by Shane Kuhn
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For all who have died at the hands of terrorist cowards. May those who have silenced you never be heard.
PROLOGUE
HARTSFIELD–JACKSON ATLANTA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
Day 63—The day before Thanksgiving
We’re all going to die.
This thought is the ice pick in his head, a cold metal truth penetrating, splitting his synapses, bleeding his sanity dry. He is languishing near the end of one of many TSA checkpoint lines pooling into a seething crush of humanity. It’s the busiest travel day of the year, at the busiest airport in the world, and families are assembled en masse, shuffling inches at a time with their screaming kids and overstuffed hand luggage so they can make it to Grandma’s house in time for turkey and pumpkin pie. Outside, a light rain under an iron-gray sky is hindering low-altitude visibility, and a red rash of delays begins to spread across the flight status screens.
He hasn’t slept in days, as evidenced by the steamer trunks under his bloodshot eyes. He fights off the shakes, palpitations, and brain fog of hypoglycemia, going on nearly twelve hours since his last meal. With his dirty, oversize raincoat and sweat-stained baseball cap, he’s fresh meat for the airport cops methodically patrolling the security clearance area with drug-sniffing German shepherds. He can’t afford to be singled out, searched, questioned, or detained. He looks at his watch.
Forty-five minutes.
His mind, despite his body’s withering fatigue, speed-shifts from scenario to scenario, hoping to collide with a viable solution . . . anything that will relieve him of what he’s there to do, what he must do. He sees his reflection in the obsidian eye of a video surveillance dome staring in wide-angle suspicion at the traveling hordes. He barely recognizes himself, a warped caricature on the verge of doing the unthinkable. He looks at his watch again. Its relentlessly ticking second hand juts like a middle finger, mocking him.
Forty minutes.
Move, you fucking coward, he bellows inwardly, hoping his command will echo down to what’s left of his guts and stir decisive action. Scanning his surroundings in a way he knows damn well looks like the scheming fidget of a novice criminal, he sees standing fifty heads behind him the one man he was praying he wouldn’t see—his crisply pressed Atlanta Police Department uniform a black monolith in the noise of vacation color.
“Fuck,” he says out loud, forgetting himself.
He draws immediate scowls from a gaggle of parents attempting to wrangle restless children. But their silent admonishments don’t arouse shame or guilt, only an acute awareness of the thousands of mothers, fathers, and kids living and breathing around him, lined up like lambs led to slaughter. With every smile, every peck on the cheek, every hand held, every baby comforted, and every anticipatory moment of holiday cheer, his heart beats faster in his chest and sweat soaks his clothes. He checks his six. The uniform is coming for him, working his way through the crowd with an eager hand on his holstered service weapon.
Time’s up.
He unbuttons his raincoat and moves, walking quickly toward the TSA checkpoint, head down, eyes in a predatory squint, hands stuffed menacingly in his pockets. Within seconds, he hears the first scream. It rises quickly to full-panic pitch and incites more, spreading like wildfire. Those who aren’t cowering in fear at the sight of him are pointing and shouting, trying to get the attention of the authorities. He breaks into a jog and throws off his overcoat, fully revealing the source of panic. A collective gasp sucks the air out of the room.
“He has a bomb!” a child shrieks, her tinny voice echoing.
He’s wearing a vest with what appears to be thirty sticks of dynamite, blasting caps, and detonation cord duct-taped to it. Armed response officers sweep into the area, ordering everyone to get down. He only has a few seconds to make it to his target, the TSA checkpoint, before he gets a bullet in the head. He lowers his shoulders and breaks into a full sprint through the blind, stampeding chaos of the crowd. The terminal is hemorrhaging humanity into the concourse while the metal detector and body scanner alarms burst into an earsplitting crescendo.
He looks back. The dark uniform pursuing him snakes through the stumbling masses and draws the inky blur of a semiautomatic pistol from its holster, taking aim with the measured stance of a marksman. He ducks and runs toward the gaping mouths of more guns. The gray sky parts, igniting the scene with the white fire of sunlight.
BRITISH AIRWAYS FLIGHT 870
Day 1—Two months ago
Ladies and gentlemen, in preparation for landing . . .”
The flight attendant chirped apologetic Cockney while Kennedy snored in his British Airways business class flatbed seat, a coveted upgrade on the Heathrow–JFK leg of a fifteen-thousand-mile work odyssey that began five days ago in Los Angeles. As a two-hundred-plus-days-per-year business traveler, this was home, or, as Kennedy liked to call it, “the master bedroom.” In fact, he had grown so accustomed to it, he wasn’t able to sleep in a normal bed but drifted off like a baby in a metal and composite tube traveling six hundred miles per hour. While the smartly dressed crew tidied up the cabin, Kennedy was dreaming—another thing he could only do at thirty-three thousand feet.
The dream was what his former shrink called recurring and it was about his sister, Belle, whom he loved dearly but who had been dead for fourteen years. As always, she sat next to him on the last flight of her young life—American Airlines Flight 11, traveling from Boston to Los Angeles on September 11, 2001. Belle was sixteen and had gone to Boston to help their nana while their grandfather was in the ICU recovering from bypass surgery. Belle hated to fly, but that time she was especially nervous because it was to be her first time flying alone. Kennedy had accompanied her on the first leg of the trip, but had had to return to school before her.
