The Travelers Read Online Free PDF Page A

The two men bump fists.
    Will reaches into his pocket, removes the gift-wrapped box. “For Aisha. It’s a few of those chocolates she loves.”
    “Oh, you shouldn’t have.”
    “Happy to. Plus, I got them for free!” He didn’t. “How’s she doing this week?”
    “Better, thank you.”
    Will nods. “Please tell her happy birthday for me.”
    “I will, Mr. Bond.” Reggie winks. “You have a good trip.”
    Will doesn’t understand how someone with such a crappy job can enjoy it so much, or can pretend so convincingly. But then again, there’s a lot about normal forty-hour-per-week jobs that Will doesn’t understand. He has barely ever had one.
    In the terminal, Will examines himself in a mirror, surrounded by all this corporate signage, Kimberly-Clark and American Standard, Rubbermaid and Purell, a barrage of brands. He himself is a brand too, Will Rhodes, Travel Writer, with his little suede notebook, his canvas sport jacket over oxford shirt and knit tie, twill pants, rubber-soled brogues, sturdy comfortable clothes that won’t wrinkle or crease or collect lint or stains, none that’ll look any worse for wear after twenty hours hanging off his lanky frame, flying across the ocean.
    After takeoff he washes down his sleeping pill with a whiskey. He reclines his seat, inserts the ear plugs, and stretches the mask over his eyes, a well-rehearsed routine. Almost immediately, he falls into an innocent sleep.
    NORTH ATLANTIC OCEAN
    Will doesn’t know how long he’s been out—ten minutes? three hours?—when a loud rumble wakes him, the shuddering of the 747, the vibration traveling up his thighs and tailbone through his spine.
    He pushes down his mask, unplugs his ears. Turns to the man-child next to him, a thirty-year-old wearing high-topped sneakers and a backward baseball cap who’d been preoccupied with a lollipop and a video game when Will last looked.
    “What’s happening?” Will asks.
    The guy looks ashen, eyes wide, mouth agape. Shakes his head.
    “Ladies and gentlemen, please ensure that your seatbelts are
securely
fastened, and all trays are in their upright position.”
    These are the same words Will has heard hundreds of times before. Sit back relax and enjoy the flight. We know you have your choice of carriers. Our first priority is your safety. We’d like to extend a special welcome…
    A flight attendant hurries past, gripping each seatback tightly as she passes, banging her knee into the frontmost armrest, pausing to gather her balance and her wits before launching herself across the open purchase-less space to a jump seat, which she falls onto, buckles herself in, pulling the straps tight, taking a deep breath.
    Oxygen masks fall from their overhead doors, and an audible wave of panic ripples down the fuselage. Will places the mask over his face, and tries as instructed to breathe normally, pinned under gathering terror to the soft leather of seat 12A.
    The plane plummets.
    People start to scream.
    NEW YORK CITY
    Malcolm walks the perimeter of the thirtieth floor, looking for any last stragglers who might interrupt him. Everyone still here is too junior, and none would have the nerve to barge in on the chief at seven-thirty, except the food editor, the guy everyone calls Veal Parmesan. Veal never seems to leave. But he also never visits Malcolm.
    Malcolm closes his door, turns the knob to lock it. He takes a few steps along the wall that’s decorated with framed
Travelers
covers, decades’ worth of the magazine’s best work, like a museum exhibit for the people who traipse through this office regularly.
    He squats in the corner of the bookshelves, pushes aside a handful of old guidebooks, reaches his hand past the books, all the way to the back wall. He locates a button by touch, and presses it.
    For a few decades, this was the only security mechanism. But during a wave of paranoia in the post-Nixon seventies, the new editor-in-chief Jonathan Mongeleach was convinced to add a second