A Thousand Doors

by J. T. Ellison

  “Among other things.”

  “I thought they were scientists.”

  “Katawala tell you that?”

  Another neatly laid trap. “Yes,” I reply without elaboration.

  About halfway across the Atlantic, when the flight attendants turned out the cabin lights and the passengers settled in for what little sleep they could get, Miles told me his parents worked for the CDC developing vaccines for rare diseases. That they were weeks away from finalizing a cure for Ebola when their house in Atlanta’s historic Inman Park neighborhood burned to the ground in the middle of the night. He told me that they were found together in bed, bodies charred but still holding hands. In that jet-lagged, sleep-deprived, mid-flight state, his light-brown eyes hooded with exhaustion, eyelashes sweeping across those high cheekbones, and his voice soft with wine and looming sleep, Miles had wondered why they didn’t wake up, why they didn’t cough and scramble out of bed. Jump out a window. How could anyone sleep through that? Then he looked right at me and asked if I thought they could have been drugged beforehand. Why would someone drug them? I’d asked in return. Because they worked for the CIA was his response.

  And I’ve been thinking about that ever since.

  Cummings sent me to Frankfurt with a file on Katawala and a single goal: Find out what he knew about his parents’ death. It’s funny how some things stick in your craw. How you can have hundreds of conversations over the course of a long career and one little comment derails everything. Two renowned biotech engineers working for the CDC, weeks away from a groundbreaking Ebola vaccine, die in a house fire, and their son believes they were murdered. What happens to the son if I include that in my report? What happens to the son if he picks up his suitcase at baggage claim and catches a cab back to his Lincoln Park row house? Do I wake up three weeks later, turn on the news, and see that some middle-aged pharmaceutical sales manager from Chicago has thrown himself off a bridge? Those are the sorts of questions that keep a girl from sleeping at thirty thousand feet.

  “When, exactly, during that flight did you and Katawala discuss the fire?” Cummings asks.

  “About halfway through, two-thirty in the morning.”

  “Was he sober?”

  I look at him, at the pinched look around his mouth, at those thin lips. He is balding poorly and going gray in patches, like a Dalmatian. But mostly I’m intrigued by this new question. “He wasn’t drunk.”

  “But he’d been drinking?”

  “Pinot Noir. Three glasses spread over five hours, one with dinner. So he was definitely relaxed and very sleepy, but not wasted.” He was also charming and funny, prone to irreverence, and laughed easily. There is no aphrodisiac in all the world like a man with a great laugh.

  “And you?”

  Another new question. “I never drink while working.”

  It’s Steve’s turn to be surprised. “How do you get around it?”

  I find his curiosity alarming. These are tricks of the trade. I never pass them out unless asked directly in a debriefing. It’s one of the few instances where truth is the better option. Damn. I have grown to hate giving Steve Cummings anything to put in my file.

  “It’s not hard. Bartenders. Waiters. Flight attendants. It’s their job to linger, to be available if you need them. So I find a moment to pull them aside and whisper, sheepishly, that I’m a recovering alcoholic and that I’m here to have a good time but I can’t drink. I tell them that I’ll order gin and tonic but I really just want soda water with lime. Keep it virgin, but don’t tell my friends. It’s embarrassing, this problem I have, but I’ve been sober now for six months and I don’t want to break the streak. They always bend over backward to accommodate.”

  Cummings looks intrigued, and for a brief moment there’s a flash of something—respect or, perhaps, regret—in his eyes. I’m the best mnemonist he has, and he doesn’t want to lose me. Tough. He shouldn’t have put out the hit on Miles’ parents.

  Like I said, I always know things I shouldn’t.

  “At any point during that flight did Katawala mention the specific nature of his parents’ scientific research?”

  “Only that they worked for the CDC in Atlanta. That his father loved the southern heat, but his mother hated it. She wanted to retire. He didn’t.”

