The Threat

“Point taken. Maybe, considering it’s off-duty hours, I could just get her verbal authorization to call the DOMS contact in the Pentagon. I can almost always get hold of him, even at night. He’s the one who can ask the governor out there to authorize whatever’s needed.” Roald paused. Then her voice changed, and he heard an edge. “Of course what we should really be doing is our important work — like getting the morning summary ready. Did you hear that one?”

Dan drummed his fingers. It wasn’t that he didn’t see the need for the national security adviser to approve alerts, or that the armed forces couldn’t go into action on U.S. territory without getting the permission of the civil authorities. But it seemed like the whole system had been designed a long time ago, when things moved a lot slower. “Do we have to go through all that? There’s no way to declare an emergency?”

“If we want to use active-duty forces inside a state, we have to get the governor’s permission.”

“How about his state troops? The National Guard?”

“We don’t have access to them until they’re federalized,” Roald told him.

Dan had been looking at the clock as they talked. Now Lynch put his head in. “Excuse me. That flight’s taking off in ten minutes.”

“Call and do your shipping-manager act again. Tell them you want to hold the takeoff. You forgot something. Under no circumstances do you want it to go out tonight. Or you’ll sue them. You’ll never send another thing UPS.”

Sweat broke under his armpits and ran tickling down his ribs. He hoped they were right, the people like Gelzinis who had to check off every block before they acted. Who thought if the intel agencies didn’t know about a threat, there was no threat. “Damn it — we’ve got to stop that plane!”

“Tell me how to do it legally, and I’ll be the first to help you,” Roald said. “You’d better ask yourself if you’re not getting too excited, though.”

“You think I’m too excited?”

“You do seem awfully fired up.”

Lynch, holding the phone’s mouthpiece against his chest: “No good getting them to kick the shipment off. She said it’s all loaded and my people are already aboard.”

“Your people? What’s she mean by that?”

“I asked her. She said, didn’t I know? There’s some techies riding along, accompanying our shipment.”

Dan knew then beyond any doubt this was not what it seemed. Whoever they were, they were there for no good purpose. And probably armed to the teeth to boot.

Lynch was on the line again. He rolled his eyes. Slapped the phone back down and blew out. “They’re gone. They’re in the air.”

“How about fighters, Captain? We can’t use active forces on the ground. Can we use interceptors in the air to force that flight down?”

Roald hesitated, then picked up the phone again. Dan and Lynch waited as she talked to a duty officer at NORAD, the North American Air Defense Command center.

She put her hand over the mouthpiece. “They won’t scramble without orders. And they can’t scramble on a civilian jetliner. The desk guy turned me down flat on that. Posse Comitatus Act. Maybe on a direct presidential order, he said. But of course the president’s not here.”

Dan stood blinking. The whole machine, immense, powerful, and expensive, was too slow. And somehow the people who were supposed to look out for things like this had missed it. Oh, they’d probably had hints. A little here, a little there. But no one had pulled it all together. Because that wasn’t anyone’s job.

Maybe he should call the Pentagon himself. No … why bother? He’d get the same stonewall, stall, runaround that Roald had.

He turned abruptly, bumping into Harlowe, and went back out into the watch area. Stood behind one of the desk officers, fingering his lip as incoming cables streamed across the screen.

Infinite information, and blindness to the essential. Instant communication, and total paralysis.

“I’m back,” said Alvarado, coming in carrying a cup of what smelled like bouillon.

“You don’t know anything else about this?” Dan asked him, distracting himself from the tragedy he saw coming but was impotent to prevent.

“What?”

“Nothing else, Luis? Nothing else about the cartel’s plans?”

“If you don’t trust me for some reason, say it.”

He looked away. Caught Roald’s concerned glance through the glass.

She got up and came toward the little, wilted group. “Your UPS flight. Where’s it land?”

“Washington. Dulles.”

“I mean — there was an intermediate stop, right? Didn’t you mention one?”

Lynch said, “A fuel stop. In Kentucky.”

She looked at her watch again. Then at Dan. “I guess I was wrong.”

“Wrong?”

“We’re not going to be able to do this by the book.”

He nodded, not really understanding.

“Come back in,” she said, and turned on her heel.

* * *

She had a screen of numbers on her monitor. Dan saw it was the emergency contact numbers of the National Guard adjutant generals for each of the fifty states.

“I’m thinking of something Colin Powell told me once,” she said.

“Which was?”

“You never know what you can get away with until you try. Now look. Before we do this…”

“Yeah?”