by Bill Granger
“Who are they?”
“People who got something I want. I told you, this is the part of Europe to be in when you’re looking for new and exotic weapons.”
“What do you want? Not bombs.”
“Better than bombs. When we get our load, then we move to Dublin and start figuring on who our mules are gonna be. And all along, we got to find the target, the right target.”
And he squeezed her thigh beneath her dress again and she realized it was the thought of an instrument of death that had aroused him. She didn’t think she was afraid of him—she wasn’t afraid of any man—but it rattled her in that moment to realize Henry McGee was sexually aroused by terror.
8
Flight 147. There were 286 people in tourist class, 19 in business class, 6 in first class.
The people in tourist class were arranged across three sections of seats. The seats were narrow enough to be uncomfortable to all but the smallest of the adults. There were sixteen children who were also uncomfortable but not because of the seats. Like all children, they had not learned the suffering patience necessary to endure the tedious hours of flight. They didn’t like this at all and squirmed their little bodies this way and that to find some soothing position. Some cried, some talked, some had managed sleep in the narrow seats.
They ate a precooked dinner of underdone veal, mashed potatoes, vegetables of different colors, either lime Jell-O or lime jelly, coffee in plastic cups, and a small bit of carrot cake. There were dinner rolls and pats of butter sealed in foil. After dinner, the movie screen at the front of the cabin showed Halloween Heaven, a film merging the genres of horror and romantic comedy. There were many drinks sold in small bottles, the most prevalent liquor being vodka followed by gin followed by Scotch followed by Canadian blended whiskey.
The seats in business class were marginally larger but were arranged in less crowded rows. Two men in this section ignored dinner (approximately the same meal as that served in tourist but with the addition of a half bottle of very bad California wine) and worked at their laptop computers. One composed a memorandum explaining the market niche for his firm in the new Common Market of post-1992. The other composed incredibly blunt pornography, partially to combat the boredom of the transatlantic flight, partially because he thought he could show his work to the black-haired male flight attendant who showed every sign of being as gay as the computer-user.
In first class, roast beef was served on china plates of a particularly sturdy, cheap design. The roast beef was individually sliced by a man in a toque blanche at the front of the section. There was free champagne, which was too warm. One veteran first-class traveler was asleep, his feet encased in slippers given out by the airline in a flight survival kit that included a toothbrush, toothpaste, razor, and cologne, as though these items would not have been brought along by the first-class travelers. The name of the airline—Euro-American—was emblazoned on the side of the plastic kit containing the gratuities.
There were no children in first class and only one child in business class.
The plane followed the familiar great circle route that extends northwest from the European north coast, across Britain, almost to the tip of southern Greenland.
Those who wished looked down on the winter waves slamming the shore of Greenland. It was November and there was ice on the land and in the ocean. The plane continued to describe its arc as it now turned south and west toward the North American continent.
In the cockpit, the crew of three had finished their meals. They had all chosen the roast beef. Their trays were stacked at the back of the crowded cockpit, which was dark, the better to read the maze of gauges, lights, and computer readings. No one was actually flying the plane in the sense that a driver drives a car. The plane flew itself, and it was exactly six miles behind the Air Canada 747 that had preceded it off the runway at Heathrow at one P.M. Air Canada would veer toward Toronto over Labrador while Euro-American would begin its gradual descent toward John F. Kennedy on Long Island.
The day was clear and calm. Calm was relative at thirty-seven thousand feet because of the jet stream, but calm nonetheless. The business of transatlantic flight is not complicated and its perils are few. The plane followed the plane in front of it just as the plane behind—was it Air France?—followed the Euro-American bird. Everyone maintained intervals. Everyone watched the routine unfold on the computers.
Three hundred sixty-two minutes into the flight, the plane blew up.
The bomb had been secreted in a case of French bordeaux in the front baggage compartment below the business section and between the two swept wings of the Boeing 747.
The bomb was relatively small. Everything was relative when it exploded. Plastic ceiling panels and floor panels shattered into infinity.
Everyone was dead within seven seconds. There was barely time to scream.
The blip of the plane disappeared from all radar.
The bits of the plane and bits of passengers began a scattered descent over twenty miles of winter ocean. The following plane shuddered as it was buffeted by the waves of explosive air, and a stewardess in first class spilled a glass of champagne on a passenger. No explanation for the turbulence was offered to the passengers by the captain of the following plane, who thought it would merely upset them. They would hear all about it in two hours, after landing at Kennedy.
9
The huge, shabby rail terminal in Naples opened onto the sprawling, shabby, beautiful city that tumbled down the hillside to the sea. The atmosphere was different from Rome. The city was slower, perhaps more passionate, a little sloppy like a businessman whose shirt collar is loosened and whose tie wears a gravy stain. On some narrow streets, the smell of urine on the walks mingled with the faintly garbagelike breeze blowing up from the bay.
Henry McGee sat at a sidewalk table of a trattoria just below the train terminal.
