Takeoff Read online

“Yes, ma’am.” My chin dropped to my chest. Then I raised my eyes. “But how is he?”

  “Weak,” she said, turning back to her monitor. Her voice had dropped to a whisper. “It’s tougher this time.” After a moment, though, the warble came back into her voice. “Big trip to New York, huh? Gonna go see the bright lights, catch a show?”

  “Something like that.”

  Although she booked all our travel, Loretta never seemed to distinguish between the neon-filled Times Square of her dreams and the airport-hotel reality we air marshals dwelled in. Truth was, I relished the idea of a little room service and a few uninterrupted hours to doodle and tinker.

  Loretta turned in her chair and pressed a folder into my hand. I could see it was marked and tabbed the way she always did it. I’d long since abandoned the idea of asking her for electronic itineraries. “Thank you, ma’am.”

  “I’m just happy you’re home,” she said. “I missed you, boy. Make this trip quick.”

  The New York airport hotel, as it turned out, didn’t have room service. At the restaurant downstairs, I was able to order some chicken soup that wasn’t horrible. Then, back in my room, I tried drawing some circuits but didn’t get very far. In the moment, I blamed the uncomfortable desk chair; deep down, I knew that wasn’t it. The room wasn’t all that different from dozens of places I’d managed to work.

  Truth was, since all the trouble, I hadn’t been particularly creative.

  Dan Shen, my friend and patent attorney, hadn’t said anything about it yet. But I could tell from our phone calls he was wondering. Whenever I stared at the pad, none of the images that usually filled my head seemed to come. Instead of circuit boards and processors floating around my brain, it was all lab tests and medical procedures.

  I switched the lights off and climbed into bed, but ended up staring at the ceiling, thinking about Loretta. I figured that was probably just as well—given the dreams I’d been having over the past few weeks, insomnia felt like an improvement.

  Returning to the desk, I opened my laptop, queued up several podcasts from my favorite tech blogs, and loaded them onto the player that fed my earpiece. My brain has this weird condition where, if it’s not being constantly stimulated by some kind of chatter or focused by adrenaline, it can go off-kilter. And I don’t mean normal mind wandering or polite daydreaming. Thoughts keep multiplying inside my head, and if they get to the point where they go exponential, I can end up a twitching, drooling mess.

  It’s put me in the hospital before. It’s not pretty.

  Fortunately, I had plenty of content to choose from: The past few weeks, I hadn’t listened to any of my usual electrical-engineering podcasts. Instead, struggling to keep up with what Sarah’s doctors were saying, I’d been running articles about cerebrospinal hypotension and acute anoxic encephalopathy through the software I have that turns text into audio and listening to those through my earpiece.

  Tonight, though, out of sheer curiosity I went onto the web and googled Max Magic. The links below her Wikipedia page mostly led to magazines, so I clicked a few. The photo spreads looked way more provocative than I’d expected. Two had the blonde youngster posing in bikinis, draped across a boat and sprawled on a beach. A third had her doing kicks in a tiny cheerleader uniform. The last one was the most suggestive: she was topless, mostly prone on a bearskin rug.

  Backing out of that one, I scrolled down until I found some music sites. Her latest hit song proved easy to find—evidently it had held the top spot on the charts for three straight months. When I saw the title, I smiled and shook my head, surprised I hadn’t heard about it somehow.

  When I was growing up, my mother had never been much for music. But my dad loved his stereo. Every time we moved, which was often, that was the first thing he’d unpack, before any of my toys or the dishes or the silverware. Every evening, he’d blast rock and R & B records until Mom stormed in from the kitchen, demanding he turn the music down and open some moving boxes.

  One of Dad’s all-time favorites was “Be My Baby” by the Ronettes. In fact, I always got the sense that, while most guys his age had fantasized about Pam Grier as teenagers, Dad would’ve preferred a tryst with Ronnie Spector. “Be My Baby” was the first song on the first side of Dad’s Ronettes record—to this day, he prefers vinyl, despite the CD player I bought him—and when I was a kid, he’d listen to it over and over. As the last chords of “Be My Baby” would fade, he’d jump from his chair to reach for the needle. I’d beg him to let it run, at first just for variety’s sake. Eventually, though, I fell for the song that followed.

