by Shane Kuhn
“Kennedy!”
Kennedy looked at him in the rearview.
“Give him a bag. His lips are turning blue.”
“I didn’t fucking sign up for this!” he bellowed into the back of Juarez’s neck.
Mitchell looked at Kennedy like he might be another potential problem he’d need to take care of.
“Calm down,” Juarez said sternly.
“Fuck you! Why did you kill them? They’re Homeland Security agents. They might be assholes but they’re on our side!”
Juarez drove down a side street and Kennedy thought he was going to be the next to take a bullet in the head.
“Those two assholes were working with Lentz,” Juarez said, his voice surprisingly calm. “We’ve tracked them for three years, since he was in Cairo. They were part of the job.”
Kennedy recalled what Wes Bowman had said about Lentz infiltrating DHS and his head began to spin even faster.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.
“We didn’t know they were going to show up today so it never crossed my mind.”
“I can’t believe this is happening,” Kennedy said, mostly to himself.
Best handed him a plastic bag.
“Breathe into this. You’re hyperventilating,” Best said.
Kennedy did it and started to feel his feet under him again.
“Listen, man,” Juarez said, “we weren’t expecting this to go down either, but it did and we dealt with it. I’m sorry, but it’s like I told you, this is the job. You want to bury Lentz so he can’t do something that will make 9/11 seem like a drive-by shooting? You have to be willing to do what he’s willing to do—without hesitation. Otherwise, you end up like Glenn.”
“Monty,” Kennedy said. “Won’t he think we did it?”
“The slugs we put in those boys were a ballistic match to Glenn’s gun,” Mitchell said. “Juarez told me what to dial in when we were in the TSA office with Monty’s men.”
He showed Kennedy the power drill. It had an LCD screen on the side with a menu of gun names. The name was Smith & Wesson Model 586, 4 Inch Barrel, .38 S&W Special.
“This unit can dial in hundreds of different types of firearms. This is Glenn’s gun down to the manufacturing date. Everything about the bullet impact will pass forensics. Only thing that won’t is the bullet, because we can’t match the specific barrel grooves.”
“Which is why you took them. So, the plan was to frame Glenn?” Kennedy asked, incredulous.
“Glenn was a stroke of luck,” Juarez said. “We were going to dispose of those gentlemen a different way, but Glenn decided to eat a bullet, so we took advantage of it. Disgruntled employee murder-suicide, et cetera.”
Kennedy felt sick. He hated Glenn, but Jesus.
“For what it’s worth, you did a great job back there,” Juarez said.
“What?” Kennedy asked.
“You did a great job,” Best said, slapping him on the back.
“Touch and go there for a minute, but you manned up,” Mitchell said. “Kept your cool with those pricks coming down on you. Helped us get our work done. This is where I get off.”
Juarez pulled over behind a black SUV that was idling.
“See you on the next,” Mitchell said.
He shook hands with Juarez and Best and tried to shake hands with Kennedy but Kennedy was lost in thought, reliving the scene with Glenn lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood with the flight attendant screaming endlessly. Mitchell got out and took off in the black SUV.
“Where’s he going?” Kennedy asked listlessly, just registering Mitchell’s exit.
“Shangri-la,” Best joked. “Or another shitty gig, whichever comes first.”
Juarez drove away and looked at Kennedy in the rearview until he looked back.
“Like it or not, brother,” Juarez said, as if he could read Kennedy’s thoughts, “you’re one of us now.”
Two days before Kennedy was getting his come-to-Jesus at JFK, Lambert was waiting in the reception area of one of Malaysia’s largest aircraft parts manufacturers. His shirt was soaked with sweat and his suit jacket was drenched with putrid rain. Prior to his final stop here in Kuala Lumpur, he had been all over Asia, visiting the aviation industry’s highest-echelon companies, using the cover of a global sourcing rep from a domestic air carrier in the United States. Alia gave him a tidy expense account that greased the wheels and fast-tracked him to access the top brass at each company.
After a few five-figure bar tabs, the drunken executives, easily distracted by the professional charms of high-dollar escorts, were the perfect marks for tech theft. Key cards, mobile phones, laptops, notebooks, smart watches—all the things they relied on to run their companies—were the keys to their data kingdoms. And that’s where Nuri came in. She had dispatched her minions to shadow the corporate entourages and gather the goods from sticky-fingered escorts in Tokyo, Shanghai, Taipei, Chiang Mai, and Singapore. Within a few days, she had root access to all of their internal networks. The problem was, when Lambert and a team of analysts at Langley pored over the data, they found nothing irregular in five years of transactions.
The Malaysian company he had gone to see that day was clean too, with the exception of an insignificant blip Lambert was reluctant to even peg as an anomaly. A third-party vendor, an avionics company that the larger Malaysian firm was preparing to acquire, was late on delivering a shipment of parts to its would-be suitor. This was common for those types of companies, run by engineers pushing to develop patented products and get them to market first in hopes of finding larger corporate buyers. Along the way, their financials were almost always a nightmare for corporate controllers to sift through in advance of mergers and acquisitions, and they had a hard time keeping up product supply for growing demand—which was why they sought acquisition in the first place.
