Cost of Life

by Joshua Corin

  “Oh, I don’t doubt it, but you’re also not a psychopath. You’ve got blood on your hands. I’ve got blood on my hands. Nobody ever said patriotism was for pacifists.”

  “You know nothing.”

  “That’s funny. Your friend the cop-killer said the same thing to me this morning. We all assume that our pain is personal and that nobody can know our sorrow and if that isn’t the foulest-smelling bullshit around, I don’t know what is.”

  “And yet your people watched while my people burned, while the Russians slaughtered my people by the thousands—”

  “No,” interrupted Xana, with a note of sadness in her voice. “We didn’t. That’s your mistake. You want to know what the American people were paying attention to during your civil wars? Monica Lewinsky. The Backstreet Boys. The best phones for texting. The best shoes for jogging. The same year you got arrested, our professional baseball players went on strike because they thought being paid seven figures to swing a piece of wood or catch a chunk of leather was slave labor. Chechnya was a massacre of innocents and we weren’t watching that happen because we were watching MTV.”

  “Then maybe I should kill every American on this plane as an act of mercy, the way one puts a sick dog to sleep!”

  “Go ahead. But I hope you like your tea with a whole lot of irony because you’d finally get the attention of the American people and we would associate a massacre of civilians with Chechnya but you would be the perpetrators. I’ve a feeling they’d laugh about that in Moscow for years to come.”

  Silence.

  Xana shut her eyes. She felt bad for the man. Prison and politics had hardened him into a monster. She couldn’t in any way empathize with the callous brutality of his actions this day—but she could sympathize with them. She could even understand them. They were the actions of a man shouting at the indifferent universe, and how many times had she stoppered the urge to shout with a bottle of Jim Beam?

  This fucking universe.

  But hey, at least there were people like Hayley. And Madeline.

  And Jim Christie.

  “I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know,” she said. “That’s why you staged this game show. You want to shine a mirror in our face and show us how we turn everything and everyone into a commodity. I get it. My last name is Marx for Christ’s sake. But you grew up under communism. You want to tell me that was a whole lot better?”

  “The first step in fixing a problem is for people to see that it exists.”

  “When you wave a gun in a crowd, the only problem anyone is going to see is you.”

  More silence.

  Then, finally:

  “I am not going to release the hostages here. I am going to fly to an undisclosed location and that’s where you’ll be able to pick them up. As long as your people don’t try to intervene, they will be unharmed.”

  “And you and your men will be gone.”

  “We spent much of our adult lives in a prison. We will not allow ourselves to be put into another one.”

  “We’ll find you.”

  Bislan replied with a small laugh. “Just follow the blood and the money and you can find anyone. Is your last name really Marx?”

  “Yes. But no, I’m not a direct descendant of Karl. Or Groucho. However, if you were to ask my father, he’d tell you I’m a descendant of Kublai Khan.”

  “It is said that Kublai’s grandfather coupled with thousands of women. It is said that his progeny alive today number in the tens of millions. You and I could be related by blood.”

  Xana stared at her hands. “Yeah. We probably are.”

  Chapter 52

  Madeline left Xana another message on her voice mail. Jim Christie’s voice mail. Why the hell wasn’t she picking up? If she had turned her phone off…if, God help her, she had gone off on a bender…

  Knock, knock, knock on her office door, and Barrett Coleman stuck his head in. “You’re going to want in on this.”

  Madeline followed him to Meeting Room 5E, where the other seven wonks were already deep in argument.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  Barrett clicked on the remote and the secretary of state appeared on the screen. The clamor in the room died to a hush. The secretary, never the epitome of health, was carrying ten-pound bags under his eyes. Whatever hour it was in Brussels, it was well past his bedtime.

  “Several minutes ago, we received a communiqué from the Russian ambassador demanding to know what American intelligence agents were doing in the home of a retired decorated army officer.”

  Madeline eased herself into a seat.

  “Now, I’ve already spoken to the director of the CIA and he has denied any involvement. So before I get yelled at by the president, I’m going to yell at you all. Do we have any operations in Chechnya that could have gone slant-ways in the past hour?”

  No one spoke.

  Madeline looked at her reflection in the table. She was going to have to choose her words here very carefully.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, if I tell the president that it wasn’t us and it later turns out that it was, I am going to personally chop off the tongue of whoever decided not to share.”

  Madeline was still without a prepared speech but she also was rather attached to her tongue. She raised her hand.

  Eight pairs of stunned expressions swiveled toward her.

  “Yes, Madeline? You have something to say?”

  “Well, sir, what evidence do the Russians have that it was Americans?”

  “I don’t know, Madeline, but I’m sure we’ll find out when we enter the discovery process during our trial at The Hague. Do you have something constructive to add?”

  “Sir, as you know, the corporation I work for has a proprietary interest as well as a legal obligation in protecting the identity of our clients. But it is possible that in the very recent past, a client may have hired us to perform a certain service for them in the aforementioned region.”

  Around the room, stun evolved into shock.

  “Please tell me, Madeline, that you’re making a bad joke.”

