Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (21 page)

Paige checked her outfit, nodded at Leila, and strode away, toward Security.

“
…you nutjob,” added Leila quietly to herself.

It was maybe two minutes later that Leila thought of her bag. The thought came to her suddenly, and she knew before she checked that she would find something terribly amiss. She knew because her heart and lungs dropped to her belly.

Correct: Her wallet, her planner, her phone, her laptop. They were all four gone. She straightened up and looked around herself quickly, accusingly, as if a paper airplane had just bonked her in the head. But in two minutes, alone in a moving crowd, the recoverable world slips away from you at a pace. There were no waitresses here.

The laptop had been replaced with a cookie tin the approximate size and weight of a laptop. In controlled shock, Leila opened the cookie tin and saw, along with cookies, a billfold, worn loose at its spine. As if with a purloined diary, she opened the wallet carefully. Inside, she found the documents of a person called Lola Montes who, it seemed, shared some of the general outlines of Leila’s life. Lola was a coastal North American with credit cards and a gym membership and business cards from restaurants. Lola had a U.S. passport, a California driver’s license, and a New York Public Library card. Lola looked a lot like Leila. Lola had a lot of cash: three hundred euros, one hundred pounds, two hundred and fifty dollars. Leila poked deeper into the wallet and found a napkin with numbers written on it, the corner of a postcard from Cancun, a rubber band around a little sachet of—what, ashes?—from India or somewhere. And in the wallet’s third layer, a picture of Leila’s brother, Dylan, and Scratch, her long-gone cat.

It was only then that Leila returned to the photo IDs. Okay, Lola didn’t look like Leila. Lola
was
Leila. Or Leila was Lola.

So. She was sitting in an airport holding a stack of high-grade forged documents, having been stripped of her own legitimate ones by an all-girl pickpocketing team.

It would be
very
hard to explain.

Still, they had given her something like a thousand dollars. Her own wallet had probably had about two hundred dollars in it. So this wasn’t larceny. Maybe this was exploding money or something. Or, oh yeah, maybe she was being recruited by a global counterconspiracy that was sending her to Dublin to meet its upper officers.

A calm descended upon her, and an awareness. She could have led mountain expeditions or been a sea captain, because when things just got fubar, she generally got steely and clearheaded. When Dylan had sliced his arm open that time he fell through the coffee table, it had been the fifteen-year-old Leila who wrapped it in a towel and kept it elevated and compressed. Her dad went all ashen and unhelpful; she told him to drive. Her mom just kept wailing; Leila told her to please be quiet.

So Leila knew at once that her best move would be to go along with this until some better option opened up. The possibility existed that she had already been played. If they could pickpocket and then put-pocket her after she went through security but before the plane, they could probably have her detained or worse, if that was their aim.

The cheapo Nokia chirruped and buzzed on the plastic table like a fly caught in a web:
1 New Message,
the screen said. She pressed View.

T
here was a problem with Mark’s ticket to Rotterdam, which was where he was supposed to board
Sine Wave
. The problem with the ticket was that the SineCo representative at Heathrow didn’t have it. It was this man’s job to meet and see to the lounging, ground-transportation, and onward-travel needs of any of SineCo’s executives, upper-level contractors, and guests who came through Heathrow.

“Mr. Deveraux, can I take you to the lounge? I’ll come back for you there when I get this straightened out?” Mark asked if he could use SineCo’s private Heathrow lounge, which was behind about three unmarked doors and usually satisfied even the most self-important trans-Heathrites. But that room was in use, apparently. So the rep ordered up a golf cart and he and Mark sat facing backward on the rear seat. As the cart whizzed along the polished concourses, Mark saw things recede before they had approached and was put in mind of near-death experiences he’d read about. A luggage store zipped forward from behind his head and was whisked backward into his past. A yogurt kiosk was similarly birthed and then faded and winked out. The cart beeped like a satellite. They arrived at one of the fancier first-class lounges, and the rep saw Mark in and promised to return once the Rotterdam thing was straightened out. It was ten o’clock in the morning.

He collected three newspapers, a
Superyachts Monthly,
two bottles of water, and four croissants. He settled himself into a leather couch. He scoped out his fellow loungers, checking to see if anyone had recognized him. He ordered a cup of coffee from the steward and tried not to eat his croissants too quickly.

Mark dialed Straw’s main gatekeeper, Nils. He got no answer, so he texted:
Glitch in Rotterdam meeting? Waiting at Heathrow. Pls advise.
He was going to stay sober today.

Mark looked at the crossword in the paper, but it was a grueling Friday puzzle, and his eyesight was kind of swimming from lack of nicotine and too much coffee. He ordered a glass of tomato juice from the steward, and then said, as if it were the first time the idea had ever occurred to him, “On second thought, why don’t you make that a Bloody Mary.” He moved from the crossword to the Jumble. He made sure that no one had a sight line on what he was doing. The Jumble was for precocious children and retirees.

