Cost of Life (20 page)

In the course of an hour, Philips Arena had transformed from a grief clinic to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Mothers and fathers and grandparents and friends were now traders, one and all, talking a mile a minute and with passionate conviction to whomever was on the other line of their phone call, and the subject was money. Wire transfers, credit limits, PayPal, Visa. Escrow. Second mortgages.

Sometimes the phone calls became threatening and nasty, and it took everything in Del Purrich's willpower not to intervene. These were empty threats born of frustration and desperation. Hopeless men and women were always full of empty threats.

Del had seen it before.

One of his first major cases had been the robbery of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Well, the attempted robbery. The perpetrators had done almost everything right. They had chosen nighttime over day. They had managed to kill both the building alarms and the vault alarms and they had managed to do so without tripping any of the built-in alerts to law enforcement. They knew which vaults to attack and which to avoid. They had done almost everything right.

Except turn off their cell phones.

And so, when one of the miscreants got a call at 12:44
A.M.
from an ex-girlfriend looking for a booty call, the bank's fail-safe internal sensors reacted to the unauthorized transfer of data accordingly. All doors sealed themselves. The on-duty guards, who had until then been expertly circumvented, notified local authorities and rushed to the scene. By the time Del arrived, the three robbers had been trapped inside Vault B23 for just under ninety minutes.

But it was what happened next that the current chaos on the floor of Philips Arena, this sad chemistry of anger and supplication, so reminded him of. Jim Christie took charge as lead negotiator and tried to convince the three trapped men that the only way the vault door was going to open was if they first laid down their weapons.

The robbers had responded by trying to shoot out the vault's cameras, but that just got one of them shot in the throat during the ricochet. Once their luck had turned on them, it had really turned on them. Now there were only two robbers left, but did they give up? No. They started asking for a helicopter. Safe passage. They asked Jim to have the fifty SWAT team officers lay down
their
weapons.

Or else what? This was the part that bewildered Del. These men had no leverage. What were they going to do? Destroy the contents of the vault? The contents of the vault, aside from the three—scratch that, two—of them was a pyramid stack of gold bricks. How exactly did they think they were going to destroy five thousand pounds of solid gold?

In the end, they never said what they would do. They left that to the imagination of the cops. Del, in his limited imagination, couldn't think of any option these men had other than surrendering.

But Jim knew better and that was why he didn't open the vault. That was why he waited another two hours until the SWAT team was able to access the vent system and flood the vault with tear gas.

As the two men were finally rounded up and carted away, Del sidled up to Jim and asked him why he'd hesitated. After all, if it was a shootout he feared, the SWAT team had plenty of body armor and far more ammunition. Why wait?

“Everyone's got a right to some dignity,” replied Jim.

Del hadn't agreed with Jim then and he didn't agree with him now. If everybody had a right to dignity, where was it? Where was it now, here, amid this mob of frenzied civilians? No. They had been reduced to talking about their loved ones in terms of numbers. Dignity was an illusion and all efforts to maintain it were as futile as trying to stay in the air after jumping off a bridge. It was arm-flapping. It was disgraceful.

This, Del knew, was what lawlessness bred, and the lawless needed to be excised from the rest of the population. And they knew it, too. And for one of the lawless, for Xana Marx, for one of the diseased to try to encroach upon the inoculated…

But that was why he'd joined the FBI. He would be the wall to keep them out. He would maintain order.

But dignity? Leave that to the purview of the rosy-eyed.

How nice, thought Jim Christie. Two Guardsmen were trying to stanch the flow of blood currently irrigating his chest into a red lake. What good soldiers they were. And so young. Only young men could offer such dedication and energy to such a lost cause.

“I think I may have internal bleeding,” Jim whispered to them. “I was head-butted by a Chechen.”

No? Not even a chuckle? Ah well. How funny to be funny now. He wasn't usually a funny man. Perhaps the philosophers were right. Dying really did change a man.

