The Chosen One

38

Virginia, Friday March 24, 18.25

He hadn’t expected to hear back so fast. Back in the old days, when it was just a few guys with notebooks and pencils, it took the best part of a week to piece together even a basic flight plan. But now there was email, and online forums and all the rest of it, things moved quickly.

The British guy, du Caines, hadn’t given him much but Daniel Judd had got the general idea. As soon as Nick had called, he knew it was going to be something big. Big enough to interest readers of a Brit newspaper; big enough for Nick to hike out to the middle of nowhere to see him.

He had read that right – once the CIA was involved, it automatically became huge – just as he had been right to say that du Caines was on a fishing expedition. The journalist had nothing but a hunch. But after the rendition stuff, Judd was prepared to believe that bunch of motherfuckers were capable of anything. More importantly, he had learned a lot in the last few years about how the CIA operated. They had a modus operandi in the air and – now – so did those, like Judd, who followed them on the ground.

He logged into his email account, typing an alias formed out of his own middle name, his wife’s maiden name and a bogus middle initial – Z – that he hoped would throw any snoopers off the scent. Of course, if the CIA really wanted to hack into his email they could, but there was no reason to make it easy.

He sent a message to his contact in Louisiana. Baton Rouge unfortunately; he’d come across no spotters in New Orleans. He worded it carefully. Even if he took precautions – encryption software, regularly changing his ISP, that middle Z-there were no guarantees that his fellow enthusiasts were as careful. On the contrary, in the era of federal wiretapping, he worked on the assumption that there was always someone looking over his shoulder. His wife and his brother-in-law had mocked him for years, reckoning he was some paranoid, libertarian nut who’d soon be hiding in the hills living off sachets of dried food. But once all that shit came out about FISA and government eavesdropping, it wasn’t him who came out looking the fool, now, was it?

Euphemism, that was the key. No word that would be flagged automatically by the authorities and their word-hunt programs.

Hope you’re well, big guy. Question for you. If our friends at the Company were planning to take a little working vacation in the Big Easy, what would be their best initial destination? Am assuming Louis Armstrong International too crowded etc. What would you advise?

He’d got a reply within four minutes.

No one but tourists uses Louis. They’d go for a place they Knew.

Neat. Just that capital K was enough. He called up the Federal Aviation Administration database, waiting for the right page to load before typing the word KNEW. Instantly the four letters were recognized as the call sign for Lakefront airport, located, he discovered, just ‘four nautical miles north-east of the central business district of New Orleans’.

He went to the airport’s website to find a photo of a rather lovely structure, complete with original art-deco terminal and a sculpture out front: Fountain of the Winds.

He read the spec: general aviation, with special provision for charter and private flights. That would be ideal for a black op, Judd decided. There was even a history of occasional military use: plausible that some of the CIA guys had used it before.

He glanced down at the dates Nick had given him, then keyed in the details he needed to call up the flight plans for aircraft that had used Lakefront in that period. He narrowed it down by selecting ‘In’ rather than ‘In and Out’. Whether the CIA had flown a plane out of Lakefront after Forbes’s death could wait. Right now he needed to see if they had flown in.

As he expected a long, long list of N-numbers appeared. One by one, using nothing more elaborate than the basic search function on his internet browser, he checked to see if any of those numbers also appeared on the list of thirty-three planes he and his fellow spotters, along with various peace activists and reporters like du Caines, had determined constituted the fleet leased by the CIA for its covert work, dominated by, but not confined to, extraordinary renditions.

Not one.

He would have to go the long way round. He decided to call his buddy Martin, whose greatest asset was that he was not burdened by even the meagre domestic obligations that sat on Judd’s shoulders. Martin had no kids, no wife and, so far as he could tell, no friends save for Judd himself.

As always, Martin answered on the first ring. Judd walked him through the problem and they agreed to split the list. Judd would check the midnight Sunday to noon Wednesday flights into Lakefront – looking for any numbers that carried the telltale hallmarks – and Martin would do the same for the second half of the week, from noon Wednesday to Sunday midnight. ‘First one to find it gets free beer for a night.’

‘Done.’

That had been close to 6pm. It was now shortly after eleven, long after his wife had gone to bed – slamming the door, asking why he didn’t just stick his dick into the computer’s disk drive, he obviously loved it so much – that he felt the first nibble on the end of the line.

Every other N-number traced back to a regular commercial air operator: licensed, well-known, all-colour website, the full deal. But here was one, N4808P, owned by Premier Air Executive Services, an operator based in Maryland, whose site gave only the sparest of details – and named no executives.

Judd headed to the registry of company records. The entry for Premier Air offered three listed officers. A further search on these three men yielded a pattern Judd had seen several times before. Their social security numbers – all fully retrievable online – had been issued when they were over the age of fifty. He wouldn’t have known about such things before, but the rendition saga had taught Judd that when a social security number is given to someone in their fifties, that someone is creating a new and fake identity.

But the company records contained one more curious fact about the provenance of Premier Air Executive Services, one that surprised him and which, he guessed, would particularly interest Nick du Caines. He reached for his phone.