Accidental Heroes

by Danielle Steel

  They had given him permission to take up to three months off, or longer if he needed it, but he was back in a month. Staying home was worse. It was all he thought about, the terrible scene when they had gone in after the final shoot-out. Ben had sobbed when he saw them. And now he was back, feeling a little shaky but anxious to work.

  He had been at his desk for exactly an hour and a half when Dave Lee called him and said they had a possible “situation” at Terminal 2. The last thing he needed right now was a “situation.” He had come back to handle customs issues, people who didn’t declare large amounts of money they were bringing into the country, jewelry some socialite hadn’t declared for duty, even drugs being smuggled. The easy stuff. He didn’t want to have to make any big decisions. And Dave Lee had said to him that they needed a decision about a possible situation. He wanted to hang up on him when he heard it. Dave had said it was time sensitive, and involved two flights that were in the air at that moment, heading to San Francisco. So there was no time to waste, but Ben felt rooted to the spot and didn’t want to move, as he sat at his desk, wondering who he could reassign it to so he wouldn’t have to go.

  Ben was forty-five years old and had had an impeccable career until the recent incident, and his superiors were sure that he would recover from it. They were more certain of it than Ben was himself. He felt as though there would never come a time when he would wake up in the morning and not think of what he’d seen in the warehouse that day. He saw it in his mind’s eye when he went to sleep at night and when he woke up in the morning. He had told the shrink about it, and the therapist had said it would get better, which seemed hard for Ben to believe. It was as sharply etched in his mind as it had been the day it happened. He was thinking about it again when Phil Carson, his boss, walked into his office.

  “I just got a call from the chief supervisor of airport security,” he said with a serious expression. “Apparently, they called you to assess a situation. Are you okay with that?” Ben wanted to tell him that he wasn’t, not by any means, but he was back, and he didn’t want to tell him he wasn’t up to it. And then there were all the bullshit beliefs about getting back in the saddle. Homeland Security was not a job for the fainthearted, or agents who couldn’t recover from seeing sixteen people dead on a warehouse floor after a shoot-out, especially if the decision to go in had been in great part their fault. It went with the territory, and he had to live with it if he wanted to keep his job. This was how it started, with a “situation” and a decision you would be responsible for, whether people died or not.

  “Yeah, I’ll do it,” Ben said, standing up slowly. “Though if we’ve got someone else to send, I’d prefer it,” he said honestly. “Who’ve we got?”

  “I don’t have anyone today. Harkness broke his ankle last week. Thompson and O’Dougherty are out with the flu. And Jimenez is on his honeymoon, again. He’s got to give that up, he can’t afford the alimony and we can’t afford the vacation. So that leaves you,” his commanding officer said, looking worried. He knew that Ben was still badly shaken by what had happened, and he had come back to work sooner than Phil expected. “It doesn’t sound like a big deal. You can check the manifest if they’re worried about a passenger, and make sure that no one on the no-fly list is on it. Call me if you have a problem,” he said, looking sympathetic. Ben was one of his best men, and he didn’t want to lose him, or kill him by putting too much on his shoulders on his first day back. And then he had a thought just as Ben was about to leave the office. “Take Amanda with you. If it’s not too dicey, you can let her handle it. It’ll make her feel good.”

  Ben groaned audibly. Amanda Allbright was the latest addition to their team. She was thirty-one years old and had a double master’s in psychology and criminology, both of which were worthless, as far as Ben was concerned. She had a theory for everything, and none of it had any reality to it. She never stopped talking, and she was the new breed of Homeland Security agent, whose entire philosophy went against everything Ben believed. He could barely say good morning to her without getting seriously irritated.

  “Now I know you hate me,” Ben said, looking miserable. “Does she have to come with me?” He looked like a kid who didn’t want to take his medicine, or his little brother to a ballgame.

  “She’ll be good for comic relief. Just try to bring her back in one piece. Don’t kill her. I don’t want to be visiting you in jail.” Amanda liked to believe she was a dedicated feminist, but as far as Ben was concerned, she was a pain in the ass, whatever her gender, and her theories drove him up the wall.

