"Ask your questions, Captain," he said. "I will answer all of them, fully and in order. And when we are finished with yours, I will have a few of my own."
Chapter Four
Thirty Years of Practice Smiling at Travelers
Richard Hale had been smiling at travelers for thirty years, and he was better at it than any man in the building. He had smiled at honeymooners and fugitives and grandmothers with contraband fruit in their handbags. He had smiled at men he was about to arrest and at men he had just decided to let walk out into the Georgia sun with their secrets intact. The smile was a tool, like the bars on his collar, like the slow way he had of saying a man's name. Tools were what separated a captain from a guard.
He had come up the slow way. Patrol in the terminals when the airport was half its present size. Then the baggage detail. Then sergeant. Then the narcotics interdiction unit, which he had built largely out of his own reputation and now commanded the way a man commands a room he furnished himself. He knew every corridor in Hartsfield Jackson the way priests know their own churches, including the ones the cameras did not see. Especially those.
The airport moved a river of goods through its belly every day, and some of that river ran dark. Drugs came through in false bottoms and freight pallets and the luggage of the desperate and the greedy, and some of those drugs got caught, and went into the evidence room under seal and signature to wait for a court order and an incinerator. That was the official river. Hale had dug a second channel off it years ago, quiet and narrow, and only two men knew its course.
It worked the way all durable corruption works, which is to say it looked like diligence. A seizure would come in heavy. The paperwork would be written light, by a kilo, by two. The difference went into a locker that existed on no inventory, and from there it went out again the way it had come in, inside somebody's luggage. Not a courier's luggage. A stranger's. A traveler chosen the way weather chooses a roof.
The stranger would be stopped, the bag opened, the drugs discovered, and the machinery of the law would do the rest with its eyes closed. An arrest was an arrest. The numbers of his unit climbed. Commendations followed numbers the way gulls follow a boat. Hale's name rose through the department on a tide of his own manufacture, and every year the smile got easier, because every year there were more people whose careers depended on not asking where the tide came from.
The choosing had its own craft. Never a local. Never anyone traveling in a group, anyone expected, anyone whose people would make noise in the first hour. A man or a woman alone, ordinary case, ordinary clothes, passing through. Someone whose word, if it ever came to that, would weigh what a stranger's word always weighs against the word of a captain of police. Which is to say, nothing at all.
This morning the catch off the Washington flight had been chosen almost idly. Collins had the description from the belt report: one black hard shell case, checked by a man traveling alone. Hale had approved it with a nod while signing something else. It was not personal. It was arithmetic. One more arrest for the quarter, one more line in the book, one more brick in the wall of a career he intended, one day not far off, to retire on top of.
Only after the man was seated in the interview room did Hale feel the first faint irregularity, like a foot coming down on a step that is not where the stair should be. The fellow was too calm. Not brave calm, not stupid calm. The calm of a man reading a document he has read before. He answered everything. He asked for badge numbers the way other men asked for the time. He folded his hands on the table and kept them there, perfectly still, as if the room were his and the two officers were guests in it.
Hale had interrogated smugglers and liars and killers of various kinds, and every one of them had leaked. Sweat, chatter, bargaining, rage. This one leaked nothing. This one watched. Once, catching those eyes on him across the steel table, Hale had the absurd thought that he was the one being inspected, and he covered the thought with the smile, the thirty year smile, and pressed on. By lunch, he told himself, this would be a file. By lunch it always was.
Chapter Five