THE LAST WORD

OCTOBER 21, 2021, 13:42

THREE TIMES the pilot of the Super Hornet asked for the order to be repeated. But he’s just the last link in a chain, and what’s the point of a hand if it refuses to obey the brain?

The decision has just been made in “The Tank,” the Pentagon’s inner sanctum. It’s a windowless, fortified space, officially room 2E924, that looks like an ordinary company conference room with its table in golden oak, its revolving leather chairs, and timeless decor. In a painting on one of the walls, President Abraham Lincoln is holding a strategic meeting during the Civil War. He is surrounded by Commanding General Ulysses S. Grant, Major General William Tecumseh Sherman, and Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter. All these officers on canvas have witnessed the most secret decision ever made by the chiefs of staff of the various armed forces, a decision that has been debated at length and on which the president wanted to have the last word.

The missile detaches from the wing of the fighter jet, which is heading northwest. The AIM-120 immediately activates its rocket propulsion and in moments has achieved cruising speed, leaving behind it a straight gray trail. The sun bounces off its steel casing, it is death gleaming bright. At Mach 4, the target is only fifteen seconds away.

In Paris, Victor and Anne are looking out over the Luxembourg Gardens, having a last coffee on a café terrace before heading off for dinner. It’s late October, but the summer is still holding on, an Indian summer, as they say. Anne looks up at Victor and smiles at him. He has never felt so alive, he sometimes thinks that the other Victor’s death has made his own existence both fragile and precious. He has put the two Lego bricks on the table, like two bright-red sugar lumps. He’s snapping them together and breaking them apart again without thinking about it.

Vanity of vanities, says Kohelet.

Havel havalim

Havel, says Kohelet, all is vanity.

Victor has just written the last word of the slim volume that describes the plane, the anomaly, the divergence. For the title, he considered If on a Winter’s Night Two Hundred Forty-Three Travelers, but Anne shook her head, then he wanted to make those the opening words, and Anne sighed. In the end it will have a short title, only one word. Sadly, The anomaly is already taken. He doesn’t try to explain, but to bear witness, in simple terms. He has narrowed it down to just eleven characters and senses that, unfortunately, even this is too many. His editor begged him, Please, Victor, it’s too complicated, you’ll lose readers, simplify it, do some pruning, cut to the chase. But Victor did as he pleased. He opens the novel vigorously, with a Mickey Spillane–type pastiche about a character who remains a mystery to virtually everyone. No, no, it’s not literary enough for a first chapter, Clémence criticized, When are you going to stop playing games? But Victor’s more playful than ever.

Thousands of kilometers away, in Mount Sinai Hospital, Jody Markle has no tears left to shed and closes her eyes. She’s losing David for the second time. He’s been deeply sedated for four days, because even the French nanomedication can’t control his pain now. Paul is standing by his brother’s bedside, thinner, drawn and silent. A noise of breaking glass outside distracts him. He opens the slats of the blind, leans forward and looks down: in the parking lot two men are throwing insults at each other over a shattered headlight, while on the monitor in the room the electrocardiogram’s undulating profile flattens to a smooth line, and its soft beep becomes a continuous note.

In Lagos, the SlimMen concert is finishing as the tropical night closes in. At the end of the concert a surprise guest comes onto the stage for the last song, amid cheering and clapping: a short fair-haired man in a sequined pink suit and huge lit-up gold glasses. More than three thousand young Nigerians join the performers in the song’s refrain, all of them aware of its hidden meaning:

I want a mist of forgiveness,

But then I’ll beg for nothing less

To cover up the blood and tears,

I just want love, I’m asking please.

Joanna March’s belly has swelled, and the baby may come earlier than anticipated. It’s a girl and she will be called Chana: it was the name of a forgotten Japanese princess and it means “year” in Hebrew. Joanna has some free time, because the Valdeo trial won’t be going ahead. A deal was struck with the plaintiffs, and Hexachlorion has been withdrawn from the market. She never went to that meeting at the Dolder club where the theme was to be immortality, nor the ensuing dinner, when the conversation turned to places on the planet to escape the effects of climate change and influxes of migrants. Prior has bought a hundred hectares in New Zealand.

Aby would have liked to keep writing to Joanna June, in a murky cocktail of distress and guilt, but she refused to keep in touch. Later, maybe. She’s met someone at the bureau, an expert in art trafficking. He thinks it’s serious, she’s not sure but wants to believe in it.

It’s the beginning of spring on West Antarctica’s ice sheet, and the Thwaites Glacier—a great raft of ice two kilometers deep and the size of Florida—may well break away in three months’ time, raising seawater levels by more than a meter, but Sophia, Liam, and their mother have left the flood-risk house in Howard Beach. The Junes have move to Akron, near Cleveland, and the Marches to Louisville. The army and the FBI kept their promises, and in return the two women have agreed never to contact each other. They could have common ground in Clark, but the terms of his sentence preclude any further contact with his family. And the levels of anger in both Liams have gradually subsided.

