“Glad you finally called,” Max said. “The stuff ’s hit the fan since you went dark.”
“I can imagine. Are you in the op center?”
“Yeah.”
“Have someone pull up the screen for the bi
o tracking chips.”
“Just a second.” There was a moment’s pause. While they waited, Mark used the Pig’s computer to jack into the Oregon’s closed-circuit television system so the image of the futuristic control room popped up on his screen. Max was standing next to the communications station, watching over the duty officer’s shoulder.
“That’s interesting,” Hanley muttered. “I have the three of you heading west at forty miles per hour, presumably in the Powered Investigator Ground, while the Chairman is going northeast at a hundred miles an hour. What happened, you guys get into an argument?”
“Funny. Make sure you stay on him. We’re on our way to the Tunisian border. Juan’s with the people we’re certain brought down the Secretary’s plane. We don’t believe she’s dead.”
“Did you say the plane was brought down?”
“I did, and I don’t think Fiona Katamora was on it when it crashed.”
“How the hell did they pull that off? Tell me in a second. You’d better hightail it out of there. Twenty minutes ago, the Libyans announced that they’ve located the wreckage, and their government has given permission for a team from our NTSB to examine it. They had been prestaged in Cairo and will be in Tripoli by noon, but I’m sure the Libyans will be swarming that area sooner.”
“They’re not going to find anything,” Mark told him. “A team of men came in on a chopper to demolish the site and ruin any chance of a reconstruction. They moved wreckage around, took some away, and smashed up just about everything they could lay their hands on. They even brought a lame camel to lay tracks all over the place.”
“A lame camel?”
“To make it look like nomads had done the damage,” Mark explained.
“Someone’s thinking a couple of steps ahead,” Max grunted.
“Is the NTSB coming to Libya general knowledge?” Linda asked.
“No. Langston told me it was cleared at the highest levels and kept under wraps.”
“That means the tangos have a source in the government if they knew to come back and mess with the wreckage.”
“Or they’re government sponsored,” Max countered. “Mark, you said you don’t think Secretary Katamora was on the plane.”
“There’s pretty convincing evidence that the plane landed in the desert before the crash.”
“You think they took her off?”
“Why else would they land it, take off again, and slam it into a mountaintop? They want the world to think she’s dead.”
“What do they gain by that?”
“Come on, Max,” Linda said. “She’s the damned Secretary of State. She’s either an intelligence coup for these people or the best bargaining chip in history. Remember, she was the last President’s National Security Advisor. If we think she’s dead, we aren’t going to be looking for her. They could extract information from now until doomsday and we’d never be the wiser.”
There was a pause in the conversation as all of them digested the implications of Linda’s theory. The terrorists getting their hands on Fiona Katamora was probably more damaging than if they had kidnapped the President. As a politician only in his first year of office, he was kept away from the operational minutia that went into fighting the war on terror. Because of the positions she’d held over the years, and the insatiable ability of her mind to absorb details, Fiona knew more about America’s ongoing operations and the nation’s plans for the future than the Chief Executive.
“We have to get her back,” Max said.
There was no need to respond to such an obvious statement.
“Is there anything else going on that we need to be aware of?” Mark asked.
“Yeah. Langston forwarded information about a mission on behalf of the State Department being carried out in Tunisia very close to the Libyan border.”
“State’s running ops now?” Linc asked.