"Let me see your identification," Hale said, and Malcolm took out his wallet and his boarding pass and laid them on the steel in a neat row, the way a man lays out cards he is not afraid to show. Collins wrote something in a notebook, slowly, and then looked up at the corner of the ceiling, where in any other room a camera would have been.
Then Hale leaned back in his chair, settled himself like a man sitting down to a meal, and the questions began.
Chapter Three
What Two Kilos Looks Like on an Interview Table
The questions, at first, were the questions of a form. Where had he flown in from. What was the purpose of his trip. How long did he intend to stay in Atlanta. Malcolm answered each one plainly and completely, the way he answered questions in his own interview rooms, and he watched Hale decide, somewhere behind the practiced eyes, that this one was going to be easy. Men who cooperate, in Hale's experience of the world, were men with something to hide or men with nothing at all, and either kind could be handled.
Then there was a knock at the door, two raps, and Collins rose to open it. A uniformed attendant wheeled in a low cart, and on the cart, sitting open like a patient on a table, was Malcolm's suitcase.
He knew it before he saw the scuffed corners. He knew it the way you know your own coat in a rack of coats. The lid stood open. His shirts had been pushed aside, and the paperback lay spine up in a corner, and nestled in the middle of his folded clothes, in clear plastic bags packed tight and squared like bricks, was a quantity of white powder.
About two kilos, he judged. He had seen enough of it across evidence tables in twenty years to weigh it with his eyes. Two kilos of white powder, in his suitcase, in his clothes, in a small room in the Atlanta airport, with a captain of police watching his face for the crack.
The crack did not come. Malcolm looked at the bags for a long moment, and then he looked at Hale, and what he felt was not fear. It was something colder and more useful. It was the feeling he got at the start of a case, when the first false note sounded in a file that everyone else believed was clean.
"Mr. Bennett," Hale said, and his voice had changed. The politeness had gone out of it, the way heat goes out of a room. "This was found inside your luggage during the inspection. Do you want to tell me what it is?"
"I could not say with any accuracy, Captain," Malcolm said. "It was not in my luggage when I checked it in Washington this morning. Of that I am completely certain."
"They all say that," Collins said from by the door, and then seemed to wish he had not.
Malcolm turned his head and regarded the officer with mild interest, the way a man regards a clock that has struck the wrong hour. "Officer Collins," he said. "Brent Collins." He repeated the man's badge number back to him, exactly as Hale had given it, digit for digit, and watched the officer go still. "I want to be sure I have everyone correctly. It matters later."
"There is not going to be a later that helps you," Hale said. "You are looking at federal charges, Mr. Bennett. Trafficking weight. That is the end of your life as you know it. The only question left is how much of what remains of it you spend talking to us."
"Then let us get the facts in order while they are fresh," Malcolm said. "It will save everyone time. My flight landed at the time shown on my boarding pass, which is on the table in front of you. I waited at the carousel for about eleven minutes. You approached me beside it, both of you together. You brought me directly to this room. The clock on your wall said ten past the hour when I sat down. This suitcase has been in the custody of this airport since it came off the belt in Washington. I have not touched it, or seen it, since I watched it go through the flaps at the ticket counter."
"You talk like a lawyer," Hale said.
"I talk like a man who keeps records," Malcolm said. "It amounts to the same thing, eventually."
He folded his hands again on the steel table. His heart was beating. He was not a statue. But it was beating at the pace of a man climbing stairs he had chosen to climb. Inside his jacket, in the pocket over his ribs, sat his phone, and on that phone were three photographs that he had not mentioned, and did not intend to mention. Not yet. Not in a room with no cameras, where anything said could later be unsaid by the only other men in it.