"Tell him thank you." It was another man speaking Gavallan's words. "So he wasn't upset when he found out you'd flown over to check out Mercury without letting him know beforehand?"
"I told you he wouldn't be," said Byrnes. "He wanted me to tell you that Mercury must be as transparent as any of its counterparts in the West."
"Did he?"
"Yes, he did. Anyway, I thought I'd fly into New York and meet you for the launch party."
"Sure thing," said Gavallan, searching for words, stumbling. He felt hollow, shaky. A rod of pain, searing and white-hot, fired inside his skull. Wincing, he touched at his forehead. "Um… yeah, sounds good, see you Monday. Oh, and call Emerald and give her your flight details. We'll send a limo to pick you up at JFK. When you see Kirov, ask him if he's free for dinner."
Gavallan waited for a response, but the line was broken and only static answered his words. Besides, it didn't really matter. Grafton Byrnes had told him everything he needed to know.
Everything's copacetic.
18
Gavallan was walking the ward.
His pace was slow, his steps measured. The click of his heels against the linoleum floor sounded to his anguished ears like the final ticks of a time bomb. With every step, he was tempted to draw a last breath, to squeeze tight his eyelids in anticipation of the blast to come. But what would it destroy? he wondered. What was left that hadn't already been torn apart by his own merciless conscience? What might it damage that hadn't been shredded eleven years ago?
The clock on the wall read 2:15. The room was extremely bright and extremely quiet, a fluorescent universe of hushed sounds. His ear seized each in turn- the rise and fall of a neonatal respirator, the gasp of a fragile patient, the sibilant bleed of oxygen- then he continued his all-night vigil.
He was back at the Zoo, doing tours of the Quad for having missed his second curfew in a month. He was pacing the ready room before his first flight into combat. He was the star witness at his own trial. All that was left to decide was the penalty. The verdict had already been given. Guilty on all counts.
"Everything's copacetic," Byrnes had said, a footnote from their shared history to let Gavallan know he was testifying under duress.
Hardly, mused Gavallan acidly.
A skeleton staff presided at this late hour: a few nurses, orderlies, and cleaners. Through the glass partition, he kept track of a janitor polishing the corridor, his green-clad back bowed and sober, his worn mop eating up miles of hallway with a methodical, unerring rhythm that was a science unto itself.
Gavallan glanced down at the child in his arms, a frail boy swaddled in a sky blue blanket. He'd been awarded the provisional name of Henry, and the name would stick until his mother could come to long enough to provide him a more permanent one. He'd been born one week before, full term, 4 pounds 2 ounces, 14 inches long. To look at him, he was a healthy child. His features were well-formed. Broad nose. Full lips. Dignified chin. His eyes were closed, and a cap of curly black hair crowned his brown skin. But the experienced eye knew differently and ticked off the indicators of the infant's affliction with weary ease. The bluish, trembling lips. The drawn cheeks. The eyes twitching beneath the lids and the head that every minute or so jerked along with them. Ataxic aphasia, they called it, a condition prevalent among children born to crack-addicted mothers.
A tap on the window drew Gavallan's attention.
"Coffee?" asked Rosie Chiu, the head duty nurse, pointing at her own mug. If she was surprised to see a man wearing a dinner jacket beneath his operating gown in the pediatric intensive care ward, she didn't show it. He'd been coming too long for that. Always at night. Always alone.
Gavallan shook his head and said no.
He'd first visited St. Jude's eight years earlier on a Friday evening benefactors' tour. The donors were lectured about the miracle of magnetic resonance imaging, the latest advances in open-heart surgery, and the newest cures in the war against children's leukemia. But it wasn't until Gavallan made it out of the neonatal intensive care unit that he grew angry. His neck grew hot, his suit two sizes too small. Like little Henry, he'd become twitchy all over. He wasn't sure why, but suddenly, he was mad- white-hot, steaming mad. Maybe it was the relentless sunniness of the place- the yellow walls decorated with dancing murals, the cheery nurses, the upbeat smiles- contrasted against the bleak reality of the situation. Even if these kids survived, what did they face? A life lived in medical institutions, state-run homes, or at best foster families. These kids with underdeveloped lungs and diseased eyes, with hair-trigger emotions and chronic aphasia. They had no right to their expectations, he'd railed silently.
But ten minutes later when Nurse Chiu finished her talk about the hospital's need for volunteers willing to come and walk the infants- to help them grow comfortable with the touch of another human being, to teach them to accept the gaze of another set of eyes, and, yes, just to keep the noisy little gremlins quiet- he'd found himself alone agreeing to return. And he wondered whose expectations he was challenging. His or the kids'?
Gavallan shut his eyes. He couldn't handle another body laid at his feet. Oh no. Byrnes's call had freed him of illusions. Konstantin Kirov was just as Cate had described him- "ruthless and conniving, and maybe even more." This time Gavallan could not look elsewhere for excuses. This time he couldn't fall back on bungled intelligence or fumbled orders. This time it was up to him.
"Don't know if I can handle this one, chief," he whispered to Henry's sleeping brown face. "Think you can give me a hand?"
And he marveled in disbelief at how once upon a time he'd been a warrior.
The whine in his ear built slowly, as it had in the plane itself. A steady high-pitched cry that signaled the powering-up of the aircraft's avionics package. He was going back to the Gulf. To Saudi Arabia. To Iraq. To Desert Storm. To the night the infrared cameras on the underside of Darling Lil recorded the tape that sat even now in his flight locker. The tape titled Day 40- Abu Ghurayb Presidential Complex. He was going to his own private little corner of hell, and his familiarity with the territory did little to lessen his terror over the trip.
"Thunder three-six. Red one. How do you read?"
"Roger, Red one. This is Thunder three-six. Ready to copy words. Which way to Wonderland?"
Gavallan is sitting in the cockpit of Darling Lil, far out on runway two-niner at King Khalid Air Force Base deep in the Saudi Arabian desert. It is 01:15 Continental European Time, the morning of February 25, 1991. Day 40 of Desert Storm. Ground operations have begun twenty-four hours earlier and the vaunted Republican Guard is surrendering en masse. Morale is high. But Gavallan is ever cautious. When will Saddam unleash his biological weapons? Is he waiting until the last minute to launch a nuke at Israel? What exactly is the Iraqi dictator keeping up his sleeve?
Despite the cockpit's airtight seal, the desert air seeps in and surrounds him. It smells of jet fuel and sweat and a million square miles of superheated sand. Gavallan loves the scent. Inside its arid folds, he can taste his country's victory.
Darling Lil is fully loaded for her night's work. Two GBU-27s sit inside the weapons bay. Each a two-thousand-pound package of high explosives capped with a delayed detonation fuse and a laser guidance system to guarantee hand delivery to the target.
"Thunder three-six. You are clear for takeoff."
"Thunder thirty-six copies all. Salaam Aleik'hum."
Gavallan wraps the fingers of his left hand lightly around the throttle and guides it forward. For a moment, the plane rocks, as if a boat in a chop, then he releases the brake and the Black Jet begins its shot down the runway. At 180 knots, he rotates the aircraft up and the wheels lift off the ground. He loves this moment, when the aircraft leaves the earth and he feels as if he too has been freed from his temporal moorings. The first climb is brief. At fifty feet, he levels off the aircraft and allows it to build speed to three hundred knots, then pushes up the nose and begins his ascent to his cruising altitude of twenty-four thousand feet.