Passenger 19

by Ward Larsen

  Sorensen was halfway up the brick sidewalk when Shea reached her. He grabbed her arm but she shrugged it away—a move that wouldn’t work more than once. She stopped short of the portico, and put all the indignation she could manage into her voice. “Agent Smithers, you’ve got some explaining to do! I’m here on assignment, and you are interfering with official business.”

  “And just what business is that?” Smithers asked.

  “First of all we need to get rid of these ridiculous cuffs.”

  Smithers hesitated mightily before nodding to Shea. The big man reached into his pocket for a pair of wire cutters and snipped off the cuffs.

  Sorensen made a point of rubbing the marks around her wrists. “We have a man in Colombia investigating an aircraft accident, and Miss Stewart’s daughter was on that airplane. Understandably, she’s worried sick. Her daughter is officially listed as missing, but last night our investigator told me he thinks she may be alive.”

  “And that’s why you drove all night to get here from D.C.? To give hope?”

  Sorensen regarded each of the agents in turn. “You obviously don’t have kids.”

  Smithers replied with a seething look.

  Sorensen said, “I’m sure you’ve verified my credentials by now.” She held out an empty hand, and after a nod from his partner, Shea gave back her ID.

  Sorensen said, “I’m going back to Washington now. I’ve got reports to file, and I’m guessing you do too. Let’s not make them any longer than necessary. Oh—and I’d like my phone back as well.”

  Looking doubtful as ever, Smithers broke away and made a phone call. After a lively five-minute conversation, she pocketed her phone and gave Shea another nod. He handed back the keys to the Acura while Smithers offered up the phone. Her conversation with Dean had just got easier, but Sorensen had no delusions—she knew the car would be tracked and the phone monitored. A backlog of her brother-in-law’s phone calls was probably already being analyzed in some distant cubicle. Jammer would call again, sooner or later, which meant she had to find a way to shift their communications strategy. But that could wait.

  Sorensen shifted her attention away from the agents to Stewart who was standing by her damaged and very expensive front door. “If I hear anything new about your daughter, I promise to call right away.”

  “No,” said Smithers, obviously not wanting to relinquish too much control. “If there’s news about her daughter, you call us first.” Shea handed over a business card with a phone number scribbled on the back.

  Sorensen took it with a faux smile. “Have a nice day.”

  She was just turning away when she locked eyes fleetingly with Jean Stewart. If she wasn’t mistaken, Sorensen thought she detected the most subtle of nods.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Sorensen drove briskly and stopped at the first ATM she came across. She withdrew three hundred dollars in cash, and asked a middle-aged man waiting behind her if there was a Walmart nearby. Yes, he told her, adding directions and a smile. Five minutes later she pulled into the parking lot. She went to the back of the store, and in the electronics department purchased an unlocked no-contract phone, along with a sim card that included data. She paid cash, and ten minutes later was online in the Acura’s driver’s seat. It took thirty seconds to find what she needed.

  * * *

  Miguel Hernandez was sleepy as he sat behind the front desk of the Hotel de Aeropuerto in Bogotá. His wife normally worked the night shift, but she had taken ill the previous evening, which meant he’d been sitting in the same seat for nearly fifteen hours. So when the phone in front of him rang he was slow to react, not picking up until the fifth ring.

  “Buenos días, Hotel de Aeropuerto.”

  “Yes, hello. I am calling on an emergency. I must get in touch with one of your guests.”

  “Una emergencia?”

  “Do you speak English?”

  “A little. Who you want talk to?”

  “Jam—Frank Davis. He’s been staying with you for the last few days.”

  “Señor Davis—un hombre muy grande, no?”

  “Yeah, that’s him, muy grande.”

  “Two zero four. I will connect you to his room.”

  “No, no! It’s hard to explain, but I don’t want a connection to his room. Could you just go knock on the door, and if he’s there have him come to the office?”

