“I don’t think so. Not yet.”
Eph carried his schematics up the wheeled stairs and into the aircraft. The seats were all empty now, and the lighting inside was normal. The only other difference from Eph’s and Nora’s perspective was that they were no longer sealed inside contact suits. All five senses were available to them now.
Eph said, “You smell that?”
Nora did. “What is it?”
“Ammonia. That’s part of it.”
“And…phosphorous?” The odor made her wince. “Is this what knocked them out?”
“No. The plane is clean for gas. But…” He was looking around—looking around for something they could not see. “Nora, go get the Luma wands, would you?”
While she went back out for them, Eph went throughout the cabin closing the window shades, as they had been the night before, darkening the cabin.
Nora returned with two Luma light wands that emitted a black light, similar to the one used on amusement park rides, that made laundered white cotton glow spectrally. Eph remembered Zack’s ninth birthday party at a “cosmic” bowling alley, and how every time Zack smiled, the boy’s teeth shone bright white.
They switched on the lights, and immediately the dark cabin was transformed into a crazy swirl of colors, a massive staining all throughout the floor and over the seats, leaving dark outlines of where the passengers had been.
Nora said, “Oh my God…”
Some of the glowing substance even coated the ceiling in a splashed-out pattern.
“It’s not blood,” said Eph, overwhelmed by the sight. Looking through to the aft cabin was like staring into a Jackson Pollock painting. “It’s some sort of biological matter.”
“Whatever it is, it’s sprayed all over the place. Like something exploded. But from where?”
“From here. From right where we are standing.” He knelt down, examining the carpet, the smell more pungent there. “We need to sample this and test it.”
“You think?” said Nora.
He stood again, still amazed. “Look at this.” He showed her a page of the airplane schematics. It diagrammed emergency rescue access for the Boeing 777 series. “See this shaded module at the front of the plane?”
She did. “It looks like a flight of stairs.”
“Right in back of the cockpit.”
“What’s ‘OFCRA’ stand for?”
Eph walked down to the galley before the cockpit door. Those very initials were printed on a wall panel there.
“Overhead flight crew rest area,” said Eph. “Standard on these long-distance big birds.”
Nora looked at him. “Did anybody check up here?”
Eph said, “I know we didn’t.”
He reached down and turned a handle recessed in the wall, pulling open the panel. A trifolding door revealed narrow, curving steps leading up into the dark.
“Oh, shit,” said Nora.
Eph played his Luma lamp up the stairs. “I take it that means you want me to go first.”
“Wait. Let’s get somebody else.”
“No. They won’t know what to look for.”
“Do we?”
Eph ignored that, and climbed the tight, curling stairs.
The upper compartment was tight, low-ceilinged. There were no windows. The Luma lights were better suited for forensic examination than indoor illumination.
Inside the first module, they made out two side-by-side business-class-size seats folded down. Behind these were two inclined bunks, also side by side, not much larger than a crawl space. The dark light showed both modules to be empty.
It also, however, showed more of the same multicolored mess they had discovered below. On the floor and tracked over the seats and one of the bunks. But here it was smudged, almost as though tracked in while still wet.
Nora said, “What the hell?”
The ammonia smell was here as well—and something else. A pungent odor.
Nora noticed it too, bringing the back of her hand beneath her nostrils. “What is it?”
Eph stood almost doubled over under the low ceiling between the two chairs. He was trying to put a word to it. “Like earthworms,” he said. “Used to dig them up as kids. Cut them in half in order to watch each section wriggle away. Their smell was earth, the cold soil they crawled through.”
Eph ran his black light over the walls and floors, scouring the chamber. He was about to give up when he noticed something behind Nora’s paper booties.
“Nora, don’t move,” said Eph.
He leaned to one side for a better angle on the carpeted floor behind her, Nora frozen as though she were about to trip a land mine.
A small clump of soil lay on the patterned carpet. No more than a few grams of dirt, a trace amount, richly black.
