by Diane Capri
Her entire workday would consist of hanging out at the Boston Consolidated TRACON. It was standard procedure for at least one agent to be present inside every affected ATC facility when the president was flying, so of course another agent would be monitoring the situation inside the control tower at Logan Airport as well. The controllers in the tower had jurisdiction over the actual pavement on the ground at Logan and the airspace immediately surrounding the field, out to a distance of five miles.
Normally, United States Secret Service agents were assigned this duty, and in fact there would be a Secret Service presence in the tower at Logan, but, as with government agencies everywhere, money was tight, so the bureaucrats in charge had elected to use their own people to patrol the area immediately surrounding the president in Boston, farming out the chore of monitoring the BCT to their brethren at the FBI.
As an agent with relatively low seniority, Kristin had inherited this duty, meaning she would spend the next twelve hours or more drinking coffee, eating way too much food that was way too unhealthy, and fending off the advances of air traffic controllers. It must be the temperament required to control airplanes, she thought—being responsible for giant aluminum tubes hurtling at each other at dizzying speeds all day, each with hundreds of people on board. Her limited experience with male controllers had been enough to convince her that they all thought they were God’s gift to women.
The exception, she thought as she took a tentative sip of her coffee and was pleased to discover it tasted perfect – she felt better already – seemed to be Nick Jensen.
Although they had talked for only a few minutes and the conversation had been all business, Nick seemed more humble than the typical controller, which she thought was strange because she had been told he was one of the best. But then again, finding out your wife had been murdered would certainly shake you, so maybe he was still in shock from that tragedy.
Kristin walked out of the donut shop and slid into the front seat of her car. She started toward the facility and found herself looking forward to seeing Nick again. She had reviewed the roster of controllers who would be working at the BCT when she arrived and noticed his name.
Jeez, she thought, what does it say about me that I’m looking forward to seeing the poor bastard whose wife just got killed? She shook her head in disgust but couldn’t help how she felt. Doesn’t matter anyway. It’s going to be all business for both of us. Maybe sometime when he’s gotten over the trauma of losing his wife, we might be able to see each other socially. Who knows?
She swung off the access road and headed toward the security building at the edge of the BCT property. The guard shack was constructed from the same puke yellow bricks that had been used to erect the facility itself. She wondered whether the federal government had gotten a discount on the masonry because of its hideous color. Based on her personal experience with government service, it seemed unlikely since they never seemed to buy anything at a discount, but why else would anyone have intentionally used such a nasty shade of mustard? It was off-putting, the architectural equivalent of a grimace.
As she questioned the mental acuity of the BCT’s designer, she pulled up to the gate in her seven-year-old Monte Carlo and waited for the security guard.
Finally the rent-a-cop slouched through the door, his uniform wrinkled and filthy, with what looked like a big piece of fabric ripped off the sleeve and hanging down at his elbow.
Very strange.
Kristin had been here several times in the past, and each time previously the guard had been waiting at the door to the security building when she arrived, uniform creased and shoes shined, standing erect in an almost military fashion.
It was a big deal to these security guys to have the FBI or the Secret Service on the premises, and normally they responded in a manner very much unlike the way this guy was acting. Kristin began to feel uneasy. Something smelled wrong.
She reached slowly under her light jacket for her service weapon, concealed in a small shoulder holster resting against the side of her breast under her left arm, but as she did so, the guard drew his own gun and jammed it into her left cheek, stopping her hand’s progress immediately.
“At least you have a little bit of sense,” the man said not unkindly, “but you definitely don’t want to put your hand anywhere near that peashooter you have under there, or I’ll be forced to blow your pretty face into a thousand tiny pieces. I guess I don’t have to tell you it won’t be so pretty then.”
“Who are you?” Kristin asked evenly.
The man smiled. “What makes you think I’m not the security dude?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe the fact that you look like a goddamned slob and handle yourself like the town drunk on a Friday night.”
The smile disappeared, and he shoved the gun into her face again. The pain blossomed. “Move your cute little ass over,” he barked.
She slid across to the passenger seat while he lowered his bulky frame into the driver’s side, his weapon never leaving its target.
He relieved her of her gun, waved an ID in front of the card reader to raise the gate, and drove into the parking lot.
Kristin watched the man warily, waiting for a chance to grab his weapon or shove open her door and roll out of the slowmoving car. “Maybe you’re unaware of this, but you’re interfering with a federal law enforcement official in the performance of her duties. What you’re doing will earn you a long stretch in prison with some very unpleasant people. It’s not too late to stop and avoid any really major problems. I suggest you give that some serious thought.”
The man laughed good-naturedly, not exactly the response Kristin had been going for. “Interfering. That’s a good one. If I blow your fucking head off right here where you sit, would that be considered interfering, too?”
