by A. C. Fuller
"Drink your tea," Greta said. "It'll help calm you down."
The lemony yerba mate was cold now, and I downed it in one gulp. "Not bad," I lied, holding back a grimace.
"I know you don't like it, but it's better for you than coffee."
I was studying the plane ticket, which looked real, but I had to know for sure. Opening my laptop, I loaded the online check-in section and typed in my confirmation code. There I was, booked on a one-way trip to Cuba, leaving the following morning. I checked, and Greta was in the adjacent seat.
"Tickets are real," I said.
"What I can't figure," Greta said, "is what she'd need your help with, and why she wouldn't just come out and say it in the letter. I thought the whole point of the Internet is that your physical location doesn't matter anymore. What can you do there—a country you've never visited, where you don't speak the language—that you can't do here?"
"Well, for this to arrive today by courier, Innerva had to send it at least a couple days ago."
"Yeah?"
"That would have been after the ransomware attack was planned, but before the attack on Greyson and the demands Amand told me about. And Amand said they lost track of Innerva a couple weeks ago."
"So?"
"My guess is that Innerva got wind of the fact that she was being tracked, disappeared, then initiated the ransomware attack she'd been planning. And that somehow her change of location required my help."
"How?"
"I don't know. Maybe she was in Dubai, then went to Cuba, and is going to ask me to do something. Like carry a computer back to Dubai, or pick up a part she needs that she can't buy herself without revealing her location. Or maybe the whole ransomware attack is a hoax and she wants to leak the whole story to me."
Greta looked skeptical.
"I know," I said. "All of that is guesswork. I—"
"Shhhh." Greta held a finger up to my lips to get me to shut up. She didn't do it condescendingly, but Greta was more comfortable with silence than me and sometimes she had to take charge to get me to stop talking.
I could tell she was thinking, and my guess was that she was calculating the best way to get me to shred the plane ticket and never think about Innerva again. It wouldn't work of course, I couldn't control my curiosity, and there was no way I'd stop looking into the story. But, as interested as I was in finding out what was on the other end of that plane ticket, I knew that I wasn't going to use it. I'd lost Greta once already, and I was pretty sure that following this story to Cuba would mean losing her for good.
"Greta, I—"
"Shhhhh!"
She stood and walked three slow laps around the couch, then got another cup of tea from the kitchen. Mercifully, she didn't refill mine.
She sat next to me and stroked Smedley's head until I couldn't take the silence anymore.
"I know what you're going to say," I said. "You're going to say that I can't go, that I promised not to get involved in this kind of thing ever again. And I get it. I do. I'm not going. But I can't help how I feel. You taught me that. You know that feeling when you know something is stupid but you have to do it anyway? You can't not do it. I don't agree with the scope of what Innerva is doing, but she doesn't deserve to die for it. I'm not going, though. I promised I wouldn't and I'm not going. I—"
"Alex, stop talking. You don't know me as well as you think. I wasn't going to say any of that."
Smedley raised his head, looking between us with concern, like a kid afraid that his parents are disagreeing.
"What were you going to say?" I asked.
"That I'm coming with you."
8
The tickets Innerva sent included a four-hour layover in New York City, and the flight to JFK left first thing the next morning. So, after scheduling a car to the airport, Greta and I spent the afternoon packing and clearing our schedules for the next few days.
I also called my old friend Lance Brickman, a legendary sports reporter who still lived in Brooklyn. Lance had mentored me during my first few years in the newspaper business, then worked with James and me for a couple years before retiring to curse at the sports section and smoke cigars in peace. After a brief chat, he promised to meet us at JFK during our layover for a drink.
By late afternoon, Greta was at her office arranging for her assistant to feed and walk Smedley, and I was at a bookstore buying a guidebook for Cuba, a country I knew almost nothing about. We met at the apartment for a dinner of leftovers, then went to bed early.