  “Baby, I Love You.”

  The two songs are similar: a clicking cymbal or tambourine drives their beat as Phil Spector’s orchestral “wall of sound” swells in the background. The Ronettes sing the chorus, while Ronnie Spector performs her whoa-oo flourishes over them. Both are classics, but “Be My Baby” always struck me as the rawer, more lust-driven song. It’s an invitation to make out.

  “Baby, I Love You” has a totally different vibe. A sweet song, it’s a testimonial about being so in love with the boy she’s singing to, the feeling moves her to tears. It’s what every teenage boyfriend will never admit he wants his girlfriend to say about their relationship.

  Flopping back onto the bed, I closed my eyes and hit “Play” on Max Magic’s cover.

  It was . . . interesting.

  They’d added a loud, electronic backbeat and cranked up the bass. Max’s voice wasn’t raspy and throaty like Ronnie Spector’s; it was clear and crisp, although I wondered how much she’d been Auto-Tuned during production. But really, the biggest difference was the emotion the lyrics carried. Where the original could convince you Ronnie might actually burst into tears at any moment, Max sounded like a little girl dreaming of how a love like that would feel.

  If Max had put anything less into it, hers might have come off as cheap, or naive. But it didn’t. The song still sounded heartfelt, only sung from a different place.

  It gave me a glimmer of hope: maybe Max Magic wouldn’t be so bad after all.

  Wednesday, July 15

  Max and I were booked out of JFK’s Terminal 8. Since it got a face-lift a few years ago, 8 isn’t too bad. It could use better restaurants—the food court’s abysmal—but otherwise it feels new and airy, with lots of chrome, windows, and high ceilings.

  That’s in the public spaces. Airports are kind of like Disneyland: there’s a whole layer to them the public never sees.

  Just inside security, the wall bears a series of unmarked doors. While they might as well be janitors’ closets as far as travelers are concerned, one of them deposits you in a narrow hallway lined with industrial carpet and framed posters of old American Airlines ad campaigns. A string of offices sprouts off it, and a windowless conference room lies at the end.

  That’s where the FBI decided we should meet at noon.

  With my doodling going nowhere and nothing else to do at the hotel, I arrived early and sat in the room alone. Despite the summer heat outside, I wore jeans in anticipation of the flight. A baggy, untucked resort shirt hid the bulge of the holster in my waistband while leaving my forearms bare. I didn’t know how many people would recognize Max Magic by sight, but for this kind of job, I figured my tattoos might help scare some people off.

  People are funny about ink. Those who don’t have any immediately draw conclusions about those who do. Take me. While I’m not the biggest guy, I’m not the smallest, either—that, plus the shaved head and the tattoos get me all kinds of reactions. That I’m a biker. Or a banger. Never that I’m a federal agent and closet electrical engineer with fifteen patents to my name.

  Folks who know tattoos, though, they get the complexity of it. Each of mine is a marker, a testament to something important.

  Or someone.

  Like the one I’d gotten just a couple of weeks before: the letters S and A inside a heart. I’d planned on getting it on my chest, close to my real heart. That’s where it seemed to belong. Until I reali
zed I’d only ever see it in the mirror with my shirt off, and written backward. I needed to be reminded more often than that. Eventually, I decided the inside of my right forearm, up by the wrist, would be better. There, it’d catch my eye every day.

  I’d spent a lot of time staring at the new tattoo. I was doing it again when the FBI detail strode in.

  Four guys in suits and ties, but no way you’d mistake them for lawyers or bankers. Jackets straining at the shoulders, not the waists. Haircuts all high and tight. Walking with their weight forward, up on the balls of their feet, instead of back on their heels. They formed two pairs, one in front, one in back, bracketing a man and a girl.

  The man couldn’t have stood out more from the agents if he’d tried. His dark suit was fancier than theirs, made of a lighter fabric that seemed to sashay on its own as he moved. Instead of a collared shirt and tie, he wore a black T-shirt beneath the jacket. His face and hands had tanned to a deep copper, about the same as my complexion, but pale skin peeked out at his neck and wrists. His long, gray hair was styled and slicked into a large wave, cresting over his forehead, while his eyes darted restlessly between his smartphone and the room around us.

