Malcolm drank his coffee and thought about the work waiting for him in Atlanta, and then about nothing at all, in the easy alternation of a man who has done his part correctly. Whatever the day intended to do with him, it would have to do it on the record. He did not know it yet, but the record had already begun.
Chapter Two
The Door Closes and the Questions Begin
The flight south was the kind Malcolm liked best, which was to say forgettable. A smooth climb, a cup of water, an hour of the paperback not being finished, and then the long descent through white cloud into Georgia heat. He came down the jet bridge at Hartsfield Jackson with his briefcase in one hand and his phone in the other, moving with the herd and in no particular hurry. His business in Atlanta would keep for an hour. It had already kept for six months.
The baggage hall was a country of its own, all echo and rolling thunder. Malcolm took his place at the carousel beside a family in matching shirts and watched the bags come up out of the dark and go around. Coats. Golf clubs. A stroller folded like a sleeping animal. His own case did not come.
He was not worried. Bags took their own roads in a place this size, and worry was a tax he refused to pay on an empty stomach. He checked the time, noted it out of habit, and was reaching for his phone to tell Denise he had landed when a voice at his shoulder said his name.
"Mr. Bennett? Malcolm Bennett?"
Two men stood there in the uniform of the airport police. The older one was in his fifties, tall and kept, with silver showing at the temples and a captain's bars that caught the light. The second man was younger, broader in the wrong places, with a face that looked like it had been awake longer than he had. Both wore the calm of men delivering news they had delivered before.
"I am Malcolm Bennett," he said. "Good morning, Captain." He had read the bars before he read the face. Men who worked in records learned to do that. "Your name, sir?"
"Captain Richard Hale," the older man said. "This is Officer Brent Collins. Mr. Bennett, your checked bag has been flagged for a routine inspection. If you would come with us, please." The please was polished and entirely decorative. It was not a request, and all three of them knew it, and Malcolm appreciated, in a distant way, that nobody pretended otherwise.
"Of course," Malcolm said. "Lead the way."
They walked him not toward the public counters but along the edge of the hall and through a door marked for staff, into the airport behind the airport. The corridors there were narrower and plainer, painted the color of old paper, lit by tubes that hummed. Carts passed. Radios murmured on other men's shoulders. Malcolm counted doors the way he counted everything, without deciding to.
He also counted cameras, for the same reason. There had been domes all through the baggage hall, dark half moons in the ceiling, watching the carousels from every side. In the staff corridors there were fewer. In the small room they brought him to at last, there were none at all.
It was a plain room, windowless, with a steel table fixed to the floor and three chairs and a smell of disinfectant and old coffee. A clock on the wall said ten past the hour. Malcolm set his briefcase down, took the chair they indicated, and folded his hands on the table where everyone could see them. He had been on the other side of rooms like this one for twenty years. He knew what they were for. They were for making a person feel that the world had narrowed to the size of the table.
Hale sat across from him. Collins took the chair by the door, and the door clicked shut behind him with a sound that had more finality in it than a lock.
"This will not take long," Hale said. "Routine inspection. It happens a hundred times a day." "I am sure it does," Malcolm said. "For the record, Captain, may I have your badge number, and yours, Officer Collins? I keep notes. It is a professional deformity."
Something crossed Collins's face, quick as weather. Hale only smiled, the smile of a man who has been asked for his autograph. He gave the numbers slowly, the way you speak to a child or a recording device, and Malcolm repeated them back once, committing them to the ledger he kept in his head, beside the flight number, beside the time on the clock.