Chapter 2: NoW Swimming
The title on Salem Khalidi’s business card read “Deputy Director of Telecommunications Security” for KMX & Associates, which sounded great to his mom. But his one job, his one real responsibility, was a shabby rented storage unit in rural Forrest County, and more to the point its contents.
KMX & Associates was a dummy company that existed only on that business card, but in Khalidi’s mind it functioned as a subsidiary of Rapier Communications with or without the pesky paperwork.
Khalidi had been hired six weeks prior, after a job interview in which he promised Lafayette Rapier he would never ask questions and never, ever reveal anything he was told to any living soul, including his mother or girlfriend, if he had one. He had signed a non-disclosure agreement, although he did not as yet know that because he had not read the fine print on his employment agreement and Rapier had not pointed it out. The financial consequences of running his mouth would ruin him, but – Rapier sensed this all along – his real concerns did not fall within the confines of the law.
“What happens at Rapier is highly classified,” the boss said. “If you speak of it, I will know. And you don’t want me to know.”
Khalidi did not want Rapier to know. He was happy with his title and his salary, which paid him more in a month than he’d made in two years as an Uber driver. He was afraid of Rapier because he was not as stupid as his father so often shouted. Hell, the mayor was afraid of Rapier. The governor was afraid of Rapier. Everyone who was anyone was afraid of Rapier, so if you weren’t afraid of Rapier you weren’t anyone. Fear was the man’s greatest asset, and the company’s primary commodity. If he were ever to say out loud what the company actually did – which he told himself he never would – he would say it trafficked in fear.
The day he was hired, after acknowledging he understood the consequences of laziness, loose lips and disloyalty, Khalidi was given keys to a white panel van filled to the brim with brand new, in-the-box pay-as-you-go cell phones of dubious origin. He was told to find a safe, climate controlled location for the phones. A place that could never be traced back to Rapier or Rapier Communications or any of its mysterious subsidiaries, real or imaginary.
“I don’t want to know where,” Rapier told him. “Never tell me how or where you do what I tell you to do.”
He told Khalidi to store the phones safely, preferably in a remote location, to wipe down the van and dispose of it in a place it would never be found.
“Dispose of it? Like, dispose of it?” Khalidi had asked.
“Not sold, not traded, not stripped,” Rapier said, so calmly it scared Khalidi to death. “Gone.”
Rapier then gave Khalidi a list of 12 addresses, all run-down houses in skeezy neighborhoods. The properties were numbered from one to twelve. Each week, after receiving a coded message, he was to wrap one of the phones in parcel paper and deliver it to one of those homes.
“Got it?” Rapier had asked.
“Got it,” Khalidi had it. But Rapier explained it over and over until he was convinced that Khalidi really had it.
Every eighth day at dawn, as Rapier prepared for morning Tai Chi on the pier below his intentionally forgettable lake home, he would pull out his current phone to text Khalidi a seemingly random phone number. Then he would throw his old phone into the Chickamauga Lake, a man-made body of water said to be so deep that a diver on the bottom would have to guard against the bends on the way up.
The phone number is irrelevant, Rapier told Khalidi. Don’t call it, don’t save it to contacts, don’t ever text it. The only significant thing about the phone number would be the last two digits. Those digits would correspond to the numbers assigned to the 12 houses.
“For instance,” he told Khalidi, “if I were to text you 867-5309, which house would you go to?”
“Number 9?”
“Number 9.”
“But what if the last two digits are 16?” Khalidi asked.
“They won’t be.”
So the system was set. Each delivery day Rapier would text Khalidi a phone number, and each of those evenings Khalidi would delivere a new phone to the corresponding address. It sounded complex, but it was simple. Brilliant, Rapier thought. But it took planning.
On his first day on the job Khalidi rented unit B4 at Dixie Storage outside Bedford, behind the strip mall that used to hold the tanning salon and the video store, but now held what was left of The Bedford Bee, a once-proud community newspaper that now operated out of an old Radio Shack. Khalidi rented the unit in the name of KMX & Associates, and paid six months in advance with cash Rapier had provided. It took all day to stack all the burner phones inside. But when it was done Khalidi was pleased with himself, pleased with his own sense of order. He turned his attention to ditching the van.
