Noah Hawley - Before the Fall

Inside, Gil remained standing, placing himself by the open door. He was a big man — six foot two — but thin, and somehow found a place in the narrow entryway that kept him out of the aisle as passengers and crew settled in for the flight.

“The second party has arrived,” said a voice in his earpiece, and through the door Gil could see Ben and Sarah Kipling on the tarmac, showing ID to the advance men. Then Gil felt a presence off his right shoulder and turned. It was the flight attendant holding a tray.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “did you want some champagne before we take off, or — can I get you something?”

“No,” he said. “Tell me your name?”

“I’m Emma — Lightner.”

“Thank you, Emma. I’m providing security for the Batemans. May I speak to your captain?”

“Of course. He’s — I think he’s doing his walk-around. Should I ask him to speak to you when he comes back?”

“Please.”

“Okay,” she said. Clearly, Gil felt, something was making her nervous. But sometimes the presence of an armed man on a plane did that to people. “I mean, can I get you anything, or—”

He shook his head, turned away, because now the Kiplings were climbing the front stairs of the plane. They had been fixtures at Bateman events over the years, and Gil knew them on sight. He nodded as they entered, but moved his gaze quickly to deter conversation. He heard them greet the others on the plane.

“Darling,” said Sarah. “I love your dress.”

At that moment the captain, James Melody, appeared at the foot of the stairs.

“Did you see the fucking game?” Kipling said in a blustery voice. “How does he not catch that ball?”

“Don’t get me started,” said Condor.

“I mean, I could have caught that fucking ball and I’ve got French toast hands.”

Gil moved to the top of the stairs. The fog was thicker now, blowing in trails.

“Captain,” said Gil. “I’m Gil Baruch with Enslor Security.”

“Yes,” said Melody, “they told me there’d be a detail.”

He had a slight, unplaceable accent, Gil realized. British maybe or South African, but recycled through America.

“You haven’t worked with us before,” he said.

“No, but I’ve worked with a lot of security outfits. I know the routine.”

“Good. So you know if there’s a problem with the plane or any change in the flight plan I’ll need the copilot to tell me right away.”

“Absolutely,” said Melody. “And you heard we had a change in first officer?”

“Charles Busch is the new man, yes?”

“That’s right.”

“And you’ve flown with him before?”

“Once. He’s not Michelangelo, but he’s solid.”

Melody paused for a moment. Gil could sense he wanted to say more.

“There’s no such thing as an insignificant detail,” he told the pilot.

“No, just — I think there may be some history between Busch and our flight attendant.”

“Romantic?”

“Not sure. Just the way she acts around him.”

Gil thought about that.

“Okay,” he said. “Thank you.”

He turned and went back inside, glancing into the cockpit as he did. Inside, Busch was in the copilot’s seat, eating a plastic-wrapped sandwich. He looked up and met Gil’s eye and smiled. He was a young man, clean-cut but with a slight glaze to him — he’d shaved yesterday, not today, his hair was short, but unbrushed — handsome. Gil had to watch him for only a moment to know that he’d been an athlete at some point in his life, that he’d been popular with girls since childhood, and that he liked the way it made him feel. Then Gil was turning back to the main cabin. He saw the flight attendant, Emma, approaching with an empty tray.

He gestured to her with one finger. Come here .

“Hi,” she said.

“Is there an issue I should know about?”

She frowned.

“I’m not—”

“Between you and Busch, the copilot.”

She flushed.

“No. He’s not — that’s—”

She smiled.

“Sometimes they like you,” she said. “And you have to say no.”

“That’s all?”

She fixed her hair self-consciously, aware that she had drink orders to fill.

“We flew together before. He likes to flirt — with all the girls, not just — but it’s fine. I’m fine.”

A moment.

“And you’re here,” she said, “so—”

Gil thought about that. It was his job to assess — a darkened doorway, the sound of footsteps — he was, by necessity, a connoisseur of people. He had developed his own system for knowing the types — the brooder, the nervous talker, the irascible victim, the bully, the sprite — and within those types had developed subtypes and patterns that signaled possible shifts in anticipated behavior — the circumstances under which the nervous talker might become the brooder, and then the bully.

Emma smiled at him again. Gil thought about the copilot, the half-eaten sandwich, the captain’s words. Travel time was just under an hour, gate-to-gate. He thought about Kipling’s indictment, about the case-closed kidnapping of Robin. He thought about everything that could go wrong, no matter how far-fetched, running it all through the gray matter abacus that had made him a legend. He thought about Moshe Dayan’s eye and his father’s drinking, about his brothers’ deaths, each in turn, and the death of his sister. He thought about what it meant to live your life as an echo, a shadow, always standing behind a man and his light. He had scars he wouldn’t discuss. He slept with his finger on the trigger of a Glock. He knew that the world was an impossibility, that the state of Israel was an impossibility, that every day men woke and put on their boots and went off to do the impossible no matter what it might be. This was the hubris of mankind, to rally in the face of overwhelming odds, to thread the needle and climb the mountain and survive the storm.

He thought of all this in the time it took the flight attendant to pass, and then he got on the radio and told command that they were good to go.

Scott drives north, paralleling the Hudson past Washington Heights and Riverdale. Urban walls give way to trees and low-slung towns. Traffic stalls, then abates, and he takes the Henry Hudson Parkway past the low mall clot of central Yonkers, shifting to Route 9 heading up through Dobbs Ferry, where American revolutionaries once camped in force, probing the Manhattan border for British weakness. He rides with the radio off, listening to the slush of his tires on the rain-slick road. A late-summer thunderstorm has moved through in the last few hours, and he navigates the tail end of it, windshield wipers moving in time.

He is thinking about the wave. Its silent rumble. The loom of it. A towering hump of ocean brine exposed by moonlight, sneaking up on them from the rear, like a giant from a children’s story. Eerie and soundless it came, an enemy without soul or agency. Nature at its most punishing and austere. And how he grabbed the boy and dove.

His mind shifts to the image of cameras — leering mechanically, thrust forward on anonymous shoulders, judging with their unblinking convex eyes. Scott thinks of the lights in his face, the questions overlapping, becoming a wall. Were the cameras a tool for the advancement of man, he wonders, or was man a tool for the advancement of the cameras? We carry them , after all, valeting them from place to place, night and day, photographing everything we see. We believe we have invented our machine world to benefit ourselves, but how do we know we aren’t here to serve it? A camera must be aimed to be a camera. To service a microphone, a question must be asked. Twenty-four hours a day, frame after frame, we feed the hungry beast, locked in perpetual motion as we race to film it all.