would be worth it at this point.
What did he care? He walked into the small bedroom and took a moment to
glance at the photos on the desk. Tears welled up in his eyes and he
quickly left the room.
At five-thirty precisely Lieberman left the apartment and rode the small
elevator down to the street level, where a Crown Victoria, its
government license plates a gleaming white in the wash of the
streetlight, was parked at the curb, its engine idling. The chauffeur
exited the car briskly and opened and held the door for Lieberman.
The driver respectfully tipped his cap to his esteemed passenger and, as
usual, received no response. In a few moments the car had disappeared
down the street.
At about the time Lieberman’s car entered the on ramp to the Beltway,
the Mariner L500 jetliner was being rolled out of its hangar at Dulles
International Airport in preparation for the nonstop flight to Los
Angeles. Maintenance checks completed, the 155-foot-long plane was now
being fueled. Western Airlines subcontracted out the fueling component
of its operation. The fuel truck, squat and bulky, was parked
underneath the starboard wing. On the L500 the standard configuration
had fuel tanks located within each wing and in the fuselage. The fuel
panel under the wing, located about a third of the way out from the
fuselage, had been dropped down and the long fuel hose snaked upward
into the wing’s interior, where it had been locked into place around the
fuel intake valve. The one valve served to fuel all three tanks through
a series of connecting manifolds. The solitary fueler, wearing thick
gloves and dirty overalls, monitored the hose as the highly combustible
mixture flowed into the tank.
The man looked slowly around at the increasing activity surrounding the
aircraft: mail and freight cargo were being loaded on, baggage carts
were wending their way to the terminal. Satisfied that he wasn’t being
observed, the fueler used one gloved hand to casually spray the exposed
part of the fuel tank around the intake valve with a substance in a
plastic container. The metal of the fuel tank gleamed where it had been
sprayed. Closer examination would have revealed a slight misting on the
metal’s surface, but no closer examination would be made. Even the
first officer making the rounds on the preflight check would never
discover this little surprise lurking within the massive machine.
The man replaced the small plastic container deep within one pocket of
his overalls. He pulled from his other pocket a slender
rectangular-shaped object and raised his hand up into the wing’s
interior.
When his hand came back down, it was empty. The fueling completed, the
hose was loaded back on the truck and the fuel panel on the wing was
reattached. The truck drove off to complete work on another jet. The
man looked back once at the L500 and then continued on. He was
scheduled to get off duty at seven this morning.
He did not intend to stay a minute longer.
The 220,000-pound Mariner L500 lifted off the runway, easily powering
through the early morning cloud cover. A single-aisle jet with twin
high bypass ratio Rolls-Royce engines, the L500 was the most
technologically advanced aircraft currently operating outside those
flown by pilots of the U.S. Air Force.
Flight 3223 carried 174 passengers and a seven-member flight crew. Most
passengers were settling into their seats with newspapers and magazines
while the plane climbed swiftly over the Virginia countryside to its
cruising altitude of thirty-five thousand feet. The onboard
navigational computer had established a flight time to Los Angeles of
five hours and five minutes.
One of the passengers in the first-class section was reading the Wall
Street.Journal. A hand played across the bushy, steel-gray beard as
large, active eyes scanned the pages of financial information.
Down the narrow aisle, in the coach section, other passengers sat
quietly, some with hands folded across their chests, some with eyes half
closed and others reading. In one seat, an old woman gripped rosary
beads in her right hand, her mouth silently reciting the familiar words.
As the L500 climbed to thirty-five thousand feet and leveled off, the