The flight from Seattle to JFK passed quickly. I immersed myself in the guidebook while Greta thumbed through a Spanish-English dictionary, trying to bone up on the language she once spoke fluently. Turns out that three years of college-level Spanish comes back pretty quickly when you're as good with languages as Greta is. By the time we got off the plane in New York, she was stammering out what I believed to be coherent sentences.
It was a little after three in the afternoon when we arrived. When I powered on my phone, I had a text from Lance.
In the pathetic excuse for a sports bar in the main terminal.
I texted him that we'd be right there, then held up my phone to show Greta his message. "Even in text format, Lance can't help but rail against the modern world."
"Gonna be good to see him again. How long has it been?"
"Since he came out to Seattle that one time. Six years ago, maybe?"
"Something like that. What's he been up to?"
"Retired. He was teaching for a while, but when he realized that the Internet wasn't a fad, and he'd have to start acknowledging its existence if he wanted to remain a teacher, he quit. He'd rather live in a world where everyone still reads newspapers and smokes at the breakfast table."
We rolled our suitcases past the security checkpoint and into the main terminal. The sports bar was a cheesy place, the kind Lance hated, but at least it was full of Yankees memorabilia. We found him at a booth in the back, hunched over a drinks menu, and he stood slowly when he saw us.
He wore dark pants and what looked like the same brown jacket he'd worn the entire time I knew him, but he'd thinned a little so it hung loose on his shoulders. "Hey kid," he said, leaning in to give me a quick hug. "Good to see you."
His voice was rich and deep, and made me feel good. I didn't realize until that moment how much I'd missed him.
As he pulled away to hug Greta, I said, "Great to see you. Let us buy you a cognac, or whatever you're drinking these days."
"Already have one on the way."
"Then why were you squinting down at the drink menu like an old man?" I asked.
"Trying to get my head around all the stupid drinks that exist these days. What in damn hell is a Cotton Candy Razzletini?"
"I don't know," Greta said, "sounds sweet."
"Anyway," Lance said, sitting down, "I'm happy to let you pick up the tab since I'm on a fixed income and you're a jet-setting media mogul."
When Lance left the company, which was called News-Scoop before I changed it to The Barker, he took a buyout of a quarter million. He'd invested it wisely enough to make ends meet when combined with his social security and the 401k he'd built through thirty years in the newspaper business. As Brooklyn had grown fancier and fancier around him, he'd managed to stay put in the apartment he'd rented in 1975, but he was far from rich.
Lance reached out and patted Greta's hand. "Good to see you, and I can't believe you haven't left this guy yet."
"I did," she said, laughing. "But he charmed his way through the door again."
Lance's cognac arrived, and Greta and I ordered beers. "Seriously though," Lance said, "I was sorry to hear that you two had split up. I don't know why, but you guys are meant to be together."
"And what about you?" Greta asked. "Still single?"
"Still playing the field," Lance corrected. He took a long sip of cognac. "I figure I'll meet someone when they finally cart my old ass into a nursing home."
"Don't talk like that," I said. "You've got a lon
g time before that happens. Couple weeks, at least."
He gave me a look, then broke out laughing. "Screw you, kid. You're not exactly the young stallion you used to be."
"Should have seen him a year ago," Greta said. "Stress eating peanut M&M's all day, drinking Red Bulls to stay up all night."
"Running a major media company isn't easy," I said defensively.
"I know," Greta said. "But you can't run it from the grave." Then she turned to Lance and said, "I've got him taking better care of himself."
Lance scanned me up and down. "I guess. If you're into that aging pop star look. Why are you headed to Cuba?"
"Sightseeing," I said, repeating the lie Greta and I had rehearsed on the plane. "Greta is really into old historical sites and wants to see the…what was it, honey?"
"The Virgen María de la Concepción Inmaculada." She said it quickly, in a convincing Spanish accent.
Lance leaned back in his chair. "Whoa! Impressive. I have no idea what you just said, but the way you said it makes me want to go with you."
