Upon A Pale Horse

ONE Flight

Keith stood in line with his fellow passengers, a procession of humanity that shuffled forward with the torpor of a giant multi-legged organism. At the head of the beast, two women checked boarding passes, studiously ignoring any hint of friendly contact as they scanned bar codes with company-issued courtesy smiles.

JFK airport was packed to capacity, in its usual state of chaotic frenzy in the early evening as travelers sought to escape New York, some finishing up their business days and flying back home, others just beginning their journeys. If Keith belonged anywhere in the scheme, it was in the latter group. He was tall, with a leonine head atop broad shoulders, brown hair with flecks of gray just beginning to appear at the temples. His piercing blue eyes scanned the backs of the boarding crowd as the jet that would take them to Rome was fueled and readied. If his fellow travelers had cared enough to evaluate Keith, they would have guessed him to be a tired businessman embarking on yet another trip to cut a deal.

He shifted his weight from foot to foot, clutching his eel-skin briefcase in one hand as he adjusted the shoulder strap of his carry-on bag with the other, regarding the boarding area with casual precision, scanning the faces of the few seated stragglers for any hint of suspicion. His eyes swept the area, but as far as he could tell, nobody was paying the slightest attention to him. He was anonymous, just another in the throng, unremarkable. Just as he’d hoped he would be. He’d gotten away clean.

The icy gray deluge continued from the sullen clouds roiling over the city, occasional gusts of wind slamming sheets against the heavy glass of the terminal. The ground crew wore slickers, loading baggage into the bowels of the plane as they hurried to finish their task and get back under shelter. The squall had blown in unexpectedly — yesterday had been sunny and crisp, as springtime in Manhattan could be. But overnight everything had changed, mirroring Keith’s mood, the turbulent front a fitting metaphor for the storm taking place in his brain.

“Good evening sir. Welcome aboard,” the gate attendant chirped at him with the sincerity of a well-trained parrot.

Keith didn’t reply. Instead, he nodded and hurried forward — only to be stalled by another line at the end of the jetway as passengers waited to board. Hurry up and wait, he mused, but then his thoughts turned to other, less mundane matters.

The flight had been booked online with a one-time use debit card drawn on a bank in Bermuda — an operational account he’d kept off the books from a trip five years ago. He’d been negotiating with a financier who’d been instrumental in laundering funds for the Agency, defining the terms of his disappearance just ahead of federal prosecution for bilking his investors out of billions in a Ponzi scheme that had ensnared the wealthy across the U.S. He’d had an oily charm to him, an ease to his manner and a labile fluidity with veracity that was sociopathic, if highly effective. But as much as he’d been useful for financial errands that couldn’t fly by Congress, his flamboyant lifestyle and lavish expenditures had finally caught up with him, and increasing numbers of his trusting investors had been demanding their money back. Keith’s job had been to figure out how to make him vanish, and to evaluate whether he could keep his mouth shut and find a new life in Malaysia, or become another notch on a wet team’s belt.

The financier hadn’t listened to reason, but the problem had ceased to be a concern when his sport-fishing boat had sunk off Panama, taking all hands with it. Keith didn’t question how that had been achieved — he’d merely done his job, signing off on the report that had sealed the banker’s fate. The details weren’t important, and Keith didn’t feel a trace of responsibility. He was an analyst, and he was paid to analyze, which is what he’d done, rendering a judgment based on experience and his take on the man’s stability, which wasn’t good. What the Agency did with the information wasn’t his problem. His job was to be right. And he was very good at it.

A stewardess greeted Keith at the jet door and directed him down the closest aisle to his row, just behind the expansive business class section, the exclusive pods roomy and lavish in comparison to his economy slot. He hefted his bags and pushed along, and experienced a momentary sense of unease he shrugged off.

Nobody was in business class — the area was unoccupied.

He stashed his carry-on in the overhead compartment and took his window seat, sliding the briefcase forward in front of his feet. Thankfully the flight looked only half full, if that. The online seating map had shown the spot next to him as being vacant on the Boeing 767, so at least he wouldn’t have to contend with a chatty companion for the seven hours it would take to get him to relative safety.

