The Asset (2 page)

“Maybe I have something important to say.”

“About which of your noble yet hideously dull pursuits? Golf, er . . . Sorry, I need a second to yawn.”

She played like she was yawning out of extreme boredom, eyeballing him for a reaction. Belle's truth serum. A teaspoon of sugar and you're stretched out on the cross.

“I don't have to take this kind of abuse. I'm going to sleep.”

“Fine, you big lug. I have better things to do anyway, like the in-flight magazine crossword puzzle.”

He could see she was getting nervous, so he gently patted her arm while she fidgeted with the folds of her skirt.

“Brother?”

“What now?” he asked with phony annoyance.

She didn't answer. Her face looked ghostly pale, as if the blood and wit had drained from it. Her slender fingers were perched tightly on his forearm, like a bird in a gale. He always tried to wake himself up at that point in the dream but never succeeded.

“What is it?” he asked.

Tears welled in her eyes.

“I don't want to go alone,” she said.

Before Kennedy could be a good big brother and say something to reassure her, he was violently interrupted by the bone-crushing force of impact with the World Trade Center's North Tower. Belle disappeared in a blinding flash as the airplane's fuselage disintegrated into white-hot cinders. Bodies—gasping, burning, convulsing, and clinging to ­nothing—were blown and scattered through a maelstrom of glass and concrete, bloody dandelion florets seeding the mouth of blackness. After the last of the aircraft debris exploded out the building's exit wound, Kennedy always ended up sitting on the edge of the building's smoking maw, looking down on a rain of fire.

“Sir?” a voice called, cutting through the dream.

Kennedy awoke with a start. Teary-eyed and disoriented, he was
staring into the face of a young female flight attendant with a cruelly similar swath of freckles.

“So sorry to disturb you but we're preparing the cabin for arrival.”

Before landing, Kennedy went to the lavatory to do what he always did after having the Belle dream. The crying wasn't the most difficult part. The most difficult part was stopping. The hollow of anguish he felt for Belle had not changed in all the years she was gone. Even in that moment, crammed in an airport lav fourteen years later, he could vividly picture everyone in his college dorm watching Belle's plane hit the World Trade Center. He had just gotten up, and after breakfast he was going to call her to apologize. Instead, he watched her die, and all that was left was a profound sense of helplessness and the one emotion that would drive everything he did in his life from that point on: regret.

T
erminal 7 at JFK always
smelled of cheap, overboiled coffee and stale cologne. As Kennedy took a brisk walk along the concourse—his version of going to the gym—he stretched his legs and contemplated Manhattan. It was the fourth week of September and the city would be singing the crisp overture of autumn. Of course, he was never going to see or experience any of it during his brief visit. Like on most of his business trips, the only sights he'd be taking in were those of Duty Free, Wok & Roll, Dunkin' Donuts, and all the other apostrophic, postapocalyptic airport landmarks he vagabonded past countless times a year.

People often made envious remarks about his business travel, not realizing that the homogenous scenery endemic to virtually every airport in the United States made one susceptible to what Kennedy half jokingly called “Terminal Illness”—a chronic frequent-traveler disease brought on by extreme isolation, fatigue-induced delirium, fast-food malnutrition, excessive consumption of bottom-shelf booze, and diminished social equilibrium. He likened it to extended space travel, but with inferior cuisine.

Kennedy lived in the rarefied atmosphere of the consultant—a hired gun on the payroll of power opening its deep pockets to address deeper fears. The client he was visiting that day was his biggest, the US government, or his rich Uncle Sam, as he often joked. Kennedy was an aviation
security specialist, and the TSA paid him to train their officers with his own trademark curriculum at airports around the country. Just like contracting Blackwater and G4S mercenaries to fight his wars, Uncle Sam found it was a lot easier, and cheaper, to outsource airport security—­especially since before September 11 it had been nothing more than an FAA afterthought.

In college, Kennedy had studied to be an architect. But after his sister's death, he withdrew from the things that had defined him—the golf team and his academic pursuits—and nearly flunked out of school. He thought constantly about hurting himself back then but never followed through. It would have been completely selfish compared to what Belle had suffered. All he could think about was doing something,
anything
, to help prevent something like 9/11 from happening again. Rationally, he knew that would never bring her back. But in his heart he felt if he made a difference somehow, she would forgive him for what he'd done and there might be a slight chance he could forgive himself.

He explored the military at the suggestion of his father, but the idea of killing people indiscriminately in conflicts that serviced political ideologies or protected corporate revenue streams only made him feel worse. The intelligence community was a natural choice for someone with his IQ and work ethic, so he applied to the CIA, thinking a career in the clandestine service might be a way to stop terrorists before they started. But news started coming out about how interagency bickering between the CIA and FBI may have paved the way for the 9/11 terrorists to pull off the worst attack on American soil in history, and Kennedy burned the thick pile of application documents that had taken him weeks to complete.

One of his friends at school, the son of a senator, landed a job with the newly formed Transportation Security Administration, an organization that piqued Kennedy's interest. To him, the front lines in the war on terror were at the nation's airports, and TSA would put him in the trenches. Lockheed Martin recruited and trained the majority of new agents for the TSA at the time and Kennedy used his friend's connections to get an unpaid internship after graduation. His father was furious that he would shoot so low when he was armed with a degree from one of the most prestigious universities in the country. Kennedy didn't care. He had no interest in working anywhere else and was committed to doing whatever it took to get on staff. He spent all the money he had saved since he was a kid, supporting himself during his internship and
even completing an elite aviation security training course in Israel. When he came back from Tel Aviv, he had earned a foot in the door.

