The 15:17 to Paris: The True Story of a Terrorist, a Train and Three American Heroes

MAP

COPYRIGHT

HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by PublicAffairs, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC,

a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. 2016

This UK edition HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

FIRST EDITION

© Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos and Spencer Stone 2016

Motion Picture Artwork © 2018 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos and Spencer Stone assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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Source ISBN: 9780008292294

Ebook Edition © January 2018 ISBN: 9780008287986

Version 2018-01-15

DEDICATION

To my family —S.S.

To Zoe —A.A.S.

To my family —A.S.

EPIGRAPH

Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when he does not want to sign.

—Théophile Gautier

CONTENTS

Cover

Map

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

→ PROLOGUE: ANTHONY SADLER

Ayoub

→ PART I: SPENCER STONE

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Ayoub

→ PART II: ALEK SKARLATOS

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Ayoub

→ PART III: ANTHONY SADLER

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Notes

Acknowledgments

About the Authors

About the Publisher

TUE, AUGUST 18, 11:03 AM

Anthony Sadler:

Still alive dad we’re in Amsterdam and staying at the A&O hostel. We will be here till Friday

Pastor Sadler:

Okay Son—how are you doing?

Anthony Sadler:

I’m great leaving wifi, talk to you in a bit

Pastor Sadler:

Okay

THU, AUGUST 20, 11:07 PM

Anthony Sadler:

Hi dad so it’s 8am on Friday here right now. We head out of Amsterdam to Paris today at 3pm and will get around 6pm. I’ll text you hotel info when I receive it

Pastor Sadler:

Okay son

FRI AUG 21, 4:43 PM

Anthony Sadler:

Call me dad

THALYS TRAIN #9364

Somewhere in northern France.

Five hundred fifty-four passengers on board.

Spencer is holding two fingers against a pulsing wound in Mark’s neck. As the train races through the countryside at over 150 miles per hour, he’s trying to plug the carotid artery because if he doesn’t, Mark dies.

Anthony watches from above.

If there are screams, Anthony doesn’t hear them; if the sound of wind rushing by the windows is loud, he doesn’t register it. He is totally focused. The terrorist is bound, hog-tied on the floor. Mark groans. Anthony feels as if the people lying there below him are the only other people in the world.

The carpet is covered in blood. There is so much blood. It is astoundingly quiet.

The bell that signals the train doors opening and closing is the only other noise, an eerie, antiseptic chirp. Anthony might as well be in the hushed corridors of a hospital. None of it feels real. Did we just do that?

The train moves along quickly, smoothly—normally—as if they’ve imagined everything that just happened. The motion is almost soothing. No one seems afraid. No one seems here. There are no extraneous people around Anthony except the ones who took part in the drama that just played out. No one except the ones he’s immediately concerned with. He seems to have blocked the rest from his mind.

He’s blocked a lot of things from his mind. Including some important things, like the notion that the terrorist might not have been acting alone—that there might be two more, or five, hiding somewhere on board, about to attack. There’s no good reason to think there’s only one. Still, as far as Anthony’s concerned, there’s only one. He’s become wholly absorbed with only this man, solving the problem that is immediately in front of him, and at the moment it is impossible for him to think about anything he cannot immediately see. His brain has walled itself off like a vault, only occasionally letting light in through the cracks and seams in the metal.

Alek is back—where did Alek go? He disappeared with the machine gun, but he’s back now, collecting ammunition and putting weapons in a bag.

Did that all really just happen?

Alek tried to kill a man. While Spencer was trying to choke him. Alek held the machine gun right up to the terrorist’s temple so that the bullet would have opened his head up and passed right into Spencer. Anthony had been trying to help subdue the terrorist when one of his friends almost killed the other. But the gun didn’t go off. Anthony doesn’t know why.

NO ONE WILL BELIEVE IT. Anthony’s not sure he believes it. It doesn’t feel real; it feels like he slipped into a video game character, his own thoughts not wholly relevant here, as if he were mostly a spectator of even his own actions. It is so quiet, and so calm, it is not yet possible to comprehend the fact that his life has just changed forever.

He takes out his phone and begins filming. He needs proof. For his friends; for himself.

