The 15:17 to Paris

by Anthony Sadler

  Ayoub leaves his sister’s home. He walks up to the roundabout with a small park in the middle but no grass, just pigeons. Up Rue Piers, where he enters the Ossenheim metro stop, going underground just before the street meets a field with young men playing soccer. He rides past the new car washes, a thinning, littered woodland, abandoned and hollowed-out automotive parts warehouses slowly filling up with bottles and old dolls and car tires.

  Past the giant slaughterhouse recently converted into a covered playground. A whole tour of urban decay in less than five minutes.

  He comes back up at the Clemenceau station by the school with the faux graffiti wall. Vivre ensemble, it says. “Live together.” And Paix, for “Peace.” As he moves through a park with public exercise equipment bolted to the ground all around him, the South Tower rises nearly forty stories high right in front of him, a giant gleaming beacon emerging from the train station. As he makes his way toward it, he moves through another area full of firearms; the region around the station is a widely known hub for the black-market weapons trade.14 The whole country of Belgium is, really. A storied history of firearms manufacturers, like FN Herstal,15 combined with lax restrictions and the country’s status as a transit hub for people fleeing other wars allowed Belgium to become a country saturated with firearms. Then after a wave of violent crimes hit, new gun control laws were enacted, but the weapons were already there; their sale continued by simply moving underground, where they combined with a wash of black-market weapons flowing in since the Balkan Wars. As people fled to Belgium from the collapsing Soviet Union, a community of Balkan expatriates grew, many of whom knew how to access old Soviet munitions reserves back home. Which turned out to be veritable gold mines.16 So by the time the government finally tried to crack down, it was far too late. There were millions of unregistered weapons already in circulation; they’d simply moved to the black market.17 There could be no better place to assemble an arsenal without authorities knowing.

  He enters the station, angled glass with white lettering, French station name in one direction, Dutch in another.18 He is six stops and less than two miles from the Maelbeek metro station, where twenty people will die from an explosion during a coordinated ISIS attack eight months later.

  Big yellow posters list times and destinations. He asks for a ticket to Paris. The clerk offers him a seat on the next train, originating in Amsterdam at 11:17, and the one after that, the 13:1719 to Paris.

  Ayoub decides he will wait for a later train, #9364. He does not say why. He does not appear to have a reason, though Thalys employees know the Friday #9364 is one of the busiest trains on the route. It’s the end of the week, it’s right at closing time, and August is high tourist season. That train is usually packed. And because in the summer Thalys attracts young people on short-term contracts looking for spending money or a foot in the door, the train’s staff that day was both younger and less experienced than usual.

  Ayoub pays €149 in cash and the clerk hands him a ticket for first class on Thalys #9364. The 15:17 to Paris, originating in Amsterdam.

  He proceeds to the platform, a nexus of old and new. Gleaming red trains whine into the station looking like long rocket ships, passing antique-style roman-numeral clocks, a gesture to the old days of rail transport. Backlit billboards show smiling white vacationers enjoying their holidays all around the continent. Above Ayoub the roofs are the same old corrugated metal that covered the slums in cities he lived in, holding back rain when it came but making it sound angry, pounding down like the sky itself wanted in. Sheets of metal just like the ones his father collected and dealt for scrap. Gauzy, filtered sunlight falls through transparent seams in the roof, as train #9364 pulls into the station.

  Ayoub approaches.

  He walks past an elegant young woman, tall and thin and blond and draped in burgundy fabric that matches the train, matches her heels. A train attendant, on a crew change.

  Ayoub is not focused on her. Ayoub is about to win glory, and he carries power in his backpack. He has a 9mm Luger semiautomatic pistol. He also has a blade from a box cutter, a bottle of gasoline, a hammer, a backpack with eight fully loaded magazine cartridges, nearly three hundred rounds of ammunition, and a side-folding Draco AK-47 semiautomatic assault rifle with a slant-cut muzzle and a collapsible butt.

  He boards in first class.

