Suspects(6)
Pascal knew who to call at Homeland Security at JFK and had the contact’s personal cellphone number. He hated to use it if it wasn’t a real emergency, but it could easily become one, particularly from a PR standpoint for the airline. He looked for the number on his phone and found it easily. He wondered if his counterpart in New York had high blood pressure too. But Pascal didn’t want to make the decision alone. The burden and the fallout were too heavy to have solely on his own shoulders. On mornings like this he didn’t enjoy his job and wished he had stayed in the military. Things had been so much simpler there. There were fewer “gray areas” than he dealt with almost daily at Charles de Gaulle.
* * *
—
Rafael Gonzales was awake but still in bed, waiting for the alarm to go off at two a.m., so he could get to his office by four. They’d had a busy few weeks, with fashion week in New York, and the overbooked flights coming in from all over Europe, plus the annual United Nations meetings, which brought people in from countries all over the world, most of them with diplomatic immunity, which was complicated for security. They’d had heads of state and high officials from countries around the globe, as well as the usual traffic of businesspeople coming to New York for a variety of reasons. It was a good time for some of the wrong people to slip in, and it was up to him to see that customs officers and ICE were vigilant about it.
His cellphone rang, and he answered immediately.
“Gonzales,” he said, sounding stern and official, as though he was at his desk and not lying in bed in his underwear.
Pascal identified himself immediately and apologized for the late hour.
“No problem,” Rafe Gonzales assured him. “I have an early shift today. We’ve been busy here.”
“So have we,” Pascal Martin said.
“What do you have?” Gonzales got right to the point.
“I’m not sure if we have a problem or not, but we got an advisory on an outbound flight, about a first-class passenger. He’s a French national. I can email you what we’ve got. There are no details, just that we need additional clearance from you to let him fly. We’ve delayed the flight until we know.”
“Send me what you have and I’ll run him through our system. It could be for other circumstances of some kind, or it could be old and should have been cleared.” They both knew that would be the best-case scenario. At worst, Pascal was going to have a giant pain in his gut, an irate passenger to deal with, and angry airline officials. It was all part of the territory that went with the job. “Give me five minutes. I’ll call you right back, so you don’t have to hold the flight.”
“Thank you, I appreciate it,” Pascal said politely. Rafe hung up and called the operations officer on duty at the airport at that hour and asked him to run Pierre Geoffrey de Vaumont through their database to see what they got. Rafael stayed on the line while he waited, and Charlie, the operations officer, was back in less than three minutes.
“No arrests, no criminal record, nothing from Interpol. The advisory is a little vague. It says he’s in investments and has ‘dubious connections’ with several Russians—at least one involved with the SVR, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service—and is possibly under surveillance by them. There’s nothing here that we can keep him off a flight for. He may just be one of those slippery characters who knows all the wrong people, or has done some shady deals, but nothing we can nail him for,” Charlie explained to his boss, and Rafe nodded as he listened and made rapid notes. “There’s nothing here that says to keep him out of the U.S., just to be aware of him.” Rafe was frowning, wondering if he had enough to go on, or needed to dig further.
“Thanks, Charlie,” he said, sounding distracted. He sat quietly for a minute after the call, and then decided that he wanted to know a little more about de Vaumont before he cleared him for the flight to New York.
He knew the right man, had the number to reach him, and wanted to be sure. He called the number quickly because he knew Pascal Martin was waiting in Paris, and the heat was on him about whether to clear de Vaumont or take him off the flight. Rafe knew what a fuss that would make, particularly if the concern wasn’t justified. He didn’t sound like a dangerous character, but you never knew.
* * *
—
Mike Andrews was sitting in the room he used as an office when he worked at home, usually late at night, when it was quiet and he had time to catch up. He was a senior supervising operative in the CIA, and head of a local office of the DO, the Directorate of Operations, which functioned primarily abroad with “foreign assets in the field” dealing with clandestine intelligence, terrorism, and weapons. His office worked in conjunction with JFK Airport when needed. He had been in the navy, in military intelligence for eight years after college, then went on to Langley, in Virginia, to be trained for the CIA. At forty-nine, he had been in the Central Intelligence Agency for nineteen years. His office was in an innocuous-looking building in Manhattan that was a rebuilt warehouse on East Seventeenth Street, and he had a fully secure computer set up at home, for when he worked there, so he could easily access any information he needed.
He lived for his work and had no other life. His apartment looked like an office, with bare walls, and a minimum of secondhand furniture. It suited his bachelor existence. Like many top CIA agents, he had the perfect profile: married to his job, no personal attachments, no family other than one sister, no encumbrances. He had done undercover work in Central and South America for his first ten years with the CIA, and then settled down at home, in a spare bachelor pad in the Bowery. He was available 24/7 and didn’t mind being called at any hour. Rafe apologized as soon as Mike picked up.