Gregg Hurwitz - The Survivor

And now group one was boarding, and they were out of time. He moved to hug her, and she half started for him, and they wound up clutching at each other briefly, like robots simulating a human custom.

When they parted, he bent so he could look at her directly. “When you were a baby, we got you home and we were gonna sleep you in our bed, between us. But you were so little and I was so big, I was worried I’d roll over and smother you or crack your neck. I was so scared I’d hurt you that I stayed awake all that night and the next, until finally your mom said she needed one of us to get some sleep, so we put you in a cradle by the side of the bed. And then finally I could fall asleep.”

Cielle searched his face. “Why are you telling me this?”

His thoughts roiled; he could find no clarity in the heat of a dozen conflicting emotions. The remaining passengers were funneling toward the checkpoint, an hourglass down to its final grains. “I don’t know.”

Janie nudged her. “We have to go.” Cielle started for the gate, Janie following, rolling her carry-on, Nate watching them walk away.

Janie got two steps, and then she let go, the handle cracking the speckled-tile floor as she spun, and then she was in his arms, squeezing him. “I’m sorry I never went to Paris with you for our makeup honeymoon and for all the times I yelled at you and for us fighting so stupidly and for the time I called you a useless asshole.”

His hands remained raised in the air behind her in stunned flotation, as though he were fearful that if he embraced her back, she’d evanesce. “I don’t remember you calling me a useless asshole,” was all he could manage.

“You don’t ?” Her face was hot against his neck, moist with tears. “You can’t imagine how many nights I’ve lost beating myself up over that and everything else I did wrong.”

“Actually, I can.”

Ahead, Cielle waited at the zipped-back stanchion, ticket in hand, chewing her gum impatiently and tugging on her purple-and-green Seuss-like scarf. The check-in agent gestured, a pert smile hiding her irritation.

Tentatively, Nate lowered his arms to Janie. She remained, firm and alive in his grasp. “Thank you for this,” he said, and let her go.

She turned and boarded briskly, not looking back. He paced a bit before the vast windows as the crew loaded the luggage and unhooked the Jetway. Finally, the 767 pulled out of the gate and turned majestically for the runway. Nate watched, hands pressed to the glass, counting the airplane windows from the front. Row 7, Row 8-and there was Cielle, her frayed sweater a spot of black against the blinding white panels of the jet. She pressed a sleeve-covered hand to her window, and he waved back.

The plane drifted forward, the rest of its sleek body pulling into Nate’s line of sight. In the row behind Janie and Cielle, a pale face loomed into view against the pane. Bullet-shaped head fringed with bristle.

Even from this distance, he could make out the displaced nose, the broad seam of the mouth twitching with something like amusement. Nate’s fists ached, and he registered distantly that he was beating them against the window. Spittle flecked the reflection of his own roaring face.

Yuri lifted a hand in mock farewell, and the plane glided forward to the runway.

“Sir, you’ll have to calm down.”

Nate leaned over the check-in counter. “I told you-”

“You want us to stop a flight? Because you don’t like one of the passengers? Whose last name you can’t even produce?”

“No, that’s not why.” He glanced through the giant windows. The plane, now taxiing to the end of the runway. “My wife and daughter’s lives are at risk -”

“We’ve already left a message for them at the arrival gate. If they are uncomfortable in any way in the air, they can report it to the flight attendants. We have a very competent crew aboard, and-”

The rest of the agent’s response was drowned out by American Flight 4 roaring into takeoff. Nate backpedaled from the counter despondently and watched the 767 mount the mockingly clear blue sky. Onlookers returned to their newspapers and laptops as the plane shrank to a speck.

Again he called Janie’s cell phone and then Cielle’s, but both were of course still turned off for the flight. Arguing with himself, he vacillated between fleeing and staying, rising and sitting at intervals, a liturgy of panic.

What if Yuri killed them en route? Or right upon landing? Nate couldn’t let his wife and daughter spend a five-and-a-half-hour flight unaware that their prospective killer was sitting right behind them. But what the hell could he do?

Flight 4 was now a memory lost to the cumulus clouds heaped at the horizon. Gone. Thin air and all. His lungs felt incapable of drawing a full breath, and for once he knew that the ALS was not to blame. What would Shevchenko have planned for Janie and Cielle when they set down in New York?

He turned from the window, nearly banging into a man standing behind him, facing away. As he started to apologize, the figure made a stiff, horror-movie pivot.

Charles.

He opened his mouth and puffed out a ghostly sheet of smoke from his charred insides. As it rose, he grinned, impressed with himself. “Know who my favorite officer always was?”

As usual, oblivious to the context.

Nate was almost too infuriated to reply. “Right now I don’t give a shit who your favorite officer was.”

“Lieutenant Spick-’n’-Span. ’Member him?”

Nate glowered at his dead friend, barely resisting the urge to inflict more bodily damage.

“One time we were rolling out for recon, and I stopped by his office to grab coordinates,” Charles continued. “He was gone, but he’d left a note nailed to his door, said, ‘In the absence of orders, figure out what those orders would be and execute aggressively.’” He took a step to the window, his fingers leaving red-wine streaks on the pane. “Funny motherfucker, LT was.”

Nate followed Charles’s gaze to the sky into which the plane had vanished, the vapor trail already starting to dissipate. Charles’s ill-timed story bounced around in his head, two words sticking: Execute aggressively. That sounded about right.

He turned and walked briskly away from the gate, passing a continuous loop of storefronts-newsstand, Starbucks, McDonald’s. Just before the escalator to baggage claim, he spotted what he was searching for-a white courtesy phone. Snatching it up and turning his face to the wall, he waited for the operator. When the pleasant voice came on, he said, “I’m calling about American Airlines Flight Four. There’s a bomb on board, planted by the Ukrainian man in the tenth row. If you don’t turn the plane around, it’ll detonate.”

He set down the receiver and, keeping his face lowered, strode the six steps to the escalator. As he descended, he dialed Janie on his cell phone, waiting for voice mail. “Janie, listen to me. I know you can’t turn your phone on till you’re taxiing in, but Yuri’s on your flight, in the row behind you. Don’t look back. Don’t be obvious. But watch yourself. Delete this message now. There’ll be security all over when you land. Get yourself and Cielle to them, and I’ll figure something out by then. Okay. I-”

The question of how to sign off caught him by surprise. He was still searching for words when the escalator sank into the floor and he stepped out into the chaos of the baggage-claim area.

At once the phone was snatched from his grasp, an arm slid around his waist, and a point dug into the side of his lower back, pressing so hard it seemed his skin would pop at any quick move.

He grunted and jerked away, making out only the bill of a baseball cap just behind his shoulder. The arm tightened across his waist so that he and the small man moved as a piece, their bodies in lockstep. Twisting, he craned for a look beneath the cap.