Cost of Life (6 page)

Flight 816's unauthorized trajectory was causing chaos for Jacksonville Center, the hub of air traffic control for Northern Florida. Of the roughly one hundred controllers at work at Jacksonville Center on this federal holiday, the task of controlling them fell to a sixty-two-year-old air traffic manager named Richard Woo.

When he'd been a child, Richard Woo had had an unconscious habit of tugging on the hairs above his left ear for good luck. Maybe it was something he'd seen a man do in a movie. His smooth black hair had begun to fall out shortly after his nineteenth birthday and by the age of twenty-two, Richard Woo had become as egg-bald as his father and his father's father before him. He often mused that any of his good luck had been left on his pillowcase or slid down the shower drain with that hair.

On days like this, he believed it.

He was currently on a conference call with his boss, his boss's boss, someone else from the DOT whose name Richard hadn't managed to write down, two men from Homeland Security whose names Richard had purposely not written down, and FBI Special-Agent-in-Charge Jim Christie, who by force of leadership seemed to be running the call.

“The problem is, sir,” said Woo in response to Jim's latest question, “we've got eighty-two other birds right now in our airspace and that's just air carrier. That doesn't account for any military traffic or general aviation traffic.”

“Richard, I guess what I'm getting at is this: Since Flight Eight Sixteen has gone silent, is it possible that it could be on a collision path with one or more of these eighty-two-plus airplanes and not even know it?”

None of them spoke to that, least of all Richard Woo. He peered out his half-open door at his frantic controllers who were busy dealing with this very real, horrific possibility. Here in the twenty-first century, the Age of Information, shit like this wasn't supposed to happen anymore—but it did. In 2003, a Boeing 727 vanished off the runway in Angola. Foul play was suspected. No remains were found. In 2014, a Boeing 777 carrying 227 passengers vanished over the Indian Ocean. Foul play was suspected. No remains were found.

Back in Atlanta, Jim understood the lack of response for what it was and let it go for now. His instinct was to vent his frustration, but none of this was Richard Woo's fault, and as Jim's mother liked to opine in situations like this, “Yelling never cured cancer.” No, when she got angry, she got quiet—and cold—and God, during those long stretches of cold silence that made up much of his childhood, God, how Jim wished for angry noise. But this wasn't about him, not today. Today was about an errant airplane.

“Errant.” That was the buzzword the Homeland Security boys insisted on at the top of the conference call. There would be no suggestion of a hijacking until there existed confirmation of a hijacking.

A lot of good that did the passengers aboard Flight 816, pondered Jim. His mind also deliberated on a room, probably in DC, full of men and women well above his pay grade who didn't give two shits about buzzwords and were seriously discussing the immediate grounding of all air traffic in the United States.

Jim was well aware of the arguments on either side.

Pro: the continued safety of the American people.

Con: scaring the very same American people on a holiday—on
this
holiday—when the possibility still existed that the radio silence and shifted path of Flight 816 were attributable to some bizarre form of pilot error—regardless of the inconvenient fact that said pilot had been involved in the murder of a police officer only hours ago.

Jim had the wide-screen TV in his office on mute. A stream of closed captioning complemented the on-air image of two talking heads gabbing about whether fireworks displays were, as an activity, inherently Republican or Democratic.

Well, at least the media hadn't gotten wise yet to the clusterfuck of Flight 816—but it was just a matter of time.

On the phone, one of the FAA executives had launched into a word salad of legalese. Jim took this as an opportunity, announced to all that he would be right back, and wandered out into the field office bullpen.

There was just so much bullshit a man could take in one phone call.

Finally Jim was back on the floor with his worker bees as they typed away at their keyboards for the honey-sweet information, 100 percent pure nectar that could help make sense of what was going on with Flight 816—preferably before everything really went pear-shaped. They were all, each of them, serious-minded, studious intelligence operatives. Jim, and by extension the Southeast, and by extension the United States, was lucky to have these men and women hard at work, and that was his job, in the end, wasn't it?

But if that was the case, what about the niggling matter of Xana Marx? Jim adjusted his sinking trousers—this, despite the benefit of a new belt wound like a girdle just below the parabola of his BBQ-and-beer paunch—and walked the floor to get his mind off Xana Marx—as if he had ever since the day he'd met her rid his mind of Xana Marx, this woman so much the opposite of his mother that, Freud be damned, Jim loved her from the bottom of his grease-clogged heart.

