30.

ALEK SAT IN AN expensive room on the second floor of the ambassador’s mansion: a big room with all mahogany everything, even the walls, a big desk in the middle flurried over with printer paper. People rushed in and out of the room with so much urgency it felt like the terrorist attack was underway rather than having just been averted. Everything was moving a million miles an hour. Alek had just stepped into this world of convoys and police escorts and even spies. They’d met with the CIA at the embassy; Alek could have sworn they favored appearance in their recruiting because it seemed like every other member of the division was some young attractive woman.

“This is some spy shit! We gotta get a picture,” Anthony said.

“You can post that, but you better not call us CIA.” Alek watched Anthony’s face turn to puzzled, like he wasn’t sure if they were joking or not.

And now Alek sat in the mahogany office, across from Chief Randy Griffith, watching the American government maneuvered to do things he hadn’t known were possible. Or legal.

It was Sunday afternoon. Whatever the hell it was that happened on the train—Alek still wasn’t totally sure—had happened just two days ago. They were going to get the Legion of Honor, the highest honor France gave, tomorrow.

They work fast in France.

By the way people were whispering around the embassy about the award, Alek could tell how meaningful they thought it was. “You guys deserve it,” people said, in serious, subdued tones that added a sense of solemnity to the occasion.

But while Alek and the boys would receive a nation’s highest honor from its most powerful man tomorrow, their families were about six thousand miles and nine time zones away.

Anthony’s dad was home in Sacramento, about to fly across the country to New York to do an interview.

Alek’s mom was in Sacramento too.

Spencer’s mom was next door to Alek’s mom.

Not only were they an ocean plus a continent away, but none of their families could possibly understand what was happening yet. Alek had yet to see an accurate news report himself, so he could only imagine what they were saying outside of this room, outside of this embassy, outside of this country.

Here, the news was still reporting that three marines had stopped a terrorist in France. Alek had been able to talk to his brother briefly, and the others had talked to at least someone in their families too, and everyone was beginning to get a sense of what had just happened, but things were happening so fast it was hard to keep track.

What was the time difference again?

What day is it back home?

What day is it here, for that matter? They’d been moving so much and had been at it so many hours it felt like they hadn’t been in any one place long enough for its time to apply.

Across from him, Chief Griffith was working himself into a lather. This was the beginning of what would be nearly a year of surreal experiences, maybe a lifetime of them. He was working with Anthony now. “Anthony,” the chief said, “focus. We don’t have much time. Where is your dad?”

“Sorry, he’s home.”

“Home—so Sacramento?”

“Yeah. Or no! No, sorry, New York. He’s going to New York for an interview.”

“So he’s in New York now?”

“Wait, today’s Saturday? Or Sunday. No, he was leaving today for New York.”

“Not anymore he’s not. Get him on the phone.”

Anthony called his father, who picked up after four rings, groggy, barely awake.

“Dad, go to the airport, you’re on the next flight to Paris.”

“Son? What time is it?” Anthony checked the clock. “It’s one P.M. Or, where you are? Where you are, I don’t know, early. But you gotta get to the airport.”

“I’m supposed to go to New York today.”

“Not anymore. You gotta cancel that, you’re coming to Paris.”

“Paris . . .” He trailed off. Alek could hear Anthony’s dad on the other end of the line trying to work things out in his mind. “I don’t have a ticket to Paris.”

Chief Griffith chimed in. “Tell him to let me worry about that.”

“Dad, Just go to the airport,” he said “We’ve got it covered.”

Alek smiled. That must have felt cool to say.

“And, Dad,” Anthony said into the phone, “the flight leaves at 8:09. Don’t be late. If you don’t get on that flight, you won’t get here in time.”

“Okay, I’ll be there.” Pastor Sadler was coming to his senses. “I’ll call the commissioner, see if he can get me a police escort so we can cut through traffic.”

While Pastor Sadler took off through the early morning in Sacramento, Chief Griffith and the embassy staff in Paris got to work clearing the way for him to get on board, which meant dealing with two immediate problems.

First, the flight was due to take off in less than an hour. If Pastor Sadler kept a steady pace of eighty miles an hour from his house all the way to the airport, he’d get to the airport just outside of thirty minutes before take-off. The airline might not let him check in, and TSA probably wouldn’t let him through. Griffith yelled for Robinson. Robinson had an idea: they had a TSA staffer at the embassy. Robinson called the TSA rep and told him to simply get to work, connect with the agent on the ground in Sacramento if need be. Calls began going from Paris to the TSA office in Sacramento.

The other problem was that even if he managed to deal with the TSA issue, the flight was oversold, so Anthony’s dad likely wouldn’t have a seat by the time he got to the gate.

Sure enough, Anthony got a call around a quarter after four—seven fifteen in the morning Sacramento time.

“They’re not letting me through, it’s too close to the flight.”

