American Subversive (13 page)

Over here with the light, Keith said.

He was pointing not at the lock but the ring that secured it to the building. It was older, weaker.

Figures, Keith said. They attach a brand-new titanium lock to a worthless rusted loop plate. Christ, look at it, I think it's the original.

He clamped the bolt cutters onto the ring and went to work, marshaling his full strength upon the weather-beaten mounting. It didn't take long. It snapped without warning, throwing Keith to the ground. He grinned as he got up and dusted himself off.

Together, we pulled open the heavy door. The hinges groaned as it gave, and light crept inside, revealing parts of two yellow snowplows and dozens of giant bags of road salt, piled almost to the ceiling.

We came all this way for road salt? I said.

Wait.

Keith flipped a light switch but nothing happened, so I handed him the flashlight and he disappeared between one of the plows and a
collection of interstate exit signs stacked against a side wall. Behind me, the wind had picked up and the trees rustled ominously. I thought about the car. Were the windows up? And would we be able to navigate those rutted dirt tracks if it started storming?

Keith, I said into the darkness, why don't I run down and check on—

Aha!
I heard him exclaim. I
knew
it was here! Paige, come on back.

He shone the flashlight in my direction, and I weaved through the obstacle course. Keith was kneeling beside a stack of wooden crates lined up against the rear wall.

Look, he said, pointing the beam directly onto one of them. I bent down to read the stamp on the side:

DANGER
HIGH EXPLOSIVES – TOVAL
Keep Away from All Metal,
Flammable or Corrosive Substances
Do Not Store Near Caps or Primers
Property of U.S. Govt.

What's Toval? I asked.

A nitro-compound manufactured in gel form, then packed in dynamite sticks.

Let me guess: they use it to blast through rock when they're building roads.

You got it, Keith said. It can't be detonated by heat, so it's safer than regular dynamite. Of course, you can't exactly toss the stuff around either.

And they just keep it up here in the middle of nowhere?

They keep it in a few places. This was the easiest to get into. And the most remote. They won't notice it's missing until they come for the salt in December.

So what do we do? Just carry all these cases out of here, stick them in the trunk, and go home?

Pretty much, Keith said. Except two should be enough.

We have room for more.

Keith chuckled. We won't need more.

So we got to work. Toval was a stable explosive, but an explosive
nonetheless (puncturing the dynamite shell could set it off), and we slipped our hands beneath the first crate extremely carefully. It was much heavier than I'd anticipated, and I started putting it back down to get a better grip.

Don't,
Keith said sharply. We work in unison. Warn me before you make any sudden moves. There can be no tilt, do you understand?

Yes, I said, struggling to wedge my fingers farther underneath.

We shuffled forward a few feet at a time, feeling for each step, and when we finally made it outside, we placed the crate down delicately on level ground and rested. Keith squinted at the sky. He was sweating. My arms hurt. And still the hard work lay ahead. It took twenty minutes and several breaks to reach the car. Already exhausted, I leaned against a door and waited for Keith to open the trunk, but he wanted to keep going, all the way to the main road. Better that than driving the dynamite over all the ruts and bumps. It was late afternoon now, and a breeze had picked up. It felt as if we were the only people for miles, and maybe we were.

It was another fifteen minutes to the bottom of the hill, where we stashed the case in deep brush, and hurried back up to do it all again. The sky was darkening. When we left the storage building for the last time, Keith tried to replace the lock's mounting to something approaching its original state, but it was beyond repair. Employing a rhythmic system of stops and starts, we shuffled down the hill. Eventually, we reached the road, and I stayed with the crates as Keith jogged back up to get the car.

I waited, hidden behind thick roadside trees, my eyes fixed on our ill-gotten gains, as thunder clapped above me. When Keith lumbered to a halt in the wheezing Toyota, we placed the first crate carefully in the trunk, but it was too tall and the top wouldn't close, so the dynamite came inside with us. We secured the crates to the backseat with the only things we had: bungee cords and blankets.

I told them we needed a station wagon, Keith muttered, as he put the car in
DRIVE
.

It was the last thing he said for an hour. The skies opened up before we made it to the highway, and he gave his attention completely over to the task at hand. I turned around every few minutes to check on our cargo, resting innocuously on the cushioned seats. It could have
been anything under those blankets. But it wasn't anything. It was high explosives, a fact I thought might lend our journey a certain intimacy—a shared acknowledgment of our feat, our felony. But Keith stared straight ahead, his green eyes fixed on the wet road, the close distance, the near future—no mirrors, no looking back. They were the eyes of a true believer, I realized then, and for a moment they scared me more than anything else in the car.

AIDAN
 

THE CAB RIDE TO THE ESSEX COUNTY AIRPORT IN NEW JERSEY WAS A NIGHTMARE. Touché, who was already there, had made it sound like nothing, a quick twenty-minute jaunt, fifty bucks tops. But as we inched west on Route 3, twenty minutes became forty, then sixty. It was a hot, muggy day, and the cabbie took the Friday-morning traffic personally, muttering in some Middle Eastern tongue with every roadway slowdown. Somewhere past the Meadowlands, his frustration boiled over and he glared at me in the rearview mirror, his cursing—if that's what it was—becoming more pointed. I opened the
Times
and tried to ignore him.

