The Asset

by Shane Kuhn

  “Does anyone know who these people are?”

  Crickets. Kennedy placed a red laser pointer dot on the forehead of each person as he spoke about him.

  “Two of the worst serial killers in US history, one of the most lethal school shooters in history, and one of the worst domestic terrorists our country has ever seen.”

  “They look like perfectly good white people,” someone joked.

  “That’s the point. The smartest criminals don’t broadcast their intentions. The only people who make bomb threats are the ones who do not have a bomb. No one knows a shooter’s plan until he’s already opened fire. A real terrorist has one goal and that is to kill as many people as possible with one act. This is why they strike when we are at our most vulnerable, when they know our guard will be down.”

  Kennedy clicked through more slides of confiscated weapons, matching them to pictures of their owners. Not one person looked the least bit threatening.

  “Credit card knives, hairbrush ice picks, stun gun canes, live smoke grenades, incendiary and corrosive chemicals, and an endless parade of loaded firearms and ammunition—all very bad things that get a lot worse at thirty-three thousand feet. You cannot afford to allow even one of these items to ever make it onto an airplane. Does anyone here know what the September eleventh hijackers used?”

  “Box cutters,” Facebook girl answered.

  Kennedy displayed a picture of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, the one his sister died in, taken just before impact.

  “Correct. Something anyone can buy at the local hardware store and, more important, something that will raise no suspicions when purchased. Only an idiot or a mental patient is going to try to get a firearm on an airplane. Finding those will be the easiest part of your job. But someone with truly bad intentions and half a brain will show up with something they think you will overlook—not a box cutter, because now we have in-flight security in place to deal with cockpit attacks. If we learned anything from 9/11 it was that weapons by themselves are not the end-all for a successful terror attack. Our scanning equipment is sophisticated enough to identify weapons of any significance. You have to think beyond technology and get into the head of someone who is trying to outsmart you, getting creative, doing hours and hours of research, devising something they are certain you will not notice. But, in the end, the key is the attacker himself. Even if you can’t see his weapon, you have to be able to see his intent.”

  Kennedy showed them a photo of Richard Reid and the shoe that he packed with explosives and took on American Airlines Flight 63 in December 2001.

  “I thank this asshole every day I have to take my shoes off at the checkpoint. The only reason he didn’t bring that plane down was because he knew nothing about explosives. He had enough C4 in his shoe to do the job, but by the time they took off, his foot sweat had soaked it through and then he tried to light the det cord with a match.”

  Everyone laughed.

  “You know what’s even funnier? The security checkpoint officers in Paris who screened him the first time he tried to fly refused to let him on the plane. They accurately analyzed his behavior, which was textbook amateur terrorist—fidgety, noncommunicative, unwilling to make eye contact, et cetera. So, he just came back the next day and the new screening crew let him on the plane. Did he change overnight? No. He just got lucky with screeners who didn’t give a shit and didn’t read the fucking logs from the day before. His photo was in those logs.”

  Murmurs of disgust. Kennedy could feel them orienting to him, like a magnet pulling iron filings out of the sand. He was making them give a shit.

  “Whatever you think you know about how to identify a threat, forget it now. The truth is that you know nothing.”

  “Sir, all due respect,” a quiet, white doughboy in the back said sheepishly. “We’ve been studying the manual for weeks. We’re not clueless.”

  “Have you ever been trained by me before?” Kennedy asked.

  “No, but—”

  “Then you are clueless.”

  More laughter from the room. Doughboy looked for Glenn to back him up, but Glenn was staring at his phone screen, mentally checked out.

  “What makes you so special?” Doughboy asked.

  “I’m not special. The people who trained me are.”

  “Who trained you? God?” he said, laughing, but no one joined him.

