The Ghost Pattern

by Leslie Wolfe

  “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.”

  ...20

  ...Tuesday, May 3, 13:41PM Local Time (UTC+3:00 hours)

  ...Purovel Spa and Sport

  ...Moscow, Russia

  ...Six Days Missing

  They had set up a room just for Myatlev and Dimitrov. The two massage beds were placed closely together and covered with sparkling white sheets. As such, the two men could have quiet, exclusive conversations during their massage sessions, in the complete privacy of their dedicated spa room.

  Two bodyguards secured the door on the outside, and Ivan and two more men were on the inside. Those guarding it on the inside had gotten a better deal, being able to let their eyes wander on the naked bodies of the two young masseuses. It was quite the view, especially if they managed to keep their eyes off the nakedness of the two chubby, hairy, older men lying on their beds.

  That’s the way Myatlev liked his full-body massages: delivered in privacy, by completely naked young women, not a day older than eighteen, with their pussies completely waxed. He didn’t touch them; well, not that often, anyway. And not when he had guests, like today. He just took in the sensation and the view, reflected by wall-sized mirrors in the warm, relaxing light of the spa.

  “This goddamned music makes me want to take a piss,” Dimitrov said grumpily.

  Myatlev gestured to the bodyguards, running the edge of his palm against his throat. Ivan obliged immediately, and the tropical forest sounds that had played in the background left the room in complete silence.

  “Better?” Myatlev asked.

  “Yeah…it’s heaven, my friend. And this devushka is giving me a hard-on, and she only just worked on my neck so far,” Dimitrov laughed.

  “Speaking of hard-ons, I just heard a joke from one of my men,” Myatlev said. “It goes like this: Can you fuck at a distance?”

  “Huh?” Dimitrov turned his head toward Myatlev, intrigued.

  “Yes, if your cock is at least five inches longer than the di
stance,” Myatlev said, and they both burst into laughter.

  “Five inches is all you need, huh?” Dimitrov quipped.

  “These days?”

  Both men started laughing hard. Myatlev signaled Ivan, who brought them shot glasses with chilled vodka.

  “Ura!” the two men cheered as they clinked their glasses together, still lying on their bellies, just extending their arms toward each other enough to make their glasses come together.

  “OK, here’s one,” Dimitrov said, after gulping down his vodka. “There was a destroyer sailing in the Barents Sea, north of the polar circle, and the XO got sick and died. The captain said he was only going to promote someone in his place if they were a real man, proving they could get an erection in the Arctic cold.”

  “Brr…” Myatlev laughed.

  “All candidates were there, on deck, with their pants down in the icy blizzard, masturbating furiously, hoping to get a boner stiff enough to please the captain and get the XO’s job. Nothing…they tried, and they tried, and nothing, one by one they gave up and went back below deck, defeated and impotent. Just when the captain was about to give up, a lowly sailor steps forward and asks if the job was still open for the man with the strongest erection onboard. The captain says, ‘Yes, it is.’ Then the sailor drops his pants and there it was, a strong, erect organ, standing proud, oblivious to the ice storm. The captain gives him the XO stripes and congratulates him, then asks, ‘Son, how did you manage to get that erection in such cold weather?’ The sailor replies, ‘Easy, sir, that’s the way it froze back in Murmansk!’”

  They roared with laughter, then gulped down some more chilled vodka. Their masseuses moved to their lumbar section, working thoroughly on their contracted muscles.

  “Vitya,” Dimitrov asked in a serious tone of voice, “are you going to tell me what you’re doing with all that lab equipment you took from VECTOR?”

  Myatlev repressed a frown and turned slightly to his left, to see the expressions on Dimitrov’s face as he was sharing his plan.

  “I’ve built a lab, a research facility buried deep in the far eastern territories. I’m building a new weapon.”