by John Altman
He lugged more debris. He registered at Chelsea Piers along with everyone else seeking lost loved ones. He watched other first responders visit the Spirit of New York tour boats, docked in the Hudson and turned into massage and chiropractic centers. But he indulged in no such luxuries himself.
On the fourth day, President Bush addressed them over a bullhorn. Bach harbored mixed feelings about W. Nevertheless, he felt something inside him stir at the words. We can’t hear you, someone shouted, and Bush answered, But I can hear you, and Bach felt hot tears spill down his cheeks.
The next morning, he couldn’t leave his bed at Stuyvesant. Overtaxed muscles had turned leaden, useless. He lay on the cot until early afternoon. Finally, he got to his feet, wincing. He went outside. The street was crowded with people who had come over by ferry from Liberty State Park to deposit flowers, pictures, articles of clothing in a makeshift grave. But he had no keepsake of his father to leave.
That night, volunteers were sent home. Professionals took over. Leaving Zone One, Bach turned back for a final look. Smoke still plumed up like a floodlit gray feather. He felt something falling inside him. He expected that at some point it would hit bottom. But instead, it kept falling.
Palliative care. He would be spared surgery and chemo and radiation. But not pain and suffering and humiliation.
He remembered watching his grandmother die. Every Sunday, he and his father would visit her in Queens. They would park before her row house and climb the stairs. Benjamin would think of Spider-Man. Peter Parker lived in Queens. They would brace themselves. Dad’s hand resting on his shoulder, supportive but also preventing escape. They would step through the front door, into smells of rubber gloves and medicine and dust and lemon-fresh Joy. Grandma would sit propped in her easy chair before a TV that played endlessly: sports, game shows, soaps, sitcoms, news, whatever. Each week, there was a little less of Grandma. And yet, she never died. Weeks turned to months, months to years. Grandma turned to ridges of bone supporting folds of gray skin. And yet, she never died. On a little table beside the couch, she kept her book and her reading glasses. During the first year, he would see a new book there every week. During the second year, a new book every month. During the last year, the same slim Agatha Christie sat gathering dust. By then Grandma couldn’t speak. She sat grinding her teeth, counting down to her next pain pill. Wisps of ashy skin hanging from spines of bone. To this day, Benjamin Bach couldn’t see a copy of And Then There Were None without shuddering.
One way or another, it would be an ugly death.
Take the initiative, he thought. Better to jump than to burn.
He thought of guns. The shooting range on the Farm. Morphine overdose. Carbon monoxide. The 5:37 express from Penn Station. The George Washington Bridge. The observation deck of the Freedom Tower. That would be only appropriate.
But then the fat little madman would have no one in his way.
The gross, fat, comical little psycho; the marshal, the Supreme Leader, as absurd a supervillain as Lex Luthor or any Bond nasty or cartoon megalomaniac. This gross little madman had the power to rain high-yield nuclear warheads down on Americans as they supped at their dining-room tables.
And whether Benjamin Bach jumped or burned, this overgrown child, this tantrum-throwing brat, would outlive him. The profiling unit insisted that the madman was, in fact, rational—that even the fat itself was a shrewd calculation, because by gaining weight the man increased the resemblance to his grandfather, who had commanded more respect than his father. But considering the stakes, was betting on the little fuck’s rationality a gamble really worth taking?
When Bach was gone, who would seize the reins? Who would stand up to the fat little madmen of the world—and, closer to home, the ass-coverers, the naysayers, the beady-eyed women from NIST, and the spineless directors of CERT? Who would take the profilers’ recommendations with a healthy pillar of salt?
He thought of windows of opportunity … missiles plunging into seas … planes plunging into buildings … jumpers plunging from rooftops … preemptive doctrines … doors, windows, opening, closing … nuclear arsenals around the world bristling, straining to be let loose … one country aiming extinction at another … melted badges, blood-soaked children … chemo drips, radiation … tripwires, thirty-eighth parallels … Apache helicopters hovering before sinking suns … F-15s making tight circles … ruined ambulances, the remnants of firefighters’ helmets … safeguards, launch codes … every system vulnerable, as Wyoming had proved … every system built to be used …
The idea was there already, coiled like a sleeping snake in the perfect center of his mind. The idea had been there for years, maybe for decades. Certainly since Luna Moth, which made it feasible.
