Accidental Heroes

by Danielle Steel

  Maybe they would think she was ridiculous. But at least then she would have done what she could. And maybe it was nothing after all. But she also knew that if the airport security team was worried about it too, all hell was about to break loose. And she had started it. The postcard was in her pocket, and she was shaking while she waited for them to show up. She told no one she had called them, not even Della.

  Bernice hoped she was just being cautious. But her instincts had been right before, about people carrying drugs, and once the components for a bomb. It had been a college kid who wanted to see if he could get away with it, but had gotten three years in prison nonetheless, and she had received a citation and mention on her record from Homeland Security. But this felt different. Even though she realized it could be absolutely nothing, she didn’t want to take the chance of staying quiet about it. And if she was wrong, she’d accept responsibility for her mistake, and endure Denise’s ridicule for sure. It might even jeopardize her job, but she felt she had no choice. She had people’s lives in her hands.

  Bernice had never hesitated to act on what she believed in and stand up for what she thought was right. She wondered how long it would take security to show up and talk to her. Her stomach was in a knot as she waited. It felt like it was taking them forever. Her heart was pounding in her chest, her palms were sweaty, and her uniform was damp under the arms. She felt like something bad was about to happen, and all she could do was pray that she was wrong.

  Chapter Four

  When Bernice called the office of airport security, a secretary took the call and jotted down what she said: that it was not a bomb threat, but something suspicious had been found in an X-ray bin. It wasn’t a high priority, the way she had described it, but they had to check it out if a TSA agent called it in. The secretary walked into Dave Lee’s office and handed him the slip of paper. He groaned when he saw her coming, and took the note from her hand reluctantly. He knew he couldn’t dodge it, but he’d had a busy morning.

  Two Indonesian men had been caught with more money than they were allowed to bring in. He’d been called, but turned it over to Homeland Security immediately for them to deal with. A college student was caught selling marijuana and cocaine in one of the restrooms, a passenger had reported her, and he had called in the Port Authority police and had to fill out a report. An abandoned rolling bag had turned up in Terminal 4, and he had called the bomb squad to handle it. They X-rayed it before taking it away to blow it up, and it was filled with pharmaceutical samples and a box of condoms. Some tired salesman had forgotten his samples, and they sent it to lost and found. Dave just wanted five minutes to himself for a cup of coffee before the next round, but he could see that wasn’t going to happen. He tried to address each situation as quickly as he could, and rarely got a break during the day.

  Even if some of the reports sounded ridiculous, they had to check out every call that came in, and if there was merit to it, he had to call the right authorities to handle it. His job was one of constant triage. He had wanted to be a chemical engineer, and his brother was a nuclear scientist. His parents were from mainland China, and he had been born in the States, and they still didn’t understand what he did at the airport, and sometimes neither did he. He had taken a summer job he thought would be fun and exciting, and ten years later, he was still there as a senior security officer. Some days he loved what he did, and felt useful to humanity. Other days he hated it, and it felt like a bad joke or a reality show. Once he’d been called in for a pet alligator a man had smuggled in a carrying case, claiming it was a dog. A flight attendant had spotted it before takeoff.

  “Is this Bernice Adams a supervisor?” he asked the secretary, not that it made a difference, he would have to go either way. But the suspicious report was more likely to be a real one from a supervisor, although he knew from experience that wasn’t always the case. He had seen damn near every imaginable situation in ten years at JFK. He had even delivered twins in an airport bathroom for a woman who claimed she didn’t know she was eight months pregnant, and the paramedics took too long to get there after he called them. The mother and twins had done fine, and she had named one of them after him, but he hoped he never had to do that again.

  “She said she wasn’t,” the secretary answered. There were three of them who took the calls as they came in and relayed the messages to the next available security officer on duty. And Dave was the next one up.

  “What’s she got?” He looked puzzled by the message.

  “Something suspicious in the X-ray bin, but not a bomb.”

  “That’s good news at least.” He grabbed his jacket off the back of his chair and left his office. It was a short drive to the terminal where Bernice was working. He asked for her by name when he got there. They’d gotten busier again, the lines of departing passengers were long, and he asked one of the supervisors to point her out, which he did. A passenger was arguing with Bernice about what he claimed was a service dog, but he had no paperwork to prove it. The dog was huge and looked like a pit bull, and the passenger wanted the dog in the cabin with him unconfined.

  Denise overheard Dave Lee question one of the male supervisors about Bernice, and asked him about it.

  “What’s that about? What’s airport security doing here?”

  “I don’t know. Bernice must have called them,” her colleague said, unconcerned. “Maybe about the dog. That dog looks like he could take someone’s arm off.” The other passengers standing near it were looking nervous, and the dog had started to growl and bare its fangs. Its owner wouldn’t relent on wanting to take it with him, and not putting it in the cargo hold in a crate, and was using every argument to support his position. Bernice was happy to be removed from the situation, when Dave Lee approached her and introduced himself to her.

  “Thank you for that,” she said softly as they walked away from dog and owner and left it to one of the supervisors.

