“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 lik
e 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.”
“Did I?”
She’s cool now, tears gone. Hardening right before my eyes.
She says, “I’m not sure what you think you can do here tonight. I’ve been able to figure out some of it, but not all. You obsess over one small thing—me neglecting to inform everyone that someone used Bill’s phone to call Shishani. You fixate on this, and then you go corner Bill. You get him to admit he doesn’t know about it, which means that if I didn’t tell him, I didn’t tell anybody. Right? Very good. But where next? Do you think that the only conclusion that can be reached is that I was in cahoots with Shishani?” She shakes her head. “Have you really been that cloistered?”
“You tell me, then,” I say, standing up to her despite a resurgence of pain in my stomach. “Tell me what other conclusions there are.”
She smiles again. She straightens. “You know what I thought when I found that phone number? I thought the obvious—Bill had been selling us out. I didn’t understand why, or how he’d ended up roped into this mess, but he was guilty. Then Ahmed was killed. I was beside myself. So I came straight home—to your home. To you. You remember?”
I blink at her. My vision’s a little blurry, but I don’t want to start wiping my eyes. I don’t want her to think I’m getting teary. “Yeah,” I say. “I do remember.”
Because I do. I remember every act of sex we engaged in. I’ve lived off of those memories.
She’s nodding slowly. “That, Henry, was when I knew.”
2
He’s pushing into me, hauling up my left leg, gripping my ankle in his sweaty hand. Straining. The veins of his strong neck are standing out in the darkness, and down here below it feels like he’s splitting me open. This is all my doing, for when I arrived at his apartment I said nothing and went straight for his body. And it’s nearly working; it’s almost enough to push away Bill’s sad face and the gut-wrenching betrayal I feel. All I want to do is escape into sex, so that I can disappear and not have to face questions of moral outrage. I want it all to be simple. A boy and a girl fucking in an unmade bed with the Viennese night hanging outside.
Then it’s over. He’s gasping beside me, saying something about what kind of apartment he thinks we can afford, how close to the Danube, and what a crazy good idea it is. I say, “Sure. Yeah,” but I’m still stuck in indecision. I want to tell him about Bill. I want Henry to sit across from me, still pink-skinned from all his exertion, and make it simple for me. Either: A traitor is a traitor, Cee. You’ve got to bring it to Vick. Or: This is Bill we’re talking about. Let’s take it to him first. I want him to take responsibility for deciding what to do, because in Moscow he became familiar with betrayal and trickery, while in Dublin I lunched with émigrés and danced to electronic music and learned how to stomach heavy ales without getting sick.
When he gets up, kisses me hard on the mouth, and tells me he’s going to shower, I wonder why he doesn’t see my indecision. Can’t he read it in my face, or is it too dark in here? How long does it take for a man to learn the ciphers of your moods? A year? Ten? Never? I suppose it’s something I’ll be finding out.
As the hiss of water runs in the bathroom, I pull on my clothes and stumble into the kitchen, where only this morning I made coffee and thought about leaving Henry. Now I’m staying, and I just want a little coffee so I can think through everything rationally. I fill up the machine with water and grounds, then turn it on. That’s when I hear the d-ding! d-ding! of a phone ringing. It’s not mine, nor is it the melody of Henry’s Nokia. Frowning, I step out of the kitchenette into the living room and pause, listening. D-ding! Then nothing. Yet it’s enough to send me over to the coat rack, where my overcoat and Henry’s hang limply. I pat Henry’s coat—in the breast pocket is a hard lump. I pull it out just as the screen illumination is turning off, a flash of phone number disappearing. No, it’s not Henry’s regular phone. It’s a Siemens. Gray and too big to be comfortable. It’s the second phone that all field agents keep—prepaid in cash, anonymous. But I haven’t seen this one before, so maybe it’s a simple burner, to be thrown away once the minutes have been used up. Before putting it back, I press the menu button, and the screen lights up. Along the bottom of the screen it asks me to unlock the phone in order to use it, and right above the request, in the middle of the screen, it says MISSED CALL and displays a long phone number that begins +9626.
It doesn’t hit me then, not entirely, and this delay is a sign of either my exhaustion or my feelings for Henry. I wonder offhand where the call is from, but the smell of brewing coffee has reached me, and I’m more interested in that. I put the phone back in his pocket and turn toward the kitchenette before stopping in the middle of the living room. +962—Jordan. 6—Amman.
I take out the phone again and look at the number. And I know, because when I discovered Bill’s treachery I kept looking at the number, trying to find ways for the digits to rearrange themselves to prove his innocence. They never did. Now I’m reading that number on Henry’s spare phone.
“Where are you?” I hear, but it’s back in the bedroom. With adrenaline pumping in my head I replace the phone and rush back to the kitchenette. The pot is half full. Trying to control my voice, I say, “Making coffee.”
“Good idea,” he says. “I’m going to have to hit a club downtown, see if I can’t find some Moroccan I’ve been hearing about.”
By now he’s walking down the hallway toward me, clad in a waist-high towel, smiling, hair glistening.
“What’s wrong?” he asks as he reaches me, two strong hands touching my sho
ulders, then sliding down to my elbows. His breath smells minty.
Everything is wrong, but for him I choose a single tragedy. “Ahmed was killed. I found out just before I came here.”
His smile wavers, sliding away, and then he purses his lips as if he’s trying to keep something in. Is he? “Shit,” he says, then repeats himself. “Shit.” He gives my elbows a final squeeze and turns away, heading back to the bedroom, not letting me see his face. Only now, after that phone number, do I wonder about this. He says, “I’d better get moving, then.”
I want to follow him. I want to corner him in the bedroom and tell him more. Tell him, They told us to take away our spy. They knew. How did they know, Henry? But I don’t do that, because for the first time in our relationship I’m scared of Henry Pelham. So I stay in the kitchenette and pour two mugs of coffee and drink one as I wait for him to come out of the bedroom. When he finally does, he’s dressed, and I hand him his cup. Distractedly, he thanks me. What’s he thinking? Is he thinking of a Moroccan he needs to track down? Or is he thinking of Ilyas Shishani, his controller? Is he thinking—and this just occurs to me—that the one thing he needs to do is to make sure no one captures Shishani, so that he isn’t implicated?
“What are you going to do?” he asks.
“Go home, take a nap, then get back to the office.”
“You can do that here, you know.”
I nod, feeling like the only thing to do is to agree with him. “If that’s okay with you.”
He smiles as he comes over and gives me a kiss that now tastes of coffee. “We might as well get started on cohabitation.”
I smile back and watch as he opens the drawer beside the oven and takes out his spare keys. Ceremoniously, he places them on the counter. I tilt my head regally to show that I recognize what this moment represents.
When he puts on his coat, I come over and, like a dutiful wife, smooth his collar. I’m really very good at this. He grins. “Off to work, honey!”
All the Old Knives Page 14
