happened,” he replied.
Mark jumped in. “And all the people on that bus?”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Cross said.
I got up in Cross’s face.
“Are you telling us that what we saw with our own eyes, the images that are on the memory card you stole out of my camera, never happened?”
“Something happened,” Colter said. “Just not what you think you saw.”
When they left, Mark and I stared at each other, dumbfounded.
“I think,” I said, “we just stepped through the looking glass.”
A little after 10 p.m. another U.S. Marshal came in and asked if we needed anything before lights out. We both took a final trip to the bathroom where I did my best to clean my teeth with plain water and a finger.
Once back in the IKEA room, I grabbed my camera bag. I tried to look casual as I rummaged through it for the small hairbrush I had stashed there. It gave me the opportunity to swap out digital voice recorders, putting the fresh one in my pocket and burying the used one at the bottom of the bag. I stowed the bag under my cot, and crawled under a rough wool blanket. The second DVR wouldn’t start operating until it detected voices, which probably wouldn’t be until morning, but it was ready just in case.
When Mark was settled in, the lights in the room went off. As we suspected, someone was watching us.
Mark said, “Do you think if we had sex on one of these cots it would break?”
I laughed. “Yeah, if it’s a repeat of our last time. I wasn’t sure then that my bed would hold up. And given that it’s the NSA, they probably have some night vision capability in here. I’m not sure I want to copulate for Mason Cross’s entertainment.”
“Point taken,” Mark said.
As I lay there in the dark with no idea what the new day would bring, I wondered how in hell I was going to get that last conversation off my little voice recorder if I ever had to play back the rest of the file for anyone.
62
The IKEA room flooded with fluorescent brightness at 7 a.m. It had taken me a while to find sleep the night before; but once out, I slept surprisingly well.
We were escorted to the bathroom, though my request for a toothbrush, or at least a tiny bottle of Listerine, was answered with a gruff, “This ain’t no luxury hotel.” That might have been the first truth I’d heard in the last twenty-four hours.
When I returned to my home away from home, the conference table held coffee, commercial cartons of orange juice, and a box of donuts.
Oh, joy. I had a strong dislike of donuts, and they returned the favor. I made do with the juice
and coffee, though Mark offered me his carton of juice in exchange for my share of the sweet fat treats. I told him he was welcome to my donuts, and he could keep his juice.
Half an hour later Cross and Colter, whom I’d started thinking of as the Two Little Pigs, showed up appearing not to have slept.
“Your lawyer will be here in about an hour, Ms. Mora,” Cross said. “Once he arrives, we’ll all have a conversation.”
Mark said, “I don’t have a lawyer.”
“Mr. Bruckner said he would be willing to represent both of you,” Cross said.
“If we’re not being charged,” I asked, “why do we need a lawyer?”
“Mr. Hearst indicated yesterday,” Cross replied, “that neither of you would sign any paperwork without a lawyer’s advice. So we got you a lawyer.”
I started to ask another question, but Cross held up his hand.
“Later,” he said.
He picked up a donut—chocolate with white icing and pastel sprinkles—and left. The image of a tough NSA thug eating a donut with sprinkles made me laugh.
“I’ll bet,” I said, “when he’s confronted with a jar of lollypops, he scratches around to find the red ones.”
Mark gave me a questioning look. I just shook my head.
Bruckner joined us in the IKEA room two hours later. He glanced around.
“Nice office,” he said to me.
“What’s going on, Jonathan?” I asked. “Twenty-four hours ago, Mark and I saw these guys murder maybe three dozen people on a tarmac at O’Hare and kidnap seven more. And all of a sudden we’re under arrest.”
I wanted to get that on my little DVR before I was ordered to stop talking, which I sure was coming.