Kristin said nothing, just glared at the man as he wheeled her car into a slot next to a large dark vehicle, the two cars looking lonely and lost in the huge, mostly empty lot. Far across the pavement, much nearer to the BCT entrance, four other vehicles sat in a neat row, presumably the cars belonging to the employees working the Saturday night mid shift. One of them was probably Nick Jensen’s.
The man shut down the engine and pocketed Kristin’s keys. “Get out,” he commanded, so she did. Then he walked Kristin across the lot and into the BCT, his gun pressed firmly against her spine the entire way, as if she might forget he was holding it.
She didn’t forget.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
The beeping noise signifying that Nick’s ID card had successfully unlocked the door to the ETG lab was even louder than he had feared. It was magnified a bit by the fact that the big building was almost completely empty. It sounded like someone had depressed the trigger on an air horn. He knew if any of the terrorists had heard it he would likely be dead within the next five minutes.
Maybe less than five.
Maybe a lot less.
He crept into the dark room and closed the door behind him, being careful to make as little noise as possible. The irony of trying to close a door silently after the loud electronic wail was not lost on Nick, but he figured there was no point in taking unnecessary chances. Even if the intruders had heard the short burst of noise, maybe they wouldn’t be able to track down where it had come from when they came to investigate.
Nick shuffled backward in the dark until the backs of his legs came in contact with the console in front of the training scopes. The room was long and narrow, maybe thirty feet by eight feet, so he didn’t have far to go. He stood motionless and counted to one hundred, listening to his heart thudding in his ears. It sounded so loud that he figured they might be able to find him based on that noise alone.
After two or three minutes, when no one came bursting through the door with guns blazing, Nick began to relax. He decided they had not heard the buzzing of the card reader after all. He risked turning on the interior light; there was no point in sneaking in here if he was just going to cower like a cornered rabbit. He had
work to do.
The plan—Nick knew calling his idea a plan was giving it a lot more credibility than it deserved, since it was really not much more than a vague notion forged out of desperation—was to reprogram the radar scopes out in the ops room to show computer-generated traffic rather than actual live traffic. He would run a training scenario on the TRACON scopes in hopes of confusing the gunman.
Nick knew there were plenty of holes in his so-called plan. The biggest one was that although it was technically possible to run an ETG feed onto the ops room scopes, he didn’t have the slightest clue how to do it. He was no computer genius; in fact, Lisa had handled all of the routine maintenance on their desktop at home as well as both of their laptops.
Then, if he even figured out how to force the fake targets on to the live scopes, he had to find a way to let Fitz know the plan, so his friend could transmit on radio frequencies that weren’t in use. There was no point in forcing the phony traffic onto Fitz’s scope if Air Force One was going to call on the actual radio frequency and ask what the hell was going on.
And then, even if he managed to figure a way around all of those problems, there was the small issue of what would happen to the president’s plane if the BCT was suddenly off-line. The Boston Air Route Traffic Control Center—the facility controlling the high-altitude traffic throughout New England that would be handing Air Force One over to the BCT—could not simply give up the airplane without having accomplished a radar handoff.
A radar handoff was the term used when one controller told a controller working a different sector, either via automated methods or over a landline, that the airplane in question had been radar identified, and the receiving controller was prepared to accept separation responsibility for that aircraft. Until a handoff had been achieved, which would obviously never happen if the radar scopes at the BCT were no longer displaying live traffic, Boston Center would not be able to permit Air Force One to enter BCT’s airspace.
Under Nick’s hastily conceived scenario, the president’s plane would get diverted to another airport if Boston Center could not accomplish a handoff and if they were unable to raise the BCT on any of the available landlines to transfer control of Air Force One. There would be hell to pay until everyone figured out what had happened, but at least the president, not to mention everyone else on board Air Force One, would still be alive.
There was another glaring drawback to Nick’s desperate plan, too. It didn’t necessarily ensure that anyone inside the BCT would survive—quite the opposite in all probability. But if nothing else, at least the terrorists’ assassination plan would be thwarted. That was the best-case scenario, the result Nick was hoping for if everything proceeded smoothly. He tried not to think about the fate of himself and Fitz and Ron.
Now, though, standing inside the ETG lab, fearing that an armed lunatic might come smashing through the door at any moment and shoot him, Nick reached the conclusion that even his minimal level of optimism had been groundless. The plan was falling apart before he could even get it rolling.
Nick had no idea how to reprogram the ETG scopes.
He desperately tried to remember the layout of the room. Fully certified controllers, unless they suffered an operational error—a situation where two airplanes were permitted to get closer to each other than standard separation allowed, known in controller parlance as a “deal”—only visited this room for refresher training on various emergency scenarios, none of which had ever involved trying to prevent a group of ruthless terrorists from blowing up Air Force One.
Nick had never been charged with an operational error, so he had not had occasion to spend very much time at all in this strangely shaped room. In fact, he could not even remember the last time he had been in here, but he was quite certain he had merely sat back and half dozed while the controller with the lowest seniority in the group ran the emergency scenario.
