The Bid

by Adrian Magson

  “No, can’t say I have. But why would these guys be interested in drones? And what for? And why go to all this trouble?” He waved a hand to include the box, the beds, and themselves. “It don’t make sense.”

  “It doesn’t have to make sense, Tommy-Lee. Not to them.” The prisoner turned and looked at him. “They’re terrorists. They’re planning to kill people.”

  twenty-two

  “How long for those fingerprints to be run?” Ruth asked. She was on the phone to Brasher, who had been called away to a progress meeting on one of his other cases. She, Reiks, and Vaslik had eaten snacks that they didn’t really want, if only to keep up the sugar levels if something kicked off and they had to move fast. Now time was ticking by and they were all getting jumpy.

  “Not long,” he said. “They told me they’ve got plenty to work with, on the hat and the knife, so if the prints are anywhere in the system, they’ll shake out sooner or later.”

  She went back to staring at the map while Vaslik ran through the iPad to see if anything stuck out. An alternate pair of eyes might throw up something others had missed.

  In the end she sat back in frustration and spoke at the ceiling.

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, but we appear to have a former USAF spook with expertise in unmanned aerial vehicles who’s gone missing, possibly taken by another man or men who allegedly want him to help them fly drones or quad-copters for an obviously bullshit reason. We have at least three men in the mix, one identified as a violent extremist with jihadist leanings. This man, Chadwick, seems to have been researching airfields or locations in remote places, which must be tied in in some way to drones, but we have no idea why.”

  Vaslik nodded. “That’s all I’ve got, too.”

  “Pardon me for saying so, Slik, but you don’t seem that frustrated by the lack of information.”

  “You reckon? Maybe I’m just better at hiding it.” His phone rang and he picked it up, pushing the iPad to one side. He listened for a couple of minutes and made some notes, then cut the connection and turned back to Ruth with a blank look.

  “A thought occurred to me while you were out,” he announced. “Where are the drones this man Paul was talking about? We don’t know if he already has them or has yet to acquire them, where they are or anything like that.”

  “True. So?”

  “I did some research on the subject earlier. There’s a ton of regulations you have to go through if you want a top-level drone that isn’t just for flying around your kitchen or back yard and amusing the kids. If you’re serious, you have to get licences and do a training course and lots of other stuff. It takes time and money.”

  “And leaves a trail.”

  He nodded. “Most of all, it leaves a trail. And if this Paul and his buddies are what we think they are, they wouldn’t want to do that.”

  “Which is why they may have kidnapped an expert in drone technology, thus avoiding licences, training, and paying a pilot.”

  “Right. That solves some of their problems, but not all. It still leaves the drones themselves.”

  “Good point.” With everything else going on, Ruth hadn’t given it much thought. “Where would he get them—it? He’d have to steal one.”

  Vaslik smiled again. “That’s another thing, if you were planning something, would you rely on a single machine … or would you have backups in case something went wrong?”

  “I’d have backups. Even with somebody like Chadwick helping to teach them, they couldn’t guarantee they wouldn’t screw it up or the machine wouldn’t malfunction. The same question holds, though: where would he get them?”

  “That’s what I asked Tom Brasher to find out.” He nodded at the phone. “He just finished running that question through every database he can find—here, the UK, Interpol, and a few others.”

  Ruth refrained from throwing her chair at him. He had news and wanted to draw it out, that much was obvious. “So?”

  “Seven weeks ago a shipment of six quad-copters from EuroVol in France, bound for L.A., went missing while in transit through the FedEx Express Global cargo hub at Memphis International Airport.”

  “An inside job?”

  “Had to be. So far there’s no trace of the shipment or a despatcher who worked in that section of the hub on the day it went missing.”

  “What kind of machines are we talking about?”

  He looked at his notebook. “They’re described as a batch of EVO Moskitos complete with video screens and cameras. Serious stuff by the sounds of it, used for aid relief in remote areas, according to Brasher.”

  “So they’d have quite a range?”

  “I guess. He’s getting confirmation of what was included in the shipment so we know what we’re dealing with. My guess is that if these were intended for L.A., they were for the film industry. A few companies are already using drones for location surveys and test footage, so they’d be top of the range.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yes. The despatcher’s name was Borz Dortyev, described as a legal immigrant originally from Chechnya. Brasher’s running a background search for more details. Dortyev had been with the company for six months before he skipped. Prior to that his employment record has him once living in Queens, New York.”

  Ruth felt a glow in her stomach. Even without confirmation it was beginning to look as if there had been a plan all along. Dortyev would have been well-placed to keep an eye out for any shipments coming through the Memphis hub and sideline them out of there if they looked useful. But was he connected to the men surrounding James Chadwick, and if so, how closely?

  “Brasher might do well to check whether Dortyev has any contacts in France.” When Vaslik looked puzzled, she explained, “Air France’s main cargo hub is called G1XL, at Paris-Charles de Gaulle. French shipments aimed for the US would begin there. It would be a good place to start.”

  “You’re right. I’ll pass it on. But how the heck do you know about that?”

