David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

So this is what it feels like, he thought to himself as they hoisted him painfully to his feet. The other travelers averted their eyes as he was led away. Yeah, wait till they come for you, he thought.

Two hours later, he was still sitting in some behind-the-curtain security office, the plastic cuffs replaced by a single metal bracelet that chained him to a chair. His shoulder felt wobbly and his nose was swollen from its meeting with the floor. But otherwise, he felt fine. Better than fine, because he had successfully resisted the state when it mattered, had walked tall when he was led away. There was blood on his white shirt but not on his gray suit.

His jailer was the black supervisor who had taken him down and who now sat at the desk near him trying to fill out the online forms you apparently need to fill out when you’ve hauled someone backstage at Newark. But it was clear to Mark, even from the wrong side of the screen, that the guy was having a hard time with it.

“Filling out those things is annoying, isn’t it?” he said.

“What?”

“Those forms. It’s like, if you miss one field, they make you start all the way back at the beginning.”

“Yeah, actually, that’s exactly what’s annoying about it.”

“You guys never let that man walk his daughter to the gate, did you?”

“Don’t worry about that, Mr.”—he looked at his screen—“Deveraux.”

“It’s just, you know, if you think you’re making us safer by doing stuff like that…Well, you’re not.”

He stopped typing. He actually looked kind of hurt. “You really don’t think we’re making it harder for the terrorists?”

“Harder?” said Mark. “I suppose so. I mean, if there really is a team called the Terrorists. But that line you guard so valiantly? You know there’s a Cheese Louise and a Sunglass Barn just on the other side, right? If I wanted to get my bomb or whatever into Newark Airport — sorry, Liberty Airport — I wouldn’t be trying to get it past you guys. I’d put it in a sack of frappuccino mix and deliver it to my friend’s Java cart. Or, even better, I’d become a TSA agent.”

“We take vendor screening very seriously. And what makes you think we’d have you?” Then the agent used a line he’d clearly used many times before. “There’s a lot of this you don’t see.” He went back to his typing, but they were alone in the office, and Mark had gotten under his skin. He quit typing. “And you know what? It’s not a team, but there are terrorists,” he said. “And when they get close enough to you, you’re going to want us.”

“Yeah, but when the threat level goes to green, you’re going to want us back,” said Mark. Then he saw the TSA guy almost say something. “I know, right?” he said, divining what the man wouldn’t say aloud. “It’s never going to go to green”—and he shrugged, even with one cuffed wrist the picture of equanimity—“don’t worry, we all know that.”

He could talk like this because he knew something that his jailer did not. If the phone call he’d made two hours ago had the effect he felt certain it would have, he could continue in this line of argument without risk of serious sanction.

The supervisor was steaming. “Well, I’ll tell you one thing, prickface. You made a real mistake when you told me how you’d get a bomb into Newark Liberty International.” He smiled at Mark and started typing again, with feeling now.

Hmm, Mark thought, dude might have a point . “That was hypothetical,” he said. “The bomb-in-the-frappuccino thing, I mean.”

“I’ll be sure to note that,” said the supervisor.

Fuck. What if he had overestimated the effect, or the immediacy of the effect, of the call he’d made? What if the black sheriff here could just add his name to all the no-fly lists?

Tessa had just said, I’ll take care of it . Then she’d hung up. How long does it take the first assistant to Parker Pope to extract an associate from an already initiated Apprehension protocol within a subsidiary agency?

There was a knock at the door of the office, and then immediately two men came through it. One was a silver-haired fox in civilian clothes with a laminated tag on his lapel that Mark saw was like the one he’d used as a hall pass on Sine Wave 2 . The second man was plainer, and subordinate. He was in a TSA uniform and carrying Mark’s valise.

“Cancel that page, Officer Aldridge,” said Silver Fox to the Black Sheriff.

The Black Sheriff looked confused at first, but, after scanning Fox’s ID badge, he stiffened.

“These pages you can’t cancel once you open them…sir,” he said.

The Silver Fox took a Node from his pocket and thumbed multiple buttons. The computer to which the Black Sheriff had been tediously feeding data for an hour shut down in an instant, and the screen winked and went blank. There was left just the tiny whir of the fans cooling the hard drives. “Take the rest of the day off, Aldridge,” he said. “Actually, you never came in today at all. Okay? How’s that sound?”

The TSA guy who’d come in with Silver Fox unlocked the bracelet tying Mark to the little chair. Mark stood and rubbed his wrist the way he’d seen the recently de-cuffed do on TV. The TSA man handed Mark a white dress shirt, still in its crinkly plastic envelope. Mark unwrapped and unfolded the shirt and quickly swapped it for his bloodied one, which he grandly chucked in the office wastebasket.

And then he couldn’t resist. As he tucked in his shirt and buttoned his cuffs, he turned to the Black Sheriff and said, “There’s a lot of this you don’t see.”

“You keep your mouth shut,” Silver Fox said to Mark. “I don’t know whose boy you are, but this is not what I do. You trip over your dick again, we will let you swing. No matter who calls me. You understand?”

Mark nodded.

“Okay, there’s a Portland flight in five hours. Until then, you sit in a Presidents Club and do sudokus or something.” The TSA man opened the door to the office and Mark was ushered out into a chute-like hallway that reminded him of the secret warren behind every food court in every mall, which he knew about because of that year before Harvard when his mom lost her job and started dating that asshole and they all moved to his shitty little city and Mark had to work at a Grill Ride in Two Lakes Mall for a meth-head manager and minimum wage. (“Welcome to Grill Ride. How can I be fresh with you?”) It was while working that job that he decided he would climb out of America’s bottom nine-tenths and never fucking look back.

Mark had no interest in the sudoku — he was embarrassed by the arithmetic deficit in him that the game laid bare. But he did have two phone calls to make, so he ordered a double rye whiskey.

First Leo. Mark was supposed to meet Leo that evening. But his flight wouldn’t land until late, so that was out. He really should keep tomorrow night for schmoozing with the Nike people. That left Sunday morning, which was kind of obviously a consolation slot for a weekend visit. Blowing people off on the day of the thing was just the kind of behavior that had left Mark light on friends. Looking behind him, he saw twenty years of not calling people back, of figuring he’d have another chance to correct an impression (or, if not, there were plenty of other people, anyway, people with whom he could start from scratch). So the message he left on Leo’s phone he tried to make super-sincere. I have a really good excuse, he said, and Leo, please don’t think I’m blowing you off. I’m not. Not this time .

Then he had to call Tessa to thank her for what she’d done. And the scolding Silver Fox had given him made him keenly aware of his debt to her. But when he rang her number, it was Parker Pope who answered.