  “Looks like you’re having a fun day,” he said easily, and she laughed.

  “Yeah. I got bitten by a Chihuahua some woman asked me to hold last week. I didn’t think they had teeth.” He smiled and she followed him into an empty supervisor’s office, and he got right to the point.

  “So what do you have? What did you find in the bin?” She seemed alert and intelligent and looked hesitant for a minute, and felt stupid now that he was here. “Did you tell your supervisor about it?”

  She nodded.

  “And?”

  “She thinks I’m crazy, and I might be. I’ve just got a weird feeling about this. It’s been bugging me since I found it this morning.” She pulled the postcard out of her pocket and handed it to him.

  “That’s it? A postcard?” He looked startled. She seemed smarter than that, and more sensible than to get worked up over a postcard, unless it had a threat written on the back. He flipped it over, and it didn’t, just the message Bernice had read when she first saw it.

  “I don’t know,” Bernice said apologetically. “The message seemed aggressive to me, especially with ‘forever’ underlined like that, and the picture of the bridge. If it had flowers on it or something, or hearts, but the bridge and that message looked weird to me.” He thought about it for a long moment, staring at it as though something additional would appear if they looked at it long enough, but nothing did, and then he looked back at Bernice.

  “I see what you mean. It would seem romantic or sexual to me, or something in that vein, but I can see how the image and the message could seem threatening to you. What does your gut tell you?” he asked her, narrowing his eyes as he looked at her, trying to evaluate her as much as the message. Being able to assess people and guess right was the most important part of his job, and he was good at it.

  “I don’t know why,” she said honestly, “but it doesn’t feel right to me. I kept wanting to throw it away, but I couldn’t. Something kept stopping me.” She knew she probably sounded
like a nut job to him, but it was true.

  “How long have you worked here?”

  “Five years. I’ve caught a couple of drug dealers going through. But I’ve never felt like this before about something I found in a bin. We find all kinds of things, jewelry, money, cellphones, a handgun once. I know this is just a postcard, and I’m probably wrong, but it scared me. What if someone is targeting the bridge?” He nodded. The same thought had occurred to him, even though it sounded like a long shot to him too. But who would have believed that 9/11 could happen before it did? That had been a wake-up call to anyone in security. They couldn’t take anything for granted ever since.

  “When did you find it?”

  “We had two San Francisco flights this morning at eight A.M. It was right around then, just before or after they took off. They canceled an A380, and I was told they accommodated all the passengers by breaking it into two flights, with equipment they had on the ground.” He nodded. So they had at least two flights to check out, if he decided to pursue this, which would be twice the complications and twice the work, to figure out which flight the danger was on, if there was any at all. Or it could be a wild-goose chase, and just a postcard with a message that meant nothing. He sat staring at the card in his hand, as though he were psychic and expected to know if the potential danger was bogus or not. The postcard of the Golden Gate Bridge seemed to link the possibility to the two flights heading to San Francisco.

  “If you want to know what I think,” he said to Bernice, as though they were partners in this and had discovered it together, “I think it’s probably nothing. Maybe a guy who proposed to some girl on the bridge, got turned down, and is saying she’ll regret it. Or someone who’s never even been to San Francisco, and was flying to St. Louis this morning. You can never tell about these things. Most of what we get like this is totally random, you have to be a mind reader to figure it out, and you never know what really happened, and nothing comes of it. There’s a 99.999999 percent chance this is just a postcard, but there’s that tiny fraction of a percent that says it could be something. That’s what’s talking to your gut, and what I work with. I think we’re probably both off base, but it’s my job not to ignore stuff like this. I don’t want the responsibility of deciding it’s nothing, and find out I’m wrong when the bridge blows sky high. Chances are, that won’t happen. But if it does, you and I will know that we could have made a difference. I’m going to call the main office of Homeland Security and hand this baby off to them. If they decide it’s nothing, then you and I are off the hook. I can’t make this decision without them or, let’s say, I don’t want to.” As he said it, and Bernice nodded seriously, listening to him, wondering if she had started a tempest in a teapot, Denise walked in and scowled at Bernice ferociously.

  “What trouble are you causing?” she accused Bernice, as Dave Lee watched her, intrigued by the dynamic. She obviously didn’t like the agent who had called him, and he wondered why. The senior TSA officer exuded disapproval and contempt for the younger, prettier woman. But Bernice seemed smart and efficient to him. Maybe that was the problem. And he didn’t think she’d been wrong to call him. In his opinion, she had done absolutely the right thing, following her instincts.

  “Are you Ms. Adams’s supervisor?” he asked Denise, with a serious expression.

  “I am,” she said reluctantly. “What’s going on here?”

  “Dave Lee, senior officer, airport security,” he introduced himself. “It’s about the postcard she found. I think she told you about it.”

  Denise looked frightened for a minute, afraid that she was in trouble. This was beginning to sound official, although she thought Bernice was stupid to call them, and she was furious she hadn’t asked her first. She wouldn’t have let her, and Bernice knew it.

