They Disappeared

45

New Jersey

Aleena woke stiff, sore and a little disoriented.

The two sleeping pills she’d taken earlier, to adjust to New York time, had put her out. Her body was bouncing gently in her window seat as her Boeing 747 encountered turbulence a few hundred miles out of Newark.

She yawned, snuggled under her blanket and gazed at the clouds.

As wisps of memory assembled in her brain, a chime sounded.

The captain announced that they would soon begin their descent into Liberty International Airport. He estimated an early arrival at the gate at 10:15 a.m. local time.

“As for the local weather, it’s a clear morning and seventy-four degrees.”

Aleena had to pee.

She contorted her way around the two other passengers in her row, inhaling the locker-room reek of the cabin air. The flight was full. The smell of the tiny lavatory was overpowering with industrial-strength freshener. While washing her face, Aleena returned to her dilemma.

I don’t know if I can do this.

She met her fearful reflection in the mirror.

But I have no choice. If I fail to make the delivery, Joost will harm my family. I’ve been around the world, I’ve seen the people he knows.

She brushed her teeth, changed into fresh clothes, returned to her seat and fished out the music box again, wondering and worrying about its significance. What makes this so important? As she examined it, the woman in the seat beside her smiled.

“It’s very pretty,” she said.

Aleena nodded and closed the box.

She put it away and glanced down the cabin, forcing herself to think of something, anything, else. But her stomach slowly knotted when she spotted the raised portion of a broadsheet newspaper. As a former reporter, she identified it as the Telegraph, a leading British paper.

Murder-Kidnap Case Stirs Terror Fears at UN Meeting in New York.

What’s that all about? She’d missed that story in Amsterdam.

Could the music box be connected to it? No, not if the other case has already happened. Maybe what I’m delivering is actually just a music box, some valuable item someone’s paid for. What if it is related to the terror story? I should throw the box away.

Aleena bit her bottom lip.

Stop this. You’re driving yourself crazy.

She grappled with her problem until the landing gear lowered with a hydraulic groan into the air rush and locked with a thump.

The ground blurred and the runway gently met the jumbo in a smooth landing. After it came to a full stop, Aleena gathered her bags and waited her turn to file off of the plane.

She used the mundane process to mentally repeat her memorized emergency contact number, starting with the area code 718. If anything went wrong with the delivery she was to call the number for instructions.

As the plane cleared, she fell in with other passengers making their way through the terminal toward U.S. immigration where she joined the enormous line for non-U.S. citizens.

There would be a long wait.

Six other international flights had arrived, four of them 747s, one from Singapore, a flight from Tokyo and four from Europe.

Joost had once told her that whenever possible he strategically booked flights for her that were scheduled to land during an airport’s busiest hours. That’s when agents were usually overwhelmed. It increased the chance of less scrutiny entering a country.

She could not know that today, at Newark, scrutiny was intensified.

The delay arose because the Office of Enforcement at U.S. Customs and Border Protection headquarters in Washington, D.C., was acting on intelligence from the FBI through Homeland Security to tighten inspections, especially at all entry points for New York City. Alert status was already high because of the UN gathering. The abductions, the murders and the discovery of evidence tied to a potential terror plot had pushed security even higher.

Lines moved with glacial speed.

Finally, the U.S. immigration inspector waved Aleena to his desk and received her passport. Coming from the Netherlands she did not require a visitor’s visa or any other documentation. She was photographed and fingerprinted on a scanner, then the inspector studied her passport and then her face, ensuring it matched her photograph.

“Where were you born?”

“Amsterdam.”

“And what do you do there?”

“I work for a travel magazine.”

“As what?”

“A travel writer.”

“I see you’ve been to many places, the last one you visited was Yemen.”

Aleena had forgotten how that might not sit well with U.S. authorities for a foreigner about to enter America.

“What did you write about in Yemen?”

“The city of Shibam.”

“Shibam?”

“It’s about two thousand years old and has skyscrapers made of mud. And I went to Socotra Island to see the strange vegetation and snow-white sand dunes.”

“What’s the purpose of your visit to the U.S.?”

“I’m writing features on New York City.”

“What sort of features?”

“About Times Square, Ground Zero.”

The inspector’s eyebrow arched and he looked again through Aleena’s passport. It had been a long time since he’d seen one where an individual had been to so many countries. Yemen. Yemen was a red flag.

“All right, we’re going to need to have a look in your bags.” He raised his arm to summon another agent. “Go with this guy coming over.”

The U.S. customs officer was grim-faced.

“May I see your passport and ticket, please?” he said, then inspected Aleena’s papers. “You have no checked bags to claim?”

“No.” She pushed her hair back.

Aleena swallowed hard.

She’d traveled the world. She’d encountered security hassles in Libya, Syria, Colombia, Mexico, Hong Kong and Kuwait City, but her instincts were screaming that today, of all days, something was wrong.

This is bad.

At that moment, she heard the yelp of a dog as the officer led her to an inspection zone with body scanners, X-ray machines, sniffer dogs. At an array of tables people were being searched, wanded, patted down, their belongings emptied from their luggage, sifted, scrutinized, swabbed.

“Put your bags on the table, please,” the officer said.

An inspector, an older man with blue latex gloves, sent Aleena’s bags through an X-ray machine while she endured a full-body scan. Then a female inspector patted her down and swabbed her hands for any trace of explosives.

With her belongings exposed the older officer examined every item-Aleena’s toiletries, her underwear. They opened her laptop, turned it on, swabbed it. Then the man held up the music box.

“Is this yours?”

“A gift for my girlfriend in New York. I plan to wrap it here.”

He opened it and it played. He closed it, then sent it through the X-ray machine again.

All the saliva in Aleena’s mouth evaporated.

God, what’s in that music box? What did Joost give me?

When it came through, he opened it and carefully began to take it apart, examining the cylinder and gear mechanism. The officer called into his shoulder microphone.

“Art, bring your partner over here, would ya?”

A dog yelped, a chain jingled and an officer with a German shepherd on a leash arrived, sniffing everything belonging to Aleena. The dog’s wet snout sniffed and snorted the music box’s mechanism.

Aleena’s stomach twisted at the fear her life could stop right here. If they found something, she’d be arrested, charged and end up in a U.S. prison.

Please. She blinked. Please.

“It’s good,” the dog handler said.

The inspector then swabbed it and submitted the sample to the machine for analysis.

“Okay, thank you.” The older officer returned all Aleena’s papers. “Get your things together, fill out an entry card and have a nice day.”

Aleena’s pulse was pounding as she repacked, shoving the music box deep into her bag as if it were an unwanted companion who’d misbehaved.

Exiting the airport she got a cab.

“The Grand Hyatt in Manhattan, near Grand Central Terminal,” she told the driver.

As they pulled away from the curb her heart was racing. It would be a long time before relief began to seep into Aleena’s veins. The first thing she would do at her hotel was take a long hot shower. Again she tested her memory on the emergency contact number: 718–555… As they glided along the freeway the flames of doubt began burning again. As the span of the magnificent George Washington Bridge rose in the distance Aleena struggled. She gazed across the Hudson at Manhattan’s glorious skyline.

She looked in her lap.

She was clutching the music box.

She pushed the button to lower her window and New Jersey’s industrial air rushed in tugging at her hair as she turned the music box over and over.

Maybe I should just throw it out the window?

Will I have blood on my hands?