He is not thinking about evidence. What he’s doing doesn’t feel like thinking at all really, it’s more like reacting.

He’d been reacting a moment ago when they were all tying the terrorist up and he heard a noise behind him. A groan? He turned, registered three distinct things all at once—a man in a soaked shirt, blood geysering across the aisle, and the man’s eyes moving toward the ceiling as if something important had gotten stuck up there.

Then the neck slackened, the chin collapsed into the chest, and the man rotated forward out of the seat.

Anthony watched it in high resolution and perfect detail, as if he were able to slow down motion just by observing it. He had a superpower.

Then this: a pool of blood crept from under the man toward the chairs.

Look at the blood. It was bright and pulsing, and a lesson from his human anatomy class bubbled up and presented itself to Anthony—bright because it’s oxygenated, so that’s arterial blood—blood meant for the man’s brain was seeping into the carpet instead, which meant he was even worse off than he looked.

Anthony took off running. He crashed through the train door into the first car and yelled. Too loud? His body was charged through with a new force he couldn’t wholly control. “Do any of you speak English?”

“Me,” “I do,” “Yes,” ten people responded, a dozen, all different accents.

“Do any of you have a towel?”

Silence, confusion. Fuck you guys, at the same moment he decided a towel wasn’t enough anyway. Back to the train car, back to Spencer on the ground, Spencer still tightening knots, and telling him there was a man bleeding out right behind him. Spencer wiped the blood from his face, crawled over to Mark, took off his shirt to use as a bandage. “I’m just gonna—I’ll just try to plug the hole.” Spencer reached forward to Mark’s neck, and just like that, the bleeding stopped.

Spencer hasn’t moved since. Anthony stands above him, standing guard, looking down as Spencer remains unmoving, on his hands and knees, shirtless, bloodied, fingers in a man’s neck, the image so absurd it’s almost humorous.

When did that all happen? A minute ago? An hour?

Anthony isn’t forming memories properly. His sense of time is distorted; the hardware in his brain that makes memory has been co-opted to dump so much adrenaline that his digestive tract has shut down; he won’t sleep for four days, and his sense of time has become plastic.

And where’s Alek?

To Anthony, his friend Alek seems only partially present; here, gone, back, no longer a whole person, just wisps and flashes across Anthony’s vision. He’s there cutting open Mark’s shirt, then gone. Walking away with the machine gun, then back. Alek is like a person in an old tintype photograph who fled midway through exposure, leaving behind just a blurred, ghostly residue on Anthony’s memory.

That’s another reason none of this feels real: none of it makes sense. It doesn’t make sense that it’s so calm on board.

It doesn’t make sense that Alek keeps disappearing.

Mostly, it doesn’t make sense that Spencer got out of his seat so fast it was like he charged the terrorist before the terrorist even showed up.

Anthony has to ask Spencer about that. He feels it as an urgent, corporeal need. Spencer, how did you know? But Spencer is busy talking to Mark, the man with the bullet wound, who’s started groaning again.

“I’m sorry, bud,” Spencer says. “If I move, you die.”

Mark doesn’t seem concerned with the hole in his neck. The woman next to him—his wife, Anthony assumes—is getting more agitated; she thinks Mark might have another problem, maybe he was shot twice, or there’s an exit wound. Alek finally decides to accommodate her.

Alek is here again.

Alek takes the scissors from the first-aid kit Anthony didn’t realize he was holding.

Alek cuts the man’s shirt and does a blood sweep, running his hand up and down the man’s back, looking for a wound. It’s strangely intimate. The three of them all try to keep a man alive with their bare hands on his body.

There is no blood on the man’s back.

Alek is gone again.

Even Mark is calm. “Guys, my arm hurts,” he says. He says it evenly. He has an arterial bleed, and is only alive because Spencer is plugging it with his fingers, but Mark doesn’t seem to know or care all that much about the fact that he’s dying.

“I can’t move you,” Spencer says. “I’ll lose the hole.”

“Just let me shift a little, my arm’s really sore.”

“Yeah. We’re not worried about your arm right now.”

