Wendell Black, MD

by Gerald Imber, M. D.

  The terminal might still have looked normal to the casual traveler. Look closely and the number of TSA people was significantly increased, and they were young, bright-looking, and alert. Not the usual “shoes off, no water, wait behind the line” people. Only the uniforms were the same. We headed for the Homeland office and banged heads with two sets of TSA gatekeepers. My ID scanned, and Alison was required to show identification despite my protests that she was with me. I expected to see my first British Secret Service warrant card, if there was such a thing. But Alison produced a New York State driver’s license and a New York State physician’s photo ID instead. Apparently, she was on the list. The gates opened wide.

  “I want to have a good look around the tarmac outside the gate. Want to come?”

  “Sure,” Alison answered, and we headed for the door beyond the immigration hall. For the first time, it was guarded. The bar code on my card opened the lock, and I was allowed to pass through. Alison was required to open with her own ID. The TSA guard was unwavering. I went ahead and Alison headed back to Homeland headquarters, looking for someone to pass her through.

  There was nothing magic out there. Anyone who has traveled through southern Italy, the Sun Belt, the Caribbean, or wherever passengers are required to walk between terminal and boarding stairs knows the drill. The planes are big, you are small, and there are trucks and buses apparently on a mission to sideswipe you at any opportunity. Airports in colder climates insulate the traveler from the action on the tarmac. Usually, airline employees keep absentminded strollers out of harm’s way. Today, I was on my own, and it was a little intimidating at first.

  I walked the perimeter of the terminal, trying doors and poking my head into everything. Maybe the ID hanging around my neck was identifiable, but I doubted it. No one came close enough to get a good look, and no one seemed to care. Walk around like you belong, and you belong.

  On the face of it, Terminal 4 is a slant-front, airy-looking, steel-and-glass structure. Basically, two overgrown stories, with the control tower looming like a mutant mushroom behind it. The central terminal houses the business end of airline travel, processes passengers coming and going, and is the only terminal in the airport with 24/7 customs control and Homeland presence. Stuck to the back of the terminal building are two limbs with a total of seventeen gates, which doesn’t sound all that imposing. But consider that the $1.4 billion monolith sits on 165 acres and handles 10 million passengers annually, and you gain more perspective on how small I felt under the wings of 757s, ducking vehicles and poking around looking for who knows what.

  The two sets of paired runways at Kennedy are laid out in a perpendicular grid. 13R-31L, at 14,572 feet, is the second-longest commercial runway in the country. At almost three miles, it is long enough to be a backup for space shuttle landings. The shortest runway, its mate, at 8,400 feet, was the first in North America to have an EMAS aircraft arresting system engineered to prevent overshooting of runways by the bigger birds. That was installed in the mid-nineties, when 8,400 feet was beginning to look too short to accommodate modern air traffic. The good news is that the airport was built on landfill in Jamaica Bay and had room to expand. The bad news is the sandy area on the far side of runway 4L is a great breeding spot for turtles, and on occasional June days, hundreds of terrapins come ambling across the tarmac to higher ground to lay their eggs, and they close down the runway.

  The miles and miles of runway was what I had expected. The enormous infrastructure necessary to make it all happen wasn’t. It seemed that as much of the terminal structure was devoted to mechanical functions as passengers. Most of the closed doors and the free-standing structures were clearly identified by building numbers and signage. Some remained a mystery.

  A worker in sleeveless coveralls and an orange-and-green vest sat atop an open aircraft-towing rigs, looking at everything and tapping on communication devices. I walked over to his perch.

  “Can I talk to you for a minute?” I shouted up at him.

  He made an “I don’t understand” kind of face and pointed at his headset. He was a big, athletic-looking guy, and he easily bent over to get within conversational distance without dismounting. He lifted one earpiece and pushed it back to sit behind his ear. I took the cue and did the same.

  “What goes on in that building?” I asked, pointing to a mechanical monster that looked like a 1930s Charles Sheeler painting. The big-bore curved pipes whirring like man-size pneumatic tubes. Rust drips stained some of the areas where the massive pipes were joined, but otherwise they were solid and well maintained. The apparatus entered and exited a formidable, windowless metal structure and buzzed with activity.

