The Ghost Pattern

…31

“There’s nothing I hate more than sitting idle and doing nothing, just waiting,” Sam said, getting off his chair and starting to pace the living room, impatiently, his fisted hands stuck deep in his pockets. “Makes me feel old.”

“The kids are working as hard as they can,” Tom said. “We just need to give them time to do their thing.”

Blake looked at them both, and said nothing. For him, waiting must have been the hardest.

Lou stuck his head through the open door and said, “Come on over, guys, we have passenger manifest analysis data ready.”

They all followed Lou into the den, where Alex and Steve were talking satellite deployment.

“One of the satellites is a loaner, it’s already launched, it just needs to be redeployed to that area,” Alex said, pointing at the map, right above the Russia — North Korea border, a tiny sliver of black line perpendicular to the coast of the Sea of Japan. “The other one is being launched tomorrow at 4:00AM local time. It will need a few hours to deploy. By tomorrow afternoon, they should be both operational and scanning. We’re looking to secure a third loaner today, leased from CNC News. We’ll see how that goes.”

“Do you have deployment patterns figured out?” Lou asked.

“Not yet. We’ll work on that right after this. What do you have?”

Everyone had taken a seat, except Steve, who leaned against the back wall of the room.

Lou searched everyone’s eyes, a little hesitant in saying what he needed to say. Alex felt a chill down her spine, but nodded an encouragement to Lou. Whatever it was, they needed to know, so they could deal with it.

“The passenger manifest deep background analysis is completed, and you’re not going to like it.” He cleared his throat a little, and then continued. “There’s a prevalence of accountants and salespeople on that flight, but somehow I doubt that the hijacking was about sales or taxes. A relatively large number of scientists who were onboard XA233, nine to be precise, represents the third most significant data cluster in this analysis. The scientists were on their way back from a pharma conference, the biggest one in the industry. They are a varied group of researchers — neuroscientists, neurologists, psychiatrists, a psychopharmacologist — all touching the field of neuropharmacology.”

They all fell silent for a little while, processing what they had just heard.

“Oh, my God…” Alex whispered.

“You might have been right about your third scenario,” Lou said. “This could be about chemical weapons.”

“What are you saying?” Blake asked in a high-pitched, trembling voice.

There was no way she could sugarcoat that. Alex looked him straight in the eye and replied, “Some kind of nerve agent.”