featured the sort of epaulets to which the major airlines were so devoted. In another place and time, Janson reflected, they would have rewarded extensive battlefield experience.
One of the women had been speaking to a jowly, heavyset man who wore an open blue blazer and a beeper clipped to his belt. A glint of badge metal from his inside coat pocket told Janson that he was an FAA inspector, no doubt taking his break where there was human scenery to be enjoyed. They broke off when Janson stepped forward.
"Your boarding card, please," the woman said, turning to him. She had a powdery tan that ended somewhere below her chin, and the kind of brassy hair that came from an applicator tip.
Janson flashed his ticket and the plastic card with which Pacifica rewarded its extremely frequent fliers.
"Welcome to the Pacifica Platinum Club, Mr. Janson," the woman twinkled.
"We'll let you know when your plane is about to board," the other attendant - chestnut bangs, eye shadow that matched the blue piping on her jacket - told him in a low, confiding voice. She gestured toward the entrance to the lounge area as if it were the pearly gates. "Meantime, enjoy our hospitality facilities and relax." An encouraging nod and a broad smile; Saint Peter's could not have held more promise.
Carved out between the structural girders and beams of an overloaded airport, venues like Pacifica's Platinum Club were where the modern airline tried to cater to the carriage trade. Small bowls were filled not with the salted peanuts purveyed to les miserables in coach but with the somewhat more expensive tree nuts: cashews, almonds, walnuts, pecans. At a granite-topped beverage station, there were crystal jugs sticky with peach nectar and fresh-squeezed orange juice. The carpeting was microfiber swank, the airline's signature blue-gray adorned with trellises of white and navy. On round tables interspersed among large armchairs were neatly folded copies of the International Herald Tribune, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times. A Bloomberg terminal flickered with meaningless numbers and images, shadow puppets of the global economy. Through louvered blinds, the tarmac was only just visible.
Janson flipped through the papers with little interest. When he turned to the Journal's "Market Watch," he found his eyes sliding down column inches of familiarly bellicose metaphors: bloodshed on Wall Street as a wave of profit takers launched an onslaught against the Dow. A sports column in USA Today was taken up with the collapse of the Raiders' offense in the face of the rampaging blitzes of the Vikings' linemen. Meanwhile, invisible speakers piped in a song by the pop diva du jour, from the soundtrack of a blockbuster movie about a legendary Second World War battle. An expense of blood and sweat had been honored by an expense of studio money and computer-graphics technology.
Janson settled heavily into one of the cloth-upholstered armchairs, his eyes drifting toward the dataport stations where brand managers and account executives plugged in their laptops and collected e-mail from clients, employers, prospects, underlings, and lovers, in an endless search for action items. Peeking from attache cases were the spines of books purporting to offer marketing advice from the likes of Sun Tzu, the art of war repurposed for the packaged-goods industry. A sleek, self-satisfied, unthreatened folk, Janson mused of the managers and professionals who surrounded him. How these people loved peace, yet how they loved the imagery of war! For them, military regalia could safely be romanticized, the way animals of prey became adornments after the taxidermist's art.
There were moments when Janson almost felt that he, too, had been stuffed and mounted. Nearly every raptor was now on the endangered-species list, not least the bald eagle, and Janson recognized that he himself had once been a raptor - a force of aggression against forces of aggression. Janson had known ex-warriors who had become addicted to a diet of adrenaline and danger, and who, when their services were no longer required, had effectively turned themselves into toy soldiers. They spent their time stalking opponents in the Sierre Madre with paintball guns or, worse, pimping themselves out to unsavory firms with unsavory needs, usually in parts of the world where baksheesh was the law of the land. Janson's contempt for these people was profound. And yet he sometimes asked himself whether the highly specialized assistance he offered American businesses was not merely a respectable version of the same thing.
He was lonely, that was the truth of it, and his loneliness was