  “And who might you be?” he responded in a pleasant, West Indian voice. I slipped my ID over my head and handed it up. He studied it long enough for me to know it meant nothing in particular to him but was seriously official. He handed it back.

  “Never saw this kind of ID out here. Are you investigating my men?”

  “No. Not at all. Just routine government inspection. I never noticed that unit before.”

  “Been here twenty years. Long as I have. It’s the strainer. All those pipes clean the water so the air-cooling works in the terminal. Pumps all day, every day. As far as I know, it’s never been down.”

  “Who goes in there?” I asked.

  “Mostly, nobody. Routine maintenance, but it don’t seem to break down. Nobody been in there on my shift in a very long time.”

  “Thank you.” I reached up to retrieve my identification card, and he shook my hand before handing it over.

  “Nice to meet you, sir,” he said, and went back to his crackling handheld device.

  There was no handle on the outside of the metal door, just a keypad and two dead-bolt locks alongside a sign reading AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Just like everything else at the airport.

  As I came around the building, the control tower loomed massive and ugly from the ground. Philos had that covered, and I didn’t want to disturb the controllers or the security people visible at the head of the stairs.

  From the start, I couldn’t get past feeling that baggage handling might be a problem. Traditional security in the baggage area at Kennedy was nonexistent. On the air cargo side, theft was a $10 billion industry worldwide. Air-freight theft was an acknowledged Mafia-owned industry and had come under increasing scrutiny. Passenger terminal thefts were less organized. The terminal didn’t handle valuable bulk cargo, like shipments of sable from Sweden, but electronics, cash, and personal goods were fair game. Baggage handlers and TSA employees have repeatedly been nailed in sting operations, and all kinds of nefarious behind-the-scenes activity takes place. The Port Authority police hold down the published crime rate by categorizing laptops and jewelry and the like missing from luggage as “lost items.” The idiotic explanation is if the items weren’t observed being stolen, then they were lost, and are therefore categorized as such. Sophistry rides again. No wonder people think the cops are as bad as the crooks.

  Entering the baggage area is easy. The flow of bags and boxes from the bellies of the giant aircraft makes for traffic jams and too many employees to constantly scrutinize. Supervisors aren’t exactly management, and the place is an unruly horror show. The handling of baggage resembles the old television ads for Samsonite, where gorillas bounce and stomp on suitcases. As a group, the baggage handlers are not gentle little fellows. The job is hard, the bags are heavy, and your maiden aunt can’t cut it.

  I hopped between the overloaded articulated carts and the belts and stood by for five minutes watching the inbound agents work. No one challenged me. Access from the outside was controlled, and Big Brother was everywhere. For sure, the CCTV monitors were being manned 24/7, and it was all digitally recorded. Baggage handling at Terminal 4 is still done the old way: 6,500 bags an hour, by hand. It’s a big job, and there’s an automated system in the works. Meanwhile, the noises of trucks, conveyor belts, and bouncing bags made the area seem more frantic than it was. No o
ne was moving quickly. Over toward the cart entry, I spotted two Homeland ICE agents entering and looking around. They recognized me as foreign to the environment, split up, and headed my way. I held up my ID, but they kept coming. The first agent, a short, dark-haired woman, was walking purposefully toward me. She had her right hand on the handle of the pistol in her holster. Her eyes fixed on my card before we were in talking range and visibly softened.

  “May I see your ID, sir?” she asked, and had her left hand on the card before I could answer.

  “Special task force,” she said, reading the laminated card. “Welcome, sir. How can we help you?” She had an attractive Southern accent.

  “You are?” Two can play that game, and I was feeling important.

  “ICE Agent Janet Kolson, sir. This is Agent Budzar.” They both offered their hands. I shook Agent Kolson’s hand first and studied her identification card. I did the same with Budzar before speaking.

  “Is this your regular post?” I asked.

