By Order of the President (Presidential Agent 1)

“Now, here we’re going to need your expert advice,” the man with the Uzi said. “Will you come with me, please?”

"Yes, sir,” MacIlhenny said.

He unfastened his shoulder harness, got out of his seat, and saw that the man with the Uzi had put the jump seat back in the stored position and was waiting for him to precede him out of the cockpit and into the fuselage.

“In the back, please, Captain,” the man with the Uzi said, gesturing with the weapon.

MacIlhenny walked into the passenger compartment.

The local pilot was still sitting taped into one of the seats.

MacIlhenny glanced down at him as he walked past. It looked as if something had been spilled in his lap.

Spilled, hell. He pissed his pants.

At the rear of the passenger compartment, the man with the Uzi ordered, “Open the door, please, Captain.”

MacIlhenny wrestled with the door.

The first thing he noticed was that warm tropical air seemed to pour into the airplane.

Then someone grabbed his hair again and pulled his head backward.

Then he felt himself being pushed out of the door and falling twenty feet to the ground. He landed hard on his shoulder, and in the last conscious moment of his life saw blood from his cut throat pumping out onto the macadam.

He was dead before the local pilot was marched—still blindfolded with yellow tape—to the door and disposed of in a similar fashion.

Then the rear door of Lease-Aire 9021 was closed and the airplane taxied to the other end of the runway, where a tanker truck appeared and began to refuel it.

[TWO]

Quatro de Fevereiro Aeroporto Internacional Luanda, Angola 1410 23 May 2005

Quite by accident, H. Richard Miller, Jr., a thirty-six-year-old, six-foot-two, 220-pound, very black native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was not only there when what he was shortly afterward to report as “the unauthorized departure of a Boeing 727 aircraft registered to the Lease-Aire Corporation of Philadelphia, Pa.,” took place but he actually saw it happen.

Miller, an Army major, was diplomatically accredited to the Republic of Angola as the assistant military attaché. He was, in fact, and of course covertly, the Luanda station chief of the Central Intelligence Agency.

But, with the exception that his diplomatic carnet gave him access to the airport’s duty-free shop, neither his official nor covert status had anything to do with his being present at the airport when the aircraft was stolen. He had gone out to the airport—on what he thought of as his self-granted weekly rest-and-recuperation leave—to buy a bottle of Boss cologne and have first a martini and then a late lunch in the airport’s quite good restaurant. Since this was in the nature of an information-gathering mission, he would pay for the meal from his discretionary operating funds.

When he went into the restaurant, he chose a table next to one of the plate-glass windows. They offered a panoramic view of the runways and just about everything at the airport but the building he was in. He laid his digital camera on the table, so that it wouldn’t be either stolen or forgotten when he left, and where he could quickly pick it up and take a shot at anything of potential interest without drawing too much— hopefully, no—attention to him.

A waiter quickly appeared and Miller ordered a gin martini.

Then he took a long look at what he could see of the airport.

Parked far across the field, on a parking pad not far from the threshold of the main north/south runway, he saw that what he thought of as “his airplane,” a Boeing 727, was still parked where it had been last week, and for the past fourteen months.

He thought of it as his airplane because when he’d noticed it fourteen months ago, he’d taken snapshots of it and checked it out.

Without even making an official inquiry, he went on the Internet and learned that it was registered to the Lease-Aire Corporation of Philadelphia. From a source at the airfield— an air traffic controller who was the monthly recipient of a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill from Miller’s discretionary operating funds—he had learned that the 727 had made a “discretionary landing” at Luanda while en route somewhere else.

Miller was a pilot, an Army aviator—not currently on flight status because he’d busted a flight physical, which was why he had wound up “temporarily” assigned to the CIA and sent to Luanda—and he understood that a discretionary landing was one a wise pilot made when red lights lit up on the control panel, before it became necessary to make an emergency landing.

Miller had begun to feel sorry for the airplane, as he sometimes felt sorry for himself. A grounded bird, and a grounded birdman, stuck in picturesque Luanda, Angola, by circumstances beyond their control, when they both would much rather have been in Philadelphia, where he had grown up, where his parents lived, and where one could be reasonably sure that 999 out of a thousand good-looking women did not have AIDS, which could not be said of Luanda, Angola.

Still, unofficially—although after a month he had reported to Langley, in Paragraph 15, Unrelated Data, of his weekly report, that the plane seemed to be stuck in Luanda—he had learned that Lease-Aire was a small outfit that bought old airliners at distress prices (LA-9021 came from Continental); that it then leased them “wet” or “dry”; and that LA-9021 had been dry-leased to a Scottish company called Surf & Sun Holidays Ltd. Just to play it safe, he’d asked the assistant CIA station chief in London, whom he knew, to find out what he could about Surf & Sun. In two days, he learned that it was a rinky-dink outfit that had gone belly-up shortly after leaving 153 irate Irishmen stranded in Rabat, Morocco.

That seemed to explain everything, and nothing was suspicious.