by Jay Brandon
Jack stood lost in thought for a moment, as if doing a math problem in his head, then led the way to a ticket-dispensing machine and bought two tickets to Houston. The flight was without incident, but Jack’s mind was filled with that plane, or rocket, that he hadn’t quite seen, so fast it could have been created by imagination. It remained that way in his thoughts: just ahead, eluding even his mental vision, until it dropped over the horizon.
“I wonder where it landed,” Arden said. “I wonder what it dropped.”
Jack was wondering something else. “If the President is doing what they demanded, why are they launching another attack?”
Houston Intercontinental Airport is vast, a city. Jack got lucky. The airport lived up to its name: there was one flight to London leaving in two hours. A late flight, overnight, which left them walking the airport for only half an hour or so.
Arden asked questions about their destination, and Jack answered evasively or not at all, until she stopped. The Chair had known what she was doing, and Jack had known what she was doing too. These attacks on him might be unrelated to the larger problem, but they had to be resolved. He needed to be away from the Circle until they figured out who was trying to kill him.
Also, of course, Gladys Leaphorn didn’t trust him. Not only had Jack been attacked, he had been seen in places he had no explanation for being, countries where he had denied setting foot in recent times. Maybe the Chair believed him, maybe she didn’t, but she wanted him gone. With Arden watching him.
At some point he would have to ditch Arden, but he couldn’t do that too soon. When it was time for Jack to bolt it would be full-out, and he wasn’t ready to do that yet.
At a concourse intersection in the terminal was an old New England pub, authentic in no details. Jack and Arden sat at a table just inside its doors, eating limp salads and watching people go by, when suddenly Jack bolted upright. The next moment he was gone. Arden barely had time to grab her purse and catch up to him. Jack was moving fast but not calling attention to himself, glancing at his watch like a man late for a plane. But then he ducked behind a pillar and looked out. Arden just stood in the terminal, staring in the same direction but seeing nothing to alarm her. Jack pulled her back.
“See that man? The one at the water fountain. Now he’s turning. Look.”
She looked. Then she stared. Across the way was a man in rumpled, faded denim and matching jacket. He wore an elaborate wristwatch and a cell phone holster. His light brown hair appeared on both his head and his cheeks, which were stubbled, perhaps deliberately, perhaps from long travel. The man looked around the terminal sleepily.
It was Jack.
That is, it could have been Jack. It could have been his brother. “Do you have—?” Arden began.
“One brother, but he doesn’t look like that.”
Jack stared quickly around the terminal. If this man was here to replace him, he would have to be part of a team. His partners would have to capture Jack, or kill him, while Denim Man stepped into his shoes.
“First of all, I wouldn’t dress like that,” Jack said, watching the imposter critically. “Well, maybe unless I was going to a convention. But I’d never wear a watch like that.”
“Unless you had to stay in touch with your entourage,” Arden said, then shook her head, cutting herself off. She put her hand on Jack’s arm. “Could we be coming down with a touch of paranoia, love? It’s been going around lately.”
“Yes, it tried to kill me in Reno, remember? Two paranoias, with weapons. And I’ve supposedly been seen in places I swear to you I was not.” He stared around. “How did they know I’d be here? Did they have a GPS tracker on your car? But we left your car.” He suddenly stared at Arden with obvious suspicion.
She shook off his look. “All roads lead to Houston,” she said. “This is one of the busiest airports in the world. It makes sense that you’d come here. Or maybe they just have a double for you stationed in—” She stopped herself again. “This is ridiculous. Look how many people pass through this place. There’s bound to be one who looks a little like—”
“Yeah, point out your evil twin.” As he said it, Jack thought that Arden herself was the evil double. Maybe her innocent twin was somewhere here, waiting innocently to be replaced.
“I’m going to talk to him,” she said suddenly.
As she walked out the set of her shoulders told Jack that she expected him to call her back in an urgent whisper, but he didn’t.
