by Joshua Corin
“Lucy Snow,” she replied.
Her voice carried with it a sonorous determination. She was not about to be cowed by this man, not Lucy Snow, chief purser, senior flight attendant, once stranded at a nightmarish hovel in Cancún; Lucy Snow, all of thirty-two years old and about to receive rude and violent action.
“Please know, Lucy, that what is about to happen is not personal. It comes not out of anger or hatred but merely—”
“That’s bullshit,” she spat in his face, “and you know it.”
“I beg your pardon?”
The cabin went silent.
“You’re so polite. Why don’t you politely tell everyone there are names missing from the website?”
Bislan’s calm grin twitched at its edges.
“You think we wouldn’t notice? Huh? Well, I’ll give you a hint. There’s five of us and we’re all wearing the same uniform. But now it’s a coincidence that you happened to choose me for your little physics experiment or whatever.”
Larry gripped the back cushion of the seat in front of him. Part of him was begging her to shut up—but part of him was begging her to shame this psychopathic freak—and part of him wanted to help her do it.
Lucy turned toward the passengers and declared: “Don’t you get it? They need expendables! They need people they can scapegoat or sacrifice or downsize or whatever the hell they want to call it and the five of us happen to be convenient.”
She matched gazes with Maryann and Deja nearby and then with Addison and Francisco sitting near the back and then to the passengers at large.
“You need to stop encouraging them! Why are you talking to his camera? Why are—”
Edil set the barrel of his weapon against the side of Lucy’s bottle-black curls.
Lucy sighed.
Shut her eyes.
And Larry stepped into the aisle.
“Stop,” he said.
Bislan set his hands on his hips. “Captain Walder, this is hard enough as is. Now if you could return to your seat—”
“No.” Larry walked forward. His mind was blank but for one thought. “Tell your man to put the damn gun down.”
“Forgive me, Captain, but it’s usually the man with the gun who gets to decide when to put the gun down.”
Each step brought Larry slowly closer, closer, closer. His heart bounced against his rib cage. He didn’t care. He was not going to let this parasite take another person away from him.
“Captain Walder—”
“Just stop. You can’t threaten me. You still need me. And that means you need her.”
“Is that so?”
“That depends,” said Larry, now within an arm’s length of them all, “on whether or not you want to be able to take off again. Do you know how to conduct a thorough safety inspection? Not for nothing, buddy, but you landed us in an orange grove. All it takes is a little defect and you’re suddenly stalling at five thousand feet. How many trees do you think our wings smacked into? Twenty? Thirty? And you better pray your friends outside with the guns didn’t poke any holes into the fuselage. Not to mention—”
“Enough.” Bislan took a step forward, closing the distance between himself and Larry. “You have made your point.”
He mumbled a few words in Chechen to Edil, who lowered his barrel and returned to his post.
Lucy Snow squeezed Larry’s shoulder in gratitude and then returned to her seat. Larry was about to do the same when Bislan leaned in to his ear and whispered:
“You could have asked for me to release the hostages.”
Larry felt the color drain from his face. “Would you have?”
Bislan replied with a shrug and a smirk.
“I…I can still ask for it. Nothing’s changed. You still need us. You especially need me.”
“I needed an everyday American pilot to bring us here—and for that I am grateful. But to take us to our next destination, all I require is someone who knows how to fly a plane. Do you see my friend standing guard by the lavatory?”
Larry glanced back at Murad.
“Aside from ably standing guard, my friend also is here because he is a graduate of a very respectable flight school. Do you understand what I am saying?”
Yes.
Larry understood.
He was as expendable as anyone else on that plane.
Chapter 37
Armed with that solid list of names, Hayley assumed the process of connecting them with backstories would be easy. She had at her disposal, after all, the greatest detection tool ever invented: an Internet search engine. Plus she had access—albeit temporarily—to DIVS, the FBI’s swanky Data Integration and Visualization System. If any of these ten men had a birth certificate, a driver’s license, or even a passport, she’d be able to match them.
Except she hadn’t been able to match any of them.
“It doesn’t make sense,” she muttered.
Angelo Potter, who sat in the workstation beside her, angled his hangdog expression in her general direction and replied, “Welcome to the world, kid.”
“No, I mean, these men—at least their arrest records should come up.”
“Maybe the list is bogus.”
“That’s not a possibility I’m even going to think about.”
Because if that was true, an old man was in critical care for nothing.
“Kid, why don’t you take a lunch break?”
“I’ll eat when I’ve figured this out,” she insisted and adjusted the oxygen tube around her ears. Her eyes were drying out from staring at the screen. She reached for a Kleenex to rub them. In doing so, she once again caught sight of the list of names and the dark blood blotching its corner….
No. That was a trick of the light. Xana in her temper tantrum had burned the bloody envelope. This one was stained only by an errant shadow.
Hayley touched the shadow. The tip of her finger vanished into darkness.
“Do you know who he is?” she asked Angelo. “The Russian who runs the pawnshop?”
Angelo sighed. “Can you be a little more specific?”
“I know his name isn’t really Yuri.”
