Underground Airlines(63)

All that mattered was that he wanted what was missing—what Kevin had hidden. For whatever reason, the marshals wanted it as badly as Barton did, and I was now in a position to deliver it.

Bridge remained quiet, and I heard the burble of the airport behind him. Gate announcements; a baby yelping; the muted beep beep of some kind of small vehicle in reverse.

I kept talking. “So when this man escaped, it created a special problem. For the Marshals Service. He couldn’t just be caught, because if he’s caught, whatever he’s carrying ends up in Canada or in front of a judge.”

More silence.

“You still not interrupting because I’m right, right?”

“Right.”

“Okay, well, now you gotta answer. Now I got a question.” I didn’t really. I actually knew the answer. But I needed to hear him say it.

“Where it said Jackdaw was known to have intended to remove himself to Indianapolis…that’s torture. Right? That little ‘known to have’? That’s some Franklin who’s persuaded to look the other way while Jackdaw’s accomplice got hung up or buried till she told what she knew.”

Silence.

“Answer me.”

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

I had to hold the phone away from me. I bared my teeth. I tilted my head back. Tortured, then, before she was killed. Of course. I knew there was something behind it all along, and what’s always behind everything? When you scrape away the sticky cobweb of euphemisms like known to have intended to remove himself, you always find something hiding underneath it, and it is always violence. It’s always some kind of violence.

I said the girl’s name to myself, the name Kevin had called out to the sky. Luna. The sun was all the way gone now. The sky was dark, and the moon had crept up, shrouded in clouds.

“The one thing…” Bridge started, then stopped.

“What?”

“I didn’t know.”

“What didn’t you know?”

“Anything. When I delivered that file to you, I thought it was real. I promise you that, Victor.”

Jesus Christ. He wanted me to care. He wanted me to know that he cared, for God’s sake.

“I agreed with you from the beginning about the quality of the file. I also felt there was something off there. I told you to do your job because that’s my job. But you had—numerous concerns, and you were vocal about them. You were persistent about those.”

“I told you to look into it.”

“And I looked into it.” He cleared his throat. “Correct.”

A sensation welled up in me, of tenderness. Empathy. This feeling I strangled. I tightened my grip on the phone. I focused on sorting out the timeline.

“So you called your boss and asked him about the file.”

“Her.”

“Fine. Her. And she called you back when? Friday morning?”

“Yes. And she told me there was nothing to be concerned about. But that—I was not satisfied with that. I pushed her. She hung up. She called me back Friday night.”

“Seven thirty.”

“Yes. Right. She told me…” A fumbling half-second silence, a search for language. “She gave me the backstory on this.”

“She told you that members of your agency have been participating in a massive fraud on the American people.” I was in a mood now to have my suspicions explicitly confirmed. “Bridge?”

“Yes.”

“And she told you the real job here was to find this kid so he could be killed and this evidence could be collected and destroyed.”

Silence. Total silence. Dead and sad.

“Bridge? She explained to you that the real job here was to find this kid so he could be murdered and his magic envelope tossed on a fire. Yes or no?”

“Yes.”

“And why didn’t you tell her to go f*ck herself?”

“It’s just…that’s not—that wasn’t an option for me.”

Not an option for him. I marveled at the phrase. I wondered in shades of furious red what the shackles were that he imagined himself to be wearing: loyalty? Some tawdry piece of information she was holding, this boss, maybe about some malfeasance of his some years ago? Was it—the word choked in me—love? Were they f*cking, Bridge and this mysterious her? I held the phone down to my stomach for a second, twisted the cheap piece of plastic like it was someone’s neck, and then I put it back to my ear.

“—you want, Victor?”

“It’s very simple. That boy is dead.”

“Dead…how—”

“They killed him by accident.”

I didn’t give him time to be happy about it. I ground my teeth. I bore down. “But the package never made it out of the Four. He left it behind. Somewhere.”

“Why?”

“Just listen. He left it behind. He felt betrayed by the Airlines, and he stashed it. It’s still behind the Fence. And no one can get it. And they are sending me there to get it. Do you understand? I have been subverted. I am a double agent now. I work for the enemy.”

At last Bridge did not ask why or say, “What?” At last he simply understood.

“You work for the enemy, except you are telling me that you do.”