Nick had a vague notion that there was a set of operator manuals stored in a small bookcase on the far left side of the room. He hoped the set of books included a programming guide that would walk him through the steps to necessary accomplish his task.
He searched frantically through the detritus of dozens of training sessions, finding discarded partially written training sheets, a couple of pens, even a half-full cup of old coffee with a chunk of greenish brown mold floating in the middle like a tiny island. There was a computer—you couldn’t go anywhere in the modern world without running across a computer, Nick thought—but the manuals he thought he remembered were nowhere to be seen.
Nick swore under his breath and felt a bead of sweat trickle down the back of his neck. Time was rapidly running out, and he was no closer to putting a stop to the president’s assassination than he had been when the terrorists had first stormed the BCT, an event that felt like it had taken place days ago, rather than the hour or so it had actually been.
He had been dreaming anyway if he thought he could piece together some sort of MacGyver-like phony traffic scenario that would fool the guy holding the gun to Fitz’s head. He had heard the man tell Fitz that he was more than a little familiar with ATC procedures and phraseology. He probably would have seen through the ruse immediately, and then things would have been worse than they were right now. If that was even possible.
He paced up and down the little room, the second hand sweeping around the face of his watch with frightening speed. He couldn’t even turn the ETG scopes on, never mind reprogram them, without a manual to follow. And there was nothing here.
Nick wondered where Air Force One was now. The president’s plane was getting close to Boston’s airspace. They were truly screwed.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Kristin Cunningham was not exactly what she appeared to be on the surface. Petite and pretty, with a face framed by wavy hair falling almost to her shoulders, Kristin had been defying the expectations of others ever since graduating high school in Manchester, New Hampshire, a decade ago. Her parents, not to mention her teachers and even her closest friends, had fully expected Kristin to go off to college after graduation and study something esoteric, like art history, or the rise and fall of the Roman empire.
It was a natural expectation. Kristin had earned outstanding grades in school her entire life; she loved reading and studying. Although she had played and been reasonably successful at a number of different sports, she was nobody’s idea of a tomboy and had always seemed more comfortable sitting in a study carrel than cavorting on a playing field.
This personal history made it all the more surprising when immediately upon graduating high school—during her graduation dinner, in fact—Kristin announced that she would not be attending college after all. A career in law enforcement was what she wanted to pursue, and she would begin working toward that goal right away. To say her parents were shocked would be an understatement, but Kristin was undeterred and eventually turned even her father’s skepticism into enthusiastic support with her hard work and unflagging energy.
She attended the police academy and was hired by the Manchester Police Department upon graduating and had never looked back. After spending five years on the force, the FBI came calling, prizing her for her independence and ability to think on her feet, two traits not always in abundant supply in government service, as well as for her fearlessness and spotless record.
Working out of the Southern New Hampshire field office, Kristin was able to live near her parents in the area she loved, while performing work that she knew was important and occasionally even made a difference. She never once regretted the decision to pursue a career path that diverged wildly from the one her friends and family had expected of her.
Now, with the barrel of a semiautomatic pistol pressed into her back, being pushed as a captive into the air traffic control facility she had been assigned to monitor, Kristin felt ashamed. She had allowed this moron to get the drop on her, and what had she been doing at the time? Mooning like some love-struck junior high girl about this Nick Jensen character. And now that la
pse of attentiveness was probably going to cost both her and Nick their lives, assuming he wasn’t dead already.
She shook her head and mumbled, “Goddamn it” through clenched teeth.
The guy shoved her in the back with the gun. “Shut up.”
They approached the double doors, and the man reached around her to wave his stolen ID in front of the card reader. As his hand hovered momentarily in front of the reader, Kristin considered stomping on his foot or grabbing his hand and twisting it, hopefully taking the man to the ground and wrestling his gun away from him.
The only problem was, the man still had the gun pressed firmly into the middle of her back, and she knew there was no possible way she would be able to knock him down fast enough to disable him before he could fire at least one shot, which would probably kill or paralyze her, and what would that accomplish?
She took a deep breath and blew it out in frustration as the big reinforced glass door swung open and the pair entered the BCT. Kristin knew the ops room was on the second floor.
The man with the gun, though, steered her toward a glass-fronted conference room that looked out of place, like it had been lifted out of a decent-sized private corporation and plunked down in the middle of this federal government building.
Kristin could see a man pacing back and forth inside it. He was dressed in black from his watch cap to his combat boots, with dark greasepaint on his face. It was jarring and seemed almost surreal: these comfortable surroundings, about as nice as you could expect in government service, overtaken by armed thugs.
The man pushed Kristin through the door.
The moment they entered, the guy dressed in black said, “Are you kidding me? A chick? Are you sure this is the right person?”
“Christ. Of course it’s the right person,” the other man said dismissively, his voice dripping sarcasm. “I know what a fucking FBI ID looks like, okay? Besides, the back of her jacket has three letters on it. Care to guess what they might be?”
