by Steven Gould
Those bags were a benefit to me. They provided no peripheral vision and so, when I moved, they didn’t see me.
I jumped behind Purple-bag and grabbed him, jumped to the pit, fifty feet above the cold, hard water, and let go, jumping away immediately. I appeared behind Orange-bag, his head turning to see what the brief grunt of surprise from Purple-bag meant, his hand going to the machine gun.
I grabbed him, jumped him to the pit, dropped him, and jumped away. Just before I did, I heard the splash as Purple-bag hit the water. I wondered if he would surface in time for Orange-bag to hit him.
I appeared six feet behind Green-bag. He’d charged forward from where he’d been, up the aisle. He was shouting. I jumped forward, to close the distance, but he was out of arm’s reach again, still moving. Damn. I jumped immediately in front of him, my hand sweeping the machine-gun barrel up away from me and away from any passengers. The gun went off, carving pieces of plastic out of the ceiling, and his body slammed into mine, carrying me back, him on top of me.
Before I hit the carpeted aisleway, I grabbed him, and jumped to the pit, appearing in midair, but tumbling backward, unsettling for me, terrifying for Green-bag, who found himself facedown fifty feet in the air.
I jumped to the cliff above and watched him hit the water right next to where Purple-bag flailed weakly on the surface. There was a tremendous gout of water; then I saw Orange-bag splash to the surface sputtering. He was trying to hold on to the machine gun, but it seemed to be pushing him under. Finally he let go of it.
Green-bag surfaced then. His bag had twisted underwater and he was pawing frantically at it, trying to get it off before it suffocated him. He pulled it free and I could hear his coughing gasps for air from the top of the cliff. He’d lost his machine gun in the water.
I looked closer. Green-bag’s hair was soaked and darkened by the water, but there didn’t seem to be any doubt that it was blond. His face was very white, from the cold of the water, but also his natural complexion.
They made their way, weakly, to the island, collapsing in the shallows, unable to pull themselves any farther.
I jumped down to the island, waded out into ankle-deep water, and dragged Purple-bag up onto dry land by his collar. He struggled weakly, reaching for his waist. I took a deep breath and kicked him in the stomach. He stopped struggling and vomited. I finished pulling him ashore, then took a large nylon cable tie out of my bag and used it to lock his wrists behind him. Then I dragged the other two out and did the same to them.
I frisked them, taking away two pistols, three grenades, and a knife. Only then did I pull the other two bags off.
European features, light coloring. Neither one was Rashid Matar.
“Who are you?”
They stared at me, dazed, uncomprehending. The water was on the low side of 60° F. They were probably suffering from some degree of hypothermia. Hitting the water at over forty miles an hour probably didn’t help, either.
I fired one of the pistols into the water near them. They jerked, more alert, the sound doubly intimidating because of the confinement of the cliff walls. “Who are you?”
The one who’d worn the orange mask said weakly, “Red Army Faction.” He had a German accent.
Not Shiite extremists. Not by a long shot. I thought about asking them about Rashid Matar, but it seemed unlikely they would know anything.
It was now less than five minutes since I first moved on the hijackers. The green bag drifted to shore nearby, floated by trapped air and pulled along in the hijacker’s wake. I fished it out of the water and pulled it over the blond’s head. Then I put the other men’s bags on.
“What are you doing?” Orange-bag asked. I pulled him to his feet. He was barely able to stand. I jumped to the first-class section of the airplane and let him collapse into a seat; then I fetched the other two as well. I brought some of their weapons back, as well, for evidence.
The passengers were coming out of their paralysis. They all looked fearfully up the aisle when I appeared, some ducking back into their seats, but none of them had ventured as far as the cockpit. The flight attendants, it turned out, were taped to seats at the back of first class.
“It’s okay,” I called down the plane. “It’s over. Somebody cut these people free.” I pointed at the flight attendants. I moved up to the cockpit and, with the captured knife, cut the pilots free. I told them the same thing. “It’s over. The hijackers are tied up in first class.”
