Kevin Hawkins was only forty-three, but he felt like a hundred.
He had lived too hard, especially the last fourteen years. His life and times had been so very intense, often flamboyant and occasionally absurd. He had been burned, he often imagined, from every conceivable angle. He had played the game of life and death too hard, too well, too often.
He started to cough again and popped a Halls into his mouth.
Kevin Hawkins checked the time on his Seiko Kinetic wristwatch.
He quickly finger-combed his lank, grayish blond hair and then left the public bathroom.
He merged smoothly with the thick corridor traffic rolling past on the killing floor. It was almost time, and he was feeling a nice out-of-body buzz. He hummed an old, absolutely ridiculous song called “Rock the Casbah.” He was pulling a dark Delsey suitcase hinged on one of those cheap roller contraptions that were so popular. The “walking” suitcase made him look like a tourist, like a nobody of the first order.
The red-on-black digital clock over the airport passageway read 11:40. A Northwest Airlines jet from Tokyo had landed just a few minutes earlier. It had come into Gate 41, right on schedule.
Somepeople just know how to fly. Wasn't that Northwest's tag line?
The gods were smiling down on him; Kevin Hawkins felt a grim, humorless smile of his own. The gods loved the game, too.
Life and death. It was their game, actually.
He heard the first strains of a noisy commotion coming from the connecting Corridor B. The photojournalist kept walking ahead, until he was past the point where the two wide corridors connected.
That was when he saw the phalanx of bodyguards and wellwishers.
He clicked off a shot in his mind. He got a peek at Mr. Tanaka of the Nipray Corporation. He clicked another shot.
His adrenaline was flowing like lava from Kilauea in Hawaii, where he'd once shot for Newsweek. Adrenaline. Nothing like it.
He was addicted to the stuff.
Any second now.
Any second.
Any nanosecond -- which, he knew, is to a second as a second is to about thirty years.
There was no X-marks-the-spot on the terminal floor, but Kevin Hawkins knew this was the place. He had it all visualized, every critical angle was vivid as hell in his mind's eye. All the intersect points were clear to him.
Any second. Life and death.
There might as well have been a big black X painted on the airport floor.
Kevin Hawkins felt like a god.
Here we go. Cameras loaded and at the ready. Lock and load!
Someone going to die here.
WHEN THE SEMIOFFICIAL ENTOURAGE was approximately twelve feet from the busy corridor-crossing, a small bomb detonated.
The explosion sent a cloud of gray-black smoke into Corridor A. Screams pierced the air like whining sirens.
The bomb had been inside a dark blue suitcase left next to the news and magazine kiosk. Kevin Hawkins had placed the innocent-looking suitcase directly in front of a sign that advised travelers to WATCH YOUR LUGGAGE AT ALL TIMES.
The deafening, booming noise and sudden chaos startled the bodyguards surrounding Mr. Tanaka. It made them erratic, and therefore predictable. Security teams, even the best of them, could be fooled if you forced them to improvise. Travelers and airport personnel were screaming, seeking cover where there was none to be had. Men, women, and children pressed themselves to the floor, faces hard against cold marble.
People haven't seen real panic until they've witnessed it in a large airport, where everyone is already close to the edge of primal fears.
Two of the bodyguards covered the corporate chairman, doing a half-way-decent job, Hawkins saw.
He clicked another mind photo. Stored it in his photo file for future reference.
This was good stuff, valuable as hell. How an excellent security team reacted under stress during an actual attack.
Then the efficient, if uninspired, bodyguards began to hurriedly move their “protected person” out of danger, out of harm's way. They obviously couldn't go forward into the smoky, bombed-out corridor. The security team chose to go back- their only choice, the one Kevin Hawkins knew they would make under duress.
They pulled along Mr. Tanaka as if he were a large, ungainly puppet or doll, which he pretty much was. They almost physically carried the important businessman, holding him under his arms so that both his feet left the floor at times.
Mind photo of that: expensive black tasseled loafers skipping across the marble floor.
The trained bodyguards had one goal: get the “protected person” out of there. The photojournalist let them proceed about thirty feet before he pushed the detonator in the shoulder bag housing his camera gear. It was that easy The best plans were one-button simple. Like a camera. Like a camera suitable for a child.
