All the Old Knives (18 page)

“There's something going on, and it has to do with Henry. I'm right, aren't I?”

“Nothing's going on. Go back to sleep.”

I'm not the liar I once was, so it's no surprise that he stares at me a while longer, unbelieving. I lean close and kiss his lips and say, “Really, Drew. I just have bad dreams. Henry is nothing. Not to me. And that's something you can take to the bank.”

He nods at that, gives me a sad smile, and puts his head down. I give him another kiss, on the cheek, then lie down, my back again toward him.

Later, when Evan is at ballet and Ginny at home with Consuela, I'm at Safeway, walking down the aisle of freezers stocked with frozen pizzas and ice cream. I think about Drew. By breakfast he was over his insecurity, but I'm not sure I am. He's a perceptive man, and this last week he's sensed my growing anxiety, my sudden bursts of bitchiness, and my too-long silences. Hopefully by tomorrow I'll be recovered. More likely, after tonight I'll have days, or weeks, of regret that will translate into more mood swings, but eventually things should settle down. Life will return to normal. We'll be able to move on. He'll help his candidates, and I'll raise our children, and only the future will matter to us.

“I love me some Häagen-Dazs,” says a voice behind me, and I turn to find a young man with long sideburns, the way men wore them in the late sixties and young men are starting to do again. They call themselves hipsters. This hipster is named Freddy, and he's opening a glass door, scanning the varieties on display.

“Where's Karl?”

Freddy doesn't turn to look at me. “With these cameras? He'd like to meet you over by the UPS Store.” He takes out a pint of chocolate chocolate chip.

“Is everything all right?”

“Perfectly, Mrs. Favreau. Everything is good to go.”

I use the self-checkout to buy a bag of tortilla chips, then leave it on the passenger seat of the SUV and walk the rest of the way through the Crossroads shopping center, an open plaza of upscale and boutique shops that services the whole of Carmel-by-the-Sea. A pedestrian walkway takes me past clothing stores, a bookshop, and a café. At the crosswalk, I see Karl sitting on a bench in front of the UPS Store, a paper coffee cup in his hand. Beyond him, beyond the low stores, rises the mountain range that forms Carmel Valley.

There are no cameras out here, but plenty of cars drive by. I wonder about his idea of security.

Random gusts of wind buffet me as I cross the street to sit next to him. He's smiling. A genial fifty-something, gray-haired, in an open-collared shirt and blue slacks. California business casual. “This place is gorgeous,” he tells me.

“The UPS Store?”

“Ha ha,” he says. “Your town. I always liked it.”

“Freddy tells me everything's all right.”

“Well, yes,” he says, but without much conviction.

“What's wrong?”

He uses an index finger to wipe something out of his eye. “Well, nothing, really. We got Rendez-vous, just like you suggested. Private party, charged to a Big Sur company. But I don't like that we can't put up a sign to keep everyone else out.”

“He would know,” I tell him, yet again. “Trust me, though—tonight you'll get two, maybe three, customers. The place is completely out of fashion. You do have a chef, right?”

“Flown in from D.C. She's excellent. Jonas will be running the bar. But there's a hitch. You know Jenny Dale?”

I shake my head.

“Well, she's their regular waitress, and the owners are insisting we use her. She needs the work, apparently.”

“Then give her some money.”

“We tried that,” he says. “She got suspicious.”

I squint into a fresh gust of wind. “Really?”

“She wanted to know why we didn't want her there. Why we'd be willing to pay her without using her services. She's … well, she's
weird.
I mean, who gets upset about free money?”

“Is it going to be a problem?”

He shakes his head, then shrugs. “Depends. If she figures out what's going on, then it's going to be a big problem.”

“Who else knows?”

“You, me, and Freddy. Jonas and the chef think it's a surveillance op. We'll let them out the back before the job's finished.”

I think about this. “If the chef doesn't know…”

“Freddy's taking care of it.”

I nod. That about covers it. But he's still looking at me, as if for guidance. That's when it occurs to me that I'm the one running this, not him. I'm the one who called him. In that Pacific Grove town house I was the one who told him what I thought was going to be necessary, and that's exactly what we're doing.