  I put all the men over six feet, but Max Magic barely broke five. Still, she stood no risk of getting lost in the crowd. Cutoff jean shorts adorned with rhinestones bared virtually all of her long legs. A tank top matching her pink sneakers hung loosely from her shoulders, exposing her arms and the straps of a black bra working hard to make her breasts look even bigger than they were. White, plastic buttons resembling little candies were sewn onto the shirt, which bore the words Sweet Tart.

  Sunglasses hid the girl’s eyes but couldn’t obscure how her face—all soft, childish curves—hadn’t quite caught up to the rest of her. Still, if she feared whatever threat was supposedly dogging her, you wouldn’t have known. Her expression was as loose and relaxed as the braid of streaky blonde hair draped down her shoulder.

  One of the front pair of agents stepped forward, so I stood to shake his hand.

  “Special Agent Gary Franklin,” he said, flashing credentials at me. His voice had a slight drawl to it, like he’d been raised in the South but hadn’t lived there in years.

  “Seth Walker.”

  Turning, he gestured to the others. “With me are Agents Hayes, Lincoln, and Jackson—”

  I smiled. “You guys are like a social studies test.”

  That earned me an eye roll. “—and allow me to introduce Gregory Drew and his daughter.”

  “Nice to meet you both,” I said. “It’s Max, right?”

  The girl didn’t react.

  Drew, though, glanced up and locked his eyes on mine. “I just want to thank you in advance for taking care of my little girl. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.”

  The intensity of Drew’s gaze felt slightly unnerving. I nodded before addressing Franklin again. “What’ve we got here?”

  “Mr. Drew approached us three months ago after receiving anonymous written threats against his daughter. Since then, we’ve been monitoring their mail, their incoming calls, providing light security—”

  “Four agents is ‘light’?”

  “Usually we’ve been leaving just one consultant with them. But we felt that Max taking this flight alone might . . . expose her in some unique ways.”

  The way Franklin paused somehow didn’t feel quite right. “She doesn’t have her own private detail?”

  “Yes. I mean, she did.” Franklin’s eyebrows rose as he nodded. “Single bodyguard, but he was former military and had done a fair amount of personal-protection work.”

  “Where’s he now?”

  “I caught him stealing,” Drew said.

  “Stealing,” I said. “Okay. And you haven’t replaced him?”

  “I’m not going to trust my daughter’s safety to just anyone, Mr. Walker. I was in the process of interviewing new bodyguards when all of this came about. Thankfully, the FBI has been taking good care of us since then.”

  Drew’s lips spread into a smile that suggested he was extremely pleased my tax dollars were paying for his daughter’s security detail.

  “Why is Max flying alone? There a reason you have to stay here?”

  “Max begins shooting on a . . . uh, movie in the next few days.” From the way he shrugged as he said it, Drew apparently wasn’t a big fan of the screenplay. Or something. “Meanwhile, I’ve got to stay here and wrap up work on some endorsement contracts. Those, and her recording career—they’re the engine that makes this whole train run.”

  “Not for long,” Max said. Her voice was flat, but not quiet.

  Drew kept smiling at the agents and me. “We’ll see, honey.”

  “Sure will.”

  He shrugged again but still didn’t look at her.

  “Are you a lawyer, Mr. Drew?” I asked. Except for Shen, lawyers have never been my favorite. And I was definitely starting to get that vibe from him.

  “I started law school just before Max came along, but I stopped when Max’s mom . . . well . . . I stopped. I’m Max’s manager. I’m involved in all aspects of her brand.”

  In my peripheral vision, I noticed Max change the direction of space into which she was staring.

  “I’m sorry for being behind on family history, but since you mentioned Max’s mother, where is she?”

  Drew’s mouth opened, but the voice that rang out wasn’t his. “She’s gone. She was a junkie, and she left.”

  I glanced over at Max and could tell her eyes were blazing at me behind the shades. “I’m sorry to bring it up,” I said. “I just wanted to understand the situation.”

