The Ghost Pattern

by Leslie Wolfe

  The worst of it was not knowing. Not knowing what was going to happen to them. That, and missing Blake. She missed him terribly. Every time she thought of him, her eyes welled up. Don’t give up on me, baby…I’m still alive, and I love you! The thought of him mourning her death was unbearable. She hugged herself, whimpering, as a tear found its way down her cheek. Don’t give up on me, baby, I’m here!

  They were well-guarded, at least two armed men watching their every move from elevated positions on the sides of the huge atrium. The captives were hundreds, against just a few men, but the Russians had machine guns and didn’t hesitate to kill. Probably more would pour in at the first sign of trouble, considering the large number of video cameras hanging from the high ceiling, all with their red LEDs on.

  She made an effort to snap out of it and got up. She straightened her dress, thinking how uninspired she had been to wear a dress on that flight. She normally wore pants when she traveled. Pants would have been such a blessing now, when she had to sleep on a cold and dirty cement floor.

  She walked around a little, looking at the people near her. They were in bad shape. In the days that had passed, a lot of things had run out, from much-needed medication for some, to hope for almost everyone. But she wasn’t giving up. No. She decided to help the best that she could, by talking to some of them.

  She saw the Chinese doctor’s wife and child a few feet away. The mother leaned against the wall, holding her daughter tightly, and quietly sobbing. Adeline touched her arm gently.

  “Can I help?” she asked.

  “No,” the woman replied with a thick Chinese accent. Her voice was soft and high-pitched, almost like a child’s. “I’m—I’m just scared, scared and tired. I’m scared for Wu Shen more than anything.”

  “Your daughter?”

  “No. Wu Shen is my husband. My daughter is Yun Tsai,” she replied, a little surprised that Adeline didn’t know the difference. “I’m afraid of what he could do, because of us, because he fears for our lives,” she said, sniffling a little.

  “I see,” Adeline whispered. “What about your daughter? How is she holding up with all this?”

  “She’s running a fever. It’s better now. It’s Wu Shen I’m worried about…”

  Adeline encouraged her a little more, then moved away, aimlessly. She saw the idiot in first class, the one who’d sat in the second row on the flight, and decided to avoid him.

  “Two weeks,” she heard him say, “two more weeks and none of this would have happened.”

  Curious, she turned and looked at him inquisitively. “Two weeks?” she asked.

  “Yeah, two more weeks, and I take possession of my own jet. Two more weeks, and I would have been absent from this party,” he added bitterly, gesturing toward the hundreds of people confined together.

  She felt a wave of anger and disgust at the man’s selfishness.

  “Ah, shut it, for God’s sake! How can you live with yourself?”

  She walked away, not waiting for his reply, and approached a group of people huddled together, talking.

  “Do we know where we are?” a middle-aged, overweight woman was asking.

  “Someone said this is an abandoned ICBM silo,” a man replied. “Missiles,” he added seeing the woman’s confusion.

  “Oh, my God! Do you think there’s radiation here?” the woman asked.

  The same conversations, heard over and over again, spoken with different levels of anxiety and desperation. The same questions, asked over and over again, in the illogical hope that they could bring a different answer.

  The one question she didn’t dare ask concerned their immediate future. On the day of their arrival, while waiting in line to board the trucks, she’d heard a Russian clearly state that they were going to be used as lab rats.

  For what?

  ...24

  ...Wednesday, May 4, 15:39PM Local Time (UTC+3:00 hours)

  ...Vitaliy Myatlev’s Residence

  ...Moscow, Russia

  ...Seven Days Missing

  Vitaliy Myatlev finished reading Dr. Bogdanov’s report on his computer, and regretted he didn’t read it in printed format. That way he would have had something to tear to pieces, or slam down against the desk.

  “Motherfucking idiot!” The man was a moron. Period. In only a few days, he’d managed to lose Faulkner, one of the best researchers in the field, because he just had to punch him in the stomach. How stupid could Bogdanov get?

