The Asset

For all who have died at the hands of terrorist cowards. May those who have silenced you never be heard.

PROLOGUE

HARTSFIELD–JACKSON ATLANTA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

Day 63—The day before Thanksgiving

W
e're all going to die.

This thought is the ice pick in his head, a cold metal truth penetrating, splitting his synapses, bleeding his sanity dry. He is languishing near the end of one of many TSA checkpoint lines pooling into a seething crush of humanity. It's the busiest travel day of the year, at the busiest airport in the world, and families are assembled en masse, shuffling inches at a time with their screaming kids and overstuffed hand luggage so they can make it to Grandma's house in time for turkey and pumpkin pie. Outside, a light rain under an iron-gray sky is hindering low-altitude visibility, and a red rash of delays begins to spread across the flight status screens.

He hasn't slept in days, as evidenced by the steamer trunks under his bloodshot eyes. He fights off the shakes, palpitations, and brain fog of hypoglycemia, going on nearly twelve hours since his last meal. With his dirty, oversize raincoat and sweat-stained baseball cap, he's fresh meat for the airport cops methodically patrolling the security clearance area with drug-sniffing German shepherds. He can't afford to be singled out, searched, questioned, or detained. He looks at his watch.

Forty-five minutes.

His mind, despite his body's withering fatigue, speed-shifts from scenario to scenario, hoping to collide with a viable solution . . . anything
that will relieve him of what he's there to do, what he
must do.
He sees his reflection in the obsidian eye of a video surveillance dome staring in wide-angle suspicion at the traveling hordes. He barely recognizes himself, a warped caricature on the verge of doing the unthinkable. He looks at his watch again. Its relentlessly ticking second hand juts like a middle finger, mocking him.

Forty minutes.

Move, you fucking coward
, he bellows inwardly, hoping his command will echo down to what's left of his guts and stir decisive action. Scanning his surroundings in a way he knows damn well looks like the scheming fidget of a novice criminal, he sees standing fifty heads behind him the one man he was praying he wouldn't see—his crisply pressed Atlanta Police Department uniform a black monolith in the noise of vacation color.

“Fuck,” he says out loud, forgetting himself.

He draws immediate scowls from a gaggle of parents attempting to wrangle restless children. But their silent admonishments don't arouse shame or guilt, only an acute awareness of the thousands of mothers, fathers, and kids living and breathing around him, lined up like lambs led to slaughter. With every smile, every peck on the cheek, every hand held, every baby comforted, and every anticipatory moment of holiday cheer, his heart beats faster in his chest and sweat soaks his clothes. He checks his six. The uniform is coming for him, working his way through the crowd with an eager hand on his holstered service weapon.

Time's up.

He unbuttons his raincoat and moves, walking quickly toward the TSA checkpoint, head down, eyes in a predatory squint, hands stuffed menacingly in his pockets. Within seconds, he hears the first scream. It rises quickly to full-panic pitch and incites more, spreading like wildfire. Those who aren't cowering in fear at the sight of him are pointing and shouting, trying to get the attention of the authorities. He breaks into a jog and throws off his overcoat, fully revealing the source of panic. A collective gasp sucks the air out of the room.

“He has a bomb!” a child shrieks, her tinny voice echoing.

He's wearing a vest with what appears to be thirty sticks of dynamite, blasting caps, and detonation cord duct-taped to it. Armed response officers sweep into the area, ordering everyone to get down. He only has a few seconds to make it to his target, the TSA checkpoint, before he gets a bullet
in the head. He lowers his shoulders and breaks into a full sprint through the blind, stampeding chaos of the crowd. The terminal is hemorrhaging humanity into the concourse while the metal detector and body scanner alarms burst into an earsplitting crescendo.

He looks back. The dark uniform pursuing him snakes through the stumbling masses and draws the inky blur of a semiautomatic pistol from its holster, taking aim with the measured stance of a marksman. He ducks and runs toward the gaping mouths of more guns. The gray sky parts, igniting the scene with the white fire of sunlight.

BRITISH AIRWAYS FLIGHT 870

Day 1—Two months ago

L
adies and gentlemen, in preparation
for landing . . .”

The flight attendant chirped apologetic Cockney while Kennedy snored in his British Airways business class flatbed seat, a coveted upgrade on the Heathrow–JFK leg of a fifteen-thousand-mile work odyssey that began five days ago in Los Angeles. As a two-hundred-plus-days-per-year business traveler, this was home, or, as Kennedy liked to call it, “the master bedroom.” In fact, he had grown so accustomed to it, he wasn't able to sleep in a normal bed but drifted off like a baby in a metal and composite tube traveling six hundred miles per hour. While the smartly dressed crew tidied up the cabin, Kennedy was dreaming—another thing he could only do at thirty-three thousand feet.