“Who is he? A defector from the Cold War?”
“Were you even alive during the Cold War?”
“I’ve read about it.”
“Oh for the love of Christ.”
“So who is he?”
“Why does it matter?”
Why was Hayley feeling so guilty? She wasn’t the one who pummeled the poor guy. True, she had lied to the special-agent-in-charge about what had happened, but…
But she had lied to him.
Why?
If anyone had earned her loyalty, it was Jim Christie and not Xana Marx, and yet she had covered Xana’s ass and without hesitation.
Why?
It couldn’t be because a small part of her hoped violent coercion was justified, could it?
“Well,” she said, “I just…don’t you think someone should call the hospital and find out how he’s doing?”
“I’ll get right on that, kid, the minute you go to lunch.”
“I told you: I’ll go to lunch when I’ve figured this out.”
“Then figure it out.”
Hayley huffed in vexation.
Angelo stood up and leaned over his cubicle toward her. “Look, kid, it’s not as if you’re the only person working the list. I guarantee you there’s a room full of analysts up in DC going through each of those names. Heck, they might have even matched them up. It’s not as if they’d call us and let us know. So why don’t you go to lunch? I’ll buy you a sandwich in the commissary.”
“The commissary is closed.”
“I hate my life.”
Angelo shuffled off toward the door.
“Where are you going?” she asked him.
“Can’t tell you. Plausible deniability.”
The door shut behind him with a click, leaving Hayley with no choice, none at all, but to resume her fruitless dirt-digging on the ten names.
Rather than repeat what she already knew didn’t work, Hayley instead decided to submerge herself in the context of the names. She typed in the name of that mysterious Russian prison, filtered out the results to recent history, and got to reading the text on the screen. The computer’s web browser did a decent job translating from Chechen or Russian or whatever the native language of this information was, but decent was a far cry from fluent.
Most of the hits brought up pages from what appeared to be a muckraking Chechen webzine called God’s Voice and written by journalists with monikers like TheSparrow and AntiShit. The webzine itself was bare-bones, but the articles ran for thousands of words each and were electric with indignation at the government.
One sample essay from August 4, 2002, was titled “What Price Slavery? What Price Freedom?” and its thesis, as far as Hayley could tell, was to establish a parallel between the oppressed Chechen people and oppressed black Americans under Jim Crow laws. Another postulated an equivalency between the oppressed Chechen people and Jews under Nazi Germany. The common thread seemed to be the notion of reparations.
Hayley thought about that for a moment.
Her cancer had first presented itself as a warm lump on her back that she had noticed one morning while taking a shower. At first the lump hadn’t been painful. She chose to ignore it.
The soreness began a few days later, so she reacted the way she believed an adult would: She downed some ibuprofen and made no mention of it, not even when the soreness had inflamed into real pain, the kind that made it difficult to concentrate.
She became scared.
She had every intention of telling her parents.
She was just waiting for the right time.
Then one night, around 4 A.M., her left arm snapped between the elbow and the wrist. Had she fallen out of bed? No. She had merely turned over on it in her sleep.
That was when she told her parents.
The doctors at Northside Hospital drew her blood. They put her in the ICU. They subjected her to X-rays and a CAT scan and a PET scan and even a bone scan, which required them to inject her with a radioactive acid.
The biopsy came next.
The diagnosis followed shortly thereafter.
Her first oncologist, the one who performed the biopsy, the one who sat her down with her parents in his art deco office, always had a pleasant look in his eyes, even when he was delivering bleak news. After he got transferred up to Sloan Kettering, Hayley was moved to a second oncologist in the same practice at Northside. Her second oncologist always had a bleak look in his eyes, even when he was delivering pleasant news.
Hayley underwent twenty-four rounds of chemotherapy. At the start, she tried to separate her mind from her body. Her body was sick but her mind remained clean of illness. She would be dry-heaving until she hyperventilated but she reminded herself that it was only her body that was suffering. She would be coughing for hours on end until wet red particles from her lungs sprinkled the dehumidified air in front of her lips, but those lungs and lips belonged to her body. She lost sensation in the tips of her fingers due to neuropathy, but her mind was clean of illness.
Then she started to forget the names of her teachers. She forgot how to spell words like soup and Sunday. She found herself staring at homework assignments and not remembering what the assignment was or what class it was for. Her oncologist assured her that short-term memory loss was a common side effect of her chemotherapy drugs.
“Then put me on different drugs,” she had said.
The new drug cocktail was not as strong and not as effective. Her neuropathy progressed. Her cancer marker trickled up. She required the use of an oxygen tank by her side at all times.
But her mind regained some of its alertness.
Some. But not all.
“So,” she muttered to the screen, “what kind of reparations do you think I deserve?”
Except she knew it was bullshit. What happened, happened, and no amount of money could fix the past. History was beyond one’s control, but the future wasn’t. And so, rather than dwell on her bad luck, Hayley walked the stage at her high school commencement along with everyone else. Soon, she was going to die, but in the meantime, she was going to intern at the FBI. How about that, TheSparrow? What do you have to say to that, AntiShit?
