Chapter Thirty-Six

It was a seven hour ride to Frankfurt Main Airport. The converted DC-10 was almost as loud as the helicopter and much bumpier. The seats slightly more comfortable than aluminum beach chairs. Jarvis settled across from Brin who promptly fell asleep and snored lightly for six and a half hours. Jarvis had no doubt that if a gun were cocked within fifty feet, Brin would instantly awaken and have the target in his sights. But all other noises were filtered out.

 

Jarvis pulled out a tiny spiral notebook, smaller than a cop’s beat notes. A shard of pencil stuck out the metal rings. He flipped open to an empty page as the plane sharply ascended. The first 5000 feet kept them in range of any shoulder missiles the Taliban might have acquired, so the quicker they made it out of that altitude the happier everyone was. Descents were even more interesting since gravity was working in their favor.

 

He doodled for a moment, creating an intricate and meaningless design along one row of the lined paper. The shapes didn’t form anything in particular, but resembled a geometric prison. His mind wandered to Wisconsin, then New York, and finally the ground falling away below.

 

Movie idea: A girl raised in Afghanistan learns to hate the invaders, her father a leader of the insurgency. She meets a soldier, who she believes is responsible for the death of her father, only to learn her own countrymen did it for political reasons. She questions her allegiance as she falls in love with the soldier.

 

Ending?

 

His pre-sleep ritual sometimes took the form of movie ideas. He re-read it and tried to picture Brin with a family, but kept seeing him like Tarzan living in tree-tops instead.

 

Jarvis stretched his legs out, leaned back, and watched Brin breathing deeply half a dozen times before his own eyes fell heavily. He slept for two hours, double his norm, making up for the previous night of no sleep at all. He cycled through two periods of REM and the dreams were vivid and shocking, but they didn’t interfere with his rest. He awoke refreshed and peered out the window into the dark sky knowing the sun was chasing them westward. Below was the first hint of Europe and in a couple of hours they’d land in Germany. He looked over at Brin who didn’t appear to have moved in the slightest.

 

Jarvis pulled out the piece of paper with the names of the remaining terrorists who were still loose on American soil. He ran his finger along each name, trying to imagine their emotional state right now. Then he took his thoughts back in time, when they’d been radicalized by a horror blamed on him and his comrades, but in reality perpetrated by these children’s own people. They were still children today, though hardened and filled with hatred. And the instigators were not truly their people, but a mutation, a false family who preyed on the fears and the patriotism of the innocent. Jarvis had to stop these children. He probably had to kill them. Little comfort came from knowing Mudar was dead. There would be another to replace him.

 

Ninety minutes later the plane made a slow, lazy circle and landed on a special runway far from the commercial tarmacs. Brin woke instantly and ready for combat seconds before the wheels touched the pavement. A narrow, stubby bus with tinted windows and plush seats carried the two men along with five other passengers to an unobtrusive gate at the main terminal a mile away. No one spoke except for the driver, a corporal in NATO uniform, who thanked Brin and Jarvis as they gave up their weapons before stepping off the bus. The transition was serene and bizarre; one minute a rifle and handgun were as normal as a laptop bag and bottle of water. Now they would cause hysteria and get both men arrested. Jarvis momentarily felt naked. He shook it off as he and Brin clambered up the metal staircase to the terminal building filled with regular travelers. In a few hours he would be armed and on the hunt again in New York.

 

The business class seats on Lufthansa fully reclined and Brin was asleep again before the chimes went off at 10,000 feet indicating it was safe to turn on approved electronic devices. Jarvis pulled out the iPad that was miraculously still in the duffle bag the corporal had handed him a couple hours earlier. He hadn’t bothered asking who had gone to the hotel room and collected his things. Jarvis pulled up a map of New York City and plotted the location on the sheet indicating the address of the poisoner. The plane had wi-fi so he could overlay museums, stadiums, outdoor markets, shopping centers, and any other heavily traversed spot or gathering place where people were likely to consume food or drink. He also added supermarkets. Assuming the poison hadn’t been aerosolized – a technically complicated process and one that diluted the potency of the agent that needed to be ingested – the killer would need to get it into some food supply. The rinky-dink Starbucks attempt would only have killed half a dozen people. That made sense if the goal were to create uncertainty and fear among the populace. But New York had heavy, dense population centers so a bigger splash would be easier. And maybe with most of the cells now out of commission or hiding, a big hit was in the plan. Jarvis rolled the dice and assumed the murders would be big and showy.

