Cost of Life (17 page)

“Well,” asked Jim, “what's it look like?”

He couldn't see for himself because he was behind the wheel of his government-issued black sedan and attempting to traverse highway traffic. On a normal day, this wouldn't be a problem, but on this abnormal day, at this abnormal hour, every driver but him seemed to have only one eye on the road. Had it even occurred to any of them to maybe pull over to the side of the road if they were going to browse the Internet while piloting two tons of steel? Of course not. But then it never did on a normal day either.

Xana sat in the passenger seat. Xana had his MacBook on her lap and was slowly scrolling down the page. She had joined him on this excursion because he'd insisted she join him. After her earlier shenanigans, he wasn't going to let her out of his sight. He told her their destination was Philips Arena, so he could deliver a press conference, and that was true—they would eventually arrive at Philips—but they had a stop to make on the way and this Jim kept to himself.

Soon, though, he would have to take the exit and she would figure it out. In the meantime, though…

“It's a pretty website,” she said.

“Wonderful. What's it say?”

“There's a horizontal bar near the top with clickable letters on it. A through C, D through F, G through J, et cetera. Underneath there's a label that reads
SORTED BY LAST NAME.
Oh, that's helpful. And below that it shows all the major credit cards they'll accept. And PayPal. Fancy.”

“Wonderful.”

Xana clicked on the
A–C
link. A new page loaded up, but instead of simply listing names, each name had a button beside it to initiate the donation process along with a profile picture, the age of the passenger, occupation, cell phone number, and even an assortment of likes and dislikes. She shared her findings with Jim.

“Hmm,” he replied. “How long do you think they've had access to the passenger manifest?”

“I don't know, but that combined with easily accessible online data and you've got yourself a dating website. Wait. This is odd.”

“What?”

“There's no space to indicate how much ransom has been donated to any of the hostages. No column, nothing.”

Jim sighed. “It's a silent auction. They're hiding the numbers. If nobody knows what they need to spend to keep their loved ones safe, they'll be more inclined to compete and overbid.”

“How do you know?”

As he relayed the conversation he'd had a short time ago with the prim leader of the hijackers, he couldn't help but swallow in, every so often, the look of curious intelligence in Xana's eyes as she processed the news—but her bottomless eyes were only one part of the whole, and heaven help him, Jim loved every part. He even loved her wanton disregard for authority—or at least loved it because it was, like her eyes, an integral part of the whole. He loved her so much that he sweat. He loved her so much that he daren't ever, ever tell her, not because he feared rejection but because he feared the revelation would cause her to alter her behavior around him, maybe even censor herself for his benefit, and that would be so very un-Xana-like of her that he wouldn't be able to stand it.

“But what's the endgame?”

“Hmm?”

She motioned to the laptop screen. “These men were most likely political prisoners. Why were they released? How were they released? This scheme is going to soak up a shit-ton of money. Is the FSIN in on it? That's the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service. They run The Oprichnina. Fun fact: For about five centuries, the Russian penal system had the most prisoners per capita of any country on the planet. Now they are in third. China is number two. And we're number one.”

“We do like to be number one. So who runs the FSIN?”

“It's an appointment position. The director of the FSIN serves at the pleasure of the Russian president.”

“So there's a lot of turnover.”

“But what you're suggesting doesn't make any sense. If the FSIN director or even the premier comes up with this scheme to extort a billion dollars, they're not going to release a bunch of political prisoners to do it. Wait—why are we getting off here? I thought we were heading to Philips Arena. This is the exit to the airport.”

“Can't get nothing by you,” said Jim.

He eased his foot off the gas as they approached a roadblock manned by a baby-faced platoon of the Georgia National Guard.

“Jim, please tell me we're here so I can reinterview the Chechen.”

He lowered his window and handed his ID to the soldier, who stepped away from examining Jim's government plates and brought the ID to his slightly older supervisor.

“Please tell me that your judgment is not so fucked up that during a hostage situation, you are detouring here to force me to apologize to a redneck asshole cop.”

“You are in fact going to apologize to the redneck asshole cop and you're going to do it right now and here's why—”

“Not a chance.” She crossed her arms and turned away. “Nope.”

“What are you, five years old?”

Xana huffed and shrugged.

“Listen,” said Jim. “You think I want to be here right now? You think I wouldn't rather be doing something productive?”

