same blue-gray hue. The women’s jackets featured the sort of epaulets to which
the major airlines were so devoted. In another place and time, Janson reflected,
they would have rewarded extensive battlefield experience.
One of the women had been speaking to a jowly, heavyset man who wore an open
blue blazer and a beeper clipped to his belt. A glint of badge metal from his
inside coat pocket told Janson that he was an FAA inspector, no doubt taking his
break where there was human scenery to be enjoyed. They broke off when Janson
stepped forward.
“Your boarding card, please,” the woman said, turning to him. She had a powdery
tan that ended somewhere below her chin, and the kind of brassy hair that came
from an applicator tip.
Janson flashed his ticket and the plastic card with which Pacifica rewarded its
extremely frequent fliers.
“Welcome to the Pacifica Platinum Club, Mr. Janson,” the woman twinkled.
“We’ll let you know when your plane is about to board,” the other
attendant—chestnut bangs, eye shadow that matched the blue piping on her
jacket—told him in a low, confiding voice. She gestured toward the entrance to
the lounge area as if it were the pearly gates. “Meantime, enjoy our hospitality
facilities and relax.” An encouraging nod and a broad smile; Saint Peter’s could
not have held more promise.
Carved out between the structural girders and beams of an overloaded airport,
venues like Pacifica’s Platinum Club were where the modern airline tried to
cater to the carriage trade. Small bowls were filled not with the salted peanuts
purveyed to les miserables in coach but with the somewhat more expensive tree
nuts: cashews, almonds, walnuts, pecans. At a granite-topped beverage station,
there were crystal jugs sticky with peach nectar and fresh-squeezed orange
juice. The carpeting was microfiber swank, the airline’s signature blue-gray
adorned with trellises of white and navy. On round tables interspersed among
large armchairs were neatly folded copies of the International Herald Tribune,
USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times. A Bloomberg
terminal flickered with meaningless numbers and images, shadow puppets of the
global economy. Through louvered blinds, the tarmac was only just visible.
Janson flipped through the papers with little interest. When he turned to the
Journal’s “Market Watch,” he found his eyes sliding down column inches of
familiarly bellicose metaphors: bloodshed on Wall Street as a wave of profit
takers launched an onslaught against the Dow. A sports column in USA Today was
taken up with the collapse of the Raiders’ offense in the face of the rampaging
blitzes of the Vikings’ linemen. Meanwhile, invisible speakers piped in a song
by the pop diva du jour, from the soundtrack of a blockbuster movie about a
legendary Second World War battle. An expense of blood and sweat had been
honored by an expense of studio money and computer-graphics technology.
Janson settled heavily into one of the cloth-upholstered armchairs, his eyes
drifting toward the dataport stations where brand managers and account
executives plugged in their laptops and collected e-mail from clients,
employers, prospects, underlings, and lovers, in an endless search for action
items. Peeking from attache cases were the spines of books purporting to offer
marketing advice from the likes of Sun Tzu, the art of war repurposed for the
packaged-goods industry. A sleek, self-satisfied, unthreatened folk, Janson
mused of the managers and professionals who surrounded him. How these people
loved peace, yet how they loved the imagery of war! For them, military regalia
could safely be romanticized, the way animals of prey became adornments after
the taxidermist’s art.
There were moments when Janson almost felt that he, too, had been stuffed and
mounted. Nearly every raptor was now on the endangered-species list, not least
the bald eagle, and Janson recognized that he himself had once been a raptor—a
force of aggression against forces of aggression. Janson had known ex-warriors
who had become addicted to a diet of adrenaline and danger, and who, when their
services were no longer required, had effectively turned themselves into toy
soldiers. They spent their time stalking opponents in the Sierre Madre with
paintball guns or, worse, pimping themselves out to unsavory firms with unsavory
needs, usually in parts of the world where baksheesh was the law of the land.
Janson’s contempt for these people was profound. And yet he sometimes asked
himself whether the highly specialized assistance he offered American businesses
was not merely a respectable version of the same thing.