He just watched. He didn’t watch Arden, except from the corners of his eyes. Even with those limited glimpses he took in her act: walking distractedly across the busy terminal, glancing up at the departures sign, a woman obviously killing time before a flight. Then she saw the man in denim, registered surprise, and rushed up to him. No subterfuge, meet-cute opening line, no time for him to prepare a defense.
Jack was concentrating on everyone else in the terminal: who seemed to be watching the little scene, what men were too hard-eyed to be travelers, who was too little encumbered with carry-on luggage. He didn’t spot anyone, became suddenly afraid that they were observing him, with better covers than he had, and skulked back deeper into the crowd.
He still couldn’t pick out any half-concealed watchers, which kicked his paranoia into such powerful overdrive it was like a heavy coat hanging around his shoulders. Then abruptly Jack shrugged it off and was moving quickly across his side of the terminal. He ducked into a line of departing passengers, which started a minor ruckus, until he stepped out again on the other side, making an angry gesture as if he’d been ejected.
Meanwhile, forty yards away, Arden had captured Denim Man’s attention. He was following her on a parallel course with Jack’s, the man talking and trying to keep up with Arden, who danced just ahead of him but looking back and smiling, leading him on. And she had managed to give Jack a little signal at the same time that he interpreted as her needing his help.
There are all kinds of little niches in an airport. Empty courtesy counters, lounges from which a plane isn’t due to depart for hours, empty kiosks, a shoeshine stand. This late at night, many of these things were abandoned, and there weren’t nearly as many passengers as there would have been earlier in the day. Maintenance people and security guards were tired and less observant, too. Arden and her prey didn’t seem to draw anyone’s attention as they slipped into a darkened alcove. Jack stood looking all around, waiting for someone else to follow them in. When no one did, he slipped across the terminal, again looking at his watch—this time for real—and stood just outside the alcove. He heard a smooth voice with rough edges say, “What flight are you on, babe? Do you belong to the mile-high club?”
“It’s been so long I think my membership’s lapsed,” Arden answered flirtatiously. “Where are you headed?”
“Miami. Land of—”
“No!” Arden squealed, like a teenager spotting a TV idol. “That’s too lucky. What flight number? Let me see.”
Jack heard sounds of a small scuffle that involved more than an exchange of papers, then Arden’s voice came much more urgently. “Jack!”
“Yeah, that’s my name, luv. How’d you—” the smooth, edgy voice was saying as Jack rushed into the alcove. The man looked up quickly: hair more blond than Jack’s, probably streaked, more wrinkles around the eyes, unless Jack hadn’t studied a mirror closely enough lately, but definitely his face, Jack’s face. It would fool anyone outside his immediate circle, meaning it would fool almost anyone.
Those eyes narrowed, and without a moment’s hesitation the man swung his right fist, catching Jack in the jaw. Jack was already skidding, trying to stop, and the punch knocked him straight to the ground. He lay there looking groggy and moaning.
Denim Man returned his attention to Arden, with an angry expression not all that different from the leer that had shaped his features a moment earlier. “So you must—” he began, reaching for her.
She hit him with her stiffened fingers in the solar plexus, just below the bre
astbone. She encountered muscle, hard and unyielding. This man only resembled Jack superficially. Under the clothes he was a very trained fighter.
The blow stopped his breath for a moment, but he grinned at her and caught her hand. His other hand came up quickly, aimed at her chin.
And then Jack, who lay flat on his back, his legs stretched out between his standing attacker’s legs, simply brought his foot up as hard as he could. It made a satisfying crunch. The man was wearing some sort of protection, like a catcher’s cup, but Jack had good leverage and his foot drove the cup up into the man’s crotch, almost as effectively as if the man had been wearing nothing. Denim Man grunted hard and crouched instinctively, trying to protect himself.
And Jack brought both his knees back against his chest and kicked out into the man’s gut, just as Arden swung her stiff hand at his neck, hitting his windpipe.
Both blows were effective. For a moment the man hunched, trying to protect himself everywhere at once, then collapsed.
“Hurry.” Arden was already on top of him, going through his pockets. She found an ID case in a jacket pocket and pulled it out. “Look.”
