The Man From Taured Read online

Noble got up and walked down the hallway. The video conference room was just down the hall and to the right. He entered the room and took a seat in front of a large video monitor. The camera itself was a tiny thing set in the wall, just above the monitor. There was a long conference room table, but he was the only one invited to this call. There was also a laptop hooked up to the monitor and a small remote.

  The tone sounded indicating an incoming call. Noble hit the button on the remote. All fifty jowls of his boss, Dashiell Malmont, filled the monitor. He had gray hair and always sported a five o'clock shadow, even early in the morning. He was fond of gray suits to match his hair and rarely bothered to run a comb over his head.

  "Hello, Noble," Dashiell said. "How are things in Chicago?"

  "Weird," Noble replied.

  "I knew that when I sent you there," Dashiell replied. "Have you had any insights?"

  "Nothing much. I just had the first interviews and there are going to have to be a lot more. I’m going to interview the supervisor later this afternoon, a guy named Chase. I'm going to have to interview everyone on the team, the security force and just about everyone on the flight. Still, from what I gather, the story is what we heard it was. It makes no sense."

  "Give me the rundown as you have it so far."

  Noble opened up his tablet and began reviewing notes. "On June 3, 2014, a plane landed at O'Hare International Airport. It originated in Spain and had a stopover in England. There were no incidents boarding. At O'Hare a man named Francis Duveen got off the plane and showed what appeared to be legit identification including a passport and driver's license. All seemed fine, including his demeanor. Nothing strange. However, his identification, and the man himself, declared that he was from the country of Taured. Such a country, as far as we know, does not exist and has never existed. No Francis Duveen was checked in at the initial boarding. No Francis Duveen got on the plane in London, either."

  “OK, so, this is a strange one. What happened?”

  “When he presented his passport and they couldn’t find the country they led him into an interrogation room and spoke to him for quite some time. Duveen claimed that Taured had been around for more than 1,000 years and that it was located in what we call Spain. Duveen also had stamps from past visits and they appear to be legit.”

  Dashiell frowned. “That is very odd. What happened to the man?”

  Noble rubbed his eyes.

  The story did not get any easier from there.

  Chapter Two

  Transcript of Interview

  Date: June 14, 2014

  Time: 9:30 p.m. CST

  Person interviewed: Chase Whitlock of TSA, O'Hare International Airport

  Interviewer: Noble Randall of I.C.E. on behalf of Homeland Security

  Subject: Strange occurrences on June 3, 2014, Chicago O'Hare Airport International Terminal.

  Noble Randall (NR): Are you comfortable, Mr. Whitlock?

  Chase Whitlock (CW): Yes, fine. It's rather late.

  NR: I apologize for that, but we are trying to get through as many of these interviews as we can.

  We can get started right away if you want.

  CW: Please.

  NR: We're interested in the case of Francis Duveen. The night of June 3?

  CW: Yes.

  NR: Can you tell me what happened that night?

  CW: With me or with Mr. Duveen?

  NR: Let's start with what you did that night and go from there.

  CW: Well, I got to work. It was just the start of my damn shift, really. I went to the office, checked

  voicemail and email and got coffee. I had just sat down to review some reports when the call came in that there was an incident at the line.

  NR: That would be the arrival of Mr. Duveen, I assume?

  CW: Yes. He was there with what looked like a legit passport and identification, but he was claiming

  to be from a country that did not exist. I even checked.

  NR: No Taured.

  CW: Never existed from what I can tell. He was insisting that it was real and had been around for

  millennia. I got him ushered over to an interview room as quickly as I could. I didn't want him causing a scene and he was holding up the line.

  NR: Did you call anyone else?

  CW: Not at first. I just thought I could ask a few questions and maybe get it sorted out right away.

  NR: Was he receptive to questions?

  CW: Yeah. I told him that we were having trouble finding his claim of orientation. He produced

  more identification. He worked for the Gemini Corporation and we were able to determine that

  such a company does exist. He produced other ID and all of it was from Taured. I asked him if

  this was a new country, maybe one that had split off from Russia or something. He seemed confused about this and wondered why there would be countries splitting off from Russia.

  NR: How long did this go on?

  CW: Maybe an hour? I finally produced a map and asked him to point to where the country of

  Taured was.

  NR: Was he able to point it out?

  CW: Sort of. He pointed to Spain. He pointed to what is listed on the map as the Principality of Andorra

  in Spain.

  NR: How did he react?

  CW: Badly. He kept looking at the map and then at me. He accused me of trying to play a trick on

  him. He got up from the table and began pacing and muttering in a language I didn't recognize. I told him to calm down and sit back down and relax. He wouldn't. He kept saying that he had no idea what Andorra was and that Taured was there. That was where it was. He wanted to know why we were playing such a cruel joke on him.

  NR: Is that when you called your supervisor and security?

  CW: Yes.

  NR: Why didn't you notify Homeland Security? Why not call the police?

  CW: If you had seen the man's face. The sheer look of absolute terror. He was certain of what he

  was saying.