Now the snake was uncoiling, stirring awake. Stretching.
One last good deed before he shuffled off this mortal coil.
His legacy.
* * *
His eyes opened. A sense of urgency nagged. Soon would come the decisive moment. Soon would come everything he had worked for. Soon.
He sat up. The quality of the night outside seemed unchanged. He felt oddly refreshed from what he sensed had been a very short nap. He felt strong, capable. Energized. No more doubt. No more fear. He was ready to see this through. Ready for the endgame. Do-mode.
Soon.
He checked his phone. His man’s message had not come yet.
But soon.
He went back to the conference room to rejoin the game.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A handful of employees on the cafeteria’s mezzanine spoke in low voices, with the occasional muted laugh. On the ground floor, McConnell and Dalia found a secluded table in a corner. He blew ripples across the surface of his coffee. She checked her phone. She had never listened to her daughter’s voice mail. In Hebrew shot through with long-distance echoes: “Eema, I’m so sorry I missed your birthday. Don’t think I wasn’t thinking of you. Things have just been crazy here. Give me a call when you get a chance. In the meantime …” Shuffling sounds, throat-clearing, and then an off-key version of “Happy Birthday,” finishing with a ringing imperative: “Yom hu’ledet sameach!”
Dalia saved the voice mail.
She checked her email. The chair of Princeton’s History Department wanted to coordinate next year’s schedule. Amazon Rewards offered a credit-line increase. Her financial advisor in Tel Aviv wanted to arrange a conference. Her editor wondered when he might expect delivery of the Issus monograph. A spot in his schedule had opened up. No pressure.
She set down the phone. Her tired eyes locked on to a curl of steam rising from her coffee and, for a long moment, refused to disengage.
“I booked rooms in Bethesda.” McConnell spoke diplomatically, sotto voce. “Say the word. I’ll give you a ring the second anything develops.”
She shook her head.
A few moments passed. “Sonny put in a call to the NRO.” The National Reconnaissance Office in Chantilly. “They’re lending us Rainbird.” He saw the puzzled look on Dalia’s face. “Cutting-edge spysat. Bypasses the Rayleigh criterion diffraction. Conventional wisdom says that from orbit you can’t beat a ground resolution of about two inches. But Rainbird uses dozens of images, then chooses the best pixels from each and combines them. Of course, you need to know where to point it …”
He trailed off again. He had read her mood. And he already knew her opinion of dependence on overwhelming technological advantage.
“Maybe she hasn’t seen the news,” he ventured.
“Or maybe she’s spooked.” Dalia sipped her coffee. “Maybe she thinks it’s bait.”
“Could you blame her?”
Dalia gave no answer. She may have misjudged the woman’s devotion to her family. At the narrow passage, the Bedouin said, there is no brother and no friend.
A titter of laughter came from the mezzanine, where one of the agents
must have told a good joke. Dalia shifted, relieving the weight on her knee. She looked at McConnell. He was only a few years her junior. In ten years, she thought, he would have retired. He would find retirement surprisingly agreeable. He would pick up hobbies: painting, fishing. He would thrive. Burying his head in the sand, he would find, was acceptable after all. He would appreciate for the first time the little things in life. He would reconcile with his ex-wife. Together they would cherish their twilight years, helping their children raise a brood of grandchildren. He would die peacefully in his bed, a smile on his face.
That, she supposed, was what they called projection.
She gulped more coffee, then nodded. McConnell gathered the cups as she set the cane and pushed herself up.
Leaving the cafeteria, they ran into Shyam Radha. He had been sprinting to find them. He paused, hands on knees, catching his breath so he could deliver his news.
Dalia felt a keen straining inside her. We’ve got her.
East Quogue, NY
Song buried the life vest under sand and leaf litter a half mile in from the beach. She did her best to keep to the woods, but she also wanted to keep the road within reasonable distance, both to stay oriented and to maintain the option of a quick getaway.
