Changeling (9 page)

Sydney, Australia

If there was
one thing Professor had learned during his time in uniform, it was that, no matter the location, branch of service or flag they flew, military bases were all pretty much the same. It wasn’t a physical similarity, though block construction and grim utilitarian uniformity were a constant, but rather something less tangible. He couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was, but Royal Australian Air Force Base Richmond on the outskirts of Sydney was no exception.

Even before getting past the main gate, as he waited beside his rental car for his bona fides to be checked and his visitor’s pass to be issued, Professor felt like he had been transported back in time twenty years to when he was a freshly scrubbed swabbie arriving at Coronado to begin Basic Underwater Demolitions/SEAL training. He found himself automatically checking the rank of every Aussie airmen that passed by, separating officers from enlisted like he used to do in the old days, just in case a salute was required. He had to fight the urge to stand at parade rest.

The airmen manning the gate handed him a clip-on pass and supplied instructions on how to find the ad hoc command center where the ongoing search for Flight 815 was being coordinated. Although the Australian Transportation Safety Bureau was the lead agency, there were more than a dozen different organizations—military, civilian, and private—and hundreds of aircraft looking for the plane, which made the RAAF base the ideal hub from which to oversee the effort.

Professor was posing as an FBI counter-terrorism consultant, on loan to the Australian government. The cover was vaguely defined, just official enough to allow him to hang out at the fringes of the search, ask a lot of questions, and get a feel for what had really happened. He did not expect to do any actual consulting, but if there was information being withheld from the public, something that provided a more concrete link to Roche’s murder, he had to find it. He had opted for casual attire—chinos and a navy blue polo shirt—but thought his Explorer fedora might set the wrong tone. It stayed in the rental car.

He decided to begin his search by introducing himself to ATSB operations manager Steven Sousa, the man in charge, notionally at least, but despite the fact that he had both emailed ahead to make an appointment and called to confirm, Sousa was nowhere to be found. The ATSB office was all but deserted. The lone agent manning the phones answered Professor’s inquiries about Sousa’s whereabouts with a shrug, which left him little choice but to park himself in a chair outside the office and wait.

Sousa arrived two hours later, a stout balding man with a haggard expression but a determined carriage. He brushed past Professor and went straight into the office where he immediately began making a phone call. Professor slipped in behind him and took a seat in front of the desk. Sousa acknowledged his presence with an irritated frown, but continued with his phone call—which mostly consisted of “No, sir. Not yet, sir” delivered with an almost stereotypically thick Aussie accent—as if Professor were not even there.

Finally, after a promise of “right away, sir,” Sousa hung up and leaned across his desk. “Let’s hear it.”

Professor offered a cordial smile and proffered his bogus credential pack. “I’m Chapman. FBI counter-terrorism.”

“Great. Another seppo.”

It did not sound like a question so Professor let it go. “I’ve got some questions I need answered and then I’ll be out of your ha… errr, your way.”

Sousa let out a noncommittal grunt. “Fine. Ask your questions. Hope you don’t mind if I keep working.” He reached for a stack of papers and began leafing through them.

The man’s recalcitrant attitude was the main reason Professor had not simply conducted this interview by phone. Getting anything useful out Sousa was going to be like pulling teeth. He decided to push back a little. “We’re on the same team, Sousa. I’m not here to piss on your hubcaps. As soon as I get what I came for, I’m gone. How long that will take is up to you.”

Sousa glared at him for a moment then tossed the papers down and folded his arms across his chest. “Go on.”

Professor took out a notepad and pen. “For starters, why don’t you tell me exactly what happened. I’ve heard what the news media are saying, and just about every crazy conspiracy theory imaginable. Now I want to hear it from you. What really happened to that plane?”

“What happened is that the plane bloody vanished.”

Professor’s pen remained poised above the page, but he said nothing.

Sousa sighed. “The aircraft took off from SYD at 0958. It’s a daily flight, originating here, not a turnaround, so the plane received a thorough maintenance evaluation before departure. Not so much as a loose nut anywhere on that bird. The flight left on time, and everything was fine until it wasn’t.”

Professor had just started writing, but stopped at the cryptic comment. “What does that mean?”

Sousa gave him a hard look. “You know anything about how airplanes work?”

“I understand principles of lift and aerodynamics, if that’s what you mean.”

“It’s not.” Another sigh. “I’m talking about the air traffic control system. People watch movies and they get this idea that ATC is like some kind of computer game, with a great big screen and little lights that show the exact location of every aircraft in the sky.”

“It’s not?”

“At any given moment, there are close to seven thousand commercial flights in the sky worldwide. There are more than a thousand different air carriers, and a lot of them are flying old birds that haven’t been fully upgraded with the latest bells and whistles. Air traffic control has to manage all of them, and the only way to do that is with radar and radio navigation. Both of those rely on line of sight, which isn’t terribly useful a thousand miles out over the Pacific Ocean. There are a lot of gaps in radar coverage. Planes aren’t tracked in real time. Sometimes, we don’t know there’s a problem until a plane fails to show up, or misses a scheduled check-in. What we know about this plane is that they reported in right on schedule for the first three hours or so, and then…nothing.”

“So the crew did not report any problems.”

“Not a peep. The odds are that this was a mechanical failure, not a deliberate act, but we won’t know what happened on that aircraft until we find it. So while I understand that you have a job to do, Agent Chapman, you’re just pissing into the wind.”

Professor didn’t back down. “And why haven’t you found it?”

“Didn’t you hear what I said? We don’t track these planes in real time so we don’t know where it went down.”

“But that particular plane was equipped with both a radio transponder and a GPS locator, right? I heard those systems were shut down by someone on the plane.”

