“I am terribly sorry.”
“Fine,” Sara says, fuming. “Are there any other charters available? Anything at all?”
“Not if you want to leave the Houston area today, I’m afraid,” the man says, his voice oozing with sympathy. “I do see that there is a commercial flight to JFK leaving in less than an hour, if you hurry. You could make a connection there.”
Sara scowls, but we don’t waste any more time arguing.
We turn and head for the doors so we can get to the main terminals.
“What do you think?” Sara asks.
“Hard to believe someone else got our jet that fast. Seems like everyone is flying private these days.”
She turns her scowl on me. Not the time for humor, I guess. “You know what I mean. Do you think it’s Godwin? Screwing with us?”
I honestly don’t know. It would be child’s play for someone like Godwin to cancel the flight with a keystroke or two. But it seems so . . . pointless. “He’s already sent someone to shoot at us,” I say. “Canceling our flight? That’s like a prank phone call. Maybe he’s not as smart as we think he is.”
“Aaric said Godwin was at least as smart as him,” Sara says. “Which means, yeah: he’s a hell of a lot smarter than we think he is. I’m not sure we can even imagine how smart he is.”
Well. That’s reassuring. Sara’s mind clouds with worry for a moment, and it’s contagious. I feel like I’ve just been outmaneuvered, and I don’t even know how yet.
But we head for the ticket counter and get our last-minute seats to JFK. Because at this point, what else are we going to do?
*
This is the other reason I prefer flying private. For me, airports are like being crammed in a factory farm, but I’m the only animal who knows how it’s all going to end.
People are everywhere, and I can feel every bit of their anger, their boredom, their frustration, their pain, and their sadness. The mile-long TSA line is like a twisted spine sending signals of pain and rage right through me. People come to the airport with their hangovers, their undigested meals, and their unresolved feelings.
Not to mention the fear.
I’m already paranoid enough, looking out for another hit man from Godwin without all this emotional static.
But aside from the obscene price of our last-minute tickets, we haven’t had any other problems. Sara makes a quick run over to the gift shop for a charger pack for her phone, leaving me waiting in line at the counter to gate-check our bags. I’d love to slide over to the nearest bar and chase a couple of pills with a quick Scotch, but we don’t have that kind of time. I’ll have to wait until we get into our first-class seats.
My phone buzzes in my jacket. Priority message. I have only a few people on my VIP list, so I take it out and check.
It’s a file from Cantrell. He managed to get a photo of Godwin from his contacts at the DEA. It’s a mug shot of Godwin’s last arrest, years ago in Manila. It’s dim and grainy—it looks like the copy of a fax of a fax—but it’s better than anything we had before.
In the photo, he’s square-jawed and unsmiling. High forehead, thick hair cut high and tight. A weird flat gray to his eyes that comes across even with the poor quality of the picture. I know I am projecting here, but he looks utterly bored. Confident, even.
He had reason to be. Cantrell’s note tells me that he was arrested on a drug charge but never convicted. He sat out three months in a cell waiting for the trial. Then all the witnesses against him, including one of the cops, either disappeared or changed their stories. His attorneys got the charges dropped. He walked out of the jail and hasn’t appeared in an official court record anywhere since.
Cantrell closes his email by saying, “Let me know if you want my help with this one. Could be very lucrative.”
Yeah. Thanks but no thanks. I pocket my phone again and start looking around for Sara. Our flight begins boarding in ten minutes. The agent at the gate calls me forward, and I haul our luggage up to the counter.
I’ve just negotiated all the tagging and bagging when I feel the telltale prickle of someone’s attention on me.
I turn and see a guy in his twenties framing me in the shot of his iPhone. Fortunately, not someone lining up a gun. But still. I raise my hand to my face and turn away just before he snaps his picture.
I get a blast of anger and disappointment from him.
I keep my back to him and try to probe a little deeper to figure out what he’s doing. I’ve been under surveillance before, but it’s usually never this obvious.
All I’m getting is an increasing amount of frustration as he circles around, trying for a picture. Plus, my attention is divided—the gate agent is asking me something as she hands me our luggage tags.
“Excuse me?” I ask.
She sighs heavily, and now I get her frustration aimed at me as well. “I said, did you want to add a frequent flyer number? Or upgrade to our gold member rewards program?”
“No, no thank you,” I reply, and try to focus on the cameraman again, who is now somewhere to my left.
I turn my head to get a look at him, and that’s when the other guy rushes out of the crowd and sucker-punches me.
I manage to pull back and roll with it, so it doesn’t land very hard—but it still rattles my brain around.
This almost never happens. I can usually see a punch coming long before it’s thrown. I can’t remember the last time I got tagged, especially not in public.
So that’s probably why I just stand there, stupidly, for a long moment, looking at my attacker.
