He’d had a call from the head of the ground crew of a major airline saying a first-class passenger on their early New York flight had been flagged as a potential problem. Worst of all, the circumstances weren’t clear. He wasn’t on the No Fly List that Homeland Security denied having, but the code that came up next to his name indicated that they needed additional clearance to allow him to enter the U.S. It appeared to be a gray area, which Pascal hated most. If they took him off the flight, he could sue the airline for the embarrassment and business meetings he missed. If they left him on, the plane and its passengers could be turned around and sent back to Paris from New York, without a single passenger able to get off.

“Shit,” Pascal said to himself as he read the printout and knew what it meant. “Questionable passenger, clearance required.” It was one in the morning in New York, the flight was due to take off from Paris in an hour, and at that time it wouldn’t be easy to reach someone at Homeland Security in New York who could give them clearance. He could feel his stomach start to churn and tighten, which was part of the job now. His wife wanted him to take early retirement, but most of the time he still enjoyed his job, when he didn’t have a problem like this one.

Pascal knew who to call at Homeland Security at JFK and had the contact’s personal cellphone number. He hated to use it if it wasn’t a real emergency, but it could easily become one, particularly from a PR standpoint for the airline. He looked for the number on his phone and found it easily. He wondered if his counterpart in New York had high blood pressure too. But Pascal didn’t want to make the decision alone. The burden and the fallout were too heavy to have solely on his own shoulders. On mornings like this he didn’t enjoy his job and wished he had stayed in the military. Things had been so much simpler there. There were fewer “gray areas” than he dealt with almost daily at Charles de Gaulle.

—

Rafael Gonzales was awake but still in bed, waiting for the alarm to go off at two a.m., so he could get to his office by four. They’d had a busy few weeks, with fashion week in New York, and the overbooked flights coming in from all over Europe, plus the annual United Nations meetings, which brought people in from countries all over the world, most of them with diplomatic immunity, which was complicated for security. They’d had heads of state and high officials from countries around the globe, as well as the usual traffic of businesspeople coming to New York for a variety of reasons. It was a good time for some of the wrong people to slip in, and it was up to him to see that customs officers and ICE were vigilant about it.