“I was trying to do something productive and he was the one who interfered. If anyone should be raked over the coals, it's him. I'll bet the chip on his shoulder would make excellent kindling.”

“You know who you are? You're the girl who gets neck-deep in quicksand and then complains about the weather.”

“I was doing my
job
!”

“Your
job
was to translate what the suspect had to say!”

“Oh bullshit. You and I both know that the FBI keeps a list of potential translators broken down by language and location for scenarios exactly like this one. You picked me because of what I bring to the table.”

“That's not why I picked you…”

“Then why?”

The National Guardsman returned with Jim's ID and waved them through. He proceeded past the roadblock and followed the signs to the North Terminal. It was eerie not having to deal with any of the usual knucklehead traffic on any of these outlying roads.

“Well?” asked Xana. “Are you going to answer me?”

“Jesus Christ. Don't you ever get tired of being so petulant? Don't you ever, just, wind down for a little bit?”

“Oh sure. Pass me a drink and I'll wind down plenty, although I've got to warn you, Officer, that might violate my probation…”

Jim pulled up to the curb in front of the North Terminal and parked behind an army-green Humvee.

He did not turn off the ignition.

He dared not look at his passenger.

The answer to her question bounced around his brain like a cueball. Of course he knew why he'd picked her for this assignment. Her expertise and experience were unparalleled—but that was only half the argument. All these years, he'd sought to value her solely on her work and not on some misbegotten feelings and desires he might harbor—ever more foolish because she was a lesbian and therefore feelings and desire impossible to be requited—not that he would ever broach the subject with her—although if there were any time to do so, well, she was practically begging him for an answer, wasn't she?

OK.

Decision made.

He was going to do the right thing.

He was going to lie.

“I sent you here this morning,” he answered, “because I felt guilty about letting you go. End of story. Was that satisfactory enough?”

Xana opened her mouth to speak, but he waved her off.

“Never mind. I already know. You're never satisfied.”

He got out of the car.

“Well, are you coming or not?”

She got out of the car.

They passed through the automatic doors and into the air-chilled terminal. This main atrium was crowded with passengers unable to do much other than eat, drink, and talk. Jim suspected the scene here was replicated in every corridor of every concourse at the airport—and replicated at every airport in the country. How many tens of thousands at this moment were stranded? Everyone appeared to be on their best behavior, but how long would their sympathy for the hostages keep their impatience in check?

He and Xana took the elevator to the third floor.

“Say something,” he said. “I know you want to. You always want to.”

“What do you want me to say? And in what language would you like me to say it?”

He smiled and glanced over at her.

Her face was a glacier.

His smile fled.

“For what it's worth, Xana, I am sorry it has to be this way. But you understand why, don't you?”

“Sure. If I don't persuade Dundee not to file charges against me, my probation gets revoked and I go to prison. I get it, Jim. I do. I just assumed you had my back. I was wrong. End of story. How was that? Was that satisfactory enough?”

At least Nell's nose had stopped bleeding. At least there was that.

Frank Brown had given her his handkerchief. Once upon a time, it had been white. Nell's blood had painted it red and then, as her blood dried, a dark burgundy. The leader of the terrorists had conked her pretty hard.

And then he'd shot her husband, Travis, as if he were a sick horse, shot him right in front of his children. He had his men remove the body, but a splash of his blood remained on his headrest. First red, then a dark burgundy.

The bullet hole stared out like an empty eye socket.

Travis's pigtailed daughter, Zelda, was cradling Baby Amy in her arms. Some of Nell's blood initially had spattered on the baby's forehead and cheeks, but a few swipes from the back of the complimentary airline magazine cleaned her right off. Now, mercifully, she was asleep.

At least there was that.

Nell raised her hand. One of the guards, the ugly fellow with the beard, approached. She asked if she could use the restroom to clean herself up. He waved her past and she skittered down the aisle toward the front.

Frank checked his phone. In the hour since he'd turned it back on, he'd left three messages for Catalina-Luisa Hierra Perez. She was probably at her internship. She probably didn't even know what had happened to his flight. Otherwise he would have received a series of messages from her, right?

He loosened his necktie. He exhaled.