It’s a different guy, also in his twenties, wearing a polo shirt and shorts and flip-flops, an aging frat boy going a little flabby. He’s enraged but uncertain. I didn’t fall down, and now he’s wondering what the hell to do next.
I have no idea why he hit me. And the stream of words coming from his mind is no help at all.
He’s clearly an amateur, which is lucky for me since I’m standing in place like a moron, waiting for him to hit me again.
The gate agent is stunned into silence, and the other people around me are frozen too. Everybody’s waiting to see what happens next.
Then someone else in the crowd locks on me and says, “Hey, hey—it’s him!” I turn and see a fat guy in a Cowboys jersey break out of the crowd. His mind is a night sky full of fireworks, nothing but sound and big lights going off and a picture of me with a target on my face. He rushes me and tries to take me down with a flying tackle.
I sidestep him neatly and he hits the counter hard enough to crack the cheap particleboard. I turn back to my first attacker, Polo Shirt. I scrape his name out of his head
But he just holds up his phone, like one of Moses’s tablets, and turns to the crowd and yells, “It’s the guy! Get this prick!”
And he turns to throw another punch.
Fine. I’ll get the answers later.
I grab his wrist and drag him into an elbow strike and he drops to the grubby carpeting right next to my roller bag. This sends a charge through the crowd, and a couple other people move toward me, like they’ve got targeting systems locked.
I’m reading the same thoughts from several people now, accompanied by a massive surge of adrenaline, some kind of shock of recognition.
I can feel it, all around me, like a charge in the air before lightning strikes.
I’m suddenly at the center of a c
ircle of people, and they’re all looking at me like I’m their worst enemy.
I look up and see Sara, confused and frightened. I shake my head, telling her to keep back.
“It’s him!” someone yells.
“What the hell do you think you were doing?” another guy yells, from the back of the crowd.
The locks on polite, everyday behavior are beginning to come undone. Being part of a crowd is giving them courage. They suddenly have a target, an outlet for their frustration. The cabdriver who took them the wrong way to the airport. The kids at home who are never grateful enough for all their parents’ hard work. The boss who always manages to work an insult into every conversation.
It’s all coming out now. They hate me so much I can feel it like a sunburn.
“Who the hell do you think you are, buddy?” another voice, again from the back of the crowd.
I think of what Stack said. How people will do and say things in groups they would never consider if they were on their own.
I have to be careful. I have to say exactly the right thing now.
“Look,” I say, my voice as calm as a hostage negotiator. “You’ve got the wrong guy.”
Wrong thing, as it turns out. Their faces all turn to snarls, and a man in a Hooters trucker cap screams, “Get him!”
And they charge.
They’re operating on instinct. On anger and endorphins. They know they have the numbers—dozens of them, one of me—and they are all feeling brave and righteous. They will excise me like a cancer.
Just like that, they have gone from a crowd to a mob. And I suddenly have a new understanding of what the term “flashmob” means. In a matter of minutes—seconds—they have become a swarm, a flock, a stampede.
Bodies hit me like a wave. I find myself shoved up against the counter. Two guys are yelling at me, pawing at me, trying to rip my suit off or punch me. A woman is swinging her purse, trying to clobber me on the head with it. The gate agent is shrieking into a phone, panic blazing from her. Airport cops are on the edge of the crowd, but there are too many bodies in the way.
I can’t tell minds or bodies apart. Just a mass of undifferentiated rage.
And I find that Stack was right again: it is contagious. Especially for me.
My blood pressure spikes. My teeth clench, along with my fists. I manage to stay on my feet. All I want, for a moment, is to begin hurting people. To use every cheap move and dirty trick I’ve ever learned to break their bones, crack their skulls, disable and deform them, make them pay.
It would be so easy to cripple them, inside and out. I could give them nightmares that would have them in therapy for years. I could fold this one’s knee back, and he’d walk with a limp for the rest of his life. I could punch this one in the throat and watch as he choked on his own windpipe. I could make this one live through a car crash or a gunshot wound or a knife to the chest—
No.
It’s not them, I tell myself. It’s not them. It’s Godwin. Whoever he is. Wherever he is. It’s him.
I suck down a deep breath. Move into a defensive posture, mentally and physically. Guard my head and my body, and bat their hands away as they reach for me. They are too close to me and each other. They are doing more damage to themselves than to me. The two men pinning me to the counter are already out of breath.
Rage can be exhausting if you don’t do your cardio. They will be out of steam in a moment. All I have to do is wait them out. I can survive this. I can.
Then the buckle on a woman’s purse catches me below the eye and opens a cut on my cheek. Blood starts to run. I flinch, and that gives one of the men an opening to catch me with a punch across my left eye.
And suddenly I have had enough of this shit.
I grab one man’s hand and bend it toward his wrist and he yelps and squeals. I feel his pain, sharp and bright. I take it and hold it, then fling it out into another man, where it stabs him like a shiny needle he feels in the same place.