  “You might have to. I’ve been cleared to return to duty, not to work with her. I’d need another year of therapy for that.”

  “Just don’t listen to her. Talk to her about baseball or sports or something.”

  “If I have to listen to her tell me about her Stanford and Columbia credentials again, I may have to strangle her.”

  “Be nice. Tell her about the Yankees.”

  Ben grinned ruefully, and went to find her. He didn’t like anything about her, although as a rule he liked women. He had been married and divorced twice, and had no kids. Both his wives had said that his passion for his work and the amount of time he spent on it were not compatible with marriage, and he agreed.

  He dated women his own age when he found any that interested him, which wasn’t often. He didn’t like frivolous women, or know-it-alls, which was Amanda’s stock in trade. Just talking to her annoyed him. She was young and sexy, and wore skirts that barely covered her ass, but nothing about her appealed to him, least of all her endless theories about criminals and crime. She had no experience to back up what she said, just what she had learned in books, and Ben and most of the guys in the office thought she was full of shit and didn’t like her. She didn’t like them either. She thought they were a crusty bunch of older guys who told disgusting jokes, and she threatened to write them up for sexual harassment and discrimination regularly. Ben admitted that she was probably right, but it didn’t make him like her any better, and none of the men were going to change. She was chasing a lost cause.

  She was at her desk, filling out a report. She had handled a drug bust the day before. She was competent and overeducated. In the field, she was considered green by the men she worked with. Amanda looked up when Ben walked in, and didn’t smile. She felt sorry about what had happened to him, but their overt hostility toward each other made it hard for her to express her sympathy. “How are you feeling?” she asked him. “Welcome back.”

  “Thanks. I have nightmares,” he said, mostly to provoke her. “Phil wants you to go to Terminal 2 with me.”

  “And you don’t,” she challenged him.

  “I didn’t say that.” He didn’t have to. They both knew he didn’t.

  “What’s up at Terminal 2?” she asked, as she stood up. She was going with him. She just needed to give him a hard time about it, as he saw it. She always wanted to know the details of everything, to an unnecessary degree, in his opinion. Most of what she wanted to know was irrelevant to anyone but her. But her question had been reasonable in the context. He just wouldn’t have admitted it to her.

  “I don’t know. They said it’s not a threat. They need a decision about something. We’ll find out when we get there.”

  She followed him out in what Ben considered a shockingly short skirt. He was more than willing to admit she had great legs, but her personality ruined it for him. He didn’t care what she looked like, he hated everything she stood for. But on the way over, he decided to take Phil’s advice. “Do you like baseball?”

  She looked at him like he had lost his mind. “No. Why?”

  “The Yankees are on a winning streak,” he said benignly, trying not to laugh. Maybe Phil was right. “I thought you might be interested.”

  “Are you asking me on a date?” She looked stunned. Maybe he’d had electroshock therapy as part of his recovery
. She thought he’d have to, to ask her out.

  “Shit, no. I just wondered if you liked sports.”

  “I just don’t like baseball. It’s boring. I played volleyball in college. We won the championship two years in a row. I play badminton and tennis. And I go to a gym to stay in shape. What about you?” It was a ridiculous conversation, but they were at Terminal 2 by then, and hadn’t gotten into an argument yet, which was a first.

  “I lift weights in my living room now that my wife moved out. I’m a black belt in karate, but I quit the last time I broke my shoulder. And I played beer pong in college,” he said smugly.

  “So did I,” she said, always competitive with him and any of her male colleagues.

  “You would,” he said, as they got out of the car and walked into the terminal. Dave Lee was waiting for them, and Ben introduced Amanda. Something about the way he did it conveyed the impression that they weren’t friends. And Dave walked them into the chief supervisor’s office in the TSA area, where Bernice was standing. Neither Ben nor Amanda was wearing a uniform. The TSA agents did, but the senior Homeland Security agents wore street clothes, if they chose to. Dave showed them the postcard. Ben looked at it for a long moment, and then back at Dave. “And the question is?”

