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THE PHOTOJOURNALIST was the last piece in the complex puzzle. He was the final player. He was working in San Francisco on December 8. Actually, the photojournalist was playing the game in San Francisco. Or rather, he was playing around the outer edges of the game.
Kevin Hawkins sat in a scooped-out, gray plastic chair at Gate 31. He contentedly played chess with himself on a PowerBook. He was winning; he was losing. He enjoyed it either way.
Hawkins loved games, loved chess, and he was close to being one of the better players in the world. It had been that way ever since he’d been a bright, lonely underachieving boy in Hudson, New York. At quarter to eleven he got up from his seat to go play another kind of game. This was his favorite game in the world. He was in San Francisco to kill someone.
As he walked through the busy airport, Kevin Hawkins snapped off photograph after photograph—all in his mind.
The prizewinning photojournalist was outfitted in his usual studied-casual manner: tight black cord jeans with a black T-shirt, tribal bracelets from several trips to Zambia, a diamond stud earring. A Leica camera was looped around his neck on a leather strap decorated with engravings.
The photojournalist slipped into a crowded bathroom in Corridor C. He observed a ragged line of men slouched at the urinals. They are like pigs at a trough, he thought. Like water buffalo, or oxen, taught to stand on their hind legs.
His eye composed the shot and snapped it off. A beauty of order and sly wit. The Boys at the Bowl.
The urinal scene reminded him of a clever pickpocket he had once seen operate in Bangkok. The thief, a keen student of human nature, would snatch wallets while gents were in midstream at a urinal and were reluctant, or unable, to go after him.
The photojournalist couldn’t forget the comical image whenever he entered an airport men’s room. He rarely forgot any image, actually. His mind was a well-run archive, a rival to Kodak’s vast storehouses of pictures in Rochester.
He peered at his own image, a rather haggard and pasty-white face, in one of the cloudy bathroom mirrors. Unimpressive in every way, he couldn’t help but think. His eyes were war-weary, an almost washed-out blue. Gazing at his eyes depressed him—so much so that he sighed involuntarily.
He saw no other mind pictures to take in the mirror. Never, ever, a picture of himself.
He started to cough and couldn’t stop. He finally brought up a thick packet of despicable, yellowish paste. His inner core, he thought. His animus was slowly leaking out.
Kevin Hawkins was only forty-three, but he felt like a hundred. He had lived too hard, especially the last fourteen years. His life and times had been so very intense, often flamboyant and occasionally absurd. He had been burned, he often imagined, from every conceivable angle. He had played the game of life and death too hard, too well, too often.
He started to cough again and popped a Halls into his mouth. Kevin Hawkins checked the time on his Seiko Kinetic wristwatch. He quickly finger-combed his lank, grayish blond hair and then left the public bathroom.
He merged smoothly with the thick corridor traffic rolling past on the killing floor. It was almost time, and he was feeling a nice out-of-body buzz. He hummed an old, absolutely ridiculous song called “Rock the Casbah.” He was pulling a dark Delsey suitcase hinged on one of those cheap roller contraptions that were so popular. The “walking” suitcase made him look like a tourist, like a nobody of the first order.
The red-on-black digital clock over the airport passageway read 11:40. A Northwest Airlines jet from Tokyo had landed just a few minutes earlier. It had come into Gate 41, right on schedule. Some people just know how to fly. Wasn’t that Northwest’s tag line?
The gods were smiling down on him; Kevin Hawkins felt a grim, humorless smile of his own. The gods loved the game, too. Life and death. It was their game, actually.
He heard the first strains of a noisy commotion coming from the connecting Corridor B. The photojournalist kept walking ahead, until he was past the point where the two wide corridors connected.
That was when he saw the phalanx of bodyguards and well-wishers. He clicked off a shot in his mind. He got a peek at Mr. Tanaka of the Nipray Corporation. He clicked another shot.
His adrenaline was flowing like lava from Kilauea in Hawaii, where he’d once shot for Newsweek. Adrenaline. Nothing like it. He was addicted to the stuff.
Any second now.
Any second.
Any nanosecond—which, he knew, is to a second as a second is to about thirty years.
There was no X-marks-the-spot on the terminal floor, but Kevin Hawkins knew this was the place. He had it all visualized, every critical angle was vivid as hell in his mind’s eye. All the intersect points were clear to him.
Any second. Life and death.
There might as well have been a big black X painted on the airport floor.
Kevin Hawkins felt like a god.
Here we go. Cameras loaded and at the ready. Lock and load! Someone’s going to die here.
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