  “No, sir. We are on our tour of the perimeter. See if anything unusual is happening and make our presence known.”

  “About how often is that?” I asked.

  “Once or twice an hour. Our instructions are to come by irregularly. Keep ’em guessing.” She smiled a bright smile lit by perfect, white teeth. Agent Kolson was very pretty when she wasn’t threatening. Budzar was tall and dark-skinned, most likely Pakistani, judging from his name.

  “What are you looking for, Agent Budzar?” I asked.

  “Don’t know, sir. Someone passing something, violating sealed baggage. Maybe someone who doesn’t belong here.”

  I thought about what he said and was getting ready to leave when another question occurred to me. “Is this your regular beat, the airport?”

  “No, sir,” they answered in unison. “This is day two. Usually in the city.”

  “You work for Philos?” I asked.

  “No, sir,” Kolson answered. “We work for Mr. Panopolous.” That meant a lot. These were definitely high-end people if they worked directly for Panopolous.

  “Good man. I guess I’m working for him, too. See you later,” I said, and waved as I headed for the exit out to the tarmac.

  49

  The early afternoon had passed quickly enough, and we began to gear up for the heavy traffic period when the bulk of the flights from LHR were expected. I found Alison in the surveillance area. She was sitting in front of the monitor bank with a notepad on her lap.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi,” I answered. She stayed riveted by the monitors as we spoke. “I guess you didn’t pass the test.”

  “Correct. I could get out there if I tossed bags or waved magic wands at planes. But being a simple British agent, I couldn’t cut it.”

  “Life is grand. Let’s have lunch.”

  Alison stuffed the pad into her shoulder bag, and we headed out into the terminal.

  “What were you looking for? You were glued to the screens.”

  “I don’t know. You look, and you look. No plan, and when something is wrong, unnatural, you see it.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Yes. Just like that. It jumps out at you, but only if you are observing normal, normal, normal . . . then bingo, abnormal. I can’t explain it any other way. Do you see?”

  “I do,” I answered. “I mean I understand what you are saying, not that I see anything. I haven’t had the experience. I haven’t tried.”

  “Well, it is like surgery or any sort of medicine. You just know when something is wrong.”

  “But what were you fixed on? You couldn’t be watching the entire immigration process, or maybe you could. But why would you choose that rather than anything else around Terminal 4?”

  “That is where it is going to happen, don’t you think?”

  “I do,” I answered. But it seemed too obvious. The anthrax would enter on—or, in this case, in—the person of the mule, and that person has to be slipped through customs. Too obvious. “I keep thinking that there must be a step that we are missing.”

  “Like what?” Alison asked.

  “Like how they get the mule onto the plane. We have the boarding process sewn shut. We are X-raying people until they glow in the dark. We know everything. You want to see breasts, we got ’em. You want to see guys with huge equipment, we got ’em. I mean, we do actually know what is boarding every airplane headed to JFK from Heathrow.”

  Alison was silent. I couldn’t tell if I had set her thinking, but I was definitely seeing a little light. Not too bright, but a light. I was excited.

  “Alison,” I said. “We have been looking at this the wrong way. Forget boarding procedures and customs. They found a way of bypassing all that. We need to look outside the normal procedure.”

  “Okay, but what do you have in mind?”

  “I mean outside the boarding process. People with access. It has to be. It works. They have to have people at the airports. People behind the scenes. People we don’t see. It makes sense.”

  “It could be,” Alison said again.

  “Think of it like a differential diagnosis. You try to think of one thing that could explain the whole package of symptoms. First you eliminate the most obvious diagnostic possibilities. You know, it can’t be appendicitis if the patient has had her appendix removed. Something else is causing the pain in the right lower quadrant of the abdomen.

  “People get on and off planes through boarding and customs procedures. But if you search every passenger and you don’t find a mule, and yet you know the mule was on the plane, then they are outflanking us. It happens all the time. The French were certain the Germans couldn’t get through the Maginot Line in 1940, because that was the normal route between the two countries and it was very well fortified. So they bet Paris on it. The Germans just went around them. Outflanked them. That’s what they are doing here, outflanking us.”

