He would need them before lunch.
Chapter Two
Room Four Has No Windows
Atlanta announced itself the way it always did, in size. The plane docked and the terminal opened around him like a city that had decided to live indoors, concourses running off in bright directions, a river of travelers flowing under signs for trains and gates and coffee. Malcolm walked it with his briefcase in one hand and his attention distributed the way it always was, exits, uniforms, cameras. He counted without deciding to count. A dome above the moving walkway. One. A black eye over the food court doors. Two. It was not suspicion. It was literacy. He had spent twenty years reading rooms the way other men read weather.
He was nearly at the escalators when the announcement found him, asking passenger Malcolm Bennett to please report to the baggage services desk. He felt no alarm. Airlines misplaced things with such regularity that a summons was closer to weather than to news. He changed course and walked back through the flow, noting without heat that the desk they named sat beyond the public carousels, in the working end of the terminal.
Two officers were waiting. He read them the way he read all uniforms, from the shoes up. The older man carried himself like furniture that owned the room, fifty three or so, silver showing at the temples, a captain's bars catching the light. The younger one, mid forties perhaps, stood a half step behind and to the side, the position of a man whose job was to agree in public. Both smiled with the lower half of their faces.
"Mr. Bennett." The captain extended a hand and a name in the same motion. "Captain Richard Hale, airport police. This is Officer Brent Collins. Thanks for coming down."
"My bag," Malcolm said. It was not a question, and Hale received it as one anyway.
"Pulled for a routine inspection, nothing to be concerned about. If you would come with us, we will have you on your way in a few minutes."
"Of course," Malcolm said.
They walked. Collins fell in on his left, Hale led, and the terminal narrowed by degrees from concourse to corridor to the kind of hallway that exists in every large building and appears on no tour, painted the color of old paper, lit by panels that hummed. Malcolm counted because counting was what he did instead of speculating. A dome at the corridor mouth. Six. A camera above the service elevator, aimed down the hall like a held breath. Seven. He kept his face arranged in mild cooperation and his mind entirely his own. He noted the absence of other travelers. He noted that his suitcase was not in sight. He noted that neither man had yet said the words random, or selection, or any of the vocabulary that usually decorated these detours.
"Long flight?" Collins asked, and his voice came out friendlier than his eyes.
"Short," Malcolm said. "Washington."
"Business?"
"A signature," Malcolm said. "Mostly I came to watch other people work."
Hale laughed once, without turning around. "Then you will enjoy this. We are very thorough."
Room Four had no windows. It had a table in the middle of the floor, four chairs, a wall clock with a second hand that ticked loud enough to be a personality, and a camera dome in the corner of the ceiling wearing a little red light like a jewel. Eight, Malcolm thought, and then, at the door, where the corridor bent past a second dome he had almost missed in the frame above the lintel, nine. Nine cameras between the escalators and this chair. He filed the number with the others, seal 81427, tag 003918471, Captain Richard Hale, Officer Brent Collins, and sat down where Hale's open hand indicated, on the side of the table that put his back to the wall and the dome in his sight line, where he would have sat in any room on earth.
"Water?" Hale asked.
"No, thank you."
"Then we will keep this simple." Hale took the chair opposite and folded his hands on the table with the care of a man setting down something breakable. Collins remained standing by the door, which Malcolm also filed. Doors get guarded in rooms where the guest is not expected to stay a guest. "Your bag drew attention coming through. These things happen. We inspect, we document, we release. Cooperation makes it fast."
"I am cooperating," Malcolm said. "I want that noted."
Hale's smile widened by a degree he probably believed was warmth. "Noted," he said, and glanced at Collins, and in that glance Malcolm saw the shape of the next hour as plainly as print. Whatever this was, it had been decided before he entered the room, perhaps before his plane had landed. The two men were not investigating anything. They were performing the beginning of something, and they had cast him in it without asking.