As soon as the plane’s wheels grabbed runway, Middleton text-messaged his daughter.
She hadn’t answered his calls from Europe, and state, county and city police had been vague about protecting a young couple just because a frantic father called from Poland. The D.C. suburban cops seemed skeptical of Middleton’s promises that Polish badges and American diplomats would echo his alarm as soon as their chains of command argued out who should contact whom.
Middleton’s text-message read: GREEN LANTERN EVAC SCOTLAND.
GREEN LANTERN: His then-wife Sylvia had scoffed at his family code word system to prevent their toddler from being deceived by two-legged predators, but little Charlotte judged the plan cool, especially when Daddy let her make their secret code his (and thus her) favorite comic book hero.
EVAC: Charlotte was nine when the Pentagon Military Intelligence Unit where Middleton spent most of his career ran an evacuation drill. She adopted the word EVAC as a mantra, with significant shifts in irony as she roared through her teenage years.
SCOTLAND. When Charlotte got married, Middleton let her use his suburban house for the wedding’s staging ground while he rented another lonely room in a hotel near the Capitol Hill garden for the marriage ceremony. Two nights before the wedding, father and daughter got drunk in the hotel bar as she introduced him to a hip single-malt Scotch. From then on, they called that hotel “Scotland.”
Told her what to do, thought Middleton. Where to go. That it’s really me.
If she got the message.
The seatbelt “ding!” launched Middleton into the plane’s aisle. Looping the shoulder strap on his soft black briefcase across his sports jacket kept his hands free. He didn’t know where the rest of his luggage was; didn’t care. His briefcase held his work, his laptop, iPod and toiletries airport security let him take onto an airplane, plus a paperback copy of Albert Camus’s The Stranger.
As Middleton was about to reach the plane’s door, a couple from First Class barged in front of him. The woman, who may have looked great 10 years and a million scowls ago, clutched a battered jewel case to suspiciously firm breasts as she and her sad-eyed husband shuffled up the jet way ahead of Middleton.
Middleton heard the wife huff, “I still can’t believe that sister of yours thought she could keep your mother’s jewels from me just by going to Europe!”
The husband’s flat voice knew its own irrelevance. “We all make mistakes.”
They bumbled ahead to Customs, where a surgical-gloved guard carefully examined the jewel box’s glittering necklaces, bracelets and earrings, comparing them to a transit document the wife kept tapping with her crimson fingernails. When he was through, the First Class couple trudged ahead of Middleton through the terminal.
Middleton’s jagged nerves keyed him into a detached hyper-vigilance he’d not felt since returning to the Balkans’ slaughterhouse. There, all he had to fear were the ghosts of strangers. Now he felt his own life crawl along the edge of a straight razor.
He smelled his fellow travelers. Damp wool scent of lived-in clothes. Deodorants’ metallic perfumes. Stale beer from the Englishman who’d tried to drown his fear of flying.
Middleton heard a child whine, and sobs from a Spec 4 soldier, who was all of 20 years old, as he marched toward a flight to Germany with connections to Iraq. An unseen CD blasted drums and crashing guitars: Middleton recognized Springsteen, and then remembered that expanding his range of classic rock music was the only debt besides Charlotte he owed his ex.
Night filled the terminal windows. Ads landscaped its walls. The musician in Middleton found melody in crowd movements synced with his rhythmic march to a bus for the main terminal. From there, he’d find his car in Long Term Parking, race to Scotland, working his cell phone the whole way. He saw all that with the absolute clarity of what is and what would be.
Looming beyond the shuffling first-class couple, Middleton saw a cop hurrying toward him. Saw the cop’s blue uniform. Saw his shoulder-holstered black automatic. Saw a second pistol on the cop’s black-leather belt along with handcuffs, ammo pouches, an empty loop for a radio.
They were 10 steps apart when Middleton matched the cop’s face to photos he’d seen in Poland of a murderer.
The fake cop unsnapped his hip holster.
Middleton shoved the first-class woman into the pistol-drawing cop.
The fragile jewel case popped out of her grasp and flew toward the cop, who knocked it away. The case burst open. Glittering objects rained on the airport crowd.
First-class woman clawed at the cop: “Mine! Mine!”
Her bumped husband fell into an empty chair.
The fake cop pointed his gun at Middleton’s face, as the woman continued to flail at him.
The gunshot reverberated through the terminal to Gate 67 some 40 feet off to Middleton’s left where FBI Agent M.T. Connolly was snapping a handcuff onto her own wrist. The handcuffs’ other clamp already circled the wrist of Dan Kohrman, who wore a second set of handcuffs shackling his wrists in front of him. Connolly’s close-cropped brass hair came up to the shoulder of the husky Kohrman who’d been apprehended in Chicago on a federal Flight To Avoid Prosecution charge and extradited to D.C. Chicago cops passed him off.
Connolly hadn’t needed to double cuff Kohrman. True, he was a felony fugitive, but he’d embezzled funds as a lawyer. Not the kind of bad boy who’d give “14-years-on-the-bricks her” any trouble. No, she cuffed her left hand to his right hand because she didn’t feel like talking to the scumbag. Easier to jerk him where she wanted him to go.
He’d protested his innocence as Windy City cops led him off the plane toward Connolly and a uniformed Virginia state trooper who had been assigned to accompany the FBI during custodial transferals through the state’s jurisdiction to a federal lockup. After that…
Well, after that, the state trooper had the easy smile of a Dixie scamp. He seemed like a possible diversion from the storm of empty howling in Connolly. His eyes twinkled while they waited for the Chicago plane, indicating to her that he harbored similar thoughts. He introduced himself as George, and she knew he wouldn’t be around long enough for her to need to remember his last name.
“Look,” Kohrman had said as she clicked her handcuff on his wrist. “Have you asked yourself why I would be so stupid as to steal that money?”
As she tightened the handcuff on her left wrist, Connolly replied, “Like I care about why.”
Then she heard the high-caliber pistol shot crackle behind her. Crowd reacting. Trooper George facing the sound source. Screams and she turned, her .40 Glock filling her right hand.
She saw travelers stampeding.
Sensed the taller, trooper-uniformed George draw his gun.
Glimpsed a thick, black-haired American crashing onto a cop.
The roar of the gun in Middleton’s face deafened him. The muzzle flash novaed his eyes. But as the bullet cut wide, Middleton fell onto his would-be killer and the crazed woman from first class, and they crashed to the floor. The gun flew from the killer’s hand as hordes of airline travelers panicked in a 21st Century terrorism nightmare.
Middleton’s vision returned. But why can’t I hear? Why is there no noise?
He scrambled after a 9mm Beretta gliding silently across a jewel-strewn floor.
The fake cop chopped at the first-class woman’s throat. Jumped to his feet. Reached for his shoulder-holstered second pistol.
Middleton heard only the hammering of his own heart. He grabbed the Beretta and fired at the man who was drawing a second gun.