Wendell Black, MD

by Gerald Imber, M. D.

  “Shit. I shouldn’t have let him go.”

  “He would not have been receptive. He was obviously on the carpet.”

  “You think?” I asked. “That guy seemed completely out of the loop. Hold on a minute while I ask our friends over there”—pointing at a couple of the agents—“if they know anything about the visitor.”

  “What difference does it make who he is. You have to talk to Philos.”

  I shrugged and stepped over to the agents, exchanged a few words, thanked them, and returned to Alison.

  “Congressman. They think the guy has some responsibility for Homeland appropriations. Hours of ass-kissing will follow the briefing. I do not think Philos will want to hear my theory about missing the boat. It’s time to call Panopolous.”

  Getting through to Panopolous was easier than I expected. The deputy secretary answered the secure cell phone quickly and seemed less harried than usual. I dove right in. His questions were direct, and he digested my hypothesis as we spoke. His conclusion was that while it was a bit unlikely, it was worth looking into. Meanwhile, he was not about to plunge headlong into the belly of the airport. “I’ll deploy a few more uniformed Homeland agents behind the scenes to make our presence known. Add some eyes and ears on the ground. Sometimes real-time CCTV surveillance isn’t good enough.”

  “What should I do?” I asked, with no real agenda. I suspected I was going to follow my intuition no matter what Panopolous suggested, but I wanted to hear how he would deal with my involvement.

  “Don’t underestimate yourself, Dr. Black. Your instincts about this have been excellent. Keep an eye out and work your side of the street. I’ll tell Philos you need a body or two, and see what you see. Come to think of it, skip Philos. He has his hands full with Ryan. We need friends in Congress. That SOB is one pain in the ass, but he’s our pain in the ass.” Panopolous stopped speaking, probably wishing he hadn’t confided the last thought. Then he added, “In the end we want the same thing: a safe America and a strong intelligence service.” That was a better sound bite. “I’ll get one of the ICE boys to lend a hand. Meanwhile, get your boys on board. That big cop friend of yours, is he around?”

  “If you mean Lieutenant Secondi, he’s somewhere out here.”

  “Yeah. I’ll tell them he and the girl have free access. They can pick up task force IDs from Philos’s office.”

  “Thank you, sir.” I didn’t bother telling him that Deuce would consider the ID an insult in his city. And he did consider New York his city. And the fact that the JFK was the territory of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey meant nothing to him. So far, he had been right. No one dared deny him access, and with his street cop ethic, Deuce would be the last guy to suck up to the feds. And how about calling Alison “the girl.” She wouldn’t be happy with that.

  I reported what little there was to report to Alison, neglecting to mention the reference to her as “the girl.” She was delighted to be given full access, or at least the same level of access I had. We ate the sandwiches, drank the juice, and had some of the lousy coffee from the machine. We still had not seen Deuce. I called his cell and left a message. It was four ten p.m. Virgin flight VS045 had landed twenty minutes ahead of schedule and was being held on the tarmac while the gate was being made ready. Instead of joining the screen jockeys, we headed out to the immigration hall and baggage claim.

  “Follow me.” I swiped my card at the door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY, and we entered the baggage-handling area. “Time to test the theory.” I handed Alison a set of the sound-suppressing earphones I had pulled from the bin in the office. She held each individually to an ear and engaged the battery power. I did the same. The move had become automatic to many with the popularity of high-tech, sound-canceling audio headsets. But these were no $300 Bose beauties. Just functional pads, like the kind we both grew up using on the pistol range. They canceled the frequency of loud noises, like gunshots and jet engines, by producing waves of the same frequency at 180-degree opposite polarity, allowing sounds in the range of the human voice to remain unmasked. The fancy ones connect you to your music and keep out 70 percent of everything else. Most of the regular tarmac employees wore ear canal–fitted protection. Too many people were deaf at fifty to risk working without protection. I was once naive enough to go bare at a Stones concert at the Garden. No ear protection. I looked cool, and I heard nothing but high-pitched whistling for the next three days. I hear it now.