Sousa sighed again as if weary of answering these particular questions. “If the aircraft experienced a major failure, like a fire in the electrical bay, those systems would have been disabled along with the radio. That doesn’t mean someone aboard intentionally shut them off.”

“Okay what about the black box? That’s supposed to be indestructible, right?”

“The cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder are designed to survive a crash, and yes, they do broadcast a 37.5 kilohertz locator ping, at least until the batteries die. Right now, search vessels are deployed in the projected crash area listening for that signal, but in case you haven’t looked at a map lately, it’s a big bloody ocean.”

“If the plane’s disappearance was a deliberate act,” Professor said, “say, an act of terrorism, it might have deviated from its course. A difference of even a few degrees would put it thousands of miles from where you’re looking. That would explain why you haven’t found it, right? I’d say that’s a pretty compelling reason to at least investigate the possibility that this was an act of terrorism.”

Sousa rolled his eyes. “I thought you wanted to know what really happened.”

“What makes you so sure this wasn’t a deliberate act?”

“Occam’s Razor. Look, if the aircraft broke up suddenly in mid-flight, whether because of a bomb or a system failure, we probably would have found the wreckage by now. That means that the plane continued to fly after the communications system went down. Here’s my theory. A fire in the E and E bay—that’s Electronics and Equipment—takes out the radios and the cockpit fills with smoke. Captain Norris is unable to send a distress call, so he immediately changes course, looking for the nearest place to set down, but the flight crew, and probably everyone else aboard, is overcome by the smoke and the plane keeps flying with no one at the stick until it runs out of fuel and crashes into the ocean. It’s happened before.”

Sousa’s expertise was eroding the foundation of the assumption that had brought Professor to the opposite side of the world, but there was something he knew that Sousa did not. “What if I told you there was credible intelligence indicating that one or more of the passengers on that plane had been specifically targeted for assassination?”

Sousa remained unmoved. “You aren’t hearing me, Agent Chapman. The plane was not destroyed along its flight path, which means that someone manually changed course. Only the flight crew could have done that.”

“The 9-11 hijackers took flying lessons.”

“If anyone had attempted to take over that plane, the captain would have immediately sent a distress call. The same goes for a passenger trying to sabotage the plane.”

“What about the crew? Maybe one of them was the perpetrator. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“We’ve already looked into that. Captain Norris and First Officer Carrera had impeccable records and no ties whatsoever to extremist groups. We’ve even done voice stress analysis of the recorded radio transmissions. There’s nothing at all to indicate that either one of them was suicidal or under coercion. No, I’m sorry. The simplest solution is almost certainly the correct one. All the evidence points to this being an accident. A tragedy to be sure, but not a crime.”

Professor’s certitude began to crack apart like thin ice. He had made the same mistake as Roche and Jeremiah Stillman and all the other kooks who saw conspiracies in every coincidence. Maybe Sousa was right.

“Can I ask you a question, Agent Chapman?”

It took Professor a moment to process Sousa’s request. He met the other man’s gaze and nodded.

“Who?”

Professor blinked. “I’m sorry?”

“You said you had credible intelligence.” An odd gleam, more than mere curiosity, had entered Sousa’s dark eyes. Professor thought he looked like a cat contemplating a goldfish in a bowl. “I’ve become intimately familiar with ever name on the manifest of that aircraft. There were no red flags. Who was being targeted?”

“It’s not something I can talk about just yet,” Professor said with a tight smile. “Besides, you’re probably right. It’s most likely a dead end.”

Sousa regarded him a moment longer, then laid his palms flat on his desk. “You got what you need here?”

A low buzzing in Professor’s pocket signaled an incoming text message. He resisted the urge to check it immediately. “I’d like to talk to a few more people. Get a broader perspective. Like I said, I don’t want to be in the way. I just want my report to reflect that I did my job. Can you point me in the right direction?”

“I’ll make a list,” Sousa said. His tone was indifferent but the glimmer had not faded from his eyes. “You know, if you really want to understand what’s going on here, you should get your hands dirty.”

“Meaning what exactly?”

“There’s an Orion leaving in about an hour. A search plane.”

Professor knew what an Orion was. The venerable Lockheed P-3 Orion was a four-engine turboprop anti-submarine/surveillance aircraft, developed in 1959 but still in service throughout the world.

“You should ride along,” Sousa continued. “Talk to the men who are actually out there looking. Besides, I can’t think of a better way to get a broader perspective than looking down from a search aircraft over a hundred thousand square miles of open water.”

Before Professor could respond, his phone buzzed again, another message or perhaps a reminder for the first. He dug it out and glanced at the notification, a single message from Tam Broderick: “Did you see this???” followed by a truncated Internet URL.

It was not Tam Broderick’s style to forward funny cat videos.

He rose from his chair. “I’ll get back to you on that, Mr. Sousa. Right now, I need to take this.”

Sousa rose as well and moved toward the door while Professor tapped his screen to see what Tam had sent him. The URL directed him to a familiar website, the Crescent Defense League’s “Enemies of Islam” page. The page had been updated since his last visit. There was a new name on the CDL hit list.

Frigid adrenaline surged through Professor’s veins.

Jade
.

The picture of her was a recent one, taken in Peru, probably a production still from the
Alien Explorers
website. Underneath, a short article outlined the reason Jade Ihara was considered an enemy to the faith, which mostly boiled down to her alleged collusion with Gerald Roche, in the pursuit of spurious evidence to support the “lie” that the Prophet Muhammad never existed.

While the article did not explicitly call for violence against Jade, the implicit message was hard to miss. Enemies of Islam like Roche and Jade needed to be silenced.