  “No, sir. And although it is true that the corporation I work for maintains its central headquarters in the United States, it also hosts many shared service centers throughout the world. I should add that, although our central headquarters are in the United States, we in fact reincorporated our charter to the island of Cayman Brac in the Western Caribbean and so while we are still recognizably an American corporate entity, we legally are not.”

  “Yes, I’m well aware of Bellum Vellum’s efforts at tax dodging, but if you believe that allows you to invade a sovereign nation…if your client is American…Christ, rich people can’t just hire mercenaries to do whatever they want wherever they want it done!”

  “Sir, at this point, I’m going to have to refer you to the FBI. It’s not my place to provide you with the intelligence they have gathered on the prison in question or on its relationship to the hijacking of Flight Eight Sixteen.”

  Around the room, the expressions of shock evolved into openmouthed astonishment.

  “Is this a real relationship, Madeline? Or a relationship fabricated to justify an illegal excursion?”

  “It’s a real relationship, sir. But again, the FBI are the ones more equipped to provide you with that information.”

  The secretary of state scowled at her—and then terminated the call.

  No one said a word.

  And then Barrett, her closest friend in the department, simply had to speak:

  “Is there a reason you excluded everyone in this room from your little operation?”

  “It was privileged information,” she replied. “Our client—”

  “—is going to be brought up on charges of—”

  “—is going to be hailed as a hero. Once all of this comes out, do you really think anyone is going to want to prosecute the man who helped end a hostage crisis?”

  “That’s not the way the law works.”

  Made
line stood up. “Maybe not. But it’s the way the world works. Now if you’ll excuse me.”

  She couldn’t leave the room fast enough and crossed the distance to her office in record time. Once she’d closed the door behind her, she took a deep, steadying breath and let it out.

  Then her cell phone rang.

  She checked the number.

  Imagine that. It was her client.

  “Have you heard anything?” demanded Sutton Buttle Jr. “It feels like I got a thousand worms wiggling in my digestive tract. When the camera on that damn plane went dead, I figured you’d call me and then you didn’t and I’ve got a lot on the line here.”

  “I know, Sutton, and you can relax. The mission was a success.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She brought up her email and opened the one she’d received six minutes earlier from Nino Tsereteli. It had no subject and only a brief line of text in its body but that brief line of text spoke volumes:

  prison in our control.

  —n. t.

  Madeline let out another steadying breath. “Yes, Sutton. I’m sure. Your money has been well spent.”

  “Speaking of that, I’ve got a few ideas on how I’d like to go public with the news.”

  “Our director of public relations should be getting in touch with you shortly.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure. Hey, listen, I don’t know what kind of salary they’re paying you, sweetie, but you may want to contact your broker. I’ve got a feeling that the stock price of Pegasus Air is about to skyrocket.”

  She could envision the wet smile on his face. It hadn’t taken much to convince an image-crazed capitalist like Sutton Buttle Jr. to sponsor a rescue mission in Chechnya. He probably was already trying to decide which Hollywood superstar would be playing him in the movie.

  Madeline said her good-byes to the glory-hound and hung up—only to have Barrett Coleman storm in and slam the door behind him.

  “Come on in,” said Madeline. “Make yourself at home.”

  “The secretary is apoplectic. He wants to fire you.”

  “Did you try to talk him out of it?”

  “I convinced him it was a good idea!”

  Madeline took out a hundred-calorie pouch of trail mix from her desk drawer. She offered it to Barrett. He scoffed at her—and then held out his hand. She tossed it to him.

  “Do you know the lesson of H. Ross Perot?” she asked.

  “The billionaire who cost Bush the First reelection?”

  Madeline grinned. “That was in 1992. In 1978, the Iranians arrested two American businessmen on trumped-up bribery charges.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it was Iran in 1978. These men were arrested and the Carter administration dithered and so the richest man in America, H. Ross Perot, assembled his own team of ex-military NGO goombahs and invaded Tehran.”

  “Are you telling me your client is Ross Perot?”

  “No.” Madeline grabbed a pouch of trail mix for herself. “But there is a reason that private contractors like me are embedded within the State Department and the Justice Department and the Treasury Department and every other department in this department-loving city. What happened today is one of those reasons and the secretary knows that.”

  “I’ll add you to the Edward Snowden fan club.”

  “Your problem is that you want this town to be like The West Wing except it’s more like The Sopranos.”

  Her cell phone rang.

  She checked the caller ID.

  “Is that Bill Gates?”

  “You need to go,” she said.

  “Are you throwing me out of your office?”

  “I am.”

  “Thanks for the trail mix.”

  He left.

  She waited for the door to close behind him and then she answered her phone.

  “So I just had the strangest phone call,” began Xana, and for the next couple of minutes she regaled Madeline with a summary of her chat with Bislan Daudov—including his plans for flying off—at least temporarily—with the hostages.

  “Damn it,” Madeline snarled, “Delta Force should have chopped off one of the wheels.”

  “Well, they didn’t. But I think we can work this to our advantage. There are only so many places they can fly and we’ll be able to track them on our radar.”

  Madeline crunched down on a handful of trail mix. “Actually, I think I know exactly where they’re going to fly. A while back, we intercepted a monetary transfer from the Chechens to Banco de Credito y Financiero de Cuba.”

