“Roger, Four Two Eight. Switch Tower on one-three-three-point-three.”
Eight and a half minutes from the Anchor fix.
Chong lit a cigarette and stared at the road running away in front of the van. Uh-oh. Here came a pickup. He used binoculars. Farm vehicle. Driver, no passengers. Looked like one large round hay bale in the bed of the thing.
As the radio chattered on, he watched the truck approach. It didn’t slacken speed, merely moved over a bit and went cruising by. Hispanic driver. No muffler.
Chong swung the binoculars. No one in sight in the fields to the left or right. There was a mobile home about a mile away to the left, but the yard was empty of people. Two vehicles there. They hadn’t moved in the last hour. He checked the mirror on his door frame. Only the farm truck in sight, going away along the prairie road.
“Denver Approach, Air Force One at Anchor at Flight Level one-nine-zero with information Foxtrot.”
“Roger Air Force One. Squawk Ident … Ident received. Radar Contact. Cross Kippr at one-one-thousand. You are cleared for the ILS Runway One Seven Right approach.”
“This is it,” Chong said to Frank and Joe. “One Seven Right. Launch it.” He reset the timer on his watch and watched the second hand begin to sweep again.
Frank and Joe opened the cargo door and got out. Joe was handed the Raven. Frank played a moment with the control box, which was about the size of a video game controller and was wired to an antenna that was stuck to the roof of the van with a suction cup. The genius of the Raven design was that all the microchips and processors that made the thing a stealth observation platform were housed in the controller, not the drone. The bird was too small for most radars to acquire and nearly silent. It was essentially undetectable at altitude when airborne, an invisible eye in the sky. Today the controller was augmented with a laptop, which was programmed with waypoints and a flight plan.
Joe took five steps away from the van, turned to face the wind. The prop on the Raven spun up. Joe waited until Frank yelled, “Ready,” then he tossed the Raven into the wind. It climbed away quickly and was soon merely a tiny dot against the dirty gray sky. Then it was lost from sight.
The radio continued to chatter. “Frontier One Nine, hold at Anchor at Flight Level two-three-zero as published. Expected approach time four-nine after the hour.”
“Is this that NOTAM closure?”
“Affirm. Advise when in holding…”
Apparently the FBI had gotten Grafton’s memo; I had no trouble carrying my gun through security at the Hoover Building. In fact, after I showed my CIA ID, I was escorted around the metal detector and straight to a conference room on the fifth floor. My escort, a young man of about twenty-four or — five years of age, looked bored. He asked me no questions at all, merely sat and played with his iPhone until a plump woman in her fifties came in carrying several paper files.
She laid them on the desk in front of me.
“I kinda thought all this would be on a computer,” I said.
“We’re trying, but not yet.”
“Okay.”
She sat down across the table from me. With two sets of eyeballs on me, it was going to be difficult to filch anything, if I got the urge.
Well, Zoe Kerry hadn’t been lying. Born in Columbus, Ohio, the daughter of a midlevel retail executive and his schoolteacher wife. Majored in accounting at Ohio State. Passed her CPA exam. Joined the FBI eleven months later. They did an extensive background investigation before ordering her to the FBI school at Quantico: It looked like the usual drivel. Her neighbors and high school teachers liked her. Her brother they liked not so much. He had gotten in trouble several times as a kid, didn’t go to college, had a couple of DUIs. Was unemployed as of the date of the last interview. I wondered what he was doing now.
Her shooting scores at Quantico raised my eyebrows. They were excellent. So were her classroom grades. She sailed through the obstacle course and did well at the cross-country. Graduated in the top quarter of her class. Bully for her.
The second file held Kerry’s record at the FBI, ten years’ worth. Assignments. She did five years in New York, then four in San Francisco. Then back to DC. Evals, lie detector test results (they gave them annually now to everybody, apparently), even expense account claims and amounts allowed. Promotions … I settled in to read her performance evaluations as the gray-haired lady watched me like a hawk. The young stud was playing a computer game on his iPhone.
The shootouts were six months apart in San Fran. She had been assigned to the antiespionage task force there. There were references to file numbers. A fellow agent, male, was killed in the first one, and she dropped the villain, a suspected Chinese agent. In the second one, a civilian bystander was killed, and Kerry killed the gunman, also a suspected Chinese spy, a mole at Apple Computer. Given temp leave after each shooting, she was cleared to return to duty by the psychologist after the first shootout, but after the second she was sent to Washington for further evaluation. No mention of what that psychologist found or recommended. Presumably Zoe Kerry came to us from there.
I reached for a notepad in front of me and jotted down the file numbers of her shooting scrapes. Then I tore off the top sheet and passed the slip of paper to the watching hawk.
“I’d like to see these files, please.”
“Are you done with those in front of you?”
“Yes, thank you.”
She picked them up and left the room.
The game player yawned. I looked at my watch. I had been reading this stuff for an hour and a half. I wondered how long it would take for Zoe Kerry to read all the crap in my files at the CIA, which were, I assumed, digitized now.
Ten minutes passed. My escort was still on his iPhone. I reached for the notepad and tore off the top sheet. Wrote down Kerry’s address and Social Security number and birthday on the bottom, below the place that held the impressions of the file numbers. Folded the sheet and put it in my pocket.
Another ten minutes passed. It was getting along toward eleven o’clock. The door opened and a Type A individual in a natty dark gray suit and power tie strode into the room. My escort snapped to attention.
He walked over to me and stuck his hand out. “Tommy Carmellini? I’m George Washington Lansdown, special agent in charge of records.”
I rose to my feet. I was about three inches taller than Lansdown, and I saw a fleeting expression of irritation cross his features. He was accustomed to being the biggest stud in the room. We pumped hands. “Pleased to meet you.”
“I’m afraid the files you asked to see are ongoing investigations,” Lansdown stated, not a bit apologetic as he looked up into my shifty spook eyes. “Department regulations do not allow us to share those files with other agencies. Not only are they sensitive, they contain investigative notes that may or may not be true that could impact innocent individuals. And, of course, unauthorized disclosure might adversely impact successful prosecution of the guilty.”
I refrained from commenting that I wasn’t going to mention a word of anything in their hush-hush files except to my boss, the acting director, but refrained. A comment like that would merely bounce off Lansdown. Obviously, it was going to take more horsepower than I had to induce the FBI to share.
“Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Lansdown. I’ll pass your comment along to my boss, the acting director, Admiral Grafton.”
Lansdown wasn’t going to waste another minute on me. “Escort him out of the building,” he said to my guard, then nodded once in my general direction and strode out.
I followed my handler like a good dog.
Chong found it impossible to stay in the van. He got out and looked in the side door at Frank and Joe huddled over the screen of the laptop studying the readouts. Chong looked at the picture on the video screen, a transmission from the color video camera in the Raven, held the radio close to his ear and waited. The drone was now level at ten thousand feet on the altimeter, flying upwind at a stately fifteen knots groundspeed.