The Matter of the Deserted Airliner

by Levi, Steve;

  Chapter 13

  “What the …?” was all Sam had time to say before he was capsized by the wave of oncoming humanity. In one instant he was peering through the camera lens at what could only be called an abandoned mezzanine of the Federal Building. In the next instant he was being pummeled by frantic pedestrians, pedestrians being the operative word, as they were running over him. There was no building of a panicked mob; it was the abrupt appearance of the same. Had he and Gerry not been near a recess for a door entrance, they might have been trampled to death. The unexpected fire alarm combined with the smell of smoke was enough to turn reasonable men and women into a mob. One second the lobby of the Federal Building was empty and the next it was packed with hysterical people trying to get out. Nothing was going to stand in their way of safety, least of all two reporters. As the human wave went, so did the reporters. By the time the stampede thinned, Noonan and Ayanna were long gone and the two reporters had no choice but to return to the station.

  At least they had a tape to look at.

  “What do you think we have?” Sam asked.

  “That,” Gerry replied thoughtfully, “remains to be seen. I don’t expect much, though.”

  Back at the television station, Gerry pulled out the tape they had been shooting all day and went over it foot by foot. The only sequence, which was of any interest, was the last split second in the Federal Building when Ayanna had reached down with her right hand to touch the shelf under the telephone, her left hand on the receiver. Because Sam and Gerry had been at the back entrance, to Ayanna’s left as she was facing the phone bank, the camera’s vision had been partially obscured. Ayanna appeared to feel under the phone shelf and then reach behind her back.

  If she had done anything else, it was not visible because Ayanna and Noonan walked away from the phone almost immediately. A quick trip back to the phone bank in the Federal Building revealed nothing. All of the phones were in working order and all of the shelves had phone books beneath them.

  “What did we just see?” asked Sam and he looked around as though expecting the answer to be revealed by some clue on the walls.

  “I don’t know. Let’s find the Facility Manager. Something set off the alarm.”

  When the Facility Manager saw Gerry, he gave a perfect impression of Dracula looking at a wooden stake.

  “What the,” the Facility Manager said when he saw Gerry and then broke into the center of the question with a l-o-n-g expletive and finished with “. . .are you doing here?!” The Facility Manager was in his late 60’s, dressed like a janitor, had a pasty white head with about six strands of hair over his pockmarked pate and a very vivid memory of Gerry when she did her expose’ on corruption in the janitorial trade contract at the Anchorage Pavilion and Symphony Center. Right smack dab in the center of the scandal was the Facility Manager, then a Contract Supervisor for the State of Alaska who was living well beyond his means. As the investigation heated up, he had suddenly resigned from state service effectively ending the legal investigation.

  But not the news stories.

  Inside information on the contract leaked for the next six months after which two commissioners and two deputy directors also resigned. Then the story died under its own weight.

  “Walter!” said Gerry with a broad smile. “What a pleasant surprise,” Gerry indicated Sam should shoulder his camera. “It’s always nice to see a friendly face in a federal building.” She emphasized the word federal to indicate she knew she was on public property.

  “Turn that *&^%$ thing off,” snapped the facility manager as he glared at the camera. “Get the heck out of here! This is a restricted area!”

  “Walter, be nice now.” Gerry was soothing and indicated Sam could continue to film. “This is your place of work, in a public building. Paid for with taxpayer money and I,” Gerry tapped her chest with her right index finger, “am a taxpayer. Now you want to be cooperative with the press, don’t you?”

  Walter didn’t look at it that way. “Get the blazes out of here!”

  “Walter,” she said in soothing voice. “Be nice. You never know what might show up on the evening news.”

  “You $%#@&^s!” Walter’s face was a beet red and the veins in his temple were throbbing.

  “Walter, we don’t want to create any problems for you. We’re just down here for some information. You tell us what we want to know and we’ll be gone.”

  “Fly away!”

  Gerry ignored his fury. She just went right ahead as if Walter was the most cooperative bureaucrat in the history of the federal building. “Walter, the alarms in the Federal Building went off this morning. Who set them off?”

  “Why do you care?”

  “Because if you don’t tell me I’m going to run footage of you swearing at us and say you are stalling a police investigation into the kidnapping of 95 people. Then I am going to ask the FBI why you are obstructing a kidnapping case – and then I will ask why a contract administrator who resigned as part of a public funding scandal. . .”

  The magic of words did it.

  “What do you want from me?” The voice had the air of defeat.

  “The fire alarms. Who set them off?”

  “No one. It was automatic. Whenever the detectors get a whiff of smoke, the alarms go off automatically.”

  “Where did the smoke come from?”

  “We don’t know. There was a strong smell of smoke but we could not locate the source.”

  “Where was the smell?”

  “Everywhere. All floors.”

  “So the smell of smoke on all floors set off the alarms on all floors. The smell of smoke was on all floors at the same time?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Isn’t that odd?”

  “Sure is. I can’t figure it out.”

  “Could the smoke have been introduced into the air vents in the basement by someone who wanted to set off the alarm?”

  “You’re a smart lady. Yeah. That’s what we think happened but I didn’t say that!”

