Deadly Dozen: 12 Mysteries/Thrillers

by Diane Capri

  Agent Cunningham hesitated. She shook her head. “Not necessarily. To my knowledge, the police have not yet developed any working theories regarding your wife’s death. It may well have been unrelated to this information. That assessment could change, of course, pending results of their investigation. But what doesn’t change is the fact that she was working on something with potentially critical implications for national security.

  “I have to ask if you would permit us to take your wife’s laptop back to the office for forensic analysis as well. It’s entirely possible, likely even, that there is more information on her computer that could help us discover the identity of the Pentagon leak. We can’t force you to release the computer to us tonight, but it could be crucial to our investigation, and realistically, we’ll be back tomorrow with a warrant anyway. We will provide you with a receipt for it, of course, and will return it to you as soon as we can after it has been examined.”

  “Of course you can take it,” Nick said, getting up to retrieve the computer. He wasn’t buying the bullshit story that Lisa’s death had been unrelated to her work at the Pentagon. It would be a coincidence of monumental proportion if that was the case, and Nick wasn’t a big believer in coincidences.

  Ultimately, though, it didn’t really matter to Nick. Lisa was dead and she wasn’t coming back. Nothing changed that. The FBI could have her computer forever if they wanted it. They could return it or not; he didn’t care. He certainly wasn’t about to use it or even look at what was on it. At least not now, and maybe not ever. It was just too painful.

  Nick excused himself and walked into the master bedroom to retrieve the laptop. He handed it to the two agents, who gathered up everything on the coffee table and headed toward the front door.

  Agent Delaney had still not said more than one or two words during the entire interview. Nick decided maybe they weren’t playing good-cop/bad-cop at all, but rather Agent Cunningham was the one with the brains in the partnership, and the man knew it. Better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.

  The pair paused at the front door. “We’ll get everything back to you as soon as we can,” Agent Cunningham said again, almost apologetically. “Thank you for making that call to the police. You did the right thing. Hopefully we can use this information to help avert a serious tragedy before it occurs.”

  The FBI agents stepped through the door and into the night.

  Nick could hear the lonely sound of crickets chirping in the front yard, and a lump rose in his throat. He was thankful his visitors were on their way out.

  “Thanks again, and enjoy the rest of your evening, Mr. Jensen.”

  He almost reminded her to call him Nick but didn’t bother. He watched them walk to their unmarked Bureau car, then closed the door and prepared to face another night alone. Enjoying his evening was out of the question. Nick’s goal was simply to get through it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The Tucson police officer crouched behind the open door of his vehicle, bracing his weapon in the crease between the hinges and the cruiser’s frame, keeping it trained on the men trapped in the glare of the spotlight. Nothing happened for what seemed like minutes, although it was undoubtedly only a few seconds. Then the cop eased the door fully open and stepped slowly and cautiously around it, eyeing the surreal scene in front of him. “Let’s all just take it nice and easy, and nobody gets hurt, all right, boys?”

  As he finished the upward inflection on the word boys and took one step away from the patrol car toward the men, a burst of automatic weapons fire erupted from behind him.

  #

  Tony’s weapon roared and bright orange fire flashed from the muzzle as he strafed the cruiser and swung his barrel slightly to the left, cutting down the officer.

  The cop’s body stuttered forward from the impact of the gunfire, twisting and writhing before falling to the ground. He thudded to the pavement with the slightly hollow, moist squishing sound of a pumpkin being smashed in the street on Halloween night. He died without uttering a sound.

  The sharp smell of gunpowder filled the air, the sudden quiet disorienting after the AK’s throaty roar. Nobody moved.

  Finally Tony spoke casually, almost lazily. “Well, what are you waiting for? Let’s wrap this thing up and get out of here. Undoubtedly that cop radioed his location to his dispatchers and advised them he was checking out a possible breaking and entering. When he doesn’t report back within a few minutes, they will send more police out here to investigate. Maybe they already have. It would seem to be in our best interest to get as far away from this place as possible before they arrive, so let’s pick up the pace.”

  While the men hurriedly finished transferring the last few crates and lashing them securely into the cargo box of the panel truck, Tony bent down and put both hands under the armpits of the fallen officer. With a grunt, he muscled the man’s still-bleeding body into the back of his own cruiser. Blood immediately began pooling on the vinyl bench seat beneath the corpse.

  Tony then slipped behind the wheel and put the idling Crown Vic in gear, moving it the short distance from the scene of the massacre to the chain-link fence at the very back of the dealership. He nosed in behind the rusting hulk of a decades-old used Airstream trailer, hoping the cruiser’s semi-concealment behind the big rig might buy the team a few more minutes before the authorities became aware of the murder. It was their third in the last two hours, and Tony knew they were tempting fate as the bodies piled up.

