“I don’t believe in luck,” Vail said.
“You may not believe in it, but you’d better hope we have some. The good kind.”
The videoconferencing room at Mildenhall turned out to be a small office in an older hangar. They filed in, shut the door and locked it, then got ready to call Knox on an encrypted video line.
“How secure is this?” Uzi asked.
“Military grade,” said the major who ushered them inside. “We installed our own SIP proxy, and with a VPN and a variety of SIP clients, we made our own platform.”
Uzi nodded. “Firewall? Is auto answer OFF?”
“Of course. No one’s gonna tap in.”
“You use AES 256 or AES 512 crypto?”
“Five twelve,” the major said. “And yeah, we’ve got the high speed hardware to handle it.”
Uzi shrugged. “Cool. Let’s do this.”
“You really understood that?” DeSantos asked.
“Didn’t you?” Uzi asked, knowing that DeSantos had no clue what the man had said.
“All I care is that it works. Get Knox on the screen.”
“Thanks, Major,” Uzi said, then waited for him to leave. He clicked “Start secure communication” and moments later Douglas Knox’s face appeared on the large LED flat panel mounted on the wall.
“We found the jet. They’re using some kind of spoof on their transponder but satellites located it. A red-eye out of LAX. Since you were the ones to key us in on this, I’m patching you in.” He gestured to Rodman, who was seated to his right. A wide-angle view filled the screen.
“What are we seeing?” Uzi asked.
“We scrambled F-22s,” Rodman said. “This is the pilot’s forward camera.”
On the left, the nose of a jumbo jet was barely visible. In the distance, the brilliant white lights and red spire of One World Trade Center was outlined against a dark but brightening sky.
Vail’s stomach churned. Her heartrate increased. And she struggled to get air into her lungs.
“We’re attempting to establish contact, but the two men flying the plane are not the pilots.”
The F-22 pulled back and the full fuselage was visible.
“How many aboard?” Uzi asked.
“It’s a 757,” Rodman said, “with 199 passengers and crew.”
So 199 versus — how many are in the building this time of morning? Restaurant workers, maintenance and security personnel, tenants burning the midnight oil to meet deadlines. Five hundred? A thousand?
“Has the president given the order to shoot it down?” DeSantos asked.
“If necessary, yes. The military’s taken over the operation.”
“It’s not about the number of lives,” Vail said. “It’s symbolic. Demoralizing to destroy what we fought so long and hard to rebuild.”
“They’re not gonna destroy anything,” DeSantos said, his right hand fisted.
Uzi leaned forward. “Plane’s over the Hudson River. If they’re going to do it, now’s the—”
Before he could finish, the bright flare of a missile launch filled the screen. A second later, the projectile struck the jet’s body. It erupted in flames, small shrapnel flying toward the camera. The 757 veered left, then right, then the nose pointed toward the sky and the burning fuselage plunged toward the water.
The camera showed a black and deep blue sky, the F-22 continuing on its straight-ahead path, zooming past the World Trade Center to the west.
Vail, Uzi, DeSantos, and Fahad continued to stare at the screen.
Vail felt intense relief — but had to fight back tears. “What did we just do? I mean, there was no choice, but — I mean, two hundred innocent people …”
The screen flickered and Knox was visible once again, a somber expression on his face. “I’ll keep you updated. It’ll probably be several days before we know how they pulled it off. I doubt it’ll be anything extravagant. We all know security on air travel is an illusion.”
None of them spoke.
The normally unflappable FBI director turned away from the webcam, took a deep breath, and composed himself. “Right before you called me about the plane, we got reports of an incident in Westminster. You know anything about that?”
“We were there,” DeSantos said, “warned MI5 of the intel we pulled from a laptop we found in a flat in Greenwich. But there wasn’t enough ti—”
“What do you mean you warned MI5? Not Buck—”
“We utilized Karen’s contact, Clive Reid. We helped minimize the impact of the attack.”
Knox frowned: he still was not pleased but he could not complain. “Some sort of chemical weapon. Sounds like they’re going to be looking at hundreds of casualties. Won’t know for a few hours, but it’s not going to be a good report.”
“They used osmium tetroxide,” Uzi said.
“Osmium tetroxide?” Knox’s jaw dropped as he processed that. “We’d discussed that a number of times over the years but our chemists told us it was not feasible.”
Time to hire new chemists.
“They aerosolized it in the ventilation system,” Uzi said. “That’s why they won’t have an accurate casualty count for a few hours. There’s a latency period.”
Knox clenched his jaw. “Status on your two targets, Yaseen and Aziz?”
“We believe they were living in that flat,” DeSantos said, “but we’ve got a forensic guy looking over latents we lifted. We engaged three tangos as they left the building. Two were killed, two escaped.”
“Are the two dead bodies going to cause a problem?”
Vail turned to DeSantos, who answered. “Just a matter of time. I don’t think it’ll be traced back to me — or us — but it’s impossible to say.”
“I’ll monitor it on my end. What about Yaseen and Aziz?”
DeSantos glanced at Uzi, then said, “Paris.”
“Paris,” Knox repeated. “Something I should know?”
“Another one of the encrypted documents I got off that laptop,” Uzi said. “It directed all their fighters to an address in Paris after the London operation.”
Knox sat back in his chair. “Mr. Fahad, you haven’t said a word. Anything to add?”
He pursed his lips and shook his head. “No sir.”
Vail’s phone vibrated. She rooted it out of her jacket pocket and read the message. Bingo.
“Something you’d like to share, Agent Vail?”
“Text from Clive Reid. There was a sniper on the roof of a building near MI5’s headquarters. We warned them about that, so they were prepared. The shooter escaped but the Met captured the guy’s face on a camera before the attack — including an accomplice. Man carrying the rifle case is—” she consulted the Samsung—“Samir Mohammed al Razi. Other one is Rahmatullah Nasrullah.”
Knox leaned closer to the camera. “Say again?”
Vail checked her device and repeated the names.
Knox’s right eye narrowed. He swiveled a few degrees in his chair and started working the computer to the left of his desk. He looked up, exposing the deep furrows in his face. “As you all know, President Nunn has made closing Guantanamo Bay a major goal of his administration. Today he’s going to announce a plan to transfer all remaining detainees to the US by overriding a congressional ban that specifically prohibits doing just that.”
“How many are left?” Vail asked.
“Two years ago we released six hundred, leaving 149. Seventy-nine have been approved for transfer but nothing’s happened because there were problems repatriating them. Thirty-seven are going to remain in detention without trial.”
“Too dangerous to release but not enough evidence to try them,” Uzi said.
“Correct.” Knox reached to his right and glanced at a document. “As of right now, twenty-three are going to be prosecuted by a military commission. Five of them orchestrated the September 11 attack. But the big fight is over closing the place down. Of the men already released, seventy-four have gone back to battle as enemy combatants against us.”