Summing up, the cool blonde characterizes it as an unsettling development, if true.
Jae and Skinner are both on their feet, several euros dropped on the table, bags collected, and on their way out of the lounge and onto the busy concourse. On their way to encourage their charter to take flight as scheduled before events in India can progress and the airports be shut down under the possible threat of a cloud altogether more ominous than mere ash.
The Dassault Falcon 7X is full.
Jae, Skinner, a flight deck crew of three, attendant, and six other passengers who give the appearance of being exceptionally accustomed to flying in this manner. All of the others are Indian, or of Indian descent, anyway; two of them speak Cambridge-quality English. There is a familiarity among the regular passengers. This is a commuter flight for them, something they do at least twice a week; leaving home on Monday mornings to go to the office before returning on Friday. Occasional midweek trips home for special occasions. None of them, other than the attendant, does more than nod at Jae and Skinner. A form of caste politics at work even in this environment.
The jet is Aircell-equipped for broadband, voice, and satellite TV. Each seat graced with its own media screen. Skinner and Jae have one between their facing seats, tuned to the BBC. Coverage of international events, cycling back regularly to the earlier reports of what are now being called potentially nuclear-armed terrorists. The sound is off, but no closed captions. Just the ticker scroll of updates at the bottom of the screen. Anyone interested in sound can plug the gold-tipped cable of the luxuriously padded Bose headphones into a seat arm socket.
The mood in-flight, as it had been on the ground when they made their way to the charters gate, uncertain if the jet would be taking off at all, is mildly nonplussed. No one is inclined to react in a manner that might be perceived as outsized. This has happened before, after all, and it turned out to be nothing. Hasn’t it? Didn’t it? Some confusion on this point. It seems as though it must have happened, an air of familiarity pervades the discourse both in the media coverage and in the reactions of the experts and officials who have been dredged up to comment. Most of these being American, as Europe was generally abed when the news struck, and the Indians themselves are avoiding anything but the most neutrally toned statements informing the public that they will not comment on unsubstantiated rumors that might foment panic if acknowledged officially.
Yes, it all seems very much as though it has happened before. Recently and regularly.
But Jae knows that it has not. Terrorists are not in the habit of claiming nuclear capability. Such a claim would be counter to the nature of any true extremist. Self-respecting terrorists don’t make statements about their offensive capabilities in advance of using them, they just blow things up.
No, this has not happened before.
What has happened before are any number of things that feel similar.
9/11. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. London subway bombings. Bombay attack. Madrid bombings. Asian tsunami. European heat wave. Darfur. Somali pirates. Hurricane Katrina. Bird flu. SARS. H1N1. The July war in Lebanon. Fiscal cliff. South Ossetia war. Kashmir earthquake. North Korean nuclear tests. Batman gunman. Global economic recession. Occupy Wall Street. Superstorm Sandy. Deepwater Horizon oil spill. WikiLeaks diplomatic cable release. Sandy Hook Elementary massacre. Haitian earthquake. China floods. Pakistan floods. Indian blackout. Boston Marathon bombers. Midwest drought. Innocence of Muslims riots. Queensland floods. Euro zone destabilization. Mexican drug wars. Arab Spring. Japanese tsunami. Highest recorded temperatures. Syrian civil war. Death of Steve Jobs.
All against a constant background of bombings and reprisals, decreasing probability of economic recovery, energy crises, YouTube atrocities, increasingly massive cyber security breakdowns, rising food cost panics, universal political intransigence, radicalized weather events, collateral casualties, systemic unemployment, and the rising awareness that the presence of men with guns in public spaces is becoming a status quo feature for all countries.
It isn’t, Jae is thinking as she watches BBC, that potentially nuclear terrorists are common, but rather that, conceptually, they suit the times. Of course some group of extremists or another has perhaps gotten its hands on a nuke. Haven’t we been talking about this kind of thing positively forever? Also the resulting sequence of reactions, subsequent responses, paramilitary ops, and what have you. Calls to increase security. Warnings about threats to personal freedom. What it all means. Realignment of world powers to deal with these threats. Yes, we’ve gone through this, we know how to behave. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a call. And there is quite a lot of phone calling on the flight. Business and family, reassurances that both will progress as normal. Until otherwise informed. After all, life on the brink can only jar one’s peace of mind so often before it becomes the natural environment. These times in which we live, private jets to shuttle you back and forth between a Paris office and a Malabar Hill villa, wondrous, yes? Everything with a cost.
Skinner has been watching the other people on the jet. Several of them have lapsed into naps following the in-flight meal. He looks across the small table between their facing seats, over the remains of the excellent cassoulet they’d been served.
“Conditioning. They’ve panicked before. Bad news. Events that feel momentous. But the world is still here. Their world is still here. Positive conditioning. An emergency introduced to the environment over and over. Until they react as if there is no emergency.”
Jae runs the tip of her spoon around the inner edge of a white ramekin, scraping up the last of her crème brûlée.
“Yes. That’s what I was thinking.”