  “Señora, I am the only one aquí. Is not so easy for me to—”

  “One hundred U.S. dollars if you can find him and bring him to this phone. He’ll pay you, I promise.”

  Hernandez’ weary eyes edged open a bit wider. “Okay, maybe I find him. Tres minutos.”

  The proprietor set down the phone and walked outside. He climbed the steps to the second floor and rapped his knuckles on the fourth door. No answer. He rapped louder, and with the image of a winged hundred dollar bill in his head, he shouted, “Señor Davis! You are there?”

  Nothing. As a last resort, Miguel took the master key from his pocket and ventured a quick look inside.

  Back in the office he relayed the bad news.

  “All right,” said the voice from afar, “that brings us to two hundred and fifty dollars …”

  * * *

  Davis was studying the seventy-two hour dispatch on the crash of TAC-Air Flight 223, probably the final official act of investigator-in-charge Marquez, when someone called, “Señor Davis! A person here to see you!”

  He walked to the entrance and saw a young boy of no more than ten. He was barefoot and smiling, and when he saw Davis he waved a piece of paper. Davis walked over and said in hesitant Spanish, “Es para mí?”

  The kid smiled even more broadly. “Yeah, it’s for you, dawg.”

  Davis sighed. Hollywood had indeed made the world a smaller place. He took the note, read it, and moved immediately toward the door.

  “Hey, homie!”

  Davis turned and saw the kid with an outstretched hand. He pulled out his wallet and put a ten in the kid’s hand.

  “That’s it? I ran all the way here!”

  “Yeah? Well take my advice—when you run back, make a stop at school and sign up.”

  * * *

  Davis was breathless when he reached the hotel office. The proprietor handed over the phone saying there would be a charge to his account. Davis said that was fine, figuring he’d find a way to expense it to Larry Green.

  Sorensen greeted him with, “The phone I was using got compromised.”

  “Compromised?”

  “An hour ago the Secret Service had me cuffed in the back of a car.”

  “Damn … you okay?”

  “Yeah, I talked my way out of it, but they’ll be watching me now. The good news is I made some headway. I tracked down Kristin Stewart’s mother. She lives in Raleigh, and I drove down last night.”

  “That’s good. Did you talk to her?”

  “It wasn’t easy. I told her I was Secret Service just to get in the door.”

  “So there is a connection.”

  “A big one. She knew the basics of the crash, that the plane had gone down and her daughter was missing.”

  “She’s been living with that for the last four days?”

  “Just like you. She was definitely distraught, but then it turned weird. When she figured out I wasn’t Secret Service, Stewart immediately assumed I was a reporter.”

  “A reporter?”

  “Yep.” Sorensen explained how the rest of the meeting had gone, and how she’d gained Stewart’s confidence. “I think what won her over was when I told her you were down there searching for your own daughter. The agents were banging on the door when she decided to open up to me. Kristin Stewart has had Secret Service protection for over a year now.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she’s the illegitimate daughter of the vice president of the United States. The man who will likely be elected president two months from now.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  It was a stage in every sense
of the word. Rows of newly installed footlights were angled carefully upward, sure to cast the speaker in a glorious hue. A high-quality sound system had been tuned to match the venue’s acoustic profile, allowing sage words to travel with pitch-perfect clarity. The chairs behind the podium were carefully placed, a squadron of congressman, party hacks, and local politicians arranged in rightful pecking order—the most important sat front and center, with certain deviations allowed in the name of social, ethnic, and gender balance. The rest—the hangers-on of the Cleveland establishment—were roundly relegated to the rear echelons.

  The vice president began his speech in the middle of the luncheon’s main course, preaching his stock spiel on foreign policy until everyone’s genetically unmodified ducks were down to the bone. With the tiramisu and coffee delivered, it was time to come in for a landing.

  “I say to you today that education and compassion will be the hallmarks of my administration. I have traveled this country and seen great need. I have traveled this country and seen even greater kindness. It comes by way of churches and non-profit organizations. It comes from well-structured government programs. Most of all, it comes from people like you. People who give time and money, and a helping hand to those facing hardships.”