  Outside, we headed into the disturbed air kicked up by a Boeing 777 making an unlikely right-angle turn into its berth. The giant bird wasn’t close enough to worry about, but size and decibels overcame rationality. We would be hard to see from the cockpit, but from the ground we were far too easy to spot; two civilians wandering around the tarmac without visibility vests. I noticed that even the ICE people wore orange. It was dumb to stand out like that, but dumber to be dangerously invisible. I approached one of the ICE special agents standing around the baggage bay. I don’t think I recognized him, and we certainly did not have the nodding acquaintance established with the people coming and going from the Homeland office. He correctly made a show of studying my card. Satisfied, he shook my hand and led us to a closet full of orange-and-chartreuse vests. I pulled one labeled MAINTENANCE. Alison got INBOUND BAGGAGE. She was swimming in the large vest, but nobody seemed to care.

  No human movement was visible until the Jetway made its way to the door on the port side of the aircraft. Then there was lots of scurrying, both in and around the Jetway and on the ground. All of it seemed legitimate, but I had nothing to compare it to. No one climbed down from the Jetway, but I could see attendants trundling wheelchairs through the Jetway. A mobile conveyor belt was secured at the open door to the cargo hold in the fuselage, and a utility truck pulled a linked chain of empty baggage containers to the base of the belt. Collapsed fiber hoses two feet across were locked into female receptacles under the fuselage, preparing to flush air into the cabins. Maintenance people were everywhere. Cleaning crews arrived in separate vehicles and waited at the base of the Jetway along with catering trucks ready to remove the prefabricated meal units. There was no sign of anyone exiting the opened ports, and as yet, no one had boarded the aircraft.

  The Homeland agent we were speaking to was assigned to the baggage area, and he did not follow as Alison and I wandered out toward the aircraft.

  “Let me know if I can help,” he said, giving us a friendly salute and turning his attention to the still-quiet belt and the men lounging around it.

  The aircraft engines had shut down. Hand-signaling and directing had ceased, and flying crew and ground support were in the let-down period after mission accomplished. When the last passenger deplaned, the crew would be double-timing along the telescopic corridors and out through customs with their carry-on luggage. Crew waiting for bags along with the civilians had a different agenda and always earned a look-through by the inspectors.

  The business of servicing the aircraft after 276 passengers had left was now in the hands of the JFK-based crews. They approached, boarded, backed trucks, opened hatches, attached hoses, extended accordion lifts, and began work. Two members of the incoming baggage crew climbed the belt and disappeared into the belly of the aircraft.

  “Shit,” I said, more to myself than to Alison. “Did you get a good look at their faces?”

  “No. What are you thinking?”

  “One of them might be switching identities with a mule in the cargo hold.”

  “Come on. She would freeze to death down there. And anyway, your mule was a passenger. Why would they change a system that works?” It was a legitimate question.

  “They probably wouldn’t, but we have to focus on how the mules—and I think they have all been males—get through to customs without scrutiny, and then pass,” I answered.

  “But I thought we determined that there is no scrutiny of landed passengers. And drug-sniffing dogs weren’t likely to pick up a scent through sealed silicone, fat, and skin.”


  “Maybe. Just humor me.”

  I walked closer to the apparatus, which had not yet begun to operate. In less than fifteen seconds, the two workers, both burly black men, were back at the open hatch. One shouted down to the operator, “Ready in here. No animals. Roll.” The belt began to rumble.

  The cargo-holding areas of modern aircraft are fully pressurized and barely heated, to uncomfortably cold but not dangerous temperatures. This is primarily to prevent contents from freezing and water expanding and contracting. Pet crates are usually transported on a forward pallet nearest the warming apparatus. Unloading animals first was routine, and handlers, being human, bent down and peeked through the fence fronts of the crates, checking their cargo. They made welcoming, friendly sounds for the bewildered, stoned animals, and generally handled them kindly. No pets had been stowed on VS045. In their absence, the process of tossing bags began. The first, nondescript, black bag hit the conveyor belt for the short, forty-five-degree transit to the team at the waiting convoy. I put the fingers of my right hand on Alison’s back and directed her to the terminal. Nothing seemed out of order, but, of course, we had no standard for comparison. It was foreign territory, but not a very steep learning curve.

