“We’re kind of from everywhere, sir,” he said.
FORTY-SEVEN
The setting sun had tinted the scattered clouds in the sky over Jamaica Bay glorious shades of scarlet and gold. The skyline of Manhattan was silhouetted in the distance against the sunset. Lights were going on all over in the city that never sleeps, and New York was beginning to take on its nighttime fairy-tale glow. But Roger Gordian stood alone at the end of a runway, oblivious to the beauty spread out before him.
He was about to bring his people home.
The pain, and the sense of terrible responsibility he felt, threatened to bring him to his knees.
As he stood there waiting, he cast his mind back over the events of the last few months. Was there anything, he wondered, that he could have done differently, that would have forestalled this moment? Anything that he or his people could have changed that would have brought these people home alive instead of in boxes? That would have brought their families together to celebrate instead of to mourn?
If there was, he couldn’t think of it now. Hindsight was usually all it was cracked up to be, but even in retrospect, he couldn’t think of a moment he’d wasted, a shred of information he hadn’t acted upon as soon as it had been verified.
Tragedy had come upon them all as silently as a mist in the night. It had drifted into their midst, burst upon them completely without warning. Set into motion half a world away by a handful of opportunists driven by greed and ambition and completely unrestrained by conscience or morality, it was too late to stop it, any of it, from the moment it had been conceived.
And the costs, God, the costs…
Gordian ran a hand over his eyes.
Times Square had only been the beginning. Over a thousand people dead, many thousands more injured. All the families and friends who would never again share the simple pleasures of life with people they loved. The survivors who would never again be able to enjoy a day without pain, who were left broken in mind and body to pick up the pieces of their lives and go on as best they could. All because they had wanted to celebrate the glorious beginning of a new millennium.
Roger Gordian knew from hard personal experience just how high that price was.
But those people, as much as he mourned their passing and grieved for their losses, hadn’t been his. He had been diminished by their loss, but not directly responsible for their deaths. He had not personally sent them into harm’s way.
More than twenty people, working at his behest in places he had sent them to, were coming home in coffins. From his ground station in Russia. From Cappadocia in Turkey.
He knew most of them by name, some of them well. A few were among the small circle of people he counted as his dearest friends.
He’d sent them out to die.
He would never take a waking breath again without thinking of them.
He would never forgive himself.
And what had it all been about?
Politics.
Miserable, stinking, corrupt politics.
His people had died because some power-crazed demagogue had wanted to throw an election.
It made him physically ill, nauseous.
Every single one of his employees had been, each in his own way, a good person. Pedachenko wasn’t worthy to be in the same room with them. But with his grandiose plans of conquest, he had killed them all.
Oh, God, the pain…
Right.
So where did that leave him?
With the present…
Russia was stable for the moment. Starinov had used the furor over Pedachenko’s actions to consolidate his government. Aid was flowing into Russia from the U.S.A. and Europe. The threat of a famine which would kill millions of innocent men, women, and children had been averted for now.
Was it worth Arthur and Elaine Steiner’s deaths?
No. Nothing was worth that.
But nothing could change what had happened, either.
Roger Gordian, mover and shaker among the world’s power elite, was powerless to alter the past, even a single second of it. He was just a lonely man with a guilty conscience, standing and waiting for a chartered plane to land, a plane full of the dead he would never be able to expunge from his conscience.
It hurt. God, it hurt.
What could he do about it?
How could he go on from here?
He searched the heavens for an answer.
For the first time he noticed the beauty of the sunset, now in its fullest glory. It was stunning. For a second he just emptied his mind and let himself bask in the beauty of it. It was, he realized, the first time he’d really looked at something and allowed himself to open his emotions to the experience since the Times Square bombing.
The world was still out there in all its imperfect beauty. It was still turning on its axis, and it would continue to do so, no matter what the humans — good, evil, or indifferent — who crawled on its surface did.
The future was his to make what he could of it.
It was a gift that Arthur or Elaine Steiner would have grabbed with both hands. He wished they were here with him, alive and happy, to do it. But they weren’t, so it was up to him.
And maybe that was the answer he was seeking.
He couldn’t change the past.
He could only embrace the future and give it his best.
It was time to begin again.
The plane he’d been waiting for, a gray-skinned IL-76, now bathed in the slanting golden light of the setting sun, taxied down the runway in front of him. Men waving fluorescent orange lights guided it to a halt, and more men rushed forward to chock the wheels. Someone driving a motorized staircase revved the engine and drove it forward, bringing it to a gentle halt inches from the door of the plane. The stairway driver turned the engine off, put on the brakes, and scrambled out to make the last few adjustments manually.
The door of the plane opened and people began exiting. These were the survivors, some of them swathed in bandages from their recent ordeal. Some of the more serious burn victims were still in Europe, too critical to be moved. Roger Gordian’s eyesight blurred as the tears he refused to shed gathered. At least his people hadn’t all died. Thanks to Max and his crew, many of those who would have certainly died without help were walking down the runway under their own power. He blinked to clear his eyes.
At the rear of the plane, a hatch opened. Musicians he’d engaged for this occasion began playing in the background — the solemn strains of Bach filled the evening. And a coffin was handed down. It was the first of many, Roger knew. Again guilt threatened to swamp him. He turned it aside, and concentrated instead on the memories. Flashes of the days he’d spent with Arthur and Elaine at ground stations all over the world. The surroundings had changed often, but one thing was constant, as immutable as time. The Steiners’ love for each other had been a beacon and an example to anyone who knew them. Death hadn’t changed that. A love like that was too enduring for an assassin’s bullet to kill. Gordian knew they were together, wherever they were, and that that’s the way they would have wanted it.