"It's a hobby," Greta continued, "visiting old religious sites. Maybe I'm trying to make up for my atheist parents. Plus, it's a little easier to travel to Cuba these days. And we're not getting any younger."
"Alex isn't, anyway," Lance said. "You look stunning as ever."
"We'll let you know how the trip goes," I said. "You never know how long Americans will be allowed to travel to Cuba, so we figured, why not?"
The beers arrived and we drank in silence for a minute, Lance gently swirling the cognac left in his glass. He seemed to be deep in thought. It was the kind of silence that would have been awkward under normal circumstances, but wasn't because Greta and I shared an old friendship with Lance. The kind that doesn't need meaningless chatter to fill the airspace.
Lance downed the rest of his cognac in one sip, then waved the empty glass at the bartender. "So, why are you actually going to Cuba?"
I stared at him for a moment, giving him my best I-have-no-idea-what-you-mean look.
"You're a terrible liar, Alex. It's one of the things I like about you." He looked at Greta and smiled, then looked at me. "One of the only things."
Greta shrugged, as if to say, "You might as well tell him."
"We didn't want to tell you," I said, "because we didn't want you to get drawn in."
"Ain't nothing anyone can do to me now," Lance said.
"First of all, yes there is," I said. "I know what these people are capable of. And second, you told me you didn't want to talk about James."
I was the one who'd broken the news of James's death to Lance. The call was short, no more than ten minutes. He'd been reluctant to engage beyond the most basic facts, and I'd gotten the sense that Lance was uncomfortable talking about death. Plus, everyone has their own way of dealing with loss, so I didn't try to press him into a therapy session over the phone.
The waiter brought Lance's cognac, and he swirled it around in the glass. "You're going to Cuba because of something to do with James?"
"Innerva actually," Greta said. "She may be in trouble and we're going to see if we can help."
Lance pondered this for a moment, pulling a cigar out of the inside pocket of his jacket and running it under his nose. "Damn computers are going to kill us all."
I'd assumed that Lance wouldn't want to get too close to the topic of James and Innerva, but since he'd asked about the trip, I felt he deserved to know what was going on.
"You might be more right than you know," I said. "Innerva may have mounted a ransomware hack targeting the servers of some—or maybe all—of the private security contractors in the country."
Lance stared at me. "I'm a pretty smart guy, but I only understood about half of the words in that sentence."
"She's trying to destroy all the companies that do national security work that aren't official military," Greta said.
Lance sighed and took a long sip of cognac. "You serious?"
I nodded, expecting Lance to launch into a tirade about computers, about James and Innerva, maybe even about me, for agreeing to help. I knew Lance to be pretty traditional, even conservative in some ways. When we'd spoken about James's death, I'd explained who was behind it, but he hadn't seemed interested in the details.
He thought for a moment, then let out a smile I never would have expected. Nodding slowly, he said "I hope she nails them all."
I looked at Greta, who was focused on Lance. "Why?" she asked.
As surprised as I was by his answer, it quickly made sense in my head. I knew that Lance had served four years in the Army reserves after the Vietnam War, while getting his start at The New York Standard. And branches of the U.S. military, even the reserves, tend to look down on the private security contractors they sometimes have to rely on, or even protect.
That's what I thought Lance would say, but I was way off. He had an odd look on his face, one I'd never seen before. At least not on him. His face was bent and contorted with pain, but also rigid like he was trying not to cry. When he finally spoke, all he said was, "Bastards deserve to pay for what they did to James."
I grew uncomfortable and glanced at Greta, but her eyes were locked on Lance. "Lance, is there anything you want to say? You seem…"
Even Greta didn't know what to say. His face shook slightly, like he was barely containing a combination of violent rage and sorrow.
