The 15:17 to Paris

by Anthony Sadler

  Joyce’s eyes widened. Passports! It hadn’t even occurred to her. She was at forty thousand feet, cruising toward France at six hundred miles an hour, and she did not have a passport.

  DANIELS HAD YET ANOTHER problem to deal with. The press interest hadn’t let up; it had grown only more intense. He’d tried to keep them at bay as best he could, but he didn’t want to lie to reporters. He batted some requests away by invoking security concerns, which were legitimate, but they weren’t much of a bulwark against the tidal wave of media requests coming in. It became increasingly clear he was going to have to call a press conference.

  Robinson and Daniels got the boys dual American- and French-flag pins, and made sure they were ready: no stains on their shirts or smudges on their faces. And then Robinson had an idea.

  “Do you guys want a few minutes before you go downstairs? Maybe we can take a few minutes to pray.”

  They got in a circle, and Robinson led; as she spoke, they each in turn began to cry. By the time they finished, there wasn’t a dry eye in the room.

  After the press conference, Alek was starting to feel stir crazy. He’d been cooped up for so long with so many people handling him, and the Legion of Honor ceremony was tomorrow; he needed to get out and be alone, or at least be just with the people he cared about. Spencer, Kelly, now Anthony, Rebecca Robinson who’d become like a close, protective aunt. “Hey, Rebecca,” he said, “can we get out of here?”

  “You know,” she said, “I have an idea. Why don’t you boys walk me home?” She cleared it with the security folks, and they walked out into Paris.

  “And you know what? Let’s take the long way to my house. Let’s visit a few of the things you came to Paris to see in the first place.”

  They walked up to the Arc de Triomphe; they all sat there and waited for the Eiffel Tower to light up. And then they just walked. They walked down the avenues,past the cafés; it was getting darker, getting on to that anonymous time of night when you can see only shapes of other people, not expressions, not faces. For those moments, they were just a group of friends on vacation in Paris. They walked down Avenue George V to the Crazy Horse Saloon, and Robinson elbowed Alek playfully. “Guess what that is.” She had a mischievous look. “That place is famous for its burlesque shows.”

  Anthony laughed. “It’s so great that someone’s telling us these things, because we never would have figured this out on our own. It’s funny, we’ve kind of stumbled into having our own tour guides the whole trip.”

  Robinson looked at Anthony, standing there in front of the Crazy Horse, like she knew what he was thinking.

  “Okay, Anthony, get over there. We gotta get some pictures.” While they were posing, a couple hurried over to them. “Are you guys . . . are you the guys? Can you take a picture with us—do you mind?”

  Alek looked at Spencer, who was just as surprised as he was.

  “Well, sure,” Alek said.

  The couple sidled in.

  “Damn, that’s bright,” Anthony said, squinting at the flash. The couple scurried away, giggling to each other, and a silence fell over the group. Alek breathed deeply, and for a moment tried to just enjoy being there, with these people. Sitting there, with their families in the air, they all just enjoyed the silence.

  “You know,” Robinson finally said, watching the couple leave, “I think this is it. From now on, I mean—from now on you’re out in the world.”

  * * *

  AFTER ALEK STRIKES HIM five, six, seven times, the man’s arms begin to slacken, his struggling is dialing down, the blade has fallen from his hand. Alek’s best friend is covered in blood, but the man is beginning to lose consciousness, so Alek just watches his eyes begin to close. Alek speaks to Spencer: “You don’t have it, you don’t have the choke in, you don’t have it.” Spencer adjusts; Alek’s strikes have weakened the gunman enough that Spencer can shift around until he has a good chokehold, and Alek wills Spencer not to let go of the man’s neck. Just to be sure. Spencer holds it. A train employee comes running into the frame, steps in front of Alek, and begins slapping the gunman in the face.

  “Okay, he’s unconscious, you can stop choking him.”