One of the embassy staffers had Pastor Sadler put the TSA agent on the phone. “These boys just got off the phone with President Obama. You do not want to be the person who screws this up.”

Sadler got through.

Next, Griffith got on a call with an executive at the airline, while Anthony’s jaw just about hit the floor. The embassy seemed capable of getting anyone they wanted on the phone.

Pastor Sadler was now at the gate. Alek could hear all this happening in real time, like listening to a radio show of a high-speed chase. Next step, the gate attendant. “Okay, listen, Mr. Sadler, here’s what you have to tell her.” Griffith laid out the script.

“You want me to say what?”

“And tell them if they don’t make that announcement—and this is very important—if they don’t make the announcement, you tell them that plane is not leaving. We will not let it take off.”

They could hear Anthony’s dad over the speakerphone talking to the gate attendant, and then the gate attendant speaking into the PA. Alek couldn’t believe it was working, but Griffith was getting frustrated, because the gate attendant wasn’t delivering the whole message.

“Pastor Sadler,” Griffith interrupted. “Tell her she has to tell them who you are.”

“I am, she won’t tell them.”

“This isn’t going to work,” Griffith said. “No one is just going to get off a flight if they don’t know why.”

The gate attendant radioed the message again; again she didn’t deliver the critical part; so the attendant was making an announcement that two people needed to get off, but not telling them why.

“Okay, this isn’t working. Hang up. I’m going to try something else.”

“Call you back, Dad!”

Griffith snapped his fingers at someone passing outside the office. “Get me someone from United.”

“You’re calling the airline? How are you just going to . . .” But Griffith was already talking to the official on the phone.

“Listen, we got your SAC to CDG through Dallas on the tarmac and I need to get two people onto that flight, the parents of one of the train heroes. We’re trying to patch into the cockpit but we’re getting some resistance—okay—okay, great. Thanks.”

Griffith addressed Anthony again. “He’s going to make sure. That plane is not taking off without your parents.”

He’s getting a message to the fucking plane!”

Finally the whole message made it to the plane, was relayed over the PA, and a married couple—two air force veterans—volunteered their seats. It was almost 8 A.M. when Anthony’s dad got on the plane, just minutes before the scheduled take-off. They’d delayed a transatlantic flight, with hundreds of people on board, just for Anthony’s parents.

HAVING WITNESSED THE levers of power operating to get Anthony’s family in the air, Alek tried to picture his own mom and Joyce. What would Joyce do? Shriek? Laugh? Would she know that Spencer was okay?

Would his mom be fretting, worried that some terrible detail had been left out of the news?

Both women were, it turned out, in respective states of mania trying to figure out (a) what exactly had happened, (b) whether this award was really going to be given to their boys, and if so, (c) how the hell they were going to get to Paris in twenty-four hours.

Both mothers, when first confronted with only the sparsest information—“terrorist attack,” “your son,” “France”—had sat staring at the television, as if simply by looking hard enough they might force it to cough up some piece of information it was holding back. It didn’t.

Joyce was half excited, half terrified. It seemed Spencer had done something good, and it seemed he was okay, but she didn’t know either for sure and she had no other details. She felt the need to do something; she couldn’t just sit there and let her imagination drive her crazy, so she did what she always did in times of crisis. She went out to buy milk.

“I don’t even need milk,” she said out loud, when she was already halfway to the market. And then, “I’ll drink it eventually.” It was reversion to a habit she’d developed when the kids were small, Spencer still right there under her care, when she’d buy half a dozen cartons of milk and stick them in the freezer, then bring one out when it was needed and let it thaw overnight. It was one of the ways she saved trips to the market and therefore just a little extra time looking after her three wild children; one of the small tricks she’d developed as a single mother, but that had become muscle memory. Spencer was off somewhere far from her reach, shirtless and bloody, and she did the one thing that made her feel the way she felt back when she was able to protect him with her own arms: spend a little more time with him by pillaging the dairy aisle.

Heidi did almost the same. She still had a young daughter she had to pick up from school; she couldn’t just sit in front of the TV all day. Plus she had an appointment to get her nails done. Should she cancel it? But she wasn’t getting any information, and sitting at home was driving her crazy. Well, I guess our day must go on. In the midst of her idle banter with the stylist she said, “You won’t believe this, but my boy I think took down this terrorist in Paris.”

“Wow, that’s interesting.”

“Interesting?” Did she not hear me?

Then she went to pick up her daughter. It became a day of trying to deal with huge, grave events by focusing on the most mundane things, the small things she could control. At the picnic tables where parents gathered waiting for their kids, she couldn’t contain it; she needed to tell someone. “Hey,” she grabbed the closest woman by the elbow and said, “I can’t even believe this, but I think my Alek took down that terrorist they’re talking about in France.”

“Oh really? Are you going to the fund-raiser this weekend?”