He had dreaded this part. Rapier had been very clear that disappear meant disappear. No trace. No trouble. He drove to a junk yard, the kind where they crunch cars into blocks, but the lady at the gate asked for all kinds of paperwork and ID, so Khalidi backed up quickly, sputtering that he’d forgotten his wallet. He drove to an old quarry, past the “No Swimming” sign that had been altered with spraypaint to read “NoW Swimming,” but it was teeming high schoolers and beer bongs and bathing suits. Khalidi couldn’t beat it out of there fast enough. He drove and drove until it finally dawned on him. A quarter of this county would soon be underwater.
Khalidi drove the van far into the hills, past reclaimed strip mines and pine forests, beneath kudzu vines that looked like Godzilla as they consumed telephone poles and power lines. He passed a shuttered old gas station, a mom & pop diner and a decrepit “gentleman’s” club called “The BooBu Patch.” He hadn’t seen a gentleman in 30 miles, and considered stopping there to see what it was all about. He thought better of it. The van first, the Patch later, he made a note.
So he drove until he found an old, abandoned railroad trestle leading into the woods. A sign said “No Trespassing," but it too had been edited with spraypaint to read “No TrespIssing,” which Khalidi thought was kind of funny. He did not see the “Bridge Out” sign, for it had been removed by the graffiti artists, who thought that was kind of funny.
The trestle looked relatively safe to Khalidi. At first. He slowly pressed the gas, and eased onto the expanse, wheels straddling rusty railroad tracks above a whole lot of nothing. It was an ancient thing, built of wood and creaking like a melting glacier. Khalidi inched along, bouncing up and down as the tires struggled with the spaces between the crossties. He began to believe with every downward dip the bridge would collapse, that he would fall to his death, never to be found as the valley filled with water. Or worse, that the van would be stuck on top of this trestle and he would have to call Rapier. He felt sick, overcome with terror and motion sickness and vertigo as the ground dropped away beneath him. The bridge shook. His stomach churned.
Up and down and up and down and up and down. He’d been so distracted, so busy concentrating on his fears and his feelings and the tracks before him that he did not look up to see the abrupt end to his trestle. For a flit of a second he noted the steel rails twisting toward the earth, and thought them beautiful, like sculpture. And then plunk.
The wheels of the van crossed the final tie, and Khalidi heard metal grinding metal as the front axle met the rails and began to slide. Khalidi slammed on the brakes and stared straight ahead, gripping the steering wheel like a life preserver. Before him lay the lush forest floor, and a whole lot of air between it and him.
The van lurched forward, but stopped as the back tires dropped, blessedly, into the space between two of the last slats. Khalidi shifted into Park, pulled the emergency brake, unclasped his seatbelt and opened the door to nothing but emptiness. He slammed it shut, and felt the trestle groan beneath him. He scrambled to the back of the van, tripping over empty phone crates and until he reached the double doors. He twisted the handle and pushed, but gravity had begun to work against him. The doors seemed to weigh a ton.
He focused suddenly, like he had when he took the SAT’s in high school. His score might not have gotten him into Harvard, but it was enough to make his mom think she might be wrong about him, and everyone else think he’d cheated. He grabbed a crowbar, leveraged one of the doors open, shoved his shoulder into it, pushed with all his might and fell, hard, onto the trestle.
Khalidi was face down above the deepest part of the gorge, eyes squeezed shut as pain radiated from his elbows. He did not actually see the van plummet into the abyss. But he heard the sound.
Screeeeeeeeeeee. And then the crash, the rending of branches and limbs. Then a thump, and creaking as the van settled somewhere far below.
Khalidi stood up, shaky. He was about to turn to go when he heard a sound from below.
“Hey!” someone yelled. “Little help down here?”
Khalidi felt a cold chill rise from the stomach and climb his spine. He vomited over the side.
He heard the voice again.
“What the hell?”
