He’d learned that from his friend, President Abramovich, from the stories of his early days in the KGB, when he had worked in punitive psychiatry, learning how to manipulate and defeat people with drugs. After all, why would that wealth of knowledge be limited to Abramovich’s use? Or to Russia’s? He could definitely use it in his business. Although he’d been on the Global Fortune 50 list for some time now, that wasn’t even close to being enough. It was never going to be enough.
After careful planning and precise delivery mechanisms, tested in the field on a vast number of unsuspecting subjects in all kinds of environments, he could rule the world. His business opponents could make some bad decisions, driven by an unexplained surge in one brain chemical or a drop in another, and he'd be there, watching, waiting, ready to reap the benefits. They could feel overly aggressive and competitive in purchasing an asset, paying to the seller — Myatlev, who else — two, three times the fair market value. They could suddenly feel weak and demotivated when bidding against one of Myatlev’s many global corporations about contracts worth billions of dollars.
That's why the formulations had to be precise, and work with accuracy. It had to gain him control. Random violence, as they had on the latest failed test, the one that left an entire offshore drilling platform covered in blood, gave him nothing.
…25
Spring in southern California is pure paradise. Not too hot, clear blue sky, and the air is filled with a multitude of scents from flowering bushes and trees, especially from citrus trees that bloom about this time. Tom’s backyard had several lemon and orange trees at the peak of their flowering season. Yet somehow, all that serene beauty failed to register in Alex’s brain, occupied at full capacity with the search for the impossible.
The thought that the lives of 441 people could be in her hands kept her going on adrenaline, in a desperate race against time and against all odds. It had already been seven days since they’d gone missing. They were definitely in distress, if even still alive. And what progress had they made? Little, if any. She was getting desperate. She stomped her leg impatiently, annoyed at the time she was wasting on food, on the “at least one hot meal a day” rule that the Isaacs had put in place.
“All right, guys, bring your plates,” Tom called from near the grill.
Alex jumped from her patio chair and grabbed a plate on her way.
“What’s cooking?” she asked.
“Just cheeseburgers, nothing fancy this time,” Tom replied. “Claire is bringing some fries.”
She liked her burger naked, no bun, but with all the trimmings. She grabbed hers from the grill, paired it with a couple of slices of bacon, and made room for Sam, who’d just arrived.
“So good to have you here, Sam,” she said, after hugging him and kissing him on his clean-shaven head. “I need you badly on this case; I need you to keep me true, and give me some more ideas.”
“Happy to oblige,” Sam replied. “Tom’s home looks more and more like a hotel. Sorry for the imposition!”
“Ah, no worries,” Tom replied. “Claire and I love a full house. We just wish it could have been under better circumstances, that’s all.”
Steve was next in line, and grabbed his burger quickly, without saying a word. Blake was last, hesitant, wearing his shoulders hunched forward and his head lowered.
“I’m not really hungry, you know,” Blake said. His voice and his entire demeanor showed the turmoil he was going through. Time was slipping by, and little progress was being made. He must have felt desperate, painfully aware of every minute they spent away from the war room, of every minute his wife remained missing.
They took their seats at the table, and Lou brought everyone cold drinks from the fridge.
“OK, we are severely pressed for time,” Alex said between bites, “so I will ask you to make this a working lunch.”
Everyone nodded or mumbled approvals, so she continued.
“Why would I hijack a plane? We sort of talked through that; I don’t think any new ideas have surfaced. But where would I take it? I think if we can answer that question, we have a better chance to find it. A 747–400 is a huge plane. Mr. Murphy told me it needs two miles of runway to land or take off. That is not easy to find outside of commercial airports. Thoughts?”
Sam wiped his mouth quickly and set his napkin down on the glass patio table.
“There are strategic highways out there. Many countries have them, including ours. These are stretches of straight highway with removable median barriers. Most of us have driven on these strategic highways and thought nothing of it. But, if need be, that median barrier goes away, and the highway becomes a landing strip for aircraft of any size.”
She felt frustration take over. With this case, whenever she thought she had a way to zero in on that plane’s location, someone would say something, or something would happen to kill every bit of hope.
“You’re frowning at your burger,” Tom said. “It can’t be that bad, I hope.”
“No, the burger’s fine, Tom, I’m just frustrated, that’s all. I thought we had a way to find potential landing sites, and, apparently we don’t.”
Blake’s eyes clouded a little more.
“How? How were you thinking to find those landing sites?” Steve asked.
“By satellite. These things you can see through satellite imagery. By the way, why aren’t the airlines using satellites to find the missing planes?”
“Satellites are most often already spoken for, and hugely expensive,” Lou replied. “There’s little-to-no satellite bandwidth available for such searches, which could be very demanding on resources. Airlines should have their own satellites they could reroute and search, but they don’t. However, don’t despair. Your idea is still good. Very few highways outside of the United States have such long stretches of straight, double-lane highways. You could spot those easily from above. I think I could code something that would scan imagery to find that. All we need is relatively new imagery, and I think we’re set there, with Google Maps.”
“Those images could be years old,” Alex said. “But that’s a great idea, Lou!”
“Maybe not so old. I read somewhere that most images on Google Maps are less than three years old. Not ideal, I know, but it’s there, readily available, ripe for scanning and comparing. I’ll put something together after lunch, see what kind of image-pattern recognition software I can find and adapt. Maybe the boys have written something recently that we could use,” he added, referring to his group of white-hat hackers and close friends.
“Jeez, I feel old and obsolete,” Sam said toward Tom. “These kids are talking mumbo-jumbo again. I can barely keep up.”
Tom nodded and replied, “I know exactly how you feel, my friend.”
“We’re just saying we could scan existing satellite imagery to find stretches of highway, that’s all,” Alex clarified. “If the imagery is not older than a couple of years, we could hope to capture 90 percent or so of the potential landing strips out there that could land a Boeing.”
“What will that do for us?” Blake asked. “What are you hoping to achieve?”
The answer seemed fairly obvious, but she saw more in Blake’s question.
“I’m hoping to eliminate where the plane can’t be,” she replied in a gentle tone of voice. “Sometimes, when you can’t find out directly where things are, you can apply a process of elimination.”
“Where would you start looking?” Blake asked again.