Nora said, “Is that what I think it is?”
Eph said, “The cabinet.”
They climbed back down the outside stairs to the area of the hangar reserved for cargo, where food-service carts were now being opened and inspected. Eph and Nora scanned the piles of luggage, the golf bags, the kayak.
The black wooden cabinet was gone. The space it had previously occupied, on the edge of the tarpaulin, was bare.
“Someone must have moved it,” said Eph, still looking. He walked away a few steps, scanning the rest of the hangar. “Couldn’t have gotten far.”
Nora’s eyes were blazing. “They are just starting to go through all this stuff. Nothing’s been taken out yet.”
Eph said, “This one thing was.”
“This is a secure site, Eph. That thing was what, about eight by four by three? It weighed a few hundred pounds. Would have taken four men to carry it.”
“Exactly. So somebody knows where it is.”
They went to the duty officer manning the hangar door, the keeper of the site log. The young man consulted his master list, a time log of everyone’s and everything’s entrances and exits. “Nothing here,” he said.
Eph sensed Nora’s objection rising and spoke before she could. “How long have you been here—standing right here?”
“Since about twelve, sir.”
“No break?” said Eph. “What about during the eclipse?”
“I stood right out here.” He pointed to a spot a few yards away from the door. “No one went by me.”
Eph looked back at Nora.
Nora said, “What in the hell is going on?” She looked at the duty officer. “Who else might have seen a great big coffin?”
Eph frowned at the word “coffin.” He looked back into the hangar, and then up at the security cameras in the rafters.
He pointed. “They did.”
Eph, Nora, and the Port Authority site log duty officer walked up the long, steel staircase to the control office overlooking the maintenance hangar. Below, mechanics were removing the aircraft’s nose for a look at the internals.
Four drone cameras ran constantly inside the hangar: one at the door leading to the office stairs; one trained on the hangar doors; one up in the rafters—the one Eph had pointed to—and one in the room they were standing in now. All displayed on a four-square screen.
Eph asked the maintenance foreman, “Why the camera in this room?”
The foreman shrugged. “Prolly ’cause this is where the petty cash is.”
He took his seat, a battered office chair whose armrests were striped with duct tape, and worked the keyboard beneath the monitor, expanding the rafter view to full screen. He scanned back through the security recording. The unit was digital, but a few years old, and too distorted to make out anything clearly during the rewind.
He stopped it. On the screen, the cabinet lay exactly where it had, on the edge of the off-loaded cargo.
“There it is,” said Eph.
The duty officer nodded. “Okay. So let’s see where it went.”
The foreman punched it forward. It ran more slowly than the rewind, but was still pretty fast. The light in the hangar darkened with the occultation, and when it bri
ghtened again, the cabinet was gone.
“Stop, stop,” said Eph. “Back it up.”
The foreman backed up a little, pressed play again. The time code on the bottom showed the image playing more slowly than before.
The hangar dimmed and at once the cabinet was again gone.
“What the—?” said the foreman, hitting pause.
Eph said, “Go back just a bit.”
The foreman did, then let it play through in real time.
The hangar dimmed, still lit by the interior work lights. The cabinet was there. And then it vanished.
“Wow,” said the duty officer.
The foreman paused the video. He was confounded too.
Eph said, “There is a gap. A cut.”
The foreman said, “No cut. You saw the time code.”
“Go back a bit then. A bit more…right there…now again.”
The foreman played it again.
And again the cabinet disappeared.
“Houdini,” grumbled the foreman.
Eph looked at Nora.
“It didn’t just disappear,” said the duty officer. He pointed out the other luggage nearby. “Everything else stays the same. Not a flicker.”
Eph said, “Back it up again. Please.”
The foreman ran it yet again. The cabinet disappeared yet again.
“Wait,” said Eph. He’d seen something. “Step it back—slowly.”
The foreman did, and ran it again.
“There,” said Eph.