Jack did. He saw his own picture and name on a California driver’s license. The picture looked more like him than the imposter did. He noted the address, in Riverside, sure it was fake but memorizing it anyway because he couldn’t stop himself. Arden didn’t find anything else useful except a ticket and boarding pass that weren’t for a flight to Miami at all, but for theirs to London. “Liar,” she sneered at the unconscious man.
Jack stared down at the face that was not quite his. He had an urge to kick the man in the head, stomp on his ribs. The urge made no sense at all. It was totally instinctive. This was his replacement, which made Jack unnecessary. Self-preservation made him tremble with the desire to smash this thing into unrecognizability. The same urge those people felt when looking at replicas of themselves growing in pods.
“Let’s take him—” he began, while Arden said, “Is there anybody—” and they both knew what the other was going to say. Jack wanted to get the man some place where they could interrogate him, but Arden didn’t think they had the time, and wondered if they could just immobilize him some place where some of their people could pick him up later.
During the second that they evaluated each other’s plans, both became unworkable. Two uniformed and armed security guards suddenly stepped into the alcove from the terminal, looked down at the man on the ground who had obviously been attacked, shouted, “Hey!” and began going for their guns.
At the same time there was a clicking sound and a door at the other end of the short alcove unlocked and opened. A much beefier maintenance man came in, gaped at the scene, and stood blocking the door.
Arden was still crouched down on the floor, where she’d been going through Denim Man’s pockets. Her face a mask of distress, she said, “Help me, please! He’s diabetic!”
The three men reacted completely differently, which Jack noticed in less than a second. One security guard paid no attention to what Arden had said, continuing to go for his gun. The other froze for a moment, uncertain. And the maintenance man started forward, looking only at the man on the ground.
That told Jack everything he needed to know. The two security guards were confederates of the fake Jack, in on the subterfuge. One of them still had some humanitarian instincts, or maybe, just maybe, he was authentic, as the maintenance man seemed to be.
“Listen to her!” Jack snapped, and kicked the fake guard in the hand. Then he grabbed the maintenance man’s arm, pulling him forward. He was a big guy, already moving forward, and his momentum turned into a lumbering fall. He sprawled into both security guards as Jack grabbed Arden’s hand and said, “This way!”
She was ahead of him, already leaping toward the closing, locked door through which the maintenance man had come. Arden caught it just before it clicked back into place, and she and Jack slipped through it, quickly closing it behind them. Something slammed into it just as it closed. A fist hammered on it.
They were in a service corridor of bare steel walls, carts, tools, and discarded signs. Without speaking to each other Jack and Arden raced in the direction of their own gate. As they ran they had to jump over thick cables in places, some of which seemed to connect nowhere. It was a little scary to see how haphazard this place looked behind the scenes.
“We can’t get on that flight,” Arden panted. Jack had been tipping back and forth, but she made up his mind.
“We can’t not! They want to trap us here. We’ve got to take off.”
“It’s already boarding,” Arden said, and he had no clue how she knew that.
There was pursuit behind them. They both began opening doors along their way, trying to leave false trails. One of the doors turned out to be to a closet. As Jack thought about ducking into it he glanced into the closet and saw clothes. A maintenance worker’s gray coverall and cap. He grabbed them.
“What—” Arden began, then shut up. “Out that way,” Jack said, pushing her, and she went out a door. Jack lingered. He could no longer hear anyone following him. They must have figured he’d done the smart thing by now and gotten out of this confining tunnel. Showed how stupid they were, thinking him smart.
“We’re going to continue our boarding of Flight 1549, overnight service to London’s Heathrow Airport. This flight is about three-quarters full, so please use all the seats available. If your carry-on luggage won’t fit in the overhead compartment, please ask a flight attendant…”
The passengers all glared at her spiel, one they had heard their whole lives. They crowded toward her like carnivores around a wounded zebra, ready to pounce. Assholes, the flight attendant thought. Do you think you’ll get there any sooner just because you get on the plane first? The worst thing about a flight attendant’s job was too many alpha types on airplanes, wanting to push ahead of everyone else even if there was nothing to be gained by it. The flight attendant lengthened her speech a little just to raise their collective blood pressure. She plastered a smile on her face.
