Read Due Preparations for the Plague for Free Online

Daddy!” he hears Amy call, and he turns. The children are running after him, breathless. Jason is crying. Dear God, Lowell thinks. What is happening to me? He sweeps Jason up with his right arm. He holds the blue tote in his left. “You didn’t think I’d forgotten you, did you?” he asks, smothering Jason with kisses. “Silly Jason. Okay, let’s go home now. First the shuttle bus, then the subway, then home. Who remembers where the shuttle stop is?”
    “I do,” Amy says.
    “Okay, Captain. I’ll follow you.”
    Why the international terminal? a voice buzzes inside his head. He tries to picture his father on the shuttle up from New York, the elegantly dressed professional man. He cannot visualize his father with a blue sports tote. Had it been inside something else? Did his father disappear into a men’s bathroom at the domestic terminal, change into jeans and baseball cap, and carry the blue tote to the lockers at international? Is there some suggestion that Lowell will be required to embark on a journey after he sees the contents of the bag? Or is this purely memento mori for the flight that never reached its intended destination, the flight from which Lowell’s mother never disembarked? Unless she was one of the hostages. Unless there were hostages, ten hostages, as the hijackers claimed.
    The hostage hoax , the State Department said, is the final ruse of a handful of desperate terrorists …
    Lowell remembers that. He remembers watching the news when that statement was made.
    There is no evidence , the president told the nation in September 1987, of any survivors of Air France Flight 64, apart from the children who were disembarked in Germany. The final landing was somewhere in Iraq where the plane was blown up. Although Iraq has not permitted the Red Cross … nevertheless our Intelligence sources have confirmed …
    Lowell finds himself pausing at an arrivals monitor, scanning for flights due in from Paris.
    “Daddy.” Amy tugs at his sleeve. “Come on. ”
    “Just a second, Amy.” Air France seems to have changed its numbering system. He sees AF 002, AF 006 … but of course flight AF 64 was going to New York, not Boston.
    “Hey.” Someone bumps into him. “People been coming through yet?”
    “What?” Lowell says. The man who has collided with him is disheveled and out of breath. He points to the monitor.
    “Flight from Frankfurt. It’s landed. People through yet?”
    “I don’t know,” Lowell says.
    “What flight you waiting for?”
    “I’m not. I’m just …” Why is he interrogating me ? “Look.” Lowell points to the large automatic doors of frosted glass. “There are people just coming through now.” But he cannot resist looking back over his shoulder as he leaves the terminal, and the man waiting for the flight from Frankfurt is not moving toward the glass doors, but is still watching Lowell. This means nothing, of course.
    Though it could mean something.
    It might mean something.
    Lowell decides he will not go direct to the subway with the children, in case he is being watched. “Here’s our bus,” he tells Amy, and they get on the free shuttle that moves between the terminals and they get off again at terminal C.
    “This isn’t our stop,” Amy says. “The subway is two more stops.”
    “Jason’s hungry,” Lowell says. “Want some French fries, Jason? Want a Coke?”
    “French fries!” Jason grins. “Yummy yum.”
    “Yummy yum yum,” Lowell chants. “Want some French fries, Amy?”
    “Okay,” she says, wary.
    There are numerous fast-food stands, none of them appealing, but he buys fries and Cokes for the children, a coffee for himself. He sets the blue bag on the floor and keeps it tightly between his feet, though an inordinate number of people seem to knock it in passing. He tries to imagine his father, with a sports tote between his ankles, having coffee from a Styrofoam cup. He cannot visualize this.
    “Okay, kids,” he says. “Let’s go.”
    They