Jim let his muscles go loose. He felt a bit chilly, but other than that he wasn't in much pain. Adrenaline was a miracle drug, and by the time it wore off he would be dead anyway, so win–win, really.

“Boys, tell me true: You think it's too late for me to put on the bulletproof vest?”

One of the two young men—Jim wasn't sure which one—replied with a reassurance that everything was going to be OK. And that was undoubtedly true. In a universe resolutely intent on equilibrium, OK was a necessary given. What a sap of a species humanity would be if OK ever sufficed. He thought about Hayley O'Leary and the physical struggles she faced daily and he had still phoned her up on a Saturday morning of a long holiday weekend and she had still come in. OK may have been good enough for the universe, but it wasn't good enough for Hayley.

He thought about Xana.

Now, here was a woman who had baptized herself with the toxic tincture of a thousand bottles in a quest—a quest!—to find equilibrium and had failed every time to achieve it but, like that poor fool Sisyphus, she continued at it, day after day until the last syllable of her car hitting a house. Had Jim ever met anyone so vehemently at odds with the universe? Was that what he found so enticing?

In his peripheral vision, he could see her sitting several yards away. Someone was questioning her. No, she hadn't been hit. Yes, the attack came without warning. And what was that last question? Why the handcuffs?

“He did it to her,” Jim called out. “The Chechen. He put the cuffs on her.”

Silence.

Had he been heard?

Had he even spoken? Maybe he had imagined it just now. If the conscious mind was capable of self-deception, who knew what feats of subterfuge the semiconscious mind could reach. He moistened his tongue with what he assumed had to be at this point more blood than saliva and tried to repeat his sentences but his body vetoed his wishes, deciding instead at that moment to contort into a soggy convulsion.

Oh, but he hoped his words had carried. These words, possibly his final words, the final words of a staunch man, an honest man, would be lies.

How terribly funny.

OK.

Maybe it was a trick of the nerves, but Jim's lips appeared to curl into a half smile, and such a half smile it was, so very red with blood, as if he'd just received the most wondrous kiss from the petal of a rose.

Could he hear the murmuring as National Guardsmen discussed the matter of the key?

Could he hear the rifling through fabric as Guardsmen searched—with respectful caution—through the pockets of the recently dead?

Could he hear the click of the tiny key, finally found, as it winked inside the tiny lock inside Xana's cuffs?

She immediately scuttled to her boss's side.

“Jim,” she said, “Jim.”

But he couldn't hear her.

No.

“I'm sorry,” said one of the young men who had tried to administer CPR. His face and hands and uniform were smeared with blood. Xana's mind suddenly flashed on the image of Yuri's face and hands and clothes after the beating she'd delivered to him and she barely made it to the nearest wastepaper basket before vomiting.

She might have sat there by the basket for the rest of her life had she not heard Jim's phone announce itself from his jacket pocket. She looked to the Guardsmen to do something. They looked to her. By the third ring she found the phone. By the fourth ring she answered it:

“Hello?”

Silence, then:

“Xana?”

“Angelo?” She brushed a stray strand of hair from her eye line. “What's going on?”

Around her, the senior Guardsmen shouted orders. They had done all they could here. All further decontamination of the crime scene needed to stop. The area needed to be contained and cordoned off.

“We need to talk to Jim,” said Angelo. “It's about your list. We think we may have a lead.”

“Who's ‘we'? Is Hayley there?”

“Hi,” said Hayley.

“You're on speaker,” Angelo added.

“Hi, Hayley…” One of the Guardsmen snapped his fingers in her face. She needed to get up. She waved him away. “How are you doing?”

“I…I'm fine…I guess…”

“That's good. That's really good.”

“Xana,” said Angelo, “what's going on over there? Are you at the press conference?”

“The press conference? Oh. No. No, we're not at the press conference.”

“Then can you put Jim on, please?”

