The Ghost Pattern (10 page)

...25

...Wednesday, May 4, 1:09PM PDT (UTC-7:00 hours)

...Tom Isaac’s Residence

...Laguna Beach, California

...Seven Days Missing

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.

“We know what kind of fuel reserves this plane had when it took off. That allows us to calculate a range, and apply that circular range over the map, centered in Tokyo. Essentially, we draw a circle on the map with a radius equal to the plane’s range, and eliminate everything blue water.”

“Why centered in Tokyo?” Sam asked. “They flew due northeast for a few hours toward San Francisco before falling off the radar.”

“Yes, but Mr. Murphy, the expert who came in yesterday to answer some questions for us, told us that you can pull off this type of hijacking by switching transponder codes between two aircraft. We have no way of knowing where or when that happened, so we’re going with the most conservative scenario, expanding our search area inland by several hundred miles.”

Blake covered his face with his hands and whispered, “This is a needle in a haystack!”

Alex sprung from her chair and went over to him, touching his shoulder. “Don’t despair. Please. I know it’s hard. It’s already been a week since they disappeared, I know, but guess what? The more we work on this, the more I see hijacking as a viable possibility, as opposed to a mid-ocean crash. There’s hope, Blake. We will find her, I promise.”

She searched her soul a little after making the promise. Did she really believe they could find the plane everyone else assumed had crashed at sea? Yes, she did. It was crazy, illogical, and yet she knew in her gut that V was somehow behind it. Why? She still didn’t know.

The fact that everyone avoided mentioning was that any chance to find Adeline alive dropped dramatically with every day, with every hour that went by. They all knew that, but never spoke of it. They all worked around the clock, living mostly off coffee and burgers, in a desperate race against time. Time was in the hands of her unseen enemy, a massive advantage on his part—441 lives…

She refocused on Blake, whose desperation and sadness were engulfing him like a shroud.

“I wanted to ask you, do you know of anyone who’d want to harm you or Adeline?”

“I don’t know…there could be.”

“Motivated enough to pull this off? With means to pull this off?”

“I–I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“Have we heard anything about any ransom or political demands? I guess not,” she continued. “Which makes scenario three the most plausible, and Sam, that’s why I needed you here.”

“Scenario three?” Sam asked.

“Yes. I am thinking V might be behind this. I don’t know why, but it just feels right. After all, if that plane is anywhere other than the bottom of the ocean, then it’s in Russia.”

Silence fell around the patio table covered with half-empty plates.

“What’s he after?” Sam asked quietly.

“Don’t know yet, and don’t think I haven’t been trying to figure that out,” she replied angrily, almost snapping at him and instantly regretting it. “But if V is indeed behind this, prepare yourselves.” She paused a little, in an effort to calm herself. After all, it wasn’t Sam’s fault for asking. Whenever she thought of V, she just got angry—angry at herself for not being able to nail that sick bastard, angry at her own ineffectiveness, her failure.

She took a deep breath, and then continued, “Lou is still processing deep backgrounds on all passengers. My guess is that will tell us what he’s trying to pull this time.”

“And satellite imagery analysis?” Blake said, with a shred of panic in his voice. “When can you do that?”

“Backgrounds are processing as we speak,” Lou answered in a pacifying tone. “I wrote some code that does that. It should finish running by late tonight or tomorrow morning, all 441 people onboard that aircraft. We’ll know everything, from call and data usage patterns, to financials, professional information, family issues, everything.”

“But don’t worry, we will proceed with all three scenarios,” Alex added, causing Sam to frown a little. “There’s something else, guys. We need to figure out how to get our hands on some satellite time. Images that are a couple of years old might be a good start, but I need fresh imagery. I’m thinking that if we look real hard from the satellite, with one of Lou’s pattern-recognition modules running, we could find the actual plane.”

...26

...Thursday, May 5, 4:47PM Local Time (UTC+10:00 hours)

...Undisclosed Location

...Russia

...Eight Days Missing

Dr. Adenauer’s mind wandered back to the place of his birth, and the disappeared loved ones in his family. He was born in 1963 in rural West Germany, in a small town called Marl, close enough to Dusseldorf to be modern, remote enough to be picturesque and serene. The youngest in a family still recovering from the wounds of war, and still mourning its dead and missing, Theo had very little to be joyful about in his early years. But the most poignant of memories, the one still haunting his thoughts and nightmares, was the memory of his sister, Helga.

