Jet Lag

"I am a huge idiot," I said after slapping my forehead with my open palm.

I'd just booked a vacation package to Vienna on another travel website, with a flight that left a few hours after Nathan Comstock's but arrived a few hours before. In his rush to get "the first flight out," he neglected to check if there were any direct flights that would get you there in eight hours instead of 13. I was looking over the website of the hotel I was practically stuck with when it hit me.

"What?" Amy asked. She was also seated at the kitchen table, most of her obstructed from my view by the screen of my laptop.

"The last four digits of Comstock's Social Security number," I said with a groan, "we have it. When you were the bank lady on the phone, you asked him what it was to 'verify' his identity, and I told you to write it down."

"Oh yeah," she said, "it's in my notebook, where ever that is."
"So we didn't have to do that whole p.h.-fishing thing to get his email password when we had the answer to his security question," the oversight had practically ground my brain to a halt.
Amy shrugged, "I guess next time we do this, we'll be able to skip that step."
"Next time," I said.

I was trying not to let the enormity of the fact that I was going to Austria seep into my mind. I'd never been out of the country before; in fact, the only reason I happened to have a passport was that a few years ago the family was planning a trip to Italy during my summer break. I was stoked about the vacation, had everything planned and had applied for my passport, but at the last minute the trip was canceled for some reason -- my dad couldn't take the time off work, or something. If Amy had a passport, I'd have gotten her a flight too. I thought for a moment I could be like one of those guys who flies to Europe just to go to a restaurant he likes, but this airfare would eat my money away in no time. I'd always wanted to fly someplace in First Class, and I'd looked into it for my flight the next morning, but it was $10,000 more than the coach seat. That seemed a bit much.

The working theory was that Comstock was taking all of his money to Vienna (which is illegal, if you don't claim the money at customs) to put it away in some kind of non-traceable Austrian bank account. Why would someone do this? Surely interest rates would be better in the US; he must be doing it to hide the money, but why? The only reason I could think of was the same reason I'd considered moving all my money to a Swiss bank account a few days earlier, when I thought people wanted to kill me for it.

Was Comstock afraid of something now? Amy said that he was acting nervous in school earlier today, that he was asking about me and suddenly clammed up. This whole thing was started when I overheard a phone call and thought that he was talking to somebody about me. "It might be expensive," he'd said, right after saying he wasn't sure if he could "make it float" and right before doling out no punishment for putting a few kids in the hospital and nearly punching a police officer. Whoever he was talking to on the phone, he was talking about me. Could they now be angry at him? So he'd have to flee the country and hide away all the money they've been paying him?

And who could it have been? Was he talking to the John Doe who pepper-sprayed my face and shot at me? Were they arranging some plot to get to my money? Have they been doing this for years, finding students or parents with lots of money and stealing it? Could he now be nervous because I ran a car into his partner-in-crime? Or could they just be pawns, working for someone else; someone from whom Comstock slyly asked for more money by saying "it might be expensive"? If that were the case, maybe that little act of rebellion made them unhappy. Maybe they wanted to know why I was now crashing cars into their guys and making scenes in grocery stores. Maybe Nathan Comstock is afraid for his life, so he's getting himself and his money out of the country.

This is why everybody around here says Don't Ask Questions.

It was late, and Amy left for home so I could pack and get some sleep before I had to be in D.C. by 6AM. I told her I'd write when I got there, if they had theinternet yet in Austria.

I was only going to be there for two nights, until Friday, so I didn't need many clothes, but I had to pack a lot to make the knife in the suitcase stand out less.

Once I had everything set to go, I had a hard time sleeping. After an hour of rolling around my bed, I gave up and decided I'd sleep on the plane instead, which would help pass the time and might prevent the jet lag associated with an eight hour flight into a time zone six hours ahead of mine. I spent the night in bed, with the laptop positioned awkwardly across my stomach, reading anything I could about Austria or international travel tips. Nothing was very interesting.

And then it was time. The sun wasn't even up, but I was out the door. I was wearing the most comfortable clothes I owned, had a small suitcase in one hand and my backpack (with laptop inside) in my other. Dulles airport was an hour's drive, which seems like much longer when you're pathetically tired and the sky is a dreary dark blue. I just kept running all of my possessions through my mind, trying to think of whether I needed it and, if I did, did I bring it. It was a short trip, I could have made it with the clothes on my back and just bought anything I happened to need, but I still wanted to be prepared.