The pilot looked at me, dazed, puzzled. “What should we do now?”
“Whatever you want,” I said, then jumped.
I stood with the press as the plane was taxied up. The regular crowd was still held behind the barrier, but the press were close enough to see the passengers come out. I’d picked up my binoculars from the baggage cart before coming up here. I tried to stand at the back of the reporters, using them to shield me from the Algerians and the passengers.
The adrenaline was still flowing through my system and my stomach was hollow, my hands shaking. I felt like laughing but nothing was funny.
The Reuters reporter was taking pictures rapidly; he was flipping a new roll of film into his camera when he saw me. I nodded politely. He nodded back, a puzzled expression on his face, and went back to taking pictures.
A statement from the Algerian press liaison had been read aloud just before the plane taxied to the gate. It claimed that the passengers had overwhelmed the hijackers and taken them prisoner.
As the passengers went by, steered carefully away from the press by the Algerians, they joked, but the laughter sounded strained, as if it might crack easily. I recognized the sound. It was how I felt.
The crew came off last and I saw the copilot glance in my direction, then stare as he spotted my face at the back of the group of reporters. I held up my finger again, over my lips, as I’d done on the plane. Shhh. He frowned and I grinned at him, then jumped.
The soupspoon was halfway to my mouth and Millie said, “Bang.”
“Millie!”
She took her hand and pointed it like a gun, thumb up, forefinger extended, and pressed it against my forehead. “Bang! Too late. The first one got you in the abdomen, maybe they could have saved you, but this one got you in the brain. Too bad, nothing left to fix.”
I put the soupspoon down. We were in Manhattan, in a booth at Bruno’s on East Fifty-eighth, and the zuppa de mussels was really good, but suddenly I didn’t feel like eating. “You sure know how to spoil a guy’s appetite.”
“We had an agreement,” she said.
I nodded. “Yeah, okay. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
She relaxed a little. “Okay. Finish your soup.”
I picked up a spoonful of the stock, pushing aside the open shells of the mussels. It was halfway to my mouth when she said, “I don’t want anything to happen to you, but if it does, I want you to survive it.”
I nodded.
“I love you and... bang.”
I jumped, spoon still in my mouth, to a recessed nook in the emergency room of Baltimore’s Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center. A nurse walked by but didn’t look in my direction. The walls were white and I smelled methyl alcohol and disinfectant. My nose wrinkled. The smells did not go with the soup, but Shock Trauma was rated as one of the best emergency rooms in the country.
I jumped back to the street outside of Bruno’s and went back in, the spoon hidden discretely in my hand and the napkin from my lap tucked into my back pocket. The waiter looked puzzled as I came back to the table. Millie smiled and kissed me as I sat back down.
We’d been playing this game ever since I described the way the machine gun had gone off during the hijacking. At any point during the time we were together, if she said “Bang” I was supposed to jump to the e-room, no questions, no delays. It wasn’t supposed to matter if I was naked, eating, or sitting on the toilet.
In addition, I’d bought several alarm clocks. They were lying around the cliff dwelling, facedown. Millie reset the
m each night to different times. When they went off, I was also supposed to jump to the e-room.
I’d been much better about responding to the alarms, even jumping, naked, to the e-room alcove when my normal alarm woke me up one morning. A nurse screamed at me, more shocked at my sudden appearance, I suppose, than at my nudity.
It was 11 P.M. in New York. Millie, back at school, had turned in early, and I’d jumped her away to Manhattan, for our first “date” in almost a month.
“CNN did another interview with the American and the two Britishers who are willing to say you appeared and disappeared in the plane. Then they did a longer interview with a psychologist who talked about the effects of post-traumatic stress syndrome. Nobody believes what really happened.”
I smiled. “Or admits it. The NSA may be suppressing some of it. Even if there aren’t any teleports at the NSA, any teleports watching the news know I exist. If there are other teleports.”