  “The question is, what is it? A big nothing? Something between lovers? It sounds faintly pissed off to me, and maybe a little menacing. Or is it a threat on the Golden Gate Bridge?”

  Ben whistled and looked at it again, narrowing his eyes. “That’s pretty unlikely, don’t you think?”

  “Could be. Nowadays, who the hell knows? We’ve all seen worse, with less to go on.” They all knew it was true, and sometimes they got no warning. This wasn’t much of a warning. But was it a clue? That was the crux of the issue. Did the postcard mean anything or not?

  “What have you got in the air right now?” Ben asked him.

  “Flights all over the country. And two to San Francisco that left an hour and a half ago, about fifteen minutes apart. An A321 and a 757.”

  “And you’ve checked the manifest for both flights?” Ben asked seriously.

  “I assume someone ran them against the no-fly list before they took off,” Dave said calmly. “I only got called after they were in the air.” They were both aware that the no-fly list was compiled by Homeland Security and the CIA, with highly sensitive information provided by international government agencies listing people known or suspected of terrorist activities, or who were undesirable in the United States. Its purpose was to keep dangerous, subversive people out of the country and off planes. There was a well-known case of an Air France flight with two suspected terrorists on board who had turned up on the sensitive lists. The plane had been kept sealed on arrival. No passengers were allowed to disembark, and the flight was refueled and sent back to Paris.

  “Let’s run the manifests again and see what comes up, who’s on both those flights.”

  “We need a psychological profile of everyone, both passengers and crew,” Amanda piped up, and Ben turned to look at her, trying to control himself.

  “That would be a great idea if they were on a cruise ship in the Caribbean. We have four and a half hours to figure this out, at best. Maybe add another fifteen minutes, or have them circle for half an hour. We can get profiles on the crew and key passengers. There’s no way we can get them on everyone on those two planes.”

  Ben turned back to Dave again then. “Let’s get those profiles on the crew, and make sure we don’t have some seriously disturbed employee up there that we don’t know about. And I’ll have them run the no-fly list again, and check for any passenger that stands out. I’ll get my office to take care of it. We can get that pretty fast.” Ben called his office then, and told them what he needed, and Ben, Dave, and Amanda sat down to wait. The answers started coming in quickly. Bernice listened closely to what was happening, but hadn’t said a word. She had nothing to add. Amanda asked her a few questions about how long she’d worked here, and her seniority, and then Dave got the manifest by email on his phone, and shared it with Ben and Amanda. She spotted Susan Farrow’s name and was impressed.

  “Well, she’s not our problem,” Ben commented. They could see no one of interest on the manifest of the second flight. And then Ben saw the Arab last name on the manifest of the first flight, which attracted his attention but didn’t concern him unduly. “I assume they were checked out on the no-fly list,” he said to Dave.

  “We check everyone,” he confirmed. “There could have been a slipup, but I doubt it.”

  “I’m sure we checked too,” Ben said quietly. “I’ll run it again. Our office can tell us in a few minutes.”

  Dave nodded in response, looking serious.

  “And I’m assuming we’ve got air marshals on both flights,” Ben said, looking thoughtful, and called Phil to check it out. There was a pause at the other end of the line when he asked, which surprised him, and Phil sighed.

  “We had a problem while you were gone. Apparently, someone ordered cutbacks without warning us. Some flights have been going out without marshals, and the pilots weren’t notified. Everyone is pissed about it, but we have not had a hundred percent coverage in the air for the past month. I’ll check on both these flights. But with the flight split into two aircrafts at the last minute, it’s possible that we’ve only got one guy up there. I hope not, but it’s possible. I’ll call you back.” He called back less than five minutes later and gave Ben the bad news. “We’ve got one on the second flight, but the A321 has no air marshal on board. The pilot has not been advised.”