  “The Israelis. They’re surrounded by enemies and have been at war since their country came into existence in 1948. Yet, not one plane has ever been successfully hijacked from Ben Gurion Airport, and the only attacks that ever disrupted air traffic came from outside the airport when groups like Hamas fired rockets from Palestinian territories or Japanese Red Army gunmen receiving weapons from Palestinian soldiers opened fire on passengers outside security checkpoints. Those were military offensives that airport security could not control. One plane was hijacked in Vienna in 1972 and forced to land there. Anyone know what happened?”

  “I think you know by now we don’t,” a recruit said glumly.

  “Israeli commandos stormed the plane, killed two terrorists, captured the other two, and one passenger was killed. One passenger. In the entire history of the airport! Two thousand, nine hundred and ninety-six people died on 9/11 and thousands more as a result of the wars triggered by that attack. We are, statistically, the worst in the world when it comes to aviation security. The Israelis are the best. And I’m pretty sure God himself must have trained them.”

  “What do they have that we don’t?” Facebook girl asked. “I can’t even pick out Israel on a map.”

  “It’s not about what they have. Screening tech in developed nations is all pretty much the same. It’s about what they don’t have: trust. They trust no one. In the US, we’re sheltered. We want to trust people—little old ladies, unassuming bookworms with glasses, the next-door-neighbor dad who rocks a great sweater-vest, moms with cute babies, and the list goes on. Profiling works both ways. There are people we’ve been trained to trust, just like those we’ve been trained to treat with suspicion.”

  Kennedy played a video showing people’s faces—a wide variety of ages, ethnicities, socioeconomic groups, and everything in between—cycling through in the same position in the middle of the screen. As the video sped up, they appeared to morph into one another, creating the illusion they were all the same.

  “Over fifty million travelers go through Kennedy Airport every year. That’s roughly one hundred and forty thousand a day. But it only takes one to pull off an attack that could be as devastating to our country as 9/11. Anyone know the recent nationwide failure rate of TSA agents?”

  “We don’t need to go into that right now,” Glenn started.

  “It was in the New York Times, Glenn. And on CNN. Talking about it is the first step to fixing it.”

  “Ninety-five percent,” one of the quieter recruits said in back, silencing the room.

  “At least one of you reads the news. Ninety-five percent of fake weapons, explosives, and contraband that undercover DHS Red Team agents attempted to smuggle through TSA checkpoints at airports around the country—including this one—made it through,” Kennedy pointed out.

  “Holy shit,” another recruit said.

  “That’s not all. Seventy-three TSA agents were on terror watch lists.”

  The room erupted. Kennedy liked what he saw. Most were pissed off, shocked, embarrassed, the whole range of emotions he would expect from someone who had chosen a career in airport security. Those who didn’t react would not be coming back tomorrow. Glenn scowled at Kennedy from across the room and shuffled back to his office. He was the problem. It was easy to blame the TSOs, with their youth and lack of experience, but Kennedy likened it to the military. When you see a Marine, you are not seeing any of the shortcomings he or she brought into the corps. Good leadership and training shapes the minds of even the most stubborn you
th. Kennedy felt a strong obligation to help shape young officer recruits, but the TSA was not supporting him with their team leaders, and that was why the system was failing.

  “You can change that score. You have to want it. And you have to listen to me and do exactly what I tell you. If you do, when I’m through with you, you’ll see everyone the way I do, as a potential threat. You’ll trust no one . . . and nothing will get past you. In case you haven’t noticed, World War Three has begun, but it isn’t nation versus nation. It’s individuals and groups versus whoever or whatever they hate. Add modern technology and the global availability of advanced weaponry—like rockets that can shoot down a commercial airliner at cruising altitude—and tell me: who can you trust?”

  “No one!”

  The group sounded off like a boot camp platoon. For some, there was hope yet. For others, there was a pink slip and a doughnut.

  After the group dispersed, Kennedy sat down to chat with Glenn. His office looked and smelled like it belonged to a high school football coach with a tendency to hoard old newspapers and novelty coffee cups. The tension, along with Glenn’s ripening armpits, was palpable.

  “Seen this?”

  Kennedy set the recent DHS/TSA threat memo on his desk.

