Cost of Life

by Joshua Corin

  But in that half second, both Kip and Kenneth had transformed from demons into toddlers. Their bodies shrank in their seats. Their eyes widened with pure terror.

  Bislan smiled behind his camera.

  Chapter 47

  Larry, slumped in his seat, couldn’t shake from his mind the thunderstorm of gunshots. They sounded so different in real life than they did in movies. Or perhaps it was just his proximity to them. Or perhaps it was the knowledge that each of those gunshots meant that someone was now dead. Not movie-dead. No stunt doubles, no second takes.

  And he knew he’d be hearing more gunshots before the day was up.

  One of the passengers behind him was puttering on about minutes. Twenty-six minutes till three o’clock. Twenty-three minutes till three o’clock. Twenty-one minutes till three o’clock.

  “I’d give real money to have her shut up,” said Marie.

  Larry looked to his wife and replied with a small, forced smile. He’d done his best to fill her in on what was transpiring and all the while, she hadn’t panicked. She’d listened, she’d nodded, and then she’d hugged him.

  Across the aisle, Sean had immersed himself in a comic book someone must have passed him. There was a real sense of community here. Voyage of the damned.

  “Do you think the soldiers are coming back?” Marie asked him.

  “They’re not going to risk setting off the explosives.”

  “Then I guess it’s up to us.”

  “How?” He heard gunshots in his mind. “We’re unarmed.”

  “They can’t kill all of us.”

  “They can. They can kill all of us. They just scared off a platoon of soldiers.”

  “Except we have something they didn’t have.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I don’t know. But once we figure it out, we’re golden.”

  She winked at him. His heart did a loop-de-loop.

  And her faith became contagious. After all, they weren’t dead yet. She was right. All they needed was a plan. Something outside the box. Something unexpected. And Larry had to be the one to implement it. It was his duty to his family, to his crew, to his passengers, to Lucy and Reese and everyone else.

  He just didn’t know where to start.

  But maybe he didn’t have to do it alone. He still had the number memorized for that FBI agent. He reached into his jacket pocket for his phone—and then his right pant pocket—and then his left pant pocket. Had it fallen out during the firefight? Had he left it in the cockpit?

  No. Of course. He’d loaned it to Bislan.

  Well, Larry wasn’t about to ask the psychopath for any favors. Not when all he had to do was turn around and ask the annoying passenger who was obsessed with time if he could borrow her phone.

  And she gladly lent it to him.

  “If you’re calling for delivery,” said Marie, “I could really go for some egg foo yung.”

  Oh, Marie.

  He kissed her.

  Then he stared at the phone for a minute. His thumb hovered over animated digits. He decided to text instead of talk. The two thugs at either end of the aisle didn’t seem to understand English, but why take chances?

  This is Captain Walder, he typed. I’m borrowing someone else’s phone. I need your help.

  Then he waited.

  Two forty-one P.M. Nineteen minutes till three o’clock.

  Christ.

  The phone vibrated. He clicked on the message icon and read:

  tell me what you need me 2 do.

  This was a start.

  He typed back: Tell me what YOU need ME 2 do.

  A short pause this time.

  help us fill in gaps, shut them down from outside.

  “Sounds good to me,” said Marie.

  He hadn’t realized she was spying. But she was right. If the FBI could somehow shut the terrorists down, maybe disable the website, anything to dash their plans into shambles, that would go a long way toward forcing an alternate ending to all this, one in which no one else, God willing, had to die.

  What do you want 2 know, typed Larry.

  The response came almost immediately:

  is there anyone who was at your house this morning that you haven’t seen since?

  Larry thought back. The only two men in his bedroom this morning had been the old man and that giant thug. This morning. Only eight hours ago. How was that even possible? Hadn’t it been days? Hadn’t it been an eternity?

  Marie snatched the phone from him. She typed: Why are they asking that?

  She handed the phone back to him. He deleted her question and answered it:

  They want to know if they have any accomplices who might be local.

  He offered her the phone. Any other questions? She shook her head.

  Finally, he answered their question with a brief: No.

  The next text came quick:

  can you vouch 4 everyone on your crew?

  Could he? Addison was new to the job. He certainly had never flown with her before. What if she was a plant? Who could possibly be less suspicious than a bubbly and bright-eyed young woman? What if her all-American cheerleader persona was an act?

  And what about the others? Sure, he’d worked with them before, but what did he know about them, really? Was Francisco susceptible to a bribe? Was Maryann? What if they had Deja’s parents hidden away in a storage locker and had forced her to cooperate with them?

  These things happened.

  Except it didn’t make sense. What would be the point? They had him. He was their inside man. Why bother recruiting someone else? So they could access the passenger manifest? They obviously had the tech skills to hack into the airline’s database. How else would they have known to target Larry in the first place?

  “By the way,” Marie said, “I forgot to ask you. Where exactly are we?”

  “Florida.”

  “Florida. Huh.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why Florida?”

  “Millions of people ask that question every year.”

  “No,” she said, “I mean, why not just fly to Cozumel and hijack the plane there, you know, on foreign soil?”

