She scribbled on a sticky note, “Verify flight path,” and then stuck it on the whiteboard. Then she took a handful of red pins, put one in Tokyo, a second pin where the plane was last seen on Tokyo ATC radar, and another one at the coordinates where the plane had presumably crashed. The last red dot was a little south of the designated flight route, causing her to frown.
“Lou? How sure can we be of these flight routes, or even the crash coordinates?”
“Huh? Not 100 percent, that’s for sure. Let me poke around a little in Universal Air’s servers, see what I can find.”
“I want to understand how they came up with those coordinates for the crash. They didn’t find any wreckage there, right? So… what are we missing? Is it a projected point based on the last confirmed set of coordinates?” She clenched her fists and stuck them firmly on her hips, and ground her teeth, letting out a groan of frustration. The she started pacing the little room, absently avoiding table corners and chairs. “Shit… there’s so much we don’t know about these planes. We have more questions than answers.”
The door opened and Tom walked in, carrying a tray with coffee and cookies, followed by Blake.
“I come bearing treats and bringing friends,” Tom started to say, then abruptly changed his tone and subject. “How can you guys breathe in here? Steve, crack open that window, will you? Whew!”
Alex turned and gave Blake a scrutinizing look. He looked a little better, some of the despair in his eyes having been replaced with a shred of hope. He wore one of Tom’s checked shirts, a complete departure from his typical dress style.
“Blake, are you sure you want to be here for this? It could get difficult for you to hear.” Alex asked, a little worried.
“Yes, Alex, please. Don’t shut me out. I’d go crazy.”
“OK, that’s understandable,” she replied, then turned her back to all of them and started analyzing the map.
How is a plane’s position tracked from ground control? Lamely, she thought, remembering her conversation with Claire about the need for planes to have GPS tracking and a sensor array at least at the level of those installed in common vehicles. Lamely or not, but how?
She turned toward the team, and saw them all seated at the table, with their eyes on her, all except Lou, who typed quickly and quietly on his laptop’s keyboard.
She took a sip of steaming coffee, a Turkish recipe Claire liked to make, brewed over an open flame. It was poignant and strong, and made to wake up the dead, as she liked to say.
“All right, let’s treat this as if it were a murder case — or a kidnapping, not sure yet,” she added quickly with a faint apologetic smile. “We’ll do full victim backgrounds,” she said, then cringed when she saw Blake’s reaction to her choice of words. She corrected herself, “We’ll do full passenger and crew backgrounds, and establish commonalities.”
She took another gulp of coffee, already feeling the effects of Claire’s special brew on her brainpower.
“Let’s talk scenarios,” she said, grabbing the blue dry-erase marker and focusing on the respective column on the whiteboard. “The scenario in which the plane actually crashed in the Pacific doesn’t interest us, so I will write it down here, then cross it out, so we can stop thinking about it.” She stroked through the word “crash” with a thick blue line. “If XA233 really crashed, there’s nothing we can do. So we’ll simply ignore that scenario. Any objections?”
No one said anything. Lou lifted his gaze briefly from his computer screen to signal his quiet approval, while Blake mouthed a silent thank you.
“Then what else do we have?” Alex continued. “If a commercial jet doesn’t make it to the final destination, doesn’t emergency land, and doesn’t crash or explode in mid-flight, there’s only one scenario left.” She wrote a word in all caps on the whiteboard. “HIJACK.”
The room fell completely silent, as if everyone there held their breaths. Lou had stopped typing, and everyone watched her intently.
“Two hijack scenarios I can think of right now,” she added, as she wrote, “for money, and for political reasons.”
“To your point, Alex, could this plane have made an emergency landing somewhere, due to some technical issue?” Steve asked.
Blake shook his head in a silent no.
“Highly unlikely,” Alex replied. “It’s been five days; the crew would have made contact by now. And someone would have communicated the emergency to ground control before landing, wherever that ground would have been.”
“But there’s been no ransom call, right? Do we know for sure?” Steve pressed on. “Officials aren’t exactly open about these things, you know.”
“None that we know about,” Alex replied. “And Lou’s been looking.”
“I’ve been checking the airlines, and talked to some friends in the FBI. There’s nothing that we know of, not a whisper of anything.”
“But there could be some hostage negotiation going on that we don’t know about.”
“If it’s about money, wouldn’t Blake know by now?” Tom asked. “Adeline would have been a prime target in that case, right? I’m sorry, Blake, I didn’t mean—”
“It’s OK, Tom, don’t apologize,” Blake cut him off. “You’re right. And they would have called me, I guess.”
“Then it’s political?” Steve asked. “If it’s political, what would they be looking for?”
“We can’t even formulate that until we know who they are,” Alex said, as she wrote UNSUB on the board, using the abbreviation for unknown subjects common for many law enforcement agencies. “Depending on who the UNSUB are, they could ask for the release of incarcerated terrorists, or the withdrawal of American troops from who knows where. They could be looking for military or diplomatic action against their enemy, and so on. It could be anything. In that case, the officials would keep this matter highly confidential. After all, America doesn’t negotiate with terrorists, remember? The public would be frantic at the thought of sacrificing 441 people to maintain such a statement.”
“Yeah, we’d have no way of knowing,” Tom said. “What do you want to do next?”
“I’m going to ignore what I don’t know, like what they’re looking to gain from the hijacking, and focus on finding them.” She wrote on the whiteboard. “No matter who the UNSUB are, this is a crime, and crimes follow the rule of means-motive-opportunity. We know nothing about motive, so we’ll ignore that for now. Let’s focus on means, the opportunity — how they grabbed it — and then we’ll figure out on why XA233 was the UNSUB’s best opportunity. Why XA233 and not any other plane? What made it special?”
She paced what little room she had in front of the whiteboard, then added, “I’ll need an aviation consultant of sorts, to teach me how someone would be able to hijack a Boeing 747–400 and leave no trace. I want to start focusing on the means, while Lou is deep-diving into everyone’s background to understand the opportunity.”
“Consider it done,” Tom replied. “I’ll find someone ASAP.”
“Thanks,” she said, then she turned toward the map, looking at it intently. She was too close, and the map print was huge, taking almost the entire wall. She took a few steps back, not taking her eyes off the map, and suddenly, her blood froze. “Oh, my God…” she whispered.
“What?” Blake asked, and everyone else locked their eyes onto her.
“What do you see here?” Alex asked, pointing a laser dot onto the main piece of land visible on the map, west and northwest of the flight path.