By twenty-five, Kennedy was one of Lockheed's top trainers, a specialist in Behavior Detection, something the Israelis had practiced for years but that was a relatively new field in the United States. In addition to training officers, he also became well versed in screening equipment and learned how to write grants for federal research facilities like Lawrence Livermore to develop new tech. At twenty-seven, he was in such high demand it no longer made sense for him to be a Lockheed employee. He hated corporate culture anyway and it seemed like the more he got promoted, the more they wanted to take him away from his boots on the ground and make him a high-paid desk jockey standing around eating birthday cake on Friday afternoons with the rest of the drones.

A few weeks before his thirtieth birthday, he became an independent consultant and inked a specialized skills contractor agreement directly with TSA and the Department of Homeland Security. Back then, it was extremely rare for individuals to have direct contracts with DHS and TSA, and this status expanded Kennedy's reputation in the airport security industry worldwide, winning him contracts with foreign governments.

As they did every year on Kennedy's birthday, he and his father had dinner in Los Angeles at Morton's. Richard was beaming with pride, a very rare condition indeed, but Kennedy thought he looked tired and underweight, a stark contrast to his usual robust self. When he asked Richard about it, his father said he'd had the flu and was on the mend. Six weeks later, Richard was found dead in his home. Unbeknownst to his family and friends, he'd been battling lung cancer for over a year. He had tried to hide that, like he used to try to hide his pack-a-day Marlboro Red habit from Belle and Kennedy. At least with the cigarettes, they could smell the evidence. With this, there was only the stink of death. His own father had not had the decency to allow him to say good-bye, something he was also denied with Belle.

Kennedy had already been struggling to assimilate himself into some semblance of a normal life. Richard's death killed that for good. Work became the false idol he worshipped nearly every waking moment. It was the only thing that made him feel safe from the constant betrayals of people and the outside world. He stopped calling friends and broke off a six-month relationship with a young woman he'd met and fallen for at Lockheed. It was impossible for him to imagine connecting with anyone
beyond the superficialities of the job. For Kennedy, it all came down to a choice. He could allow his pain to swallow him up into the same dark mire he'd been in with Belle—and run the risk of suffocating to death—or harden his heart and channel his rage into his work. He never looked back. Now, at age thirty-­three, he was making a very high six-figure salary, consulting with every major airport in the United States and many in Europe and Asia, and living in the hermetically sealed, disposable world of the frequent flier.

“Good morning,” he said to Lizzy, the young Starbucks barista who knew him by name and his order by heart.

Despite the line of caffeine junkies snaking all the way around the kiosk, she waved him over to the pickup counter to get the latte that was already waiting for him.

“Damn, you look tired,” she said.

“You forgot old.”

“Shut up”—she laughed—“or I'll call out your embarrassing order in front of all these people.”

“You wouldn't dare.”

“Double tall coconut half caff cinnamon dolce latte, extra whip!”

Teenage girls pointed and laughed.

“Thanks, Lizzy, you're a mensch,” he said, handing her a twenty.

“Anytime,” she said. “But when are you going to really show your gratitude and take me out on the town?”

“When I'm not old enough to be your . . . cool uncle,” Kennedy said.

“Eleven years is not that far apart.”

“Maybe not in Utah.”

She laughed again, and Kennedy was eager to change the subject.

“Seen any of my sworn enemies?”

“You mean like that massive toolshed from Homeland Security?”

“That's Mr. Massive Toolshed to you, young lady.”

“Haven't seen him. And my boss isn't here either, so you can kiss me now.”

“Maybe I should go to Peet's,” he said, blowing her a kiss as he walked away.

“I better not catch you cheating on me!” she yelled across the concourse.

As he walked to the TSA office, dreading another training session full of recently unemployed 7-Eleven clerks, his mood took a nosedive. In the past few months, he had begun to hate his job, something he had never dreamed possible. His career had always given him purpose where he had none, and it was one of the few things in his life he genuinely felt proud of. That was back when he thought he could make a difference. But that buoyant illusion sank like a stone when he saw the recent TSA “progress” reports all over the national news saying the agency was failing on an epic scale.

As much as he wanted to nail himself to the cross, he knew the situation was completely beyond his control. Equipment suppliers who skipped testing and oversight because they had half The Hill in their back pockets, bureaucratic interference, and an overworked, underpaid officer workforce that was never given enough time to train and mentor in real-world situations—these were enough to destroy the TSA long before Kennedy arrived on the scene. Put simply, Washington and its parasitic fauna sucked the life out of a program that, in the beginning, had great promise and was formed for all the right reasons.

The end result for Kennedy was a monkey on his back telling him that his life's work was a complete waste of time and taxpayer money. His passion for traveler safety had increased over the years, but his sense of purpose was beginning to ebb. The only thing that kept him going was knowing
they
were still out there, plotting their elaborate schemes to burn the good old US of A to the ground and stomp on the ashes. When he focused on that, and thought of all the time, money, and manpower terrorists were spending to get the upper hand, it didn't matter how fucked up DHS and TSA were. All the cynicism, laziness, and pointless internal bickering weren't going to change the fact that passengers still needed to be kept safe.

As he often did when he was facing a crisis in his life, Kennedy turned to Noah Kruz, a “life mastery coach” who had published a dozen best-­selling books and spoke all over the world on the art of creating a life that
reflected a person's true self versus one that reflected the demands of others. Kruz believed that the egos of people around us had the power to influence and control everything we did, from romance, to career, to health. Once a person was able to filter all of that out and identify what it was that they wanted in these areas, getting it was a far simpler and more rewarding process.