After Four
Her parents had arrived in Greenland to look after her, but Allie felt it was much the opposite: that she needed to look after
the kind of star who usually showed up on the screen in crossed gun belts. Her mother had been an honest-to-God cheerleader
for the Dallas Cowboys, and looked it, even at sixty. Her hair was a glossy honey blond. It came out of a bottle now.
But her mother showed up in Greenland with a pair of granny glasses perched on the end of her nose and a tremble in her hands.
Archibald Shiner looked too thin and shouted because he had left his hearing aids in America. When her folks saw her, in the
lobby of the hotel, they pulled her into their arms and cried and shook, while she promised them it was all right, she was
all right, comforting them instead of the other way around.
Her father wanted to sit in on her interviews with the FBI. He wanted a lawyer present.
“Don’t dick around with me, amigo,” he hollered at the agents conducting her interviews. “You think I don’t know how you people
work? I served in Congress for ten years. Go ahead and try something with me. You’ll be making photocopies in the Chattanooga
office the rest of your career.”
Allie was starting her day with a Bloody Mary and drinking her coffee with Baileys in it, and although she was interviewed several times by the same agents, she was never quite clear on their names.
She had the slightly hilarious idea that they were named Simmons and Garfunkel, but that might’ve been wrong.
Simon and Garfingle? Lennon and McCafferty?
Paul and Oates? She was too sozzled most of the time to worry about it.
“We know who you are, Congressman Shiner,” said the agent she thought of as Simon, a brisk, slender Black man with the quick
hands of a professional pianist. When one hand flicked out to smooth his tie, it was like watching a hummingbird dip its beak
for nectar from a flower. Allie thought it was nice of Simon to refer to her father as Congressman Shiner. Her dad hadn’t
been in Congress since 1986. “I want to assure you, your daughter is being spoken to as an eyewitness only and is in no legal
jeopardy. We’re working with a team of psychologists to reconstruct the events that took place during the flight of BA 238,
and I am told it would undermine their work to crowd the room with family. Your daughter would naturally not want to upset
you. You’ve been upset enough. But if she feels constrained by your presence, it will undermine our fact-finding mission.”
Looking at Allie as he spoke, telling her with his calm stare that he expected her to agree with him.
“He’s right, Dad,” Allie said. “Promise you’ll have a bottle of wine ready when I’m done?”
“A bottle or three,” her mother said.
“A lawyer,” her father insisted.
“I’d like to get this done and send you all home,” the agent said. “Of course, if you want a lawyer present, we can work on
that. But we’re in Danish territory, plopped down in the middle of an international investigation involving six agencies and
four nations. If we can begin the interviews today, we might get you out of here on Friday morning. If you require a lawyer,
we’ll have to clear his presence with all of those agencies and countries, and I can tell you, he’ll have to be a Dane. A
US license to practice law means bubkes here.”
“Dad,” Allie said, which in the end was the only argument required, more effective than anything Simon said.
In the interviews, Simon took the lead and his partner, Garfingle, took the notes.
He didn’t in any way resemble Art Garfunkel: he had a pocked, round, bored face, a bristle cut, and pale belligerent eyes set too close together.
The way he looked at her, Allie had the idea she disgusted him, which was fair enough.
She disgusted herself: drunk before lunch.
And sometimes there was a third man in the room: a wide-body with a big drooping mustache like an Old West gunslinger, legs
thicker than fire hydrants. He wore a bad sports coat and khakis straight from the Big he had learned about Matthews in an article about white nationalism that had run in The Atlantic months before.
Donovan hadn’t thought much of it, but Allie got a bee in her bonnet about it and wandered upstairs to interrogate
the guy. Horation had initially denied his identity but seemed shaken. Allison had returned to Van, and both he and her new
friend Robin had begged her not to trouble him again. But she couldn’t let it go, and when she confronted him again, he lost
it, attacked her physically. Frank Heck—who Allie learned was an agent with the Department of Justice, recently detailed to
Interpol Paris—had intervened and in the scrap that followed, lost his pistol to the militiaman, who pursued Allison downstairs,
into economy. In the fracas that followed, the gun went off, and Matthews was partially sucked out the window.
Simon and Garfingle (those hitmakers behind “Tell Us Again” and “We Just Want to Understand What Happened”) didn’t merely
accept this part of the story. They seemed grateful for it, almost relieved.
Allison only got into trouble when she talked about the dragon.
“After the pistol went off,” Simon said, “the cabin experienced explosive decompression and a brief electrical failure. At
that time, there was an escort of two American fighter jets, F-16s, that had been tasked with seeing your flight to the ground.
