“Hi,” she said.
“Is there an issue I should know about?”
She frowned.
“I’m not—”
“Between you and Busch, the copilot.”
She flushed.
“No. He’s not—that’s—”
She smiled.
“Sometimes they like you,” she said. “And you have to say no.”
“That’s all?”
She fixed her hair self-consciously, aware that she had drink orders to fill.
“We flew together before. He likes to flirt—with all the girls, not just—but it’s fine. I’m fine.”
A moment.
“And you’re here,” she said, “so—”
Gil thought about that. It was his job to assess—a darkened doorway, the sound of footsteps—he was, by necessity, a connoisseur of people. He had developed his own system for knowing the types—the brooder, the nervous talker, the irascible victim, the bully, the sprite—and within those types had developed subtypes and patterns that signaled possible shifts in anticipated behavior—the circumstances under which the nervous talker might become the brooder, and then the bully.
Emma smiled at him again. Gil thought about the copilot, the half-eaten sandwich, the captain’s words. Travel time was just under an hour, gate-to-gate. He thought about Kipling’s indictment, about the case-closed kidnapping of Robin. He thought about everything that could go wrong, no matter how far-fetched, running it all through the gray matter abacus that had made him a legend. He thought about Moshe Dayan’s eye and his father’s drinking, about his brothers’ deaths, each in turn, and the death of his sister. He thought about what it meant to live your life as an echo, a shadow, always standing behind a man and his light. He had scars he wouldn’t discuss. He slept with his finger on the trigger of a Glock. He knew that the world was an impossibility, that the state of Israel was an impossibility, that every day men woke and put on their boots and went off to do the impossible no matter what it might be. This was the hubris of mankind, to rally in the face of overwhelming odds, to thread the needle and climb the mountain and survive the storm.
He thought of all this in the time it took the flight attendant to pass, and then he got on the radio and told command that they were good to go.
Chapter 32
Countryside
Scott drives north, paralleling the Hudson past Washington Heights and Riverdale. Urban walls give way to trees and low-slung towns. Traffic stalls, then abates, and he takes the Henry Hudson Parkway past the low mall clot of central Yonkers, shifting to Route 9 heading up through Dobbs Ferry, where American revolutionaries once camped in force, probing the Manhattan border for British weakness. He rides with the radio off, listening to the slush of his tires on the rain-slick road. A late-summer thunderstorm has moved through in the last few hours, and he navigates the tail end of it, windshield wipers moving in time.
He is thinking about the wave. Its silent rumble. The loom of it. A towering hump of ocean brine exposed by moonlight, sneaking up on them from the rear, like a giant from a children’s story. Eerie and soundless it came, an enemy without soul or agency. Nature at its most punishing and austere. And how he grabbed the boy and dove.
His mind shifts to the image of cameras—leering mechanically, thrust forward on anonymous shoulders, judging with their unblinking convex eyes. Scott thinks of the lights in his face, the questions overlapping, becoming a wall. Were the cameras a tool for the advancement of man, he wonders, or was man a tool for the advancement of the cameras? We carry them, after all, valeting them from place to place, night and day, photographing everything we see. We believe we have invented our machine world to benefit ourselves, but how do we know we aren’t here to serve it? A camera must be aimed to be a camera. To service a microphone, a question must be asked. Twenty-four hours a day, frame after frame, we feed the hungry beast, locked in perpetual motion as we race to film it all.
Does television exist for us to watch, in other words, or do we exist to watch television?
Overhead, the wave crested, teetering, a five-story building on the verge of smooth collapse, and he dove, squeezing the boy to him, no time to take a breath, his body taking over, survival no longer trusted to the abstract functions of the mind. Legs kicking, he entered the blacks, feeling the spin-cycle tug of the wave pulling all things to it, and then the tilt and inevitable gravity of descent, grabbed by a monster’s hand and thrust deeper, and now it was all he could do to hold the boy to his body and survive.