  The trick was to find weaknesses in the security of the system before we paid the price. We watched the terminal end of the baggage-unloading process for a few minutes more. It seemed endless, and we weren’t lifting a thousand bulging bags. Cleaning crews entering the cabin were checked in by a Homeland agent, which was not routine and definitely did not go unnoticed by the workers. No one working in the guts of Terminal 4 was unaware of unusual scrutiny. But it did not alter their routines. And it was not an unusual occurrence. This was the drill every time an unclaimed bag was reported in the terminal or alert status was raised on “credible intelligence.” It happened every time a new, increasingly blatant series of thefts was reported, and it happened with every Homeland training run-through. Nobody seemed to pay it any mind. I couldn’t help feeling how routine everything was.

  “What’s wrong with this picture?” I asked Alison. Well, maybe I was asking myself more than Alison. It just did not make sense. “Everything is so routine. Nothing edgy or out of place.”

  “Well, if you are correct, someone is either oblivious or good at hiding their anxiety, or maybe they aren’t here at all,” Alison said.

  “Which would make me wrong. And I am not wrong. The delivery will happen in front of our eyes, or at least where our eyes should have been. Let’s go inside and watch the screens.”

  The CCTV room was crowded with agents. Too many agents from too many overlapping jurisdictions. It took on the look of a party with lots of healthy young people jostling for position at a bar, talking trash about people on the immigration queue instead of a football field. Underneath it all, the tension on our side was obvious from the smell of excitement all around us.

  “Ripe in here,” I whispered to Alison. “Or is it me?”

  “Not you. Never. But these guys are ready for it to happen.”

  The corridor had emptied of all but staff. The 276 passengers, or something like that number, seemed to have formed lines behind the U.S. citizen and alien entry lines. Twice the computer alarm sounded in the room, and Homeland agents were dispatched onto the floor to interview incoming passengers. Both times for questioning of alien travelers. Both were young males. Both seemed bewildered by the process, and both were released and allowed to enter baggage claim without interrogation. Each time the CCTV room grew quiet, as if a silent alarm had spread the word that something might be going down.

  The baggage area slowed to a halt as all incoming was loaded on two successive caravans, each carriage with protective side curtains held away and piled full by an irregular mass of predominantly black bags, with the occasional corrugated box tied with twine, backpack, or plaid piece breaking the monotony.

  An accordion lift backed in to replace the baggage conveyor belt and was raised to the cargo hold. I had no idea what would happen next and just pointed Alison’s attention to the screen and waited. We didn’t have long to wait. In seconds, three men, accustomed to the task, wrestled a highly polished casket of dark wood by its brass handles onto the platform of the lift. I was interested and watched as a black SUV with ambulance doors pulled onto the tarmac. The operator lowered the lift to the height of the ambulance doors of the SUV. The driver exited and watched while the three baggage men and the lift operator grasped the brass handles and respectfully worked the casket into the truck. Damn!

  “That’s it! That’s it. Stop them,” I shouted. “Stop the hearse.”

  50

  And then all hell broke loose. Philos materialized from nowhere, trailed by two other men in suits. The muscle boys in the ICE shirts parted like the Red Sea for Moses.

  “What have you got, doctor?” Philos asked, remarkably calmly after the alarm my excitement had sounded in the room.

  “Stop that hearse . . . the SUV. That’s the perfect place for the anthrax. It’s sealed and safe, and even the baggage guys are handling it with respect. Don’t let it get out of here.”

