The Ghost Pattern (9 page)

...22

...Tuesday, May 3, 3:03PM PDT (UTC-7:00 hours)

...Tom Isaac’s Residence

...Laguna Beach, California

...Six Days Missing

Alex stood in front of the wall-sized map, staring at the piece of Russian territory shown on it, northeast of China and north of Japan. Where could a plane that size go? Where could it land? With the amount of fuel it carried, it could be anywhere on continental Russia.

She held the fresh cup of coffee close to her nose, inhaling the delicate French Vanilla flavor that filled the room.
Where are you? Where on Earth are you?

A quick tap on the door, then a bulky man in his sixties entered the war room hesitantly, followed closely by Tom.

“Alex, meet Roger Murphy, former ATC shift supervisor at LAX,” Tom said. “Mr. Murphy, this is my associate, Alex Hoffmann.”

They shook hands, and the man sat down with a quiet groan, giving the map on the wall a furtive glance. Medium height and heavy set, the man wore thick-rimmed glasses and an untrimmed moustache that had lost its symmetry a long time ago. One edge was hanging lower than the other was, but it wasn’t just the hair longer on his left side; his features were slightly lower too; his lips and cheek lopsided. Alex wondered if Roger Murphy was aware that he had probably had a small stroke recently.

“Mr. Murphy, thank you for coming here today,” Alex said.

“Yeah, how can I help?” His speech was a little slurred too.

“I need to understand how someone might make a plane disappear in a different spot than it had actually disappeared.”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

She backtracked a little. “How would one know where a plane is at a certain moment in time?”

“All commercial planes are equipped with transponders,” Murphy replied. “The typical transponder emits an identification signal in response to a received interrogation signal. Radar operations depend on transponder signals to pinpoint aircraft position and altitude with precision.”

“How does it work?”

“Secondary radar pings the transponder, then sends what we call an interrogation signal. Upon receipt of this interrogation, the transponder will return its code or altitude information. Some transponders are designed to be used in busy airspace areas, and are compatible with automatic collision avoidance systems. What kind of aircraft are we talking about?”

“Umm…” she hesitated a little, looking at Tom for a split second. “A Boeing 747-400,” she replied, causing Murphy to pop his almost bald eyebrows up in an a skewed expression of surprise.

“Oh, then it most likely has best-in-class transponder equipment onboard.”

“So how can one grab a 747?”

“What do you mean?” Murphy fidgeted uncomfortably in his seat. His concerned expression showed he was becoming less and less at ease with the direction their conversation was going.

“Let me tell you what this is about,” Alex said, thinking she needed him to open up, not hold back. “We’re trying to locate flight XA233, and we’re thinking that it could have somehow made it to land, but ATC never knew about it.”

“Ah…” Murphy said, slouching a little in his chair, more relaxed. “I see where this is going. Yeah, well, I guess you could make the plane disappear if you would just turn the transponder off. Really, that’s all it takes.”

Unbelievable. Modern aviation in the twenty-first century. Huh…“That’s all it takes? No GPS onboard?” Alex probed.

“All aircraft have GPS, but it’s for the pilots’ use while in flight. It doesn’t transmit anything to anyone.”

“The pilots do get their info from satellites, right?”

“Yeah, but the airlines aren’t equipped to retrieve, interpret, and use that type of information from the satellites. No one is.”

“So, if you wanted to grab that 747 and land it here, somewhere,” she asked, pointing her laser spot casually at the Russian mainland near the Pacific coast, “how would you do it?”

He stood with difficulty and scratched his balding head. “This is where they were last tracked?” Murphy asked, pointing at one of the red pushpins.

“Yes.”

“You could do that two ways, I guess. It depends, really. You could start by dropping altitude, then kill your transponder, do a course change, fly back these few hundred miles, then land.”

“Why drop altitude?”

“So that the last transponder ping sees you in distress, losing altitude right before the so-called crash, right?”

“Ah, yes. You’re right.”

“But there’s a small problem with this method. Ideally, you’d want the plane out of the air when the alarm sounds.”

“What alarm?”

“When a plane is assumed crashed, all nearby radar stations will start searching everywhere, and everyone starts looking. At that time, you want your hijacked plane to have landed already.”

“So how do you pull that off?”

“Easiest way? With another plane, a plane no one will be looking for. You’d bring the second plane really close to the 747, above it or under it would be best. Then you synchronize transponder codes. The Boeing turns its transponder off, at the same time as the other plane turns its transponder on, using the same code. It’s programmable from the cockpit, you know. Then the Boeing changes course and heads for the mainland, while the second aircraft continues for a while on the 747’s original flight plan, pretending it’s the Boeing, then simulates the crash.”