  Cummings leans back in his desk chair and steeples his fingers. It’s dark outside now and the streetlights are popping on, one by one, across the city, little pinpricks of light on the other side of his single, narrow office window. My stomach growls even though my waistband feels tight. It’s a strange sensation. I stifle a yawn. Wonder what I look like on those hidden cameras. Like hell, no doubt. As though I’ve wilted. Limp hair and dark circles under my eyes.

  “We have reason to believe that the Katawalas gave their son a digital file containing all of the research they conducted for the CDC. It is imperative that the Agency finds him and takes possession of that research. Under no circumstances can that research fall into the hands of his employer.”

  I shake my head, seemingly confused, and make a note of that last sentence. The ability to control a disease—its spread and its cure—is a valuable commodity, to my employers and to an entire drug industry. But that is not a line of questioning I am willing to pursue on tape, so I turn the conversation in a safer direction.

  “What do you mean, it’s imperative that the Agency finds him?” I ask.

  There is a single, sharp knock on Cummings’ office door. He tips his head to the side and squints at me. “Miles Katawala deplaned in Chicago, and no one has seen or heard from him since.”

  Two knocks this time. Harder. More insistent. I force myself not to look at the door, uneasy at the idea of being surrounded.

  Cummings pushes back from his desk and steps around my chair so he can open the office door behind me. He sticks his head into the hallway. “What?”

  I resist the instinct to stand or angle my body into a safer position. Reminding myself that I am on camera, that someone, somewhere in the bowels of this building, is watching me, taking notes, I try to appear disinterested. I glance casually around the room, waiting. I look at the dusty ficus tree, the landline with its twisted cord lying at a haphazard angle on Cummings’ desk. The window blind. And I listen as Steve Cummings steps into the hall and pulls the door tight, but not all the way closed. Entry to his office requires a key card, and that is sitting on his desk beside his phone. The voices on the other side of the door are hushed whispers. Masculine. I know that a question has been asked because Steve says, “Not yet,” as he pushes the door open and steps back into the office. He returns to his seat. Taps the Katawala file on his desk with a pen. Avoids my gaze for a good ten seconds.

  “Where is Miles Katawala?” he asks bluntly.

  “I don’t know.” This, like half of what I’ve said on record today, is a lie. That’s the thing about this job, over time you get really, really good at lying. You start out doing it for sport, just to see if you can get away with it. Then it becomes a matter of survival.

  “Security footage from Chicago O’Hare International Airport on the day of your arrival shows Katawala exiting the plane, stopping by the men’s restroom, then heading toward baggage claim. But he never got there. His luggage was never collected, and he is not seen on any camera leaving the airport.”

  I shake my head. “How is that possible?”

  “We were hoping you could answer that.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Can’t? Or won’t?”

  I ignore the implication and ask, “Did he change in the bathroom? Put on a hat? He had a small carry-on.” I press my eyes shut, searching for that thread among all the others. “A messenger bag. Black leather. Kenneth Cole. I never got a look inside, but it was big enough to hold a complete change of clothes.”

  “No. He exited the bathroom in the same clothes.”

  “So, what ha
ppened?”

  Steve shrugs. It’s a helpless motion that doesn’t suit him. “He got on the people carrier and rode it for fifty yards. Then he stepped off and entered a crowd of people headed toward baggage claim. By the time they moved into the next field of vision he was gone.”

  “He didn’t backtrack?”

  “No. He’s not seen again on film, after that. Or anywhere else, for that matter. Your flight arrived at O’Hare on Sunday morning, and he never showed up for work on Monday.”

  “What about his landlord? Neighbors?”

  “Doesn’t have a landlord. He paid cash for his row house six years ago. He might have been back to his house. We can’t say for sure. It was eight degrees in Chicago on February fifth. All the neighbors said they stayed in and tried to keep warm. No one saw him. And we didn’t start looking for him until his boss at Meyer Pharmaceutical reported him missing.”