  “Yeah,” Glenn lied, glancing at it.

  “And?” Kennedy asked.

  “We get ten a those a day.”

  “Not like this one.”

  “What the hell’re you talking about?”

  “You haven’t read it, have you?”

  Glenn tried to cheat a sneak peek at the memo and Kennedy pulled it off the desk. Glenn’s face turned cartoon red. The only thing missing was steam coming out of his ears.

  “You come here to bust my hump? You enjoy fucking with me?”

  “I’m here to help you protect your passengers, Glenn.”

  “Oh yeah,” Glenn said sardonically. “Like you helped me before?”

  Before he could stop himself, Kennedy was in Glenn’s face.

  “Would you rather have killed two planes full of people and become the national poster boy for criminal stupidity?”

  “You done?” Glenn snorted.

  “Just getting started,” Kennedy said. “Red Teams breezed through here too, buddy. Three fake handguns and two leg-strapped bombs. Five of your planes would have gone down in flames.”

  Glenn just shrugged.

  “I’ll give you one thing, Glenn. At least you’re consistent.”

  Glenn got up and left his own office, in much the same way he had three years back when Kennedy discovered a glaring security breach exposing him for what he was—an incompetent moron. DHS had warned TSA chiefs of a potential terror threat coming out of Somalia. JFK had seemed a likely target, and Kennedy was concerned Glenn wasn’t taking the threat seriously, so he stuck around New York for a couple of days and kept his eye on the checkpoints. Eventually, one of Kennedy’s TSA trainees pulled two men traveling with South African passports, carrying what they said were transplant corneas and human tissue donations. Their paperwork looked solid, and X-ray images of their cases didn’t reveal anything overtly suspect, but Kennedy had felt they were exhibiting suspect behavior patterns and had them moved to a private room for additional questioning.

  When their passports were scanned, the system came back matching their pictures to known Somali Al Qaeda operatives—but with only 70 percent accuracy. Kennedy practically sprinted to Glenn’s office to celebrate having potentially bagged the threat operatives. But to his bewilderment, Glenn opted not to question them.

  “Glenn, it’s a seventy percent match. We have to question them.”

  “We?”

  “You, I mean. Why don’t I get someone from the bureau over here to do it? Then you can just let them handle it. I’m sure they wouldn’t want you to just let them go.”

  “We’re not calling them. Anything less than a ninety percent match and they’ll chew my ass for wasting their time.”

  “Is that what you’re worried about?”

  “Yeah, some of us have jobs, buddy, and we want to keep ’em.”

  “At least search their medical cases.”

  Glenn had already started packing up to leave. He had his hockey bag and Kennedy knew he was in a hurry to make his beer league game.

  “And run the risk of contaminating human tissue donations dying people might be waiting for? You want to pay for that lawsuit?”

  “Then call the sending and receiving hospitals. If they verify it, we’re good.”

  “That’s proprietary medical information. Ever heard of HIPAA?”

  “How are the names of the hospitals proprietary? It’s not like we’re asking the addresses of the recipient patients.”

  Glenn looked at Kennedy impatiently.

  “We got protocols here, ways of doing things. I’m not about to just throw all that out the window on a hunch.”

  “A hunch?” Kennedy practically yelled. “It’s the best lead anyone has had on this threat to date. We can’t just let them go!”

  Kennedy knew immediately his forceful tone had been a huge mistake.

  “There’s that ‘we’ again,” Glenn said with a cynical grin. “I think you need to call it a day, CSI Miami. Let us do our job.”

  “But you’re not doing your fucking job.”

  “You have a good night,” Glenn said and left.

  Smug Glenn thought he had put Kennedy in his place, but after he left, Kennedy went straight to the containment room to search the medical cases before the men were cut loose. It was an incredibly risky move. Defying a TSA chief and doing an unauthorized search was a breach of trust that could have easily landed him in jail, but he could live with all the consequences of being wrong, and none of the ones that came with being right. When he cut through the sealing tape on the medical cases, his hands were shaking. And what if a bomb was inside? He might accidentally detonate it and do the terrorists’ work for them. He had to make a game time decision. If he did nothing, the cases would end up on two different planes in a matter of hours.

