John Case - Ghost Dancer aka Dance of Death

Good meeting with contacs. You and me, we show good faith, they get it together for us. Okay? This means (you ready? here goes)

Remove shrinkwrap.

Do NOT pull out handels. Do not!

Take to terminel at Dulles.

Now, pull out handels.

Walk away.

You have 10 minutes.

I am in hourly parking lot 6 to 6:30.

Look for Jeep in Row 15.

No show? I go. But then you have a problem. Hope not.

Wilson parsed the words with a deepening frown. No question, the message was authentic. Draft mode was exquisitely private, and even though the words were unenciphered, he and Bo had agreed on a convention to authenticate the messages between them. The first sentence of every communiqué would contain four words. No more, no less. It was prehistorically simple, but it worked well enough.

Falling back in the chair, he raised his eyes to the ceiling. One target ought to be enough, he told himself. One person ought to be plenty. An undersecretary of something or other, or just a derelict. In fact, a derelict would be perfect because there wouldn’t be any publicity – and it would still make the point. Anything bigger was stupid. Anything bigger was overkill.

The more he thought about it, the more upset he became. How would he get away? Not just from the airport, but… all the way away? The feds would be looking all over the place. Unless… unless it was “a suicide bombing.”

Wilson thought about that. You have 10 minutes. Would he? Would he really? And what about Bo? Look for Jeep in Row 15. Okay. He’d look. But what if there was no Jeep?

The room felt uncomfortably warm. A bead of sweat zigzagged down his spine. His heart was revving like a motorcycle at a stoplight.

Get a grip.

The words fell from his lips in a whisper. “You have to make this work,” he said. Then he took a deep breath and, leaning forward, erased the message from Bo, letter by letter. When the box was empty, he typed

Please don’t be late.

and sat back, thinking, I’m gonna need things. Gloves. And a hat…

He thought a while longer.

And a sling…

It’s one sad story after another, Wilson thought, riding in a cab out to the airport. And you have to get past that because, after a while, the stories no longer matter. The faces no longer matter. All that’s left is the event. It’s like…

The Arizona! No one thinks about the sailors, burning, drowning, dying in their bunks. Or the good volk of Dresden, incinerated from the air. The streets of Hiroshima, the trading desk at Cantor Fitzgerald – the dead are everywhere. So you can call it whatever you want. You can call it an atrocity. But in the end it always comes down to the same thing. It’s History.

And as for the dead, no one remembers their names. But Manson and Mohammed Atta – they’re a part of us now, as familiar as the dark. The truth is, after a while the shock fades and even a massacre artist like Cortéz is celebrated as a hero. A bringer of culture, a great explorer. Prometheus, drenched in blood.

The past softens. What begins as a massacre is packaged as news and consumed as “infotainment.” Eventually, it turns into a television miniseries.

But not this time. This time, there won’t be any reenactments. Or any news, for that matter. Just the event. Then nothing. The idea made him smile.

No one remembers the yellow ribbons and teddy bears, he told himself. The snapshots and handwritten notes – artifacts that appear out of nowhere, like mushrooms after a soaking rain. All forgotten. In the end, the walls and floors are washed down with hoses. The abattoir turns into a memorial. Tourists gawk.

Like when that English princess died in France. He was in Colorado at the time, locked down as a Level 1 prisoner in Supermax. But there was a program about it on one of the godsquad shows. People stood in the rain for hours, waiting to sign some kind of “book of remembrance,” at her funeral. He wondered about it for a long time. What did they get out of it? Eventually, he decided they wanted a piece of her death, a piece of her celebrity.

“You need a receipt?” the cabdriver asked.

Wilson snapped out of it. “No, that’s okay.” He took a deep breath. Put on the hat.

He had to remind himself, because he almost never wore a hat. But this was different. This was it, and there were cameras all over the place. So he clapped the Borsalino on his head, pushed open the door to the cab, and stepped out into the slush.

A light snow whirled through the air.

Flight crews and passengers were coming and going with suitcases, carry-ons, and kids. Good, Wilson thought. It’s busy. “Busy” is good. “Busy” is what they want. “Busy” is the whole point.

Moving quickly around to the back of the car, Wilson waited as the driver popped the trunk, then he stepped forward. “I’ll get them,” he said.

Seeing his passenger’s arm in a sling, the driver looked surprised, but figured what-the-hell.

Wilson reached into the trunk and, using his “good” arm, hauled the suitcases out by their carrying straps.

“You want a skycap?”

Wilson shook his head. “That’s okay,” he said, handing the driver a couple of twenties and a ten.

He was standing by the curb with his overcoat draped across his shoulders like a cape. A chenille scarf hung from his neck, which served also as a fulcrum for the silk sling in which his left arm was hung. Taxis, cars, and vans pulled in and out around him, disgorging passengers under the “Departures” sign. A few yards away, a young white cop strolled along the middle of the road, slapping the roofs of idling cars, chiding everyone to “Keep it moving! Let’s go!”

The temperature was just below freezing. Wilson could see his breath tumbling in the air as he stood in the slush, staring at the suitcases. Pull them out. Pull the handles out. But…

The cop was looking at him.

What the fuck, Wilson thought and, reaching down, jerked the handle up from the suitcase, half expecting a thunderclap of light and fire. Nothing. He pulled out the second handle. Nothing again! With a sigh of relief, he shot the cuff on his right arm and checked the watch he’d bought for the occasion.

This was not the kind of watch that complements a cashmere overcoat. It was, instead, an inexpensive digital sportswatch with a plastic band the color of graphite. Set to TIMER, it read 10:00:00. Pressing the button at the base of the watch, the one marked START, Wilson watched the numbers begin to morph, forming and re-forming. 9 minutes, 54 seconds… 9 minutes, 51 seconds… 9 minutes-

Looking up, Wilson swung his head from left to right, and caught the eye of a skycap. The man hurried over.

“Where to?”

“B-A.”

“You got it!”

A thin black man with flashing eyes and perfect teeth, the skycap bent to his task, depressing the handles into the suitcases. Then he swung each of the bags onto a cart and turned to go. “First class, right?”

Wilson faked a chuckle, but his heart wasn’t in it. “I wish,” he said. His voice sounded hollow, even to himself. A soft guffaw from the skycap as the man leaned into his cart, and pushed off toward the automatic doors. Then a whoosh of air, a burst of noise, and they were in the terminal, engulfed by the chaos of the place. The skycap nodded toward a line of passengers that serpentined inside a maze of ropes, curling back and forth in front of the ticket agents’ counter.

“You could be here awhile.”

Wilson shrugged.

“I’ll put these up front,” the skycap told him. “That way you won’t have to kick ’em through the line.”