  This isn’t uncommon. Katawala is not the first Client to go missing after one of our chats. I do my part, and then I walk away. Sometimes, weeks or months, even years later I read about a disappearance in the newspaper. I remember the face. I try to stifle any sense of guilt. It’s the unspoken reality of my job. Yet, in all the years I’ve been doing this, Steve Cummings has never mentioned it afterward.

  “And you think what…that I had something to do with it? That I killed him? Dismembered him in the family bathroom at O’Hare and flushed all the bits down the toilet?”

  “No,” he says. “I think you helped him.”

  I slump back into my chair. Cross my arms. “Oh, for God’s sake. Really? That’s why you’ve had me here for sixteen hours? Why you won’t let me go home?”

  “It’s the only logical explanation.”

  “You guys lose a Client, in the airport of all places, and it’s my fault? I’ve turned somehow? Are you serious?”

  “Katawala had no reason to run unless he was tipped off.”

  Sometimes it’s just a breath—the difference between winning or losing, keeping your secrets or revealing them, living or dying—a mere split-second decision that could go either way. You see the trap, or you fall into it. You blurt out something you shouldn’t know, that maybe Katawala ran because his parents were murdered. Or you slow it down, sidestep the retort, pull your shit together, sit calmly in your damn chair, and look at your boss like you pity him for grasping at straws.

  “You’ve studied the footage,” I say.

  “At length.”

  “Then you’ve seen that, after Katawala deplaned, I did the same. That I went directly to my connecting flight and flew to Dulles.”

  “The footage shows that, yes.”

  “Then you know I had nothing to do with it.” A pause, and then, “But I am curious about something.”

  At length, he asks, “What?”

  “Why does it matter? Katawala. The fire. His parents. Their research. What he did or didn’t know?”

  Steve Cummings looks at me with an expression that can only be described as disappointment. I have failed him. I can see the realization there on his face. I don’t have what he wants. This has been a waste of time. He is wrong.

  “That is need-to-know information, Mia. And you don’t work for the Agency anymore,” he says, then tosses the pen onto his desk.

  Something about that small, frustrated movement gives me the confidence I need to stand. “Thank you,” I tell Steve Cummings as I lift my purse from the table beside my chair. I sling the strap over my shoulder.

  “For what?”

  “Accepting my resignation,” I say.

  He meets me in front of his desk, and I think for a moment that he will offer his hand, subject me to the obligatory farewell shake. But instead he reaches for the doorknob and says, “Allow me.”

  As I move into the hallway, I am almost hopeful that I will, in fact, make it out of this building. And that is when the phone on Steve Cummings’ desk rings.

  He pauses for a half step and looks over his shoulder. I ignore him. Ignore the phone. I glance toward the bank of elevators at the end of the hallway.

  A second ring.

  I step to the side, careful not to turn my back on him just yet.

  A third ring.

  Steve Cummings gives me a curt nod. “Mia,” he says, with finality, and then he goes to answer the phone.

  It’s hard not to run. I have timed this before. I know that it takes exactly five minutes and twenty-three seconds to get from Cummings’ office to my Jeep in the parking lot. Two hundred and eighty steps at a normal pace. Five floors. Three hallways. One elevator. The lobby. A short set of steps out front. The sidewalk. A long stretch of asphalt. All of it monitored by closed-circuit cameras. And just as there is an art to listening and lying, there is an art to making a clean exit.

  Don’t look at your phone. Don’t pick your nails. Don’t hold your breath.

  Do acknowledge anyone you meet with a polite nod or a simple greeting. Do smile at the security guards. Do give the star embedded in the middle of the marbled lobby one last, wistful glance before walking out of the building for good.