  “I have the same concerns she did,” Dave said. “I’m almost positive it’s nothing, and so is she, but I’m not willing to stake my life on it, or anyone else’s. I’m calling in the main office of Homeland Security. We can let them figure it out. If they don’t want to pursue it, that’s their business.” He picked up the desk phone as he said it and dialed a number. He told whoever he spoke to where he was and what was happening, and then listened to them and hung up a minute later. He looked at both women.

  “They’ll be here in twenty minutes. I’m going to get a cup of coffee. I’ll be back before they get here.” And without saying another word, he left them then, as Denise looked at Bernice in a fury, and waited till he was out of earshot before she said anything.

  “You realize, don’t you, you’re going to be in a world of trouble, if you stirred up all this shit for nothing?”

  “I know,” Bernice said meekly. She’d been thinking that herself, and had called security anyway.

  “You’ll be lucky if you don’t lose your job over this,” Denise said angrily. And she realized that she herself looked bad, because she had not acted on Bernice’s concerns. If Bernice turned out to be right to be worried, it was Denise’s ass that was going to be on the line, not hers.

  “I understand that, but I couldn’t ignore it, Denise. I don’t know if there’s anything to it or not. But I couldn’t take the chance that it might be real.”

  “You better pray that it is, girl. Or you’re going to be ten feet under a pile of shit.”

  All Bernice could think as Denise threatened her was that she only had two more months of law school to finish, and she could apply for a job as a paralegal, if nothing else. But there was no way she could ignore a possible risk of some kind of terrorist threat, assuming the worst case about the postcard, which seemed unlikely, but you just never knew, as Dave Lee had said himself.

  Denise walked out of the office then, and Bernice followed her, torn between feeling worried about her job and about the postcard, and the possible danger it represented if it was a terrorist threat of some kind, however far-fetched that seemed. Homeland Security would have to make that decision. She didn’t have the authority to do that at TSA. Even Dave Lee felt he couldn’t, with all the experience he had. It validated Bernice’s concerns somewhat, as Della came up to her and whispered.

  “What’s happening? Someone said that airport security was here to see you, and Denise said Homeland Security is showing up, and boy, is she pissed.”

  “I know she is. I found something in a bin this morning. It’s probably nothing.” She tried to tone it down for Della, until they knew more.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Della looked surprised that she hadn’t. They told each other everything at work, or so she’d thought.

  “I thought I was just being paranoid. I told Denise and she blew it off, which is probably why she’s so pissed now. It kept bothering me so I called AS, without telling her, and the AS guy decided to call the main Homeland Security guys to check it out. They’re probably going to decide I’m nuts and have me fired, or at least that’s what Denise said.”

  “Screw her. It sounds like you did the right thing, if they called Homeland Security. Is it some kind of threat?”

  “Could be,” Bernice said vaguely. She didn’t want to tell Della before Homeland Security made a decision about it.

  “Keep me posted,” Della said and went back to the spot where she was working, directing people into the body-scan machine. Bernice was on a break now, and Homeland Security was due any minute, so there was no point going back to work yet. She stood there waiting, while Denise ignored her, and prayed that it would all turn out to be nothing. She didn’t want anyone to get hurt, even if she lost her job. She could hardly wait to leave anyway when she graduated. She’d had enough of Denise’s abuse. It was time to move on. Her five years at TSA had served her well. They had given her the time she needed to go to law school, and a salary she could live on and support her son with while she was doing it. But she didn’t want to put up with Denise, or anyone like her anymore. Thinking about it made her feel braver as she wait
ed for Homeland Security to arrive.

  * * *

  —

  Ben Waterman sat at his desk, after his third cup of coffee, feeling slightly jangled, but his nerves were on edge these days anyway. It was his first day back at work after a month’s leave. The highly publicized hostage situation that had gone sour a month before, in an airport warehouse, had left sixteen people dead when a SWAT team rushed in to rescue the hostages after a twenty-four-hour siege, and the hostage takers had killed them all, including a child in the final shoot-out, and then killed themselves before they could be captured. The decision to go in had been made by the captain of the SWAT team, in conjunction with the police and the head of Homeland Security, but Ben had been part of the decision, and urged strongly for it. The hostage takers were starting to panic, Ben could feel it, and he was sure innocent people would be killed, so he had fought for the SWAT team to take action, and in the end they had all died anyway. No one blamed him for it, and from everything they knew now, it had been a no-win situation. The perpetrators were seeking worldwide attention for an extremist cause, and his superiors had told him afterward that there probably had been no way to spare the hostages right from the beginning, but it was no consolation with sixteen people dead.

  In spite of a month of intense therapy and debriefing, Ben blamed himself for his part in the decision, and knew he always would. How did you forgive yourself for the blood of sixteen people on your hands? How could you ever know or believe that there had been no right decision? What if there was and he had missed it? He had been among the first on the scene after everyone had died, and it had been carnage. They had almost had to drag him away. He had done everything he could to save them and keep them alive.