  “For chrissake, are they serious?” Ben was furious at the idea, particularly in this case.

  “That’s the reality of it. There’s no air marshal on that flight. And we checked the couple with the Arabic surnames. They’re not on the no-fly list, but we don’t know who they are. They could be perfectly innocent, or we could have a problem.”

  “Well, find out, for chrissake.”

  Phil was used to Ben’s style, and he always brought home the results. He didn’t object to Ben being cantankerous and even rough at times, particularly after what he’d been through. “Do you really think we have a problem?” Phil sounded worried, but Ben hadn’t decided. He needed to know more.

  “I don’t know yet. We need the crew profiles on both flights. And I want everything we can get on the two Arabs, just in case.” Ben was livid that there was no air marshal on the flight.

  The only names that had caught their attention on the two manifests were the Arab man and woman, who could be anybody, and Susan Farrow, the famous actress, who was not a terrorist. Phil was going to call his source at the CIA to check on the two Arabs. Ben sat back with a sigh and looked at the others in the room.

  “What we have here is basically a cover-your-ass mission,” Ben said with a look of displeasure. “We don’t have a goddamn thing. We have two aircraft full of random people, two Arabs who are not on the no-fly list and could be harmless or not. And no air marshal on one of the flights. If we put the whole thing to bed and forget about it, and some nut job dive-bombs the Golden Gate Bridge on a suicide mission, we’ve killed a hundred and eleven people on the flight and possibly more on the ground, and we get maximum publicity with a major movie star on the flight, just in case we needed that. In my head, I think it’s nothing,” he said to the others out loud. “In my gut, something is bothering me, and I don’t know what it is. But just in case, I want to talk to the pilot of the A321 the two Arabs are on, so we’re covered. I want to let her know she has a potential problem on board, and no air marshal on the plane. She’ll be thrilled with that,” Ben said unhappily, and then called Phil again. “Have we got satcom phones in the cockpit of the A321?” he asked him, and Phil said they did, which would allow them a private conversation with the pilot that no one else could hear. He said they’d get the number from the airline in five minutes and call him back
.

  As soon as Ben got the number, he called Helen on the flight and explained who he was. She sounded surprised to hear from him, and said that everything was fine on the flight.

  “Almost fine,” he corrected her. “Your air marshal wound up on the other aircraft. You don’t have one on your flight.” She paused for a moment as she listened to him, and decided not to tell the others. His decision to warn her on the satcom phone instead of the radio had been a good one. Only she could hear Ben on the phone, so no one needed to know they had no protection.

  “Roger, I got that,” she said quietly and didn’t comment on it further.

  “A TSA agent found a postcard we’re not happy about. It could be nothing. It’s not a direct threat, but slightly suspicious, relating to San Francisco. We’re going to investigate it further. And you’ve got two Arabs on the flight the CIA is ID’ing for us now. They weren’t on the no-fly list, and they’re probably fine. I just want to check them out. And any passengers who stand out. I’ll let you know if we have a problem after that, but I wanted to give you a heads-up about the air marshal. I think it happened when they split the flight,” though it shouldn’t have. They both knew that, and so did Phil and Dave. But it was too late to fix that now.

  “Thanks for letting me know,” Helen said in an even tone, and Ben promised to call her back. She turned to talk to Jason when she hung up. “We have two passengers in business who could be a problem. They’re checking them out, and they’ll tell us when they know more.”

  “What kind of problem?” Jason was suddenly alert. He wondered why they had called her on the satcom phone, and was suspicious it might be something about him. He’d had his share of clashes with the airline, and they had slowed down his progress toward promotion considerably, but she didn’t mention that, and seemed unaware of it.

  “Apparently, the two passengers in question have an Arab name, but they don’t show up on the lists, so they may be fine. That’s all I know for now. I’d like you to take a stroll back through the cabins, and quietly let the crew know, discreetly,” she emphasized. “Ask the business flight attendants to keep an eye on them, and let us know if they notice anything unusual about them or anyone.”