“Christ,” exclaimed the foreman, almost jumping out of his creaky seat. “I saw it.”
“Saw what?” said Nora, together with the duty officer.
The foreman was into it now, rewinding the image just a few steps.
“Coming…,” said Eph, readying him. “Coming…” The foreman held his hand over the keyboard like a game show contestant waiting to press a buzzer. “…there.”
The cabinet was gone again. Nora leaned close. “What?”
Eph pointed to the side of the monitor. “Right there.”
Just evident on the wide right edge of the image was a black blur.
Eph said, “Something bursting past the camera.”
“Up in the rafters?” said Nora. “What, a bird?”
“Too damn big,” Eph said.
The duty officer, leaning close, said, “It’s a glitch. A shadow.”
“Okay,” Eph said, standing back. “A shadow of what?”
The duty officer straightened. “Can you go frame by frame?”
The foreman tried. The cabinet disappeared from the floor…almost simultaneously with the appearance of the blur in the rafters. “Best I can do on this machine.”
The duty officer studied the screen again. “Coincidence,” he declared. “How could anything move at that speed?”
Eph asked, “Can you zoom in?”
The foreman rolled his eyes. “This here ain’t CSI—it’s Radio-fucking-Shack.”
“So, it’s gone,” Nora said, turning to Eph, the other men unable to help. “But why—and how?”
Eph cupped his hand over the back of his neck. “The soil from the cabinet…it must be the same as the soil we just found. Which means…”
Nora said, “Are we formulating a theory that someone got up into the overhead flight crew rest area from the cargo hold?”
Eph recalled the feeling he had gotten, standing in the cockpit with the dead pilots—just before discovering that Redfern was still alive. That of a presence. Something nearby.
He moved Nora away from the other two. “And tracked some of that…whatever swirl of biological matter in the passenger cabin.”
Nora looked back to the image of the black blur in the rafters.
Eph said, “I think someone was hiding up in that compartment when we first entered the plane.”
“Okay…,” she said, grappling with that. “But then—where is it now?”
Eph said, “Wherever that cabinet is.”
Gus
GUS SAUNTERED DOWN the lane of cars in the low-ceilinged, long-term parking garage at JFK. The echoing screech of balding tires turning down the exit ramps made the place sound like a madhouse. He pulled out the folded index card from his shirt pocket and double-checked the section number, written in someone else’s hand. Then he double-checked that there was no one else near.
He found the van, a dinged-up, road-dirtied, white Econoline with no back windows, at the very end of the lane, parked astride a coned-off corner work area of fluttering tarp and crumbled stone where part of the overhead support had cracked.
He pulled out a hand rag and used it to try the driver’s door, which was unlocked, as advertised. He backed off from the van and looked around the isolated corner of the garage, quiet but for those monkey squeals in the distance, thinking trap. They could have a camera in any one of these other cars, watching him. Like on Cops, he’d seen that one: PD’d hooked up little cameras inside trucks and pulled them over on a city street, Cleveland or somewhere, and watched as kids and other yo-yos jumped in and took off on a joyride or a trip down to the local chop shop. Being caught was bad, but being tricked like that, getting hosed on prime-time TV, was much worse. Gus would rather be shot dead in his underwear than be branded a fool.
But he had taken the $50 the dude offered him to do this. Easy money, which Gus still had on him, tucked inside the band of his pinch-front hat, holding on to it for evidence in case things went south.
Dude was in the market when Gus went in for a Sprite. Behind him in line when he paid. Outside, a half block away, Gus heard someone coming up on him and turned fast. It was the dude—hands out, showing them empty. Wanting to know if Gus wanted to make some quick money.
White guy, neat suit, way out of place. He didn’t look cop but he didn’t look queer neither. Looked like some sort of missionary.
“A van in the airport parking garage. You pick it up, drive it into Manhattan, park it, and walk away.”
“A van,” said Gus.
“A van.”