  Alek feels rage. Where was this guy before? Back the fuck up. Where were you when this guy was trying to shoot us?

  A new gust of motion; a British businessman is there, in his sixties, oxford shirt, glasses, buzz-cut, he will introduce himself as Chris and prove to be a steady, calming presence, but for now is important because he speaks both the languages.

  As Spencer drags the terrorist to the floor, Alek sees the long-haired man on the ground gushing blood. How did I not see him before? Alek thinks the man might die if he doesn’t get help, but there are other tasks that need to be performed. Alek quickly establishes a division of labor. “Spencer,” he hears himself saying, “go get that guy.” He points to the bleeding man. Maybe he just looks at the man. Spencer puts his hands in the man’s neck as if Alek could direct them there just by looking.

  The bleeding stops.

  The British man has a necktie in his hands and is binding the terrorist’s legs and hands behind him. The British man has gotten hold of some kind of cable too, and has the loose ends in his teeth, pulling them tighter.

  Alek can focus on his next task.

  He picks up the machine gun again, cocks it, puts a new bullet in the chamber, extends the butt stock so he will have better control of the weapon, and goes back to make sure no one else is hit, and that there are no other terrorists on the train. He walks toward the next train car, but something catches his eye. In the one fluid motion with which he manipulated the weapon he ejected the old round, which popped out of the barrel and bounced onto a seat, where it now lies, as if waiting for him to find it.

  Alek looks closely, and suddenly he understands why his friend is not dead. The terrorist had aimed at Spencer, pulled the trigger, and the weapon did exactly what it was supposed to do. A spring pushed a bullet into the chamber, the trigger moved the firing pin, the firing pin struck the bullet. Then the unlikeliest of malfunctions occurred, just about the only malfunction possible in an AK-47. The bullet, which Alek now holds between two fingers and examines closely, has a perfect, deep dent in the back. Just like it’s supposed to. Just like you’d see on a spent shell casing after a bullet had fired.

  Only this time the bullet didn’t fire. It had a bad primer. The firing pin struck the bullet, but the chemical reaction that was supposed to initiate simply did not happen. The bullet simply did not ignite. The little piece of brass refused to do its one job. And it saved Spencer’s life. Which meant it probably saved everyone else’s too.

  ALEK STARTS MOVING back through the train. The only notions occupying his thoughts now are tasks that need completing; advancing to the next level. He feels logical, as clear as he’s ever been, a computer operating without noise, silently running a single program. He is not thinking—it does not feel like thinking—it is ratcheting down a checklist. He moves into the next train car, following the terrorist’s path in reverse, moving past the bathroom where the attack began. He walks through carriage thirteen: empty. The café car: empty. He registers the detritus of fleeing commuters: open laptops, cell phones, iPads, books. It looks like a place from which people have dematerialized in the middle of whatever they were doing. A marooned plastic cup, lolling on a table after falling from a hand that has disappeared.

  Another empty car, then another.

  Then, in the last two cars, a site that nearly bowls him over. Every single person huddled together, hundreds of them.

  For the first time, the gravity of it strikes him. All these people. If that man hadn’t been stopped in the front—if we hadn’t stopped him—and he’d made it back here with all that ammo, to all these people, confined in one small place with no way to escape . . . the immensity of it pulls him from his state.

  “Is anyone hurt?”

  He goes back to the second train car from the front. He begins clearing the AK
-47 when a train employee comes to him with damp paper towels to help clean up blood. The train employee is trying to be useful. It enrages Alek. Alek has shifted into a military kind of perception, dividing labor, triaging tasks; his level of adrenaline is still high, only now it’s mixed with the emotional tidal wave that started to swell when he saw the huddled passengers at the back of the train. He is not prepared for a distraction from the tasks that need to be done. This man is disordering a To Do list and Alek is too amped up to accommodate disorganization. Things in their order. It’s not time to clean up—that’s a step whose turn has not yet come—the employee is throwing it all out of order.