Millie shrugged. “If they exist, they may be saying, ‘How stupid to be public’ “
“How did the experts explain the water? That the terrorists were soaking from head to foot?”
She laughed. “Sweat. Nervous sweat.”
“Sounds like a dramatic failure of their antiperspirant.”
She laughed again.
“What’s the official story?”
“The original one—that a passenger managed to capture all three terrorists, but that he left the plane in Algiers instead of taking the replacement jet on to Rome.”
A smile died on my face. “I really don’t care who gets the credit. I just wish Rashid Matar had been aboard.”
Millie frowned. “There are two hundred innocent people who are alive and well today, because of what you did. Isn’t that enough for you?”
I wiggled in my seat, uncomfortable.
“What do you intend to do to him, if you catch up with him?”
“When I catch up with him. When, not if. And I don’t know.”
She shivered. “Well, think about what it would do to you to use his methods. Whatever you do, don’t become like him, okay?”
The thought chilled my bones and, again, the soup tasted funny.
“Okay,” I said.
She said, “Bang.”
I hadn’t seen Dad since before Christmas, when I’d met him on the sidewalk outside his bar, so I jumped to the backyard one evening and looked at the house. His car was in the driveway, but all the curtains were drawn. There were lights on in the kitchen and living room, none in my old room.
When I jumped to my room, it was dark and the door to the hallway was slightly ajar, spilling a thin wedge of light across the floor. There were footsteps in the dust.
Behind me I heard someone move and then a soft coughing sound, mechanical, and the world’s largest bee stung me in the back of my leg.
I flinched away, jumping, appearing in the fiction section of the Stanville Public Library.
So much for all the work I’d done with Millie, I thought, twisting to look at what my hand found. It was metal, tufted with foam at the end, about an inch and a half long. I tugged it out. The needle on the end was three-quarters of an inch long and fat enough that there was blood on it. A clear liquid dripped out of the tip.
Shades of “Wild Kingdom.”
The room started to spin and I jumped, dart in hand, to the cliff dwelling, where I fell forward onto my bed. I’m not sure whether I passed out before or after I hit the mattress.
In spy movies, the gallant hero wakes up after being shot with the tranquilizer dart clear-eyed and clearheaded, completely aware of his surroundings.
My first memories were of hanging facedown over the edge of the bed and puking my guts out. I think that’s the first memory. From the later evidence, I must have done this several times before I was awake enough to check the time.
Fourteen hours had passed since I’d visited Dad’s house. I was having trouble thinking, and the stench was making me sick again. I rolled to the other side of the bed, away from the mess, and it occurred to me that the NSA didn’t have Dad under covert surveillance—they’d moved in with him.
Well, with any luck, they’d make his life more miserable than Millie’s. I hoped they’d interrogate him on drugs. Perhaps he’d feel as bad as I did now.
I jumped to my favorite oasis; the sun was shining and the temperature was in the high sixties. I rinsed my mouth out at the spring and washed my face in the cold water.
It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen Millie last night and that she was probably worried sick. I considered jumping to her apartment and waiting for her to get back from class, but I might run into her roommate or show up on their tapes if they’d bugged the place.
I was getting very angry.
There was a homeless woman at the Stillwater bus station who took my offer of a hundred dollars. I wrote the message out for her and dialed Millie’s number on the pay phone, standing so I blocked the dial. When their answering machine message finished, I handed the receiver to her.
In a surprisingly pleasant voice she said, “Millie, I heard from Bruno and he’s fine. He thought he had a job in a hospital, but it didn’t work out. He’s sorry he hasn’t answered your last letter but he promises to write real soon. I’ll talk to you later.”
Bruno’s was where we’d had dinner the night before. The homeless woman handed the phone back and I hung it up. I gave her another four hundred dollars. She looked surprised.
“Hell,” she said. “I thought you were going to take the money away from me after I made the call.”
“Get off the street,” I said. “It’s a hard life.”
“Ain’t that the truth.”