  “I had to track a missing person through the airport a couple of months back and got an in-depth tour of the place from one of their security geeks.” She smiled to herself. The official, whose name was André, had been most effusive and even got a little too touchy-feely in one of the transit sheds until she’d pointed out, not unkindly, that he might have stood a better chance if his name had been spelled Andrea. “It’s a pretty impressive operation but like all airports, it has its weak points.”

  “I’ll do it now.” He turned and sent off a quick text message to Brasher. The FBI man had told them that it was the best way to contact him as he was on the move so much attending to a backlog of cases. But this was one he didn’t want to let go of.

  When Vaslik finished he looked back at Ruth, who was once again scanning the map they’d found among Chadwick’s effects at StoneSeal. “No ideas with that?”

  She shook her head. “It’s just a map with a few scribbles, but nothing leaps out at me. He could have been planning a hiking holiday for all I know.”

  “Right. Suddenly James Chadwick, corporate and UAV nerd, is a mad trail hiker? I don’t see it.”

  “Me neither.” She stood up and took the map over to him. It was about time for some fresh eyes on the damned thing. “See what you can find,” she told him. “It’s there, I can feel it—it’s just a matter of nailing it.”

  Vaslik spread the map out and got to his feet. Ruth knew he’d taken a look at it before, but with focussing on other aspects of the case, such as the Newark/New Jersey locations and liaising with Brasher, he’d pretty much left this one to her.

  She left him to it and went in search of some tea. Reiks directed her to a pharmacy nearby, where she found tea bags, which she took back and served up to Reiks and Vaslik before rejoining in the study of the map.

  “Have you noticed,” Vaslik said after a few minutes, “that the circles are all located in N
ebraska, Oklahoma, and Kansas?”

  Ruth nodded. “I saw that. The same three states he was Googling for airfields. But I have no idea why. There are no place names in the circles; in fact, they look as if they’re in the middle of nowhere.” She tapped the edge of the map. “He also wrote some stuff down, most of it in pencil and too faded to read. But there’s one word here I can read.” She pointed at a single word on the border of the map. It had been underlined once, and unlike some of the other scribbles, was in ink. “He also made Google searches for the same place.”

  Freedom.

  They stood and stared at it for a few moments, then Vaslik said dramatically, “I think, Ms. Gonzales, that we’re going to need a bigger map.”

  twenty-three

  The hinges on the door had been fitted all wrong, Tommy-Lee could see that. He’d done enough construction work in his time to know you didn’t use butt hinges on the outside of the frame and door, like they’d been done here, but recessed them for a neater finish and safety. He’d figured there was something off the first time he’d looked at them, but he hadn’t given it much of a thought until now.

  Now things were different. After what the prisoner had told him he needed to get outside and breathe some fresh air, then take a look-see at that hangar Bill and Donny spent so much time in. Sitting here on his butt was starting to freak him out.

  He checked his watch. Nearly three in the afternoon. Jesus, where the hell had time gone? He had to get moving. He checked both ways for signs of movement and listened for the noise of an engine. Nothing. Quiet as a graveyard, only emptier. He took out his hunting knife and set to work. Lucky for him Paul hadn’t thought to get him to empty his pockets. Also lucky was the fact that the construction crew had used big cross-thread screws but hadn’t tightened them up all the way. They’d been in too much of a hurry, he figured, and had nobody checking their work.

  It was the work of a few minutes to unscrew the hinges on the frame itself, and he eased the door clear just enough to squeeze through, leaving it propped with the lock still engaged. That way, if the three men came back early, he’d have time to replace a few of the screws and pretend everything was fine and dandy.

  He glanced back at the prisoner. “Don’t you go anywhere, you hear? I won’t be long.” Then he was through the gap and the outer door and in the open, breathing cool air and taking in the aroma of wide open spaces. Man, that was so good. He was never going to spend so much time indoors ever again once he got out of here. It would be open air all the way.

  He set off across the grass, eyes firmly fixed on the hangar. Now he was out here and not seeing just a slice of the picture, it looked huge. True, it was pretty much a wreck, like it was a prop in a disaster movie, but still impressive. He made sure to keep a check on the approach road and didn’t tread anywhere where he’d be likely to leave tracks. Wouldn’t do to leave footprints and let the ragheads in on his secret excursion.

  The closer he got to the hangar the bigger it looked. A lot bigger. It was like it suddenly expanded once he was in its shadow, dominating and aggressive in spite of its sorry state of disrepair. Then he was standing by the front corner, the wooden walls looming high overhead, silent save for the sound of the breeze hissing through the battered woodwork. All down one side was a line of windows, many of the panes broken, some slipped but hanging in there, all of them coated with years of windblown dust and so weather-beaten and scratched you could hardly see through them. This place must have been built for cargo planes, he figured, or maybe bombers. The sliding doors looked like they hadn’t been used in years, with the metal tracks and runner wheels all gummed up with dirt and grit. He took one last look around to check nobody was coming, then stepped inside.