All around him, people were on their phones. In every aisle, in almost every seat, men and women and even some of the children were in communication with their loved ones. Other than his Spanish princess, Frank had no loved ones. He had acquaintances at work, but he never socialized with them outside the office. He never socialized, period. And he was OK with that. He was an introvert. Refusing to accept the truth of that fact was as fruitless as refusing to accept the truth of the Big Bang.

But it would have been nice to have someone to call him.

He held no illusions. He would be in the Bottom Five. Even if Catalina-Luisa Hierra Perez uploaded every penny of her savings to keep his head off the chopping block, she was still only a graduate student. How many pennies would that really be? And he had no way of uploading even one penny of his savings. His bank was closed. It was a federal holiday. And with the real threat of identity theft—compounded, he would be the first to admit, by his neuroses—he didn't dare trust debit cards or credit cards. He was likely the only person on this plane who had paid for his airfare with cash.

But at least no one would miss him.

No one except her.

He checked his phone again.

Behind him, the snoring walrus was talking up a small storm, but not to anyone in particular. He had decided to document this whole affair for the Internet. He stood in his seat and panned across the cabin with his phone's camera.

“Like the newly arrived at the black-water banks of the River Styx,” he intoned, “we wait, but impatiently. We are ready to be driven forward. There is comfort in being the sheep, even with the slaughterhouse on the horizon.”

His name was Horatio Wygant. Frank knew this because he had introduced each of his now seven short videos with: “I am Horatio Wygant, coming to you live—for now—from Flight Eight Sixteen.” After the third video, in which Horatio Wygant compared their situation to Auschwitz, Frank was ready to turn around and throttle him. What ticked Frank off the most was the fact that Horatio Wygant's videos would probably earn him thousands of dollars in bidding. It was brilliant, in a revolting, narcissistic sort of way. When all this was through, when the media began their next-day retrospectives, Horatio Wygant would be one of the stars.

And Frank would be one of the faces in the RIP montage.

“Would Plato recognize this ship of fools? Yes, I say. Yes, he would.”

Frank prepared his hands for choking the life out of Horatio Wygant.

And then his phone rang.

His hands relaxed. His entire body relaxed.

He brought the phone to his ear and pressed
TALK.

“Mi amor.”

Once their videoconference with the secretary of state was finished and everyone but Barrett Coleman left to take on their appointed assignments, he keyed up the hijackers' website and projected it onto the large oblong screen. Madeline soon returned, laptop in tow. Hers was, by all appearances, identical to his. They sat side by side and shared information and, at precisely 12:15
P.M.
, witnessed the website on the big screen refresh and its top third be replaced by a black rectangle.

“Greetings and welcome,”
intoned a smooth Euro-trash voice-over.
“We're so glad you could join us.”

Coleman sat up. “Here we go.”

“I've always believed that the best choices we make are informed choices, and so over the next few hours, as you consider whether or not to sponsor one or more passengers with your hard-earned money, you and I are going to get to know them.”

“My God,” said Madeline. “They're going to present this like it's a telethon.”

The black rectangle flickered—and then became a live video feed from the main cabin of Flight 816. Columns of terrified faces from every age and every race gawped back. The shaky camera zoomed in on a young woman in the third row. Hundreds of millions of people beheld her smooth, sun-brown skin, long-curled auburn hair, and vibrant green eyes. They scrutinized her simple, short-sleeved turquoise blouse. They noted that she wore no makeup. They fixated on the tiny mole on her neck, just to the left of her larynx, and made careful observation of the plain silver cross she wore on a plain silver necklace.

They discussed these things on Twitter.

“Say your name for the people,”
suggested the voice.

The young woman meekly muttered her response.

“A little louder please, dear. The world needs to get to know you if they're going to want to save you.”

She sat up and repeated her name to the camera lens in an accent as southern and soft as a slice of red velvet cake:
“Oletta Harmon.”

The camera angled down to the fingers of her left hand, which were entangled among the thicker, furrier fingers of the man sitting beside her. Her silver ring tapped against his silver ring. The camera then traveled up. Hair-mopped forearm. Athletic biceps. Geometric face. Blue eyes. Blond hair.

“Well,” said Coleman, “at least they're not playing the pretty-white-people-in-jeopardy card.”

The young man stood up straight and spoke in an accent nearly identical to his wife's:

“My name is Anson Harmon.”