  A polite round of applause broke the vice president’s rhythm, and of course he allowed it. Happily, he saw the teleprompter pause as well. He’d stumbled there earlier, during the party convention. Rapturous applause had intervened once too often that night and the text ran ahead, mismatching his speech. He’d covered reasonably well, although on leaving the stage he had fired the media tech on sight. Today there were no such troubles.

  He picked up again on a cadence that was almost musical. “My campaign for president is nearing the finish line. For almost four years now I have served as vice president of this great country, and I have fought the fights worth fighting. That record will serve as the foundation for the worthy programs I’ve outlined.” A thoughtful pause to build anticipation. “In the course of my campaign, I’ve met a great many Americans, men and women, even children, who ask that most noble of questions—How can I help? By attending this fundraiser, each of you has already begun to do so. But I’d like to tell you about one man in particular whom I recently had the pleasure of meeting. It was in the Midwest, and his name was Thomas—not Tom, he was very insistent about that—and he was down on his luck. Thomas had lost his job in a company that manufactured American flags. That’s right … American flags. His job had been outsourced overseas. We met in a soup kitchen, yet Thomas took no shame in that. He stood tall and proud, and he asked what he could do to help my campaign.”

  Another heavy pause.

  “That’s right—what he could do to help me. Thomas said he was homeless, and he jested that I was too—as you may know, the United States Naval Observatory, the traditional home of the vice president, has been undergoing extensive renovations. We had a good laugh about that before Thomas turned serious. He reached into his tattered jacket and pulled out one of his few possessions in the world, something he thought might help get my message across. He said he hoped it would raise money for my campaign, because if I was elected he knew I’d keep my promise to help others who found themselves in his situation.”

  The vice president reached under his lapel and extracted a large piece of folded cardboard. “So, for one night, ladies and gentlemen, I have a new fundraising director, and his name is Thomas.”

  He unfolded the cardboard sheet, and showed the audience a message drawn in bold block letters.

  HOMELESS

  NEED MONEY

  GOD BLESS

  Cameras flashed and the crowd went wild, normally sedate lawyers and bankers and businessmen cheering as if they were at a high school football game. It was a moment. It was the moment. Martin Stuyvesant, Democratic Party nominee for president, clasped his hands over his head and smiled like a candidate with a ten-point lead in the polls.

  Which was exactly what he was.

  He milked the moment for all it was worth, shaking hands with the mayor of Cleveland, two congressman who were sweating reelection, and a man in uniform who was a something-or-other in the Ohio National Guard. Stuyvesant kept smiling all the way off stage, waving and slapping shoulders, pointing his finger occasionally as if recognizing someone special in the sea of strangers. As soon as he was backstage and clear of the cameras, his smile transformed—less broad and fewer teeth on display, but still in place. A more inward pleasure.

  Roger Gordon, his campaign manager, sidled up and the two began walking. “We need to talk,” Gordon said through the side of his mouth.

  Stuyvesant said, “Did you hear that? They loved it!”

  “You need to tell me before you do something like that. It could easily have backfired if—”

  “If I hadn’t set it up so well? Give me a little credit, Rog.”

  “Is there really a guy named Thomas?”

  “Of course. Only he made me promise not to send any attention his way.”

  Gordon took his candidate by the elbow. He leaned in close as they steered through the exit and back to the campaign bus. “Marty, we are ten weeks away from the goddamn White House. A nine-point lead is good, but you can still screw this up.”

  “Ten points—CNN and Gallup both.”

  Gordon’s voice broke to a whisper, “What’s happening down in Colombia could flip that overnight.”

  Stuyvesant stopped short of the bus’s stairs. “Is there something new?”

  Gordon’s gaze drifted to a group of reporters behind a barricade fifty feet away. They were shouting questions across the divide. “Wave and smile, then get on the damned bus. There’s someone inside you need to meet.”