Karl clears his throat and says, “We're right about this, aren't we?”

It takes a moment to figure out what he means. “Yes,” I say. “He's the one.”

“Because I've been wrong before. Like with Bill Compton—I had that one ass backwards, and you were right to tell me to fuck myself.”

“This time,” I tell him, “there are no mistakes. We are in the right.”

He sips his coffee and thinks about that. It seems funny that I have to be the one to reassure him. It's supposed to be the other way around.

 

6

First in Arabic, then in English, he says, “Children to the front!” We're in row 22, but he's seven rows up at 15, shouting at a black woman who's clutching her five-year-old boy in a bear hug, shaking her head no, as if the command has made her mute. But the boy's not scared. He's kissing his mother's forehead and whispering something into her ear, something that relaxes her shoulders. He slips out of her loosened grip, takes the hand of Ibrahim Zahir, and walks with him to first class.

“The front!” says a voice behind my ear. I turn to find Suleiman Wahed, face pinched and splotchy, a gun in one hand, looking into my soul.

I rise halfway out of my seat to block his view of Evan and Ginny. “No. Not them.”

Do I really believe that this will be enough? I do, actually, and so I'm taken off guard when he says, “You give them to me now, or I'll kill them in front of you.”

Would he? A face like that, he might. So I stand completely still and think it through. I measure distances—between me and the back of the seat, between his gun hand and my hand, between my children and his gun. I wonder how long it will take Ibrahim Zahir to get back to us, and how long the other two hijackers, Omar Ali and Nadif Guleed, would need to run out of the cockpit. I give Suleiman Wahed a hard look and say, “You take them out, then.”

I'm exasperating him, and I can feel the anxious attention from all the other passengers. What kind of lunatic would provoke men with guns?
Give them up,
they're thinking.
Hand them over, you crazy bitch.

Roughly, with strength that makes me doubt what I'm able to do, he pulls me out of the way, into the aisle, and leans forward to grab my children. Ginny screams. It's a high, department-store-alarm scream that digs into the eardrum, and it's my cue.

I throw myself on Suleiman Wahed's sloped back, arms on either side of his head, fingers clawed, and grab both cheeks, ripping. Nails tear into soft skin, and he lets out a howl as he stumbles back. I'm riding him in the aisle. He tries to shake me off, but now my thighs are around his waist. I grab his chin with one hand and slip the other to the back of his skull and pull with all my strength, just as the pirate taught me. A delicious crack sounds inside his neck, and he drops, me falling with him.

It all happens so quickly that Ibrahim Zahir, walking the black boy to the front, is just now turning around. I'm fumbling with the gun in Wahed's death grip, finally getting it loose. Then I raise it. We've drawn at the same time, Zahir and me. Our shots explode in the enclosed space, so that the ringing in my ears cuts out most of the screams around me. But Zahir is down now, convulsing on the floor, as the little boy stares at him, stunned.

I stay low, moving quickly toward the boy, waving him out of the way as the cockpit door opens and one of them steps out—Omar Ali, I think. He carries only a knife, which glints in his right hand. One shot.

Bang!

Down.

The door jerks as I reach it, Nadif Guleed trying desperately to close it even though Ali's body is in the way. I take a breath and rip open the door and shoot him once in the face, step into the cockpit, and shoot him again.

I'm gasping now. I haven't moved this quickly in years. I lean against the cockpit wall, staring at the mess at my feet. This is what death looks like—messy, wet. It's what you have to look at in order to appreciate the opposite. It's what you need to do if you love your children.

Then I notice how silent it is.

Not silence, really, just no voices. A hissing sound: the ventilation. The lights in the cockpit are on, and though I see the crowns of the two pilots in their chairs, their blue caps above the headrests, I don't see their faces because they haven't bothered to look at me.

There it is, like every time, the crushing weight of knowledge.