No one seems to have any sense of how serious any of this is. Mark is unbothered that his head is inches from the terrorist who shot him. They’re lying right next to each other, right there on the carpet. Neither of them cares. The terrorist is unconscious, and Mark is close behind.

They wait.

They ride the train for thirty more minutes.

Anthony knows police in France will want to talk to them. He knows newspaper reporters in France will probably want to as well. Through the fog lifting in his mind he understands that they’ve just encountered a terrorist. We just frigging stopped a terrorist. Spencer and Alek are off-duty US service members. Anthony knows that will matter. Anthony knows that will make this a big story in France.

The train curls into the station, and when he presses his face up to the window he can see the French National Police standing on guard next to SWAT-type vehicles. Still, he does not know what will follow. That they will become celebrities, not just in France but in America too. That they will be on the cover of People magazine, that the CEO of Columbia Sportswear will give them his private jet for a week and that Anthony will ride it home, that his arrival will be captured by cameramen in helicopters overhead, that plainclothes officers will stake out his college classes, that he will sit next to a gorgeous starlet and have a conversation on TV with Jimmy Fallon, that the president of the United States will invite them over so they can see the secret catacombs of the White House, that Alek—Alek!—will be on Dancing with the Stars and make it to the final night, that they will ride a float through their hometown during a parade in their honor, that a glittering Megyn Kelly will win a nationwide contest for their first group interview.

That a trip Anthony only began planning a few months before, when his application for a high-limit credit card he definitely could not afford was miraculously approved, would make him an international celebrity.

All he could think about at that moment was, I gotta talk to Dad.

WHAT ANTHONY WILL UNDERSTAND later is that, at the moment he recognized the threat he was facing, his body was overtaken by a series of physiological changes that prepared him to take it on but prevented him from accurately perceiving his surroundings; that literally changed how he experienced sights, sounds, and feelings. Others called it “fight or flight” but that didn’t do it justice, didn’t express the power of the processes taking over their bodies. This he knew something about; he was a kinesiology major. That the moment he recognized what was happening on the train, chemicals released, arteries constricted, noncritical systems shut down. Sugar was pumped where it was needed, which is why he felt a superhuman level of energy, but also his perception changed. His body jettisoned senses that weren’t mission critical. People didn’t get that—their bodies actually changed. Everything changed, down to tiny muscles that flattened the lenses of their eyes so they could focus on objects in the middle distance. Better to see charging predators or paths of escape, but that same change stole their peripheral vision. They were looking through tunnels.1

But the most beguiling thing of all was that he wasn’t processing information accurately, because he was blocking out things that weren’t important. He did not remember any other people on that train car except the ones he interacted with. Spencer. The hog-tied terrorist. Mark moving closer to death. Were there even other people in the car? He could not honestly say he remembered them, though of course he knew that there were.

But most relevant to what he was experiencing at that moment, this disruptive, disturbing inconsistency, was that the moment he recognized the danger and this process began inside him, his perception of time changed. Events presented themselves to him as slower than they were actually happening, and his memory imprinted things out of order. Sometimes his memory was simply blank. There was a reason for this too: as his body was overtaken by physical changes, the hardware in his brain that formed memory was co-opted to dump chemicals. The memory-forming machinery was no longer left to simply form memories—part of what was happening to Anthony on that train was a medical condition with a commonly known name: amnesia. He couldn’t form memories correctly, in effect because the video recorder in his brain was being used for something else.

Perhaps that’s why Anthony never saw that pistol. Or rather, Anthony could not remember seeing that pistol. It’s a funny thing about memory: it doesn’t always feel hazy when it’s wrong. Maybe it’s why witnesses to violent crime swear they saw things they never did, and swear they didn’t see things that happened right in front of them. It’s why burglarized store clerks sometimes don’t recognize what’s going on in the jumpy CCTV footage of the robbery or the shoot-out: what they actually experienced felt entirely different from what they see on the screen.