  NR: Crazy people are often certain of their delusions.

  CW: But you didn't see the passport and ID. It was flawless. It looked real. He wasn't making

  threats or anything. He was just scared. I thought that I could calm him down and get him

  talking again. Maybe something could be sorted out.

  NR: And he did calm down again?

  CW: Once my supervisor, Roy, got there he did.

  NR: That would be Roy West?

  CW: Yes.

  NR: Did you and Mr. West continue to question Mr. Duveen?

  CW: Yes, for quite a while. I don't even know how long we were in that room. Must have been

  hours.

  NR: Did you learn anything else?

  CW: Not much more. He insisted that he was from Taured and that he was not part of any criminal

  organization. He did not make any threats against the United States or even those of us in the

  room. He just claimed to be a businessman from Gemini Corporation on a business trip to

  Chicago. He said he was as confused as to why Taured was not on the map as we were. He

  had no idea why that would be.

  NR: It says in the initial report that his went on for almost eight hours. Is that true?

  CW: If that is what the report says, that is what I believe.

  NR: And you never thought to call Homeland?

  CW: My supervisor was there and if he felt that Homeland needed to be called, I would have

  listened. Both of us felt that we could just get to the bottom of this on our own.

  NR: You are aware that this country was attacked on September 11, 2001?

  CW: Of course.

  NR: The Department of Homeland Security was created to prevent such things from happening in

  the future. A man claiming to be from a fictional country with false papers should be the very

  first thing at the top of the list of reasons to call us.

  CW: I don't know how to
respond to that.

  NR: Whose idea was it to put him up in a hotel for the night?

  CW: I think that was Roy's idea.

  NR: That is one big jump in logic that I am just having a really hard time understanding. I

  mean, with the increased security, the fact Homeland wasn't called and Mr. Duveen put into

  custody are some big, glaring errors here. Is this how you handle these kinds of

  things?

  CW: We've never had this kind of thing happen here before. We've had people here from countries

  that fall into war and then their passports are no good. Like that movie? The one with Tom

  Hanks? We've had to deal with that, but never anything quite like this. Roy said that the man

  was tired. We'd get guards to watch the room and we'd talk to him with fresh eyes, ears and minds the next morning.

  NR: I see. So, you decide to put this guy up at a local hotel. That was the Hilton?

  CW: Yes, the one located right there at the airport. It's in a busy area, where anyone trying to climb

  out of a window would be seen. Lot of light. There are no ledges or balconies, just glass windows

  and walls. There would be no way for the guy to get in and out except through the hotel room door.

  We'd provide meal service for him and it would be checked out by the guards before being delivered

  to Mr. Duveen. There was no adjoining room or door. It was as secure as a jail cell.

  NR: Save for the telephone, king-sized bed, and cable TV.

  CW: Yes.

  NR: OK, so, let me see if I got this straight. A mysterious man shows up seemingly from nowhere. He

  does not cause a disturbance at any point, until you start questioning him about his passport which seems to come from a fictional country. You interrogate him for nearly eight hours, getting nowhere, and then, instead of calling the authorities and notifying my office, you decide to put the guy up in a luxury hotel for the night. Did I miss anything?

  CW: Well, it’s a nice hotel but hardly luxury. I mean my supervisor and I spent time making phone calls.

  We called his place of employment. We found out that there is a Gemini office in the part of Spain

  that he kept calling Taured. They had no record of the guy. They also denied that there was any area

  of that part of the world called Taured. We called the office here in Chicago and confirmed they

  were open and working, but that no one named Francis Duveen was scheduled for a meeting there.

  With anyone.

  NR: OK, well, that's something. So, when did you head home?

  CW: I headed home when my shift was over in the morning. I told the guy who was taking over for me

  about the incident and told him that Duveen was in the hotel room. I said that he should bring him over that morning and try questioning again. If he got the same answers, then it would be time to call you guys.

  NR: Good to know that we finally entered the conversation at some point. So what happened then?

  CW: I went home. I had just gotten home and was getting ready to eat my dinner and then get into bed for

  the day when the phone rang.

  NR: Was this the call from Collin Boynton?

  CW: Yes, sir. He was my replacement for the morning. Anyway, he's in a panic. He says the guy is not in

  the room. His clothes are gone. There's just no trace of him. The guards say they were there all night, never left, and never fell asleep. They heard nothing, not even the television, all night and when they go in the next morning to bring him breakfast, they find Mr. Duveen is gone.

  NR: Just like that?

  CW: Just like that.

  NR: Had the bed been used?

  CW: It didn't appear to have been used, no.

  NR: So the guy must have escaped not long after you put him in the room.

  CW: We don't believe that he escaped.

  NR: Oh no? Did he just vanish into thin air?

  CW: Yes.

  NR: What?