“Everyone is in neutral on an airplane.”
She licks the custard from the spoon.
“Until it starts to go down.”
Skinner nods.
Jae’s phone rings. Generic pulsing tone. Factory setting.
She has to find it in her laptop bag. The volume is maxed and she fumbles with it a little trying to answer quickly before she wakes any of the sleeping rich people around her. Not realizing that she has no idea who might have this number until she is already holding the phone to her ear and speaking.
“Hello? Yes. I’m here.”
“Jae. It’s Cross. You’re not at the Paris safehouse.”
She hangs up and drops the phone on the table.
Skinner looks at it.
“Not, I’m assuming, a wrong number.”
She folds her arms over her chest.
“Cross.”
The phone starts to ring again, still at top volume, vibrating loudly on the hard surface.
Skinner picks it up, presses the power stud, and the ring mutes. He holds the phone on his flat palm as it trembles like a frightened thing.
“It would be helpful to know how he got the number.”
Jae is feeling like hitting him. She wonders how many more times she can experience that feeling before she finally acts on it.
She takes the phone from his hand. There is something judgmental entering the serene atmosphere of the jet. Passengers disturbed in their repose, projecting their displeasure into her space. More impulses to hit people run through her. Then she remembers the feeling of the man’s jaw breaking under her elbow on the auto deck of the boat train, and the urges diminish. She inhales, exhales. Answers the buzzing phone.
“How did you get this number?”
Silence.
Cross clears his throat.
“It was emailed to me. To my personal account. My most personal account. The one I use for family. Sent several hours ago from a Gmail account. I chose not to act on the information until I knew more about the source. I’ve been told, after some investigation, that it originated in Mumbai. Assuming that you’ve seen something of the most recent news, you’ll understand why I’m very interested to know exactly where you are right this moment.”
Jae is mouthing the word email to Skinner. A brief pantomime of typing ge
ts her meaning across. Skinner rolls his index finger in the air. Get more.
“Jae, that wasn’t a statement, I’m asking, with a great deal of concern, just where the hell are you right now?”
Jae wishes there were some way around explosive decompression at forty-five thousand feet. Some loophole that would allow her to open the cabin door and fling the phone into the troposphere.
“People tried to kill us.”
A long exhale from Cross, exasperation physicalized.
“You stayed with Skinner.”
“People. Who work for you. Tried to kill us.”
“I’m uncomfortable, Jae, talking about that kind of bizarre accusation on an open line.”
Jae attempts to rephrase.
“Fuck you.”
A burble on the line, possible ghost voice evoked by the great distance between them, the near-mach speed of Jae’s flight, and their signal’s journey into orbit and back to earth; communication haunted by the technology that makes it possible.
Cross taps something, computer keys, thumbnail on teeth, a brief tattoo of frustration.
“We’ve been finding things. The anarchists are forthcoming. We have computer forensics. Terrence was doing more than profiteering. He was engaged in something dangerous. Not just dangerous to Kestrel but to America. Jae, I’ve checked that Gmail account I opened for you. I see that the email from Cervantes was read. Did you look at what he had to show you?”
Jae thinks about the satellite photos. Cargo container. The payload it could carry. Thinks about nuclear capacity.
“I looked.”
“It’s possible. I know you know that it’s possible. The claims on the ground are possible. We’ve done a very good job so far, the community, NGOs, even the governments themselves, tracking these kinds of materials. Making sure they don’t go places we don’t want them to go. But there’s just so much of it. The cold warriors made so damn much of it. And the goddamn Soviets did a piss-poor job of securing it all while their pants were falling down. So we don’t know.”
“What do you know?”
“We know that there has been shooting. Organized. Not suicidal. Concentrated in a hard point. Defensive. We know that the source of the nuclear claim comes from a native of the area in Dharavi. Someone that is not, as reported, likely to be a terrorist. We know that the same claim has been made by more than one such person. We do not know if the corroborating claims were made under duress. Torture. We know that the Indians are not inviting foreign involvement at this time.”
“But there is foreign involvement.”
Cross clucks his tongue.
“Undoubtedly. Every embassy on foreign soil has someone tasked with intelligence duties. Some countries have several someones. Some countries are riddled with such personnel inside and outside of their embassies.”
“India is popular.”
“India is a nuclear power at constant odds with another nuclear power that happens to share a border with a country where the United States is currently trying to withdraw from a war that is both constantly drifting over that border and increasingly under the auspices of the fucking CIA, Jae. Yes, there are spies all over the goddamn place, and many of them are no doubt trying to find out if these people really have nukes.”
“And if they do?”
“If they do, India will be relieved of the burden of asking for foreign involvement.”
Jae imagines a room in an aircraft carrier somewhere. A SCIF-certified room with very comfortable chairs. Large men with buzzed hair and intensely focused eyes. SEAL Team 6 veterans of the Operation Neptune Spear killing of Osama bin Laden. Looking at the same satellite photos she has seen. Being briefed on the possibility of a Club-K carrier-killer system armed with nuclear warheads. Intelligence on the topic, including her own determination about the container in Afghanistan.