  “That…is an excellent question…” He handed the phone to her. “Ask.”

  She typed her question.

  They waited.

  Two forty-four P.M.

  Two forty-five P.M.

  “Silence is bad, right?” Marie asked Larry.

  “Right now? Everything is bad.”

  Finally, the response arrived:

  we have a new plan, it’s going to take time.

  “What does that mean?” Larry muttered. “How could they suddenly know—”

  Marie placed an index finger on her husband’s lips to shush him.

  We have 14 minutes, she typed back.

  Two forty-seven P.M.

  Thirteen minutes.

  Then:

  stall.

  To which both Larry and Marie had identical reactions. They both stared drop-jawed at the words on the screen.

  Stall them? How? Magic tricks? Juggling?

  Could the FBI have offered any advice more useless?

  “Any ideas?” Marie asked Larry.

  He looked around the cabin. The coeds sat several rows ahead. Every now and then, one of them would sit up in her seat and reveal cheeks lined with the dried rivers of old tears, nostrils blackened with crusts of dried blood. Several rows behind, the boxy fellow who had instigated that uprising was on the phone, probably brokering for his life.

  No, if Larry could have stalled the terrorists, he would have done so already. He had done so already. He’d stopped Bislan from shooting Lucy Snow.

  But then she’d ended up dying anyway.

  Whatever the FBI’s brilliant new plan was, they had thirteen—no, twelve—minutes to enact it, because there was nothing Larry or anyone else on this plane could do to stall them.

  Chapter 48

  Xana’s brilliant new plan wasn’t a plan, pe se. Nor was
it brilliant. But it was new. It was, at the very least, that.

  She’d just commandeered/bullied her way to the front of the long, long line for the women’s restroom when she’d read the pilot’s question about Florida. A hunch took shape, the implications of which caught her so off-guard that she even gasped. But she needed confirmation before taking the next step. She shot off another text message then called Hayley.

  “Angelo wants me to tell you that the Russians are on their way to arrest the warden,” Hayley said in lieu of hello. “And we’ve got the relevant portions of the soldier’s journal translated. It looks like there was a bit of bragging about how today’s bad boys were able to purchase their arms at a dealers show in Macon and how readily the West enables its own demise, et cetera, et cetera. The important thing is the brother. Zviad. He’s not going anywhere.”

  “That’s great. I don’t care. I need to pick your annoyingly precocious brain.”

  “You don’t care? We now have leverage! You said it yourself: ‘There’s no way Bislan is going to let his brother rot away in that frozen hellhole,’ although frozen hellhole is a bit of an oxymoron, if you ask me.”

  “I know what I said. I know what I said because I said it. And I wasn’t wrong. I’m not wrong. But I need you to listen to me. Are you listening to me?”

  “That depends. Are you condescending toward me?”

  Xana left the queue. The adrenaline greasing her veins wouldn’t let her stand still. Her bladder would just have to wait.

  Two fifty-four P.M.

  “Hayley, why did they land in Florida?”

  “I thought it had something to do with Cuba. Isn’t that the big theory?”

  “Then why didn’t they just fly to Cuba? Why not just ransom off the passengers there?”

  “Because…I don’t know…”

  “OK.” Xana found the bookstore. Predictably, it was the one location in the terminal nigh free of passengers. Optimal room to pace without tripping over someone’s legs. “You’ve never traveled abroad, have you?”

  “I always wanted to go to London. For a while, we were saving up money so we could go, as a family, but it’s hard to save up money when you’re spending so much of it on everything else…”

  “You’d have to save a lot more money than you think, because one thing about traveling out of the country is the roaming fees. If your cell phone carrier even allows you to make calls at all.”

  “And that’s why they didn’t land in Cuba.”

  “Or Cozumel or anywhere else. They wanted to guarantee that all the passengers could use their phones. But here’s the part I can’t understand. They’re in the middle of an orange grove. I can’t imagine there’s a cell tower nearby.”

  “How could they know the passengers would have cell reception at all?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Maybe they didn’t,” suggested Hayley. “Maybe they lucked out.”

  “This has been planned to the letter. You know that.”

  “Maybe they installed a cell tower of their own.”

  “You’ve seen the satellite imagery. Any antennas on the roof of the barn?”

  “No…”

  “Then help me out.” Xana paced the narrow aisles of the bookstore. The boy with the lazy eye behind the counter didn’t seem to mind. It wasn’t as if she were going to shoplift anything, not with soldiers with guns standing a few yards away. “How did they do it?”

  “Maybe they have antennas inside the barn…? No. The antennas would have to be at a certain height to be effective. Oh, the satellite imagery! That’s it!”

  “What’s it?”

  “The satellites!” replied Hayley. “They don’t need an antenna. All they need is an earth station! Ooh, that’s sneaky.”

  “What the hell is an earth station?”

  “They’re how we communicate with satellites and how satellites communicate with us. All they’d have to do is jury-rig it to route cellular frequency and point the dish out one of the barn’s windows. I mean, I assume it has windows. It would account for making sure the cell phones have reception and all that, although they would need a satellite, like, directly overhead, especially if they built the earth station themselves, and I mean stationary overhead, and as far as I know, we don’t like to waste our satellites to have them permanently spying on orange groves.”

