He’d tried to sleep on the plane. Economy all the way home. They’d flown him to DC on a government jet and sent him back to Minneapolis commercial. He’d sort of been hoping he’d get a first-class upgrade, but nope. That was the federal government for you. He’d tried closing his eyes anyway, leaning against the window and letting the drone of the motor vibrate him to sleep, but whenever he’d get close to actually drifting off he’d imagine the feel of something crawling on him. His leg. His arm. The back of his neck. After the third jump of adrenaline, the third time he started swatting at himself, he decided it was better to just call it a day and watch some television. Not a comfortable trip.
He waited until the plane was mostly cleared out before he made his way up the aisle from near the back. He didn’t have any luggage. The director had made it clear he was expected in Washington immediately, with “immediately” being code for “If you stop to pack luggage, you will find yourself reassigned somewhere unpleasant.” Mike did take the time to have his hand stitched and bandaged and to put on a new suit that didn’t have blood or puke on it, but all he was traveling with was his wallet, his cell phone, which was dead because he hadn’t brought a charger, his identification, and his Glock. The gun was a perk of working for the agency. They still wouldn’t let him bring a bottle of water through security, but the Glock wasn’t a problem. He wished he had taken the extra minute to grab his shoulder holster instead of his belt holster. A shoulder holster did a much better job of keeping his gun hidden, even if it was shitty for any real fieldwork. The holsters were slow to draw, and when you did draw, it was hard not to unintentionally put somebody in the path of the barrel as you moved it to where you were going. They looked undeniably cool, though. He kind of wished he’d been wearing one in that professor’s lab. His suit wasn’t much, a shiny Men’s BusinessDress special, but with his jacket off and a shoulder holster, he would have looked good. He did push-ups and chin-ups for a reason. But no. Instead, he was back in Minneapolis, getting off a plane after going nonstop for three days, the holster on his hip sitting against a patch of sweat. He’d showered at the hotel, but a change of clothes was in his near future.
He could hear the buzz of voices before he reached the end of the tunnel, but it wasn’t until he popped out into the terminal that he realized there was something wrong. The normal unpleasantness of an airport was turned up. Way up. Instead of the boarding-area stasis of families clustered together in boredom, middle-aged consultants who thought they were important enough to warrant three seats when there weren’t enough to go around, harried parents with car seats and juice boxes, instead of all that, there was a sense of mutiny. Crowds were clustered around the airline desks at the gates, a jabbering mix of yelling and pointing here, small groups of people crying there. More worrisome was that the people freaking out were only a small minority. The rest of the people were engaged in what looked like a mass exodus. A dispirited mass exodus, but a mass exodus all the same.
This, he thought, was what 9/11 must have been like.
Mike saw a uniformed TSA agent making like a traffic cop, and he stepped over to the young man, giving a flash of his ID. “Just got off a flight and my phone is deader than dead. What’s the ruckus?”
“No ruckus. Flights are canceled.”
“This is all just for a few canceled flights?”
The TSA agent stared at Mike with what looked suspiciously like a smirk. For a second, Mike indulged in the fantasy of popping the kid a quick one in the nose. It was a nice fantasy, but unwise.
“It’s not a few canceled flights. It’s all of them.”
“All of them?”
“Yep. Every flight.”
“Every flight from Minneapolis has been canceled?”
This time there was no suspicion. It was definitely a smirk. “Every flight in the country. Grounded all of them.”