still didn’t know who—had shouted into the waning strength of the command net, “possible commercial air.”
The wake of an SM-2 missile looked like a miniature version of the space shuttle blasting off from Cape Canaveral, the launch fuel burning a hot white plume. But down in the battle chamber Doug had heard only its deafening roar and, seconds later, as the symbols on the big screen collided, the eruption of cheering.
“So,” the shopkeeper said, placing the stack of boxes on the counter and indicating the television with a nod of his head, “you know these murderers, do you?”
“My ship,” Doug said, standing up straight, whatever reprieve drunkenness had offered abruptly gone. “My ship.”
It had taken a while for the initial reports to be confirmed. “Iranian Airbus. Passengers, two hundred and ninety, over.”
The shopkeeper’s coal-black eyes widened, his upper lip quivering.
“These Iranians, they are too much, but this—this, shame!” he said, pointing into Doug’s face. “You are butchers, you and your government are butchers.”
Doug counted twenty-dollar bills from the wad in his fist, setting them down one by one on the counter.
“I’ll need a bag,” he said.
“I will not take your money!” the man shouted. “I will not take it!”
Doug counted out another three bills, placing them on top of the rest. Rage welled in the shopkeeper’s eyes.
Once he had gathered the cartons of cigarettes into his arms, Doug remained standing there at the counter for a moment. On the television, shawled women keened over a small wooden coffin.
Twenty days of his tour left now. Twenty.
“You should know, sir,” he said, “under the conditions, you should know, sir, that we would do it again.”
Then he turned and walked out of the shop and across the darkened street, throwing the cigarettes into the backseat of the jeep.
“What’s his problem?” the kid asked.
“Just drive, would you?”
As they sped along the road back to Juffair, Doug sat upright, the wind full in his face, figuring in his head how long it would take for the letters he’d mailed in Manila to make their way into the offices of the brokerages and the banks.
Part
One
Chapter 1
A plot of land. That’s what Doug told his lawyer. Buy me a plot of land, hire a contractor, and build me a casino of a house. If the neighbors have five bedrooms, give me six. A four-car garage, the kitchen of a prize-winning chef, high ceilings, marble bathrooms, everything wired to the teeth. Whatever the architecture magazines say. Make the envying types envious.
“What do you want with a mansion?” Mikey asked. “You barely sleep in your own apartment. You’d get nothing but lost.”
Finden, Doug told him. Build it in Finden.
And so on a Sunday morning in January 2001, Mikey had picked Doug up at his place in Back Bay and they had driven west out of Boston in a light snow, the gray concrete of the overpasses along the Mass Pike blending with the gray sky above as they traveled the highway that Doug had traveled so often as a kid. It had been six years now since he’d moved back up to Massachusetts from New York. What had brought him was a job at Union Atlantic, a commercial bank whose chairman and CEO, Jeffrey Holland, had entrusted Doug with the company’s expansion. In the years since, his salary and bonuses had accumulated in the various accounts and investments his financial adviser had established, but he’d spent practically nothing.
“You’re pathetic,” Mikey had said to him once, when he’d come back to Doug’s apartment for a beer and seen the college furniture and books still in their boxes. “You need a life.”
A solo practitioner, Mikey had gone to Suffolk Law at night, while he worked at a bail-bond office. He lived with his girlfriend in one of the new condos in South Boston, six stories up and two blocks east of the house he’d grown up in, his mother still cooking him dinner on Sunday nights. He liked to call himself a well-rounded lawyer, which in practice meant he did everything but drive his clients to work.
A few miles short of the Alden town line, they turned off at the Finden exit onto a wooded road that opened out into the snow-covered meadows of a golf course, used at this time of year for cross-country skiing. They passed under an old, arched brick railway bridge and soon after reached the first stretch of houses.
The town was much as Doug remembered it from the days when he’d driven his mother to work