“No, I'm sorry, Angelo. I can't do that.”

This time the Guardsman, whose general scruff and scar-wrinkled cheeks gave him the face of a scrotum, simply reached down with one of his sinewy hands and grabbed Xana under her arm to heft her up, hoist her over his shoulder, and carry her out of the crime scene.

Xana did not like that at all.

On impulse, she balled her right hand into a fist and launched an uppercut at the Guardsman's actual scrotum. The Guardsman awkwardly staggered back, legs apart, as if he were riding an invisible horse.

Xana whispered an apology to Jim. She knew he would not have approved of her reaction. She squeezed his fingers. Then she heard Angelo call her name from the phone.

“Yeah,” she said to him. “Jim can't come to the phone right now. So what did you and Hayley find out?”

Why not tell him the truth about Jim? Could it be that the moment she said the words, the moment she transmitted the information, the information left her control and became real? If a tree fell in a forest and only she was there to report it, well…

Or it could be she was simply still in denial.

“One of the names on the list, Bislan Daudov—we were able to connect to a recently incarcerated Chechen separatist named—”

“Zviad Daudov.” Xana shifted her legs until they were crossed. “Fuck. Wait, what do you mean ‘incarcerated'? Zviad's the invisible man. The Russians caught him?”

“He turned himself in.”

“Bullshit.”

“No, really. In a church. During mass. Six months ago.”

What did it all mean? Xana glanced over at Giant Nezh's corpse, which lay not too far away. If she'd only had a few more minutes with him…

No. This one wasn't ever going to talk.

Especially not to her.

“Do we know why Bislan and the others were released?” she asked Angelo.

“That's the thing. All evidence that they even exist has been wiped clean off the Internet. The only way we were able to make the connection that Bislan and Zviad were brothers was from one line on Zviad's Interpol page.”

“Except we're not talking about some second-string car-bomber. Zviad helped orchestrate the attack on the Moscow Metro back in 2003. Not only would his immediate family be under constant surveillance but so would all known and past associates, friends, classmates…the fact that Zviad has a brother is not the kind of thing Russian intelligence can just brush under the carpet, not in the twenty-first century. OK. You know who you need to contact? Paul Kelly at the CIA.”

“Didn't Paul Kelly retire?”

“Damn it. So who's the current bureau chief in…?” Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Scrotum-Face speaking to an older Guardsman, probably a supervisor. What a tattletaler. “Listen, Angelo, I'm probably going to have to go soon. Here's what I need you to do.”

“Xana—”

“Just listen. Put Hayley on the phone and take us off speaker.”

“Xana—”

“Just do it, please.”

Silence, then Hayley said, “I'm here.”

“Are you still on speaker?”

“No. Why?”

“Because I'd rather Angelo not hear what I'm about to say.”

“What are you about to say?”

Xana glanced down at Jim. That half grin on his face simply tickled her heart.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “For this morning. I…I should have done better. I wanted you to know that.”

“Wow. Is that, like, the first time you ever apologized out loud?”

“This is why I didn't want to be on speaker.”

Scrotum-Face and his supervisor were goose-stepping toward her now.

“I really need to go, Hayley. In a little bit, you're going to hear some horrible news. Make sure you let everybody know that Jim Christie was a hero. You got that?”

“Wait—what do you mean ‘was' a hero? What are you—”

But by then the two National Guardsmen had arrived to take her away.

After she gave her statement to the lead investigator, Xana was admonished not to go far, but given that the airport was still under martial law, this wasn't really a viable concern. So Xana adjourned to the nearest washroom, cleaned as much blood off her hands and face as she could, and then wandered down to the atrium, letting her still-weak stomach roll at the smell of cooked meat.

The only seat available in the steak house was at the bar.

Of course.

But at least the TV was tuned to anchormen reporting the dismal news. Maybe a touch of schadenfreude was just what the doctor ordered to distract Xana's mind from that lovely, lovely array of labels running along the back of the bar on either side of the inevitable, unavoidable mirror.