  Philos looked at me with obvious skepticism at first, then acceded with a little vertical nod of his head. He took a phone from the left inside pocket of his suit coat, and the musical notes of speed dialing filled the now-quiet room. “This is Command One. Isolate the tarmac until the all-clear from me.” Then another series of electronic sounds and he was giving quiet orders again. “Send a car out to the funeral SUV at gate 12. Hold the car and all occupants.”

  “The baggage handlers. Stop them, too,” I interrupted, with my hand on his arm. Philos did his version of a nod again, and said, “And hold the baggage handlers who lowered the coffin. They are . . .” He looked over at the CCTV and added, “They are still at the hold. Detain the lift operator, too. Isolate them. Confiscate their cell phones. Nobody leaves, and no communication with the outside. Understood?” He listened to a response for a few seconds and said, “Isolate them from one another.” Another pause. “Don’t tell them anything. Just get enough men out there now. Right now.”

  Philos looked at me. “Interesting, Dr. Black. We shall see.” Then he spoke directly to the two men accompanying him. “What do we know about the body being transported?”

  “Nothing, sir,” said one.

  “Nothing, sir,” said the other suit. Everyone in the room could see Philos clench his jaw. His fists were tight at his sides, and I thought he was going to explode.

  “Get on the phone with the carrier. Find out what the hell is going on here. I want to see the papers. Gilliam. Gilliam.” Now he was beginning to raise his voice. “Where the fuck is Gilliam?”

  “Here, sir.” It was a voice from the archway between the rooms of the suite.

  “Get out there and find out what the fuck is in that fucking coffin. And then explain to me why the fuck we didn’t expect it.” Philos was a cop after all.

  Emergency vehicles materialized across the tarmac from every fifteen degrees of the compass. The strobe lights on the rooftop bars were annoying even on TV. I could barely hear their sirens, but doubtless they were screaming for attention as they were meant to. My inclination was to run out there myself, but everything was frozen until Philos calmed down and gave orders. Alison had disappeared, or at least I lost track of her. In truth, I wasn’t looking for her. I was trying to figure out the best way to contain the danger.

  In the next minute or two, Philos drifted away from us and made more calls, with his eyes fixed on the CCTV screens. He finished talking and held his phone at his side instead of replacing it in his pocket.

  “Let’s go,” Philos said. I expected a stampede of agents, but no one moved. He was speaking to me, but I was frozen in front of the screen. “Now, doctor.”

  By the time I pushed through the agents, he had made half a dozen long strides and was headed out the back door to the tarmac. I ran the first twenty-five yards and was beside him walking quickly out to the aircraf
t. A fully lit Port Authority police car pulled directly across our path and stopped. Philos switched his phone to his left hand and held up an open badge case in his right. He started around the vehicle. Before the Port Authority officers could open the doors and disengage themselves, half a dozen Homeland people were all over them. Then Philos and I ran, more than jogged, out to the scene. The Homeland agents cleared a path for Philos, and I followed in his wake to the center of activity, which was the black SUV carrying the coffin.

  “Cuff them all. Take the keys and put the driver back in the car. The others go to interrogation.”

  There was a flurry of activity. Philos and an agent he singled out from the group approached the SUV. Philos opened the back door and seated himself behind the driver. He signaled the agent to sit alongside the driver. “Close the doors; I can’t hear myself think,” he said. I saw the driver through the window. He was a pale, Anglo-looking man in his forties, in a black suit, white shirt, and dark tie. As far from Middle-Eastern-looking as imaginable, which probably meant nothing. I glanced around at the other men being detained. All three looked vaguely familiar. Of course they did—I had been watching them work before it hit the fan. Their faces were already in my memory bank. They were the two black guys from the incoming baggage crew, and a grungy-looking Caucasian with a black Van Dyke beard and soul patch. All three were acting out varying degrees of fear and anger. None of their questions were being answered, which added frustration to the mix. Baggage workers and ground crew stopped working and followed the action in small groups. I hadn’t heard an order being given, but two of the muscle agents in ICE shirts began to circulate among the workers and collect cell phones. Other agents were stationed in pairs at every exit from the tarmac. The concept of a quiet operation was history.