Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (38 page)

Years ago, a boyfriend who was trying to make up for some bad behavior had written hundreds of little notes to her and left them around the apartment they shared in DC. He was the drinker, that one, a poet and a plate smasher. Those notes bought him six more months with Leila. But, finally, the affair had left her with a mild distrust of love letters.

Not this one. She recalled what Leo looked like; how his voice had sounded. A key in her was turning. She realized how unfair it was of her to leap into his life like that, demanding something and then vanishing. She hadn’t even given him her name.

M
ark had a Friday-morning flight out of Newark, and when the car dropped him at Terminal C two hours before departure, he was in a sharp suit, with a charged laptop and his wits about him. He was nervous about seeing Leo that evening and about the Nike thing the next day.

The security line had stalled. The guy in front of Mark cursed under his breath, gathered his plastic bin, and moved—shoeless, beltless—to the next line over. Mark saw the problem. The TSA agent in Mark’s line was getting stern with some poor schmuck who apparently had no boarding pass. “Sir, without a boarding pass, I cannot let you through,” the meaty agent was saying. “Sir, you will have to step out of the line, sir. I’m not going to tell you again, sir.”

Mark thought,
Jeez, this guy hasn’t been in an airport in ten years?
But then he looked closer and started listening. The man was speaking Spanish; a chewy, Central American kind of Spanish. He was trying to make himself understood. Mark’s Spanish was poor, but even he understood what was going on. The man’s wife and daughter were through security, twenty feet away from him. The daughter clung to the wife while another agent swabbed the daughter’s wheelchair with one of those dainty little wands. It wasn’t an airport-issue wheelchair, but a more specialized job. The daughter had matchstick legs and a severely torqued spine; her face was bent with worry and pain.

Some muscle at Mark’s core flexed, and without deliberation, he said to the TSA agent, “This man just wants to walk his wife and daughter to the gate.” The agent ignored him. But the Central American man gave Mark a
thank-you
look, so Mark, who still had his shoes on, stepped closer. “He just wants to stay with his daughter a little longer,” said Mark to the agent, “Look at her. It’s no big deal. Just let him through.”

“You have no input, sir. Step back in line.” The agent was about Mark’s age, though smoosh-faced and small-eyed. He had a shit job, but it had one perk, and that was being able to tell anyone—any civilian—to Step Back in Line.

Mark felt his breath go thin. Some line about the Gestapo came to him. But he wanted to get to Portland this morning, and though you could make a point—probably
should
make a point, actually—you were not going to beat Homeland Security while standing in Security Checkpoint C-3, even if you still had your shoes on. So Mark stepped back in line, though he did not drop his eyes while he did so.

Their little fuss had attracted two more agents, one of whom hovered near Mark while the other tried to get the Latino dad to leave the line. People behind Mark were shifting to other lines. The supervisor interacting with the Latino dad wanted him to return to the ticket agent and get something called an escort pass. The Latino dad was saying he had tried to do that; that the ticket agent had told him to ask the TSA. But none of the gloved and badged men in the huddle spoke Spanish.

“Look, he tried that,” said Mark, from behind his little minder, a mousy dude who didn’t even really fill out the royal blue of his TSA uniform. “They obviously told him you people make this kind of call. He got the runaround. Why not just let the man walk his family to the fucking gate?”

“I’m going to need you to stay out of this. Choose a new line now,” said the supervisor, a handsome, mustachioed black man.

Then a few things happened quickly. Mark waved his hand before his face, rolled his eyes, and curled his lips; the international sign for
Oh, whatever
—the same maneuver a six-year-old uses to infuriate a reprimanding parent.

But the mousy agent who was standing near Mark took the wave as an aggressive act and grabbed Mark’s wrist and twisted it about an axis it did not possess. Mark yelled. The girl on the far side of security half collapsed, and her dad made a break for his daughter. A clutch of agents, who had been doing nothing but poke through bathroom kits for years, sprang into action, tackling the dad. Mark, who had two self-defensive maneuvers—the head-butt and the run-away—automatically employed the former on the agent who was trying to bring him down. This did in fact get Mark’s wrist released, as the agent put his hand to his own cracked brow. But then the handsome mustachioed supervisor was on Mark in an instant, and Mark’s arms were wrenched behind him and he could hear the plastic cuffs being zizzed tight.