“Our sources indicate four fatalities now in that police shooting at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta Airport. Authorities have not yet revealed the names of the deceased. The shooting took place at twelve forty-five
P.M.
on the third floor of the Domestic Terminal, in or around the airport precinct offices of the Atlanta Police Department.”

The anchorman had a clean jaw and confident eyes. Farm-boy good looks. His tie was an American flag. Xana imagined ten thousand carbon copies of him storming the beaches of Western Europe on their way to the jungles of Southeast Asia. Central Asia would come later for him, but it would come.

“As promised, we now take you live to the FBI press conference on the hijacking of Flight Eight Sixteen and the hundred seventy-four lives that hang in the balance.”

The news network cut away from their apple-pie pretty boy to a decidedly less wholesome Del Purrich, standing onstage at Philips Arena. Someone forgot to add foundation and cream to his face; without makeup under those intense lights, the smarmy schmuck looked like a sickly albino. Still, Xana couldn't help but feel a little pity for the man. All his career Del had slouch-slithered toward the national spotlight, but to have to step over the dead body of Jim Christie to get there…

“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Special Agent Del Purrich of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and I am the acting lead investigator in the matter of the hijacking of Flight Eight Sixteen. This is what we know. At six thirty-two this morning, Eastern Standard Time—”

The spray-tanned bartender popped up between Xana and the mounted television. “Hey, what can I get you?”

“You got a lunch menu?”

He passed her the lunch menu. It was bound in red vinyl.

“Just to let you know,” he added, laying on a thick North Jersey accent, “we're out of tomatoes.”

“OK.”

“And pickles.”

“OK.”

“And we're running low on french fries.”

“Yeah, well, the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” She handed the menu back. “Just bring me a burger.”

“How would you like it cooked?”

“On a grill.”

“Whatever. Want anything to drink?”

Oh God, yes. Yes, please.

“Water,” she grumbled.

“Coming right up.”

He walked away.

She returned her attention to the TV, where the press conference had moved on to the questions and answers:

Q: Do we know yet if this is al-Qaeda?

DEL: We are still assessing the facts on the ground and therefore would urge caution before any unjustified conclusions are reached. Next question?

Xana shook her head in amusement. Del always did have the realpolitik doublespeak down cold. The bartender delivered her water. The ice cubes tasted like soap.

Q: What efforts if any are being made to rescue the passengers?

DEL: Any and all operational activities vis-à-vis achieving a peaceful resolution to this conflict are currently being explored. Next question?

Del wasn't enjoying himself up there. None of his top-of-the-class smugness was on display. Well, he had known Jim Christie a long time.

Almost as long as Xana had known Jim.

Q: I have a source who has confirmed that the decision to ground all domestic air travel has stranded approximately eighteen thousand people across the country. Do you have a timetable for them on when the airports might be reopened?

“Yeah,” muttered Xana. “God forbid this terrorist attack inconvenience Dick and Jane's summer vacation.”

To her left, a jarhead in desert fatigues snickered into his Sam Adams.

Xana raised her glass of water and toasted him.

“Awful rude to toast with water,” he said. His hands were quick; when he snapped his fingers, the bartender rushed over like a faithful mutt. “Get this feisty lady a real drink, would you now?”

“That's OK…” Xana said. She suddenly felt warm. “I'm fine.”

“Now, come on, are you really denying a genuine war veteran on this day of days the opportunity to buy a beautiful woman a beer?”

For a closer, the marine brought out the aww-shucks, boy-howdy grin.

And it would have been so easy for Xana to politely demur, perhaps even flash him her sobriety chip, but she didn't say a word. Was this pride again or something else? What caught her tongue? Was it shame?

No.

She wanted the drink.

For fuck's sake, her boss had just died in her arms. Surely she'd earned one beer.