“What the lazy aphorist needed to finish the job” was the motto over the little illustration of a man sitting stumped at a desk, huge books piled on either side of him. The cartoonist had managed to convey the fact that the man was a blocked writer; something desperate about the eyes. The answer was a three-word phrase: one letter, four letters, three letters.

With the Jumble, you unscramble jumbled words and take the circled letters from the unscrambled words and use those letters to construct the phrase that answers the riddle in the motto above the picture. The trick was to kind of blur your eyes when you first looked at the jumbled word you were trying to decipher. You had to sneak up on the letters; notice them before you read the word; you had to remember how words looked before you could read.

KWHCA
.

Whack
. Just like that. Mark carefully inked the letters into the little boxes and extracted the
C,
 the
K,
 and the
W
,
which had ended up within circles.

It was like Step Three: Notice Everything Anew. Though, come to think of it, it was also a bit like Step Five: Stay Open to the Possibilities. Yeah, the steps did kind of run together, like those of a bad dancer.

SMAHUB
. This one resisted Mark’s eye-blurring trick.
Bumhas?
No, not a word.
Shambu?

A beautiful girl walked into the lounge. She went to the little concierge desk, not looking entitled enough. The woman at the desk examined her ticket, a trace of disdain apparent in her manner. The girl had a rolling suitcase and was dressed like she had come from somewhere hot. She was maybe five foot four. The fittings and furniture in the lounge, which were king-size, made her look like a waif. She made straight for the bar. Parked her rolly suitcase, mounted a bar stool.

Mabshu?
Oh, come on, this was ridiculous. He was a public intellectual, for Chrissake. He moved on.
VARESH
.
Ravesh!
No.
Sharve?
No.
Shaver.
Ha, yes.
Shaver.
Mark took the circled letters of the word
shaver
—
S
and
A
—and scribbled them at the bottom of the page. His Bloody Mary arrived, and Mark sipped, sipped, and then drained it. He tried to casually place the empty glass outside his little zone of executive kerfuffle.

It was after his second drink that he decided to start fetching his own Bloody Marys from the bar. That steward was a little too on the ball for his liking. Plus, the girl at the bar had not turned around. Mark strode up to the bar and ordered another drink. He placed himself near the girl, but not too near. “You can skip the celery stick,” he told the barman, who was Indian or Pakistani or Sri Lankan or something. “The celery stick is a bit much, don’t you think?” He addressed this to the girl, who had apparently barely registered his presence beside her.

“Hmm?” she said, and she met his gaze briefly. Where could she be from? Even just the
hmm
told him she spoke American, but she was something other than white. “Yeah, a bit much,” she said. She returned to the notebook she was reading and writing in.

Fine, then. It was while returning to his perch that he noticed an older woman walking toward the back of the lounge with a pack of cigarettes.

What was this? Could there be…? Yes, there
was
a smoking lounge attached to this lounge. The rich world was still surprising him. You could smoke…
inside an airport
. He put his drink down by his seat and ambled pointedly toward what turned out to be a negative-pressure conservatory-type thing labeled, romantically,
Fumoir
. Would wonders never cease? The problem now was that he had no tobacco. There was only one other lounger in the
fumoir,
the woman whom he had followed in. He bummed a smoke from her and lifted two extra from the back of the pack. She was Israeli. Mark heard all about her granddaughter in New York while he sucked the life out of a slender cigarette. The low drone of the extractor system made the lady hard to hear. Plus her accent didn’t help. And it was a smoking room, the fancy name notwithstanding, and smelled like it; no amount of expensive up-dressing could disguise that.

In the silent outside beyond the frosted glass of the
fumoir,
the sun made a shimmer of things, and little trains of luggage carts snaked down painted-on tarmac-avenues. The tires on planes: Were they little or big? They looked amusingly diminutive beneath the planes but massive next to the jumpsuited men who serviced them. Maybe the sixth or seventh step could be something like Keep It in Perspective. Or better yet: Choose Your Perspective.

He returned to his spot in the lounge. Shoot, he had left the Jumble faceup on his papers. Actually, he’d left all his stuff unguarded. Is that just one of the things you can do when you are among the first class? He hoped so. But, no, there must still be a type of thief who operates within the wealth-saddled set, lifting merch from his hosts and fellow travelers: the cigarette case from the end table, the Rolex from the gym locker, the Vicodin from the medicine cabinet. He should be more careful. Step Nine: Watch Your Fucking Back.

He returned to the Jumble.
LAVNI.
He squinched up his eyes. Nothing.

The girl at the bar was still rabbiting away in her notebook. It was strange that she had been so cool to his opening. Not strange because he was all that or anything. But who doesn’t have time for a little interaction? Sheesh.
Vilan?
No.
Laniv?
No.
Nilav?
No.
Anvil?
Wait, was
anvil
a word? Yes, that thing you just hammer away on. Ha—three words expertly unjumbled. But
anvil
yielded only an
A,
which he scribbled down next to the other letters he had netted. What would a lazy aphorist need? And what the fuck was
shambu? Hubasm?