“What’s in it?”
Dude just shook his head. Handed over an index card folded over five new tens. “Just a taste.”
Gus pulled out the bills, like lifting the meat out of a sandwich. “If you PD, this entrapment.”
“The pickup time is written on there. Don’t be early, and don’t be late.”
Gus thumbed the folded tens in his hand like sampling a fine fabric. Dude saw this. Dude also saw, Gus realized, the three small circles tattooed onto the webbing of Gus’s hand. Mex gang symbol for thief, but how would this dude know that? Was that why he made him back in the store? Why the dude had picked him?
“Keys and further instructions will be in the glove compartment.”
The dude started walking away.
“Yo,” said Gus after him. “I didn’t say yes yet.”
Gus pulled open the door—waited; no alarm—and climbed inside. Didn’t see no cameras—but he wouldn’t anyway, would he? Behind the front seats was a metal partition without a window. Bolted in there, aftermarket. Maybe truck full of PD he’s driving around.
Van felt still, though. He opened the glove compartment, again using the rag. Gently, as if a gag snake might jump out at him, and the little light came on. Laid out inside was the ignition key, the parking garage ticket he needed to get out, and a manila envelope.
He looked inside the envelope and the first thing he saw was his pay. Five new $100 bills, which pleased and pissed him off at the same time. Pleased him because it was more than he had expected, and pissed him off because no one would break a century from him without a hassle, especially nowhere in the hood. Even a bank would scan the hell out of those bills, coming out of the pocket of an eighteen-year-old tatted-up Mexican.
Folded around the bills was another index card listing the destination address and a garage access code, GOOD FOR ONE USE ONLY.
He compared the cards side by side. Same handwriting.
Anxiety faded as exc
itement rose. Sucker! Trusting him with this vehicle. Gus knew, right off the top of his head, three different spots in the South Bronx to take this baby for reconditioning. And to quickly satisfy his curiosity as to what sort of contraband goodness he was carrying in back.
The last item in the larger envelope was a smaller, letter-size envelope. He withdrew a few sheets of paper, unfolded them, and a warm flame rose out of the center of his back and into his shoulders and neck.
AUGUSTIN ELIZALDE, headed the first one. It was Gus’s rap sheet, his juvenile jacket leading up to the manslaughter conviction and his being kicked free with a clean slate on his eighteenth birthday, just three short weeks ago.
The second page showed a copy of his driver’s license and, below that, his mother’s driver’s license with the same East 115th Street address. Then a small picture of the front door of their building at the Taft Houses.
He stared at that paper for two straight minutes. His mind raced back and forth between that missionary-looking dude and how much he knew, and his madre here, and what kind of bad shit Gus had gotten himself into this time.
Gus didn’t take well to threats. Especially involving his madre: he had already put her through enough.
The third page was printed in the same handwriting as the index cards. It read: NO STOPS.
Gus sat at the window of the Insurgentes, eating his fried eggs doused with Tabasco sauce, looking at the white van double-parked out on Queens Boulevard. Gus loved breakfast, and, since getting out, had eaten breakfast at nearly every meal. He ordered specific now, because he could: bacon extra crispy, burn the toast.
Fuck them, NO STOPS. Gus didn’t like this game, not once they included his madre. He watched the van, thinking over his options, waiting for something to happen. Was he being watched? If so, how close? And if they could watch him—why weren’t they just driving the van themselves? What kind of shit had he gotten himself into here?
What was inside that van?
A couple of cabrones came sniffing around the front of the van. They ducked their heads and scattered when Gus emerged from the diner, his top-buttoned flannel shirt flaring out behind him in the late-day breeze, tats sleeving his bare forearms in bright accents of red around jailhouse black. The Latin Sultans’ cred carried out of Spanish Harlem north and east to the Bronx, and as far south into Queens. Their numbers were small, their shadow long. You didn’t mess with one unless you wanted war with all.
The Strain Page 10