Sometimes memory can feel precise, a laser-cut model of what happened, so you can see a fully detailed picture right there in front of you when you close your eyes. It can feel certain when it’s wrong. How are memories formed, but through a system of sensors arranged around your body to take in sights, sounds, smells? What if those senses are off? What if they’re calibrated wrong? What if the shape of your eye has changed so that, like through a fisheye lens on a camera, the image you capture is altered? What if even the way you’re experiencing time has changed? Anthony experienced the attack differently from Alek, who experienced it differently from Spencer. The acceleration and near-freezing of time began and ended at different points for each of them. Each have large black spots over their memories of parts of the attack, extraordinary clarity over other parts.

Later Spencer would say he wished he had a video of what happened, but his older brother, Everett, a highway patrolman, disagreed. Everett knew what it was like to go through a traumatic confrontation that felt so maddeningly different from what an unfeeling security camera captured that it was actually disorienting. “It’s better that you just have your memories,” he said.

But that was just it. Their memories were different.

AYOUB

In 1985, European officials met in Schengen, Luxembourg, to hammer out an agreement. The purpose was free trade. European countries had similar values, and if you could ease passage between them, you could make trade easier. Easier trade was good for everyone; all economies would benefit. All countries would get richer as goods and services passed seamlessly between them, with fewer regulations, fewer taxes, fewer holdups at border crossings.

The idea was to turn the whole territory into effectively one country—once you were in, you were in. Internal borders would become almost meaningless.

For someone traveling from outside, the challenge would be getting into Europe. Once you arrived, you could move within the continent at will. If you had a Schengen visa, you usually wouldn’t get ID checks. The agreement also made it easier for foreigners, like American tourists, to vacation in Europe. They didn’t need visas at all, and after they arrived in one of the participating countries, they never had to show their passports again, even when they moved between countries.

Not all of Europe signed on to the Schengen Agreement immediately, but among the first seven members were three critical ones: Belgium, France, and Spain. It made Europe, or at least those countries, more appealing to American tourists. And to immigrants.

Ayoub El-Khazzani was born in Morocco, and lived in a place called Tétouan. Its name came from the Berber word for “eyes,” a reference to the watersprings that littered the city; Ayoub was raised in something of a Moorish paradise. His family was not wealthy, not even middle class, but the world that surrounded him was luxuriant, suffused with souks overflowing with handicrafts, pomegranate and almond trees lining the hills. It was a North African crossroad; the clothes and crafts in shops testified to all those who had marched through and deposited part of their culture there, most prominently the Berbers, but also the Moors and Cordobas. It was mostly Muslim and, in a way, a reflection of a bygone period thirteen hundred years earlier, when the Muslim world was at its richest, a cultural and intellectual powerhouse, a place with security and civil liberties where even Christians and Jews were protected because they too were sons of Ibrahim. And although they paid extra taxes for their beliefs because they were of course still infidels, they also didn’t have to fight in the army. Things were fair. Things were balanced, stable, orderly. The great Caliph Usman came along and eliminated poverty. Great scientific discoveries emerged from that place. Al-battani, the astronomer and mathematician who fine-tuned the concept of years lived then, as did the father of optics, Ibn al-Haytham, the man who proved that eyes don’t emit light, but take it in. Al-Farabi, the greatest philosopher after Aristotle, studied there. It was the time of the House of Wisdom, where philosophies were translated from Greek to Arabic so they could end up in the West.

The world owed the caliphate its knowledge; the West owed Muslims.

Ayoub was well east of ancient Mesopotamia, the site of the explosion of culture that emerged where the Tigris collided with the Euphrates, and that became known as the cradle of civilization. But his city gave the cradle a run for its money. It resembled the place and the time that continue to produce such powerful yearning in its descendants.

And which also, occasionally, produces such extraordinary violence in those who believe they can return the world to that utopian period, if enough trauma can be delivered to the powers corrupting Muslims that they shrivel up and retract like severed arteries.

Despite the wealth around him, work was sparse; Ayoub was near that rich, verdant world, but not of it. His family was poor.

In 2005, Ayoub’s father was forced to board a ferry for the short ride to Spain so that he might find better work. Eventually he got a job dealing in scrap metal, extracting value from the things other people discarded.

He was gone for two years, so Ayoub went through his adolescence straddling two kinds of lives. Not fatherless, but his father was absent, living in another country, living on another continent, and yet not even a hundred miles away. There, and not there. Close, but in another world.