Safety.

He wondered at the innocuous word — how benign it sounded, the promise it offered — and wondered whether he’d ever be safe again. He’d covered his tracks as best he could, erasing any traces of his exploration into forbidden areas of the Agency’s database, a tribute to his ability to hack with the best of them — a skill that had been one of the primary reasons he’d been recruited fifteen years earlier. It had only been once his ability to predict had been noted by his superiors that he’d begun his career climb, ultimately becoming a special situations analyst, which was Agency parlance for a troubleshooter, a Jack of all trades. Keith was very smart, able to see things others missed, to assemble seemingly random variables into intelligible patterns, making sense out of the nonsensical. It had served him well, and he’d been a rising star in Langley, his future bright.

Until he’d poked his nose where it didn’t belong, and began pulling on a thread that led to a discovery so shattering it challenged his reason, and made him question all the comfortable assumptions he’d made about the world — the constructs that explained why things mattered and what his place in the order was.

Why? Why couldn’t he have just left it alone?

The question haunted him, but to no useful end. Once on the path, he could no more ignore the pieces falling into place than he could decide whether to be right- or left-handed. It was fundamental to his nature.

But now he was the man who knew too much. He vaguely recalled a film with that title, though he’d never seen it.

The body heat from the passengers combined with the high humidity to make the interior atmosphere muggy, and Keith reached up and twisted the air on, a bead of sweat working its way down his forehead. The nozzle hissed its flow at him, and he wiped the perspiration away with the back of his hand as he looked around the cabin.

Only a few passengers in his section, just in front of the wings. Maybe twenty people, no more, all seated now, in anticipation of what would likely be a rough takeoff. He leaned over and took another glance at business class. Still no passengers. Probably a function of the economy, he mused. For all the statistics, things were still bad and getting worse, and nobody believed the official numbers anymore. Unemployment statistics ignored the legions that had been out of work for over a year, a sizeable number that was growing daily. His back-of-the-napkin calculations put the true number at more like twenty-five plus percent, not the seven or eight touted by the administration. Money was tight and getting tighter, so it didn’t surprise him that the much more expensive seats up front were vacant. Everyone was cutting costs, and most could manage a few hours in a chair rather than a mini-bed for that kind of cash.

Keith pulled the in-flight magazine out of the pocket in front of him and absently browsed the entertainment section as his mind raced over his next moves. Italy would be a good base — the infrastructure typically Latin and informal, the attention to detail lackadaisical at best. Nobody would make too much of a big deal out of him checking into hotels without showing his passport, which wasn’t the case in most other places.

He had enough money stashed to last him six months, maybe eight or ten if he watched his expenditures carefully, and had a second passport in a different name he could use to disappear. That was cash he had squirreled away outside of the system; his two hundred grand in stocks and bonds and the equity in his house were a write-off for now, until he could get things straightened out and figure out what he was going to do.

Assuming he ever got things straightened out.

Some things weren’t fixable. His fear was that this was one of them. So disoriented was he by the revelations of the last weeks that he wasn’t sure where he stood anymore. The conspiracy he’d discovered was so vast, so far-reaching, so devastating, that he had a hard time believing anything now. It was all lies. Everything.

He mentally shook himself — that kind of thinking wasn’t useful, and it wouldn’t get him anywhere but paralyzed with inaction, hiding in a darkened room somewhere. He needed clarity, not confusion.

The woman across from him reclined her seat with a sigh and placed her large purse in the space next to her. Keith’s eyes darted from her to the glowing face of his watch. They would push back from the gate soon, and then he’d have the entire trip to ruminate over the mess he was in. A mess of his own devising.

A chime sounded on the public address system, and the fasten seat belt icon illuminated. Screens dropped from the cabin ceiling and a security video played, race-and-gender-diverse actors simulating the smiling calm with which passengers would be expected to suck at precious oxygen or exit the crash-landed sinking aircraft, as they were presumably kept afloat with a plastic life vest or a floating seat cushion in the North Atlantic’s freezing seas. Two stewardesses held masks aloft and pointed at their chests, and then demonstrated how to unclip a seatbelt before warning about the potentially devastating consequences of using electronics or a cell phone while in flight.