The roads were all dead, but when I got to the airport there was a flurry of activity. I parked my car in an $8-per-day lot and was bussed to the terminal. I retrieved my ticket and checked my luggage at the counter without any problems. After a half-hour in the security checkpoint line, I was through there without any problems. Somehow, it seemed like I should have been coming up against more obstacles. It was rather fortunate that I wasn't, because I was so tired that my brain was working on backup power and it felt like I was wading through a thick soup with every step. There was an hour before I had to be on the plane, so I wandered around the terminal for a while. I got some overpriced breakfast from the food court, a little wrapped-up egg thing that I knew would probably throw a pretty rowdy party once it hit my stomach. I browsed through a Borders book store and got a small textbook on foreign banking, and after much deliberation settled on a novel that looked interesting enough. On my way to the gate, I found an ATM that seemed to have no withdrawal limit so I took out a thousand dollars in cash from my savings account and walked it over to a currency exchange and turned it all into Euros. A few years ago, advice would say to stick with American dollars overseas, but the Euro seemed to have changed that from what I'd read.

I'm just a dude with 700-so Euros in his pocket. Nothing unusual about that.

But there was something unusual, I knew. I was flying to Austria on a whim, to try and find out what kinds of sordid business my school principal was conducting. I had a knife, and seedy plans for how to get him to talk. This wasn't normal at all. I was beginning to wonder if this was my life now, if everything would be following shaky leads, snooping into bank and email accounts, buying cars and crashing them into weirdhitmen. God, the fact that I'd driven my car into a person had still not seeped through my skull into the reality center of my brain. Here I was again, moving without thinking, going from impulse to impulse, reacting on-the-fly. This had to stop, I knew, and I hoped it would stop in Austria.

After the tedious process of gate-waiting and boarding, I was sitting in an uncomfortable seat somewhere in the middle of an Austrian Airjetplane . My tiredness was useful in keeping me from freaking out about how cool-yet-unusual this all was. The flight crew ran through the safety demonstration in English, then German, but it all sounded muffled and distant to me. I closed my eyes and tried to let myself sink into slumber.

I woke up to the feel of G-forces tugging on my skin, hoped we were landing, but knew we were just taking off.

If you ever have the opportunity to sit in the same place for eight hours straight, I suggest you decline. I tried to tell myself it was just like school, but at school I at least could walk from place to place and feel like a real human with motor function. Just sitting there, reading or trying to watch a DVD on the laptop, it felt like some kind of torture nuevo. I started with the international banking book for research, but my immune system seemed to reject it as foreign, so I switched to the novel which was pretty good; about a professional bodyguard who protects an abortion doctor. I liked the pacing, and the first-person narrative. I knew it was fiction, but it made me think maybe I should tell my story some day, although I knew it would have to have an ending first. Things had only been interesting for six days so far, I didn't think I could stretch six days for very many chapters.

Flight attendants came around once in a while, bringing drinks and pitiful sandwiches. I went to the bathroom twice, just to feel my legs work for the trips back and forth.

When the gods of time passage saw fit to declare that my eight hours were up, I waited in line to get off the plane, waited in line for baggage claim, waited for my baggage, then waited in line to get into the customs line, then waited in the customs line, all doing so while being bombarded with foreign languages and odd-looking things that were poking at all my senses from all directions. I had been a bit worried about customs, so I'd prepared a whole long story to explain why I was seventeen and flying to Austria alone. My dad was a charter pilot for a wealthy businessman, I'd say, and he had a long stay in Vienna while his client had business, and my dad knew I'd always wanted to see Austria, so he paid for a ticket for me to fly out and stay here with him for a few days until he had to fly his client on to London. I figured that story had just the right amount of rich-people-suck, families-are-great, Austria-is-wonderful, and travel shop talk to keep any customs officer entertained but not too curious.

It didn't matter, as all I had to do was say "pleasure" and have my passport stamped. They didn't even look through my suitcase, so I didn't have to explain that the pocketknife was my dad's but he never used it anymore because it was dull, and I wanted to surprise him with it because I'd had it professionally sharpened.

A few minutes later, I was finally able to walk through some doors and be outside for the first time in over nine hours. I was in Vienna. Vienna, Austria. The air smelled different, the people looked different, cars were different, but I felt the same: tired and grouchy.

It was after 9PM local time. By my count, Comstock wouldn't be landing until around midnight. That meant I had probably four hours until he would be trying to check into his hotel room, which would give me just a few hours to enjoy the city before I had to start breaking any laws.