The Tells
Pat Dixon
I’m not the kind of person that likes to brag, unlike fifty of my colleagues and my immediate supervisor, who shall remain nameless, but I am the best at what I do.
When I’m off the job and just hanging out with my buddies or driving my wife around, people tend to pigeonhole me as an icky-picky hypercritical sonuvabitch, especially where other people’s cars are concerned. In fact, until I got this job in security last year, ninety-five percent of the people who knew me would mock me in some way or other—and the other five percent would silently roll their eyes.
Security at the tunnels and bridges around Baltimore! You’ve probably wondered how we do it. How do we keep some suicide bomber from driving a car or truck loaded with explosives into or onto the structure and just ka-blooie-ing the damn thing to kingdom come? How do we keep the 4.7 million vehicles moving smoothly—well, moving at all—into and out of and around this great metropolis without putting these vital arterial structures at risk?
You have to know that we can’t do it by stopping every vehicle and searching it or even taking a few seconds to eyeball the I.D. of the drivers. That would cause way way way too many thousands of hours of delays—and it would require far too many more Monitors than the taxpayers of this great state of Maryland or anywhere else can afford to train and pay.
The secret—is D.P.—Driver Profiling—the cutting-edge science that has rewritten the books on Homeland Security. Between the knowledge gained in the city’s 45-hour course of training, in which I scored in the top half of my graduating class, and my own innate, natural, inborn, God-given abilities, I have personally been able to keep Baltimore’s bridges and tunnels safe from the threats posed by at least four bombers in just the past two months.
Not to brag, but my most famous coup was to have a huge shiny black Mercedes SUV pulled over fully two and a quarter miles before it entered a tunnel. At my own insistence, the occupants were detained and questioned while their vehicle was thoroughly searched by man and beast. One and a half hours later, nothing had been found. They, the occupants—two men and two women—all had what appeared to be valid I.D. as well as sundry and assorted papers that purported to make them out to be Staten Island residents on vacation, headed towards D.C., with confirmed hotel room reservations waiting for them. All kinds of colorful flyers and brochures about the Smithsonian Institution and a large array of hoity-toity cultural events like concerts and plays were marked up in pen with words like “Sounds great!” and “This is a must-see!” And their hotsy-totsy leather luggage had designer sports clothes and fancy-schmancy evening-wear, including strapless gowns and white bowties and the like.
Of course I know better than to be impressed with surface crud like that—or even by threats that they will sue or call their congressman. My supervisor nervously told me he was in favor of apologizing and putting them back on the road. He only gave me that “courtesy” because I had been right in 97.4% of the other cases I’ve been involved in, both before and after he came aboard with the Agency. And I told him I was coming down from the Monitor Room, the M.R. as we like to call it, and eyeball them and their vehicle in person before he did so. It’s S.O.P. for us Vehicle Monitors to have this right, and so he said for me to please try and get there on the double.
I eyeballed them for three minutes through the one-way glass. All of them were well dressed in expensive casual clothes and were talking in a ritzy-schlitzy way to each other and the three nervous Agency reps who were with them in the Driver Detainment Room, a.k.a. the D.D.R.
I glanced over their suitcases and handbags and papers for another two minutes and was negatively impressed by their expensive designer sunglasses and designer underwear and so on, so forth, and etcetera.
Their vehicle, I immediately has surmised, would be the make it or break it item, so I took the express ‘vator down to the Search Garage two floors below street level. Whatever could be pulled apart or probed without cutting it had apparently been pulled apart, probed, and inspected from every angle. I walked twice around those dirty bastards’ shiny black SUV and petted one of the Sniff K-9s that followed me. Then I beckoned one of the Search Team Personnel over and whispered a couple words in his ear. He shook his head. I jerked my thumb towards the Mercedes and said softly, but with total authority and confidence: “Do it.”
Those bastards—may they all rot in hell—are now behind bars because of my acumen and nigh-infallibly honed American instincts. And thus one more avenue of attack was closed off to the enemy—thanks exclusively and totally to me.
All the Search Team had to do was remove their massive tires from their mag wheels, including of course their spare, and check the wheel itself. Any semi-smart Drug Dick on the Tex-Mex boarder would have known enough to look there—for drugs—but, as my supervisor said when I was awarded my fifth Citation of Excellence, “Who’d ‘a’ thunk to look on a Mercedes’ mags for ‘splosives? Only Marvin Walsh had the insight, the instincts, the vision, the intuition, the acumen to do so! God bless America!”