  Alek tries to ignore him. He asks Chris to ask the man for some space. Chris has an innate ability to speak sense into people. Chris whispers to the man and the man retreats. Alek finishes emptying the weapon, places it on a seat, moves to Spencer’s side. He asks Spencer if he can help. Spencer is trying not to move, trying to keep the bleeding man from moving, but Mark is groaning, and his wife is insists Mark got shot in the chest. Alek knows Mark did not get shot in the chest, but he does not know how he knows. Spencer seems to agree, but he says, “Check anyway.”

  Alek takes the box cutter from the terrorist and slices open Mark’s shirt. He does a blood sweep, running his hands all over Mark’s torso to see if blood comes up, which would mean there was another wound. He doesn’t find any. He stands up.

  He looks at Anthony, who has a look on his face like he’s just witnessed some ridiculous slapstick accident, a man and a banana peel. Alek doesn’t know what’s funny. Did he do something? Say something? Is there a smudge on his face?

  And then he understands. All of it. There is a terrorist tied up on the ground, Spencer is bleeding in a million places, and meanwhile the train is whirring along quietly, a big smooth machine oblivious to the menagerie inside it. Alek is on the same page now. He stands next to Anthony, this friend he had not seen since middle school, a person he was surprised was coming at all, a person he didn’t totally get, and the two of them, without even really needing to say anything, know they are thinking exactly the same thing. It is all absurd and ridiculous, and together they stand there and laugh.

  THE TRAIN PULLS INTO THE STATION, Alek still thinking about the absurdity of it all. He needs space. He wants to be next to Anthony, but Anthony has gone off with a policeman and is trying to recount what happened. Alek wants to go be with Spencer, but Spencer has a swarm of EMTs around him. Alek doesn’t want to be with anyone else. There are too many people around. He’s tired of being confined in such a tight space with so many people trying to take charge.

  He sits by himself on a bench, alone, a little like an old man at a park whose friends have all left him, and he begins to think.

  It is a process that will last months, years, but he is beginning to see a series of uncanny coincidences.

  That they left Amsterdam when they did, even though none of them really wanted to. What was it that pulled them to Paris? Why did they decide to ignore all the people who told them to skip France? Two separate girls traveling alone whispering into Anthony’s and Spencer’s ears as if the devil preferred to send his messages through spunky young Asians.

  What made them come to France anyway? A sense. He thinks of all the coincidences:

  That they were on this train. So close to staying in Amsterdam and taking a different one.

  That they were even in Amsterdam at all, when none of them planned to be.

  That they kept failing to meet up in Germany like they were supposed to.

  That they were in the right train car, after the old man and his daughter took them three cars back. That the Wi-Fi was bad. If it had worked, they would have stayed back there, been back there when the man started shooting.

  Or was that some force trying to keep them out of harm’s way?

  That Spencer had been too cheap to join any kind of gym for exercise except jujitsu, so he knew a form of fighting that worked on anyone.

  That Spencer’s roundabout path, failing pararescue, failing SERE, had taken him to EMT and given him just enough skills to save that man?

  Alek’s own obsession with firearms, so that he knew exactly what to do, how to handle the weapons the terrorist brought on the train. What if it had been anyone else?

  That Anthony had become obsessed with capturing everything on camera so he had footage, pictures of everything, everything an investigator could hope for.

  Or back even further, that his mom moved into the next house down, not twenty feet from Spencer’s. That their moms were so similar. Both had been flight attendants, both had just been divorced, both had kids almost the same age, so similar their families had congealed into one. That their names came right after one another alphabetically, and that when Anthony came to the school, his had too. That Anthony kept getting signs that he should come on a trip he couldn’t afford. His coworkers telling him he needed to travel young, just as Alek’s other friends were dropping out; that the first credit card he qualified for was a travel credit card.

