It took Snake, who had never before seen an airport security checkpoint, about two minutes to figure out how he would get his gun through. He actually had three guns on him, one in his hand and one in each side pocket. He thought he could probably get them all through, but decided not to get greedy. He herded his group over to a trash can and, after glancing around to make sure nobody was looking, dropped Monica's and Walter's official-issue Clocks into the slot. Then he waited for another minute, until he saw a businessman with a laptop-computer bag slung over his shoulder approaching the checkpoint line. As the man walked past, Snake shoved Puggy after him, into the line. As they shuffled forward, Snake whispered to Puggy and Jenny:
"We get up there, you" — he jabbed Puggy — "put that suitcase on that belt and then you walk through. Girlie, you walk through right after. I will be right fucking behind you. Either one a ya says a fuckin' word, you are both fuckin' dead, unnerstan'?"
"Snake," said Eddie. "This ain't gonna work, man. They got machines up there and shit."
"Shut up," said Snake. He was sick of Eddie's attitude.
They were now almost to the checkpoint. Just on the other side of the metal detector was a rotund man whose job, as he interpreted it, was to wave people through as fast as possible.
"Step through, please!" he said, over and over, waving at the passengers.
The businessman in front of Puggy put his laptop bag on the belt, and the rotund man waved him through, then started waving Puggy through. Puggy, prodded by the feel of the gun under Snake's sweatshirt, hefted the suitcase onto the belt and went through the metal detector. As he did this, the woman operating the X-ray machine, seeing the businessman's laptop, said, "Computer check!" They were very vigilant about computers at the security checkpoint.
The rotund man turned toward a stern-looking woman at a table at the end of the conveyor belt and said, "Computer check!" The woman waved the businessman over. She would make him turn on the computer. That was the heart of her job: making people turn on their computers. In the world of the security checkpoint, the fact that a computer could be turned on served as absolute proof that it was not a bomb.
The instant that the rotund man turned his head away, Snake, in one motion, pushed Jenny through the metal detector and placed the sweatshirt, with the gun in it, on the pass-though shelf. He stepped quickly through the detector right behind Jenny and picked up the sweatshirt; this took maybe two seconds. By this time the rotund man had turned his head back and was looking past Snake, to the next person in line.
"Step through, please!" he said.
"Bag check!" said the X-ray woman. She was pointing at the metal suitcase. "Bag check!" said the rotund man, to the stern woman, who was watching the businessman turn on his laptop. When he was done, she pointed at the metal suitcase at the end of the conveyor belt and said to Puggy, "Is this yours?"
"It's mine," Snake said. He was right behind Puggy, letting him feel the gun in his back.
"Bring it over here and open it, please," the woman said.
"Do it," Snake said to Puggy.
Puggy lifted the suitcase onto the table. He unlatched the four latches and raised the suitcase lid. The stern woman looked inside, saw the steel canister, the black box with the foreign writing, the bank of switches.
"What is this?" she asked.
"Garbage disposal," said Snake.
"A garbage disposal?" asked the stern woman. This had not been covered in security-checkpoint training.
"It's portable," explained Snake.
The stern woman hesitated for a second. She thought about calling for her supervisor. But she also thought about what had happened the last time she'd asked him to look at something she thought was suspicious: It had turned out to be a latte machine, and the supervisor had chewed her out for letting the line back up. The supervisor had been hearing from his supervisor; there'd been a lot of complaints lately from passengers who had missed, or nearly missed, their flights because of delays at security.
As the stern woman was thinking about this, the X-ray woman called out, "Computer check!" Another potentially deadly laptop was coming down the belt.
"Computer check!" echoed the rotund man. Passengers were still streaming through the metal detector. The checkpoint was backing up.
The stern woman looked at the line, looked at the suitcase, looked at Snake.
"You'll have to turn it on," she said.
Snake studied the interior of the suitcase. On the black box next to the metal cylinder were three switches, which Snake figured were some kind of security system, to protect the drugs or emeralds or whatever was in there. He reached down and flipped the first switch. Nothing happened. He flipped the second. Nothing. He flipped the third. Some digital lights started blinking under a dark plastic panel on the bottom left corner of the box. They said:
The stern woman frowned at the blinking zeroes, then at Snake.
"It's got a timer," he explained. "Like a whaddya-callit. VCR."
"Computer check!" called the X-ray woman.
"Computer check!" echoed the rotund man. The laptops were stacking up.
"OK," said the stern woman, waving Snake's party away. Snake closed the suitcase, not noticing, as he did, that the digits had stopped blinking and were now registering:
And then:
Snake latched the suitcase, then jabbed Puggy. "Move it," he said. Puggy picked up the suitcase, and the little party headed down the concourse toward the planes. Behind them, the stern woman turned her attention to the next passenger, a pension actuary who was already, without having to be asked, turning his computer on, knowing that this was the price that a free society had to pay to combat terrorism.
Monica trotted through the automatic doorway into the main concourse, darting her eyes back and forth. She was hoping to see another officer, but as bad luck would have it, all the available airport police had been summoned to the extreme other end of the large, semicircular concourse, where trouble had flared at the Delta counter. It had started when a Delta agent had informed a would-be passenger that he would not be permitted to board his flight with his thirteen-foot python, Daphne, wrapped around his body. The passenger, attempting to show what a well-behaved snake Daphne was, had placed her on the counter. As the Delta agent and the nearby passengers backed away in terror, Daphne had spotted, on the floor a few feet away, a small plastic pet transporter containing two Yorkshire terriers named Pinky and Enid. In a flash, she had slithered off the counter and was snaking toward them, as screaming passengers frantically scrambled to get out of her way, clubbing each other with boxes of duty-free liquor.
Within seconds, Daphne had wrapped herself around the pet transporter and was trying to figure out how to get at Pinky and Enid, whose terrified yipping inspired their devoted owner, a seventy-four-year-old widow with an artificial hip, to overcome her lifelong fear of reptiles and flail away at Daphne's muscular body with a rolled-up Modem Maturity magazine, until she was tackled from behind by Daphne's owner, who was no less devoted to his pet and had also played linebacker at the junior-college level.
Within a minute, the Delta end of the concourse was in near-riot mode, with virtually the entire airport police force sprinting in that direction, walkie-talkies squawking. Thus, when, a few minutes later, Monica entered the concourse at the other end, looking for reinforcements, she saw none.