“Let me sleep,” she said, her eyes closing again, trying to push away the voice which was emphatically saying something about running out of time.
Suddenly she was back in a beautiful field under a clear blue sky, motioning to a lover to hurry with the buttons he’d been undoing on her blouse, and realizing with a surge of pleasure that it was Steve.
Building 4-104, Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado Springs (10:32 p.m. / 0432 Zulu)
“That’s all? That’s all you guys can come up with?”
Dana Baumgartner searched the eyes of the hastily assembled team of engineers pulled from their homes to find a way to do what they had labored to prevent: Physically disconnect the airborne unit that was the entire focus of the black project they were legally required to protect.
“Those were the specifications, Colonel!” one of them said in a pleading voice. “We worked long and hard to think up every way some desperate hijacker could try to disconnect us and thwart all of them.”
“Yeah,” an owlish-looking engineer interjected. “Like burying the relays for the flight controls where no one could reach them, or… or…”
“I get it, guys,” Dana replied. “But we’ve got less than an hour, and if we can’t get the disconnect code, we’ve got to tell those pilots how to disable the system.”
“Sir, it can’t be done!”
“You can’t cut power to the box, even?” Dana asked.
“Especially not that, sir. It could be catastrophic because of the different relays, sequences, and power source changes that would result.”
“I want you to stay here and keep thinking, keep working on it, just in case. Don’t approach it from the position that it’s impossible. Approach it from the idea that you left out something… left a backdoor, a way to knock it off. I refuse to hear that it’s impenetrable! Just do it. We have a lot of lives at stake, as well as the efficacy of this program and your jobs.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
The White House (12:40 a.m. EST / 0440 Zulu)
Safely ensconced behind bulletproof glass in the front guardhouse, the well-trained officer who had greeted Will Bronson and Jenny Reynolds after they tumbled out of their rental and fast walked the distance to his window was used to random citizens wobbling in off the street to ask—sometimes demand—to the see the president. Some were drunk, some high on God knew what, some dangerously deluded or sufficiently hostile to trigger an armed response. But seldom had he seen ID cards from NSA and DIA pushed under the window without a concurrent appointment.
Carefully matching the pictures on the IDs with the faces in front of him, the officer keyed the speaker.
“Who do you want to see, and why don’t I see an appointment?”
“Because,” Jenny said, as close to the microphone as she could get, “This has just emerged as something only the White House can handle. It is a matter of national security, it is extremely urgent, it involves a hijacked, American-flagged airliner about to invade Iranian airspace, and we have the codes that can stop a tragedy that could result in the deaths of everyone aboard.”
“Who do you want to see?” The officer asked again, evenly, fully expecting to hear the word “president” in the answer.
“The chief of staff or the duty officer in the Situation Room, even if you have to get them out of bed. We have less than forty minutes, and this is no joke.”
“Stand by, please,” was the response, and within less than five minutes a man they judged to be in the Secret Service detail had arrived to escort them through a metal detector and a quick pat down, and then to a tiny office somewhere on the first floor.
“You folks remain here. Someone will be back with you.”
“Wait! Wait a minute!” Jenny had sat down for a few seconds before leaping up. “That airliner will be in Iranian airspace in… if I calculate it correctly… less than thirty minutes, and something terrible is going to happen if the pilots haven’t regained control.”
“Ma’am, you’re preaching to the wrong choir,” the agent said.
“I’m trying to tell you how urgent this is! Every second counts!”
“Yes, ma’am. I get it. Stay here.”
The door closed behind him, and Jenny knew instinctively someone would be standing on the other side to make sure they didn’t leave unescorted.
“It’s too late, Jen. We’ve done the best we could,” Will said, his face a mask of defeat.
“If they don’t get their asses in gear, I’m afraid we’re going to be left in limbo until it is too late,” Jenny said, pacing back and forth while Will stood, looking helpless.
“We don’t even know if your code is right.”
She turned, a finger in the air suddenly. “What do you bet the White House has a Wi-Fi system?”
“Probably. With passcodes I’m sure.”
“Which I’ll bet I can crack!”
She was already pulling out her laptop and firing it up, balancing it in her lap with the paper containing the unlock code on the keyboard, her finger nervously tapping the side of the machine as she anxiously waited. “Come on, come on, come on!”
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Mojave, California (8:40 p.m. PST / 0440 Zulu)
Jaime Lopez, Esquire, had finally reached his personal breaking point. Getting away from Ron Barrett and his manic little group in the dusty airfield office was no longer a desire. It spelled survival. Beyond the embarrassment of a serious, senior attorney pretending to be surprised hours before, when the two federal agents couldn’t locate Pangia’s Airbus on their ramp, the past few hours of waiting for the next shoe to drop had been a special agony. As general counsel, his purposeful deception with the agents had been so beneath his dignity, if not unethical. But then, again, the whole day had been such an unmitigated disaster, it hardly mattered. A few more random indignities seemed trivial.
True, there was something very fishy about the agents’ story and the speed with which they had appeared, and more than likely they were lying about being from the Transportation Safety Administration. But whoever they were, their presence spelled deep trouble.
Jaime had endured the tense atmosphere of Barrett’s vigil as they monitored the media’s sketchy reports on the fate of Pangia Flight 10, everyone present aware of the elephant on the table—the question of whether they would still have jobs when the smoke cleared. But for some reason, the one horrific possibility Jaime could not let go of was the idea that Carl Kanowsky, the employee who had dispatched the wrong jet, was some sort of clandestine operative. The two agents had said as much after one of them spent a half hour in another room with Kanowsky’s file.
“We think,” he told Jaime as they were leaving, “…that the Kanowsky name is an alias, and whoever he really is, the mission he was on required him to get hired by your company. We checked his address. It’s empty desert.”
There had been no time to look into the quality of the due diligence checking of Kanowsky’s application, but on top of all the other worries about massive looming liability for Mojave Aircraft Storage, the thought that they could have stupidly hired a terrorist made his blood run cold.
Jaime finally made excuses and broke away from the group just before ten, leaving the rest of them glued to CNN. He sat down in an adjacent office and read every line of Kanowsky’s folder and application. The overall liability of the company might well turn on the contents, but there was nothing whatever that would have waved a flag at even the most skeptical of interviewers. The agents had said the address was a vacant field, but it was suspicious that they seemed to know that almost instantly. Jaime used the map program on his iPad and carefully typed in the address that Kanowsky had given, watching with a sinking feeling as the map zoomed in on a vacant patch of desert on the eastern edge of Lancaster, just as they’d indicated.