Ten years his senior, Helga entered the whirlwind of bipolar affective disorder with the onset of puberty, just when Theo was starting to be old enough to understand and remember. Of course, there was little to understand at first, when he was just a pre-teen, and Helga’s mood swings left him crying and confused, unable to comprehend why his big sister, playful and fun just the day before, could turn into an angry monster, lashing out with words that hurt worse than fist blows.

With time, his parents explained what was going on. They told him that her mean words, crying spells, and bad behavior were not her fault; she was sick. Theo understood, and became committed to helping her. He suddenly realized, about the time that he entered puberty, what he was meant to do with his life. He would become a doctor, a great one, who could cure his sister and end the constant suffering of his family.

He studied hard, and worked desperately to understand everything that he could about the human brain. Since high school, he’d started devouring any book or medical publication he could get his hands on, absorbing, learning, analyzing.

He was admitted to the Universität Düsseldorf in 1981, and his grades gave him recognition from the dean and from his professors. Some took an interest in the highly motivated young man who had the most interesting questions about brain chemistry, about chemical imbalances in the brain, and about understanding the deep synergies among complex psychotropic drugs used in controlled combinations.

He still had a few weeks left before graduation when Helga jumped in front of a train, ending her desperation-filled days just before Theo could return home and help her.

He went home to Marl and mourned with his grief-stricken parents, not in the least concerned about the classes he was missing, or about the risk of being expelled. His guilt was tormenting him, eating at him from within. It was his fault that Helga died. He didn’t find the cure fast enough, didn’t graduate quickly enough.

The dean called one morning, when Theo was still spending his time staring into emptiness, at the home of his and Helga’s childhood, and somehow talked him into returning to school. He graduated a couple of months later, and immediately began the research work that had been his mission ever since he could remember.

His academic record brought him a choice of research engagements, and he chose the path that led him closest to what he wanted to do: heal the invisible wounds of the suffering brain. It was too late for Helga, but there were others just like her, others he could still save.

Achievement after achievement, conference after conference, and award after award, his career soared. But he never stopped, and never slowed down. The most remarkable of his achievements, a drug that reduced the risk of suicide by 90 percent in clinically depressed and bipolar patients, had brought him a nomination for the Nobel Prize. He almost missed the news; that was the year his parents died, within a few months of each other.

Sometimes he wondered if he was indeed arrogant, as many had said about him. He didn’t think so. He’d taken hard looks at himself many times, probing for signs of narcissism or other personality disorders, but, in his case, there was no foundation for such concern. It was just value, pure value. His record of achievement supported that, and he was well aware of his own worth. If that happened to come across as arrogance, well, that was unfortunate, but it wasn’t something he was willing to change. His career was nothing to be humble about.

It had been years since he’d wandered down memory lane, remembering Helga, and the things he held most dear in his heart. His commitment to help people. His entire life dedicated to ease the suffering of the chemically imbalanced brain. And now? What was he going to do? Let some terrorists, because that’s what they were, use him to gain access to a weapon meant to
bring
chemical imbalance to the brain? Then how could he live with himself?

Yet there was no easy choice. He could pretend to comply, and deliver weak formulations, as harmless as possible, stalling for as long as he could in the hope that something would eventually happen to free them from their hell. Or he could resist, refuse to deliver, and endanger the lives of hundreds of people.

This wasn’t really a choice.

May God have mercy on my soul…

He stood from his lab chair and rubbed his creased forehead for a little while.

“We’re ready,” he said, showing the other doctors two small containers with capsules.

They gathered around him quickly. Drs. Davis, Fortuin, and Chevalier, who had worked side by side with him, pulled their chairs closer.

“The red ones are a modified, diluted selective serotonin reuptake enhancer. We will tell them they need time to absorb and become effective, to preemptively account for the ineffectiveness of the compound. The green ones are equally diluted SSRIs. They’re just modified, low-dose Prozac essentially.”

He stopped talking and searched their eyes. Many reflected the same anguish he was feeling. Others, only deep sadness for what they were about to do.

“All right,” he said, taking a deep breath, “let’s call them.”

A few minutes after they had informed their omnipresent guard, Dr. Bogdanov entered the lab and took the two containers. Then he switched on a couple of monitors, image feeds from an empty room.

The doctors stood there, watching in silence the screens showing the empty room from different angles. Then the Russians started bringing in the test subjects, ten of them. One by one, they were dragged in there, screaming, pleading, sobbing, manhandled brutally by the guards. One by one, they had their mouths forced open and the capsules shoved down their throats. One by one, they chocked, fought, scratched at the strong arms holding them down, and had no option but to swallow the drugs. Then one by one, they settled down, sobbing quietly, fear and desperation engraved deeply on their weary faces.