John Ringo: Ghost

“I’ve actually got that number on my computer, somewhere,” the SAIC admitted. “It’s just part of the background of how lovely my job is since any one of them could be a truck bomb. Call it in, I want to talk to the victim.”

“The torture victim?” Nix asked.

“No, the kidnap victim, the victim victim. The ‘torture victim’ is a fucking terrorist. Period. So he got shot in the leg. See me crying.”

He walked over to where the young lady was sitting in a chair, a frustrated police woman by her side with a notebook open filled with obvious gibberish.

“Hi,” Barry said, smiling as pleasantly as he could. “Officer, could you give me a moment alone with the young lady?”

“Not alone,” the police woman said with a sniff. “That would be a violation of procedure.”

“Then stand across the damned room,” Conway said coldly. “Among other things, we have jurisdiction now and your ‘procedures’ are my procedures.”

When the woman was gone he perched himself on the desk and shook his head.

“You look, frankly, like you’ve been through hell.”

“Thank you, so much,” Ashley responded, pulling the blanket around her more tightly. “I don’t know anything about the guy who did the shooting. I didn’t get a good look at him. Sort of short, sort of tall, medium build, maybe a little thin. Sort of…”

“Spare me,” Conway said with a chuckle. “I’m not after him. I could give a rat’s ass about dead terrorists, miss. Tell me anything you can about what was going on. We’ve got missing girls, girls just like you. These days, the FBI tries really hard to stop this sort of thing and this time we screwed up. They got through. I want to know where the girls are going, how, anything you can tell me.”

“There’s probably a piece of paper on the desk,” Ashley said cautiously. “That might have information. It was a container thing, a truck. Like they load on ships. But… somebody said it was going to Atlanta airport.”

“That somebody might have read that off of the paper or he might have heard it after shooting the terrorist in the leg? Or is that too blunt of a question.”

Ashley looked at him for a moment and then shook her head.

“I don’t know anything about that. Just that you should be looking at Atlanta airport.”

“Ashley, your name is Ashley, right?”

“Yes.”

Ashley, I swear to God I’m not looking for whoever shot up these… assholes,” Conway said, waving around. “But I need hard information. Would you please tell me what happened to get the information so I can verify it and check it?”

Ashley lowered her head and shook it, slowly.

“I think I need to talk to a lawyer,” she said, softly. “Or the news media.”

“Ashley, please ,” Conway said, getting off the desk and dropping to a knee. “I’ve got a time issue, here. The girls are being moved. You say to the Atlanta airport. Fine, we’re checking on that. But I need plate numbers, container numbers, a plane number if it’s available. I want to make sure we’re not missing something. Think about the other girls, please. I won’t use the information you give me against whoever saved you, if there was such a person, who might have been a short, tall, thinnish-fat man with a full head of receding hairline.”

Ashley looked up at that and faintly smiled, then shrugged.

“Okay, the terrorist said the girls were being transported to an airport,” she said, getting up and walking to the desk. “But he didn’t know which one.”

“You’re sure?” Conway asked.

“I’m really, really sure,” Ashley replied. “And there’s a paper, somewhere, on this desk that said Atlanta airport. It was some sort of form,” she said, reaching for the papers.

“Let me,” Conway said, holding out his hand. He reached into his suit pocket and pulled out a set of rubber gloves. Then he glanced over the top papers and picked up a cargo manifest.

“Says that they’re being sent to the Atlanta airport,” he said with a nod. “One problem.”

“What?” Ashley asked.

“It’s got so much bogus information, I can tell it’s a fake a mile off. The weight of the vehicle is wrong, way too high, the container number is the wrong number of digits, the license plate doesn’t match the standard parameters. It’s a red herring.”

“Damn,” the girl muttered. “I guess Mr. Wonderful didn’t know it all, then, did he?”

“Not that I know who you are talking about,” Conway replied. He lifted some more of the scattered paperwork then pulled out the drawers. The top, center, drawer was locked but it opened to a screwdriver. He pulled out the file folder in the drawer and opened it, scanning the paperwork. Then he looked at his watch and grimaced.

“What’s wrong?” Ashley asked.

“They left from Ben Epps airport two hours ago,” the agent replied. “Even if we could figure out what airplane, quickly, they’re going to be out of radar coverage. And five gets you ten, the listed destination for the plane is going to be bogus.”

“What’s that mean?” the girl said, worriedly.

“It means they’re gone.”

“I just love waking up to good news in the morning,” President Cliff said, leaning back in his chair and looking around the Situation Room. “What do we know, what don’t we know and what do we suspect?”

“We know that fifty females from the Athens, Georgia, area have been kidnapped and transported somewhere,” the FBI director answered. “One of the persons who was involved in the operation has admitted to being in a terrorism cell. He says that it’s an Al Qaeda cell, but he’s very low level and that information would be suspect without other items. One of the dead terrorists is on the terrorism watch list and has ties to Al Qaeda. We suspect the subject females were loaded on a 727 at Athens Airport. The 727, tail number R2564F, had a listed destination of Rota, Spain. We know that it is outside our airspace at this time and we do not have a lock on its transponder nor did we have a lock by the time the information came out. The females were transported in coffins. One of the two rescued females had already been loaded in one. She was connected to an IV that had a mild dose of Rufinol in it, enough to keep her sedated for up to twenty hours. We suspect that the plane will not head for Rota but for some other location. We suspect that it may have its tail number changed at that location or the girls may be transloaded. We are tracking down the ownership of the plane as well as the background of the pilots. We have alerted Interpol to look for the plane.”

“What about the shooter?” the Secretary of State Powers asked. “Do we know where he is or who he is?”

“We have not, yet, identified the shooter,” the FBI director admitted. “We’re still lifting prints from the scene. The one witness, Ashley Winters, is being notably uncooperative…”

“She’s protecting her rescuer,” Dr. Minuet Kern, the national security advisor, pointed out.

“Obviously,” the FBI director said, dryly.

“I don’t blame her,” Minnie said. “I’d do the same thing in her position.”

“Well, it’s not helping the investigation,” the FBI director said, bluntly. “We need to find this guy and ask him some questions. Notably, how he was aware of the operation.”

“I heard he went through the room like a buzz saw,” Donald Brandeis said. The secretary of defense looked as if he’d had a full night’s sleep, unlike the FBI director and the President, and he grinned at the image. “Just blew them away like they were cardboard cutouts.”

“The shooter appears to be highly trained,” the FBI director said. “Possibly a member of a SWAT team or military.”