For long stretches, she picked her way through dense foliage, over leaf mold and rocky sand. Then would come houses—cottages, mansions, estates. Then raw countryside again, babbling brooks, and deep virgin copses of parkland. Every half hour, she stopped to check herself for ticks.
She guessed she had been walking more than six hours. At first, she had been alone with the night wind and the trees and the animals. Then, as the sun rose, her shadow had joined her: a graceful, though limping, ballerina slowly contracting into a squat, hunchbacked dwarf.
Soon after dawn, she heard the racket of revving ATVs. Male laughter, a barking dog. She stopped and leaned against a tree. For much of the night, soaked to the bone, she had been chilly. Now, between the sun and the exertion, she was hot. The dampness of the limp sun hat was changing from seawater to sweat.
She pressed on, giving the ATVs a wide berth. Winding hiking paths, and beaches with sumac and dogwood and kinnikinnick, and always the road within earshot, growing noisier as the morning developed. Birds caroled happily. Squirrels chittered as they went about their morning errands.
Her leg hurt where the man had banged it against the bed frame. She had thought the hip was just bruised, but maybe there was a hairline fracture.
That had been a lifetime ago. That never really happened.
Thinking of the man reminded her of the Adderall. She dug the Tupperware out of the fanny pack. She shook three tablets—proof that it had been real after all—into her palm. Down the hatch.
She walked on. Each step now sent shivers of pain radiating out from her hip. She had wanted to get beyond the search zone before she contrived a ride. But she was realizing now that she could not go much farther on foot.
She could still hear the road, just over the ridge of trees. Soon, she would need to take the chance.
Reaching a small rise, she paused again, then lowered herself to the ground. Her stiff body bent grudgingly. She would rest a few moments. Then she would risk the road.
She took off the damp shoes and set them in the sunshine to dry. She watched a single gull circling over blue-gray water. A fresh, pleasantly cool breeze teased her hair beneath the brim of the sun hat. She wondered how long she could sit here without being bothered.
She released a slow breath. Good heat baked up from the ground beneath her. The wind coming off the water was not too balmy, not too chilly. No mosquitoes yet—too early in the season. And no humidity worth mentioning. For this fleeting moment, she felt almost content.
She went into the Tupperware again, past the cash and gun and IDs, to her rations. She got out a granola bar, took a bite, and chewed mechanically. Had to keep the old engine fueled. She would need her energy. Today, and tonight, and tomorrow. And the day after, and the day after that. She would never truly be able to relax again.
She massaged her neck, then her aching feet. In a former life, she might have worried about calluses and bunions. What was the point of a hundred-dollar mani-pedi if you let yourself get bunions? But in the life before that, in her true life as Song Sun Young of Camps 14 and 15, she would have spared her vanity no thought whatever. Anything that had not killed her had not been worth her attention.
Who was to say which life was the true one? Yes, she had been born into Chosun. And something in her core would forever remain there, an orphan, small, sad, hungry, and frightened. A pitiful little kochebi, wandering swallow, who had never known her father, whose mother had died before her eyes. But she was also Mi-Hi Abrahams, PTA volunteer extraordinaire, mother of two.
Were some selves truer than others? Could more than one self be true?
She sat and listened to the forest rustling like an incantation and wondered.
Eventually, she released another slow breath. She couldn’t sit here forever.
She pocketed the granola bar’s wrapper and creaked to her feet. She put on her sneakers again and limped in the direction of the car sounds.
* * *
A group of day laborers hung out beside a convenience store, leaning against a cinder-block wall, spitting tobacco juice into the sand.
She walked past them, onto the gravelly shoulder of a narrow highway. She slowed, taking in the tactical features of the landscape. She saw plenty of potential cover for agents lying in ambush: buildings, trees, parking lots, crowded boat slips.
If they had tracked her, they would have made their move by now.
She wet her lips, then gave the brim of the sun hat a downward tug and kept moving.
She passed a Best Eastern Motel, then a place called Stone Creek Inn. Would they search every motel? Maybe not. Maybe she could rent a room and rest. Hide in plain sight. But her intuition told her to keep moving.
