“That figures. Everyone has to swipe their badge before keying in a code.”
The good news was that the door was down a small hallway, so we wouldn’t be seen doing something unless someone was in the hallway with us. The bad news was that Delta Airlines was serious about security. Nobody entered the door without badging in. Not even when someone already had the door open. Everyone waited, one at a time, to key in their code.
“We need a reason for someone to hold open the door. And we need to do it quick, before the police realize we aren’t at Concourse B. They’ll be back in force.”
“What are we going to do?”
I watched a purser push an old man down the concourse in a wheelchair, and came up with an idea.
“Follow me.”
I hugged the walls, staying out of the fisheye of the cameras every thirty feet. Getting to a smoking lounge, I found what I was looking for.
“Get in.”
“What?”
“Get in and act like you need this chair.”
Jennifer scrunched up her eyes, clearly wondering if maybe we weren’t now on the desperate side of things, which we were. She sat down in the wheelchair.
“I’m going back to the ATM next to Gate 19. I’ll mess around there until someone goes into the hallway. If he’s alone, I’m going to wait until he opens the door, then holler at him to hold it.”
“This will never work. Delta doesn’t have pilots in wheelchairs.”
I began pushing. “Yeah, you might be right, but you’d be surprised at the number of times ridiculous shit I’ve pulled out of my ass has worked.”
“Ahh… no. I don’t think I would. Pulling stuff out of your ass seems to be your way of life.”
We reached the ATM just as a single pilot began walking down the hallway. I pushed her forward.
“It’s worked out pretty well so far.”
63
“Hey! Hold that door, please. Let me get her through and I’ll badge in.”
The pilot looked at me, trying to decide, then held it open.
“Thanks. I appreciate it. Just let me get her inside.”
I could tell he was wondering why a guy in civilian clothes wanted to take a female in a wheelchair into the pilots’ lounge, but his chivalry took precedence.
He said, “You sure you’re in the right place? You know there’s no elevator in here, don’t you?”
I pushed Jennifer through, saying, “Yeah, I know. She can walk short distances. She’ll be okay. We’re just catching the bus.”
I saw the door close and said, “Give me a hand with her leg braces, will you?”
He came to the front of the wheelchair, where I was fiddling with the leg platforms. I stood up and grabbed the conveniently thick polyester collar of his uniform and cut off the blood flow to his brain. Once he was down, I ripped off his badge and stuffed him into an empty closet designed to hold the carry-on luggage of pilots coming and going.
“Okay. What now? Where do we go?”
Jennifer was stunned, looking at me like I was the Terminator.
“Come on! Where do we go?”
She snapped out of it, saying, “Down. There’s a stewardesses’ lounge on the right and a pilots’ lounge on the left. Once we get in there, we need to move straight to the exit. There’s a bus stop underneath the concourse.”
Two minutes later we were waiting with a bunch of other Delta employees for the shuttle to the Delta parking lot, me wearing the pilot’s badge around my neck with the picture side conveniently against my chest. After the longest three minutes of my life, we were on the next bus headed out of the airport. We sat in the back, away from anyone else, Jennifer still trembling from our narrow miss.
She said, “I don’t think I’m cut out for this law-breaking stuff. It’s going to give me a nervous breakdown.”
I said, “Trust me; I didn’t think it was fun either. You get used to it.”
“What do we do now? Are we still going to D.C., or are we headed to Mexico to find a cheap house to spend the rest of our lives?”
“If you’re game, I think we should continue on to D.C. Still want to do that?”
“Well, shit, we’re outlaws now. It looks like the choices are turn ourselves in, run for the rest of our lives, or try to solve this thing. That’s probably the only way to get any mercy. Maybe cut the jail term to half of our lives.”
“Okay. I’m game. The folks looking for us know we’re in Atlanta, so we need to do all preparations here, while it won’t give anything away.”
“What preparations do we need to do? How are we going to get to D.C. with the cops chasing us?”
“We have to disappear. We can’t use any credit cards, cell phones, anything tied to either you or me. Right now, the police know we’re in Atlanta, so it won’t do any harm to use your ATM or credit cards here. It’ll just reinforce what they already know. Once we leave here, we can’t use anything that will trigger an alert with the authorities. First thing we need to do is go to an ATM and take out your max amount of money. Next, we need to get to a place that sells prepaid credit cards and cell phones. We also need to get a rental car for local use.”
Something dawned on me. “You don’t have your cell phone with you, do you?”
“Yes. I turned it back on when we hit the U.S. It works now.”
“Turn it off and take out the battery.”
“I haven’t called anyone. Nobody knows it’s on.”
“Doesn’t matter. Your phone talks without you using it. It constantly sends out a signal to make sure it has a tower it can talk to. This signal leaves a trail, essentially telling anyone who wants to check that your phone talked to such and such tower at such and such time. They can track the city you’re currently in and neck it down to which tower you’re near. Depending on the concentration of towers, it can put you within a couple of city blocks. That’s
I had intimate knowledge of the power within the U.S. government and knew that any slip-ups would cause us to be caught fairly quickly. Despite all that, the federal government wasn’t omnipotent. Most fugitives were caught by doing something stupid, like returning to the scene of the crime, or going to a family member for help. Smarter fugitives managed to evade the law for extended periods of time, no matter how much effort was put against them.
A buddy of mine in the FBI had chased a man named Eric Rudolph, a homegrown terrorist who had murdered at least three people and wounded upwards of a hundred because of his twisted beliefs, including the 1996 bombing during the Atlanta summer Olympics. He’d managed to evade the FBI and local police for five years, despite a million-dollar bounty on his head and being on the FBI’s top-ten most wanted list.
64
Harold Standish slowly hung up his phone. Disappointed at the failure at the Atlanta airport, he wasn’t overly surprised. Pike and Jennifer were proving to be more resourceful than he would have thought, but knowing Pike’s