 

He wrote ideas and the broad strokes of a plan in the Notes app and linked them to different locations on the map. When they landed, the first thing they’d have to do was get armed. He pulled up Outlook and shot a couple of emails to former colleagues in the area. Shutting off the iPad, he settled back and flipped on the large screen embedded in the seat in front of him. There were twenty-four movies, sixty-three televisions shows, a hundred and sixteen music tracks, and a dozen games available on-demand. He narrowed it down to one film he thought he could put up with and accepted the offer of wine and dinner from the flight attendant who seemed to want to stay and chat. He started the movie and figured by the time the protagonist got the girl, saved the day, and rode off into the sunset he’d have some answers to his emails.

 

Seven hours passed quickly. Jarvis watched the business travelers sleep through most of it. He had no recollection of his sleep patterns as an infant or toddler, but he vividly remembered long nights in elementary school when his father would catch him reading with a flashlight under the covers or watching a portable television at 2 a.m. in the closet. College was when he decided it was a blessing instead of a burden. Getting into an Ivy League school surprised his parents because they never paid attention to his grades and assumed a smartass kid who spent all his spare time playing basketball and chasing girls was making up for being dumb. He never tried to distinguish whether he excelled because of talent in the classroom or an extra six hours of study time every night. In college he just knew he could take more classes, ones he liked and not just the ones for his major. Biology for the latter, and anything related to history, criminal justice, and war that he could get his hands on. He could have graduated in two years if he’d focused on bio but staying the full four cost his father another sixty grand and he figured it was a fair trade for almost two decades of having to live with the prick. The chain of thought was not transparent to him as he looked at the slumbering passengers and he was unaware of rubbing the spot on his collarbone where his father had slammed the frying pan one Saturday morning breaking it – the bone, not the pan – clean in half. The acceptance letter along with first year tuition information had just arrived. Jarvis’ mother reminded his dad about a promise he’d made a dozen years earlier – he’d pay for any school the kid got into. So sure his son was a moron, he laughed and even signed with his scribble on a sheet of yellow legal paper she provided. She hadn’t pulled it out since then, half in hope and half because over the years she’d moved inexorably toward her husband’s way of thinking, that her son was never going to amount to much. The father’s incessant cynicism, code for what others might call emotional abuse, wore at her and Jarvis. It was easier to give in and not fight. But when the letter came, a shadow of her former self emerged and she insisted.

 

When the frying pan hit and Jarvis bent over in pain as he heard the bone snap, he kept his legs beneath him. It took thirty seconds for the blinding agony to stop and when it did, he rose up. Still a couple inches shorter than his father, a growth spurt still a year or so ahead, and forty pounds lighter, he single-mindedly aimed himself at his father who had already turned back to the dish of eggs he’d made. Jarvis’ mother saw the look and stepped between them before the father could know what was in Jarvis’ eyes and heart. She took Jarvis to the hospital instead of calling the police and used this new leverage to whisper to her husband, “every penny the boy needs.”

 

They never spoke of it and Jarvis did not see his father for six years.

 

The plane circled New York as it descended to five thousand feet and Jarvis looked out the window. They flew along the Hudson and it seemed the plane was tracing the outline of the gaping, empty hole that was still ground zero. Construction crews, scaffolds, trucks – they were all dwarfed by the enormity of what was no longer there. The flight attendant tried gently to wake Brin to tell him to return his bed to the upright position. She got as far as reaching a hand out to his shoulder before he was fully alert and instantly assessing the situation. He did so quickly enough to avoid grabbing her hand in mid air. Instead he turned to Jarvis.

 

“Get a good night’s sleep?” He yawned and cracked open a bottle of water. “Let’s go hunting.”

 

Thirty minutes later they were in a taxi heading to Brooklyn. A pawnshop run by a Ranger Jarvis knew had a back room and wide selection of weaponry.