I walked around the corner, to a hardware store, and bought a mop and bucket.
Millie wanted me to avoid Dad from then on, but all she could get me to promise was to be careful.
I showed her the dart, after jumping her to the cliff dwelling at midnight. She stared at it, then insisted on cleaning the wound. She wanted to know when I’d last had a tetanus shot.
“Two years ago.”
She chewed on her lip. “That should be all right.... Damn! I’m really starting to hate these guys! What’s that smell?”
“Disinfectant,” I said, and changed the subject.
“A Pan Am 727 was hijacked on takeoff from Athens. It landed in Larnaca, on the Turkish half of Cyprus. The authorities say there is only one hijacker, but he’s wired himself with explosives and the plane’s fuel tanks are over three-quarters full.”
“I’ll call back,” I said.
I jumped to Texas, than Larnaca. The press pointed cameras like cannon from the terminal. Fire trucks circled the aircraft like Western wagons under Indian attack. Where was John Wayne when you needed him? I settled in the shadow of a foam truck and used the binoculars.
The plane’s doors were shut and one of the plane’s engines was idling, to run the air-conditioning, I guessed. The passengers’ windows weren’t shaded and I could see worried faces staring out through them.
At the other end of the truck, the firemen were gathered around the open door of the cab, listening to the radio. I moved closer until I could hear.
“... and unless my demands are met, I will detonate my explosives, killing all two hundred and twelve passengers and crew.” The voice was calm, matter-of-fact. The accent was Middle Eastern. I wondered if it was Matar, but I doubted it. He might blow up the passengers, but never himself.
I looked back at the plane. If the hijacker was on the radio, then he was up in the cockpit.
I jumped to the top of the wing, by the fuselage, near its trailing edge. I could just see in one of the windows. A terrified face looked back at me.
I held up my finger over my lips. The man blinked rapidly but didn’t seem to say anything. I moved up the wing to the next window. That window and center seats on this side of the plane were empty, but a woman in the aisle seat saw me and held her hand over her mouth, then let it drop and clamped he
r lips shut.
I jumped into the plane, into the empty seat.
The plane stank of fear; the woman in the aisle seat jumped when I appeared, and shrieked. Down the plane, a baby cried suddenly and there was a collective gasp in reaction to both noises.
“Silence!” a voice yelled from the front of the plane. It was the voice from the radio, but I couldn’t see past the partition at first class to see him.
The woman next to me held both hands over her mouth. She alternated between looking up the aisle and looking at me. I shifted into the middle seat, motioning her to be quiet. She leaned away from me, avoiding contact.
From the middle seat I could see into the first-class section almost all the way to the front galley. I couldn’t see into the cockpit, but the hijacker chose that moment to walk back to the barrier between coach and first class.
It wasn’t Matar. He was a slight Arab, young, with steel-rimmed glasses. At first I thought he was wearing a down vest, but I was wrong. It was the explosives, fastened to some sort of harness, wires running to detonators, batteries clipped to his belt. In his left hand he held a switch on a wire extension. His thumb was poised a quarter-inch above a small, red button. A quarter inch.
Jesus! Jump away!
In his right hand he held a pistol, a compromise, for threatening individuals rather than whole groups. I didn’t care about the pistol. It was the quarter-inch gap that worried me, the little red button.
He walked past us, all the way to the back of the plane. I saw heads lower as he came by, avoiding eye contact. There wasn’t any doubt who had dominance in this pack. But the eyes raised again, as soon as he was past, straining to see the explosives, the button, as if watching could somehow prevent the detonation.
A quarter-inch.
At least it wasn’t a dead-man switch, a switch that would close when a person let go of it. He walked forward, headed back to the front of the plane. When he was past me I took the metal rod from my bag of odds and ends.
It was steel, a half-inch thick, twelve inches long. The bottom four inches were wrapped in cloth tape, to form a grip. It weighed slightly over one pound and was the color and hardness of the hijacker’s eyes.