THURSDAY, JUNE 24, 2021
McGUIRE AIR FORCE BASE, TRENTON, NEW JERSEY
A BOEING 787 with a damaged fuselage is parked at the end of runway 2, not far from a group of U.S. Air Force Black Hawk helicopters and gray, twin-engine propeller planes. Three armored vehicles are in position beside the long-haul Boeing. A warm night with a smell of the sea settles over the wasteland, overrun with broom and sage.
Over by the buildings, there’s a constant choreographed flow of military trucks. In a mixture of crisis mode and discipline, hundreds of soldiers are setting up something unidentifiable in a vast hangar recently vacated by the impressive Lockheed C-5 Galaxy cargo plane that was being serviced there. Silhouetted against the huge sliding doors are three tiny figures. Something in the bearing of the woman, wearing a misfired copy of a Chanel jacket, and one of the men, in a dark Men in Black–style suit, leaves little room for doubt: they’re in the security services. The third person is more unusual: his hair is long and on the greasy side, a pair of round steel-rimmed glasses keeps slipping down his nose, and his holey T-shirt announces “I ♡ zero, one, and Fibonacci.” He also smells of sweat, a little, and beer, a lot.
Adrian Miller may well have drunk two bottles of water, but his head’s still spinning. As soon as he stepped out of the police car, the two agents came over to introduce themselves, and Miller immediately forgot their names, both the guy from the CIA and the woman from the FBI. He now proffers his hand limply, making no pretense of energy.
The CIA guy shakes it reluctantly, stiffly even, making as little contact as possible, as if touching the viscous fin of some slightly rotten bottom-feeder fish.
“I have to confess, Professor Miller, I didn’t picture you so…so young.”
The FBI woman, a thirtysomething Latina with delicate features and sharp eyes, appraises the mathematician in silence. At first, she thinks he looks like John Cusack, let’s say a somewhat flabby, poor man’s John Cusack, then she thinks better of it: no, not even that. Still, there’s a combination of amazement and surprise in her voice when she speaks.
“We know your report by heart, Professor Miller. Remarkable work. We have high hopes for what your experience can offer us. I imagine you and Dr. Brewster-Wang have dealt with Protocol 42 before.”
Adrian Miller mumbles an inaudible “no.” He’s had so little contact with Tina Wang that he didn’t know a Brewster had come into her life, and no, he’s never dealt with a Protocol 42. So far as he knows, not one of the events envisaged in the “low probability” protocols has come to interfere with air traffic: no extraterrestrials, to which three protocols are assigned—“Encounters of the third kind,” “War of the worlds,” and “Unknown intentions”—each with a dozen variations, including Godzilla to keep Tina happy; no airborne invasions by zombies or vampires—or any rapidly spreading airborne epidemic, like a coronavirus or a hemorrhagic fever such as Ebola—to which five further protocols were dedicated; as for a hypothetical destructive form of artificial intelligence taking control of air traffic—whether acting autonomously (Protocol 29) or remote-controlled by a foreign power (Protocol 30)—that hasn’t yet happened, although it’s increasingly plausible.
But Protocol 42…it simply can’t happen, not Protocol 42. Miller takes a sip of water and makes his opening gambit.
“You know, Ms…. I’m sorry, I forgot your names.”
“Senior Agent Gloria Lopez. And my opposite number from the CIA, Marcus Cox.”
“Well, Senior Agent Gloria Lopez, to be totally honest, Protocol 42 is…how shall I put this…”
Adrian Miller takes another sip of water; he can’t find the words. He can’t in all decency admit that it was just a naughty math-geek joke that’s already cost the taxpayer half a million dollars, and that’s if you’re counting only the twenty years when the State has paid two pranksters to carry bulletproof cellphones twenty-four hours a day, cellphones that should never have received a call. He looks at the Boeing, a great aluminum cigar now lit up by powerful floodlights.