  He shut down the engine and jumped out of the patrol car. He thought for a moment about taking the dead cop’s riot gun—after all, he reasoned, the cop certainly didn’t need it anymore, and you could never have too many weapons, especially high-quality ones like the Remington 870—but ultimately decided that it might be detrimental to his freedom if he were to get pulled over with a murdered police officer’s weapon lying on the front seat of his vehicle.

  Tony had no doubt he could shoot his way out of any confrontation if necessary, but it was important to keep his eyes on the big picture, on his sacred destiny. Getting into a shootout with the police during the drive back to D.C. was a distraction he didn’t need when he had been given the honor of ridding the world of the President of the United States, the oppressor of so many of his people half a globe away, Robert Cartwright.

  Tony slammed the door of the cruiser, sealing the dead cop inside with a satisfying clunk, then jumped when Brian, standing right behind him, announced, “We’re all done and ready to roll.”

  He decided he must be extremely tired. There was no way any of these American pseudo-terrorists, despite graduating from the rigorous Afghanistan training program, should have been able to approach from behind without him being aware of it.

  He closed his eyes and centered himself, focusing on the steps he needed to accomplish to achieve his goal. Right now that meant getting the Stinger missiles out of here and as far away from Tucson as possible before daybreak. Sleep would have to wait.

  “Thank you,” he said to Brian, forcing himself to remain calm and doing his best to keep the annoyance out of his voice. He hated for these nonbelievers to see him at anything less than his best, although he doubted Brian or any of the others would even notice.

  A quick inspection of the back of the panel truck convinced Tony that the missile crates were well secured with bungee cords and completely covered with wool blankets. Anyone looking into the back of the truck would see only piles of unidentifiable material. A closer examination would reveal the true nature of the truck’s cargo, but Tony would ensure no one made that examination. Anyone attempting to do so would suffer a fate identical to that of the cop lying dead in his own vehicle just a couple of dozen feet away.

  The team climbed into the two cars that had been used to stage the accident, while Tony slid behind the wheel of the panel truck. The military transport vehicle they left parked in the rear of the lot. There was no way to hide it effectively, and it would be discovered
soon enough in any event.

  The three-vehicle caravan snaked its way along the rutted tarmac to the front of the Southwest RV Center. It was now nearly four o’clock in the morning, and the horizon to the east would begin lightening soon. Already the sky in that direction looked a little lighter than it had a few minutes ago.

  The team pulled onto the road, moving west toward Interstate 10. The plan was to take the highway north, hoping to lose any initial pursuit in the urban sprawl of the Phoenix/Glendale/Scottsdale metropolitan complex, before continuing on to Flagstaff and then turning east on I-40 to begin the long drive back to their home base in Washington, D.C.

  A few cars were beginning to populate the roads, early risers getting a jump start on the workday or perhaps a few heading home after a long night of drinking and partying. The team observed no law enforcement activity between the RV center and the highway. They hit the interstate and accelerated to an invisible sixty-five miles per hour and drove for ten hours straight, stopping only for food and fuel. Things were right on schedule.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Nick had taken just a week off from work following Lisa’s death, but as he walked through the double doors into the Boston Consolidated TRACON operations room to begin his workweek, he felt as though nothing and everything had changed. He flashed his key card at the scanner mounted outside the door and flinched like always as the annoying, high-pitched beep sounded, signifying the reader had recognized the chip embedded inside his ID card and he was permitted to enter.

  The door swung open noiselessly, and Nick stepped into the massive room. Built in 2004 to house four separate radar approach control facilities, the building was currently home to just two—the controllers formerly quartered at Logan International Airport in Boston, and those from Manchester-Boston Regional Airport in Manchester, New Hampshire. This meant that the majority of the radar scopes placed side by side around the outside of the room—shaped more or less in a fair approximation of a giant Roller Derby rink—were unmanned, giving it the look of an air traffic control ghost town of sorts.

  Glancing to the right as he entered, Nick saw the controllers in the Manchester Area, at the moment operating with three radar sectors plus a flight data position. Each controller sitting at a scope was responsible for his or her own sector within the Manchester airspace; that is, a slice of the airspace “pie” belonging to Manchester was delegated to each position.

  The flight data controller answered landline calls, handled coordination for the radar sectors when they were too busy to do it themselves, and took care of routine paperwork. Fully certified controllers rotated among positions and most tried their best to avoid flight data, which was almost universally considered boring.

  Nick walked toward his own area of specialization: the Boston Area, located in the rear of the operations room. At the moment it was running with five radar sectors plus one flight data position.

  Within the giant oval of the operations room was what controllers referred to as the inner ring—a console built approximately ten feet inside the room, running in a complete circuit around the oval like the radar scopes but with five openings, each roughly four feet in width, allowing people access into and through the ring.

  The inner ring was where management tended to congregate when in the ops room. The workspace for each area’s supervisor was inside the inner ring, and the Traffic Management Coordinators—tasked with the responsibility of ensuring a smooth flow of traffic into and out of the facility’s airspace—worked inside it as well.