But I’m under control, I tell myself. I do exactly what I need to do to get them to back off. Nothing else.
They both try to stagger away from me. Instead, they bounce against the crowd yelling behind them.
In those moments, it’s like they wake up. They look around and see what they are doing.
Their rage is suddenly replaced by fear. They’re in the center of something big and ugly, but they are no longer a part of it.
They pull back from the brink. Just like I do.
But you can’t call time-out in the middle of a mob.
I can’t use any of my mind tricks on this many people at once, especially when they’re operating on the level of lizard-brain instinct. I need something else, some way to wake them all up. I look to my left and see it: a fire alarm set into the nearest wall.
I grab the purse from the woman’s hand. She’s suddenly appalled.
I take the purse and fling it at the alarm switch as hard as I can.
It hits like a fastball and a siren begins to wail, along with a loud buzzing noise. Sprinklers in the ceiling open up, and water begins to drench everyone in the terminal.
It’s the perfect cold shower. People step back, blinking, shouting with surprise. The rage curdles fast. They feel sick and guilty.
I get that too. It feels like nausea.
The cops reach me then. They’re the only ones in the crowd who are still angry. I’ve got no idea how to explain this.
Fortunately, Sara is there. She handles it. She saw the whole thing, Officers. People just went crazy and attacked.
She points out the first two guys—Polo Shirt and the Cameraman. They are trying very hard to be nonchalant, walking slowly away from the mass of bodies.
The cops turn their anger on them, slam them up against the wall and start shouting questions. In the meantime, someone finally turns off the sprinklers. We all stand around, dripping wet and faintly ridiculous.
It takes about twenty minutes of this before we finally get to the root cause of the whole riot.
Polo Shirt—real name, Matthew Harbaugh—holds up his phone.
It’s from his Facebook feed. There’s a picture of a man in a suit. My face—grainy, probably chopped from some surveillance camera video— has been painstakingly Photoshopped onto the body.
He’s pissing on the American flag.
The headline: you won’t believe how this rich liberal got away with this!
The story hardly matters. In Texas, this is a death-penalty offense. Which explains why this group of otherwise ordinary people were just looking for an excuse to beat the shit out of me.
I am amazed at Godwin’s work, at his speed. He didn’t even have to put me up on Downvote. He just had to plant the seed.
For the next few minutes, the cops snarl at me instead of anyone in the mob. I’ve just gone from victim to suspect.
Those are some of the milder thoughts. They’re actually doing their best to lock their anger down, to keep it behind the thin blue line. They are cops, after all.
But it’s hard.
So I keep explaining, patiently and calmly, that it’s not me in the photo. That I didn’t do anything like that. That I am a veteran myself. And so on.
Finally, Sara unspools the whole mess by tapping on the story on the phone. It leads exactly nowhere—one of those anonymous Internet memes that doesn’t seem to have a source, that appears to generate spontaneously, like mildew in a shower.
“John Smith,” she says to the cops. “I mean, really? It could be anybody. It’s fake.”
They both scowl at the phone for a long time. They look at each other.
They’re not sure they want to believe that the story is a fake. But they see this as the quickest way to end this with the least amount of paperwork.
“Man. Sure looks like you, though. I can see why they wanted to kill you,” one of the cops says. He looks at the picture and then at me again. He shakes his head. “You can hardly blame them.”
*
“I thought you never got hit,” Sara says. She looks at me from her little pod in first class, across the aisle from mine. Her hair is still wet even though we both had time to change into dry clothes. She’s trying to be playful. To laugh off the experience. It’s a pretty common reaction after something frightening or shocking, and it speaks well to her mental health and resilience.
I’m not quite there yet.
The cut below my eye has stopped bleeding. But my jaw still hurts, and I’ve got blood on my new, dry shirt, so I’m not seeing the humor.
It should go without saying that we had to take a later flight. The police decided to let me off with a warning, even though I was the one attacked. It helped considerably when I said I didn’t want to press charges. The people in the mob separated and went back to being themselves, on their way to their final destinations with a story to tell when they arrived. You’ll never believe what happened at the airport . . . Oh yeah. I even punched him. Guy had it coming, what can I say?
At least it’s quiet now. Most of the people in first class have pulled down their shades, put on sleeping masks, and taken drugs to knock themselves out. Something happens when you yank a human being thirty-two thousand feet into the air. At some deep, almost cellular level, everyone in a plane knows their fate is no longer in their hands. For at least a couple of hours, they are free of gravity and all the cares and worries back on the ground.
Sara’s still waiting for an answer.
“Too much going on,” I tell her. “One guy trying to get my picture, dealing with the gate agent—”
“Oh sure.” She’s smirking. Amusement dances in her mind.
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