Their father, Richard, an air force captain, had treated the situation in his usual hard-ass way, telling her to buck up and face her fears head-on. Their mother had passed from cancer shortly after Belle was born, so Richard decided he was going to raise them both in the school of hard knocks. For a highly analytical and somewhat emotionally unavailable child like Kennedy, this worked perfectly. But Belle was like their mother, Grace, the polar opposite. She had complex emotions from an early age and vexed her father with her inability to look at the world like he did, as a colorless grid ruled by mathematics.
The night before the flight, Belle spoke to Kennedy about it over the phone. The two of them were very close, relying on each other for advice and shoulders to cry on. Kennedy was nineteen at the time and every bit the protective big brother—feigning apathy but loving Belle more fiercely than himself.
“You’re going to be fine. Just put your headphones on and sleep and the next thing you know you’ll be home.”
“What if I’m not fine?”
“What do you mean?”
“You seem so certain I’ll be okay, but how do you know? How could you know?”
“I just know. There are literally tens of thousands of flights in the US alone every day. Statistically speaking, the chances of you dying in a plane crash are nil.”
“Yeah but, statistically speaking, if my plane does crash, the chances of me dying are one hundred percent.”
“Belle, riding in the back of Dad’s car while he drives you like a maniac to ballet class is exponentially more dangerous, but you’re no
t afraid to do that.”
“I am now! Jesus, you’re a big help. I’m more worried now than before I called.”
“You don’t need to worry at all, Belle. What good would it do anyway?”
“Oh, here we go with your patented We’re all doomed so screw it and have another beer philosophy.”
“I find it comforting.”
“Which is why you never get any dates.”
“Whatever. I get dates.”
“Yeah, in your granola.”
“Ha-ha. Pretty funny for someone supposedly experiencing mortal terror.”
“It’s how I cope.”
“Coping implies the existence of an actual problem.”
“I know this makes no sense to you, but this doesn’t feel right to me. Like that time my hair stood on end before lightning struck Mrs. Garcia’s oak tree.”
“That wasn’t a feeling, it was static electricity.”
“Stop trying to make me feel better by telling me I’m full of it!”
“You know what? I don’t have time for this right now. I have a tournament this weekend and an anthropology midterm I haven’t even thought about studying for. Call Dad and tell him to come get you.”
“Dad will tell me to buck up and get on the plane, just like you. You come.”
“There’s no way I can fly back to Boston right now. Absolutely no way.”
“You’d be back in less than twenty-four hours. Come on, it’ll be fun—”
“Belle, you’re living in a fantasy world. I’m living in the real world and I can’t just fly to Boston to fly you home because you’re nervous.”
“I’m not just nervous. I’m really scared! All you care about is your stupid golf and Stanford nerd friends! I’m your sister . . . I don’t want to go alone.”
Belle’s aggressive tone disappeared on her last line because she was fighting tears. Kennedy angrily interpreted this as an attempt to manipulate him.
“At least I’m not a little princess who thinks the world revolves around her! Call me when you decide to grow the fuck up.”
He hung up. Belle tried calling him back several times but he didn’t answer out of spite. That was the last time he ever spoke to her.
* * *
In the dream, Belle was always the same age as when she died. Her strawberry hair and faint pixie dusting of freckles taunted him with their eternal innocence. Like when she was alive, she always had the mirthful expression of someone up to no good. As they sat next to each other on the flight Kennedy never took, Belle talked incessantly, blithely cruising through subjects both relevant and tangential, while he waited to get in his own edgewise word that would never see the light of day. But it didn’t matter. Her manic narratives endeared him.
“I wish you would shut up,” he joked.
“Then we would both have to listen to you, and that just wouldn’t do, Monsieur Ennui,” she politely chided, punching him in the arm.
“Maybe I have something important to say.”
“About which of your noble yet hideously dull pursuits? Golf, er . . . Sorry, I need a second to yawn.”
She played like she was yawning out of extreme boredom, eyeballing him for a reaction. Belle’s truth serum. A teaspoon of sugar and you’re stretched out on the cross.
“I don’t have to take this kind of abuse. I’m going to sleep.”
“Fine, you big lug. I have better things to do anyway, like the in-flight magazine crossword puzzle.”
He could see she was getting nervous, so he gently patted her arm while she fidgeted with the folds of her skirt.
“Brother?”
“What now?” he asked with phony annoyance.
She didn’t answer. Her face looked ghostly pale, as if the blood and wit had drained from it. Her slender fingers were perched tightly on his forearm, like a bird in a gale. He always tried to wake himself up at that point in the dream but never succeeded.
“What is it?” he asked.
Tears welled in her eyes.
“I don’t want to go alone,” she said.
