John Barnes - Directive 51

The ground crew weren’t happy. Guns pointed at them made their unhappiness irrelevant. One or two of them had tried to explain that you couldn’t use auto body paint on an airplane and expect it to look like anything, but the small man with the big mustache and the rage in his eyes had caressed the pistol on his hip, and now they were working fast, painting out the Lion Airways insignia on the 737.

They worked from ladders and scissor lifts, using mops, long-handled brushes, even brooms. The drums of white paint stood open all over the hangar, emitting clouds of strong fumes, enough to make men sick. The mustached man said to vomit if they had to but keep working.

He walked over to look at the three captured Americans; the dark-skinned, short man was dead or unconscious, not surprising after the beating they’d given him. He flipped the motionless man over with his boot toe; the open eyes were dried and dull.

The tall white man and the skinny woman lay huddled against each other. In one of your stupid movies, he thought, you would fall in love, overpower all of us, and escape to save the world, but here in reality, you cling to each other like a refugee child clings to a stuffed animal. It is pleasant to see that expression in an American’s eyes instead of a refugee child’s.

He could see no gain in separating the man and the woman, so he returned to shouting at the impromptu paint crew. Already, the Lion Airways insignia was more than half covered; they were at least a half hour ahead of schedule.

Zach coasted up to the next recycling cart on his mud-spattered single-speed pink girl’s bicycle. He still rode awkwardly with his large bags of plastic bottles; he hoped people would think it was because he was drunk. He threw the lid back and glanced around. The first ten seconds was the highest risk—it wouldn’t look like a real bum stealing plastic. One more look around; surely it looked realistic for a bum stealing recyclable plastic to be paranoid?

Zach didn’t know much about being homeless, and even less about being a drunk. The cheap whiskey he’d poured all over his clothes was all the liquor he’d ever bought in his life.

His heart was pounding. Oh, well… Step One, here we go. Zach dumped his front left bag into the recycling cart—whoever heard of a bum putting plastic bottles into the trash? He mixed them thoroughly with the bottles that were already there, stirring with the yardstick he carried. Wonder if this looks like I’m looking for something?

Step Two was less conspicuous. He scrounged in the recycling cart, looking like any other bum as he filled up his bag, not worrying about happening to take back a few of the bottles he had just deposited there.

He hoped Step Three would look weird enough. He pulled out a Dad’s Root Beer two-liter bottle with a wadded paper napkin inside and uncapped it, retching at the smell. No question, Bugs and DarwinsActor had known their stuff; the inside of the bottle smelled like a fart from a sick cat, and the clear surface was already spotted with cloudy slime. From his coat pocket, he drew a whiskey bottle filled with a mix of beef broth, molasses, and fine-chopped plastic bottles, swirled it, and splashed about a teaspoon into the plastic bottle, taking care to soak the infected napkin.

He carefully left the Dad’s bottle on the top of the heap in the recycling cart; holes would form within an hour, and the solution would drizzle down through the cart.

If anyone in authority asked about the care he took of that special Dad’s bottle, he would explain that it was demonic and he had to sacrifice his whiskey to it and send it away before it destroyed all his plastic.

That made him laugh to himself in a convincingly weird way. So close to the truth, no one would believe it.

“Hey, shithead !”

Zach turned around slowly. Scrawny, red-skinned old white man. Bad leg, visible cataract, about six flannel shirts. “This here block is mine,” the man said. “You don’t take no plastic from it.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know it was your territory. In fact, let me give you a couple bottles from my bag.” Zach handed him two seed bottles; he had more than he would need and was supposed to improvise with some of them.

“That’s real nice a-you,” the man said, “ ’Preciate it.” As he went to tuck the bottle into the huge bag he carried, he caught a whiff, and said, “These smell awful, where’d you get them?”

“Some kids’ party house I think. Think they maybe pissed in ’em. They’re still money.”

“Yeah.” The old man reached out and tapped his shoulder in what was probably intended as a friendly gesture. “Got any money? Want to come in and drink or something?”

“Gotta get me to some more carts,” Zach said. “Any more of these blocks yours?”

“Naw. I ain’t got no block that’s mine. Just people shouldn’t fuck with me, you know?” The old man scratched and squirmed, as if he’d had about as much human contact as he was prepared for. “My name’s Peter. You come by anytime.”

“My name’s Paul,” Zach said. After all, he thought , we’re two guys spreading the stuff that’s going to make the whole world better.

With his face against the window, Samuelson could just see the rising sun. The point of what they’d done to poor Taylor, and of leaving Samuelson with the corpse for so long, and the beating that followed, could only be to make him despair; since that was what they wanted, he’d have to hope.

But not hope to live. He knew in his bones that he wouldn’t live. Whether they killed him or not beforehand, they meant to die themselves. They’d left the door open while they beat him, and he’d seen the big gray metal box, with two of them fussing over it, and the array of fifty-five-gallon drums, in the lounge. He was quite sure that whatever the box and the barrels held, it wasn’t supplies or documents, and their destination—no, their target —was a big crowd, a famous building, or both.

The three strong young men who had beaten Samuelson had left bruises everywhere, and now his back and gut ached, and his whole face was sore and puffy.

They’ll demand that I make a statement for broadcast before we hit, he thought. Almost for sure. That’s got to be why they care about what I’m feeling. I wonder if I can say the whole phrase “Mohammed is sucking Satan’s dick in hell” before they kill me on camera? He was surprised at himself, but only a bit. “New situations call for new insights,” he thought, quoting some of his speechwriter’s best work. Maybe I’m just getting in touch with my inner hawk. Some things are hard not to take personally, you know.

He lay sideways on his bed, chained to a furniture bracket, with two guards always watching him.

He really missed Kim.

He wished he’d been more suspicious, more paranoid—maybe just more angry—back when it could do some good, but had to admit that the too-trusting, too-open way he had walked into this had always been his whole approach to life.

He could see now what Rog had been trying so hard to tell him. If your biggest worry was that the other side might stop talking to you… well, sooner or later, if there was one genuinely malicious force in the world, you’d meet it, and something like this would happen. Once I made myself into John Samuelson, The Man Who Can Always Get a Deal, I was doomed to come out and meet these guys, even though Rog and everybody who really knew anything told me that it smelled bad and they didn’t want to do it.