His phone chirruped at him. It was a message from Nils.
Meeting location changed. Await instructions.

Well, excuse me
, he thought. A different kind of waiting, when you don’t know how long you’ll be waiting. He closed his eyes, just to rest, not to sleep. As if providing a living caution against public sleeping, an overweight man snored at random intervals in the corner, drool like beetle silk strung between his slack lower lip and the fist-size knot of his iridescent purple tie.

Maybe
busham
was a kind of plant, or a unit of measurement. Hadn’t he heard something like that? Like, twelve bushams to a furlong or something? He stood up and neatened his piles of papers and put on his jacket and buckled his valise and put it in his seat. He ate a breath mint. He walked to the bar.

“Make me another one of these, would you?” he said to the barman. Then, turning to the girl, he said, “Have you ever heard of the word
busham?
”

“Excuse me?” she said.

“
Busham. B-u-s-h-a-m?
Is that a word? Like a measure of something?”

“I think you mean
bushel,
” she said. She might be younger than him, but she was worn already around the eyes, or maybe just recently underslept. She was ragged but beautiful in the way that hair-gel ads were always trying to sell raggedness as beautiful.

“Ah. Yes.
Bushel.
” Mark bit his lower lip.

The girl returned to her notebook, but then seemed to reconsider. “Why do you ask?” she said. Whether this was out of patronizing politeness or genuine interest, Mark could not tell. He could work with either, for now.

“Oh, it’s just this thing I have to copyedit. And I think there’s a misprint.”

“It sounds like
ambush,
but swapped around,” she said.

Well, hell:
ambush
. “Yeah,
ambush,
” he said. “Thanks.”

“No problem.”

The barman had stuck a stalk of celery in Mark’s drink. “Oh, it’s fine like that,” Mark said, but not before the man had flung the celery stalk in the bar sink so that it suddenly seemed as if Mark was saying that the barman needn’t make the whole drink all over again; as if he, Mark, were forgiving the celery contagion. He realized this made him look like an asshole, so he was especially grateful upon receipt of his drink and made a stupid
mmm-mmm
sound when he put the drink to his lips, standing there at the bar. That made him look like a real douchebag, so he left a ten-pound note on the bar and retreated.

Okay, so
ambush
gave up its
A
and its
H
. So he had
C, K, S, A, A, A,
and
H.

Well, the first word was obviously just
A,
the article. Give one
A
to each of the remaining two words.
A wash cak? A cash kaw?

Oh, how he sometimes despised himself. In his seminars, he was always warning against self-pity, which everyone knows was this terrible character flaw, with its overtones of mope and sob and gripe. But what about straight-up self-despising, like, with good reason? Aren’t you supposed to be appalled at yourself sometimes? He meant not just the confusion over the drink order just then, or the midday drinking, or the being stumped by a juvenile word game when he was under binding contract to deliver a book within weeks. He meant his general dishonesty, the part of him that always had to calculate his approach angle to any situation. Presumably, everyone did this some of the time. You can’t just blob around, all id, like a clothed baby. You had to game it. But he had gotten to the point where it was all game. How much better waking life must be for people who did not operate this way. Here was the self-pity part, he supposed, because it seemed to him that he had an invisible handicap, and if buses could kneel for wheelchairs, the world should be able to accommodate him somehow.

That girl looked like his ex, but more exotic. He had half a mind to go back and try to talk to her again. Like his ex, she had a palpable prickliness about her, but that was the kind of wall he liked breaching.

His ex. Thinking about her now made him feel shitty. He’d really messed that one up. What if you got only one chance at something like that? What if you made enough poor choices that your life was going to suck no matter what? What then, self-help guy? Five minutes of thoughts like that began to have a worrying cardiac effect—like the muscles of his heart were snapping; like his blood was becoming thinner. Surely, that was not happening? When you had anxiety attacks, the first rule was Tell No One About Them. Or at least, if you did, describe them in such a way that others were left with the impression that the condition was the result of your being a very sensitive and intelligent person. What you
did not
want to do was make the complaint so that the solution—do not smoke, do not drink—was plain.

The second rule—or the first, really—was Don’t Forget to Breathe, which Mark now saw could really be Steps One through Ten.

What
was
going on in his upper chest? If he cardiac-arrested right now, would that ace steward zip over and defibrillate him? A couple of minutes of controlled breathing while looking out the window at the beautiful planes, and he became less aware of his splashing heart. There was a 747 parked—parked?—outside.
The swannish head of that plane is so graceful,
he thought. Mark let himself sink into the leather of the seat, apologized to his body, made it certain promises.

He did not need another drink. Actually, ice water was the way forward. He returned to the bar.

This time, she spoke to him.

“How’s the edit?” she asked. She had a nice smile.

Step Seven: Put Yourself Forward. “Well, you know, I wasn’t really copyediting anything. I was doing the Jumble. You know what the Jumble is?”