“Newlyweds?”
the off-camera voice asked.

Anson answered with a small, serious nod.

“Is this your honeymoon?”

“Yes.”

“And whose idea was it to go to Cozumel?”

The young man's flat face creased with tension.
“Mine.”

The camera zipped back to Oletta and focused on her big Irish eyes, so brimming with sad love.

“Any regrets, Mrs. Harmon?”

Madeline shook her head in disgust. Fortunately, she had just received the perfect email from the Justice Department to distract her. She opened the email's attachment and quickly read the preliminary report she'd requested on the son of a bitch in custody down in Atlanta.

Officer slain…

Suspect arrested at the airport…

FBI sent a translator to assist…

Holy fuck.

Madeline had to read the sentence again to make sure her eyes weren't playing tricks, but sure enough, there in paragraph six was the name of her ex—in all-caps even.

Madeline read on about The Oprichnina and scrolled down to the addendum, which offered up all intelligence the Justice Department currently had on the hoary Russian gulag—which amounted to not a whole lot. That was really the territory of the CIA, and Madeline suspected that there was, in a room not unlike the Truman Building's 5E, a gathering of spooks discussing just how much of that territory they were willing to reveal to their brothers and sisters at the FBI.

Bellum Vellum had no such quandary.

What was it, an eight-hour difference between Washington DC and Grozny? Madeline shot out an email to the unfriendly but competent fellow who oversaw company operations in that neck of the woods. She expected a reply within the hour.

Or she could get the information she needed even sooner if she called up Xana…

No.

Some doors, no matter how tempting the destination behind them, needed to remain shut. Madeline reminded herself that temptation itself was a warning. She would not buckle. Sure, time spent with Xana, even on the phone, was guaranteed to be exciting and shocking and unpredictable—but so was an active volcano. Or—even worse—what if those months in rehab had extinguished Xana's glorious fires? Madeline wasn't sure she could handle that kind of heartbreak.

On the monitor, a shrunken man in his golden years was begging for his life. A chyron underneath his face identified him in Times New Roman as Erskine Faulks.

“Please…please…I have seven children…three grandchildren…I have been a good Christian my whole life…I don't want to die…”

“Few of us want to die,”
the terrorist leader, off-camera, answered.
“But we've all got to go sometime. Convince the people at home why your life is more valuable than that of the Harmons. You're in your eighties. They're newlyweds. Why should a person donate his or her money to save you when that money could be donated to save a loving young couple at the dawn of their happy life?”

To emphasize the point, the camera angled back to Oletta and Anson, who were still holding hands.

“I…well…they don't have to choose!”
the old man wept.
“They can give a little for them and a little for me too!”

“I'm not sure if that's the best advice. A man who tries to save everyone saves no one.”

Madeline's stomach roiled.

Just in time, Barrett Coleman looked up from his computer and shared some good news:

“We've got them.”

She looked over at him with skepticism.

“The NCTC have traced a wire transfer of one dollar to a bank account in—wait for it—Banco de Credito y Financiero de Cuba. Time for the State Department to make a phone call to the president of Banco de Credito y Financiero de Cuba, wouldn't you agree?”

“Honestly? I don't know.” She frowned. “These bastards have been very clever so far.”

“You think it's a false flag?”

“I think it's worth investigating but I also think…yeah, I think it's too damn convenient.”

Coleman picked up a phone. “Madeline, you got to learn to be less cynical.”

As he initiated the process of tracking down the bank president, Madeline got up and stretched her back. Her legs still felt wiry from her hike. She traveled out into the empty hallway and found the nearest window. Nobody enjoyed the hot, swampy air of Washington, DC, in July, but oh, the view could be scrumptious. The cherry blossoms along the Mall shimmered with pink promise under the midday sun. Farther on, the Capitol Building held fast atop its prepossessing hill; no matter the light, no matter the temperature, no matter the season, marble would always be what it was, never mistaken for anything else, not even by a poet.

Marble was implacable.

Reliable. Comforting.

Yes.

“Madeline?”

She turned about. Coleman stood a few feet away. Once again, he had that good-news glint in his eye.

“What is it?” she asked.

“In five minutes, none of your worries will matter. Operation Orange Rescue is a go. Time for these Chechen cocksuckers to feel the wrath, courtesy of Delta Force.”