  From the outside the building looks like most of the others in Langley: Unmarked and uninteresting. Numbered instead of named. Solid and square. Red bricks and bulletproof glass. I breathe. Search for my keys in the bottom of my purse. Cross the parking lot. Let myself believe for the first time in weeks that I will see Miles again. That he’s waiting right where I left him. I fantasize about that burger and fries as I cross the parking lot. The wine is off limits until I’ve pissed on a stick, however. I couldn’t run the risk of knowing, for sure, in the off chance that Cummings would subject me to a polygraph test.

  My Jeep is the realization of a teenage fantasy. Impractical. But it makes me feel young and fun. I like the roll bar and the way it rumbles when I take corners a little too fast. When I climb inside, it smells of warm leather and air freshener. I take my old, outdated iPhone out of my purse and set it in the console. My fingers itch to put it in airplane mode, but I force myself to wait.

  It’s amazing, the things you learn over the course of a fifteen-year career in espionage. The conversations you have, many of them in airports, during interminable layovers, with pilots and flight attendants, fellow travelers, TSA agents, gate crew, maintenance men, and air marshals (they’re easy to spot if you know what you’re looking for). People are always bored in airports. They are happy to talk, and I am eager to collect tricks of the trade. Things that may come in handy one day. I have learned the specific steps by which a commercial passenger plane can be landed remotely. That all air traffic control officers are chain smokers. How to check a gun with ammunition so it arrives without incident at my final destination. That with older model iPhones, anything before iOS 10, airplane mode disables GPS.

  And I have learned that there are service doors located discreetly in every US airport. An escape hatch for authorized personnel only. They are tucked between video surveillance cameras and are accessible only by a key card or an access code. These doors lead to a stairwell, followed by a short hallway and your choice of an exterior door that goes directly onto the tarmac or an elevator that will take you to the basement. I gave Miles Katawala that access code thirty minutes before we deplaned at O’Hare along with instructions to exit via the basement and wait at a safe house until I arrived. The man is very good at following instructions.

  I start the engine. Put the car in drive. Roll toward the security gate. And my phone rings.

  Steve Cummings’ name flashes across the display. There are cameras throughout the parking lot. I can’t not answer.

  “Hello?” I stop beside the guard house and roll down my window. Smile politely. Hand him my badge.

  Cummings’ voice is smug on the other end. “How far along are you, Mia?”

  I refuse to panic. I’ve got a fifty-fifty shot that he is taking one last, wild sta
b in the dark.

  “What?”

  “Did Katawala induct you into the mile-high club? Or did you seal the deal later, wherever it is you’ve hidden him?”

  I’m holding the phone to my ear as the security guard looks at the laminated rectangle with my picture and then directly at me. Back and forth. Three times. My heart pounds in my chest. When he tries to hand my badge back, I shake my head. “Keep it. Today’s my last day,” I say, and then, to Cummings, with every bit of disgust I can force into my voice, “Good-bye, Steve.”

  I end the call, and the security guard lifts the red-and-white striped bar. I put my phone in airplane mode and drive away.

  I don’t look back.

  The Actress

  Joy Jordan-Lake

  My mind keeps spiraling away—looping and twisting and frantic—from whatever it is the perky young reporter is asking. I am trying to focus on the words she is forming, not because I give even one sliver of a damn about what she is saying but because my own thoughts have become a dark, dizzying blur.

  I am straining to listen to her—truly I am—but all I can hear is the splat and hiss of the waves hitting the cliffs below us. It should be relaxing, this sound—tourists come from all over the world to admire the surf here, and the cliff-edged sweep of this bay. But today I can think only that it must hurt, those waves slamming so hard into rock.

  Today it makes me think only of death.

  Trying harder to focus, I lean forward and narrow my eyes on the reporter’s too-eager face, her cheeks flushing the same fuchsia as the roses behind her—the roses that line the cliffs here at Laguna. But there my thoughts go again, swooping out to those roses and over the cliffs, down toward the rolling blue-green Pacific, and back to a range—my range—of rolling blue-green mountains back east.

  My thoughts come now in time with the slap of the waves on the cliffs:

  I should be there.

  I should be there right now.