1 #6
“Tell me about your life,” he said.
“That’s too general.”
“Then tell me why you came to Paris.”
“I chose the city at random,” I said.
2
Because the avoidance of patterns can save your life.
I was speeding through the dark down a Texas highway, Felix in shock beside me, that scrap of paper with one word—RUN—held loosely in his hand, and then a short time later in the Houston airport I stood in front of a screen showing departing flights, calculated that the next flight we could reasonably catch was the flight to London, but the former UK was at least as unstable as the former United States in those days, and also was the next flight too obvious?
Possibly. I considered the next two flights after that, and flipped a coin: heads for Paris, tails for Vancouver.
We were waiting at the Paris gate when a text came in on Felix’s phone from an unknown number. Two photos, one each of his friends Cali and Drew, tied to chairs. The message: You have one hour to deliver the entirety of the Company merchandise to Staplestown parking lot.
“I’ve known him since I was nine,” Felix said. His eyes were wide and panicked. “We were in The Nutcracker together.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “What is the Company?”
“A competitor.” Felix was carefully maintaining eye contact, in the studied manner of a man who’s been told to maintain eye contact while lying.
“You’re a terrible liar and you have to tell me,” I said.
“I made a mistake,” he said, “about a month before I moved to Ohio. I cheated someone out of money I owed and left town.”
“A lot of money?”
“A lot of money.”
“Where was this?”
“Maryland,” he said. “I didn’t think I was traceable, but I think they found me.”
“Why did you do it?”
“Because I thought I could get away with it,” he said. “I’m sorry, Ari. It was stupid.”
I nodded. “This entity you cheated, this was the Company?”
“Yeah. They were a local militia.”
“Was this near the Virginia border?” I asked.
“Very near. Silver Spring. How did you know?”
“I spent years reading in prison libraries,” I said. “Nonfiction, mostly. How far is that from Langley, like a twenty-minute drive?”
“I don’t remember. About that. Why?”
“It’s a militia based twenty minutes from Langley, called the Company, and you thought they were local?” I’d dropped my voice to a whisper, because I was trying very hard not to shout.
“I’m not sure what you’re getting at,” he said.
“I’ll bet their weapons were unusually advanced,” I said. “Kind of stuff you couldn’t get anywhere else, right?”
“How did you guess that?” he asked.
“Here’s the thing about Drew and Cali,” I said. “I think they’re already dead.”
He nodded, slowly, and closed his eyes.
“I’m going to take your phone,” I told him.
“Okay.”
I held the phone in my hand for the hour that followed, waiting at the gate while other travellers filtered in.
At fifty-eight minutes, I left Felix sitting there and walked away.
The new texts came in as I was approaching the gate for the flight to Vancouver.
I allowed myself a quick look. The same two pictures, except now Drew’s and Cali’s throats had been cut.
At the Vancouver gate, I dropped the phone into a woman’s open handbag while her back was turned, and watched from a distance till I was certain the woman and the phone were on the plane.
When I returned to the gate, Felix was watching me.
“There was no way to get back in time,” I said. “Absolutely no possible way.”
“We could’ve told them that,” Felix said. “We could’ve made arrangements.”
“We could’ve,” I said, “but I think then we’d be dead too.”
We landed at Charles de Gaulle at 6:20 in the morning, grimy and exhausted after a night spent unblinking in a class of service where the seats didn’t recline, where we had to pay for plastic cups of water and no suitcases were allowed, a night in which I’d stared into the cold darkness of the cabin and thought of hails of bullets, bombs wired to car engines, being pushed from a tall building, Cali’s unblinking eyes in the second photo.
Whenever I looked at Felix, his eyes were open too, fixed on nothing.
We held hands as we left the plane—his was damp and hot—and moved like ghosts toward passport control.
By then I was too tired to be afraid. We were still dressed in the clothes of the previous day—previous country, previous life—and Felix wore a blank, shell-shocked expression, although in fairness I probably looked no better.
We’ve done all we could, I told myself, but I knew this wasn’t true.
I knew I could have gone further, because it is always possible to go further.
There’s always one more precaution you could have taken.
“Our passports are perfect,” I murmured to Felix, as much for myself as for him, and he nodded in a way that made me think he hadn’t heard me.
His attention was focused on the border agents, a line of blue-uniformed men and women encased behind glass at the front of the line.
But he seemed stunned, and I was afraid of how he might react if we were questioned.
I was trying to be patient but it was wearing on me a little, this feeling of being entirely in charge of our fates.
I wanted him to snap out of it. The line was moving very slowly.
There was one person ahead of us, then no one, then we were moving toward a window where a blank-faced young man examined our passports without interest. We were Adrienne and Jeremy Spanner of Philadelphia, citizens of the Atlantic Republic, with a few years to go before our passports expired and a modest history of travel to nonthreatening locales.
The agent paused over my passport, stamp poised in the air, and for just a moment my heart seized up, but then he glanced to his left and I realized it wasn’t my passport that had pulled his attention, it was a scene playing out at the neighbouring window, where a young woman was speaking softly, urgently, to a border agent who kept shaking his head—Desolée, madame, mais vous n’avez pas les papiers—and now police officers had materialized at the young woman’s elbows and they were leading her away, the woman crying silently now, while in the meantime our passports were returned to us under the bulletproof glass.
A short time later we stood swaying with exhaustion in a taxi line outside the airport, in the first sunlight of our first morning in France, first morning of a new life.
I felt delirious. The sky was very blue.
We took a taxi to Place St. Michel, chosen at random from a memory of a long-ago novel set in Paris.
It felt important to avoid patterns of any kind, because patterns can be predicted.
Patterns are death. It seemed unlikely that whatever malign interests had pursued us back in Texas would follow us over the Atlantic, but we could be certain of nothing.
At Place St. Michel we sat on a bench for a long time in silence, staring at people, exhausted.
The security presence was significant, but all of the agents I saw seemed to be agents of the state—no obvious militias—which was reassuring.
I liked the idea of being in a stable country.
“Ari,” Felix said, “why Paris?” Which was a reasonable question on the face of it, but he was asking for a fourth or fifth time.
“I chose it at random,” I explained, again. “I think you’re in shock.”
“I like Italy,” Felix said, also for the fourth or fifth time.
“Well, me too, but we’ve been there, both of us.
So a person who knows that about us might look for us there.
” It was like being stuck in a conversational time loop.
I felt that I was being very patient. The sunlight was too bright, and Felix was blinking in an idiotic way that made it hard to look at him.
“Let’s find a hotel,” I said. What I meant was Let’s build a new life, since we can’t go back to the old one.
But he wasn’t the right person for a new life, that was the next thought, and I felt such sadness at this. I really did like him.
Still, I did what I thought I was supposed to do: I rose from the bench, and took his hand. I walked with him—led him—down streets that I chose at random.
“Do you think anyone’s following us?” he asked after a while. We’d gone away from the city centre, into a quieter district where the buildings were shabbier. I didn’t answer his question, because I’d already answered it several times and my patience wasn’t actually infinite.
“Here,” I said. We’d reached a narrow blue hotel, wedged in between other four-storey buildings. It looked modest but possibly not infested with cockroaches, which was the level of hotel I’d been searching for.
“Why here?” he asked, and I looked at him for a long moment. I was beginning to think he might not be as intelligent as I’d thought.
“I picked it at random,” I said.
“Just now?”
“Just now.”
“Oh,” he said. “Okay.”