  “Of course you didn’t, Walter. You couldn’t have said it because we never talked, did we.”

  “You got that one right!.”

  “Good. Now, let’s see the source for the air vents.”

  “I can’t help you there. The FBI has closed off the room and they are going through it with a fine tooth comb.”

  “The smoke in that room would have gone to all floors at the same time?”

  “Yup.”

  “Thanks, Walter. You’ve been a great help.”

  A filthy word formed on his lips but he stopped himself and had to live with a vitriolic “Don’t come back.”

  “He was not a very pleasant fellow,” Sam said as they left the basement of the Federal Building.

  “No, I suppose not.” Gerry grinned. “He was very helpful. Now we know what happened. The first payoff was made in the Federal Building and the kidnappers were clever enough to set off the alarms at exactly the right moment to cover the pick-up. Very, very clever. It would take split-second timing. At least two of them, one to pick up the payoff and the other to set off the alarm.”

  “I’m not an expert at this,” Sam said as he snapped the camera off. “I’d count three. Someone had to be in the basement to get the smoke smell into the air vents. How do you think they got the smell to move so fast?”

  Gerry though about it. “Not sure. A flare might do it. There’s a lot of air pressure down there. Has to be to get air to blast all the way to the Fifth Floor. I’ll bet the instant our two pigeons walked across the lobby the flare was lighted. Then it was stuffed into the air vent system. Might even be a handful of flares, the kind you can buy at a fireworks stand. Lighted them and tossed them into the compressor. Then hit the fire alarm on the way out of the basement. They all had to be talking by cell phones to have the timing so precise.”

  “Talk about precision,” said Sam, getting to like this game of cat-andmouse with an increasing number of players. “What we’ve got now is an A-1 ne
ws story. We’ve got 95 hostages, an out-of-state cop, ransom payoffs and split-second timing for the crooks. All we need is some drugs and sex and we’ve got a made-for-movie contract.”

  “And we own the tape,” said Gerry as she tapped the camera. “Just remember who you work for, Sam: me. Got it?”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  Chapter 14

  The expression “not a lot of happy campers,” was the perfect description of the 80-odd relatives of the hostages when they gathered in the ballroom of the Anchorage Intercontinental Hotel. The hotel had not been expecting anyone to use the ballroom so it had taken more than an hour before a buffet could be set up. The food was adequate – adequate in the sense no one complained – but not a lot of people were eating. They were just milling around waiting for something to happen. The airport security people who came in occasionally kept telling them the same thing: there was nothing to report. In the meantime, a lot of the relatives were on the phones with friends, newspapers, radio stations and one was working on a reality show deal.

  The atmosphere was not pleasant because of the circumstances. It wasn’t as though this was a large family of relatives who only came together once an eon because of personal animosities. Rather it was a crowd of increasingly angry individuals who took out their frustrations on hotel personnel, meal servers, janitors and desk clerks. No one was in their good graces.

  The situation threatened to get out of hand so a no-host bar was wheeled into the room. When it ran dry management decided some members of the crowd were too wet. Then some of the crowd got nasty – all four of them. These individuals were quietly escorted into a booth in the back of the nightclub – not yet opened – and each was provided with a full bottle of his/her choice of liquid sustenance and a six pack of mix apiece. The refreshments quelled the level of complaints considerably.

  What made the waiting intolerable was the press of reporters who kept sticking microphones and cameras into peoples’ faces for real time quotes on the ongoing crisis. Twelve hours into the standoff the relatives had run out of polite. Then they were outraged. After the second camera crew was escorted out of the gathering by a collection of family members, the press was banned from the ballroom. If anyone wanted to talk to the press they had to do it in the lobby.

  Chapter 15

  “You what?” Ayanna’s shrill voice was loud enough to catch everyone in the Command Center by surprise. There was a momentary lull in the conversation as Ayanna confronted the FBI Agent in Charge, the AIC.

  “This is an FBI operation,” the AIC reminded her like a teacher chastising a child. “You and Detective Noonan are only here at the insistence of the kidnappers.”

  “Look,” snapped Ayanna. “What we’ve got here is what we c-i-v-i-l-i-a-n-s” she spelled it out–“call a very delicate situation. We’ve got almost 100 lives at risk and we do not need a single screw-up to make anything worse than what we’ve got right now.”

  “Ayanna,” the AIC was almost casual in his tone—and he used her first name, the only one who dared do that. It was a clear matter of talking down to her. “There’s no problem here. This is all procedure. There’s no risk.”

  Ayanna was in a red-hot burn.

  Noonan, who had been sitting alongside the two at the Formica table stood up slowly and leaned into the conversation.

  “What I think Ayanna is saying,” he said softly to the AIC. “Is if there is anything happening which has anything to do with the payoffs, she’d like to know about it. Ahead of time. Not after we get a call from the kidnappers. Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Noonan continued as the AIC started to interject a comment. “I know it’s your procedure but Ayanna doesn’t and she doesn’t like surprises. No one does. Next time you do something like put a homing device in with gems, tell her.”

  The AIC looked affronted. “It’s procedure. We don’t talk about procedure. We just do it.”