  Myatlev stood abruptly, pushing his desk chair all the way into the wall. He went to the window, opened it, and lit a Dominican cigar, savoring the fresh, heady smoke as it filled his mouth, his nostrils. Better.

  Then he read the report again, this time in a calmer state of mind. All right, maybe it wasn’t that bad. After all, in just ten days since Myatlev had come up with the idea, he’d hijacked a commercial flight, set up a state-of-the-art lab in the middle of nowhere, and had the best scientists in the world working for him. Not bad!

  Yes, they will need a few more days to have the first batch ready, but so what? So fucking what? In the grand scheme of things, it didn’t matter. These things normally took years. For him, it would be just days, or maybe a couple of weeks.

  Then he would really conquer the world. No one would be able to say no to him anymore. He would be able to manipulate and control everyone in his path, from business opponents to clients to governments. No one would be able to resist.

  He poured himself another glass of vodka and slammed a few ice cubes on top of it, sending droplets of clear liquid splashing all around him. He sipped it with reverence, letting it work its miracles in his weary body, and expressing his enjoyment with a loud, satisfied exhalation of air mixed with bluish smoke.

  We are slaves to our brain chemistry, all of us, he reflected. Equally vulnerable. There's no willpower, no intelligence, and no spirit that won't succumb to the right mix of drugs.

  He’d learned that from his friend, President Abramovich, from the stories of his early days in the KGB, when he had worked in punitive psychiatry, learning how to manipulate and defeat people with drugs. After all, why would that wealth of knowledge be limited to Abramovich’s use? Or to Russia’s? He could definitely use it in his business. Although he’d been on the Global Fortune 50 list for some time now, that wasn’t even close to being enough. It was never going to be enough.

  After careful planning and precise delivery mechanisms, tested in the field on a vast number of unsuspecting subjects in all kinds of environments, he could rule the world. His business opponents could make some bad decisions, driven by an unexplained surge in one brain chemical or a drop in another, and he'd be there, watching, waiting, ready to reap the benefits. They could feel overly aggressive and competitive in purchasing an asset, paying to the seller—Myatlev, who else—two, three times the fair market value. They could suddenly feel weak and demotivated when bidding against one of Myatlev’s many global corporations about contracts worth billions of dollars.

  That's why the formulations had to be precise, and work with accuracy. It had to gain him control. Random violence, as they had on the latest failed test, the one that left an entire offshore drilling platform covered in blood, gave him nothing.

  ...25

  ...Wednesday, May 4, 1:09PM PDT (UTC-7:00 hours)

  ...Tom Isaac’s Residence

  ...Laguna Beach, California

  ...Seven Days Missing

  Spring in southern California is pure paradise. Not too hot, clear blue sky, and the air is filled with a multitude of scents from flowering bushes and trees, especially from citrus trees that bloom about this time. Tom’s backyard had several lemon and orange trees at the peak of their flowering season. Yet somehow, all that serene beauty failed to register in Alex’s brain, occupied at full capacity with the search for the impossible.

  The thought that the lives of 441 people could be in her hands kept her going on adrenaline, in a desperate race against time and against all odds. It had already been seven
days since they’d gone missing. They were definitely in distress, if even still alive. And what progress had they made? Little, if any. She was getting desperate. She stomped her leg impatiently, annoyed at the time she was wasting on food, on the “at least one hot meal a day” rule that the Isaacs had put in place.

  “All right, guys, bring your plates,” Tom called from near the grill.

  Alex jumped from her patio chair and grabbed a plate on her way.

  “What’s cooking?” she asked.

  “Just cheeseburgers, nothing fancy this time,” Tom replied. “Claire is bringing some fries.”

  She liked her burger naked, no bun, but with all the trimmings. She grabbed hers from the grill, paired it with a couple of slices of bacon, and made room for Sam, who’d just arrived.