  Kennedy opened them. He had seen donor tissue packs before, and what was inside looked nothing like those. In the dry ice there were six aluminum cylinders with safety-locked aerosol tops, like the aerosol triggers on mace cans. On the bottoms of the cylinders, there were stickers with nondescript medical insignias. When Kennedy peeled one off he found Syrian characters laser-cut into the metal. Someone had unsuccessfully attempted to file them off. He texted a picture of the cylinders to one of his father’s old air force buddies, a guy who’d worked with his dad at the Missile Systems Center in LA. The guy wasn’t 100 percent sure, but he thought they might be gas canisters. Kennedy wasn’t going to risk it, so he called in an airport shutdown protocol, using Glenn’s office hotline.

  When the NYPD bomb squad arrived, they immediately turned the case over to the feds and cleared out the entire terminal. Military munitions experts later determined the canisters contained sarin gas, a deadly nerve agent. Minuscule amounts of the toxin can kill several people and they had enough in their two phony transplant packs to kill a thousand or more. They had rigged the canisters with locking aerosol tops that, when activated, would continue to spray long after the terrorists themselves were dead. In addition to killing everyone on board and bringing down both planes, the gas would have made the crash site a lethal hot zone, killing emergency first responders as well.

  The two men were taken into custody as enemy combatants and became honored guests at the Gitmo country club. Kennedy was given a lucrative contract renewal and a big fat hush bonus, and Glenn was still trying to clean the egg off his face. His decision to let the men go was a matter of record and his superiors were well aware of it, but they didn’t fire him, for fear he would leak the incident to the press. It all got swept under the proverbial rug, along with other, less egregious terror attempts Kenn
edy had thwarted at different airports over the years. Glenn, of course, learned nothing from the experience and made no attempt to improve himself. Instead he got fatter on the government dole and perfected the art of resenting Kennedy.

  * * *

  Kennedy left Glenn’s office, just like he had three years back, deeply worried about what would happen in the event of another, larger attack. The problem was, there were too many Glenns in other airports around the country, and now it was a matter of public record that US airports were patently unsafe. The notion of trying to stop a threat being organized by anyone with half a brain filled Kennedy with the sharp bile of anxiety. As he zombie-walked through the airport, his mind was racing in so many directions he could scarcely remember the departure time for his flight home. He passed a Hudson bookstore, his version of a local library, and saw a rack with Noah Kruz’s new best seller, The You in Universe. He had read it twice already but dropped in and cracked it to his favorite passage:

  If you view your enemies simply as antagonists, you narrow your vision and create a self-fulfilling prophecy of defeat. When you see your enemies as emancipators, freeing you from the rigid perceptions that create needless conflict, your mind will open to infinite solutions, and the entire concept of defeat will cease to exist.

  Reading the passage made Kennedy realize he would never be able to rely on TSA to respond to the threat because the “self-fulfilling prophecy of defeat” was festering at the core of their organization. They suffered from the narrow vision that creates needless conflicts. Not Kennedy. Many times he had proven he didn’t need their help rooting out vermin. Alone, he could move quickly, unencumbered by bullshit policy and rampant employee apathy.

  In a world of infinite solutions, he was one.

  LOS ANGELES

  Day 2

  Welcome home.”

  Gil, the British concierge at Hotel Bel-Air, was waiting by the curb when Kennedy’s Uber SUV arrived from LAX a few minutes after midnight. The Bel-Air was one of Kennedy’s favorite hotels. It was an oasis of Mediterranean architecture in the Westside hills, with sweeping views of Los Angeles, from the heat mirage of downtown all the way to Malibu. Although it was one of the most exclusive hotels in the city, it had managed to avoid becoming a celebrity petting zoo. For Kennedy, it was an exquisite escape, allowing him to turn the volume of LA down to zero and breathe.