Hall nodded.
“You know him, Natalie?” the president asked.
“I don’t know him, but I saw him translating for Matt at a reception at the Hungarian embassy,” she said.
“Why do you need a Hungarian translator, Matt?” the president asked with a smile.
“The Hungarian came with the package,” Hall said. “He speaks seven, maybe more, languages, among them Hungarian. ”
“He’s a linguist?” the president asked.
Hall understood the meaning of the question: How is a linguist going to do what we need here?
“Well, that, too, sir. But he’s also a Green Beret.”
“A Green Beret?” the president asked, his tone suggesting that the term had struck a sympathetic chord.
“Yes, sir,” Hall replied. “He’s a Special Forces major. I went to General Naylor and asked him if he could come up with somebody who had more than language skills. He sent Charley to me. He’s a good man, Mr. President. He can do this.”
“Makes sense to me,” Cohen said. “Matt thinks he’s smart, which is good enough for me. And no one is going to suspect that a Special Forces major would be given a job like this.”
“I’d like to meet this guy,” the president said. “Okay, what else do we need to get this started?”
“We’ll need all the intelligence filings,” Hall said. “I suppose Natalie will have most of them—or synopses of them, anyway.”
“Mostly, all I get is the synopses,” Cohen said. “I have to ask for the original filing, and raw data if I want to look at that.”
The president thought that over a moment.
“We don’t know that somebody is not going to try to fly this airplane into the White House or the Golden Gate Bridge . . .”
Hall opened his mouth to say something, but the president held up his hand in a gesture meaning he didn’t want to be interrupted.
“. . . so I think it could be reasonably argued that the missing 727 is something in which Homeland Security would have a natural interest.”
Hall and Cohen nodded.
“So, Natalie, why don’t you send a memo telling everybody to send the intelligence filings to Matt?”
“And the raw data, Mr. President?” Hall asked.
The president nodded.
“All filings and all raw data, from everybody,” the president ordered.
“Yes, sir, Mr. President,” Dr. Cohen said.
“Okay. We’re on our way,” the president said.
[TWO]
Hunter Army Airfield Savannah, Georgia 1315 27 May 2005
The Cessna Citation X attracted little attention as it touched down smoothly just past the threshold of the runway, possibly because one of the world’s most famous airplanes was moving majestically down the parallel taxiway.
The copilot of the Citation looked at the enormous airplane as they rolled past it, and turned to the pilot, as the pilot reported, “Six-Zero-One on the ground.”
“Twenty-nine,” the copilot said.