I straighten and balance on my own two feet, so tired. I step over Omar Ali's corpse, back into the cabin. Up in the front are six children, ranging in age from two to nine, pale faces in stark contrast to the blood running out of their noses and, in one case, covering a girl's chin. My focus stretches out, reaches back, and the dead fill the whole length of the plane. I run down the aisle, counting rows, and when I reach 22 I nearly trip over Evan's sneaker sticking out in the aisle. His limp foot is inside it. He's on the floor, having slipped out of his seat during his death tremors. Ginny is rolled up in the seat above him, in a puddle of something dark.

 

HENRY

AND

CELIA

 

1

She's not answering, so I lean closer. “
Who
were you protecting, Cee? Bill? Just tell me. If we don't answer this question now, then it's going to come back. Maybe not now, but in five years, ten years. And next time it won't be from a man who loves you.”

When she blinks, a tear comes out, and she wipes it with the finger that wears her wedding band, an unostentatious strip of white gold. She sniffs. “You know, Henry. This is why I left Vienna. It's why I married Drew so quickly and got the hell out of there. The fucking Flughafen. At first, I thought I could get over it. I thought life could return to normal. And it did—but that was the problem. Normal, in Vienna, meant the constant pressure of secrets. It meant living in a maze. It meant not even trusting the people you loved. And guilt, so much guilt. A hundred and twenty people dead.” She snaps her fingers. “Like
that.
Doesn't it tear you up?”

“It tears all of us up.”

She shakes her head. “I don't think it tears you up, Henry. No, I don't think it bothers you all that much. What did I tell you about love? There's only one kind of love that's real, and this…” She points at me, and then herself. “This isn't it. It never was.”

She's confusing me again, and I look away in order to gather my thoughts. Treble is counting out dollars and placing them in a tray, moving with the exacting motions of the spendthrift. In the corner, beside the empty bar, the replacement waiter with the sideburns is watching him closely. Once Treble's left, she and I will be alone. A part of me fears this. The other part, my defiant half, says to Celia, “I think you're giving yourself too much credit. I didn't come here to sweep you off your feet. You hid crucial evidence about a leak in the embassy. I'd like to know why.”

Her eyes are dry now, touched with red veins, and she shakes her head. “Henry, we both know Bill didn't do anything wrong.”

“And what about you?”

“Me?”

“If you weren't protecting him, then you were protecting yourself. Is that how you want it to read in my report?”

“It's galling,” she says, her voice dropping an octave and taking on an edge that I haven't heard yet tonight. “I mean, I'm trying to play this off until the end. I'm really trying. But you're obstinate to a degree that I can't quite comprehend. All this diversion. Do you really think it makes any difference in the end?”

I stare at her. There's no anger there, not really, just frustration, and this is what worries me. I'm cornering her, shoving her around with the growing accusation, and she's not reacting as she should. She should either break down like Bill or rise up with a muddled defense. Because I have her. I really have her. She found a crucial piece of evidence and went out of her way to keep it under wraps. She's carried this secret with her, hoping against hope that it would never be uncovered. But Gene Wilcox gave me the direction, and a simple look into the logs told me what I needed to know: She saw the phone call. Bill admitted that she never brought it to him—that recording is on my computer in Vienna. So we come down to the culprit herself. It might not be courtroom evidence, but we don't bring things to court these days. It's enough.

Does she know? Does she know who that businessman is who's getting up from his table and walking past her to the front door, muttering “Thanks” to the waiter without even a glance in my direction? If she did, she wouldn't be so composed now. No one would. The door closes. Treble's gone, and we're alone.

No, it doesn't really make any difference, because I've made my decision, and very soon Celia won't be around to defend herself anymore. What I'd like, though, is a final answer from her before the job is finished. The final justification that I'll be able to use if Vick or someone at Langley connects the dots to figure out what I've done. We can't let traitors off the hook, and we can't prosecute them. I'm only following Agency logic to its inevitable conclusion.

“No,” I tell her. “It doesn't make any difference in the end. But I'd like to hear it from you. I'd like to hear you tell me that you made the call to Ilyas Shishani and told him about Ahmed. That you killed our only chance of getting those people out alive.”