She crossed a footbridge above dun-colored water. Boats were moored underneath, all in a line. They would be quickly missed if stolen. She limped on. A dentist, a hardware store, a law office. Business hours starting soon. Monday morning. Dex would be getting ready for school, unless Mark was keeping him home. Probably, Mark was keeping him home.
People chatted on street corners. They bought coffee and Danishes. They walked dogs and pushed strollers. Couples ate breakfast at round tables beneath blue umbrellas. Flags licked in the breeze.
She felt acutely aware of the chance she was taking, showing herself in public. But she was mostly dry now. The wide-brimmed sun hat covered her face. She blended in because she willed herself to blend in. And so far, it was working. No one looked at her twice. In Chosun, at the Chongjin railway station, on the streets, and especially inside the camps, she had stayed alive by not being noticed. She had learned the small tricks of body language that made others’ eyes keep moving without pause. She had made an art form of avoiding attention. When she came west, she had struggled to unlearn the habit. She had hated raising a finger to ask a waiter for a check. In doctors’ offices and banks, anywhere they asked for personal information, she had died a little inside, responding lightly with a smile as she gave them the very means to track her.
A liquor store, shuttered. A bagel store with a line winding out onto the sidewalk. She crossed the street to maintain some distance. A Chinese restaurant and a butcher shop were both closed. She passed a newspaper rack, then stopped and backtracked.
A headline blared, The Disappearance of Mi-Hi Abrahams: What We Know Now.
Icy fingers grazed the length of her spine.
It has been two days since Mi-Hi Abrahams was abducted by terror suspect Yusuf Bashara.
A blurry screen capture followed. Her Volvo parked by a street corner at night. Song herself sitting behind the wheel. A threatening-looking man wearing a heavy black beard, caught in t
he act of emerging from a nearby doorway.
Since her disappearance, images of the woman—happy with her husband and two small children, and held at gunpoint near her tony Upper East Side apartment just minutes before a violent confrontation outside Newark Airport—have haunted authorities and onlookers alike.
She was standing, goggling, mouth hanging open. Attracting attention. She could feel people on the other side of the street taking notice.
She broke the spell and made herself walk on.
A wave of unreality washed over her. For a few seconds, wheels spun in her mind, failing to find traction. It made no sense. Abducted by a terror suspect? Held at gunpoint near her tony Upper East Side apartment? What fuckery was this?
Then she ruthlessly forced the question from her mind. Later she would figure it out. Now she needed to focus. Avoid drawing attention. And get off the roads.
She turned down a wide avenue that intersected with the main street. Out of the corner of her eye, she had glimpsed an auto junkyard. Crumpled, ruined cars, cars half buried in sand, cars without windows, cars without tires. Auto Salvage, a sign proclaimed. sold as is. all sales final. Hand-lettered placards in windshields gave prices. The small cinder-block office was closed. She saw no indication of hours.
She approached a Mazda L-series that looked drivable. The placard read $1,975. The windshield was spiderwebbed with cracks. The car was old enough to predate transponder keys. Most of these cars were, which meant she had a shot at hot-wiring it.
She looked around. A plastic-bagged circular rotted in a driveway across the street. A crow on a high branch looked inscrutably back at her.
She tried the Mazda’s driver’s-side door. Locked.
Hunting on the sandy ground, she found a bent tongue of metal beside a rusted camshaft.
She would never get away with it. The salvage yard’s owner would show up. Helicopters would appear overhead. Drones, satellites, dogs …
She slid the metal down outside the window and slipped the lock. Inside the Mazda, she located the hood release. Outside again, she lifted the hood. She tracked the red coil wire on the right side of the four-cylinder engine. Moving as if she had every right to be here, doing this, she used the metal’s ragged edge to strip a half centimeter of insulation. She ran the wire to the battery, then slid behind the steering wheel again and popped the trunk, praying. Her prayer was answered in the form of a tire iron. She jammed the tapered end between the wheel and the steering column and gave it a hard wrench, unlocking the column. She found the starter solenoid and stripped two more wires, then paused briefly. So far, so good. She held her breath and touched the wires together.