“The same place as you.”
Tony stopped and faced her. Nina had summoned the CTU Crisis Management Team to Doris’s workstation. As far as he was concerned, the CTU team didn’t — and shouldn’t — include an entity from the DOD.
“But you’re not part of the Crisis Team,” he informed her.
“I am now, Special Agent Almeida. Nina Myers just notified me of the security clearance upgrade.”
Tony looked away. “RHIP,” he muttered.
Captain Schneider fixed her blue eyes on him. “You are correct. Rank does have its privileges. But is it really my rank that bothers you?”
Tony glanced to his right and left. “It’s not your rank,” he said quietly enough to keep their conversation private. “It’s your relationship to a powerful member of the House Ways and Means Committee.”
“A person can’t control the situation she was born into. But let me assure you that no strings were ever pulled for me….I earned the rank and responsibilities I hold.”
She whirled and stalked away before Tony could make his meaning clear. He didn’t give a rat’s ass about the woman’s career trajectory. It was her direct line to another branch of government that gave him indigestion. If Captain Jessica Schneider decided to pass judgment on what and how they did things at CTU Los Angeles, she could pass that judgment on to her father, who wielded plenty of influence via his position on a Capitol Hill oversight committee. So why didn’t Nina
Tony continued on alone across the command center floor. He arrived at the Crisis Team meeting to discover a crowd silently watching the young Korean-American woman stretching in her cubicle. Her back turned to the spectators, Doris — head tilted on her long neck — was balanced on the tips of her toes. With balletic grace, she dipped to one side then the other, blithely unaware she had attracted an audience. When she finally stretched her arms high over her head, spun around, and opened her eyes, she found the others watching. Scattered applause followed. Doris, blushing, put her arms to her sides and dropped back down to the soles of her bare feet.
“Sorry. I was sitting so long I kinda needed to stretch. ”
Nina had watched with arms folded and a look on her face as if she were indulging a child. Now that Tony and Captain Schneider had arrived, she was ready to begin. “Miss Soo Min, apprise the group of what you’ve uncovered.”
“Right,” said Doris. She knocked her shoes off the chair and slid into it, then tapped the keyboard.
“Getting the data off the chip was actually, like, a whole lot easier than I thought it would be. Whoever programmed this used the same algorithm the South Koreans use in their toy computers — the stuff they make for their kids. I worked on this kind of program in my uncle’s toy factory in Oakland, so I recognized the pattern immediately. The encryption overlay that the North Koreans tried to hide the data behind was very basic, too. It was almost too easy to break, even without an encryption protocol, which I brought with me and downloaded from my own PC. ”
While Doris babbled on, the large HDTV monitor sprang to life and a half dozen data windows appeared. In each display box, the digital representation of a different type of aircraft appeared. The image shifted so that each individual aircraft was displayed from various angles, followed by an image composed of its heat signature.
Dozens of aircraft were on display — all civil aircraft used in the West — passenger airliners, cargo craft, even research, firefighting, and weather monitoring aircraft were included in the chip’s extensive database.
“What is all this?” asked Jamey Farrell.
“This is all the data I downloaded from the memory stick,” said Doris. “There’s nothing left beyond some random data strains here and there I have yet to decrypt. I’ll continue working on them though; maybe I’ll find something important.”
“What exactly are we looking at?” Milo asked.
“It looks like a pretty thorough civil aircraft registry,” said Tony.
“
“That would be the computer guidance system inside the anti-aircraft missile itself,” said Captain Schneider. “Once programmed and fired, the missile can guide itself to the target with the data downloaded from the memory stick.”
Nina’s face was tight with tension. “With this device at their disposal, terrorists could pinpoint and down any aircraft they wanted to. They—”
Captain Schneider raised her hand. “Not quite,” she interrupted. “The effective range of a shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile is very limited. A civil aircraft at its normal cruising altitude would probably not be at risk. A target aircraft would have to be flying at a fairly low altitude — as it is when it takes off or lands — for a Long Tooth missile to be truly effective.”
“That explains why the terrorists were at the airport,” said Tony. “They wanted to maximize their chance for success.”
“But it doesn’t explain their choice of target,” Nina replied. “There was absolutely nothing aboard the cargo aircraft Dante Arete’s gang was aiming at to warrant a shoot-down. It was a standard, cargo-configured 727 packed with overnight mail and packages. The cargo was checked after landing and cleared by National Transportation Safety Board screeners under our supervision.”
“Maybe the shoot-down was supposed to be symbolic. Maybe the terrorists wanted to send a message,” said Jamey.
“Or maybe it was a test,” said Tony. “Maybe they wanted to see if the target recognition system really worked as advertised before they went after their real target.”
Nina tucked strands of her short black hair behind an ear. “Whatever Dante Arete’s goal, we know that with this technology, he and his accomplices have the ability to target
Nina faced Captain Schneider. “I’m turning the actual memory stick over to you next. Take it apart and put it back together, reverse-engineer the thing, trace each individual component to the original manufacturer or melt them down to their base minerals. I want you to do whatever it takes to find out where this device was made and where the maker got the parts.”
Captain Schneider detached the memory stick from the data port it had been plugged into. She placed the device inside a static-free Mylar envelope and headed back to the Cyber Unit.
When she was gone, Tony confronted Nina.
“What are you doing giving Captain Schneider a spot on the Crisis Team? She’s not an agent; she’s a computer engineer. Captain Schneider doesn’t have any field experience and she isn’t even a member of CTU.”
“We needed her expertise,” Nina replied, still staring over Doris’s shoulder at the images crawling across the HDTV screen.
Tony shook his head. “I don’t accept your explanation. What does Chappelle have to say about all this?”
Nina rose to her full height, faced Tony Almeida. “Ryan Chappelle is on a conference call to Washington. He’s working to control the damage, which is pretty important right now. That means he has no time to monitor the Crisis Team, so he left that task to me. In case you’ve forgotten, Jack left me in charge, too, so I’m handling the situation. My way.”
Georgi Timko cradled his friend’s head in his bloodstained hands. Jack ripped away the ragged flannel shirt to check the downed man’s wounds. Jack could see the man had taken three shots — to the chest, the shoulder, the abdomen. The shoulder wound was not life-threatening. It was impossible to tell how bad the abdominal wound was, but the largest injury was a sucking chest wound. When Jack tried to plug the hole and allow him to breathe, the man gasped, choked on the blood that shot up from his flooded lung and flowed from his mouth.
The man was doomed and Jack knew it. But at the behest of the heavy-set man, whose piercing gray eyes both commanded and pleaded, Jack went to work, applying every first aid skill he’d acquired in fifteen-plus years of service in the Army, and later in the elite, anti-terrorist organization Delta Force. Jack managed to staunch the flow of blood, but the wounded man’s eyes glazed over.
“Alexi, stay with me,” Timko urged, shaking him.
“We have to move him,” said Jack.