Then the rush began. They thrust boarding passes at her, crowding almost shoulder to shoulder. She smiled at each one as she held the pass under the laser light that registered the passenger’s name and seat.
The line wasn’t halfway through when a maintenance worker appeared at the flight attendant’s shoulder. “Sorry, Jane, spot check. It’s not registering on board.”
“What? What do you mean, not registering? They’ve all beeped—”
“But they haven’t recorded,” the maintenance man mumbled. He wore a cap and kept his head down, already messing with her scanner. “We’re going to have to get all those passengers back off and run them through again.”
The line groaned, a big sound in the late-night airport, following by mutters that sounded threatening.
“No, please,” the flight attendant said urgently, under her breath. She was about to explain further to the maintenance guy when the next passenger in line thrust her boarding pass at them like a sword. She was a pretty young woman, but not at the moment, with her features contorted by anger.
“I’m in a hurry, miss,” the bitch snapped.
The maintenance man barely glanced at her as he said, “Then maybe you shouldn’t slow us down while we’re trying to do our jobs.” In that moment he became the flight attendant’s hero. The angry young woman’s jaw dropped, she had no response, and a few of the passengers behind her even grinned at how effectively the man in the coverall had shut her up.
“There, I think that’s got it,” he said a moment later, becoming everyone’s hero. He took the angry young woman’s boarding pass (two of them, as a matter of fact, though no one noticed), scanned it (them), said, “Yup,” just like Clint Eastwood, and disappeared into the departure tunnel.
The bitch turned in the doorway, holding everyone up, glaring at the crowd, saying, “Wait, I dropped my ticket.” People tried to push past her but she was immovable until someone grabbe
d the ticket folder off the ground, thrust it at her, and she went through into the boarding tunnel.
Which had given Jack time to discard his maintenance worker’s coverall and cap and join the line of boarding passengers. Arden caught up to him and said under her breath, “Thanks. You just made me the most hated person on this flight.”
“You probably would have accomplished it on your own anyway. But I’d advise you not to drink anything that flight attendant offers you.”
But the ruse had worked. Arden’s and the fake-Jack’s boarding passes had been scanned, and anybody watching the departing passengers would not have seen Jack boarding the plane. If anyone checked the computer records later they would show that the imposter had boarded the plane and Jack had been left behind in Houston.
He hoped someone would be dumb enough to fall for that. It was going to be a long flight.
Jack had never been able to sleep on an airplane. He wasn’t afraid of flying, exactly, he just didn’t believe in it. He knew the theory—the shape of the wings, speed plus lift, all that aerodynamic theology—but his body still knew it made no sense that an object this heavy, carrying so many people and tons of luggage, could remain aloft. At least not without his concentrating very hard, keeping the plane in the air through mental effort.
“Why don’t you play your game?” Arden asked. She had noticed the hand-held player that Jack had clipped to his belt, through all this.
“I can’t get on-line up here. That’s the only way it’s interesting for me any more.”
“Playing with strangers?”
Jack nodded. “Trying to figure out an opponent when you have no clues about him or her except the way he or she plays. In fact I’ve played a few times when I’m pretty sure the opponent was several people taking turns.”
“Or a schizophrenic.”
“Even better.”
Arden settled back with a magazine. Even with their business-class seats made into mini-beds, Jack couldn’t relax. Too much on his mind. Hanging up here in the air, giving his enemies hours to prepare for his arrival in London, set any kinds of traps for him they could devise, or simply have him arrested for assaulting Denim Man and stealing his identity—which had been Jack’s to start with, but he might have a hard time explaining that—any of these was a possibility. All that kept him edgy, even after the double bourbon and water he’d ordered from the smiling flight attendant. Arden had glanced at her thirstily but then declined, with thanks.