“It worked?” Jenn asked, somewhat appeased.
“Well, I won’t know for sure until I don’t get arrested tomorrow. But, yeah, it worked.” He gave her the highlights of his incursion while he ate. “Tomorrow I drive out to Dulles and report that I lost my credentials. I’ll have to fill out a lost-pass form, but that’s a formality. Fifty bucks and my winning personality, and we’re in business. So what do you say you put the pin back in the grenade?”
Jenn stared at him long enough that he began to brace himself for a fight. Finally, she took a long sip of her beer, shut her laptop, and stood up.
“Know how to play cribbage?”
Not what he’d expected. “Do I know what, now?”
“I’ll be in the living room after you do the dishes.”
“What?” he asked, although he knew the answer. “All of them?”
“How do you know how to play cribbage?” Gibson asked when Jenn had finished showing him how pegging worked. It seemed like a game from another kind of lifetime.
“My grandmother played every card game ever invented.”
Jenn’s father had died in the Marine-barracks bombing in Beirut in 1983. She’d been two. His death had unraveled Beth Charles, who had deliberately and conscientiously taken refuge in a bottle of vodka before wrapping her pickup around a tree. Jenn’s grandmother had taken her in, put a roof over her head.
“That sounds kind of nice,” Gibson said.
Jenn nodded. “She wouldn’t have a television in the house, but she’d gin rummy you to death if you let her.”
Gibson had never gotten the sense that Jenn had been close to her grandmother, so marathon card games surprised him. Jenn read his mind.
“Cards was the only time she took a break from criticizing. And not always then.”
They played a couple of practice hands until Gibson got the hang of the game. Jenn shuffled the deck and dealt for real.
“Did you like her?”
“She taught me to shoot,” Jenn replied.
Gibson waited, but that was all the answer Jenn seemed inclined to give. “So I’m in trouble here is what you’re saying?”
“Aren’t you always?” she asked, turning over the four of spades from the deck. He played a six, and she laid the five of hearts. “Fifteen for two.” She moved her peg two places forward on the board.
“It’s part of my charm,” Gibson said with a wry smile and played the eight of diamonds. “Twenty-three. So are you going to tell me your plan? I’m still hazy on why you didn’t have me create credentials for both of us. Why just me? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Thirty-one for two,” she announced triumphantly as she played an eight. Gibson stared forlornly at the board while Jenn used his remaining cards to score even more points.
He was in trouble here.
“Do you know what Category X means?” Jenn asked, shuffling and dealing the cards.
Gibson did. Cat X was the Homeland Security designation for US airports deemed high-value terrorist targets due to the volume of commercial passengers. Billions of dollars had been spent hardening Cat X facilities post 9/11, and only twenty-five airports had such a rating: Logan, O’Hare, JFK, LAX, SeaTac . . . Dulles.
“Actually, it works in our favor,” Jenn said as she arranged her new hand. She picked two of her cards and put them in the crib. Gibson added two of his own. The game continued.
“How do you figure?”
Jenn paused and ran her tongue over her teeth the way she did when she was thinking.
“Cold Harbor operates a C-130 out of Dulles,” Jenn said. “It resupplies Cold Harbor’s base of operations in North Africa and supports its contracts there and in the Middle East. Cold Harbor is dirty as hell, but they keep a low profile at Dulles—everything by the book. My guess is that’s why Eskridge is using it to fly George out of the country. In five years, they’ve never once been cited for a violation by customs inspectors, and no one will be looking at them too closely. Plus, Eskridge thinks that flying out of Dulles offers him a measure of protection. Who would be stupid enough to take down one of his shipments at a Cat X?”
“But we are? That stupid?”
Jenn ignored him. “Cold Harbor flights are guarded only by a skeleton detail plus flight crew plus whatever personnel are being transported to Africa. And because it’s Category X, their materiel has to be sealed in shipping containers. They won’t be armed.”
“Yeah, but neither will we,” Gibson reminded her. “Armed or not, how are we supposed to take George off a plane guarded by Cold Harbor mercs? Rock-paper-scissors them for him?”
“Who said we’d be unarmed?” Jenn said with a crafty smile.
“Jenn. I’ll have a green badge, and that will give me the run of the airport, but I’ll still have to pass through security to get on premises. There’s no way I’m getting guns through. So unless you’ve been tunneling under security at night . . .”
“Are you familiar with the term ‘security theater’?”
Gibson nodded. It was the criticism that the billions of dollars spent since 9/11 to upgrade security at American airports had had little impact on overall security. That all that the pantomime at TSA checkpoints accomplished was to create the illusion of increased safety.
Gibson said, “Doesn’t mean they won’t catch me carrying a gun into the terminals.”
“That would be true if we were infiltrating that Dulles International Airport.”
“There’s another Dulles I haven’t heard about?”
Jenn nodded and explained that there were, for all intents and purposes, two Dulles International Airports: commercial and general aviation, each one operating on two entirely different sets of security principles. “Cat X really only refers to the commercial side of the airport. The airline terminals. Where TSA puts the general public through their little shoeless, beltless parade—metal detectors, pat downs, all of that. Then there’s GA—general aviation. That’s the side of the airport that accommodates private aircraft—anything from a one-seat prop to Gulfstream jets. And private cargo planes for businesses like FedEx and UPS.”
“And Cold Harbor.”
“And Cold Harbor,” she confirmed. “That’s why you now work for Tyner Aviation. It’s one of the FBOs—fixed-base operators—that provide services, such as fuel and maintenance, to private aircraft at Dulles.”
“So no security theater in general aviation?”
“Why bother?” Jenn asked. “There’s no one there to see it. I mean, they still have employees pass through security checks, but it’s pretty nominal compared to the commercial terminals.”
“Metal detectors?”
“Yes,” Jenn said.
“So how do we get weapons in?”
“Simple. Fly them in.”
That seemed like an even worse idea to Gibson. “Oh, come on. They don’t search aircraft?”