The Younger Man Who Kept Checking the Ceiling
Brent Collins had a tell, and he knew it, and knowing it had never once stopped him. When a room got tight, his eyes went up. He checked the ceiling the way other men checked their watches, looking for the dark glass domes that hung all over the airport like a second set of stars. He told himself he was being professional. He told himself a good officer always knew where the cameras were. He did not tell himself the truth, which was that he was looking to see whether God, or anything doing God's work, had a view of him.
There was no dome in this room. That was the point of this room. Hale had explained it to him years ago with the patience of a teacher: interviews went better without an audience, people talked freer. Collins had nodded and understood, and understood also that what was true of suspects was true of them, and that this was the real lesson.
His part this morning had taken four minutes. That was the obscenity of it, how small the sin was when you timed it. The case had come off the Washington flight and gone down the belt to the sorting area, and Collins, with a scanner in his hand and a reason to be there, had carried it the twenty steps into the service corridor where the camera had been dead since spring. Everyone knew it was dead. Maintenance knew. Hale knew first.
The package was waiting in the locker, wrapped and squared, a little over two kilos of somebody else's seized tomorrow. He had worked the latches of the case, pushed the folded shirts aside, laid the package down among a stranger's clothes, closed it again, and carried it back into the light of the system as if it had never left. Four minutes. His hands had not even shaken. They shook now, in the interview room, an hour later, and he kept them flat on his knees, below the line of the table, where the big man could not see.
The money was never large and never late. That was how the captain kept it clean enough to live with. An envelope in the locker on the first of the month, folded bills, enough to cover the truck payment and his daughter's braces and the quiet emergencies of a house that ran a little behind the world. Collins had a whole catechism for it. The drugs were already seized. The men they were planted on were probably guilty of something. The numbers kept the unit funded, and the unit kept the airport safe. He could recite all of it. He had recited it in the shower that morning.
The first time had been different. The first time, Hale had not asked him to plant anything. He had only asked him to carry a case from one belt to another and sign a form with a time on it that was nearly true. Collins had understood what nearly meant. He had gone home and stood in his kitchen and waited to feel like a criminal, and when the feeling did not come, he had decided that meant he was not one. That was three years ago. The envelopes had been coming ever since, regular as rent.
It did not explain why he kept looking at the ceiling of a room with no camera in it.
The big man across the table was the problem. Collins had seen a hundred travelers in that chair go to pieces in a hundred different ways, and he had privately despised most of them for it. This one had not gone to pieces. This one had asked for their badge numbers and repeated them back like a man shelving books. He had looked at the open suitcase and the white bricks inside it and his face had done nothing at all, and Collins, standing by the door, had felt the four minutes in the corridor come back to him all at once. The dead camera. The locker. The shirts that were not his.
"You are awful quiet, Mr. Bennett," Hale said, pressing a little. "Innocent men usually have more to say."
"I am saving it," the man said. "For a larger room."
Collins looked up at the ceiling again. At the blank white corner, the empty bracket, the nothing that was watching them. For the first time in three years of envelopes, it occurred to him that the absence of a camera might not protect them at all. It might only mean that when the record of this morning was written, it would be written by the one man in the room who had come prepared to write it. He looked down at his hands. It will be over by lunch, Hale liked to say. Collins tried the sentence on, silently, and found that it no longer fit.