“Paid or pirated?”
It was his turn to frown. “A thousand songs? Who pays for that much music these days?”
“Sorry.”
“Hang on,” he said, “let’s be sure — I’ve got the playlist right here.” After less than a minute, “No, this doesn’t match the music on Davis’ Spotify account… not even close. It’s got to be the daughter’s, a Christmas present. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“Okay. But why would he take his daughter’s iPod, full of her music, to Colombia?”
“And then forget the cable?”
Silence as they both pondered it.
“I don’t get it,” he said weakly.
“Me neither, let’s move on.”
“What’s he doing now?”
She looked at her screen. “We’re getting every keystroke through his phone — he must have set it down right next to the damned keyboard. He’s searching for performance data on ARJ-35s.”
“Okay, at least that makes sense.”
“What should we do about the iPod?” she asked.
“You know the orders.” An extended silence ran. “Where is Stuyvesant?”
The woman had to check. “He’s on another bus. Florida this time.”
“They might reach out to him there — the South Americans are all over Florida.”
“Maybe. But that’s out of our hands. And you didn’t answer my question. Are you going to send this little tidbit up?”
The man sighed. “Where is Strand now?”
She checked the schedule and told him.
“We can only use a landline there — even he has to turn his cell off.”
“The number is listed right here on the schedule. He put it there for a reason.”
The man relented, picking up a phone and placing the call. After two rings it was picked up across town in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
Right next door to the White House.
TEN
Davis found Marquez in a conference room preparing to go home for the night.
“You are working late tonight?” the colonel asked as Davis eclipsed the doorway.
“I don’t exactly have a family to go home to right now.”
“Did you learn anything useful this afternoon?”
Davis pulled the two passports and dropped them on a table. “One is Jen’s. The other belongs to the girl who was sitting next to her, Kristin Stewart. I found them in the seatback pockets.”
Marquez took both and flipped through the pages. “That is a strange place to leave them.”
“I thought so too. Jen knows better than to put important documents where they might be forgotten. Now, the iPod being there — that doesn’t surprise me. But for both girls to leave their passports in their seatback pockets. That’s not right — there’s a reason.”
Marquez shrugged it off, a man already mystified by the teenagers he kept at home. He put the passports in a cabinet, locked it, and said, “I will keep them for now.”
“What about you?” Davis asked. “Anything new to report?”
“Unfortunately, no. Nothing since we last spoke. Tomorrow morning I am going to the medical examiner’s office. They will have the results of the postmortems on our pilots. Ten o’clock at Al Hospital Occidente de Kennedy. You are welcome to come.”
“I think I might. Is that where all the bodies are being held?”
“Yes, for the present time.”
“Okay. Before you leave tonight can you give me any information you have on the pilots?”
“Of course, we have a file on each man.”
“I’d also like to see the video footage from the boarding area.”
“I will talk to Rafael before I go. I can tell you I’ve watched it four times myself. Our suspect, Señor Umbriz, is only briefly visible as he gives his boarding pass to the agent. Apparently he arrived late — which in itself tells me something.” Marquez looked at him as if expecting a response.
Davis didn’t give one.
“If that is all,” said Marquez, “I will see you tomorrow morning. Try to get a good night’s sleep.”
Rafael set up a monitor in a side room and gave Davis a quick tutorial, then left him alone. The video was black and white, a fish-eye view from a camera mounted near the jetway entrance, looking back across the gate area. Davis cued the video to a point fifty minutes before the flight’s departure.
In the beginning there was little action, and he fast-forwarded liberally. Roughly twenty minutes before the scheduled push-back time passengers began lining up. They stood casually between twin rope-lined stanchions, waiting to board a doomed airliner. Davis imagined there had been a similar scene a century ago, when the passengers of an unsinkable ship boarded at a pier in Southampton, England. As ever, fate traveled as a quiet companion.
He studied the passengers one by one, and in shades of gray saw a mixed clientele, some dressed for business and others less formally. Sales meetings, in-law visits, second honeymoons. Summer internships. There were twenty-one good reasons why people were getting on TAC-Air Flight 223, and not a single person appeared to have reservations about the pending journey, including the pastry chef from Cartagena who boarded near the end and looked the most disinterested of the lot. There was no agitation in his manner. No sweaty brow or fearful, darting eyes.
One passenger, of course, demanded the bulk of his attention. Davis allowed himself that. He held steady as he watched, pushing away the chance that these sterile images might be the last ever captured of his daughter. She was near the back of the line wearing a familiar pair of jeans and a loose khaki shirt covered with pockets. She’d bought the shirt specifically for the trip, and he’d teased her that she looked like Indiana Jones — or at least the female, undergraduate version. She looked happy and vibrant, immersed in her big adventure. He watched Jen exchange a few words with her seatmate, Kristin Stewart, who responded in kind. Davis wasn’t a lip-reader but he didn’t need to be. Where do you live? What’s your major? How long will you be here? The usual.
Again, he was struck by their similar appearance. Roughly the same age, same over-the-shoulder auburn hair and willowy build. He forced his eyes away and tried to pick out the last passenger in Row 7. Davis remembered the name from the seating chart. Thomas Mulligan. Mulligan — like an extra shot in golf. His attention settled on an Anglo at the end of the line, behind the two girls. A man whose busy eyes alternated between the terminal area and his phone. Not nervous. Alert was more like it. Watchful. Perhaps searching for an associate. He seemed to be alone, and by the way he was dressed — casual gray coat and pressed trousers — Davis fixed him as a businessman. A Yankee trader in South America selling drilling equipment or washing machines.
The most interesting frames were near the end of the video. They were all moving toward the gate, and presenting boarding passes to the TAC-Air agent. Almost imperceptibly, Davis saw Kristin Stewart turn and say something to Mulligan over her shoulder.
Davis played it back, and by the third replay he was sure. Aside from Jen, Kristin Stewart had made another acquaintance.
At some point, she had also met Thomas Mulligan.
By eleven that evening Davis’ concentration was ebbing. He’d moved on from the video to study a pair of manila file folders, the background on the pilots. The majority was government information pertaining to airman certificates, security and background checks, and medical licenses, all retrieved from records kept by the Colombian Special Administrative Unit of Civil Aeronautics — the local version of the FAA. The remaining information came from TAC-Air’s corporate personnel files. These files each contained a photograph of the respective pilot standing against a wall, behind them the corporate logo of TAC-Air. That same photo would appear on the corporate ID each wore on a lanyard at work, and was probably on file in a half dozen government ministries.