So this is what it feels like,
he thought to himself as they hoisted him painfully to his feet. The other travelers averted their eyes as he was led away.
Yeah, wait till they come for you,
he thought.

Two hours later, he was still sitting in some behind-the-curtain security office, the plastic cuffs replaced by a single metal bracelet that chained him to a chair. His shoulder felt wobbly and his nose was swollen from its meeting with the floor. But otherwise, he felt fine. Better than fine, because he had successfully resisted the state when it mattered, had walked tall when he was led away. There was blood on his white shirt but not on his gray suit.

His jailer was the black supervisor who had taken him down and who now sat at the desk near him trying to fill out the online forms you apparently need to fill out when you’ve hauled someone backstage at Newark. But it was clear to Mark, even from the wrong side of the screen, that the guy was having a hard time with it.

“Filling out those things is annoying, isn’t it?” he said.

“What?”

“Those forms. It’s like, if you miss one field, they make you start all the way back at the beginning.”

“Yeah, actually, that’s exactly what’s annoying about it.”

“You guys never let that man walk his daughter to the gate, did you?”

“Don’t worry about that, Mr.”—he looked at his screen—“Deveraux.”

“It’s just, you know, if you think you’re making us safer by doing stuff like that…Well, you’re not.”

He stopped typing. He actually looked kind of hurt. “You really don’t think we’re making it harder for the terrorists?”

“Harder?” said Mark. “I suppose so. I mean, if there really is a team called the Terrorists. But that line you guard so valiantly? You know there’s a Cheese Louise and a Sunglass Barn just on the other side, right? If I wanted to get my bomb or whatever into Newark Airport—sorry, Liberty Airport—I wouldn’t be trying to get it past you guys. I’d put it in a sack of frappuccino mix and deliver it to my friend’s Java cart. Or, even better, I’d become a TSA agent.”

“We take vendor screening very seriously. And what makes you think we’d have you?” Then the agent used a line he’d clearly used many times before. “There’s a lot of this you don’t see.” He went back to his typing, but they were alone in the office, and Mark had gotten under his skin. He quit typing. “And you know what? It’s not a team, but there
are
terrorists,” he said. “And when they get close enough to you, you’re going to want us.”

“Yeah, but when the threat level goes to green,
you’re
going to want
us
back,” said Mark. Then he saw the TSA guy almost say something. “I know, right?” he said, divining what the man wouldn’t say aloud. “It’s never going to go to green”—and he shrugged, even with one cuffed wrist the picture of equanimity—“don’t worry, we all know that.”

He could talk like this because he knew something that his jailer did not. If the phone call he’d made two hours ago had the effect he felt certain it would have, he could continue in this line of argument without risk of serious sanction.

The supervisor was steaming. “Well, I’ll tell you one thing, prickface. You made a real mistake when you told me how you’d get a bomb into Newark Liberty International.” He smiled at Mark and started typing again, with feeling now.

Hmm,
Mark thought,
dude might have a point
. “That was hypothetical,” he said. “The bomb-in-the-frappuccino thing, I mean.”

“I’ll be sure to note that,” said the supervisor.

Fuck. What if he had overestimated the effect, or the immediacy of the effect, of the call he’d made? What if the black sheriff here could just add his name to all the no-fly lists?

Tessa had just said,
I’ll take care of it
. Then she’d hung up. How long does it take the first assistant to Parker Pope to extract an associate from an already initiated Apprehension protocol within a subsidiary agency?

There was a knock at the door of the office, and then immediately two men came through it. One was a silver-haired fox in civilian clothes with a laminated tag on his lapel that Mark saw was like the one he’d used as a hall pass on
Sine Wave 2
. The second man was plainer, and subordinate. He was in a TSA uniform and carrying Mark’s valise.

“Cancel that page, Officer Aldridge,” said Silver Fox to the Black Sheriff.

The Black Sheriff looked confused at first, but, after scanning Fox’s ID badge, he stiffened.

“These pages you can’t cancel once you open them…sir,” he said.

The Silver Fox took a Node from his pocket and thumbed multiple buttons. The computer to which the Black Sheriff had been tediously feeding data for an hour shut down in an instant, and the screen winked and went blank. There was left just the tiny whir of the fans cooling the hard drives. “Take the rest of the day off, Aldridge,” he said. “Actually, you never came in today at all. Okay? How’s that sound?”

