by James Frey
“How did you get friends in Istanbul?” he asked, his voice low and even. I couldn’t tell if he suspected me of anything.
“College.”
“Which college?”
“Berkeley,” I said. Damn it. I shouldn’t have said that. What if he’d seen the article on me? What if he recognized me? We had rehearsed this, and I was supposed to say UC–San Francisco.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Uh . . .” I reached into my pocket and showed him my passport.
“Frank. Frank Finn.”
“If you’re from Berkeley, why are you flying out of Reno?”
“Look, is there a problem? I need to get to the gate.”
He refolded the ticket but didn’t hand it to me. “Why are you flying out of Reno?”
“I’m from here,” I said. “School’s out for another couple weeks.”
“What part of Reno?”
“I’ve got to get to my plane,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm.
“What part of Reno?”
“Sparks, actually. Near the golf course.” I was making it all up, but I was banking on the hope that he, as a Reno cop, wouldn’t know details about the streets in Sparks. In all honesty, I didn’t even know if there was a golf course in Sparks.
Kat had made it through the checkpoint and came up behind me.
“Hey, Frank.” She took my hand.
“You’re with him?” the cop asked.
“Of course,” she said.
“Okay,” he said slowly. “Listen. I know why people your age go to the Near East. Hashish and opium, right?”
“We won’t be messing with that,” I said, and took my ticket out of his hand. “We have to go—we’re going to be late.” I started backing away from him, heading toward the concourse.
Behind the cop, I could see another officer leading John to a room just beside the security line. Had he been recognized? My worry must have shown on my face, because the cop looked over his shoulder.
“You know him?”
“No,” I said too quickly.
Calm down, I told myself. You’re acting defensive and stupid.
He narrowed his eyes. A voice came in on his radio, and he answered it. Then he nodded at us.
“Go on, then. Have a safe flight.”
As he walked away, I turned to Kat, feeling simultaneously relieved and panicked. Kat was grimacing.
The police were on high alert. What would happen if they arrested John? After all that hard work, our mission would be screwed.
We hadn’t discussed any of this as a potential problem. My squad had contingencies in case we failed. If Kat and I didn’t show up in Baghdad by a certain date, then Eugene was to try to do the job alone. But no one expected John to fail. No one was backup for him. The same went for Walter. He was going to Omaha since he knew the Cahokian line so well, and he insisted he could get the job done despite being recognizable to them. He said he was able to get through their defenses. He said he knew them all.
If John didn’t get on the plane, should I try to find other Zero line members in the airport and ask them if we needed to back up John? Maybe Barbara or Douglas had copies of the dossiers.
But I didn’t know where Walter would be in the airport. He wasn’t taking the same plane that so many of us were, since he wasn’t going international.
I took Kat’s hand. We made it to the gate in three minutes, just as the airline crew was closing the door.
Kat and I had seats next to each other, and I saw a few other members of our crew scattered around the plane. We were all pretending not to know one another. We were going to have a layover in Atlanta, and then Kat and I had another 10-hour layover in London before continuing on to Istanbul.
But the plane didn’t leave.
I flipped absently through a Time magazine that someone had left in the pocket of the seat in front of me, knowing I needed to stay calm. Were they on to us?
There was nowhere to run to, even if I dared. It didn’t help that this was my first time on a plane—I felt claustrophobic, and my heart was pounding in my chest.
Two policemen appeared at the front of the plane.
Damn.
They started to very slowly walk down the aisle, looking at all the faces.
I wished I hadn’t shaved my beard. Not looking like Michael Stavros would have been a big help right then.
The cops stopped. I was in the back of the plane, in a middle seat. Kat was by the window. She was reading a book in her lap, her head down and her long brown hair covering the sides of her face. I knew Eugene was up in front somewhere, but I couldn’t tell if that was where they had stopped.
“What’s going on?” I asked the man in the aisle seat.
“Cops,” he said. “Do you think that maybe they were going to try to hijack this plane?”
“Who?”
“You know,” he said. “The pinkos trying to get to Cuba. They’re always in the news.”
“Yeah,” I said with a nod, trying to stay calm.
A stewardess walked past, and the man next to me asked her what was happening.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “Everything is safe.”
Everything is safe. That sounded ominous, even though it was supposed to be reassuring. She should have said something like “Everything is fine.” “Everything is safe” meant that something was unsafe, but the problem had been taken care of. Did that mean they stopped a criminal? Did they catch one of us in Zero line?
She left us. He blew out a long breath and pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. “I need a smoke. You travel much?”
“No,” I said. “Not by plane, I mean.”
“The name’s Marty.” He held out his hand to me. “Cigarette?”
I shook it. “Frank. No thanks.”
“There they go,” Marty said.
The police were pulling someone up from a seat.
“Shit,” I murmured.
It was Eugene.
Did that mean they were onto us? Would Kat and I be next? And what had happened to John? He was supposed to be on our plane, but I hadn’t passed him as I’d made my way to my seat. I’d never seen him come out of the room by security.
Had he been arrested?