“Wow…This way, the 747 lands before anyone even looks for it, right?” Alex confirmed.

“Right.”

“What kind of plane does the other one need to be? What would work?”

“Even a personal jet would do. They were out at sea, and radar doesn’t have the accuracy you’d expect. It can’t distinguish that well between hull sizes. That’s why we need transponders. So any jet can do it, as long as it can match the 747’s cruise speed and altitude.”

“Which is?”

“Speed? 500 miles per hour, maybe 550.”

“Which jets can match that?”

“Non-commercial? Cessna jets would do that, a Dassault Falcon 50, Learjet, there are a few.”

She exchanged a quick look with Tom, barely able to hide her enthusiasm. If there was a way, there was hope. She refocused.

“Why would you grab a 747? Can you reuse it?” Alex asked.

“I guess I could, if I’d repaint it, strip it of all Universal Air markings, replace its black box, yes, I think I could.”

“How much is one of these planes?”

“About 200 million dollars,” Murphy replied without hesitating. The man was a walking and slightly slurred talking aviation encyclopedia.

She frowned. This theory didn’t make much sense.

“I think there are easier ways to steal 200 mil,” she voiced her doubts.

Roger Murphy stood, ready to leave. He showed an uncanny way to know when she’d run out of questions.

“Depends on what you’re after,” he concluded.

That’s right,
Alex thought, barely refraining from hugging the man.
That’s precisely right. What are you after this time, my dear V?

...23

...Wednesday, May 4, 1:24PM Local Time (UTC+10:00 hours)

...Undisclosed Location

...Russia

...Seven Days Missing

Adeline Bernard woke up with a start. Someone moved very close to her, and her senses, hypervigilant, caused her to wake up abruptly. She looked around her, a little dazed, until, within seconds, she remembered her reality.

Captive!

Crammed together with hundreds of others, in what seemed like a large, round industrial area or warehouse, with barely enough room to stand, sit, and lie down, for what seemed now like an eternity. The air, stuffy and heavy with the smell of human waste and sweat, was hard to breathe and brought little oxygen to her thirsty lungs.

Food and water were brought once daily, stale water tasting of swamp and rusted metal, and cabbage or potatoes for food, boiled and tasteless. Prisoners rotated through kitchen duty, having to prepare their own food in precarious conditions. They boiled the cabbage and potatoes in huge pots over an open fire, in a smaller room fitted with a massive stove and a chimney of sorts. Every day, right after the meal was cooked, someone came in and took a large pot of it away. That’s how Adeline knew the doctors and Lila were still alive.

The worst of it was not knowing. Not knowing what was going to happen to them. That, and missing Blake. She missed him terribly. Every time she thought of him, her eyes welled up.
Don’t give up on me, baby…I’m still alive, and I love you!
The thought of him mourning her death was unbearable. She hugged herself, whimpering, as a tear found its way down her cheek.
Don’t give up on me, baby, I’m here!

They were well-guarded, at least two armed men watching their every move from elevated positions on the sides of the huge atrium. The captives were hundreds, against just a few men, but the Russians had machine guns and didn’t hesitate to kill. Probably more would pour in at the first sign of trouble, considering the large number of video cameras hanging from the high ceiling, all with their red LEDs on.

She made an effort to snap out of it and got up. She straightened her dress, thinking how uninspired she had been to wear a dress on that flight. She normally wore pants when she traveled. Pants would have been such a blessing now, when she had to sleep on a cold and dirty cement floor.

She walked around a little, looking at the people near her. They were in bad shape. In the days that had passed, a lot of things had run out, from much-needed medication for some, to hope for almost everyone. But she wasn’t giving up. No. She decided to help the best that she could, by talking to some of them.

She saw the Chinese doctor’s wife and child a few feet away. The mother leaned against the wall, holding her daughter tightly, and quietly sobbing. Adeline touched her arm gently.

“Can I help?” she asked.

“No,” the woman replied with a thick Chinese accent. Her voice was soft and high-pitched, almost like a child’s. “I’m—I’m just scared, scared and tired. I’m scared for Wu Shen more than anything.”

“Your daughter?”

“No. Wu Shen is my husband. My daughter is Yun Tsai,” she replied, a little surprised that Adeline didn’t know the difference. “I’m afraid of what he could do, because of us, because he fears for our lives,” she said, sniffling a little.

