3.

Lowell lies full length on the carpet, face down, his forehead cradled on his arms. “My son whom I am terrified of losing,” he murmurs to the floor. He rocks his head the way people with migraines do.

Declassified fragments and seventy-six blacked-out spaces tramp through Samantha’s head, left right left right, with a hundred and one halflines close behind: Salamander in charge of operations … XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX loose cannon, Salamander warns, but as rogue agents go, we can use XXXXXXXXXX backstairs contacts in the Saudi palaces and has usable information … XXXXXX payments and arms supplies to be arranged XXXXXXXXX Salamander to meet with Sirocco …

Boom, boom, boom, beats the drum of indictments. Boom: the stroke of the censor’s pen. Boom, boom, faster and faster, Samantha’s noisy blood keeps time. It pounds at her temples. She feels a surge of incapacitating rage and pain. She wants to pound on the walls with her fists. How could you not have known? she wants to ask Lowell. She wants to scream.

I would have known, she believes. If my father had crimes on his head, I would have known. I would have confronted him, I would have argued, I would have raged.

If necessary, I would grab his ghost by the lapels.

“He lived in perpetual terror that his son would come to harm,” Lowell says. He recites the words like a child memorizing a catechism or a magic charm. He begins to move around the room like a sleepwalker, stumbling against the bed, bumping into the dresser and chair, butting the wall with his head. “My father was Salamander,” he says. The room seems to tilt and spin. His voice drops to a whisper. “My God, my God. My father was Salamander.”

Sam slides the Number Two cassette into place. She presses the POWER button on the remote. She clicks to VCR mode. She presses PAUSE.

“Say something,” Lowell demands.

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Say something, damn it. You made Salamander your north star. You’ve been steering your life by my father. You had fantasies of making him pay.”

“He seems to have paid,” Sam says with difficulty. (But did he pay enough? she asks herself. Is he paid up? How do we get due reparations for and from the dead?) She says in a flat quiet voice, “Your father couldn’t have killed my Jacob. Your father was already dead. Someone else was pulling Salamander’s strings.”

“He was afraid for me. I thought he watched me like a hawk because he expected me to fuck up. I thought he was ashamed, and all the time …”

Samantha goes to the window and parts the heavy drapes. A single floodlight puddles gold on the only car in the lot: the proprietor’s van. The small motel office is lit; the rest is darkness. On the other side of the room, the windows look onto the marsh. Sam lifts the drape and looks out. The expanse of water and sweetgrass is eerily beautiful in the moonlight. Nothing stirs except the grasses and the night birds, the slow-gliding seabirds of the night.

“Lowell?” Sam touches him on the shoulder. “The other cassettes …?”

“I don’t know if I can,” he says.

“It’s what he asked of you.”

“I’m afraid.”

“So am I. We have reason to be.”

“I’m afraid of disappointing him yet again. I’m afraid of not measuring up. I’ve already lost the ring binders.”

“You saved the tapes.”

“If you’d seen my apartment after they ransacked … How am I going to keep these safe?”

“You’ve kept them safe. They’re here.”

“Sam. Samantha. How are we going to stay alive?”

Sam considers peering between the drapes again, but is afraid to. “We’ll figure that one out later,” she says. “Don’t think about it. First we have to watch the tapes.”

“I’m afraid of what he wants us to see.”

“So am I.”

Lowell checks the chain on the door. “What if I was followed?”

“We’ll sit in the dark.”

“The psychiatrist,” Lowell says. “He knows I’ve got them. Someone’s bound to have been tailing him. They could be at the boathouse by now. They could be at the motel office.” He peers between the drapes. The parking lot is still quiet as death. “You’re right,” he says urgently. “We have to watch these before—” He takes the remote. “We have to watch while we can. Where’s the—?”

“I’ve already put it in the VCR,” Sam whispers. “Keep the sound low.”

Lowell presses PLAY. Sam turns out the lamp and they sit in the dark, side by side on the double bed, propped against pillows and headboard, their faces ghostly in the flickering light from the screen.