I reached out and patted his hand awkwardly. "Lance, I…"
Finally, Lance looked up, first at me, then at Greta. He smiled, then downed the rest of his cognac in one gulp. "I'm sorry," he said. "Not usually an emotional guy. I didn't agree with a lot of what James and Innerva ran off to do when they left us in New York. Still don't agree with it. Journalists partnering with hackers is a dangerous game. Only thing more dangerous than that is when essential military or governmental functions are carried out by private companies, accountable to no law, answering to no one who isn't already on their side. I hope Innerva destroys every last one of them."
9
The flight went smoothly until about twenty minutes after takeoff, when a redheaded flight attendant emerged from the cabin to serve drinks.
The second I saw her, I looked away and began swallowing my breaths and blinking rapidly.
Greta noticed right away. "Alex, what is it?"
My fists were in balls, and beads of sweat were forming on my arms. I tried to speak, but nothing came out, and I watched in a panic as Greta scanned the plane. She saw the flight attendant, and a look of understanding passed over her face.
Putting her hands on my cheeks, she turned me toward her. "Alex. It's okay. Can you hear me? You're okay. It's not her. Breathe."
I took a couple deep breaths, then tried to look at the flight attendant again.
"No," Greta said. "Don't do that to yourself. Keep your eyes on me until you're ready. Can you do the steps?"
Staring into Greta's steady eyes, I felt myself calming a little.
I closed my eyes and took a few more deep breaths, reciting in my head the process I'd learned in therapy.
Step 1: Acknowledge the attack. "I'm having a panic attack," I said out loud, but more to myself than to Greta. I waited a few seconds, then said it again. "I'm having a panic attack."
Step 2: Wait. I kept breathing, as deeply as possible, eyes still closed.
Step 3: Action. I couldn't make a panic attack end with sheer willpower. And believe me, I'd tried. But I'd learned that I could take steps to make myself more comfortable while I waited for it to end. With Greta next to me, I was as comfortable as I was going to get. I'd had panic attacks three or four times, and they'd been worse when Greta wasn't there. I shifted in the seat and took a few more deep breaths.
Within a minute or two, I was feeling better. I turned slowly to look at the flight attendant, careful to focus my vision around her neck, rather than her hair. In the past, that technique had allowed me to speak with redheads without freaking out.
As panic attacks go, this had bee
n a mild one.
There are two things no one ever tells you about being tortured. The first is that, unless you're Mel Gibson in Braveheart, even tough guys will sell out their friends to stop the pain. We'd all like to think that we wouldn't, but until you've experienced the psychological terror of drowning while being strapped to a board, a hood over your head, you don't know.
The second thing that no one tells you about being tortured is that you never get over it. That your torturers leave scars on your soul and haunt your dreams until the day you die.
I had two primary interrogators. One was a short, angular woman named Bonnie, the other a beautiful redhead named Holly. Bonnie was the bad cop, and I hated her deeply. Holly had played the good cop, yet somehow I'd been more traumatized by her. Her hair was like Nicole Kidman's in Far and Away. Bright red and curly and flowing. So striking you couldn't look away.
Of course, that hadn't stopped her from strapping me to a board and whispering in my ear as Bonnie poured water down my throat. But something about the combination of beauty and evil had stuck with me in a way nothing else ever had.
Now, every time I saw a woman with curly red hair, my self-protection instincts kicked in. As Greta described it, I contracted internally. To me, it felt like the emotional version of standing in a corner, fists up, ready to fight.
"Better?" Greta asked, resting her head on my shoulder.
"Yeah," I said, relieved. "That one wasn't as bad as it could have been."
Other than the discomfort I felt when the redheaded flight attendant made her way down the aisle, the flight was uneventful after the initial trauma. For Greta and me at least.
For the other passengers, the flight from JFK to Cuba was like a party bus to Atlantic City. We were surrounded by dozens of couples in floral print shirts, boozing it up on six-dollar beers and ten-dollar pre-mixed daiquiris while talking too loudly. Every once in awhile, an exuberant shout would erupt from nearby and I'd turn to see people high-fiving or mingling in the aisle.