  The silence and sense of space hit him right away. It took him all the way back to when he was a kid going to church on Sunday; there was the same interplay of light and gloom, and the feeling of openness above his head. Only instead of heavy wooden beams above the congregation, this place had a network of steel struts holding up the roof, with rusted pulleys and chains and light fittings hanging there like dead things. And instead of pews and chairs down at ground level, all he could see in front of him was a vast expanse of concrete floor, stained black and cracked to hell, as if a giant mole had tunnelled underneath and ripped it up. Elsewhere weeds had taken over and stood three feet high in places, with lumps of concrete, cement, and nameless pieces of ironwork poking up through them like they were trying to reach the sunlight before they got swallowed up altogether.

  A few small birds scattered out of the roof as he stepped forward, the sound of the wings echoing like ghosts. He shivered and continued walking, watching where he put his feet. There were holes in the floor where the ground beneath had sunk, and he skirted these with care. Other times he took the precaution of avoiding clumps of thick weeds in case they harboured snakes. Last thing he wanted was a bite from a pissed-off rattler or a cottonmouth; he’d be dead before the day was out.

  He stopped and looked around. Most of the solid segments of walls were peppered with small holes where the fabric was beginning to come apart with age and neglect. Over to one side were some boards on the floor, which looked like they might cover an inspection pit. Overhead was a large pulley-and-chain affair, rusted to hell, and alongside the boards was a pair of huge steel H-beams that looked like they would have once been an inspection hoist.

  Away on the other side of the hangar was a low structure along the wall that he guessed had once been an office. He decided to check that first. If the two goons had spent any time here, he was guessing it wouldn’t have been in the main hangar space, where the air was drawn in through the vast open doors and pushed out through a smaller door at the rear of the building. Whatever else they were, he didn’t have them down as stupid enough to stand around in the open where they could be seen by anybody passing by on the road.

  He sniffed the air as he crossed the floor, picking up a gamey, mouldy aroma. It reminded him of rotting fruit in the garbage dump outside a supermarket. Probably food the men had thrown aside or maybe a kill brought in from outside by predators. But there was something else, too, much more alien to a place that hadn’t had any use for at least thirty years.

  Burned metal and plastic. It got stronger the closer he got to the office, hanging in the air like a screen as he passed through the door.

  A table stood in the middle of the room. On it was a moulded crate about two feet square, the kind he’d seen a film crew using one time. A smaller one stood alongside. The outside of each crate was ribbed and had carry-handles at each end with twin clasps on the front and a lock in the center. He counted ten more crates on the floor, five large, five smaller, with a pile of flattened cardboard boxes—the same ones, he guessed, that had made the journey down here with him—spread over the floor. He approached the table with care, checking he wasn’t going to step in anything that would leave tracks.

  He knuckled the side of the bigger crate. It sounded hollow and shifted on the table. He lifted the lid. It was empty save for some foam packing, moulded to take something fairly big and more or less rounded in shape. Whatever had been in this crate he figured must have been fragile or valuable or both. There were markings on the side and lid, but he couldn’t figure out what they meant. The smaller crate was the same; empty save for moulded foam and bearing the same series of numbers and letters.

  He went over to the other crates and hefted the nearest one to test the weight. It was heavier and didn’t have that hollow empty feel of the one on the table, although the lock and clasps had been popped. The shipping numbers, he noted, were consecutive.

  He stepped over to the cardboard boxes. More labels and numbers, with the thick cardboard creased where plastic ties had cut into it. A bundle of these ties were now laying a few feet away. He’d worked in a transport warehouse for a while and knew these were freight packs. You didn’t have to know what any of the markings st
ood for, only that they had to match a cargo manifest or delivery note. He nudged one of the boxes to one side and saw a familiar logo: FedEx Express. Next to it was a barcode and a number, and a roughened area where a label had been ripped away.

  Over by the window was a pile of heavy fabric on wires, and he couldn’t figure out its function until he spotted hooks in the wooden wall either side of the windows.

  Curtains to block out the light.

  He turned back to the unlocked crate on the floor. He hesitated only a moment, then lifted the lid. It gave a suck of air and he emitted a further fresh tang of plastic. He laid it back with care and studied the inside of the box.

  A layer of thick, dark foam covered the contents and he lifted it gently, picking carefully at the edges of the piece until it came clear. Whatever was inside was coloured white, in a plain plastic bag, and fitted snugly into its foam nest. It was a casing of some kind, sort of crab-shaped and slightly oval with four protruding arms and a cylinder about an inch wide attached to one side and sticking out of the top. He fed his fingers down the side of the casing, easing the object out of the foam bedding and lifting it clear. Then he placed it on the table.

  For a moment he couldn’t make out what the hell he was looking at. It could have been a fancy piece of household electrical equipment, maybe a dehumidifier or one of those automatic vacuum cleaner robots he’d seen once. Only he knew it wasn’t. This was something special; it had to be, with all the special packing and moulded foam and locks and stuff. And the sheen on the casing looked expensive and high-tech, like … carbon fiber? Maybe that was it—like they used in race car bodies.

  He bent close and peered through the plastic bag. There was some writing down one side; a name in fancy colored letters. EuroVol~2. And the four arms were contoured and stubby, each with some kind of socket-and-nut assembly on the end facing up, with gaps where he could see a glint of copper wiring. And each of the wings had louvered air vents down each side.