  “Unless we know there’s a plane full of hostages in that orange grove,” replied Xana, shaking her head at the realization. “Then we’re guaranteed to have a satellite overhead.”

  “Which they’d know. Oh. Wow. They totally played us. Wow. But that still doesn’t account for all that data. You know, the credit card transactions and stuff. They need to operate the website and maintain all this traffic and that’s going to require some servers of their own, unless they’re renting them out, but they wouldn’t rent it out because why take the risk, so they’d have to have servers of their own but they wouldn’t need to be in Florida or even in the Western Hemisphere—except, no, they probably would want the servers to be in the Western Hemisphere, or at least the United States, because you’ve got to figure the majority of the traffic would be coming from the United States—ideally, they’d keep the servers right here in…oh my God…”

  Xana stopped pacing.

  They still had someone here in the city.

  “It makes perfect sense,” she said. “They need the servers to be in a location with a reliable infrastructure, right? Hayley?”

  Silence.

  “Hayley?”

  Silence.

  Two fifty-seven P.M.

  “Hayley…?”

  More silence, then:

  “Sorry. All that talking. I ran out of air.”

  “Oh Jesus.” Xana let out a gasp of her own precious oxygen. “Hayley…”

  “No, it’s OK. I’m OK. And you’re right. But if their servers are here, where are they?”

  “Well, it’s a pretty big city.”

  “Sure, but it’s not like this kind of a sustained data spike is going to go unnoticed. Especially today.”

  “Why especially today?” asked Xana.

  “Uh, hello, it’s a national holiday. Everything is closed.”

  The implication set into Xana like a cold knife.

  She stepped into the corridor and looked both ways. She quickly lost track of how many families were here, sitting on the floor, playing games or watching movies on their phones; how many soldiers were here, standing guard, waiting for their next order; how many overtired custodians, struggling to keep up with the discarded trays and ketchup-wet utensils and the candy wrappers and the soda cans.

  “No, Hayley,” she said. “Not everything is closed.”

  “What—oh! Oh. But that’s ridiculous. Why would they risk it? You said there are National Guardsmen everywhere.”

  “The best place to hide a needle is not in a haystack. The best place to hide a needle is in a pile of other needles.”

  “Yeah, but we’re talking about a really big pile of needles. Hartsfield-Jackson is over forty-five hundred acres. The amount of official data there on a regular daily basis has to be astronomical—”

  “—and today is no ordinary day.”

  “So where do you even start to look?”

  Where indeed…

  “Let’s start with where they’re not going to be,” decided Xana. “The cops and the weekend warriors are doing regular sweeps of the airport. That means all the offices, all the lavatories, all the broom closets and maintenance sheds and employee locker rooms.”

  “How about the airplanes still docked at the gates? There’s got to be dozens of them.”

  “No. Procedure has them all emptied of personnel and sealed up tight. Same with all other vehicles. Fuel trucks. You name it. This whole airport is under lockdown.”

  “Maybe we’re wrong. Maybe the servers aren’t there.”

  Xana frowned. She didn’t like maybes.

  She headed toward baggage claim. Congregations of folks
had repurposed the luggage carousels into long oval beds.

  Two fifty-nine P.M.

  Was there any part of the airport not occupied? Was there any part of the airport not currently under vigilant surveillance?

  On the other side of the baggage carousels were the vast glass walls and a perfect view of ATVs parked outside and the ATVs obscured what would otherwise be clear sight lines to the parking garage and on the other side of the parking garage, entirely blocked from—

  Wait.

  Wait a minute.

  “I’ll call you back,” said Xana, and she hung up her phone and raced for the nearest exit as clocks all across the East Coast struck 3 P.M.

  Chapter 49

  In Philips Arena, all the chatter suddenly ceased. From their imperial skybox, Sutton Buttle and his wife put down their glasses of Merlot. Down below, Del Purrich was pacing the stage. He noticed the quiet, noted the time, and told Angelo—with whom he was on the phone—to call him back. A local pastor of some renown led a large group in silent worship. The mayor of Atlanta and the governor of Georgia were somewhere in the crowd as well. And of course there were the dozens and dozens of interspersed reporters, but 3 P.M. came and even their chatter died away.

  Not far away, at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta Airport, thousands of stranded men, women, and children—echoes, really, of the crowd at Philips—stood and sat and watched the ubiquitous screens scattered throughout the five-thousand-acre complex of jetways and terminals.

  In the basement of the White House, the president and his national security team watched their screen with restless impotence.

  “It is time!” Bislan announced, and focused the camera on his smile-stretched visage. “Aren’t you all excited? I am. But countdowns always leave me feeling alive. You can only imagine how intolerable I become on New Year’s Eve. Before we begin, I want to give a special hello to six continents. Yes, that’s right—the viewership of this website is literally worldwide. And how often do events occur that can attract the interest of the world? I’d say this is cause for celebration—not celebration of me, of course, but of you! Your empathy in these proceedings deserves a round of applause.”