Cutting Edge

15

It was midmorning when Lund put in a call to Fred McDermott, the Coast Guard’s FAA liaison for Alaska. McDermott worked out of Anchorage, and when he didn’t pick up, she left a message explaining what she needed. He called back at two that afternoon.

“Well, I found that jet you were looking for,” he said in his gravel-edged voice. The same voice Lund would have someday if she didn’t stop smoking.

“Did it land in Anchorage?”

“Actually, no. They changed their destination once they got airborne — said they were diverting.”

“Diverting? Is that common?”

“Not common,” he said, “but it happens. Sometimes you have to land at a different airport because the weather at your original destination goes bad, or maybe due to a mechanical problem. As far as I could tell, it wasn’t any of that. No record of an emergency, and the weather that night was fine.”

“So why would they have gone elsewhere?”

“Business jets do it now and again, generally for corporate reasons — maybe a meeting schedule changes. Private owners might change their minds about which vacation home they want to visit. There aren’t any rules against altering a destination.”

“So where did they go?”

“They refiled their flight plan for Minneapolis.”

“Minneapolis?”

“That was the first change. You piqued my curiosity, so I tracked the jet as far as I could. Bear in mind, this requires transiting a foreign country. Canada is more inviting than most — they charge for air traffic services, so every time an airplane goes through their airspace it’s money in the bank. This jet flew southeast through British Columbia all the way to Manitoba. Reentered U.S. airspace in northern Minnesota, and at that point they canceled and went VFR.”

“VFR? What’s that?”

“Visual flight rules. Basically, they said bye-bye to air traffic control. Below eighteen thousand feet you can do that, go anywhere you want without being tracked.”

“So there’s no way to tell where this jet ended up?”

“Not really. But there is one way you could get an idea of their intentions.”

“How?” asked Lund.

“I do a little flying myself, and I happen to know that aviation fuel is outrageously expensive in Kodiak. The government wouldn’t care, mind you, but no private jet operator is going to buy an ounce of fuel more than necessary.”

Seeing where he was going, Lund scrounged through the pile of papers on her desk for the servicing records she’d printed out earlier. “How much gas would a jet like that need to get to Anchorage?”

“Well, it’s not the sort of airplane I fly,” said McDermott, “but Anchorage is about three hundred miles. A Lear might need two, maybe three hundred gallons.”

“And to Minnesota?”

“That’s gotta be a couple thousand miles more. The jet could do it, no problem, but you’d need full tanks.”

Lund found the paper she wanted. “They paid for eight hundred gallons.”

“I’d say that’s full. Which implies to me that they never intended to go to Anchorage in the first place. More to the point…” His coarse voice drifted off, allowing Lund to finish the thought.

“They were trying to hide where they were going.”

DeBolt was casing a neighborhood for a home to burgle. There was simply no other way to think about it.

He approached on foot, looking up and down the street. He watched the homes adjacent to 98 Mill Street closely, but saw no activity, although the house diagonally across the street had an open garage door and a minivan parked inside. The tasteful stone path that led up to 98 meandered through tight landscaping, and near the front steps he encountered a plastic sign shaped like a shield. It warned that trespassing was inadvisable, courtesy of AHM, a home security company so commonplace that even a lifelong renter like DeBolt had heard of it.

He went straight to the front door like any visitor would, and paused in a portico twenty feet tall. There DeBolt turned three hundred and sixty degrees, taking in everything around him. He wondered if there might be a key under the doormat, or behind the terra-cotta planter that held the remains of last spring’s annuals. He was dismissing that hopeful thought when he looked again at the sign. AHM. Having never been a home owner, he was unfamiliar with how such systems worked. All the same, two questions arose. Did the Thompsons really have an active security contract with AHM, or was it only a sign meant to frighten away shady people like him? And if there was a system — what could AHM do for him?

He looked up and saw a security camera. A tiny red light glowed steady, the lens pointing directly at him.

DeBolt composed his thoughts in the way that was becoming second nature: 98 Mill Street, AHM, front door camera.

He waited, thinking, Surely not. For almost a minute there was nothing.

Then, all at once, DeBolt was looking at himself. It streamed in near real time on the tiny screen in his visual field. He shook his head in disbelief, which actually registered in the feed, although not right away. Curious about the delay involved, he put it to a test — he waved and began counting Mississippis. Four and a half seconds later, he saw the wave in his right eye. He supposed the interval might be different for another camera, or another system. All technologies had variables and electronic quirks, the likes of which he had no hope of comprehending. In this case it was a four-and-a-half-second relay gap. He was learning.

DeBolt suddenly felt vulnerable, wondering who else might be watching the feed — it was a monitoring system after all, and not intended for his private use. He suspected the Thompsons in New York could, if they wished, see his image on their phones or tablet computers with the same four-and-a-half-second delay. Fortunately, both were probably too busy to bother, he in meetings with well-starched attorneys, she engaged with smiling sales associates in front of changing-room mirrors.

He thought: 98 Mill Street, AHM, front door camera, disable.

This took ten seconds. Then the image disappeared from the screen in his eye.