  “So good to have you here, Sam,” she said, after hugging him and kissing him on his clean-shaven head. “I need you badly on this case; I need you to keep me true, and give me some more ideas.”

  “Happy to oblige,” Sam replied. “Tom’s home looks more and more like a hotel. Sorry for the imposition!”

  “Ah, no worries,” Tom replied. “Claire and I love a full house. We just wish it could have been under better circumstances, that’s all.”

  Steve was next in line, and grabbed his burger quickly, without saying a word. Blake was last, hesitant, wearing his shoulders hunched forward and his head lowered.

  “I’m not really hungry, you know,” Blake said. His voice and his entire demeanor showed the turmoil he was going through. Time was slipping by, and little progress was being made. He must have felt desperate, painfully aware of every minute they spent away from the war room, of every minute his wife remained missing.

  They took their seats at the table, and Lou brought everyone cold drinks from the fridge.

  “OK, we are severely pressed for time,” Alex said between bites, “so I will ask you to make this a working lunch.”

  Everyone nodded or mumbled approvals, so she continued.

  “Why would I hijack a plane? We sort of talked through that; I don’t think any new ideas have surfaced. But where would I take it? I think if we can answer that question, we have a better chance to find it. A 747-400 is a huge plane. Mr. Murphy told me it needs two miles of runway to land or take off. That is not easy to find outside of commercial airports. Thoughts?”

  Sam wiped his mouth quickly and set his napkin down on the glass patio table.

  “There are strategic highways out there. Many countries have them, including ours. These are stretches of straight highway with removable median barriers. Most of us have driven on these strategic highways and thought nothing of it. But, if need be, that median barrier goes away, and the highway becomes a landing strip for aircraft of any size.”

  She felt frustration take over. With this case, whenever she thought she had a way to zero in on that plane’s location, someone would say something, or something would happen to kill every bit of hope.

  “You’re frowning at your burger,” Tom said. “It can’t be that bad, I hope.”

  “No, the burger’s fine, Tom, I’m just frustrated, that’s all. I thought we had a way to find potential landing sites, and, apparently we don’t.”

  Blake’s eyes clouded a little more.

  “How? How were you thinking to find those landing sites?” Steve asked.

  “By satellite. These things you can see through satellite imagery. By the way, why aren’t the airlines using satellites to find the missing planes?”

  “Satellites are most often already spoken for, and hugely expensive,” Lou replied. “There’s little-to-no satellite bandwidth available for such searches, which could be very demanding on resources. Airlines should have their own satellites they could reroute and search, but they don’t. However, don’t despair. Your idea is still good. Very few highways outside of the United States have such long stretches of straight, double-lane highways. You could spot those easily from above. I think I could code something that would scan imagery to find that. All we need is relatively new imagery, and I think we’re set there, with Google Maps.”

  “Those images could be years old,” Alex said. “But that’s a great idea, Lou!”

  “Maybe not so old. I read somewhere that most images on Google Maps are less than three years old. Not ideal, I know, but it’s there, readily available, ripe for scanning and comparing. I’ll put something together after lunch, see what kind of image-pattern recognition software I can find and adapt. Maybe the boys have written something recently that we could use,” he added, referring to his group of white-hat hackers and close friends.

  “Jeez, I feel old and obsolete,” Sam said toward Tom. “These kids are talking mumbo-jumbo again. I can barely keep up.”

  Tom nodded and replied, “I know exactly how you feel, my friend.”

  “We’re just saying we could scan existing satellite imagery to find stretches of highway, that’s all,” Alex clarified. “If the imagery is not older than a couple of years, we could hope to capture 90 percent or so of the potential landing strips out there that could land a Boeing.”

  “What will that do for us?” Blake asked. “What are you hoping to achieve?”

  The answer seemed fairly obvious, but she saw more in Blake’s question.