Normally, Lambert wouldn’t have given a damn about details like that, but if Lentz was savvy enough in that industry, he might know about the quirky intricacies of smaller companies and use them to his advantage. If he wanted critical aircraft parts, he would have been smart to acquire them from those firms, as they were always eager to sell to just about anyone to keep their balance sheets attractive, and they tended to dance around regulations. Even at long-shot status, this made the blip worthy of scrutiny. He and Alia decided to work a different angle and have him come in as a representative of potential investors. Alia backed it up with banking documentation showing funds in place contingent upon a review of the company’s financials. This made Lambert an instant VIP, and he was able to pull all the information he needed on contracts, personnel, supply chain, and manufacturing figures.
He suffered the swampy heat to get back to the Hilton and check out the documents in his air-conditioned room with a burger and a six-man squad of Budweisers. Other than a lot of bad math, there was nothing in the company’s financials that leaped out at him as suspicious. But because their productivity had been consistent over the past several quarters, it was definitely odd that they had a sudden drop in inventory on a part that had regularly been in surplus. The tech was something he’d never seen before, so he called Leo, one of his golf buddies at Boeing. Leo was a top engineer there who padded his Christmas fund with a few CIA consultant dollars from time to time. It was 10:00 P.M. in Kuala Lumpur so he was able to catch Leo as he was starting work in Chicago at 8:00 A.M.
“It’s actually a neat little piece of communications gear that connects tower and autopilot systems with proprietary code transmissions based on binary—”
“Jesus, Leo, quit stroking your beard and give me the bar stool version.” Lambert moaned.
“You’re always so goddamned cranky when you’re in Asia. Is it the sweats or the shits this time?”
“What are you, my third ex-wife? Both, as usual.”
“You need to drop a few Michelins ther
e, Tommy Boy.”
“Fuck off. My kids thought you were a manatee when we were in Tampa last Christmas.”
“Bullshit. They were looking at your second ex-wife.”
“Can we talk about the thing, please? I know it’s comms, but I don’t have any white paper.”
“The thing, which is its scientific name,” Leo said, “allows autopilot to communicate independently with the tower using a system that can’t be accessed by the cockpit and can’t be intercepted or hacked by anyone other than the one with the transponder, which is the tower mainframe. Tower mainframe access is controlled like a missile silo, with several key turners needed to alter it. Bottom line is this little baby is going to make planes hijack proof. Pilot wants to use the plane as a missile, override. Some camel jockey tries to take the wheel, override.”
“Camel jockey? Really, Leo?”
“Are you listening? This shit is revolutionary. Airbus developed it after that German nut job decided to plow his 320 into the French Alps.”
“Why isn’t it being implemented in US aircraft already?” Lambert asked.
“Pilots’ union,” Leo said. “They’re freaking out about it.”
“Thanks, Leo. Hello to the missus.”
Lambert hung up and phoned Alia. As expected, she wanted him to buy up a sample ASAP. He drained his last Bud, set an early alarm, and wondered how the hell he was going to survive another day in the heat.
The next morning Lambert paid the avionics company a visit at its headquarters in an industrial wasteland on the outskirts of the city. He had developed a nasty cough from moving in and out of heat and air-conditioning and from the malevolent haze of the city’s notoriously bad pollution. The reception area felt like a steam room, and he had to fight off cockroaches as big as his thumb trying to crawl up his pant legs. After sweltering in what he was convinced might actually be one of the lower levels of hell, he finally met with one of the company representatives. The man was very friendly, spoke English well, and nodded approvingly at Lambert’s credentials.
“Is this for commercial or military use?” the man asked.
“That’s classified.”
“Our government does not allow us to sell to foreign military.”
“I work for a major carrier in the US. The proposed use is civilian.”
“Fine. Follow me.” That was easy.
The man took Lambert to the production line and showed him the part and how it worked. Afterward they went to accounting to draw up the purchase order. When the man logged into his computer, Lambert captured his password with an RFID skimmer device and sent it to Langley. The analysts there were able to see the network ID and log-in as soon as the man logged out, allowing them to download the company’s customer database. As soon as they acknowledged a successful download, Lambert paid for the part and went back to his hotel. He was packing for a late flight back to DC when his room phone rang. It didn’t stop, so he picked up, annoyed.
“I’m here to pick up the package,” a man on the other end of the line said with an Australian or maybe a light British accent.
“Who is this?”
“Alia sent me. She doesn’t want you carrying it back with you through customs. Too risky. Can I come up?”
“Give me a minute.”
Lambert hung up. Alia would have told him if she were sending someone. He called her on his satellite phone.
“Guy just called me from the lobby. Said you sent him to pick up the part. I drop-shipped it to you from their office like we agreed—”
“Get out of there now,” she said and hung up.
There was a knock on the door.
“Hey, it’s me. Front desk let me up,” the man called from the hallway, definitely a Brit.