Did you have a sense, at that time, that BA 238 was out of control and might’ve swiped one or both of the jets?”
“And made them both go boom?” Allie said. “No, I’m pretty sure that was the big frickin’ dragon. That’s the one part of the evening I can’t figure out. Do you think Horation was friends with a dragon?”
Neither Simon nor Garfingle showed the slightest reaction, playing another one of their hits, “Did You Hear Her Say Something?
No, I Didn’t Either.”
“So you don’t know what happened to your fighter escort,” Simon tried again.
“I know all right. I saw a dragon as big as the plane cut through one like—I hate saying a knife through butter, that’s really
trite. My friend Arthur can’t stand clichéd language. He’d take a whole grade off my report for that.”
“No,” Simon said, trying a third time. “It wasn’t a question. It was a statement. You didn’t see what happened to your escort.”
“Okay,” Allie said. “Uh. Sure.”
“It’s been a long afternoon,” Simon said—another crowd-pleasing classic. “Let’s pick this up tomorrow.”
But they got stuck on the dragon again the following day.
“When were you aware that your plane had an escort?” Simon asked her.
“Are you talking about the jets? Or the dragon?”
The big man with the mustache happened to be in the room, and at this he barked with laughter . . . the first time she had
ever heard a sound out of him.
“Are you familiar with the phenomenon of St. Elmo’s fire?” Simon asked, smoothing his tie, then flashing out one of his pianist’s
hands to draw an invisible line in the air between them.
“That’s, like, swamp gas, right?”
“Something like. When there’s a strong electrical field in the atmosphere, it can surround iron objects in a kind of membrane
of hot plasma. The effect has often been compared to dragon’s breath. What you—and some other passengers—saw out the window
was the F-16s, flying in tandem, collecting an electrical charge from the storm and tossing lightning bolts back and forth.
It would’ve looked very frightening.”
Allie said, “No, c’mon. The dragon was out there for a good half hour before anyone saw the F-16s.”
Simon cast a knowing look at his partner, then leaned toward her. “Miss Shiner? I’m authorized to tell you that the F-16s
were accompanying your jet almost from the time it left JFK. Frank Heck had alerted the ground that Horation Matthews was
a passenger and there was concern he might attempt to seize control of the plane. The FBI was on the lookout for just such
a possibility. We had been tracking increased chatter among the anti-government separatist militias for several months. All
the signs indicated they were preparing to act. We stopped them here—you stopped them, Miss Shiner. Unfortunately, they got by us in Oklahoma.” He let that sink in, then pushed a photo toward her.
It showed a blob of light against a stormy sky. It looked oddly like a bent, greenish-tinted claw reaching out of a cloud,
impossibly huge. At the center of it was a small T-shaped black dot. When Allie squinted, the T-shaped dot resolved into a
jet.
“Did what you see look anything like this?” Simon asked.
Allie smiled and sat back. “Ah. I get it now. Do you want me to say this is what I saw?”
“We don’t want you to say anything. We want you to clarify what you saw, for the record and for your own well-being. You’ve
been through a deeply traumatic experience. You nearly died. No one would be surprised if you had a breakdown, especially
given your history.”
Suddenly the interview wasn’t fun anymore. She felt the tattoo no one could see but her, scrawled around her torso, prickling
and cold and tight.
“What about my history?” she asked, although she already knew what Simon was referring to.
He smiled apologetically. “We’ve had to hospitalize three passengers for their own safety. We don’t know for how long. It’s
scary and very sad, for them and their families.”
Allison was not confused about what she was being told. She leaned across the table toward the agents, found Simon’s gaze,
and held it. “It is scary and sad, when you won’t say what people want you to say, and they have to lock you up.
Reminds me of what John McCain went through in North Vietnam.
You know John McCain’s story, don’t you?
My dad loves the guy. We spend a little time with his family in Arizona every summer. ”
“Your father is a good man,” Simon said. “That guy was a rock for Dallas. He had some great years for them. I have a picture
of him in my head when he was twenty-four and unstoppable. It’s a little jarring to see him now. What is he, seventysomething?
He looks older. I guess losing your brother took a lot out of him. And the heart attacks. He was lucky to survive the last
one, I heard. It’s important to be strong for him, isn’t it, Allie? Not to put him through even more. Your teenage episodes
already put them through plenty, didn’t they?”
Suddenly Allison wanted to lie down. She wanted a dark room and a cold washcloth across her eyes. “I think we should pick
this up tomorrow,” she said.
“Let’s do that,” Simon said, flapping a folder shut. “These sessions can be exhausting. It’s healthy to have some time to
collect your thoughts.”
And at that, the big man in the cruddy sports coat laughed again.