The TSA guy who’d come in with Silver Fox unlocked the bracelet tying Mark to the little chair. Mark stood and rubbed his wrist the way he’d seen the recently de-cuffed do on TV. The TSA man handed Mark a white dress shirt, still in its crinkly plastic envelope. Mark unwrapped and unfolded the shirt and quickly swapped it for his bloodied one, which he grandly chucked in the office wastebasket.

And then he couldn’t resist. As he tucked in his shirt and buttoned his cuffs, he turned to the Black Sheriff and said, “There’s a lot of this you don’t see.”

“You keep your mouth shut,” Silver Fox said to Mark. “I don’t know whose boy you are, but this is
not
what I do. You trip over your dick again, we will let you swing. No matter who calls me. You understand?”

Mark nodded.

“Okay, there’s a Portland flight in five hours. Until then, you sit in a Presidents Club and do sudokus or something.” The TSA man opened the door to the office and Mark was ushered out into a chute-like hallway that reminded him of the secret warren behind every food court in every mall, which he knew about because of that year before Harvard when his mom lost her job and started dating that asshole and they all moved to his shitty little city and Mark had to work at a Grill Ride in Two Lakes Mall for a meth-head manager and minimum wage. (“Welcome to Grill Ride. How can I be fresh with you?”) It was while working that job that he decided he would climb out of America’s bottom nine-tenths and never fucking look back.

Mark had no interest in the sudoku—he was embarrassed by the arithmetic deficit in him that the game laid bare. But he did have two phone calls to make, so he ordered a double rye whiskey.

First Leo. Mark was supposed to meet Leo that evening. But his flight wouldn’t land until late, so that was out. He really should keep tomorrow night for schmoozing with the Nike people. That left Sunday morning, which was kind of obviously a consolation slot for a weekend visit. Blowing people off on the day of the thing was just the kind of behavior that had left Mark light on friends. Looking behind him, he saw twenty years of not calling people back, of figuring he’d have another chance to correct an impression (or, if not, there were plenty of other people, anyway, people with whom he could start from scratch). So the message he left on Leo’s phone he tried to make super-sincere.
I have a really good excuse,
he said, and
Leo, please don’t think I’m blowing you off. I’m not. Not this time
.

Then he had to call Tessa to thank her for what she’d done. And the scolding Silver Fox had given him made him keenly aware of his debt to her. But when he rang her number, it was Parker Pope who answered.

“Marcus, you old so-and-so.”

“Mr. Pope. Pardon me, I was trying to reach Tessa Bright, your assistant.”

“She doesn’t go in for what you got, Mark.” Then he did his fake Indian—“I thought you were understanding that”—and roared down the phone.

Mark cringed but laughed. “Right you are, sir. No, but I just wanted to uh…well, anyway, no matter, I’ll drop her an e-mail.”

“Did you just want to
uh…well
say, ‘Thank you, Tessa, for bailing my ass outta TSA jail’?”

Shit. “Yes. Yes, actually that is exactly what I wanted to say to her, sir.”

“Well, then, you can say it to me, boy”—fake Indian—“because it is I who am making it happen.”

“Then thank you, Mr. Pope. I am very happy to be out of that spot. Your man is very…competent.”

“That he is, Marcus. That he is. Hey look, don’t mention it. No problem. That’s the kind of help friends offer each other, you know?”

Mark used the beat to take a huge swig of whiskey.

“Just, tell me this, Marcus,” Pope demanded, “why, why, why have you not come to work beside my good friend James?”

Mark swallowed. Too much rye in one go; it rather steamed his head with its sugary rank. His eyes watered.

“Marcus?”

“You mean, sir, why haven’t I started as SineCo’s storyteller-in-chief?”

“Nyyyuhhhhh-huh.”

“James—I mean, Mr. Straw—and I were just still trying to, you know, tweak the position’s, um, scope of work, so that I can be my most effective, you know, self…” Mark should be able to bullshit Pope. Why was he getting all wobbly? “And, you know, we’re just not sure we have it where it needs to be.”

Pope leaped: “Scope’s not where it needs to be? Is that about it?”

See, it was the cheeriness that made Pope present as a psychopath, thought Mark. “Yes. I think that’s a fair assessment.”

“Okay, look, you little shitbag.” Now it was like his voice was crawling out of the holes on the phone—ants from a rotten log. “James Straw wants you to take this job. He is going to pay you lots of money. Now, you apparently think that you deserve more than what’s on the table—”