All the Queen's Men by Linda Howard Read Free Book Online

even the CTX-5000 machines such as were used in Atlanta. He notified Frank, who quietly set about getting all the information available on Flight 183 as soon as NTSB and the FBI gathered it.
    The crash site was difficult to work. The terrain was mountainous, heavily wooded, without easy access. The wreckage was strewn over an enormous area. Bits and pieces, both metal and human, had been found in treetops. Teams had been working nonstop for a week, first gathering the human remains and turning them over to forensic specialists for the almost impossible task of identification, then searching for even the smallest piece of the aircraft. The more pieces they found, the more complete the puzzle would be, and the more likely they were to discover what happened.
    Fifteen minutes later an agent knocked on Vinay's door, rousing Kaiser. John remained in the library, out of sight, while Frank, with Kaiser beside him, collected the report.
    Frank had requested two copies of the report, and on returning to the library he gave one to John. He sank back into his chair, his brow furrowed as he read. The report wasn't reassuring.
    "Definitely an explosion. That wasn't really in doubt." People in the area had reported hearing an abrupt boom and seeing a bright flash. Whether or not anyone actually had seen anything was open to speculation, since the plane had gone down in the mountains where there wasn't a good line of sight in any direction. People generally didn't go around staring at the sky, though if the afternoon sun had glinted off the plane and caught someone's attention at just the right moment it was
possible
to have seen the actual explosion. More than likely, though, on hearing the noise, people had looked around, seen the smoke and arcing debris, and their imaginations took it from there and convinced them they had seen one hell of a fireball.
    Rumors had immediately started that Flight 183 had been shot down by a missile. Congressman Donald Brookes, the House chairman of Foreign Relations, had been on Flight 183. Someone
had
to have wanted him dead for some reason, though all the reasons popping up on the Internet had been farfetched, to say the least. Proof of the plot, the missile theorists said, was that Congressman Brookes, who lived in Illinois, was reportedly going on vacation but for some reason was on a flight originating in Atlanta, instead of Chicago. That was obviously suspicious. Even after it was revealed that the Brookes's oldest son lived in Atlanta and they had visited him for a couple of days before leaving for Europe, the bring-down-a-plane-to-get-one-man theory persisted.
    There was, however, no evidence of a missile. The pattern of rupture in the metal, plus the burn patterns and residue on the pieces of fuselage, all gave evidence that Flight 183 had been brought down by an internal explosion that had literally ripped the plane apart, blowing out a huge section of the fuselage and all of the left wing.
    Preliminary chemical analysis indicated plastique. They had not, however, found any evidence of a detonator. Even in such a catastrophic explosion, microscopic and chemical evidence would have remained; if something existed, then it left its print.
    "To have done this much damage, the bomb had to have been sizeable; the machines in Atlanta should have detected it." Frank was deeply worried; all luggage for the flight had been inspected, either by machines or humans. If, as John thought, the device was undetectable by their current technology, then they had a big problem on their hands.
    Every piece of luggage, both checked and carry-ons, would have to be hand searched, but airlines weren't the only ones vulnerable. The possible applications of such a device were staggering. It could be used in mail bombs, to destroy federal buildings- any public building, actually-disrupt transportation and communication. No one in America paid much attention to the security of bridges, either, but let a few of them come down