  “Take me through it from Heathrow,” Alison said, holding my shoulder. We were standing off to the side of the food arcade in the terminal, not a dozen steps from a busy kiosk.

  “I will. Let’s grab something and take it back where we can talk privately. Here,” I said, picking two bananas from a bin, two pint containers of fresh orange juice from a cooler, and two bland-looking tuna fish sandwiches from the refrigerated display, and handing the lot to her while I reached for my wallet. “We should pick up a couple of sandwiches and a Coke for Deuce,” I said and added two ham-and-cheese to the pile.

  “Healthier than yesterday,” Alison said.

  “But not as tasty. Let’s go.”

  We grabbed an unoccupied desk in the corner of the Homeland base. Deuce was still not around, so I put his food in the little fridge in the back room. Someone would eat it if Deuce didn’t show.

  “Okay, take me through it.” Alison had begun peeling a banana before I spoke, and was playing with it in a distracted manner. One of the guys across the room was staring at her, smiling. His companion followed his eyes and was smiling, too. When she put the end of the banana in her mouth, we all laughed. Alison looked around and blushed. She said nothing and took a fierce bite out of the banana. Everyone looked away.

  “They evaded detection each trip by moving the mule through the back of the terminal onto the plane. Maybe someone else went through security and passport control. Then, either en route to the aircraft or on board, they switched. Maybe they inserted the mule on the Jetway; maybe the mule was one of those people bringing wheelchairs to the boarding door or the gate. Maybe the mule was switched into the wheelchair between the gate and the aircraft. Or maybe the mule was part of the cleaning crew and stayed in the lavatory.”

  “Those are a lot of maybes.”

  “Let me finish. However they did it, they had a person or people working at Heathrow. That’s the key. That’s what we have to think about. It’s easy enough to imagine how they enlisted help. Coercion, money, relatives in the Old Country, true believers, lots of possibilities. The mule gets on the plane. They land
at JFK and the reverse process takes place between deplaning and customs.”

  “How?”

  “They switch on board or after everyone else has de-planed.”

  “Deplaned. My God. You have been spending too much time here.”

  “That’s the truth. Someone stays on the plane after the other passengers have gone. The ground crew comes aboard. They switch identities. The worker goes through customs with the passenger’s documents, and the mule is whisked away through the employees exit. Not much security on the way out of work for cleaners, baggage handlers, and mechanics.” I stopped and thought for a moment. “I haven’t worked out the details. A lot of this may be just plain wrong, but the general idea is correct. Some variant of this is how they do it.”

  “Is it possible that the mule never goes through customs at all? Do they check deplaning passengers off a list?”

  “Deplaning passengers?” I said, smiling.

  “Sorry,” she continued. “But do they check them off a list? Do they know if three hundred people boarded in London and two hundred and ninety-nine entered the U.S.? I never saw any evidence of a checklist. Immigration and customs are a free-for-all with passengers from various flights mixed together. The flight crew abandons ship on a run, and no one is counting heads. It could work. You could be right.”

  “I am right. I’ll call Panopolous.”

  “Protocol is to speak to Philos—he can call Panopolous,” Alison said.

  My head was spinning with ideas, and I didn’t register what she said. The activity level in the room had increased with the arrival of passengers in the hall. Chairs scraped and people stood at the monitors. Then Philos entered with a man in his mid-fifties, wearing a gray suit, neat white shirt, and a red tie held by a clasp with the presidential seal. He stood nearly a head shorter than Philos. I had never seen him before, but there was every indication that he was government and important. They were deep in conversation, or at least Philos was speaking. The other man nodded his head or listened quietly. Alison’s suggestion popped into my head. Philos seemed to be briefing the visitor on the situation. He was treating him with obvious deference, so I waited for a break in the conversation. Several times, at pauses, I motioned and tried to get Philos’s attention, but even when he looked my way, he was looking through me and making his case. I was about to call out to him when he guided his guest out of the room.