A love that had made him a coward today. How shameful he felt at sending Del and Angelo to meet with her and break to her the bad news of her discontinued employment. How ironic then that even though he hadn't seen the downcast sadness in her eyes, he could imagine that look, her look, the unfairness of it all, this rejection of her talent, of her—this image conjured by his mind was haunting him as vividly as any actual memory.

Damn it all.

The Fourth of July was a mandatory workday for most everyone here, but that workday had been expected to begin at 8
A.M.
About a quarter of them had shown up early; about half of them would be staying late. Theirs was a profession where successes were private and failures were very public.

Jim walked the floor. He was tempted to gather some of his senior agents in the conference room for a collective update, but decided instead—for now—to touch base with them individually. When employees worked this arduously, personal attention mattered.

“What's the word?” he asked Del.

Del glanced up from his workstation. Given the amount of glut and clutter in the office, the relative cleanness of Del's desk gave it an eerie otherness.

“It's hard to say,” the agent replied. “Per protocol, we've been coordinating with state and local authorities to investigate the usual claptrap of threats and so far they've all come up bogus, but…”

“But?”

“We've received word from a park ranger that the Stone Mountain Militia have lowered the flag on their bunker to half-staff.”

“Oh for fuck's sake, Del.”

The Stone Mountain Militia fancied themselves the rightful heirs of Joe Simmons's hundred thousand Klansmen of the 1920s. Forty-one men, women, and, yes, children cohabited on a barb-fenced ten-acre parcel of land southeast of Atlanta. Their vile website, with its repository of hate speech and handy links to other like-minded homegrown organizations around the United States, drew a million hits a week. Outside of the Internet, though, in the real world, they had, with a few minor exceptions, kept to themselves. But if their flag—Stars and Bars, of course—was at half-staff, something had happened. Something bad. And when it came to militias, something bad usually led to something worse.

“Keep me posted,” Jim said, and he moved on to dimple-cheeked/coffee-breathed Myra Lowenstein, who was sifting through all the current domestic terror alerts, of which there were multitudes. Would any of these shed light on Flight 816?

“What have we got, Myra?”

She opened up a BBC news report on Ahmad Shah Massoud, the anti-Taliban revolutionary assassinated on September 9, 2001. Many in intelligence had concluded—in retrospect—that this assassination had been a clear precursor and corollary to what happened two days later in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington. She then brought up a BBC feature article from last week.

Jim tugged his eyeglasses from his breast pocket and slid them on. “Who is Khalid al-Hazar?”

“A high-ranking member of the new Libyan government notable for his sympathies to the West.”

She clicked on a third article, this one from an Arabic newspaper dated only three hours ago. Al-Hazar's bearded face stared out beside the caption. She translated on the fly:

“This is from the
Bengazi Al Maydan.
According to them, four hours ago Khalid al-Hazar was the victim of a suicide bombing in Tripoli.”

“Anyone taking credit?”

“No, but I just got off the phone with a friend at the Company. They believe this to be the work of an insurgency with funding from an extremist offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood called The Trust.”

Jim heard himself groan.

“Boss, I think we're looking at another Massoud. Tell me you've got military aircraft scrambling over Florida.”

Last he checked, there were two F-22A Raptors from Tyndall Air Force Base on approach. They were not cleared to engage.

Not yet.

“Anything else?” he asked, not especially keen on receiving an answer.

“Abel Dumbuya.” She brought up a profile of him on her screen. Mid-forties, dark skin, movie-star handsome. “Midlevel rabble-rouser out of Sudan.”

“Yeah, I know who he is. Made our watch list after that incident in Virginia last year.”

“He's missing.”

Jim clutched the top of one of her cubicle walls. “What do you mean he's
missing
?”

“He was under surveillance and now he's not. Our friends in Richmond assure me that they are pursuing a lead and—”

“Oh for fuck's sake!”

That was when Jim's assistant Nomi flagged him down. He was needed back on the phone. Grinding his teeth the entire trip back to his office, Jim Christie picked up his receiver.

“Sorry about that,” he said. “Any word on—”

“That's the thing,” said Richard Woo. “Flight Eight Sixteen has begun its descent.”