  She turned away.

  “Deborah left when Max was about six months old,” Drew said. “Since then, it’s been just the two of us.”

  I nodded. Because my godkids had lost their father, I knew a little about absentee-parent issues. “I’m guessing everyone has already asked you this, Mr. Drew, but just for my sake, do you have any idea who’d want to hurt Max?”

  “I can only imagine it’s someone jealous of her success, or someone who’s patently deranged.”

  I turned to Franklin. “Bureau have any ideas? What about the ex–security guy?”

  “We checked him out. Looks clean.”

  “Wouldn’t it be safer to do this on some private plane?”

  Franklin shook his head. “We’re guessing this is some lone nutcase. Spends his time clipping letters out of the newspaper for his notes. Nobody knows she’s taking this flight except us. She’ll blend in a lot easier in a big crowd than she would at some rinky-dink private airport—you’re not gonna have any problems.”

  “Oka-y,” I said. If all that were true, Max wouldn’t have needed a four-agent detail to escort her through the terminal. But since Franklin apparently thought I was stupid enough to believe it, I didn’t see the point in pressing it further. “Sounds like this’ll be a cakewalk, then.”

  The agents escorted Drew out, leaving me alone with Max. What, I wondered, did you talk about with a teenage pop star?

  “So,” I said. “You excited to get to California?”

  She raised her hand and slowly twirled her index finger. “Yay.”

  “You know, I used to be an engineer, and I worked on a bunch of audio technology. When you’re recording a song, do you get involved in all that?”

  “No,” she said, glancing off toward the door. “That’s the sound engineer’s job.”

  I waited a beat. “So, is Max your real name?”

  Her head snapped back toward me. “Excuse me?”

  “I mean, Magic’s obviously not your real last name, right? So I was wondering, is Max your real first name?”

  “That’s my name.” Her tone was that of telling a dog to sit for the fifth or sixth time in a row. “That’s what everyone calls me now.”

  Since our getting-to-know-you chat was going so well, I checked the time on my phone and maneuvered my carry-on around the table. “We should get to the g
ate.”

  Instead of proceeding through the door, Max stepped to the side. When I continued to stare at her, she asked, “Aren’t you going to get my bag?” A loud pink roll-aboard suitcase stood slightly behind her, where one of the FBI agents had left it.

  I leaned down until my eyes were inches from her sunglasses. “I’m your protection. Not your handservant.”

  By the time we reached the gate, our airplane had already arrived and unloaded. I steered Max to the desk where, making it look like I was requesting an upgrade or something, I showed the agent my badge. She confirmed they were still cleaning from the previous flight, but took our tickets to allow us to preboard.

  A lot of marshals I know like to get onto the plane early. The good ones figure it’s best to check in with the crew and inspect the plane before any passengers come aboard. The bad ones, well, they just want to ensure themselves room in the overhead bins and get to their seat. I never liked preboarding—too noticeable. But today, given that people might already be ogling Max, getting her into a controlled environment as soon as possible seemed to make the most sense.

  She followed me down the jetbridge and onto the plane, a 767. Maneuvering to the farther of the two aisles, I led us back to the last row of business class. Unsure if Max could reach the overhead, I stowed the rollaboard for her after she grabbed a few things out of it. Then I ushered her into the window seat.

  As I eased myself down next to her, the cushions embraced my back more than I was used to, and my legs felt like they were swimming in space. I’d need to tease Loretta about getting me seats like this more often. Marshals get upgraded if a first-class seat goes unclaimed, but with fewer flights and all the elite programs, it’s become an extreme rarity.

  While I was still marveling at the luxury, a familiar female voice snapped me out of it. “Seth Walker, you keeping us safe today?”

  I glanced up the aisle and saw Diane Carter approaching from the forward galley. A senior LA-based attendant with silver hair and a Brooklyn accent, Diane tended to fly cross-country routes. I’d flown with her maybe three dozen times over the years. “Not today. I’m on escort duty. Diane, meet Max.” I turned, expecting her to be staring out the window at best, eye rolling or sneering at worst.