The Asset (22 page)

MINNEAPOLIS–SAINT PAUL INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

Day 43

W
e're going to get shot,”
Love said.

It was 7:00
A.M.
at the Minneapolis–Saint Paul Airport, and she, Kennedy, and Best were in a rent-by-the-hour conference room in the United Club lounge, gearing up to give Kennedy's new airport-bugging scheme a test run. Love was wearing a fake explosives vest made up of composite material meant to emulate the look and density of real plastic explosives vests confiscated from Al Qaeda agents. Best had two composite pistols strapped to his legs.

They had a lot of ground to cover to finish the final airports that had been left hanging due to the Tad Monty incident—Minneapolis, O'Hare, Midway, Detroit, LaGuardia, Newark, and Boston—and very little time to do it. Alia wanted it finished in three to five days if possible, an aggressive proposition considering the distance between most of the airports and the worsening weather in the Midwest and East Coast.

But Kennedy was having a hard time focusing. The intel Trudeau had sent from Russia had changed the nature of the threat completely. The fact that Lentz had nuclear weapons in large quantities was bad enough. What made it worse was the tone of Trudeau's communication and the fact that he had asked Kennedy to keep his knowledge secret from Alia and the rest of the team. He understood Trudeau's reasoning, and was glad that he'd been entrusted with the information, but the duplicitous nature of the
exchange made him uneasy. What if he found something himself that was related to the intel? How the hell was he going to communicate that to Alia so they could take action?

And the whole notion that politics might come into play at the highest levels of government made his blood run cold. That was exactly how 9/11 had happened. Politics intervened and practically rolled out a red carpet for Osama bin Laden.

“Earth to Kennedy,” Love said. “You with us?”

“You're not going to get shot,” Kennedy reassured her. “I'll step in before things get out of hand. Besides, they're never going to catch you anyway.”

“I can't believe this is going to make it past their scanning gear,” Best said.

“Not only is it going to get past the scanner, but also the explosives swab. Love's vest has bomb-making residue on it, but not from materials they can detect in their outdated system.”

“This just keeps getting better and better,” Love said.

“Won't they see the items on the scanner?” Best asked.

“The vest is shaped like Love's body, so it won't register as a foreign object. The position of the guns will make it very hard for even the best screener to see. These scanners are dialed way down to protect peoples' vanity, so they miss a lot.”

Kennedy's new technique for getting the upgrades done was a sort of soft blackmail job on the TSA chiefs. Instead of telling them he was coming, giving them the chance to alert others and question the visit, he was going to emulate the weapons-smuggling tactics Homeland Red Teams recently used to get 95 percent of their phony contraband past TSA screening checkpoints.

Once he successfully smuggled the weapons in, and the embarrassed TSA chief was finished soiling himself, Kennedy would then generously offer to install the upgrade at no charge, thereby keeping it off the radar screen of Homeland and allowing the TSA chief to avoid getting shit from guys like Tad Monty. Alia thought the plan was brilliant.

“All set,” Best said.

Kennedy inspected their work. Both setups were flawless and there were no wires or metal for the body scanner to pick up and give the agents an argument for accuracy.

MSP was one of the safer airports for him to test-market his idea. The TSA chief, a chain-smoking bureaucrat named Ralph Lee, was a friendly. He wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed, but he and Kennedy played golf once in a while, and he pretty much took whatever Kennedy said as gospel. His assistant was the one Kennedy was worried about. Janet was an insufferable busybody, constantly haranguing Kennedy about paperwork, protocols, and administrative red tape. Kennedy knew how to handle her but was not in the mood.

Best and Love queued up in the checkpoint line while Kennedy watched from the Starbucks on the other side. Love handled herself well. Having been onstage hundreds of times, she knew how to deal with nerves. She made it up to the checkpoint and looked at Kennedy. He nodded with a confident smile and she went through without incident. When she joined him at Starbucks, she looked impressed.

“I guess you are pretty good at this shit, aren't you, you big lug?”

“Let's see how Best does before we start high-fiving,” Kennedy said.

Best made it past the checkpoint with flying colors as well and sat down next to them.

“I don't know if I should be happy or violently ill,” he said.

“Welcome to my world,” Kennedy said and called Ralph Lee.

When Ralph arrived at the Starbucks, he was his usual completely distracted self, dying to get curbside for a cigarette. Kennedy introduced Best and Love and said they'd be happy to join him. Ralph took them through a pass-code door to a loading bay outside the terminal, his unofficial smoking lounge. When Kennedy showed him the hardware Love and Best had just gotten through the checkpoint, he lit the filter end of his cigarette.

“You fucking kidding me?”

“Sorry, man,” Kennedy said.

“Shit!” Ralph practically screamed. “Did Zombieland Security send you?”

“Relax,” Kennedy said. “We're all friends here. They wanted me to run the Red Team test and install a prototype for a new upgrade. I'll tell them you passed.”

“You're my hero, man. I've been in the penalty box since that news report came out. Do whatever you need to do. How long will it take?”

“Fifteen minutes on the outside,” Kennedy said.

“Go now. Before that witch Janet gets back from her third lunch.”

Best worked quickly, adding the upgrade in less than ten minutes, but not fast enough to avoid Janet. She shot across the terminal in her block-heeled army shoes, making a beeline for the checkpoint. Kennedy moved away from it in case she had not yet seen Best, but it was too late.

“Who's that monster?” Love asked.

“The fabled Janet.”

“Shit.”

“Be a dear and disappear,” Kennedy said.