The man in Seat 18A was on his way to Cozumel to meet the love of his life. His name was Frank Brown. Her name was Catalina-Luisa Hierra Perez. If ever he had doubted in the magic of words, his faith restored itself each time he whispered her name and felt his heart double in size.

He had met her in an online chat room, but so what? For men like him, teetotalers, introverts, there were not many other alternatives, and he hadn't signed into that chat room on a frost-cold December night expecting to meet the love of his life. But if ever he had doubted in fate…

The screen name Frank Brown used was Ag(NH3)2NO3. That tended to keep away the perverts and, in theory, attracted like-minded, intelligent loners like himself who also possessed more than a passing knowledge of chemistry. The compound he alluded to was known as Tollens' reagent and what made it extraordinary was…but no, the specifics didn't matter. It was a test, pure and simple, to seek out the embrace of smart conversation on a lonely night.

And on that night, on the eleventh of December, his silver lure found gold. For starters, she had signed in under the screen name Half-a-Cat.

Hesitant but hopeful, he'd messaged her:
Does your owner Erwin treat you well?

Her reply arrived almost instantaneously:
He's always waving.

Frank Brown had nearly chirped in excitement. She'd picked up on his Schrödinger reference and had added to it with a joke about his theory of wave particles! Oh! They continued to banter all through the night, lobbing scientific puns back and forth for hours. He learned that she was a graduate student in marine biology at the University of Quintana Roo on the tropical island of Cozumel. She told him her name. She mentioned that her friends called her “Cat.” But even then, Frank couldn't think of her as anything less than Catalina-Luisa Hierra Perez.

After a week of online chatting, they exchanged phone numbers.

After a month, on one dark evening in January, they exchanged pictures.

By February, they were discussing when they could meet in person. The bank Frank worked for was going through a merger and the earliest he could get off for vacation time was July. So be it. The day his boss approved his request, Frank bought his plane ticket to Cozumel. That afternoon, he went to the post office to get a passport. He was forty-two years old. He had never even left the state of Georgia before. Now he was on his way to Mexico.

Magic. Fate.

Next to him, a mother breast-fed her newborn. Were newborns even allowed to fly? The baby had spent most of the flight so far producing from its tiny lungs a series of screams that far exceeded anything Frank's own lungs could ever have produced. He had to be grateful at least that its mouth was currently stopped up.

Catalina-Luisa Hierra Perez wasn't fond of kids either. She was fond of
pozole,
football, bad jokes, and coral reefs. And Frank. She was fond of Frank.

He smiled. He was fond of her too.

Not even one hour into the flight, and already he was antsy. He wanted to chat with his love right now via text messaging, but he couldn't afford the airline's insane WiFi rates. Other people around him didn't seem to have the same concern. Across the aisle, the mother's husband was clacking away at his tablet's keyboard. Beside him, their pigtailed daughter was clacking away at
her
tablet's keyboard.

Via eavesdropping, Frank had learned that their names were Travis and Zelda. The mother's name was Nell. The baby's name was variously Amy, Amy-Poo, and My Darling Cabbage.

He shut his eyes and reclined his seat. Maybe he could relax away the butterflies flitting about his belly. He had a Learn Spanish book in his carry-on, but that would hardly get his mind off his lovely Catalina-Luisa Hierra Perez. He breathed in, he breathed out, and he let the cushions behind his head and behind his back do the rest.

Then he heard the snoring. Arrhythmic. Abrasive. It came from the row behind him. He opened one eye. The culprit was a man about his age, dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts, and with a red mustache underneath his wide nose. With each epic snore, the hairs of the mustache flitted about like terrified red ants.

Frank considered tapping the man on the knee. If he squeezed his arm in the gap between his seat and the nursing mother's seat, he might just be able to do it…

The plane canted to the right, and then slightly downward. Must be turbulence, Frank thought. This was his first flight. He brought his seat back to its upright position and stared out at the clouds. They looked like white water waves. And waves reminded him of Catalina-Luisa Hierra Perez.

He smiled again. Let those butterflies in his belly have at it. Let the walrus behind him snore. In a world in which
she
existed, in a world in which she was waiting for him, what did a few hours of aggravation matter?