“Do you know exactly why we’re here? What’s so special about this plane? Apart from the hail damage to its windshield and its crumpled nose.”
“It’s a radome,” the CIA agent corrects him. “The aircraft’s nose. It’s called a radome.”
“We don’t know very much, Professor Miller,” the woman interrupts them. “And Professor Brewster-Wang’s chopper is about to arrive. It’s that black dot over there, to the north.”
“Yes, actually, could you sign the bottom of this page, Professor Miller,” Agent Cox adds, opening an envelope. “It’s a confidentiality agreement: all the information you’re given from now on will be classified. If you refuse to sign this, you’ll be brought before the military tribunal for breaching national security. And, thanks to 18 U.S. code section 79, it would be considered high treason if you violate it after signing it. Thank you for your cooperation.”
SINCE KING ARTHUR and his knights, if not before, military types have liked gathering in the round, most likely because circles profess equality while doing nothing to hide the true hierarchy. The McGuire base therefore has its statutory big round table in the middle of the underground command center, where the lighting is harsh and the walls are lined with large screens: several of them show images of the grounded 787, shot from every angle by a battery of cameras.
Tina and Adrian felt safer sitting next to each other, so that they could jointly confront the good dozen multi-star generals and men and women from every imaginable agency, all with their names and credentials in Plexiglas name-holders. Besides the FBI and the Department of Defense, there are representatives of the State Department, the U.S. Air Force, the CIA, the NSA, NORAD, the FAA, and still other acronyms that Miller’s never heard of. He and Tina also qualify to be identified by their titles, and their first and last names above a mention of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—where neither of them still works.
Tina Wang hasn’t changed much, although her outfit is more sensible than the Goth look favored by the PhD student she once was. She’s had time to tell Adrian under her breath that she’s stopped teaching, that, yes, she married a Georg Brewster, a physicist she met in the cafeteria at Columbia, and—smiling deviously—that she would have struggled to recognize Adrian, seeing as he no longer really looks like Christian Slater in The Name of the Rose. She thinks he now has something of a balding Keanu Reeves about him, but keeps this to herself.
A powerful voice booms above the hubbub. This tall, slim man doesn’t need to trot out his results from West Point, nor his war exploits in Homs and Mogadishu: his crew-cut white hair and muscular, willful features, along with the three black stars embroidered on his collar, are as good as a résumé. In this room, with its civilized wood paneling, his gray-green camouflage combat fatigues are of little use to him.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m General Patrick Silveria of the National Military Command Center, and I have full authority to represent the Department of Defense. This situation must remain secret, and the president has opted not to change his schedule in Rio, but rest assured that he’s being given constant updates. I’ll do the rounds of the table: on my left is General Buchanan, who commands the McGuire base and is our host for these few days. I imagine no one knows Professors Miller and Brewster-Wang to my right: they’re mathematicians, and we’re indebted to them for the crisis protocols we’ve been following since 9/11.”
The two in question give awkward waves amid a murmur of approval.
“Professor Miller teaches at Princeton,” Silveria continues, “and Professor Brewster-Wang is a consultant for NASA and Google. They will have complete free rein to apply Protocol 42, and I will coordinate the operation. Before anyone points out that the CIA isn’t authorized to operate on national territory, I’d like to make it clear that the protocol requires the cooperation of all agencies.”
While an officer hands each participant a tablet and a thick dossier labeled “Classified Information,” Silveria goes on to introduce the senior FBI agent and all the others, from the CIA special agent to the NSA’s head of digital surveillance—early thirties, with the irritating face of a geek who’s set up a social network—and all the way to a small woman with a soft, clear voice and short, snowy hair, despite being barely forty: Jamy Pudlowski of Special Operations Command, PsyOps, a specialist in psychological operations. Each in their own way, they are necessary to the smooth running of Protocol 42. It’s all coming back to Miller: the government agencies involved, the rank of each person around the table, even the agenda for this meeting…nothing that he and Tina Wang hadn’t specified in their report.