“Roger that,” Love said, taking off.

“Well well well,” Janet snarked as she walked up. “Tad Monty's bitch. You come here for another murder-suicide or just passing through?”

“Janet . . . Always a pleasure.”

She eyeballed Best, who was reinstalling the access panel on the scanner.

“What's he doing?”

“You've read the recent threat reports I assume?”

“I wiped my ass with them, yes.”

“Arresting image. As usual, I'm the only one taking them seriously, so I'm testing a body cavity detection prototype in the millimeter wave scanners.”

She immediately dialed Ralph on her mobile phone and tried to narc on Kennedy, to no avail. She hung up, obviously angry at Ralph's response.

“Janet, it's not going to—”

She got in his face. “Not going to what? Slow us down all day and create an angry mob of passengers we have to deal with after you're long gone?”

Her breath stank of sour white wine. Kennedy knew the bartender at Chili's To-Go, Janet's favorite lunch spot. Earlier that morning, he'd called Andy and told him to give Janet a two-for-one airport employee's special if she came in, which she almost always did. Janet was a notorious lush, and she had predictably taken the bait. From the smell of it, Kennedy estimated she was about four glasses in.

“I'm doing this to increase safety, which should be your concern as well, Janet.”

“Get off your high horse—”

Kennedy theatrically sniffed the air between them. “Whoa. How many glasses, Janet?”

She glared at him. “Excuse me?”

He got closer to her and spoke quietly.

“How many glasses of wine did you have at lunch?”

“It's my friend's birthday,” she lied.

“How many?”

“None of your fucking business.”

“Maybe so, but I'm sure Ralph would consider it his business.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“If Ralph realizes you're intoxicated, he is required by law to fire you. There are no second chances with TSA. Are you going to keep running your mouth so he can smell the birthday party or shag your sorry ass out of here and let me do my job?”

Kennedy had never so much as looked at her wrong in the past, and hearing him say those things shocked her into submission. She stared with her mouth open for a long, uncomfortable moment, her lips twitching to form a retort that never came.

“Tell him your kid is sick and you got called to school to pick him up.”

The mention of her young son quickly snapped her out of it and she practically jogged out of the terminal.

“You're a slick motherfucker,” Love said behind him.

“How long have you been there?” he asked.

“Long enough. You know I got your back.”

SIBERIA

Day 45

T
rudeau huddled next to a
space heater in an abandoned apartment. He was going on almost twenty-four hours of squatting in a block of run-down flats for nickel mine workers. Luckily, the building had central heat because of the families who still lived there, but the empty unit he was able to find had two broken windows, so he'd bought the space heater, along with as much packaged food and water as he could carry, at a local store. He had gotten very lucky and was able to convince his Russian support agent that she would not get disavowed if she came back to save his ass. She had driven him there after the airport cabdrivers refused to take him and he nearly froze to death on the side of the road.

He was about to lose his mind from sleep deprivation when he finally felt his satellite phone buzz in his pocket. He pulled it out with shaking fingers and checked the screen. Sat connection was restored and the phone was downloading hundreds of text messages from Juarez, asking about his status. The last few were Juarez saying he was coming to Norilsk to retrieve him. He had secured a private plane and was going to pick Trudeau up at Valek Airport, a small airstrip nine kilometers northeast of the city. Aly­kel Airport was too dangerous for the extraction. Trudeau was ecstatic. Based on the time the texts were sent, Juarez would be arriving that night. Trudeau rang him.

“Are you all right?” Juarez asked.

Trudeau could hear the drone of airplane engines in the background.

“Tired and freezing, but fine. What's the scenario?”

“Private plane registered as med evac for cancer patients going to Moscow for treatment,” Juarez said. “Strip is a five-mile walk from your location. Better get going.”

Juarez hung up before Trudeau could complain about the fact that it was arctic cold outside. Coming out of the construction site, he checked the street. Empty as a tomb. He jogged to stay warm, his lungs burning from the shock of the frigid air. He was numb all over by the time he made it to the outskirts of Valek Airport. He walked along the edge of the fence, following the map coordinates sent by Juarez and trying to make out anything that remotely resembled an airport in the driving snow, when a Russian military transport vehicle emerged from the mist, its patrol lights scanning the perimeter. Trudeau had nowhere to hide as the vehicle stopped next to him and two soldiers got out.

“Passport,” one of them said sternly in Russian, pointing his assault rifle at Trudeau.

He handed them his cover passport—Norwegian businessman, oil and gas consultant. The soldiers didn't give a shit if he was Mother Teresa. They took one look at the passport and opened the back door to the military vehicle for him.

One of them motioned to the car with his rifle barrel.

Trudeau saw no way out. At least in the truck he would die warm. He got into the backseat and they shut the door, locking it from the outside. Another soldier was on the seat next to him. The soldier who had checked his passport sat in the front passenger seat and turned to address Trudeau, this time in English.

“Sir, we are detaining you for further questioning with Russian military intelligence.”

“What in God's name for?” Trudeau protested.

The soldier next to him punched him hard in the face, breaking his nose. Then he slammed his rifle barrel into Trudeau's stomach, knocking the wind out of him. The soldier in the passenger seat offered him a dirty oil rag for his bloody nose.

“What is the purpose of your visit here?” the soldier asked calmly.

“I'm a businessman,” Trudeau gasped. “Hired by your government. My visa is in my passport case. I demand to be taken to my embassy.”

The soldier next to Trudeau backhanded him, splitting his brow. Blood poured into his eye. Then he hit him in the jaw, knocking him unconscious.