  The stairs under the train doors retract; the train managers radio to each other, and the train begins to move. It happens without sound. Like the world has tipped just a little and the train has begun to roll downhill. The hum of the engine kicks in, but it is faint and feels far away. It is astoundingly quiet. Even the people speak in hushed tones, as if discussing something grave or private. The loudest sound is the pneumatic hiss of the doors between the cars opening and closing, as confused passengers finally find their assigned seats.

  The train rolls out onto the tributary of tracks multiplying in front of the station. It picks up speed, passes the junkyards, moves onto a smoother track, picks up more speed. Within minutes of leaving the station, it is traveling at over 150 miles per hour.

  Ayoub leaves his seat and enters the carriage-twelve lavatories.

  He plays a YouTube video on the phone he has just activated; on the screen in his hand, a speaker incites the faithful to take up arms in the name of the prophet.

  Ayoub removes his shirt.

  He straps the backpack and Draco machine gun across his bare torso.

  When he is finally ready, he opens the door and walks out.

  He sees something he has not anticipated: a curly-haired man seems to be waiting in line to use the toilet.

  Ayoub feels a shift in weight on his shoulders—a second man has grabbed him from behind, and now the curly-haired man is grabbing, twisting, torquing the machine gun;20 Ayoub feels it slip out of his grasp and now the curly-haired man has the gun and Ayoub reaches for his pistol and gets his finger over the trigger guard.

  A crack echoes through the carriage. Glass shatters. The men leap backward. The machine gun clatters to the carpet and the curly-haired one crumples; in an instant a bullet has passed through his shoulder blade, pierced his lung, and struck his collarbone.

  “I’m hit,” he says. He has locked eyes with his wife, and is staring at her through the seats.21 “I’m hit.”22

  He is no longer holding the machine gun.

  Ayoub picks up the weapon and realizes he has space around him. “It’s over,” the fallen man says. Legs and arms are in motion, bodies sprinting in different directions, the pistol like a starting gun, Ayoub is under way. One man has taken off toward the back of the train, the train attendant is sprinting toward the front, past the letters on the door panel, thalys—welcome to our world, and Ayoub swings the Draco forward and decides to follow the attendant. Ayoub is in control. It is working again. He has a bag full of weapons and a train car full of unarmed targets, enough ammo for all or at least many of them. He is in power, he is winning justice for the weak and oppressed, he will make this country bleed. There are more voices now, and a flash of sky blue23 growing bigger in his vision. A ridiculous sight, a body running toward him. This is surprising, but the man is an easy target and he’s running down a perfect shooting gallery: the train car boxes him in, the man has no cover, seems to have no weapon, is not threatening. Ayoub barely has to aim. He lowers the weapon at the man and pulls the trigger.

  The gun doesn’t go off.

  He pulls the trigger again.

  The man is close, the gun’s not going off, the one thing everyone knows about this kind of gun is that they never jam, he tries to cycle it but he’s flustered now because the unjammable gun seems to be jammed so he grabs the wrong lever and accidentally activates the safety, now the trigger won’t move, and he’s out of time. The man is almost on top of him so he swings the weapon up into the man’s face just as the man arrives but the man has so much momentum that Ayoub is driven back and just as he’s coming back off his feet there’s a gap so he can see two more bodies,
a shorter man in the red-and-blue stripes of the Bayern Munich soccer club and a tall man with skin like his, and then Ayoub is on the ground and the gun is gone from his hands, and he begins to fight.

  WED, AUG 19, 11:35 PM

  Anthony Sadler:

  Still alive dad, loving Amsterdam like deeply in love lol

  Pastor Sadler:

  Lol That’s great Son. People are nice?

  Anthony Sadler:

  The Nicest! The language is Dutch but mostly everyone speaks English and they are just genuinely nice people. The most black people I’ve seen yet also I was surprised. We went to the black neighborhood in south East Amsterdam and it was cool

  Pastor Sadler:

  Wow!