“Our team will be receiving a lot of reinforcements in the next few hours,” Silveria says. “Right now, many people from a variety of disciplines are on their way to the base and will help us deal with the situation. How many agents are the FBI’s PsyOps sending us, Special Agent Pudlowski?”
“More than a hundred. We’re also working out of our offices in New York.”
“Thank you. You have before you an up-to-date account of what we know of the situation. The 787 on the tarmac is the reason we’re all here: it opened communication with Kennedy Airport at exactly 19:03 hours today, June 24. It identified itself as flight Air France 006 from Paris to New York. The plane reported significant damage and was rerouted to this base within minutes. The captain states that he is David Markle, and the copilot Gideon Favereaux, and you each have a full list of passengers and crew. I’m going to hand things straight over to Brian Mitnick of the NSA. A word about the tablets, Brian?”
The man from the National Security Agency stands up. On his feet he looks even more boyish, particularly as he’s tinkering with a slender black rectangle with adolescent zeal.
“Hello, everyone, you have in front of you a tablet like mine. Yours is personal and unlocked. On the welcome page you’ll find a plan of the Boeing 787. Click on each seat and a name will appear in a pop-up window, seat by seat, including the crew. The NSA is updating your tablets in real time as we get the data for each person on the flight. If and when there’s a link to another page from an image or a fragment of text, it will be highlighted in blue. Click on it and the page will appear. To go back, click on the ‘back’ arrow. It’s very simple. Now, please look at the display screens.”
With a flick of his finger, Mitnick scrolls through photos of Markle and Favereaux, then the cabin stewards. While Mitnick is having fun with his toy, Silveria takes over again.
“Protocol 42 has been set in motion because today’s Air France 006 flight already landed at JFK more than four hours ago, at the scheduled time of 16:35 hours. But it was a different aircraft, with a different captain and copilot. On the other hand, an Air France Boeing 787, with the same reference Air France 006, with exactly the same damage as this one, piloted by the same Commander Markle, copiloted by the same Favereaux, and manned by the same crew and with the same passengers, in other words the exact same plane as this one you see here, this same plane, then, landed at JFK Airport, but at 17:17 hours on March 10. Precisely one hundred six days ago.”
The whole room is a cacophony, but the CIA agent brings the racket to an end by raising his hand.
“I don’t understand,” he says. “The same plane landed twice?”
“Yes. I repeat: it’s the same plane. One of the maintenance technicians has confirmed it: he worked on this same 787 nearly four months ago. He says that the damage is lighter, as if the plane spent half as much time in the hail, but he incontrovertibly recognizes some of the impacts on the windshield, some of the damage on the radome, et cetera. I now have a live link to the pilot.”
A touch of feedback buzzes through the command center.
“Good evening, Captain Markle. General Patrick Silveria here again. I’m with the crisis staff. Could I ask you to introduce yourself once more? And give us your date of birth again.”
Markle’s voice reverberates around the room. It’s weary.
“David Markle, born January 12, 1973. General, the passengers can’t take much more. They want to disembark.”
“We’re going to evacuate them in the next few minutes. One last question, Captain Markle: What day is it and what time is it?”
“My instruments aren’t functioning but it’s March 10, and my watch says 8:45 pm.”
Silveria cuts the call. The luminous clock says the date is June 24, and the time 22:43. With no warning, the image of an intubated patient on a hospital bed now appears on the largest of the screens.
“This photo was taken ten minutes ago by an FBI agent in room 344 of Mount Sinai Hospital. This man is also called David Markle. He was the pilot on flight Air France 006 on March 10. That particular David Markle is dying of pancreatic cancer, diagnosed a month ago.”
Silveria turns to Adrian Miller and Tina Brewster-Wang, who are still silent.
“I hope you understand why we’ve implemented Protocol 42, and can tell us what the next step should be.”