Before Kennedy could be a good big brother and say something to reassure her, he was violently interrupted by the bone-crushing force of impact with the World Trade Center’s North Tower. Belle disappeared in a blinding flash as the airplane’s fuselage disintegrated into white-hot cinders. Bodies—gasping, burning, convulsing, and clinging to nothing—were blown and scattered through a maelstrom of glass and concrete, bloody dandelion florets seeding the mouth of blackness. After the last of the aircraft debris exploded out the building’s exit wound, Kennedy always ended up sitting on the edge of the building’s smoking maw, looking down on a rain of fire.
“Sir?” a voice called, cutting through the dream.
Kennedy awoke with a start. Teary-eyed and disoriented, he was staring into the face of a young female flight attendant with a cruelly similar swath of freckles.
“So sorry to disturb you but we’re preparing the cabin for arrival.”
* * *
Before landing, Kennedy went to the lavatory to do what he always did after having the Belle dream. The crying wasn’t the most difficult part. The most difficult part was stopping. The hollow of anguish he felt for Belle had not changed in all the years she was gone. Even in that moment, crammed in an airport lav fourteen years later, he could vividly picture everyone in his college dorm watching Belle’s plane hit the World Trade Center. He had just gotten up, and after breakfast he was going to call her to apologize. Instead, he watched her die, and all that was left was a profound sense of helplessness and the one emotion that would drive everything he did in his life from that point on: regret.
Terminal 7 at JFK always smelled of cheap, overboiled coffee and stale cologne. As Kennedy took a brisk walk along the concourse—his version of going to the gym—he stretched his legs and contemplated Manhattan. It was the fourth week of September and the city would be singing the crisp overture of autumn. Of course, he was never going to see or experience any of it during his brief visit. Like on most of his business trips, the only sights he’d be taking in were those of Duty Free, Wok & Roll, Dunkin’ Donuts, and all the other apostrophic, postapocalyptic airport landmarks he vagabonded past countless times a year.
People often made envious remarks about his business travel, not realizing that the homogenous scenery endemic to virtually every airport in the United States made one susceptible to what Kennedy half jokingly called “Terminal Illness”—a chronic frequent-traveler disease brought on by extreme isolation, fatigue-induced delirium, fast-food malnutrition, excessive consumption of bottom-shelf booze, and diminished social equilibrium. He likened it to extended space travel, but with inferior cuisine.
Kennedy lived in the rarefied atmosphere of the consultant—a hired gun on the payroll of power opening its deep pockets to address deeper fears. The client he was visiting that day was his biggest, the US government, or his rich Uncle Sam, as he often joked. Kennedy was an aviation security specialist, and the TSA paid him to train their officers with his own trademark curriculum at airports around the country. Just like contracting Blackwater and G4S mercenaries to fight his wars, Uncle Sam found it was a lot easier, and cheaper, to outsource airport security—especially since before September 11 it had been nothing more than an FAA afterthought.
In college, Kennedy had studied to be an architect. But after his sister’s death, he withdrew from the things that had defined him—the golf team and his academic pursuits—and nearly flunked out of school. He thought constantly about hurting himself back then but never followed through. It would have been completely selfish compared to what Belle had suffered. All he could think about was doing something, anything, to help prevent something like 9/11 from happening again. Rationally, he knew that would never bring her back. But in his heart he felt if he made a difference somehow, she would forgive him for what
he’d done and there might be a slight chance he could forgive himself.
He explored the military at the suggestion of his father, but the idea of killing people indiscriminately in conflicts that serviced political ideologies or protected corporate revenue streams only made him feel worse. The intelligence community was a natural choice for someone with his IQ and work ethic, so he applied to the CIA, thinking a career in the clandestine service might be a way to stop terrorists before they started. But news started coming out about how interagency bickering between the CIA and FBI may have paved the way for the 9/11 terrorists to pull off the worst attack on American soil in history, and Kennedy burned the thick pile of application documents that had taken him weeks to complete.
One of his friends at school, the son of a senator, landed a job with the newly formed Transportation Security Administration, an organization that piqued Kennedy’s interest. To him, the front lines in the war on terror were at the nation’s airports, and TSA would put him in the trenches. Lockheed Martin recruited and trained the majority of new agents for the TSA at the time and Kennedy used his friend’s connections to get an unpaid internship after graduation. His father was furious that he would shoot so low when he was armed with a degree from one of the most prestigious universities in the country. Kennedy didn’t care. He had no interest in working anywhere else and was committed to doing whatever it took to get on staff. He spent all the money he had saved since he was a kid, supporting himself during his internship and even completing an elite aviation security training course in Israel. When he came back from Tel Aviv, he had earned a foot in the door.
By twenty-five, Kennedy was one of Lockheed’s top trainers, a specialist in Behavior Detection, something the Israelis had practiced for years but that was a relatively new field in the United States. In addition to training officers, he also became well versed in screening equipment and learned how to write grants for federal research facilities like Lawrence Livermore to develop new tech. At twenty-seven, he was in such high demand it no longer made sense for him to be a Lockheed employee. He hated corporate culture anyway and it seemed like the more he got promoted, the more they wanted to take him away from his boots on the ground and make him a high-paid desk jockey standing around eating birthday cake on Friday afternoons with the rest of the drones.