“I see,” Adeline whispered. “What about your daughter? How is she holding up with all this?”

“She’s running a fever. It’s better now. It’s Wu Shen I’m worried about…”

Adeline encouraged her a little more, then moved away, aimlessly. She saw the idiot in first class, the one who’d sat in the second row on the flight, and decided to avoid him.

“Two weeks,” she heard him say, “two more weeks and none of this would have happened.”

Curious, she turned and looked at him inquisitively. “Two weeks?” she asked.

“Yeah, two more weeks, and I take possession of my own jet. Two more weeks, and I would have been absent from this party,” he added bitterly, gesturing toward the hundreds of people confined together.

She felt a wave of anger and disgust at the man’s selfishness.

“Ah, shut it, for God’s sake! How can you live with yourself?”

She walked away, not waiting for his reply, and approached a group of people huddled together, talking.

“Do we know where we are?” a middle-aged, overweight woman was asking.

“Someone said this is an abandoned ICBM silo,” a man replied. “Missiles,” he added seeing the woman’s confusion.

“Oh, my God! Do you think there’s radiation here?” the woman asked.

The same conversations, heard over and over again, spoken with different levels of anxiety and desperation. The same questions, asked over and over again, in the illogical hope that they could bring a different answer.

The one question she didn’t dare ask concerned their immediate future. On the day of their arrival, while waiting in line to board the trucks, she’d heard a Russian clearly state that they were going to be used as lab rats.

For what?

...24

...Wednesday, May 4, 15:39PM Local Time (UTC+3:00 hours)

...Vitaliy Myatlev’s Residence

...Moscow, Russia

...Seven Days Missing

Vitaliy Myatlev finished reading Dr. Bogdanov’s report on his computer, and regretted he didn’t read it in printed format. That way he would have had something to tear to pieces, or slam down against the desk.

“Motherfucking idiot!” The man was a moron. Period. In only a few days, he’d managed to lose Faulkner, one of the best researchers in the field, because he just had to punch him in the stomach. How stupid could Bogdanov get?

Myatlev stood abruptly, pushing his desk chair all the way into the wall. He went to the window, opened it, and lit a Dominican cigar, savoring the fresh, heady smoke as it filled his mouth, his nostrils. Better.

Then he read the report again, this time in a calmer state of mind. All right, maybe it wasn’t that bad. After all, in just ten days since Myatlev had come up with the idea, he’d hijacked a commercial flight, set up a state-of-the-art lab in the middle of nowhere, and had the best scientists in the world working for him. Not bad!

Yes, they will need a few more days to have the first batch ready, but so what? So fucking what? In the grand scheme of things, it didn’t matter. These things normally took years. For him, it would be just days, or maybe a couple of weeks.

Then he would really conquer the world. No one would be able to say no to him anymore. He would be able to manipulate and control everyone in his path, from business opponents to clients to governments. No one would be able to resist.

He poured himself another glass of vodka and slammed a few ice cubes on top of it, sending droplets of clear liquid splashing all around him. He sipped it with reverence, letting it work its miracles in his weary body, and expressing his enjoyment with a loud, satisfied exhalation of air mixed with bluish smoke.

We are slaves to our brain chemistry, all of us,
he reflected.
Equally vulnerable. There's no willpower, no intelligence, and no spirit that won't succumb to the right mix of drugs.

He’d learned that from his friend, President Abramovich, from the stories of his early days in the KGB, when he had worked in punitive psychiatry, learning how to manipulate and defeat people with drugs. After all, why would that wealth of knowledge be limited to Abramovich’s use? Or to Russia’s? He could definitely use it in his business. Although he’d been on the Global Fortune 50 list for some time now, that wasn’t even close to being enough. It was never going to be enough.

After careful planning and precise delivery mechanisms, tested in the field on a vast number of unsuspecting subjects in all kinds of environments, he could rule the world. His business opponents could make some bad decisions, driven by an unexplained surge in one brain chemical or a drop in another, and he'd be there, watching, waiting, ready to reap the benefits. They could feel overly aggressive and competitive in purchasing an asset, paying to the seller—Myatlev, who else—two, three times the fair market value. They could suddenly feel weak and demotivated when bidding against one of Myatlev’s many global corporations about contracts worth billions of dollars.

That's why the formulations had to be precise, and work with accuracy. It had to gain him control. Random violence, as they had on the latest failed test, the one that left an entire offshore drilling platform covered in blood, gave him nothing.