  The history of FAA air traffic control was filled with decades of animosity between controllers—who often considered themselves the only ones who did any real work in the FAA’s Air Traffic Division—and management, many of who were viewed by controllers as “weak sticks” who couldn’t handle the constant unrelenting pressure of separating airplanes and had moved on to positions with more authority but fewer challenges than live air traffic control.

  For their part, many in management—especially those above the level of first-line supervisors who worked next the controllers in the ops room and faced many of the same pressures the controllers did—considered air traffic controllers independent, overpaid prima donnas, to be kept in line by any means necessary, up to and including management by fiat and the imposition of strict disciplinary measures for minor, non-safety related infractions.

  From the disastrous PATCO strike of 1981, when nearly all of America’s air traffic controllers participating in an illegal job action against the government were summarily fired by President Reagan and replaced with an entirely new workforce, to the rancorous contract negotiations of 2005 and 2006, when management finally broke off talks and simply imposed their own set of work rules on controllers in an attempt to break their union, now known as NATCA, controllers and management were often at odds. In the eyes of controllers, management was often arrogant and militaristic, while to management, controllers were often arrogant and disrespectful of their authority.

  This historically adversarial working relationship eventually led to a situation where controllers often tried their hardest to avoid anything more than a purely professional relationship with representatives of FAA management and vice versa, even though most of the personnel populating management ranks were made up of people who had, at one time or another, done the very same job the controllers were doing now.

  The inner ring at the BCT was a perfect example of this fundamental disconnect. Management considered it their province within the ops room, and controllers tended to stay outside it.

  As Nick walked toward the back of the ops room, skirting the inner ring, he glanced at the giant plasma screens placed high on the walls above the radar scopes encircling the room. Displayed on one screen was a depiction of the equipment monitoring the status of all the approach aids serving both major airports in the airspace, Manchester and Boston. Another featured a real-time display of all the traffic inbound to each airport from across the country and overseas, and still another screen showed the status board indicating which runway configurations were in use at each airport.

  To the uninitiated, the darkened ops room looked impressive and intimidating, with its electronic equipment and flashing lights and buzzers and alarms. Even to people who moved thousands of airplanes through a congested chunk of airspace every day, it was pretty impressive when they actually stopped and thought about it, which controllers rarely had the time or the inclination to do. The ops room was just where they went to work and did their thing. Another day at the office.

  Nick trudged through the dimly lit room, approaching the Boston Area slowly and with some trepidation. Air traffic controllers tended to be strong-willed, decisive people, with take-charge personalities and irreverent senses of humor, given to regarding virtually any situation as fodder for a joke. Nick supposed it was a natural coping mechanism in a job where you held more lives in your hands every single day than a brain surgeon did in his entire career.

  Today, though, Nick wondered how he would be received. Losing a spouse, especially at such a young age, was no joking matter, and he felt nervous, on edge, and reluctant to face his coworkers. It was almost as if he thought people would view him with suspicion, like he had done something wrong, which, of course, he hadn’t. His wife had been killed, for crying out loud, murdered; it wasn’t like he had something to be ashamed of.

  He needn’t have worried. No sooner did the controllers spot him in the gloom of the low TRACON lighting than a shout went up from John Donaldson working the Bedford sector. “Futz, welcome back, my man. We’ve missed you! It’s been boring as hell around here. There’s nobody as much fun to heckle while they’re running their airplanes together on Final Vector as you!”

  Nick grinned in spite of himself. The nickname Futz had been bestowed on him by someone—he couldn’t remember who—when he had first arrived at the facility as a wet-behind-the-ears trainee years ago. It was short for Fucking Nuts, which had been his style when working Final Vec
tor. He would aim everybody at the same point in space, then at the last minute begin to sort them out. As an operating technique, it was not the sort of thing you would ever train someone to do, but from his earliest days as a controller Nick had possessed an uncanny ability to visualize the sequence of arrivals developing well before anyone else could, so what appeared random and accidental to the uninitiated was in reality a well-choreographed aerial ballet.

  “Hey, John, thanks a lot. I’d like to say it’s good to see you too, but I still find your hideousness repulsive, even in the dark.”

  “Jeez, now you’re starting to sound like my wife,” Donaldson shot back. “Of course, she would say, ‘especially in the dark,’ if you get my meaning.”

  By now, everyone along the line of scopes had turned their attention away from their sectors long enough to add their own welcome-back message to John’s.

  Even Larry Fitzgerald, working the intense Final Vector position, took a second to shout, “Hey, Futz, enough with the hearts and flowers. Make yourself useful for a change, and come give me a break,” before turning back to his scope and leaning so close to it his nose practically scraped the screen.

  Final Vector was generally considered the busiest and most pressure-filled position because the goal was to get the airplanes as close together as legally possible and keep them that way, all the way to touchdown on the landing runway. Often that meant taking a steady stream of arrivals from four or more different directions and running them almost directly at each other—a task requiring intense concentration and nerves of steel, and one not to be undertaken by the faint of heart.