  “Cuba makes sense. And it’s well within their range given how much fuel they’ve probably got left. You think the Cubans will be cooperative with us?”

  “They haven’t been so far,” replied Madeline, and then she got her bright idea. “But maybe they just haven’t received the right enticement.”

  Chapter 53

  And so Larry Walder was back in the captain’s seat. It was not by choice. Bislan had serenaded him with that old chestnut of murdering his wife and son and so Larry had plodded up to the flight deck and soon started down his preflight checklist.

  “Captain Walder, I have good news,” said Bislan, wandering in. “You’re going to have a companion with you.” The guy who had been guarding the rear bathroom paced into the flight deck. A few hours ago, Murad had been wearing glasses. Now his eyes were unobstructed and his face, battered repeatedly by the Australians, had curdled into a prune.

  He took the first officer’s seat.

  Reese Rankin’s seat.

  “Not only will my friend Murad here make for good company, but he’s in the process of getting his pilot’s license. If you try anything you shouldn’t, he will know.”

  “Why don’t you just have him fly the plane?”

  “Because I just told you—Murad doesn’t have his license yet. Allowing him to fly this plane would break the law.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What do you want me to say, Captain? I value your abilities. You get a gold star. But you also get a watchdog. I seem to have developed serious trust issues. Have you entered in a flight path yet? Yes? Good. Then I’ll leave you two boys to your work.”

  To his credit, Murad appeared eager to assist, and Larry was grateful for the extra help. Readying a commercial jet for takeoff was not really a one-man job under ideal conditions—and these were far, far from ideal conditions. In fact, Larry wasn’t entirely convinced they would be able to make it off the ground.

  “Come with me,” he said to Murad. “Let’s take a walk.”

  The prune-faced Chechen stared at him.

  “Do you speak English?”

  The prune-faced Chechen stared at him.

  Larry sighed, stood up, walked exaggeratedly to the cockpit door, and then motioned for the man to follow him.

  This the prune-faced Chechen understood, and soon the two of them were not only off the flight deck but off the airplane. Larry moseyed toward the westward barn doors, where Lucy Snow had only recently laid down her life. Murad shadowed him close behind, keeping a firm hand on his submachine gun.

  Whatever.

  Larry lifted the bar off the doors and pushed them open. The humidity of the citrus grove smacked him in the eyeballs and then slithered up his nostrils. He turned around and headed for the other set of the barn doors.

  “This is going to be the real problem,” he told Murad. “You see, an Airbus A321 at maximum takeoff weight requires a runway that is approximately fifty-six hundred feet long. When me and Reese—that’s the guy you’re replacing, by the way, and you look just like him—when me and Reese landed, we needed about five thousand and fifty feet and we just barely had enough ground. Now I’m hoping the other side of this barn opens up to a long, flat road. What do you think the odds of that are?”

  He lifted the bar off the doors and pushed them open and came face-to-face with orange trees for miles and mosquitoes by the swarmful.

  “Yeah,” he muttered. “I figured.”

 
He looked up. The barn was tall.

  He looked back. The barn was long.

  “But are you tall and long enough?” he wondered aloud.

  There were some other potential obstacles such as klieg lights and some kind of machine topped with a satellite dish, but these were all flush with the walls.

  He headed back to the flight deck. Murad followed him. The rest of the checklist took some time to go through, but it wasn’t as if Larry had been given a clock to beat. He took his time. If he fucked this up, he wasn’t going to get a second chance.

  And with his wife and son on this plane, not to mention all of these other passengers counting on him, not to mention what was left of his crew…no, he wasn’t going to fuck up. He owed it to all of them. One hundred seventy-three people. He was going to do this right.

  He clicked on the intercom.

  “Flight crew, prepare for departure.”

  He clicked off the intercom and turned on the seat belt indicator. Murad fastened his seat belt. Larry did the same.

  Well, so far, so good.

  Next came the rearview camera. Would it have detritus on it? Mercifully no. The black-and-white image was clear. He was staring at the path down which he’d arrived. Somewhere out there were the soldiers who’d tried twice to rescue them. He didn’t see the soldiers, but he knew they had to still be there. And what would they think of Flight 816 taking off? Would they try to stop it? Would they shoot out his landing gear?

  Anything was possible.

  Larry shifted into reverse, inched the seventy-five-ton plane out of the barn. Murad had his face so close to the rearview screen that his pulped nose was just about giving it an Eskimo kiss. Either his missing glasses were intended to correct a nasty case of hyperopia or the guy really, really was interested in monochromatic orange trees. With a case of hyperopia as nasty as this, Murad would never have been able to pilot a bicycle much less an airplane. No, Bislan’s threats about Larry’s expendability had been toothless—but at this point, what did it matter?

  The reversing airplane clipped away at the surrounding branches, more than a few of which were noisily scratching up the glass of the cockpit. Every few yards, the wheels would run over some large rock or whatever. Who knew what detritus must have been jostled into their wake after that initial arrival so many hours ago? Probably nothing, though, would puncture the tires. Probably.