Would we be able to manage with Walter in charge? Walter was working with John, but it was John we always went to with problems. Walter was focused tight on the objectives, not paying attention to the people who were supposed to perform all their duties. Walter didn’t understand people who were struggling, or confused, or those who weren’t as well trained as a Green Beret. He had no tolerance for problems. People were going to be scared now, and Walter was not the leader to calm anyone’s fears.
“I wouldn’t worry,” Marty said, talking to me as if I was a kid. “They say planes are the safest way to travel. Much safer than cars.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
Were the police just catching Eugene based on his other crimes? Or was this about the gun store? Or the bank robbery? My heart was pounding so loud, I was sure the cops could hear it.
What if they stopped Mary’s plane to Mexico?
The captain came on the PA and announced that we would be departing in a few minutes, and he apologized for the delay.
I flipped through the pages of the magazine again, stopping on a photo of ancient Anasazi petroglyphs in Arizona. They were images somewhat in human form, but with circles around their heads, or horns, or antennae.
“Look like aliens, don’t they?” Marty said with a laugh.
“Yeah.”
“All this time we’ve been talking about aliens and seeing UFOs, wondering if they’re real or not. Imagine if they really came to make contact with Earth, and they landed a thousand years ago with the Indians. Maybe they decided that we were primitives and they left thinking we were just living in tepees and not worth bothering with.”
I forced a chuckle. He had no idea what was really going on. No one did. He ha
d no idea that we were on our way to stop the aliens from destroying the world.
The police left, and a moment later John came on the plane, smiling broadly without looking at anyone in particular. He sat down, and the stewardess closed the door.
He hadn’t been arrested. Relief flowed through my body. We’d lost Eugene, but at least we had our leader.
The low roar of the engines started up, and the plane began taxiing away from the terminal.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“This food is pretty terrible,” Kat said to me, looking disdainfully at the ham sandwich in her hands. “Even the chips are bland.”
We were sitting in the Atlanta airport during a three-hour layover, waiting for our plane to London. There were quite a few Zero line members waiting for the same flight—London was a hub that would lead many of us to our final destinations. But, besides Kat and me, no one else was supposed to know one another, and after the trouble at the Reno airport, we all sensed we should stick to our cover stories carefully. That only gave me Kat to talk to.
I ate the dry, stale sandwich I’d bought at an airport restaurant. From where I sat, I could see Rodney had one too, but he hadn’t touched it. He used to run a deli, so this kind of prepackaged airport food must have seemed terrible to him.
They called his flight before ours.
Kat was reading a book. I debated asking her what we should do now that we didn’t have Eugene. Just as I was about to, John appeared beside me and sat down.
He crossed his legs and slouched in his chair. “Ever been to Atlanta before?”
I stammered for a minute. I was four seats away from the next traveler, close enough that I didn’t want to say anything important.
“I haven’t. It’s humid. Getting off the plane felt like walking into a Laundromat.”
“It is. And this is nothing compared to outside.”
I had bought a New York Times and a copy of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe. It didn’t sound like my type of book, but John had recommended it several weeks ago. It was sitting on my lap.
“Any good?” he asked, pointing at it.
“Haven’t started it yet,” I said.
“It’s missing a major character.”
“Yeah,” I said slowly and casually. “I wonder what it’ll be like without him.”
“The plot is still solid. You’ll be surprised how well it all works out.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve been studying it all summer. Two great characters who work together well.”
I nodded. “I hope you’re right.”
“Of course I’m right. I assume this edition has copies of all the notes? Details?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess so.” I had copies of all the Baghdad plans—the place where we were supposed to pick up the smuggled bombs, the thermite, and guns.
His voice lowered. “Do you need me to send you a third?”
“Who?”
“I could arrange Julia. Or Rodney.”
I thought about it for several seconds. I flipped through the pages of the book, and then closed it again.
“No, we’ll be good.”
“Okay. Good. Don’t worry. I know you’re upset about Mary. But don’t let that screw with your head. She’ll be waiting for you.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll see you. Be safe.”
I didn’t nod, just stared straight ahead. “Okay.”
As it turned out, I started reading the book on the 747 and fell asleep, waking up to find it was the middle of the night in London.
I didn’t know about the others, but I breathed a sigh of relief to be on foreign soil. There were no American cops to worry about the bank robbery or the protest at Berkeley or the gun store. And since no police were waiting for me at the airport, I figured that Eugene hadn’t ratted us out. Not that he would, but my mind was wandering down a catastrophic road.
I checked my watch. It was set to California time. I mentally added two hours to it and tried to visualize where Mary was and what she was doing. Odds were she was asleep. Or staying up late, drinking with Bruce. Or they were—no. I had to stop myself from imagining the worst.
During our 10-hour layover in London, Kat and I ventured out of the airport. I’d never left the United States before. It was the middle of the night, so nothing was open, of course. After changing some money, we took a taxi into town and had the cabbie drop us off at Big Ben. I didn’t know where any of the landmarks were, but we found Westminster Abbey and followed the signs to Buckingham Palace.