  Anthony Sadler:

  We’ve literally just biked the whole city, takes about an hour but it’s not ridiculously big so that’s nice and beautiful! I love show you tons of pics

  32.

  IN THE MONTHS AFTER it was over, there was this feeling. That they had disrupted something large, used up all their good luck in those few moments, and had none left to spare.

  A feeling that their parents’ prayers had tugged them to just the right place at the right time and then protected them once they were there, so that an alert man would see the terrorist first and take the only bullet; prayers that had poisoned the primer on that next round so that the gun didn’t go off and charging the weapon wouldn’t help. So that none of the boys were killed, but also so that none of them had to kill.

  The odds of all that happening were so astoundingly low, so overwhelmingly against them that it must have taken the full force of prayer, of God, of whatever it was that allowed you to confront a universe canted against you and prevail. The feeling Anthony had was that their luck, their parents’ prayers, might, therefore, be exhausted.

  And on a more tangible level, a troubling idea lingered. A question that a reporter had asked his father at a press conference, just after he returned to the US. Was he worried that by stopping a terrorist attack, the boys had invited reprisals on themselves?

  All of it mixed together and simmered, and produced in him an unsettling sense, humming along in his mind, always in the background but still always there, that the other shoe would drop. It was only a matter of time. The universe would eventually correct itself.

  On October 1, it began to.

  It was another lost twenty-six-year-old. Although this time instead of a terrorist on a train to Paris it was a community college student in Oregon, and this time there was no one there to stop it. Nine people died, and then the gunman shot himself.

  Anthony turned off the TV before the reporter could poison his mind with any more of the details, which he knew by now were not likely to be accurate anyway; he understood the press better after they made him a marine. Anyway, Anthony was getting tired of news that had to do with death and violence. He had no more stomach for it.

  He saw Spencer the next day on their way to New York, and Spencer told him Umpqua Community College was where Alek had gone before deploying to Afghanistan.

  Where Alek would be right now, in fact, if he hadn’t accepted the invitation to be on Dancing with the Stars.

  When Anthony next saw mention of the shooting on the news, it was all about Alek. Alek leaving the show, Alek going home to be with his people. This part didn’t feel fair. There was a subtext to even showing Alek at all, and Anthony wondered: Will there always be a question, held in people’s minds, about the three of them? Could you have stopped it? Where were you this time?

  Was he now expected to be a hero wherever he was?

  It was an immense amount of pressure, and every time he turned on the news something else dark and violent had happened. Each event fit into a story in his mind, a growing narrative of violence, and each one was pressure on him and his friends.

  Alek had helped save a bunch of people once. Alek would have been on campus if he wasn’t dancing on TV. Were they trying to say Alek was partially responsible for people dying? Would that be with them forever?

  33.

  ANTHONY THOUGHT HE’D come down, found some level of normalcy. But the energy still coursed through him, this weird pressure, a thing he’d accomplished; they’d diverted the course of world events. They’d nudged history aside in a small but perhaps significant way, maybe changed what textbooks would say in the future.

  It was pressure, it was the most powerful high, it was many things at once. It was neurotransmitters firing in a hundred different directions for a hundred different reasons.

  No one could really understand what they were going through, because they didn’t really understand what they were going through, and they’d already been pulled in so many different directions, so many competing media requests, that they hadn’t had the chance to sit in a quiet room together, just the three of them, and figure it out.

  Not since the police station in Arras. And even then, Spencer hadn’t been there.

  The embassy in Paris, but there they were either cracking champagne bottles in the ambassador’s residence, or they were surrounded by crowds nearly euphoric with gratitude.

  They hadn’t really reflected, and the pressure of it was still there. Latent, but bubbling, bubbling.