The God’s Voice posts ended around 2007. Hayley went back to her search results and reordered them with the most recent appearing at the top. Here she came upon an item from Interpol released to all major intelligence agencies regarding the voluntary surrender of—
“Eat,” said Angelo, and he placed a paper plate beside her keyboard and on the paper plate—oh my—three slices of American cheese drooling in between the crusts of perfectly browned white bread.
She hesitated. “Did you break into the commissary?”
“Plausible deniability.” He had a half-eaten sandwich of his own in his hands. “Eat.”
Truth be told, she was starving.
She took three large bites.
He handed her a can of Diet Coke.
She smiled, cracked it open, and washed the delicious chunks of grilled cheese down her gullet.
Angelo glanced over her shoulder. “Solved all the problems of the world yet?”
“No,” she replied, “but I did find this.”
She pointed at the Interpol release:
On January 1 of this year, a chief strategist for the Ichkeria Republic, the unofficial name for the unofficial secessionist party of Chechnya, interrupted a prayer session at the Akhmad Kadyrov Mosque in Grozny to turn himself in. In exchange for a waiver of the death penalty, he pled guilty to sixty-five counts of treason, nineteen counts of murder, seventeen counts of conspiracy to commit murder, eleven counts of arson, eleven counts of malicious mischief, and four counts of sabotage. On January 15, he was sentenced to fifty-one consecutive life sentences at The Ophrichnina.
“Does it say why he turned himself in?” asked Angelo.
“No, but that’s not what’s interesting. What’s interesting is his name.”
Angelo peered closer at the screen. “ ‘Zviad Daudov.’ ”
Hayley picked up the slip of paper and pointed to the third name.
“ ‘Bislan Daudov,’ ” Angelo read aloud. He took a moment to process the information. “Could they be related?”
“I don’t know. All evidence of the name Bislan Daudov has been wiped clean off the database. But the bottom of the Interpol release has a link to Zviad’s dossier.”
She clicked the link.
She and Angelo scanned the dossier.
And there it was, halfway down the page, the answer that had been so elusive, the answer that could potentially change everything.
There it was.
“We need to call Jim Christie,” said Angelo.
Hayley picked up the phone and dialed his mobile number. She put it on speakerphone.
Angelo took another bite out of his sandwich.
Ring. Ring. Ring.
Impatient, Hayley tapped her fingers against the desk.
Ring.
“He’s probably busy with—”
A female voice cut in: “Hello?”
Xana Marx? What was she doing with Jim’s phone?
And what was all that shouting in the background?
Chapter 38
Nine minutes earlier, Jim and Xana had walked into the airport substation. They were not the only visitors here to see Lieutenant Dundee.
“Les Kramer,” said the tall, gaunt man in the chinos. “US Marshal.”
Marshal Kramer was here to transport the Chechen prisoner for pretrial to the federal penitentiary some ten minutes up I-85. He just needed the LT’s signature to authorize the handoff.
Officer Chiles had all the paperwork ready. She had already radioed Dundee on the walkie and assured Kramer that he would not be long. When Chiles spoke, she spoke to the floor, not because the marshal was so obviously tall but because Chiles was so obviously smitten.<
br />
“Guess we’ll have to wait in line,” said Jim. He adjusted the belt on his low-riding slacks. Someday he was going to lose all this excess weight. He had once been in good shape—or if not good shape at least good enough to pass the physical at the FBI Academy. Sometimes it took him a full ten minutes after waking up to remember that he had become fat and old. Those were his favorite ten minutes of the day.
Xana, meanwhile, was getting examined by Marshal Kramer. The tall man had cocked his head southward and was peering at her as if she were a three-eyed trout.
“Do I know you?” he asked.
“No.”
“Now, now,” crowed Lieutenant Dundee from the doorway, “don’t lie. He may not know you, but he recognizes you. Want me to tell him or should you?”
Dundee stepped into his squad room. He had a Granny Smith in one hand and his paring knife in the other and a shit-eating grin goosing the cheeks of his face.
Officer Chiles headed her boss off at the pass and handed him the authorization forms for him to sign. He propped the apple between his jaws and used the tip of his knife as a tracking tool to help him read the forms.
“You still want me to apologize to that?” Xana muttered to Jim.
Dundee handed the forms back to Chiles, took a bite out of his apple, and said, mouth full of fruit, “Since when does a marshal need two feebs to escort a prisoner to lockup?”
“Lieutenant, we’re actually here on a separate matter,” said Jim, who then identified himself.
“Yeah, I imagine you are.” Dundee winked at Xana and then reached into his breast pocket for his ballpoint pen. “I’ll be with you two in a second.”
He signed Marshal Kramer’s forms and handed them to him. Chiles followed the tall marshal into the interview room to retrieve the quarry; any excuse to spend more time with the tall marshal was a fine excuse for Officer Chiles.
Dundee sliced across his apple with the flat blade of his Swiss Army knife and deposited the fresh-cut chunk into his mouth.
“How about it, darling?” he said to Xana. “You got something you want to say to me?”
Xana stepped forward, bowed her head, and spoke:
“I’m sorry…”