The younger officer’s mouth opened and closed silently, like a fish pulled from the water. The ziplock bag in his hand suddenly seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. His partner, the older officer who had been hanging back, took a sudden, jerky half-step backward, his hand instinctively twitching toward his sidearm.
“Don’t even think about it,” the bald man commanded, his voice barely rising above a whisper, yet carrying the force of a physical blow. He didn’t even turn his head; his peripheral vision had caught the older cop’s flinch. “Unless you want this terminal locked down and both of you swinging for treason before sunset.”
The older officer froze, his hand hovering awkwardly near his belt. The silence between the three men was deafening, a thick bubble of tension amidst the chaotic blur of the surrounding airport.
“Who?” the man repeated, his eyes drilling into the younger officer. The panic in the kid’s eyes was absolute.
“It… it was a dead drop,” the young officer finally stammered, his voice cracking. “A burner phone. Text message only. Instructions to plant the package on the man matching your description at gate 42.”
The man from Internal Affairs processed this without a flicker of emotion. A dead drop. A burner phone. Typical, sloppy local corruption, or the outer layers of an onion carefully constructed by someone much higher up? He leaned closer, the scent of the officer’s fear sharp in his nostrils.
“You’re lying, kid,” the man said softly. “Local cops don’t get dead-drop orders for a frame job on a federal agent unless the local precinct captain is in on it. And your captain isn’t smart enough to run an op like this.”
He reached out and snatched the ziplock bag from the officer’s trembling fingers, slipping it smoothly into his own jacket pocket. He then snapped the wallet shut, hiding the gold badge from view, and tucked it away.
“You’re going to give me that burner phone,” the man stated, a simple statement of fact rather than a request. “And then, you’re going to tell me exactly how long the Directorate has been paying your precinct to look the other way.”
The older officer finally found his voice. “The Directorate? You’re out of your mind. We don’t know anything about…”
“Shut up,” the man snapped, finally looking at the older cop. “This goes way past a little powder in a bag. They didn’t target me just to get me out of the way. They targeted me because of what I found in Marseille.”
He turned back to the younger officer, extending an open hand. “The phone. Now.”
With a trembling hand, the young cop reached into his uniform pocket and produced a cheap, scuffed flip phone. The man took it, examining it for a brief second before pocketing it alongside the bag.
“This is just the start,” the man said, his voice cold and resolute. “You two are going to stand right here and look perfectly normal until I’m on that plane. If you move, if you make a call, if you even sweat too loudly, I promise you, Internal Affairs will be the least of your worries.”
He grabbed the handle of his suitcase and turned toward the gate. Before he took a step, he paused, looking back over his shoulder.
“The people pulling your strings? They’re already dead. They just don’t know it yet.”
He walked away, disappearing into the sea of travelers, leaving the two officers rooted to the spot, terrified of the storm they had just inadvertently unleashed. The burner phone in his pocket felt heavy, a direct line to a conspiracy that reached higher than he had ever anticipated. Marseille was just the tip of the iceberg.
