Sousa rolled his eyes. “I thought you wanted to know what really happened.”
“What makes you so sure this wasn’t a deliberate act?”
“Occam’s Razor. Look, if the aircraft broke up suddenly in mid-flight, whether because of a bomb or a system failure, we probably would have found the wreckage by now. That means that the plane continued to fly after the communications system went down. Here’s my theory. A fire in the E and E bay — that’s Electronics and Equipment — takes out the radios and the cockpit fills with smoke. Captain Norris is unable to send a distress call, so he immediately changes course, looking for the nearest place to set down, but the flight crew, and probably everyone else aboard, is overcome by the smoke and the plane keeps flying with no one at the stick until it runs out of fuel and crashes into the ocean. It’s happened before.”
Sousa’s expertise was eroding the foundation of the assumption that had brought Professor to the opposite side of the world, but there was something he knew that Sousa did not. “What if I told you there was credible intelligence indicating that one or more of the passengers on that plane had been specifically targeted for assassination?”
Sousa remained unmoved. “You aren’t hearing me, Agent Chapman. The plane was not destroyed along its flight path, which means that someone manually changed course. Only the flight crew could have done that.”
“The 9-11 hijackers took flying lessons.”
“If anyone had attempted to take over that plane, the captain would have immediately sent a distress call. The same goes for a passenger trying to sabotage the plane.”
“What about the crew? Maybe one of them was the perpetrator. It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“We’ve already looked into that. Captain Norris and First Officer Carrera had impeccable records and no ties whatsoever to extremist groups. We’ve even done voice stress analysis of the recorded radio transmissions. There’s nothing at all to indicate that either one of them was suicidal or under coercion. No, I’m sorry. The simplest solution is almost certainly the correct one. All the evidence points to this being an accident. A tragedy to be sure, but not a crime.”
Professor’s certitude began to crack apart like thin ice. He had made the same mistake as Roche and Jeremiah Stillman and all the other kooks who saw conspiracies in every coincidence. Maybe Sousa was right.
“Can I ask you a question, Agent Chapman?”
It took Professor a moment to process Sousa’s request. He met the other man’s gaze and nodded.
“Who?”
Professor blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“You said you had credible intelligence.” An odd gleam, more than mere curiosity, had entered Sousa’s dark eyes. Professor thought he looked like a cat contemplating a goldfish in a bowl. “I’ve become intimately familiar with ever name on the manifest of that aircraft. There were no red flags. Who was being targeted?”
“It’s not something I can talk about just yet,” Professor said with a tight smile. “Besides, you’re probably right. It’s most likely a dead end.”
Sousa regarded him a moment longer, then laid his palms flat on his desk. “You got what you need here?”
A low buzzing in Professor’s pocket signaled an incoming text message. He resisted the urge to check it immediately. “I’d like to talk to a few more people. Get a broader perspective. Like I said, I don’t want to be in the way. I just want my report to reflect that I did my job. Can you point me in the right direction?”
“I’ll make a list,” Sousa said. His tone was indifferent but the glimmer had not faded from his eyes. “You know, if you really want to understand what’s going on here, you should get your hands dirty.”
“Meaning what exactly?”
“There’s an Orion leaving in about an hour. A search plane.”
Professor knew what an Orion was. The venerable Lockheed P-3 Orion was a four-engine turboprop anti-submarine/surveillance aircraft, developed in 1959 but still in service throughout the world.
“You should ride along,” Sousa continued. “Talk to the men who are actually out there looking. Besides, I can’t think of a better way to get a broader perspective than looking down from a search aircraft over a hundred thousand square miles of open water.”
Before Professor could respond, his phone buzzed again, another message or perhaps a reminder for the first. He dug it out and glanced at the notification, a single message from Tam Broderick: “Did you see this???” followed by a truncated Internet URL.
It was not Tam Broderick’s style to forward funny cat videos.
He rose from his chair. “I’ll get back to you on that, Mr. Sousa. Right now, I need to take this.”
Sousa rose as well and moved toward the door while Professor tapped his screen to see what Tam had sent him. The URL directed him to a familiar website, the Crescent Defense League’s “Enemies of Islam” page. The page had been updated since his last visit. There was a new name on the CDL hit list.
Frigid adrenaline surged through Professor’s veins.
Jade.
The picture of her was a recent one, taken in Peru, probably a production still from the Alien Explorers website. Underneath, a short article outlined the reason Jade Ihara was considered an enemy to the faith, which mostly boiled down to her alleged collusion with Gerald Roche, in the pursuit of spurious evidence to support the “lie” that the Prophet Muhammad never existed.
While the article did not explicitly call for violence against Jade, the implicit message was hard to miss. Enemies of Islam like Roche and Jade needed to be silenced.
It was the last sentence that made Professor’s blood run cold.
Ihara is believed to be in Scotland, near Glasgow.
He jumped to his feet but before he could turn toward the door, he felt a sharp stinging at the back of his neck. He jerked away reflexively, spinning on his heel even as the sting transformed into a spike of cold, like an enormous icicle stabbing through his upper torso. He whirled around to face his assailant, but whatever Sousa had injected was already robbing him of motor control. Professor’s legs collapsed under his weight and he crashed into the wall.
He clung desperately to consciousness but knew that it was a losing battle. The last thing he heard before the fog closed over him was the distant sound of someone speaking. It was Sousa’s voice, but without any trace of an Australian accent.
“I need a replacement… No. Take him to the facility. We’ll get what we need from him there.”
TEN
As her flashlight beam illuminated the face of the man standing in the passage, Jade managed to stifle her shriek of alarm. The noise that issued from her sounded more like a burp of displeasure.
“Kellogg! Damn it! What are you doing here?” She paused a beat, though not nearly long enough to allow him to respond. “Wait, did you…follow me here? You did, didn’t you?”
A guilty look flickered over his face, but it was replaced almost immediately by an expression of triumph. He pointed a finger at the object peeking from Jade’s clenched fist. “You found it. Roche’s book. I knew you would.”
She jammed the thumb drive into a pocket and took a step toward him, hands on her hips. “You followed me,” she repeated. “What the hell?”
“I didn’t follow you. But when you kept asking about Mr. Roche’s hunting lodge, it wasn’t hard to figure out that you would come here. And I realized that it was the obvious place to look for his manuscript.” His eyes narrowed in suspicion. “I do hope you weren’t trying to cut me out of the picture.”