Lambert grabbed a cigarette lighter from his pants pocket, got up on a chair, and flicked the lighter flame under the glass bubble on the fire sprinkler. The glass bubble broke and the sprinkler went off, along with the building’s fire alarm system. The deafening tone started a panic on Lambert’s floor. He grabbed his satellite phone and passport and jammed them in his pocket. The man was knocking hard on his hotel room door, yelling for him to open it, warning him there was a fire in the building. Lambert knocked hard on the door of the adjoining room.
“Who is it?” a voice called from the other room.
“Hotel security!” Lambert yelled back.
A frightened elderly couple opened the door. Lambert went into their room and locked the door behind him. Right after he did, he heard the door to his room being kicked in.
“You need to evacuate,” he told them.
“I just need to get my purse,” the wife said and went into the bedroom.
She got her bag and hurried back into the room.
“Mr. Lentz sends you his regards,” the husband said.
“What did you just—” Lambert began but was cut short when the wife pulled a Beretta 93R machine pistol with a barrel suppressor from her purse and emptied its twenty-round mag into his head and back at point-blank range.
Day 22
Kennedy poured another mini bottle of Jim Beam into a plastic cup in his room at the JFK Sheraton and ignored the incessantly vibrating Red Carpet satellite phone on the dresser. He sat in a worn vinyl chair, fully dressed, with his packed luggage on the bed. It was 4:30 A.M. and nightmarish flashes of Tad Monty’s cronies, blood gushing out of their ruined heads, were playing on repeat in his mind. Kennedy had seen dead people, but even in Tel Aviv he had never seen anyone killed right in front of him, close enough to touch. The way their eyes bulged and rolled back as their bodies crumpled like marionettes clipped from strings would haunt him for the rest of his life.
“This is the job,” Kennedy said out loud and drained the cup.
He went for another bottle from the minibar and stopped himself.
“But this is not me,” he said. “Time to go home.”
He grabbed his bags and walked out, leaving the sat phone on the dresser.
There was a 7:00 A.M. flight back to Los Angeles out of Newark, and Kennedy was going to be on it. Alia could keep her money and hero scout badges. The spectrum of potential consequences, he knew, started at grim and ended with catastrophic. There was a real chance they would kill him before they would let him walk away. He had seen damning things. And after all, he would not be missed. On the other hand, they could easily implicate him in the two TSA agents’ deaths—what would probably amount to a capital murder case in federal court—so that might be enough to leverage him to keep his mouth shut. In any case, it didn’t matter. Death, or even imprisonment, was far less daunting than having a front-row seat to another business-as-usual CIA snuff job.
Newark Airport was quiet when Kennedy arrived at 6:00 A.M. He had purchased first class so he could go through priority check-in. He passed the ID checkpoint without incident and cleared the millimeter wave body scanner. But the luggage-scanning agent asked him for a bag check and then took her sweet time swabbing his carry-on and briefcase for bomb materials. After she inserted the swabs into the machine for analysis, her demeanor of routine-induced boredom turned to one of suspicion. She stared for an uncomfortably long moment at the analysis screen.
“Sir, I’m going to need you to come with me for an additional luggage screening.”
Kennedy knew that meant the bag had tested positive for chemical residue, which made no sense.
“Is there a problem?”
“This machine isn’t giving me an accurate readout so we’ll need to try another.”
She signaled her supervisor, who walked over and looked at the scanner screen. Kennedy tried to relax. If he missed the flight, it would give Juarez time to track him to Newark. He just needed to stay cool and cooperate to avoid delays.
“Could you please come with me, sir?” the supervisor asked firmly.
Ken
nedy nodded and the supervisor led him through a door with a keypad entry, then down a long, blinding-white fluorescent hallway. Two male agents came around the corner from an adjoining hallway and greeted them. Kennedy could tell they were armed.
“Hello,” one of them said in an overly friendly way.
“Hi,” Kennedy replied amiably, knowing they would be looking for all the things he trained TSOs to look for—agitation, dilated pupils, heavy perspiration, nervous affect. He’d been up all night and was sweating Jim Beam, so trying to appear “normal” was taking every ounce of composure he had left.
“Thanks so much for your cooperation. If you’ll come with us, we’ll get this sorted out.”
“May I ask what needs to be sorted out?”
“Agent Hickman’s equipment is a little glitchy today, so we’re going to analyze it with another machine and get you on your way,” he reassured, nodding at Hickman to leave, which she did quietly.
The other male agent said nothing and took the bags as the three of them walked down the hall and into a room with what Kennedy recognized as sophisticated bomb detection scanning equipment. While the silent agent analyzed the bags, the other agent continued their friendly chat.
“Where you off to today?”
“Los Angeles.”
“Great. Love it there. Business or pleasure?”
“I live there.”
“Lucky you.”
The other agent walked over and handed Mr. Friendly a paper. Mr. Friendly stopped being Mr. Friendly and Kennedy’s heart sank. This was the room where they weeded out the false positives. At that moment, he was clearly a positive, and if Kennedy had been advising these agents, he would have told them to take him into custody.