She rubs the back of her neck.
“People tried to kill us, Cross.”
“I’ve heard that several bodies have been found in Germany. Assorted locations. Unless he is among them, I don’t know where Haven is. And, if I did, I am not in a position to change his contract. There were terms I agreed to. He wanted to define parameters. Do you understand?”
She looks at Skinner.
“Yes.”
The attendant is hovering, he wants to clear their plates, Skinner smiles at him. Another moment, please.
Jae looks at her thumbnail. Dirty. Far longer than she likes. With a very sharp knife she could shave it to the quick.
Cross clears his throat again.
“Where are you?”
Jae mouths to Skinner, Where are we?
He looks out the porthole window at the lights flashing on the tip of the wing, looks back at her, and nods.
She purses her lips, unsure. But it seems events have moved beyond the point of caring who has been trying to kill whom. Details.
“We’re on our way to Bombay.”
“Mumbai.”
“Nobody calls it that, Cross. Nobody who lives in Bombay calls it Mumbai.”
“Whatever it’s called, I don’t have anyone there. No one reliable. I need someone reliable.”
“Good luck with that.”
“Jae.”
She looks out the porthole herself, hoping the stars might tell her something. What to do. But she can’t see past the beacon on the wing.
“We’re going. I don’t know what we’re going to do there. Find out what Terrence was trying to do. I don’t know. But we’re not going there to keep Kestrel’s name out of anything.”
Cross, a silence, gaping, and then a laugh.
“Kestrel. Out of anything. Jae. Nuclear capacity. I have a sense of proportion.”
Jae doesn’t laugh.
“Want to know what I think?”
“If it’s helpful.”
Jae spreads the fingers of her left hand, hears the knuckles crack.
“I think you’re experiencing firsthand the potential drawbacks of contraction theory.
She makes a fist.
“This is the real endgame of withdrawing from the concerns of the world. This is what can happen in those lost corners. And your watcher against the chaos is off interpreting his mandate however he pleases. While you sit at home with your dick in your hands. Asshole.”
Again she hangs up. This time he doesn’t call back.
Skinner takes the phone from her and looks at the call log.
“He used an unscreened number.”
She shrugs.
“He wants us to be able to call him.”
Skinner hands her the phone, nods to the attendant, and they are silent as the plates and silver are cleared. Real silver. A perk of traveling in rarefied air. When they are alone again, their illusory bubble of privacy, Jae puts both her hands on the table, palms down.
“Someone emailed him the number from Bombay. A few hours ago.”
It’s dark in the cabin. All but one of the other passengers have switched off their lamps; all of those attempting sleep have left their media screens on. Low flickering light, and the flashes from the wings. One passenger sharing the late hour with them, eating a second helping of crème brûlée and drinking port from a double rocks glass. One of the English speakers with the elite accents, he is watching rugby highlights, occasionally flipping to BBC World or Al Jazeera English, Bose headphones clamped over his ears.
Skinner touches the edge of the table, resting a fingertip.
“The number was emailed about the time I responded to the last bicycle post?”
She turns her head, rubs her chin on her shoulder.
“That fits, yes.”
“So then. Shiva.”
“Little Shiva.”
“Terrence left behind some very detailed protocols for someone. Once he, whoever has been posting in Terrence’s place, Little Shiva, once he or she sent the Bombay coordinates, he or she also sent an email to Cross with the number of one of our new phones. Or both numbers.”
“Terrenc
e wanted Cross to be able to communicate with us. Or us with him.”
“Yes.”
She squeezes her eyes shut.
“I’m tired.”
Skinner eases a hand onto the table, close to hers but not touching.
“Sleep.”
“I should be online. Watching TV. It will help when we’re on the ground.”
“Sleep.”
She opens her eyes.
“When we get there, Skinner, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know. Terrence, whatever he expected of us, help this plan of his, whatever. I don’t know if I’m going to do that. Or something else. Nuclear capacity. Cross said he has a sense of proportion when it comes to stuff like that. But I don’t. A nuke in Bombay? Whatever Terrence wanted to do, expose contraction theory, make up for creating the meme, I won’t let people die. Thousands and thousands. I won’t. I don’t know what I am going to do, but I won’t help blow up a city or an aircraft carrier so Terrence can make a point from beyond the grave. I just.”
She curls her fingers, tight, small fists on the table.
“This is a weird conversation.”
Skinner looks at her hands, scars on her knuckles.
“Yes, it is. Undiscovered country. The place where you find yourself talking about the unknown.”
She uncurls her fists.
“What will you do?”
He looks up from her hands to her eyes.
“I’ll protect my asset. I’ll protect you, Jae. Everything else is just the world.”
Not moving his hand forward, he extends a finger, and Jae does the same, until they touch. In her head, those three words, I’ll protect you. She lets them repeat themselves over and over as she closes her eyes, sleep, finally; the chairs, on the sixty-million-dollar jet, uncommonly comfortable.