He was lonely, that was the truth of it, and his loneliness was never more acute
than in the odd interstices of his overscheduled life—the time spent after
checking in and before takeoff, the time spent waiting in over-designed venues
meant, simply, for waiting. At the end of his next flight, nobody was
anticipating his arrival except another visored limo driver who would have
misspelled his name on a white cardboard sign, and then another corporate
client, an anxious division head of a Los Angeles-based light industrial firm.
It was a tour of duty that took Janson from one corner office to another. There
was no wife and no children, though once there had been a wife and at least
hopes for a child, for Helene had been pregnant when she died. “To make God
laugh, tell him your plans,” she used to quote her grandfather as saying, and
the maxim had been borne out, horribly.
Janson eyed the amber bottles behind the bar, their crowded labels an alibi for
the forgetfulness they held inside. He kept himself in fighting trim, trained
obsessively, but even when he was in active deployment he was never above a slug
or two. Where was the harm?
“Paging Richard Alexander,” a nasal voice called through the public announcement
system. “Passenger Richard Alexander. Please report to any Pacifica counter.”
It was the background noise of any airport, but it jolted Janson out of his
reverie. Richard Alexander was an operational alias he had often used in bygone
days. Reflexively, he craned his head around him. A minor coincidence, he
thought, and then he realized that, simultaneously, his cell phone was purring,
deep in his breast pocket. He inserted the earphone of the Nokia tri-band and
pressed snd. “Yes?”
“Mr. Janson? Or should I say, Mr. Alexander?” A woman’s voice, sounding
strained, desperate.
“Who is this?” Janson spoke quietly. Stress numbed him, at least at first—made
him calmer, not more agitated.
“Please, Mr. Janson. It’s urgent that we meet at once.” The vowels and
consonants had the precision that was peculiar to those who were both
foreign-born and well educated. And the ambient noise in the background was even
more suggestive.
“Say more.”
There was a pause. “When we meet.”
Janson pressed end, terminating the call. He felt a prickling on the back of his
neck. The coincidence of the page and the call, the specification that a meeting
take place immediately: the putative supplicant was obviously in close
proximity. The call’s background acoustics had merely cinched his suspicions.
Now his eyes darted from person to person, even as he tried to figure out who
would seek him out this way.
Was it a trap, set by an old, unforgiving adversary? There were many who would
feel avenged by his death; for a few, possibly, the thirst for vengeance would
not be entirely unjustified. And yet the prospect seemed unlikely. He was not in
the field; he was not spiriting a less-than-willing VKR “defector” from the
Dardanelles through Athens to a waiting frigate, bypassing every legal channel
of border control. He was in O’Hare Airport, for God’s sake. Which may have been
why this rendezvous was chosen. People tended to feel safe at an airport, moated
by metal detectors and uniformed security guards. It would be a cunning act to
take advantage of that illusion of security. And, in an airport that handled
nearly two hundred thousand travelers each day, security was indeed an illusion.
Possibilities were considered and swiftly discarded. By the thick plate glass
overlooking the tarmac, sitting in slats of sunlight, a blond woman was
apparently studying a spreadsheet on her laptop; her cell phone was at her side,
Janson verified, and unconnected to any earpiece. Another woman, closer to the
entrance, was engaged in spirited conversation with a man whose wedding ring was
visible only as a band of pale skin on an otherwise bronzed hand. Janson’s eyes
kept roaming until, seconds later, he saw her, the one who had just called.
Sitting with deceptive placidity in a dim corner of the lounge was an elegant,
middle-aged woman holding a cell phone to her ear. Her hair was white, worn up,
and she was attired in a navy Chanel suit with discreet mother-of-pearl buttons.
Yes, she was the one: he was certain of it. What he could not be certain of were
her intentions. Was she an assassin, or part of a kidnapping team? These were
among a hundred possibilities that, however remote, he had to rule out. Standard