Almost a week had passed with no major developments, and the bombing had been relegated to page A17. According to the article, an Al Qaeda splinter group had taken credit for the blast on their website, and though an FBI source questioned the group's credibility, the larger implication was clear: the culprits were Islamic. A few days ago, I'd have glanced at the piece without raising an eyebrow. But now . . . I put the paper down. Reading in traffic was making me queasy. And the meter was climbing—soaring!—toward triple digits. I lowered the window and turned my head into the breeze. Except there was no breeze. We weren't moving.

Touché's idea was simple enough: fly up to Fishers Island, find Brendan Carlyle, and get him to talk. It was that easy, a weekend jaunt. Except
it was completely implausible. Beyond the practical questions—would Carlyle be there? Would he say anything? Did he
know
anything?—loomed the greater issue of the flight itself. Because Touché, it became clear, had meant that
he'd
be doing the flying. I was petrified of planes and only boarded them heavily medicated and under extreme circumstances—family funerals, destination weddings, and trips to Vegas. It was a question of physics, equations of weight and balance that defied logic.
Wake turbulence, air pockets, wind shear, bird strikes:
these were the phrases, the
fears
, that consumed me every time I gazed down on the earth from thirty thousand feet, and all the alcohol and Ambien in the world couldn't dull them.

All of which is to say that the prospect of a Friday-morning flight to Fishers Island with Touché at the controls wasn't entirely appealing. In fact, it was harrowing. I'd never been in a private plane before, and I'd told Touché as much the night before.

“Ah, yes,” he answered, “then this is exactly what you need. You can sit in the cockpit, be my copilot. Then you'll see how easy it is, how
routine
.”

“Amtrak is routine,” I'd responded. But he had a point. What better remedy than facing my anxiety head-on, with a newly minted pilot in a single-engine plane? Still, I made one excuse after another until Touché said, “Fine, let's forget the whole thing.” Which is when I remembered the whole thing—the bigger picture, the tiny photograph. That something would come of it was a long shot, of course. But even if Paige Roderick proved nothing more than a pretext for an island getaway, that was fine with me. Anything beat another weekend in the scorching summer city.

When Touché had told me Essex County was a private airport, I'd conjured images of a wind sock astride a dirt runway. As we finally pulled up, though, more than an hour late, I saw hangars, a tower, even a terminal. I grabbed my bag and gave the cabbie five bucks on top of the $95 fare. He spit at my feet as he drove off.

The “terminal”—a dozen cushioned seats and a tiny information counter—could have been a doctor's waiting room, but for the two men in pilot shirts sipping coffee near the door that doubled as a gate.
“If you're looking for Julian, he's out there working on his engine,” one of them said, pointing at a group of planes parked in the near distance. His friend laughed. I didn't.

Almost a decade had passed since 9/11, and still it felt disturbing—almost illegal—to be walking through a door and out onto an airport tarmac. The midday clouds had evaporated and the sun was ascendant; I could feel the concrete give a bit underfoot. Up ahead, a dozen aircraft of varying sizes sat neatly in rows. I spotted Touché through the glare, climbing down the steps of a small Cessna. When he got to the bottom, he made his way to the tip of the plane, where, to my horror, he dipped his head under the open hood of what must have been the engine. The pilot hadn't been kidding.

“What the hell are you doing?”
I shouted.

Touché reemerged from the engine block, careful not to bang his head. He was holding a screwdriver. “Glad you could make it. Did you walk?”

“Traffic.”

“Well, put your bag in the cabin and come help me.”

“With what?”

“Routine maintenance.”

“
Routine maintenance?
Don't you have
people
for that kind of stuff?”

“Just hurry. We'd be there already if you'd been on time.”

Resigned to my impending demise, I climbed into the plane and looked around. The cramped four-seater smelled strongly of gasoline and old leather. Flight time was less than an hour, but still. I clambered back down the steps and joined Touché, or at least the visible part of him.

“The fucking thing's tiny.”

“Do me a favor,” he said, from inside the engine. “Check the oil, will you? It's directly opposite me, you'll see it.”

I didn't move. Touché poked his head up, annoyed. “What's wrong with you? It's the same as a car. There's a—what do you call it?—a
dipstick
.”

“My God. You're serious.”

I walked around the propeller to the other side, where another cover lay open, baring the aircraft's inner workings. The dipstick was
right in front of me. I pulled it out, wiped it on the bottom of my jeans, then put it back in and pulled it out again.

“It's at three!”
I shouted, over the fuselage.

“Out of what?”

“What do you mean, ‘out of what'?”

“I mean three out of what?”

I looked down at the rod in my now greasy hand, and like every dipstick I'd ever seen, it went to ten.

“Ten!”

There was silence.

“Is that good or bad?”
I shouted.

“It should get us there”
came the reply, followed by the slamming of the engine cover on the other side. A moment later, Touché was standing beside me.

“I'm not going,” I said.

“Of course you are.” He snatched the dipstick from my hand and put it back in himself, then slammed the cover closed.

“I don't know how to say this. Actually, I do. I'm not flying in this piece of shit. I don't care if you've had ten thousand hours in the air, and all the—”

“Ah, Aidan, stop being a baby. I was kidding about the oil.”

“No you weren't.”

Touché thought for a moment. “Fine. I'll go alone. You can stay here and wait for another e-mail that will never come. Or you can be
proactive
.” With that, he climbed up into his machine. He knew I'd follow him; in the end, everyone followed him. I took a deep breath and started up the stairs.

Touché twisted knobs and read gauges while I strapped myself into the copilot's seat. Then he stood up, pulled the steps into the plane, and with a straight face recited the location of emergency exits and life jackets in the event of various catastrophes. “Sorry,” he said, as he sat back down. “I have to say all that.”