CBS Anchorman:

We bring you the latest breaking news on the hijacking of Air France 64, which took off from Paris on September eighth, six days ago. After all children on the flight were safely disembarked in Germany, the plane was permitted to refuel.

The hijackers then flew to Libya, where gas canisters were brought on board and protective masks and clothing were distributed to passengers. Permission to land in Paris was demanded by the hijackers.

The hijackers’ claim to have released sarin in the plane, and the limited protection-time offered by the gas masks, were used as blackmail to secure landing rights. The hijackers also declared that flammable gases had been released, and that any attempt at rescue by sharpshooters would cause the plane to explode. The hijackers demanded that ten named terrorists, currently in prison, be released and allowed to board the plane at Charles de Gaulle Airport.

Intelligence sources could not confirm the release of gases and experts believed this unlikely. Permission to land in Paris was refused.

Yesterday, September thirteenth, on the Tikrit airstrip in northern Iraq, the plane was blown up, and it was believed that all remaining lives were lost.

ABC Anchorman:

Intelligence sources have revealed that the so-called hostage demand was a hoax. The tape received yesterday from an Iraqi television station, and distributed to global news organizations, has been analyzed by forensic experts. “This footage has been very cleverly put together,” one expert claimed on condition of anonymity, “but it is, without a shadow of doubt, fraudulent.”

The ultimatum that convicted terrorists be released in exchange for the hostages’ lives is believed to be a desperate plan by a peripheral cell of the terrorist network. Our sources indicate that this group was not even involved in the hijacking, and their film footage has been obtained secondhand and spliced into the so-called Operation Black Death ultimatum. Reliable evidence indicates the hijackers were suicide zealots, all of whom perished when they blew up the plane two days ago.

“We would not, in any case, have cut a deal with barbarians,” an official of the State Department said. “But in this instance, we were deeply suspicious from the moment the demands were received. Apart from the children, whom our negotiations succeeded in liberating from the plane, we can say categorically that there were no survivors from Flight 64, and no hostages. UN observers have been permitted on Iraqi soil, and the charred remains of the plane have been examined. All the hijackers are accounted for. Our evidence is that they were part of a highly trained terrorist cell of Islamic fundamentalists based in Paris, but made up of a diverse group of Algerians with French citizenship, Palestinians, and Pakistanis. All due steps will be taken to demand reparations from the governments of those involved.

“Although the toll in American lives has been horrific,” the State Department said, “we do at least know that the dangerous Parisian cell has been eliminated.”

She is stunned by the sight of her father, by the way he gives off energy even in a still photograph. The energy hits her like a hard rubber ball and bounces back. On PAUSE, the image wavers and blurs, so she rewinds a little and sees him clear for a second and then hits the PAUSE button again. Her hands shake because she knows the photograph, and it is part of a whole. It is a detail from a framed family portrait that she keeps on her desk. Her father stands to the right of a swing on which she herself sits. Sam is three years old in the photograph. Her mother stands behind her, her mother’s hands are on the ropes. Her mother has paused in the act of pushing the swing and is turning slightly to smile at her father. Her father is wearing jeans and an Atlanta Braves sweatshirt, and his right arm is raised because his hand closes over his wife’s hand on the rope.

In the still image on the screen, Sam’s father wears jeans and an Atlanta Braves shirt. His right arm is raised, but the edge of the screen slices his arm at the elbow. One cannot see the rope, nor the swing, nor her father’s hand, nor any hint of the presence of Sam herself.

She rewinds again and her father smiles for three seconds, and she smells his warm father smell and takes his hand. There is a fleshy imperfection that grows like a bud on this thumb. Her fingertips play with it.

As far as Sam knows, there is only one other copy of the photograph on her desk. It is in Lou’s photograph album. Sam’s mother must have sent it to her sister. Lou must have taken it to France.

“I don’t understand,” Sam says. “I don’t understand how they got that.”