BUILDING 24-442, SUBURBAN VIRGINIA
Thomas stared at the tube, watching as it filled with a list of green letters denoting files of intercepted, deciphered, and translated intercepts tangentially related to Verko. He chose one at random and opened it; it was a Russian interior ministry estimate of how long it would take to clear land mines in the region. Thomas chose another, which referred to the need for firefighting apparatus. A third was filled with gibberish, though whether that was a glitch on the American side wasn’t clear.
Thomas got up from his desk. He’d piled up his papers and reports so he could pace from wall to wall; it helped him think.
Why set up a base at an old airport, he thought to himself, unless you have an airplane? And yet there were none there, at least not according to the sat photos or anything else he’d seen.
If it were big enough, Thomas realized, an airplane would be the perfect delivery system. Packed full of explosives and waste, you could crash it into a city, or maybe explode it above—death would rain everywhere.
So where was the plane?
He sat back at the computer and did a search of Interpol and the FBI looking for stolen planes. Nada. Then he realized that it wasn’t absolutely necessary to steal an entire plane. It might make more sense to take different parts, ship them in by truck, and put the airplane together. He found different sites where plane parts could be purchased. Then he made a few calls for background information and data. A rather cranky FBI intelligence expert told him that it would be next to impossible to put a plane together from parts; not only would it cost much more than the aircraft itself, but finding people with the expertise to assemble everything would be a nightmare. Besides, there would be records of the purchases anyway, and you’d need a ton of shell companies to obscure what you were doing.
Stubbornly, Thomas clung to the theory. The agent’s objections led him to a file listing parts purchases that had been blocked because of Customs concerns, and it was on that list that he found a company whose name matched the gibberish in the NSA intercept he had opened.
Thomas hand-copied the symbols, then went back to the intercept, holding the paper up to the screen. Then he went back to the Customs database and did a general search. There were no hits. But a similar try in one of the Interpol networks led to an Algerian airline company, which Thomas already knew was on a list of possible fronts for Islamic militant groups. The gibberish was actually an acronym for an airline company name in Arabic.
He stood up from his desk, cracked all of his knuckles, then sat back down and began running requests for information on the airline and any company it did business with.