Fly by Wire

Chapter FORTY

They walked quickly along the rue Terme. Sorensen was leading, weaving among groups of late night revelers. One side of the street was bright with faux gas lamps, the other side dark. Sorensen chose the light. Davis used it to scrutinize everyone on the busy sidewalk. He knew she was doing the same, looking for Caliph, the face that had been on the front page of every newspaper in the world for the past three days.

The night had turned messy and snow was coming down. It wasn't a fluffy Christmas mix, but frozen granules that gave the sidewalk a gritty feel and crunched under their feet. Turning into the place des Terreaux, Sorensen found what they needed.

"There it is, Jammer. I knew I'd seen one."

It was an Internet cafe, the standard all-hours marriage of caffeine and WiFi. Viewed from the street, the place oozed a warm, inviting light. Davis and Sorensen went in to find rows of glowing screens, soft chairs, and the thick aroma of the cafe du jour.

Or noir, Davis figured.

The cafe was busy, but Sorensen found an open machine and went to work on access. Davis stood behind her impatiently. Before leaving Jaber's he had dashed to the kitchen counter and swiped up a pile of papers, including the one he reckoned was the most important — the page with the matrix of coordinates. He had rolled them up and stuffed the wad into his jacket pocket. Davis pulled them out now, unrolled and shuffled until the one he wanted was on top. Latitudes and longitudes. Something about it bothered him. Really bothered him.

Davis racked his brain, made approximations. The coordinates were scattershot, sprayed all over the world, but a preponderance were in places he was familiar with, places he'd flown before — Texas, Louisiana, the Middle East. He tried to add it all up. Jaber's papers, World Express 801, a terrorist taking potshots at them. The events seemed incredibly disjointed, each disturbing in its own right, but collectively unrelated. Davis stumbled to find a relationship, some link to make it all fit.

His eyes were drawn to a discarded newspaper at a nearby workstation. The entire front page was engulfed with articles about oil refinery attacks, spiraling fuel prices, and turmoil in the financial markets. It wasn't just his investigation coming undone — the whole world was fracturing.

And that was when it hit him.

His head spun. The vacuum of ideas was replaced by its antithesis — everything came at once. He alternated between the newspaper and Jaber's printouts. He stared at words and numbers. Flight control software. Architecture. Integration. Then a picture filled his mind, an image he had first seen three days ago in Sparky s office. The overhead satellite view of the crash site. He remembered what had been off to one side, barely in view — an image that brought cohesion to everything.

"Christ almighty!" he spat.

"What is it?" Sorensen asked, still typing.

"Just keep going!"

"We're online," she announced, sliding her credit card back into her wallet.

Sorensen got up and gave Davis the seat. He called up a commercial mapping program, selected satellite view, and typed in a set of coordinates from the list, the ones he thought approximated the crash site. Davis had to be sure. He needed one precise picture. Seconds later he had it.

Davis adjusted the view to zoom in. "There!"

"What?" said Sorensen, looking over his shoulder.

He tapped the picture on the screen. It was an overhead view of an oil refinery — piping, stacks, holding tanks. "Does this look familiar?"

"No."

Davis used arrows on the screen to shift the view less than a mile. A pristine meadow came into view "There's our crash site," he said. Davis looked at the date on the satellite image. "Or at least that's what it looked like six weeks ago." He tapped Jaber's page of coordinates with a finger. "This is not a list of simple lat-longs. It's a target list!"

"That refinery near the crash site was a — a target?"

"Straight from this page. And the only thing that kept World Express 801 from hitting it was Earl Moore. He rebooted the damned airplane." Davis typed in a second set of coordinates from the list. An overhead shot of a Japanese oil refinery came into view. "It'll take some typing to prove, but I'd guess that every latitude-longitude pairing on this list is the geographic center of an oil refinery."

"Jammer — this is scary."

Davis looked at the list. He remembered his bombing missions from the Gulf War — he had always been given a primary and a secondary target. The page in front of him held at least two hundred. This wasn't just a target list, it was an Air Tasking Order, a tactical war plan.

"Every one of these airplanes must have the same code," he said, "with this coordinate list embedded. These jets have to be grounded right now."

"How can we do that?"

He thought aloud, "Bastien is worthless. And I'm sure the BEA won't be answering any phones until the start of business hours tomorrow morning."

After a lengthy pause, Sorensen said, "I could do it."

"How?"

"I'll get through to the very top, the director of the CIA if I have to. If I can convince Langley this is for real — I mean, really convince them — they can patch me through to somebody with enough clout to ground these jets."

"Okay, Honeywell. Give it a try."

She pulled out a fancy phone and he watched her dial. Sorensen began talking to somebody, but right away got put on hold.

Davis went back to the computer and typed more coordinates from the list. Just as he'd guessed, each set gave him an overhead view of yet another oil refinery.

With the phone to her ear, she said,'41 gave it the highest priority. They're running a connection to Langley." She stared at the screen as she waited, her face taut with concentration. "Jammer—"

He broke away from the computer and gave her his full attention.

"There's one thing I don't understand," she said, her thumb pressed to a set of pursed lips.

"What's that?"

"If Jaber planted a virus in the system, then all those airplanes are affected, right?"

"Probably."

"Well — World Express 801. Why did that particular airplane go down?"

He shrugged. "I don't know. I guess the whole program must have some kind of trigger, some instruction to—" Davis stopped in mid-sentence. He looked back at the computer and stared at the tiny clock in the bottom right corner of the screen.

Clock. Computer.

"That's it!" he said.

"What?"

Davis didn't answer. He rifled through his jacket and found the wad of business cards still jammed into one pocket. He threw them aside one by one until he found the card he wanted. With his own phone he dialed the number scribbled on the back.