He had taken the express from Rome to Naples and he had been waiting for twenty-five minutes. He appreciated the city sights around him and drank them in with yet another cup of cappuccino. It was the middle of the afternoon and the sun was warm. A sleepy early afternoon. A perfect time to make a deal.
The lead story in that day’s International Herald-Tribune was about the mid-Atlantic bombing of a Euro-American Airlines flight to New York. Henry had read it twice. It might have been fate, he decided. The target had been picked for him by some minor-league terrorists who wanted to teach the Great Satan America a lesson. As though the bombing of a single airliner would halt the transatlantic trade.
Henry thought it was a waste, an utter waste. Not of lives but of effort. What exactly would the terrorists get? The point of doing anything—especially doing terror—was to get some controlled result. There would be public grief and private sorrow from the bombing; funerals and denunciations by politicians; big lawsuits and a crackdown on airport security procedures… and then, nothing. The world would go on pretty much as before. Nothing would have been gotten.
Henry knew what he wanted to get.
At that moment, the fat man sat down in the empty chair on the other side of the table.
Henry looked up from the paper.
The fat man had three chins and a face like a bowl of oatmeal. His frog eyes were large and distended and his fingers were sausage links rolled into doughy palms. He wore a tan suit with a grease spot on the left lapel. His collar wings were bent and his tie was askew. He was perfect for the city he lived in, Henry thought immediately.
“How much money did you bring?” the fat man said without introduction.
“Enough to get you interested.”
“Do you have it?”
“Sure.”
“That’s trusting of you,” the fat man said. He had a slight accent that betrayed a Mediterranean—not necessarily Italian—heritage. He tried out a smile that was ominous. “I might have confederates with me. Men who will stop at nothing. They could rob you and kill you—”
The fat man interrupted himself t
o wave his hands in a fluttery gesture of dismissal. “I suppose you thought of that.”
“Cut it out, Juno,” Henry McGee said. “I ain’t afraid of you or the Confederacy and I get tired of reading the same newspaper over and over just to kill time waiting for you.”
Juno stared and blinked. The frog eyes were green and damp.
“You read about the airplane accident?”
“It wasn’t no accident,” Henry McGee said. “Another pea-brained Middle East terrorist decided to make a statement. No one seems sure of what he was trying to say exactly, but it sure got everyone’s attention.”
The fat man chuckled. He wiped his hand across his face to remove a sheen of sweat.
The waiter came out from the restaurant with a tray in his hand and waited.
Juno licked his lips and looked at Henry. “Have you eaten?”
“I came to parley, not eat,” Henry said.
The fat man stared at the menu board in the restaurant window. “Calamari,” he began. “Fettuccine alia mara.” He spoke with reverence, as though he were praying.
“Vino?”
“Sì, sì, bianco soave Bolla?”
He paused, looked again at Henry. “Nothing?”
“Nothing,” Henry said.
The fat man made a fluttery dismissal with the backs of his hands. The waiter looked at Henry and shrugged in a very Napolitano way and turned to the door.
“You made all the right contacts in the States,” the fat man said. He rested his hands on the white tablecloth. “My… business partners have vouched for you. You were in prison for two years.”
McGee said, “I didn’t come here to hear about my life or watch a fat man eat.”
Juno’s pasty face went a shade whiter. He clenched his fists on the table. “I still don’t understand why I have to deal with you to deal with your… clients. I’m known.”
“Well known in certain parts of the world and not so well known in others,” Henry McGee said. “It so happens that you can put your hand on something I want and I can get you payment up front for it. The use we make of it will never be traced back to your… supplier, and certainly not to you. Catch on, Juno, or am I going too fast for you?”
“Poison gas is rarely used. It is proscribed in the rules of war.”
“There are no rules, least of all in wars. This is proscribed, too.” Henry pointed to the headline in the Herald-Tribune. “Decent society frowns on innocents being blown up. On the other hand, decent society has to have a short memory or else everything would go down the drain. So it invents rules and pretends it lives by them. And it ignores terror, which makes terrorism a bit ridiculous.”
“True,” Juno said. He inclined his head. “What do you have in mind for… the product I might be able to supply?”
“Juno, don’t be coy. You supply arms, you supply everything from timing devices to detonators. You are a terrorist merchant and it really doesn’t matter a shit what I do with your product once I get it, does it?”
“It matters insofar as it does not trace back to my source or is used against my source or the allies of my source,” Juno said.
“You mean you’re a square shooter?”
Juno frowned. “I don’t understand that term.”
“An honest man,” Henry translated. He smiled. His smile was very engaging and his even, white teeth were bright in his dark face. “Honey, I’m going to be operating in a part of the world where nobody knows your name and nobody is going to figure out your source. Hell, I know your source in any case.”
“You do,” Juno said.
“Patras,” Henry said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Then I wasted the morning coming down to see you.” Henry got up. The fat man waved his hand again. Henry waited, staring down at him.
“Why are you in such a hurry, Mr. McGee. Sit down.”
Henry took his time.
“Mr. McGee. The weapon we speak of—more properly, the ordnance—is very, very dangerous. Not only in the end result but dangerous to the user.”
“I won’t shoot my foot off,” Henry said.