As I stared through the gates, I wondered what I’d gotten myself into. I was nineteen, a college dropout, standing in front of Buckingham Palace while I waited to get to Istanbul so I could plant a bomb. I was going to kill people. A Calling didn’t need to kill people, Walter had said, but it could. If things didn’t work out, I would die, Kat would die, and maybe a lot more people would die. Eugene might very well be the only one to make it out of this alive.
No, that wasn’t true. If we failed, then the whole world would face apocalypse. My death would be horribly insignificant.
It was the surviving Player whose people would live, which made my mission almost laughable. Walter had guessed that I was part of the Minoan line—which was the line I was going to end. If any one of our squads failed in their missions, or failed in Munich, then I was signing my own death warrant.
With that thought, I joined Kat in wandering the streets of London, down a long road that was lined with trees, and, as the sun rose, we found ourselves in Trafalgar Square. I ate breakfast at a pub on a side street—the full English breakfast: sausage, eggs, beans, black pudding, and fried tomatoes and toast. I didn’t know what black pudding was, but it tasted good. I wasn’t a tea fan, but Kat insisted that I drink it, and the cup they brought with the breakfast was hot and satisfying.
We went back to the airport, and I broke the rules. I wrote everything down in the back pages of my book. Everything. I started by describing the Calling the best that I could, listing all the lines: Minoan, Shang, Cahokian, Aksumite, Sumerian, Harappan, and on and on. I wrote down where these lines could be found. I forgot the cities where some of the lines lived, but I narrowed the others all down the best I could: some got a city name and others got a city and street. I listed the specific addresses of the Minoan line and the Sumerians. And then I wrote about the aliens. Everything I knew. Everything that John and Walter had said. All the discussions we’d had around the campfires all summer, all the weird historical anomalies John preached about: the Pyramids, the Mayan artifacts, the Nazca lines, the Piri Reis map, the Annunaki. I wrote down how I’d been recruited, how Walter knew about this, how we’d lived and trained on Mary’s ranch. I wrote about the meteor—how it flew harmlessly through our atmosphere, almost smashing into Earth and blowing out our windows with a sonic boom. I wrote about Mary.
I didn’t know how to end the section on Mary, so I left that page in the middle of a sentence.
I confessed to the gun store robbery, to killing the sheriff, to burning down the store. I wrote about Tommy. I wrote about the bank. It all came out, a manifesto of the Zero line.
And I left a paragraph of warning, saying that these 12 ancient lines needed to end, that we needed to imprison the Players, or kill them if need be, if we were to ever have a chance as the human race. We were not a game created by aliens; we were a planet filled with good people. Zero line wasn’t intent on killing for the sake of killing. We were saving the world.
“What’s that?” Kat asked, looking over my shoulder.
“Everything,” I said. “In case this all goes wrong. Someone needs to follow in our footsteps.”
“Is it safe?”
“Is any of this safe?”
“I worry about you, Mike.”
“I’m not going to screw up our missions.”
“That’s not what I meant,” she said. “I worry you won’t make it. I don’t want that to happen.”
I reached
over and took her hand, gave it a squeeze.
“We’ll be okay. You and me.”
Near baggage claim I found a locker. I used some coins to open it and leave my book. I put the key, clearly marked with the locker number and HEATHROW—in the pocket of my jeans.
Eight hours later I was waiting to pick up my luggage in Yeilköy Airport with Kat at my side. We were here together, as boyfriend and girlfriend.
There was a cacophony all around us, but we ignored it and stared, waiting as the big, brown, hard-sided suitcase appeared and slid toward us. A few moments later, a burly man dropped Kat’s smaller blue bag onto the sloped luggage rack.
I carried the big one, along with my backpack, out of the airport. It was hot there in the Turkish sun, and humid on top of it. Kat immediately stepped out into the road and waved for a taxi. One stopped in front of us and the driver jumped out and placed our cases in the trunk.
CHAPTER NINE
The Minoan house wasn’t a house at all. It was a compound. All the buildings in Istanbul were crammed together, and to get to the Minoan house you had to walk down an alley about twenty yards and then take a left into a parking area. A slim metal door opened into the compound, and from our vantage during a scouting mission, we couldn’t tell if that door went into a building or a courtyard.
We’d been in Istanbul for a week, and only had five days left to figure out the best way to set off the bomb. So far, our trip had been careful and slow: we’d rented a truck, figured out where the Minoans were, and traced three different routes between their compound and our hotel (which we’d purposely gotten on the opposite side of the city). We visited the fish market, and a few of the tourist spots, just in case someone was following us.
Our scouting mission had the two of us holding a map and walking down the alley, arguing about where we were and which way we needed to go to get to Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque.
Following our cover story, we were dressed in normal Western clothes—jeans and a T-shirt for me, a long, casual sundress for Kat.
We’d discovered that Turkey was a blend of Middle Eastern and European influences. Many of the men there were wearing jeans—even some women. In some ways it wasn’t all that different from London.