They had shrink-wrapped five packages of plastique explosive C97 inside eight layers of air-tight coating and had slathered each layer with turpentine to cut down any residual odors the K-9s might pick up—and THEN had buried the packages in mud on the Jersey side of the lower Hudson River for two months. Those dirty rotten bastards actually bragged about their modus operandi during interrogation after they learned that it had actually worked for them—even to the extent that when I pushed each dog’s nose up to the packages that were crazy-glued on the insides of the mags, not one mutt had a clue that this was what they’d been trained to locate.
Since I knew already before I went into the Search Garage that I was correct—that these creeps had to be hiding something someplace—it was merely a matter of finding out what the Search Team had done and then going one giant step beyond that to the correct answer.
Now, boys and girls, I’ve been temporarily been reassigned to help orient you new trainees and upgrade the others Vehicle Monitors in my unit. I even get to wear this shiny Instructor badge at this training course, which is now a mandatory 48-hours long. And, for this work I get time-and-a-half!
In my three fifty-minute blocks of instruction, I will be showing video clips of various vehicles I’ve been involved with and’ll be asking you, “What’s wrong with this picture?”
Invariably, nobody can see it without prompting from me, even if I just creep through the video one frame at a time and point my little red laser at different parts of the screen.
The case I’d be proudest of—if I was a boastful sort of person—is that one with the four rich yuppy-looking suicide-bombing bastards in that black Mercedes SUV. All my—uh—students in my previous classes all found it difficult to believe that they actually had a normal-looking tattered U.S. flag flying from a little plastic mast on the passenger’s side and two standard decals with Old Glory and “God Bless America” displayed on their rear window. That, to them, is the height of deviosity! I just kind of chuckle every time and say, “Elementary, my dear students.”
So, how did those godless atheistic foreign perverts with their perfect English and perfect flags and perfect luggage and brochures slip up? How did I spot them on my high-res monitor before they were within four miles of the tunnel and know to have them pulled over, them out of the thousands of vehicles that were queued up to enter that vulnerably endangered structure? Also elementary—if you, like me, ever have watched and studied how U.S. citizens, especially with New York plates, actually drive!
Tell number one—22.7 percent of the vehicles from New York have got drivers yapping into a phone, and for drivers in the ritziest vehicles the percentage is at least triple that. But nobody in that vehicle—not one of ‘em—was using a hand-held cellular phone. This alone constitutes suspicious behavior in my mind when I first spot ‘em on my high-res monitor. And it later turned out that they’d planned to “phone” their mags while inside the tunnel to detonate all that C97 plastique.
And for another thing—tell number two—those people stayed totally inside their own lane. Virtually nobody from New York ever does that, and no New Yorker with an SUV can resist straddling the left-hand lane divider even when he—or she—isn’t compulsively leaping back and forth, back and forth, one lane to another. This really sent up a major flag for me to keep my eye on ‘em.
But tell numero three was the last-straw final give-away. Their driver did behave normally by letting a few other cars cut in ahead of them—real native New Yorkers will alternate between aggressive meanness and hyper-politeness in any two-minute period—but it was the red stoplights along that stretch of the approach that spelled their doom and downfall. Along that stretch—hand activated by me—there are three red lights in front of them—and they stopped for each one! In fact they were braking when each light was only yellow! No real New Yorker ever would do that! And it wasn’t because he’s scared of detonating their explosives prematurely ahead of time. Not at all. So, seeing that bizarre behavior, I knew just like the Hungarian language-coach guy in My Fair Lady that there’s majorly something totally unkosher about these people! “Their driving is too good,” I said! It was way way way too damn good for ‘em to be real New Yorkers—or even real Americans—except for maybe some of those rare weirdos that come down here from western Massachusetts and totally stop dead for anybody that’s even thinking about stepping into a crosswalk.
So I knew they had to be damn foreigners—and up to no damn good. Now that’s what we call expert profiling! Of course, this insight now being a crypto-classified state secret, if any of you flunk this course and don’t become Certified Maryland Vehicle Monitors yourselves, I’ll just have to tell the Agency to—wink, wink—kill you.
