Jake Grafton ran his hand through his hair.
“And she had a shooter in her purse. I picked it up. Makeup doesn’t weigh that much.”
“She’s a sworn officer. They probably require her to be armed.”
“Yeah. PTS. Light duty.”
He picked up the phone and asked Jennifer to call the assistant director of the FBI, Harry Estep, whom Jake had worked with on several prior occasions.
While we were waiting, he said, “You got a gun at home?”
“Sure.”
“Wear it.”
The phone rang. Grafton got to it. “Sorry to hear about Maxwell, Harry … I know you’re busy as hell … I’m sending a man over tomorrow morning, Tommy Carmellini. He will want to see one of your personnel files.”
A pause.
“Zoe Kerry.”
Another pause.
“I know all that. I want him to read her file. Everything. Supposedly she was in a couple of shootouts. Performance evals, psychologist’s evals, all of it.”
After another pause he said, “Thanks, Harry. See you at the White House tomorrow at ten. You’re coming to that soiree, right?”
He listened a bit more, then said good-bye and hung up.
“Ask for Alice Berg in the director’s office,” Grafton told me. “We’re violating the privacy laws and personnel policies. Don’t take anything or copy anything. Just look.”
“Yes, sir.”
He picked up the phone. “Jennifer, send an e-mail to Alice Berg in the FBI director’s office. Tell her Tommy Carmellini will be armed tomorrow when visiting, and at all other times when he enters the building.”
There was a pause; then he cradled the instrument and looked at me.
“Thanks, Tommy.”
“Don’t mention it, boss.”
He ran out of words right there and sat staring at a paperweight, an A-6 Intruder hold-back bolt. I got out of my chair and closed the door behind me.
I drove over to Roslyn to see how Willie was doing on the surveillance system in the parking garage. Almost done. We took a break for dinner at the pizza joint. I had my phone on the table and studied the feed from the Graftons’ building while we waited for the pizza and sipped beer. “I watched it four hours today,” Willie said. “About a hundred bucks’ worth, before taxes.”
When I had had enough I pocketed the phone. After we finished eating, Willie didn’t reach for his check. I remarked on that.
“Hey, man,” he said, deadpan, “you got a big expense account and a wallet full of fake credit cards. Stick it to Uncle Sam.”
“Yeah.”
“This is pretty good pizza.”
“Health food.”
“I had the all-meat for lunch. I paid for that.”
I paid both our tabs, left him there and headed home.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Tragically, making war may be what humans do best.
The place where they parked the van wasn’t ideal. They were sitting beside a fence on a narrow lane of asphalt, in dry-land farm country fifteen miles north of Denver International Airport. Frank and Joe — not their real names — were assembling the drone in the back of the van. Cheech, a nom de guerre that he had chosen, was outside with the hood up, apparently tinkering. Chong — he picked his name too, after Cheech had his, so none of the men he worked with would know his real name — was the man in charge, and he sat in the passenger seat with a handheld aviation radio.
He glanced again at his watch. They had about an hour to wait, if he had all this timed correctly. Another passenger jet went overhead, about four thousand feet above them, heading for the airport. They came in more or less an endless stream, about two a minute.
He turned the frequency knob on the radio to 125.6, the Automatic Terminal Information Service, and adjusted the volume control. “Denver Airport Information Foxtrot. Temperature one-seven. Dewpoint, three. Check density altitude. Overcast at fifteen thousand, visibility seven miles. Wind two-two-zero at twelve, variable fifteen, gusts to twenty. Landing Runways One Seven Left, One Seven Right, One Six Left, and One Six Right. Altimeter two-niner-niner-eight…”
Chong switched the radio to 119.3, Denver Approach. “Denver Approach, United Four Two Eight, at Anchor at flight level one-nine-zero with information Foxtrot.” Anchor was a published GPS waypoint.
“United Four Two Eight, Ident.”
There was a pause.
“United Four Two Eight, I have you in radar contact. Proceed Kippr”—another waypoint—“and cross at one-one-thousand. You are cleared for the approach ILS One Seven Right.” ILS meant Instrument Landing System, a precision instrument approach, which was routinely used even in good weather.
Now came the read-back, which ensured the pilots of the approaching plane had heard and understood their instructions. “Four Two Eight, direct Kippr and cross at one-one-thousand. ILS One Seven Right.”
Chong turned down the volume and glanced behind him. Frank and Joe had the drone assembled and were testing it in the back of the van.
The bird was an AeroVironment RQ-11 Raven, a hand-launched remote-control drone. This one had been extensively modified and weighed 5.2 pounds, a pound more than the Raven in military service. It carried the usual CCD color video camera and a small, specially constructed bomb. The bomb weighed fourteen ounces and its attaching hardware, detonator and receiver two more ounces.
The Raven had a pusher prop powered by an electric motor. Power for the motor, sensor and controls came from a lithium ion battery. This particular bird was the Digital Data Link version, one of the newer ones. AeroVironment had manufactured and sold to American and allied forces over twenty-four thousand of the things at last count. This Raven had been purchased from a Spanish army major in Barcelona who had no idea who the buyers were or what they intended to use it for. Nor did he care. He was paid ten thousand euros, enough to save his house from foreclosure, and that was enough for him. He reported the Raven and its control box destroyed in a storage shed fire that he set himself. There was no investigation.
Chong consulted the map of the Denver airport on his lap as Denver Approach instructed the next plane to fly the ILS approach to runway One Seven Right. DIA had four parallel runways, 16 Left and Right, and 17 Left and Right, so there was no way to pre-position the Raven until they knew which runway the target plane was assigned.
The Raven had its limitations. The airport approach corridor was four miles wide, and the drone flew slowly. Its cruising and climb speed was about thirty-five miles per hour, a bit faster in a dive. And it would have to climb five thousand feet here, up to ten thousand feet above sea level, where it would be fighting that wind from the southwest, which would probably be stronger at altitude. It might make thirty to thirty-five miles per hour in the climb, which would take a bit over six minutes from launch. Then it would have to be positioned southwest of the interception point so it could make its run-in in a descent, at max speed.
The timing had to be exquisite.
The color camera hung on gimbels under the nose of the craft. The gimbels on this one had been modified so that instead of looking down, the camera could look five degrees above level at max elevation. Still, to see the coming airplane and intercept it, the Raven would have to be higher than the plane. The video from the camera was displayed on a laptop computer, which was interfaced with the drone controller.
“We’re ready,” Frank said.
Chong looked at his watch. Watched the second hand sweep. Listened to the radio chatter, waiting …
“United Four Two Eight at Kippr at one-one-thousand inbound.”