  “I’m hoping to eliminate where the plane can’t be,” she replied in a gentle tone of voice. “Sometimes, when you can’t find out directly where things are, you can apply a process of elimination.”

  “Where would you start looking?” Blake asked again.

  “We know what kind of fuel reserves this plane had when it took off. That allows us to calculate a range, and apply that circular range over the map, centered in Tokyo. Essentially, we draw a circle on the map with a radius equal to the plane’s range, and eliminate everything blue water.”

  “Why centered in Tokyo?” Sam asked. “They flew due northeast for a few hours toward San Francisco before falling off the radar.”

  “Yes, but Mr. Murphy, the expert who came in yesterday to answer some questions for us, told us that you can pull off this type of hijacking by switching transponder codes between two aircraft. We have no way of knowing where or when that happened, so we’re going with the most conservative scenario, expanding our search area inland by several hundred miles.”

  Blake covered his face with his hands and whispered, “This is a needle in a haystack!”

  Alex sprung from her chair and went over to him, touching his shoulder. “Don’t despair. Please. I know it’s hard. It’s already been a week since they disappeared, I know, but guess what? The more we work on this, the more I see hijacking as a viable possibility, as opposed to a mid-ocean crash. There’s hope, Blake. We will find her, I promise.”

  She searched her soul a little after making the promise. Did she really believe they could find the plane everyone else assumed had crashed at sea? Yes, she did. It was crazy, illogical, and yet she knew in her gut that V was somehow behind it. Why? She still didn’t know.

  The fact that everyone avoided mentioning was that any chance to find Adeline alive dropped dramatically with every day, with every hour that went by. They all knew that, but never spoke of it. They all worked around the clock, living mostly off coffee and burgers, in a desperate race against time. Time was in the hands of her unseen enemy, a massive advantage on his part—441 lives…

  She refocused on Blake, whose desperation and sadness were engulfing him like a shroud.

  “I wanted to ask you, do you know of anyone who’d want to harm you or Adeline?”

  “I don’t know…there could be.”

  “Motivated enough to pull this off? With means to pull this off?”

  “I–I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “Have we heard anything about any ransom or political demands? I guess not,” she continued. “Which makes scenario three the most plausible, and Sam, that’s why I needed you here.”

  “Scenario three?” Sam asked.

  �
�Yes. I am thinking V might be behind this. I don’t know why, but it just feels right. After all, if that plane is anywhere other than the bottom of the ocean, then it’s in Russia.”

  Silence fell around the patio table covered with half-empty plates.

  “What’s he after?” Sam asked quietly.

  “Don’t know yet, and don’t think I haven’t been trying to figure that out,” she replied angrily, almost snapping at him and instantly regretting it. “But if V is indeed behind this, prepare yourselves.” She paused a little, in an effort to calm herself. After all, it wasn’t Sam’s fault for asking. Whenever she thought of V, she just got angry—angry at herself for not being able to nail that sick bastard, angry at her own ineffectiveness, her failure.

  She took a deep breath, and then continued, “Lou is still processing deep backgrounds on all passengers. My guess is that will tell us what he’s trying to pull this time.”

  “And satellite imagery analysis?” Blake said, with a shred of panic in his voice. “When can you do that?”

  “Backgrounds are processing as we speak,” Lou answered in a pacifying tone. “I wrote some code that does that. It should finish running by late tonight or tomorrow morning, all 441 people onboard that aircraft. We’ll know everything, from call and data usage patterns, to financials, professional information, family issues, everything.”

  “But don’t worry, we will proceed with all three scenarios,” Alex added, causing Sam to frown a little. “There’s something else, guys. We need to figure out how to get our hands on some satellite time. Images that are a couple of years old might be a good start, but I need fresh imagery. I’m thinking that if we look real hard from the satellite, with one of Lou’s pattern-recognition modules running, we could find the actual plane.”

  ...26

  ...Thursday, May 5, 4:47PM Local Time (UTC+10:00 hours)