  CW: That's what it looked like. There was no other door save for into the bathroom. None of the ceiling

  tiles had been removed. We checked the ceiling spaces and there was no way for a grown man to crawl up there without falling through and most of the paths were blocked by vents. There was no damage to any of the air vents and it would have been impossible for a grown man of Mr. Duveen's height to crawl through them. Plus, even if he could somehow manage it, there was no way to get the vent screen back into place and the screws back in. There was no way to get under the floor. The windows were intact. The bed was made. There were no clothes. If he were escaping through vents or something else, he would have had to take his briefcase and his luggage with him, which would have been impossible. He was just gone.

  NR: I see. You seem to be quite the detective here. Too bad you weren’t able to follow procedure.

  CW: So, is there anything else?

  NR: I have no further questions right now, but might have more later.

  CW: What happens now?

  NR: Well, Mr. Whitlock, I cannot stress enough the sheer amount of procedures that you violated doing

  this. I am going to be launching a serious investigation into you and your supervisor. There will be an inquiry and disciplinary action is likely and, yes, you might lose your job. If you're lucky, that will be the only thing that happens. A man enters the country from nowhere, with false papers, and then gets away all on your watch. You had better hope Mr. Duveen is not a terrorist or involved in any terrorist organization, Mr. Whitlock. So, I will be in touch.

  CW: What about the weird things that have been happening to me since this all went down?

  NR: What weird things?

  CW: Strange people lurking outside my house? Weird guys with wide-brimmed hats lurking behind trees.

  Is that you guys? Are you going to end the harassment?

  NR: Mr. Whitlock, we have no one stationed outside your home. I don’t know what you’re talking about.

  CW: Yeah, right. No idea. Look, you’re freaking out my wife and kid. Just stop it. I told you everything I

  know and I was following my supervisor’s orders. He just vanished.

  NR: If you have people lurking outside your home, call the police. They are not from my department or

  Homeland, as far as I know. As for the rest, you can tell that to the inquiry.

  END OF INTERVIEW

  ***

  Noble sat in the empty room for some time after Whitlock left. He rubbed his eyes and his temples. This story was just getting stranger and stranger. He checked the time and saw it was after ten o'clock. He had to inspect the room where Mr. Duveen had been placed and the idiots who had put him there had at least had the presence of mind to tape the interview in the interview room. Noble would have to review that as well.

  Not tonight. He had already reported the incident to his supervisor. His supervisor was already calling for Whitlock's head and the head of Whitlock's immediate supervisor.

  Hotel room.

  Really.

  Noble could remember September 11 as clearly as anyone else, perhaps more so. He had been working at Boston's airport the day the buildings came down. He remembered vividly standing there and watching the second plane hit. He had been on break, getting coffee, when the news broke about the plane crash in the first tower. Noble remembered literally jumping as if struck and dropping his coffee when the second plane exploded into the building live on television. He ran back to his office and soon thereafter the world changed.

  Noble looked at the passenger list again. It was about the nine hundredth time that he had done so and others had looked too. They had also cross-referenced it against known terrorist aliases and identities.

  Nothing. No one. Nothing out of the ordinary.

  They had also studied photos of the passengers taken from the security cameras around the airport and done facial identification and then cross-referenced those.

 
; Nada. Zip.

  Not long after those horrible days in 2001, he had become part of the Homeland Security investigative arm of I.C.E. (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). He was the guy that was supposed to track down illegal immigrants and get them deported. Although, soon after he joined up, he was pulled off of border patrol near El Paso and moved to a special taskforce in Chicago.

  Cases like this one were his now. He had no idea why someone had thought he was fit for this.

  Vanished into thin air. The guy had just vanished into thin air.

  Noble snorted, laughed, and ran his hand through his hair. He packed up his briefcase, his laptop and walked out of his office. It was late, the sky black and the stars twinkling. Noble had grown up in eastern Ohio, out in the country, and he remembered nights when there were so many stars and they seemed so big that it was almost too much to take in. Not so much here in Chicago.

  He had been in Chicago for four years now. It was a great city, he supposed, if you liked cities. Noble was not a city boy. He and Olivia visited his relatives in northeastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania as much as possible and they often talked about quitting their respective jobs and moving there. So far, though, the job kept bringing him back.

  Noble was out of the parking lot, waving to Charlie, the guard at the gate, and onto the toll way in less than ten minutes. The one good thing about leaving this late was that there was little traffic. In Chicago there was no such thing as a rush "hour", there were many hours starting at about three o'clock and sometimes stretching until after seven that traffic was a nightmare. That did not take into account the nighttime work that sometimes happened.

  Noble let his mind drift as he drove home, headed south and then west into the suburbs. The city receded in the distance, but the steady air traffic never stopped, as Noble glanced up into the sky he could see planes in a line waiting their turn to land. Where he lived now, he was somewhere in the middle between O'Hare and Midway airports. That meant that any night he tried to look up at the stars, even out there, he saw airplanes slowly crawling across the sky.

  Noble pulled into the driveway about half-an-hour later. The lights were still on inside because, fortunately, Olivia was still a night owl.

  Olivia’s car was parked in the driveway so Noble parked his in a parking spot just down a bit from his house. There were few streetlights out here in the 'burbs. It was late and the lights from most of the houses were out, as if the entire sub-division were sleeping.