Blake is wrong to be worried. No one at the FBI is still looking for him. Using two blurry images taken in customs at Kennedy Airport of a man who might be the passenger from seat 30 E, the NSA has used facial recognition software to identify 1,049,278 individuals. Of that million, 1,553 are people photographed in East Coast airports the following week, but that proves nothing; 4,482 other faces don’t match any profiles, and appear only in photographs, sometimes in the background. Granted, the man was duplicated, but he’s obviously trying to go unnoticed. And anyway, what is he guilty of, apart from breaking a door in a hangar and stealing a car?

André March puts a blue ceramic jug on the sideboard in the kitchen of his brand-new house in Montjoux. In early August he went to a concert in Montjoux’s temple, and met a woman who lives in the neighboring village and plays double bass: he was ready. This tall, very dark-haired woman with bottomless blue eyes makes him laugh and never stops giving up smoking. She sometimes wears baggy overalls whose yawning gaps are a delight for André’s hands, and he’s discovering the pleasures of electric bicycles. After they made love this morning, she went back to sleep in the bedroom, and while he sets the table for breakfast, Lucie March calls him just for the pleasure of talking to him. She’s working “way, way too much,” she says, but she’s calming down, coping with the routine that’s fallen into place between her and Lucie June for spending time with Louis. Who’s doing well. “Amazingly well.”

The boy doesn’t mind that his “other” mother, Lucie June, is pregnant. The center of gravity of that Lucie’s life has shifted so far in the space of a few months that the unimaginable has become possible. Are you sure? asked André June, feeling happy and anxious in equal measure. Yes, she really is sure. It’s a new pivotal point, and a sort of revenge on this fate. She never called Raphaël again, and no other casual lover has taken his place.

Adrian and Meredith are in Venice, Italy, Europe. They’re trapped in their hotel by the acqua alta, but this transient confinement isn’t so tragic: their sun-filled room overlooks the Fondamenta del Passamonte, the room service is above reproach—the hotel director thought he recognized Adrian as an American actor, but who exactly?—and his less and less white, less and less spotless shirt, a souvenir from the White House, is sprawled across the floor with a black dress on top of it. They’re talking quietly, hidden under a pyramid of sheets, and Meredith’s clear laughter rings out.

The Department of Defense shut down Protocol 42 in September to concentrate on Operation Hermes. The task force’s speculations went on all through the summer, but still no one came up with a way to disprove or confirm any of the theories. Nor have Americans found out about the other plane, the one in China. There’s no news about its passengers.

Jamy Pudlowski is drinking a dry martini in one of Quantico’s bars after a final training session. Two days ago she gave the green light to the latest protection plan for the passengers of Flight 006, and she herself is being transferred to the West Coast, to San Francisco, where she’ll be starting next week as director of the regional office and its seven satellite offices. If anyone asked her what she’s thinking right now, she’d just order another dry martini.

The side camera under the Super Hornet’s left wing follows the AIM-120’s trajectory, and in the underground command center at the White House the president of the United States is watching a huge screen with his eyebrows knitted together and his fists balled. Yes, it was a difficult decision, and I made it alone, because it’s my job to make decisions alone. When he was told that a third Air France Flight 006 had loomed into the Atlantic skies with the same Captain Markle at the controls, assisted by the same Favereaux and with the same passengers on board, the president gave the order for the aircraft to be destroyed. We really can’t keep letting this same plane land.

Let’s have one last coffee, says Victor, would you mind? He draws Anne to him, strokes her cool fingers and kisses her gently on her lips, which she opens slightly. His breath smells of tobacco and menthol. And that is when it happens. At first it’s just a breath of wind, a fleeting whirl of dead leaves on the ground. A soft, soft note hums in the air, a very low F. The air quivers, and the sky becomes clearer, but almost imperceptibly. A well-dressed woman pulling a shopping trolley stops outside a bookshop, a man in a raincoat is out for a walk with a big black dog, a young woman on a bicycle pedals past them, stops, checks her phone, and smiles. It’s a peaceful moment, serene.

The missile is only a second away from Air France Flight 006, and time stretches and expands before the explosion.

It’s difficult to describe what happens, there’s no word in the language to define accurately the slow vibration through the planet, the infinitesimal pulsing that is felt at the same time all over the world, just as much by the cat that was sleeping by the fire in a log cabin in Arkansas as the greylag goose flying across the skies over Bordeaux, and the Zambezi falls and the pristine snow on Annapurna, the Rialto over the Grand Canal in Venice, and the congested main road in the huge Dharavi slum, in the dirty sponge left on the edge of the sink in Montjoux and the punctured old tire on a garage forecourt in Mumbai and the red cup f c ffe wi h its I y bra d g i tor Mi el’ h d a d i th b l