The dream was what his former shrink called
recurring
and it was about his sister, Belle, whom he loved dearly but who had been dead for fourteen years. As always, she sat next to him on the last flight of her young life—American Airlines Flight 11, traveling from Boston to Los Angeles on September 11, 2001. Belle was sixteen and had gone to Boston to help their nana while their grandfather was in the ICU recovering from bypass surgery. Belle hated to fly, but that time she was especially nervous because it was to be her first time flying alone. Kennedy had accompanied her on the first leg of the trip, but had had to return to school before her.

Their father, Richard, an air force captain, had treated the situation in his usual hard-ass way, telling her to buck up and face her fears head-on. Their mother had passed from cancer shortly after Belle was born, so Richard decided he was going to raise them both in the school of hard knocks. For a highly analytical and somewhat emotionally unavailable child like Kennedy, this worked perfectly. But Belle was like their mother, Grace, the polar opposite. She had complex emotions from an early age and vexed her father with her inability to look at the world like he did, as a colorless grid ruled by mathematics.

The night before the flight, Belle spoke to Kennedy about it over the phone. The two of them were very close, relying on each other for advice and shoulders to cry on. Kennedy was nineteen at the time and every bit the protective big brother—feigning apathy but loving Belle more fiercely than himself.

“You're going to be fine. Just put your headphones on and sleep and the next thing you know you'll be home.”

“What if I'm not fine?”

“What do you mean?”

“You seem so certain I'll be okay, but how do you know? How
could
you know?”

“I just know. There are literally tens of thousands of flights in the US alone every day. Statistically speaking, the chances of you dying in a plane crash are nil.”

“Yeah but, statistically speaking, if my plane does crash, the chances of me dying are one hundred percent.”

“Belle, riding in the back of Dad's car while he drives you like a maniac to ballet class is exponentially more dangerous, but you're not afraid to do that.”

“I am now! Jesus, you're a big help. I'm more worried now than before I called.”

“You don't need to worry at all, Belle. What good would it do anyway?”

“Oh, here we go with your patented
We're all doomed so screw it and have another beer
philosophy.”

“I find it comforting.”

“Which is why you never get any dates.”

“Whatever. I get dates.”

“Yeah, in your granola.”

“Ha-ha. Pretty funny for someone supposedly experiencing mortal terror.”

“It's how I cope.”

“Coping implies the existence of an actual problem.”

“I know this makes no sense to you, but this doesn't
feel
right to me. Like that time my hair stood on end before lightning struck Mrs. Garcia's oak tree.”

“That wasn't a feeling, it was static electricity.”

“Stop trying to make me feel better by telling me I'm full of it!”

“You know what? I don't have time for this right now. I have a tournament this weekend and an anthropology midterm I haven't even thought about studying for. Call Dad and tell him to come get you.”

“Dad will tell me to buck up and get on the plane, just like you. You come.”

“There's no way I can fly back to Boston right now. Absolutely no way.”

“You'd be back in less than twenty-four hours. Come on, it'll be fun—”

“Belle, you're living in a fantasy world. I'm living in the real world and I can't just fly to Boston to fly you home because you're nervous.”

“I'm not just nervous. I'm really scared! All you care about is your stupid golf and Stanford nerd friends! I'm your sister . . . I don't want to go alone.”

Belle's aggressive tone disappeared on her last line because she was fighting tears. Kennedy angrily interpreted this as an attempt to manipulate him.

“At least I'm not a little princess who thinks the world revolves around her! Call me when you decide to grow the fuck up.”

He hung up. Belle tried calling him back several times but he didn't answer out of spite. That was the last time he ever spoke to her.

In the dream, Belle was always the same age as when she died. Her strawberry hair and faint pixie dusting of freckles taunted him with their eternal innocence. Like when she was alive, she always had the mirthful expression of someone up to no good. As they sat next to each other on the flight Kennedy never took, Belle talked incessantly, blithely cruising through subjects both relevant and tangential, while he waited to get in his own edgewise
word that would never see the light of day. But it didn't matter. Her manic narratives endeared him.

“I wish you would shut up,” he joked.

“Then we would both have to listen to you, and that just wouldn't do, Monsieur Ennui,” she politely chided, punching him in the arm.