“What do you know about the… material? A point of curiosity.”
“Patras has developed Hydra. I know that much. Hydra is nerve gas and untraceable in the body after it does its work because it mimics the glue that connects the central nervous system. I know that much. I talk kind of dumb but if you want me to use the big technical words for what you have, then I can do that, too. So stop fucking me around, fat man, comprenez-vous?”
“You are not a civilized man.”
Henry didn’t even chuckle at that. It was too absurd. He waited. The server came out of the restaurant and put a plate of bread on the table. He looked at Henry as though he might shrug again but decided not to.
When he was gone, the fat man said, “If I choose to deal with you, the deal is fifty thousand dollars per liter.”
“The stuff is a liquid?”
“Precisely. It turns to gas when it is heated to seventy-five degrees centigrade. It literally boils into a gas.”
“A simple detonator—” Henry began.
“Fawww,” Juno said, making a gesture of dismissal. “A cigarette lighter. Well, what do you say, Mr. McGee? Fifty thousand per liter.”
“And what does a liter do?”
“You haven’t done your homework, not all of it.” The fat fingers tore the bread apart and lifted the pieces to the surprisingly small mouth. The fat man chewed as though he had all the time in the world. When he was finished, he spoke again.
“A block of London on a calm day. An auditorium full of school children. No, less than a liter. Perhaps a quarter liter to kill six or seven hundred, depending on the size of the space and the degree of enclosure. What do you want me to say by way of illustration?”
“You said the right things,” Henry said.
“Where and when?” The deal done, the voice lost interest in the details.
“Here and now, like I said,” Henry said.
“All right.”
In the literature of secret dealings, there are always complex arrangements. The simple dealing was much more secret. So Henry had argued in his first telephone contact with Mr. Juno.
Henry took out an envelope. He put the yellow paper on the table. Juno looked at it for a moment before attacking the wrappings. He opened it and saw what it was full of.
“Thousand-dollar bills are dangerous. I’ll have to launder these in Switzerland.”
“I didn’t have time to buy an attaché case. Fifty of them. Now give me the stuff.”
The fat man stared through him for a moment and then looked back at the contents of the envelope. “You have no time for amenities,” he said with a trace of sadness.
“Not at the moment.”
The fat man nodded and raised his right hand and snapped two of the sausages. The action made a wet sound.
From across the street, a tough-looking Sicilian sauntered to the table and stared at Henry. He carried a paper bag.
“I didn’t think of an attaché case either,” Mr. Juno explained. “I thought you’d bring one.”
“It’s in the sack?”
“An old Smirnoff vodka bottle. Perfectly safe as long as you don’t drop it on the train,” Mr. Juno said. He muttered a laugh this time, as though his heart wasn’t in it. The envelope disappeared into his suit-coat pocket. “The key is to keep it cool, avoid direct sunlight, avoid anything that would increase the temperature to seventy-five degrees centigrade.”
“Death in a bottle that held American vodka,” Henry said. He smiled. “I like that.”
“Be very careful,” Mr. Juno said.
But Henry was up now, the bottle bag in hand. “I’ll be in touch.”
“We’ll have other dealings?” Mr. Juno said.
“We’ve only just begun, honey.” And Henry was loping up the street, carrying the bottle by the neck of the bag. He had left the newspaper. After all,
he had read everything twice about the plane, and he remembered all the names.
10
Devereaux floated near the ceiling of the hospital room. He looked down at the man in the bed. It was himself.
The man in the bed had tubes in his nose and his arm. The tubes were connected to many things. There were electrodes attached to his head by wax and more electrodes attached to his chest.
Devereaux smiled down at the man in the bed. He wondered if the man was dying or recovering. He considered the question and saw the irony of it: Even if he was recovering, he was dying. Life is just dying. A typically dark thought. Devereaux smiled at his own lack of compassion for the human condition. Yes, that was it exactly. He had no passion, not for life or for death. It made him so detached that he could not speak of it.
The problem, Devereaux decided as he floated slowly around the darkened room, was that he could not say the things that were in his heart.
He was certain he had been human at one time. He could bleed and even feel loss. He was a man after all but he never considered himself that way. These things were unspoken because he could not reveal one crack in the armor coating of his soul. Why not? Because that single act of weakness would destroy him.
Why did it matter now? He was clearly out of his body, and in a little while, his body would cease and then he would cease. There was nothing beyond the end because the end justified its own means. In this case, life. Devereaux smiled at his jaded cleverness. He could have been a very clever man if he had stayed at Columbia University as a teacher, if he had merely dreamed his Asian dreams instead of realizing them, if he had not become an intelligence officer (as they put it) and gone to war for Lucky Strike. Very clever. All those clever thighs seated in the first row, longish skirts back then at the beginning of the 1960s, but tight enough to reveal all the secret teacherly lusts. Devereaux was prematurely gray and he had compelling gray eyes. How can I get an A, Professor Devereaux? asked the comely thighs. The same way Hester Prynne did, replied the professor. Ah, hell. What were the uses of memory of everything except to burden the soul unto death?