  Anthony was still wired, still jacked, still had flashbacks to when it happened; not so much sounds and images playing across his memory but the feeling of it, the adrenaline, the power, the moisture in his palms and the sense he could run through walls. Little things he didn’t even register, he wasn’t even conscious of, could make him feel the way he felt on the train. He didn’t even need to be thinking of the train. Something would happen, a sound, a sight, a color, something that evoked a moment on board, and then it was automatic. A part of his brain would shift just a little, and the adrenaline would come coursing through again. His body prepared itself for war but war wasn’t there.

  It happened first at a club in Manhattan. Spencer was holding a drink, an aloof partier bumped into him, the drink spilled, and the guy just stared at Spencer, didn’t apologize, offered no indication of emotion at all. Anthony shifted to put himself between Spencer and the stranger, since Spencer still had one arm in a splint. Anthony said, “Stay back” to Spencer and that’s when the guy swung.

  Anthony lit up with rage. Sparks fired across his retinas. Security guards were there in an instant but Anthony was electric with anger and energy now; the guy had flipped a switch and turned Anthony to “go.” The guards perp-walked the guy out the front and ushered Anthony out the back, but the moment they pushed him out the back door Anthony ran the block over and found him in front of the club next to a line of cabs.

  “What’s up now, huh? Security’s not gonna help you now!” Anthony ran at him, their bodies collapsed together, the guy was on the ground, Anthony started swinging, his body going back and forth, wrestling with a stranger just as he and Spencer and Alek had wrestled a stranger once before; the guy’s friends circled and Anthony turned to face them. “What’s up? You guys want some too?” Then back to the man on the ground, his fists finding flesh, letting it all out, until he felt his whole body pulled back through air as if out of a dark dream where he’d lost control, Spencer’s good hand around the back of his belt drawing him back to real life.

  The next clear thought he had, they were in a cab pulling away. Did that happen?

  THE NEXT DAY, Belgium’s prime minister awarded them the country’s highest commendation.

  It was an upscale reception. Anthony’s stomach swam and his head throbbed. But it was a catered affair; the UN General Assembly was in session so senior diplomats from all over the world had descended on New York City, and it felt like all of them were here in their finest attire, mingling and congratulating Spencer and Anthony. Which was wonderful, but Spencer and Anthony were operating with two hours of sleep between them and respective force-12 hangovers. Butlers carried champagne and bottles of Belgian beer, which felt like a slow form of torture. Anthony burped. He looked at Spencer, who
was hurting worse than Anthony, but then Spencer gave an oh well half nod, plucked a beer off a passing tray, and put it to his lips. He recoiled.

  Uh-oh, Anthony thought. He’s gonna hurl right here.

  Spencer put a fist to his mouth and burped again. He looked at Anthony. Spencer tried another sip; Spencer was brave. Anthony, inspired, smiled at a waiter and picked up a glass of champagne. The thought of alcohol was nauseating, but so was the thought of passing up free champagne. This was a matter of principle. When the champagne was free, you drank it.

  34.

  THE VIDEO SPENCER SENT was dark and jerky, like a grainy image from a security camera at a crime scene, the bodies too close. Like Anthony’s own videos from the train, or one of those found-footage horror movies. Was Spencer drunk? Or was it just too many bodies moving and dancing? Anthony tried to make out where Spencer was; by now Anthony could tell most of Sacramento’s bars by the inside décor, since he could get into any of them for free and often did. But too much was going on for him to see clearly.

  “Spencer, Where you at?”

  Spencer didn’t reply. Anthony hoped he was okay. He put his phone on the nightstand and fell asleep.

  He woke in the morning to his phone leaping off the table with messages and missed calls. His father had tried to call him six times, so Anthony returned that one first.

  “Son, Spencer got stabbed last night.”

  “What?”

  “I’m trying to get details now. But he’s at the hospital. I’ll let you know when I know. I’ve got Joyce on the other line now.”

  “Is he okay, though?”

  A pause. “He’s in the hospital.”

  That’s not an answer.

  It took most of the day for Anthony to learn what had happened, to be satisfied that it was not a terrorist tracking the boys to Northern California. It was a fight that had taken place outside a bar.