  That when the man started shooting, the closest train station was here, not even thirty minutes from a hospital in Lille that happened to have a renowned orthopedics program. As if the train was being diverted exactly to where Spencer needed to be for any hope for recovering the use of his thumb.

  The one million things that had to happen for them to be here, to stop the attack. Then to keep them safe.

  The coincidences piled up in his mind to something immense, almost too much to bear. It was as if they’d found themselves in the center of a cosmic tug-of-war, one invisible force pulling them away from the attack, the other pulling them toward it.

  As if Joyce’s prayers and Heidi’s prayers, in living rooms back in Sacramento within earshot of one another, were competing. One pulling them to safety, the other pulling them to mission. Somehow they’d each pulled just enough, just the perfect amount, so that they’d gotten both.

  * * *

  AYOUB

  In January 2015, two heavily armed brothers stormed the offices of a weekly satire magazine called Charlie Hebdo and opened fire. With military discipline, they killed eleven people, injured eleven more, then shot and killed a national police officer outside the building. France deployed the army, and the brothers took hostages, but they were shot and killed before the end of the day.

  The shootings shocked people in the country and beyond. Nearly four million people demonstrated in France, the phrase Je suis Charlie, “I am Charlie,” in solidarity with the magazine, ricocheted across the Internet, and though the magazine typically sold fewer than a hundred thousand copies, the next issue sold almost eight million, and in half a dozen languages. The world mourned for Charlie Hebdo.

  Ayoub El-Khazzani did not.

  Ayoub resented this reaction.

  On social media he posted old photos of the violence colonial France inflicted upon Africa. He said France was a terrorist state for what it had done. He posted videos explaining theories that these attacks by Muslims were faked, just hoaxes meant to marginalize Muslims yet again. Ayoub proclaimed, “I am not Charlie Hebdo.” He had no sympathy for a magazine that mercilessly insulted his religion. That was just picking on the weak. He began posting videos of Saudi sheiks of the strict Salafi tradition preaching, on sites devoted to religion.

  And, still mostly lonely, he spent the rest of his time reading up on love, how to fashion his hair, how to lose weight.

  More than a year after going off the radar in France, on May 10, 2015, Ayoub El-Khazzani popped back up. He was in Berlin.

  He was boarding a Germanwings flight to Istanbul,1 the gateway to jihad in Syria.

  Because he was under an S-Card, his movement was caught and the intel was passed to Spanish intelligence the next day.

  Security services lost the trail after he landed in Turkey,2 but there was little doubt where he was headed. Syria was a place where fighters were trained to join the jihad there or, ever more frequently, trained and
then sent home to carry out attacks on European soil.

  On June 4, he returned to Europe on a flight from Antakya, a Turkish city on the Syrian border.3

  He went to Belgium.4 Belgium was a country with the highest concentration of jihadi volunteers in Europe.5

  He stayed with a sister above a Carousel minimart in Molenbeek, a district of Brussels,6 where he was surrounded by people like him; its population was largely Muslim, and also largely of Moroccan extraction.

  It also had a thriving illegal arms trade. It had the highest unemployment in the city. It was crowded and graffitied.7 It provided ample disaffection for those on the path to violence, or who had traveled far and wide in search of opportunity but had found none.

  And it provided weapons. It was weapons from this slum that were used in Paris in the attack on a kosher market, and at the shootings at the Jewish Museum in Belgium.8

  That summer, while Spencer, Anthony, and Alek prepared excitedly for their EuroRail adventure, Ayoub went on a backpacking trip of his own,9 traveling between Belgium and Germany, as well as Austria, France, and Andorra. He traveled, each time, by train.10

  Then, just as Spencer was leaving Portugal, and Anthony and Alek were saying goodbye to their parents, Ayoub finally called his. He had not spoken with his father for a year and a half.11

  It’s August 21. It is hot and humid, with little relief. A nearly windless day.12 Ayoub purchases a burner phone13 and activates it.