What is going on with these people! While she was trying to figure out why the city was so maddeningly indifferent to her momentous news, the media clearly wasn’t. Joyce called and said, “Channel 10 wants to interview us.”

“I don’t really want to interview,” Heidi said, but then she couldn’t articulate exactly why.

“I don’t either,” Joyce said. “I haven’t washed my hair.”

“Maybe we should do it anyway. It feels important.”

So Joyce and Heidi sat down next to each other, with the living room lit up by camera lights, and answered the reporter’s questions. “I spoke to Spencer,” Joyce said, her voice beginning to crack, “and he said,‘I would have been killed if it wasn’t for Alek.’”

“And I spoke to Alek, and he said the same thing: ‘Mom, if it wasn’t for Spencer, I’d be dead.’”

“I really feel like they had a divine intervention and they were saved, because the gun was at his head and . . . he tried to shoot twice . . .”

WHEN JOYCE FOUND OUT the boys were going to receive the Legion of Honor, she knew she wasn’t going to miss it. She didn’t need to be told twice that the medal was a big frigging deal; everyone in all three families needed to be there. Heidi, unsurprisingly, was on the same page.

But figuring out how to get to Paris in time for the presentation was a puzzle. Last-minute tickets to Paris at the height of tourist season cost thousands of dollars. She didn’t have that cash on hand. Think, Joyce! She was a problem solver; she always had been, plus her job as a workers’ comp adjustor for the state had primed her to deal with people in times when they were at their most desperate, or most manipulative. Now she tried to channel both mindsets. She needed someone who had the means to get them there, someone who could use a vanity project, maybe someone with a private jet to loan, and for whom money was no object and a little good publicity was worth any price—and then it struck her. Donald Trump!

“Oh, please,” Heidi said, “come back to earth. We need to figure out a real solution.”

But Joyce felt she was on to something. She adjusted her glasses on her nose, fired up the computer, went online, and started pelting requests at every Donald Trump–related website, Facebook page, and real estate company she could find. “Could you please tell Donald Trump that we, the parents of the boys who stopped the terrorist attack, would like to borrow his jet.”

Alek’s mom decided to try her own approach. Divide and conquer. “Okay, you work on that. Alek’s commander, Colonel Prendergast, said if I need anything I could call. I’m going to go see if he can help.”

“Okay,” Joyce said. “I’m going to stay here and wait for Donald Trump to return my call.”

Heidi had the first sign of success. She got through to Prendergast and asked him if he could help them get to Paris in less than twenty-four hours. A silence on the other end of the line.

“Actually, I have an idea. Sit tight, I’ll call you back.”

Thirty minutes later, he called back. “I might have something. It’s a friend who flies a private jet for a big CEO. I don’t think he ever loans out his plane, but we’re going to ask.” The pilot had received the request in an email while on the golf course, and decided to forward it to his boss.

The next update from Alek’s commander came just before midnight.

“Okay, be ready. We have the plane for you, but you’re going to have to leave at six A.M. to get there on time, so get yourselves to the airport.

“The Sacramento airport?

“The Oregon airport. Get yourself to Oregon, the private jet will fly you over from there.” Heidi shrieked. “Thank you so much, you are a saint!” Then she collected herself. “Ahem. I have my neighbor, Joyce? She’s Spencer’s mom. Can you take her, too?” She waited a moment, then added, “Also, if it’s not too much trouble, the boys’ siblings?”

There was a pause. “Um, I’ll—I’ll check the plane’s capacity, I guess.”

“Great! And one more thing.”

“Yeah?”

“How are we supposed to get to Oregon?”

Prendergast had another idea. Since he was in the National Guard he had a day job too, as an analyst for Nike, so he had frequent flyer miles piled up, and he decided to donate them so Joyce and Heidi could get last-minute tickets from Sacramento to Portland.

When they arrived just before dawn in Portland, Joyce still couldn’t quite accept that someone’s personal plane, unless it was Donald Trump’s, would be able to accommodate all of them, much less carry them thousands of miles across the Atlantic. But when they landed in Portland, a van picked them up, took them to the airfield where the private planes were kept, and they couldn’t believe their eyes. It wasn’t just any little private plane, it was an eleven-passenger Falcon 2000 built by, appropriately enough, a French avionics firm. The owner’s crew was standing by, waiting to give them the grand tour of the most luxurious plane they’d ever seen. Everywhere they looked was some glimmering wood panel that with the push of a button revealed a tray of snacks or some other fancy swag. The pilot welcomed them aboard, Joyce found her way to one of the La-Z-Boy–sized, fully reclineable bucket seats, shimmied around in it, and then all of a sudden her feet flew up and the seat-back went down so that she went from upright to horizontal in about a nanosecond.

She lay there, stunned, for a moment.

“Okay yeah,” she said, “I admit it. This is plush.”

Heidi rolled her eyes and smiled as the pilot fired up the engines.