Damn it.

She took out her phone—Jim's phone—and turned it back on.

The screen lit up. She—Jim—had seventeen missed voice messages. This was why she'd turned it off in the first place. She scrolled through the recent calls until she found the number she was looking for. She dialed it.

“Who're you calling?” asked the marine. “Your husband?”

“My sponsor,” she replied.

The person on the other line picked up immediately. “Hello?”

“Hayley, hi. How are you?”

“Are you kidding me? It's all over the news! Is it true? Is he…?”

“Yeah. He's dead.”

“Wait, who's dead?” The marine frowned. Then he noticed the blood on Xana's shirt. “Oh Jesus, were you involved in what happened upstairs?”

Xana held up her one-minute finger and rotated away from him on her stool.

“Hayley…I know it is incredibly unfair of me to burden you with this, but I'm at this place in the airport and I need you to tell me not to drink.”

“Excuse me?”

“Or drink. Whichever you think is best.”

“Are you serious?”

“I am.”

“I…well…OK…first of all, were you hurt?”

“Hurt? No. It's a miracle, really. Does that mean I shouldn't drink or that I should?”

“You're making a joke out of—”

“I swear to Christ, Hayley—I have never been more serious in my life.”

“OK…well, in that case, you're right. It is unbelievably unfair—not to mention irresponsible—to ask another person to make this choice for you—not to mention a
teenager.
You do know that, don't you?”

“Hey, if I were able to process things clearly right now, you think I would have called you?”

“Is this PTSD?”

“Call it whatever you want.”

“Why
did
you call me? I mean, why me?”

Xana rubbed at her eyes. “Do we need to get into that now?”

“You're right. I should probably go…”

“I think I need you to absolve me. I think I need you to either absolve me or condemn me. Does that make sense?”

“No.”

“Well, Hayley, I don't know how else to say it, unless you want me to repeat it to you in Russian or Cantonese or—”

“Why me?”

“I have blood on my hands.”

“So wash it off.”

“I'm being metaphorical.”

“So am I. Look, you're an adult—more or less. You're going to do what you're going to do. You want me to absolve you? Fine. You're absolved. But if you think that means anything, you're crazy.”

“I miss indulgences. Redemption for sale. That was a good system.”

“Yeah, that was a little before my time.”

“It's not that I believe in heaven…”

“You may want to file that under ‘things not to say to a girl who is dying.' ”

“Oh please. You don't believe in heaven. Do you?”

Hayley paused. Then:

“I like happy endings.”

“If only they weren't so goddamn elusive…”

“You want my advice? Here's my advice: Don't drink.”

“Thank you, Hayley.”

“Or drink. Whichever you think is best.”

Xana chuckled. “Bitch.”

“Hey, I learned from the master.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

“Angelo is giving me a strange look. Are you going to be OK?”

And that was the question, wasn't it?

Xana told Hayley yes and they said their good-byes.

Then Xana took a deep breath.

Then Xana spun around in her seat to face the marine.

Sitting on his stool was a middle-aged Indian in a wide white turban. He was sipping at a Shirley Temple. Xana recognized the style of headwear as “Nok,” and therefore placed the gentleman as probably originating from Punjab. She greeted him in Hindi and then looked around the restaurant for her marine.

“He left,” said the bartender, setting down her hamburger plate. “I think you scared him away.”

“Yeah, I have that effect on people.”

He reached for a glass. “You still want that drink?”

“No,” she said. “I'm OK for now.”

Her phone rang. It was still in her hand. She had forgotten to turn it back off—and was about to do just that when she saw the phone number on the screen.

Hmm.

She pressed
TALK.

“Hayley?” she asked.

“Yeah, um, there's a woman on the other line who says she knows you and needs to speak with you?”

Xana didn't have to ask who it was. With the day she was having, only one person could possibly have called. And once again the booze along the shelves appeared mighty, mighty alluring.