  Stuyvesant did exactly that, and soon the door shut behind them. The interior of the bus was plush, configured as an executive suite with meeting tables and couches arrayed in the forward salon, a small bed and study in the back. Stuyvesant saw three others at the main conference table: his chief of staff, Bill Evers, his top strategist, Maggie Donovan, and a coarse-looking, wiry man he’d never met.

  Everyone rose as Stuyvesant approached, and Evers said, “Martin, I’d like you to meet Vincent Kehoe.”

  It did not escape Stuyvesant that Evers had ignored his title of vice president—it meant that whatever Kehoe was, he wasn’t a wealthy donor. The man had snapped to his feet and stood practically at attention, the way the Marine guards did around the White House when the one-term outgoing commander-in-chief, Truett Townsend, ambled up the corridors. Yes, he thought, Kehoe was unquestionably ex-military—Stuyvesant himself had never served, but he’d seen plenty of the sort. The man looked like he was built from a series of coiled springs. Sinew and muscle, not an ounce of fat anywhere. Stuyvesant guessed him to be on the near side of thirty. He was clean-shaven with a receding hairline, what was left on top he cropped in a way that said he really didn’t give a damn. The two shook hands, and Stuyvesant felt a firm grip, although one he suspected was being kept in check.

  When everyone sat, Evers said, “We were able to arrange funding for the ransom to be paid—”

  Stuyvesant cranked his eyes sharply to his chief of staff, who caught his look.

  “Sorry. Mr. Kehoe is directly involved. He’ll be the one going to Colombia to retrieve the girl. He works for a very discreet private company and has been thoroughly vetted. I won’t bore you with his resume—suffice to say, he’s done this kind of thing before.”

  “Does he know …” Stuyvesant searched for the words, “why we are so concerned about this abduction?”

  Kehoe answered. “No, sir. I know we are dealing with the kidnapping of a young girl, and that I am to make a ransom payment and extract the victim with the greatest possible discretion. Those are my orders and it’s all I need to know.”

  Stuyvesant grinned. “Good answer. What are the arrangements?”

  Evers said, “Mr. Kehoe will be flying south later today, a private jet arranged by his employer.” />
  “Is the Secret Service still involved?”

  “We’ve come to an agreement with the director on that. They prefer to have no further involvement in this affair.”

  Stuyvesant wished he’d been in on that decision. “All right, we’ll let the director back off. But I’ll have his nuts in a vise come January.”

  Dutiful nods around the table, the usual reaction from staff watching a firing squad assembled for a colleague.

  “What is the time frame for this mission?” Stuyvesant asked, liking the military sound of it.

  Maggie Donovan, who in spite of her title as strategist was in fact more of a logistician, answered, “Mr. Kehoe will receive the funds directly after this meeting. If all goes as planned, Kristin Stewart will be back in North Carolina tomorrow evening.”

  “That will make her mother happy. How has she been handling it?”

  “Well enough,” said Evers. “We conveyed your message: we told her everything that can be done is being done.”

  “And it is,” Stuyvesant said.

  Everyone nodded. A few more administrative matters were discussed before they all wished Kehoe good luck and launched him to undertake his final preparations. When he was gone, Evers cornered Stuyvesant as the bus began to roll. “There is one complication. Someone’s been asking questions.”

  “Questions?” Stuyvesant said. “About what?”

  “About Kristin.”

  The vice president took a handhold as the bus rounded a corner. Outside, through a cracked window shade, he saw throngs of well wishers. He ignored them as Evers continued.

  “A CIA officer made inquiries through official channels last night, a search on Kristin’s name and passport information.”

  “The CIA? How the hell did they get wind of this?”

  “We don’t think it’s anything official,” said Evers, “and of course she got nowhere. All information relating to Kristin has been scrubbed from the official servers. We sent a man to speak with this officer last night in D.C. Apparently she’s an acquaintance of the investigator, the man the NTSB sent to Colombia.”