  “Well,” said Noonan casually, “as far as this case is concerned, you’re dealing with a civilian. Ayanna is not traditional law enforcement and doesn’t have any kind of ‘inside information’,” Noonan made quote marks in the air with his fingers. “It’s what she doesn’t know that can cause real problems for all of us. Let’s cut this discussion short and just agree you will tell Ayanna everything you are doing which falls within ‘procedure.’” Again he made quote marks in the air with his fingers.

  “All right,” sighed the AIC, but he did not look happy about it.

  “Look,” said Ayanna, not willing to let the FBI have the last word. “You should have told me there was a homing device among the gems. I should have been told!”

  Noonan spoke faster than the AIC. “It really doesn’t make any difference at this point. The bad boys and girls knew it before we dropped off the bag. They expected it. That’s why they led the FBI on a wild and merry chase around town. So let’s drop it.”

  “That must have made you very unhappy,” Ayanna said to the AIC, a bit of a gloat on her face.

  “Yeah, we weren’t happy. It was a long shot. We followed the bug for an hour. Where it went, we went. After chasing ghosts around town for an hour we ended up at the Railroad Terminal at the same phone where you got your first call. We found the bug with a note about your next drop.”

  “Well, let’s not have any more trouble!” Ayanna was not going to let the matter drop.

  Chapter 16

  It wasn’t going to take long for the bathrooms to start to stink. You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to know there were too few toilets to handle 95 people. The restrooms had been designed to accommodate mechanical crews, mostly men. There were, what, six men per shift. Maybe. Men didn’t spend a lot of time in restrooms. It was in, do your business and be gone.

  The women’s toilets–all two of them–had been installed because of the sex equality legislation, not any functional reason. It had been easier to install the two toilets, mirrors and bidets than fight a legal battle costing more on paper than the toilets, mirrors and bidets. No one had ever used the toilets, mirrors and bidets. They were just installed and left. Functional, functioning but never used.

  The extortionists had planned well. The warehouse in question was a substantial distance from its nearest neighbor. At least three miles. It was hardly in the proverbial middle of nowhere but it was remote. Originally it had been a mechanical shed for a farming conglomerate. It had served its purpose well until Boeing paid more per acre than farm labor ever would. Thereafter it sat empty while, at the same time, its raw value per square foot went up appreciably. The structure was too expensive to tear down so it was mothballed. Its toilets flushed and it was still on the power grid so it was as good a place as any to keep 95 people away from the prying eyes of the FBI, FAA and even the local constabulary.

  You could see the warehouse for miles. If you happened to be within a few miles of the warehouse. Which no one was. The hostages had commented on the warehouse on their way in. They didn’t yet know they were hostages as they were riding into the compound. They weren’t hostages yet. No even captives. There was no reason to be alarmed. No one was carefully watching where they were going. All they had been told was there had been an emergency and they were being taken to a place of safety. It was a matter of national security and it just happened they were in the eye of a maelstrom and it was best if they would not be at the airport. Suitable substitute transportation would be provided along with four–count them, four, one-two-three-four–round trip tickets to anywhere Unicorn flew. Or its frequent flier partners. Which included Hawaii and Mexico and Europe.

  So no one was particularly concerned if they got to Anchorage a day later. After all, FOUR, count them, round trip tickets were worth the inconvenience. No one was complaining. And no one objected when their cell phones and laptops were collected. National security, you know, all hush hush.

  So no complained. No one said a word. They went along with the two men in the TSA uniforms.

  When they arrived at the warehouse they had been screened thr
ough the front door. It was just like the airport. Looked like an airport screening entrance. No one thought otherwise. It was routine – not there was anything routine about flying these days. You just put up with the inconvenience. So they had freely given up their cell phones and laptops. It was only after they had entered through a one-way door did it become apparent to them something was amiss.

  The interior of the massive warehouse had been divided into quadrants. Two of the quadrants had cots, one labeled MEN and the other WOMEN. The third quadrant was an eating area. The last, where Jennifer was now sitting, was the meeting area. It was called the meeting area because that’s what the sign overhead read: MEETING AREA.

  This was a long way from her desk at the Northern Lights Real Estate Exchange in Anchorage. Though it was only a cubicle there was a lot more privacy than here. The only consolation was she was here with her son, Jason. Jason, all ten years of him, was having a great time. He wasn’t in Anchorage and he wasn’t in Seattle and he wasn’t listening to his father and mother fight over things he knew nothing about: custody, child support, and court appointed administrators. Which was fine with Jennifer too. She needed to get on with her life. There wasn’t anyone in her life, except Jason, at this time but who knew?

  Jennifer shook out her hair. Growing it long had been a good idea months ago. Now, under these situations, it was not such a good idea. Cleaning up, or freshening up, as the expression went, was not going to happen until this was all over. Whenever that was. So now Jennifer was stuck with the clothes she had on, far too formal for flying but what she had to wear for the court hearing. Then it was right to the airport, high heeled shoes and all. Now she was here, dressed for success in an abandoned warehouse sharing toilets with 93 other people not one of whom she had ever seen before.