Keith was pragmatic. He had no illusions about how the world functioned. After fifteen years in the clandestine realm, he understood that few things were as they seemed to the rank and file, and he was okay with that. But there was a line — a limit. There had to be. What he had uncovered wasn’t a cynical manipulation the likes of which the Agency specialized in. This was far, far larger; and insane. There was no other word for it. If he was right, which he believed he was, it would make the Cambodian killing fields seem like a summer picnic. “Crimes against humanity” didn’t even begin to cover it. Plain and simple, it was diabolical, and amounted to genocide unlike anything the world had never seen.

He fervently hoped for the umpteenth time that he was wrong.

Which wasn’t likely. But he needed final confirmation from someone who could look at the data and answer his questions definitively. And all trails led to Rome. He couldn’t go to anyone in the U.S. It was too dangerous, and the Agency’s reach was too great there, in spite of its prohibition from running any ops on domestic soil. Over the last decade so many protections had been discarded, so many constitutional violations tacitly sanctioned, that notions of safety while in the country were a farce. Plain and simple, the government did what it wanted, due process and Congress be damned. From personal experience he understood that the NSA could monitor every phone call, every email, every movement he made by tracking cell phones or credit cards and scanning the countless traffic cams and other surveillance gear that had been quietly installed in every American city — for the population’s protection, of course. And the group responsible for what he’d discovered had been at it for fifty years at least, so there was no question that its power now was massive and all-encompassing.

Keith watched the stewardess nearest him walk down the aisle with a desultory glance at the female passenger’s seat back and purse, and the tingle of anxiety in his stomach blossomed into a full-blown panic attack as she failed to tell her to return it to its upright position or stash her bag. That wasn’t the protocol. Something felt wrong. The flight attendant averted her eyes, seeming to be far away as she went through the motions, and also ignored that his seatbelt wasn’t fastened.

Maybe she was having a bad day. God, he knew how that was. Maybe a boyfriend had dumped her or she’d gotten news of a layoff, or the biopsy of that lump in her chest had come back with ominous findings. Countless things could explain her lack of diligence. Keith forced himself to take deep breaths and calm down. Not everything was evidence of a threat. He’d made it. He was on his way, and by the time his departure was flagged by the computers he’d have touched down and melted into the crowd.

He’d need to touch base with Becky at some point, obliquely, through some sort of a cutout, to let her know that he was okay. They’d been dating for four years, getting serious, discussions of weddings and children increasingly common, and she knew nothing of his sudden disappearance, which was for the best. If she was questioned, there wasn’t much she could tell anyone that would put her at risk — all she really knew was the early part of his saga, where he’d developed a fascination with cattle.

The plane jolted as it rolled back from the gate, and then the turbines kicked up with a whine and they were taxiing in the worsening gloom towards their position, third for takeoff. The woman across the aisle’s lips moved slightly as she reclined with closed eyes, and Keith realized with a start that she was praying.

Of course she was. She still believed in a God that would protect her from harm. Keith had long ago discarded those notions in favor of the harsh evidence that this was all there was. Part of him wished that he could escape into the belief of an afterlife where good deeds were rewarded; or barring that, could at least knock back a dozen mini-bottles of hard liquor to numb his soul. But it was no good. Nothing could provide solace at this point but confirmation of the truth.

The engines wound to high pitch and then he was pressed back into his seat as though by an invisible hand. Rain streaked off the wings, leaving white froth as evidence of their passage. He joined his praying cabin mate in closing his eyes, and waited for the lift into the air that would signal the true finality of his escape. The aluminum tube hurtled down the runway until physics took over, the curved upper surface of the wing creating lift at somewhere around a hundred fifty miles per hour, and the jet leapt into the sky, gray as elephant hide, and ascended into the clouds with a roar.

Sixteen minutes later, Flight 418 to Rome disappeared from JFK’s radar screens, vaporizing east of Long Island, over the Atlantic.