Out of Time

by David Klass

  Tom hastily lowered the gun to its case as Tracy stepped into the room. “How’s Mom?” he asked quickly, a little embarrassed at having been caught.

  “Out cold,” she said. “And she’s not gonna wake up anytime soon unless you start shooting hunting trophies. Let’s get out of here.”

  They slipped out the back door and stepped through a gate in the mesh fence onto the dark golf course. They made their way through dense rough onto the fifth fairway and trudged silently side by side through the low-trimmed grass, deep in their thoughts.

  “So, is she like that often?” Tom finally asked.

  “The pills or the booze?”

  “Either or both?”

  “If you were home a little more you’d know.”

  Tom didn’t want to fight. “Yeah, I guess I have been away a lot. I didn’t realize you were a frequent houseguest.”

  “It’s less than two hours from Key Largo,” Tracy said. “I come for lunch or dinner and drive back.” She paused. “She’s been taking prescription sleeping pills for the last two years. I think she’s hooked and can’t sleep without them. The gin is more recent. Warren was hitting the bottle pretty hard toward the end, and people tend to get loaded together.”

  “I think he knew it was coming,” Tom said.

  “It didn’t stop him from drinking,” she said, as they approached a green. They skirted a sand trap. “And it sure didn’t make him any nicer.”

  “No, it didn’t,” Tom agreed. “But he’s gone now, and I guess we should bury him with as much love as we can muster.” He realized he’d repeated Brennan’s exact words, and they now sounded a little foolish. “I just hope some people show up tomorrow. I think it will make it a little easier for Mom if there’s a decent crowd. He had some golf buddies and poker cronies who will be coming, right?”

  “Something tells me they’re going to be on the links,” Tracy said, stepping onto the green.

  “Trace, maybe we should stay on the fairway. These greens are hell to take care of.”

  “Do I care?” Tracy asked, and angrily kicked a divot out of the green with the toe of her boot. “If a dozen people show up tomorrow I’ll be surprised.”

  “You really don’t think our dad’s much of a draw.”

  “I almost didn’t come,” she told him bitterly. “And I’m not planning to speak. Mom wants one of us to say some words, so you’re up.”

  “Fine. I’m sorry that you’re so angry with him, even after he’s gone. But I guess I knew you guys had issues.”

  A small animal darted through the darkness ahead of them and disappeared into a clump of bushes. Tracy sucked in a deep breath of night air and exhaled very slowly, her arms now wrapped around her body. “Did you know he put his hands on me?”

  Tom was genuinely shocked. He stepped closer and said softly, “I had no idea, Trace. I’m so sorry.”

  “I was twelve. He was drunk. He ran his hands down my body. I bit him. He never did it again.”

  “Maybe he was blind drunk.”

  “Don’t you dare make excuses for him.”

  “I won’t. But he used to beat me up right about then, and I could smell it on his breath. I tried to tell myself that maybe he didn’t know what he was doing.”

  “He knew what he was doing,” Tracy said. “Tell you what: you muster some love for both of us tomorrow.” They walked off the green and headed for the sixth tee. For some strange reason, they were walking the course as if they were playing it. “And then do me one more favor, bro, before you disappear again,” she said, and she was looking at him with angry, warning eyes. “Don’t become him.”

  “Why would you ever think that?”

  “You were drinking his whiskey and holding his gun.”

  “It’s the night before his funeral and I was thinking about him is all.”

  “You took his old job.”

  “It’s a completely different job.”

  “Bullshit,” she said. “It’s the FBI.”

  “The FBI does good work. They catch bad guys. That wasn’t the problem.”

  They reached the sixth tee, and Tracy stopped walking. It was a water hole, and the reflection of the moon gleamed in the round little lake. “The children of abusers become abusers,” she said softly. “The children of assholes become assholes. It’s a well-known fact. You got far away, and I envied you that, and I also admired that you had the strength to break away from him. Don’t fall into that trap now.”

  “Is that what you brought me out here to tell me?” he asked her.

  “Partly,” she said. “I know what you’re doing. With the FBI. Mom told me. Don’t you dare catch him.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Tom said, “but maybe we should go back.”

  “I talk to the dolphins about him,” Tracy said.

  “You’re still working at that place in Key Largo?” Tom asked, fearing she was going nutty on him and desperately trying to change the subject. “I thought they . . . I thought it didn’t work out.”

  “I’ve been clean for almost a year. I went through a program. I get tested every week. They took me back on probation, and everything’s going fine, and I just love it.”

  “That’s really great, Trace. You were always happy there.”

  “I swim with them in the morning, in the bay. I know each of them, and they know me. And we have conversations. Don’t look at me like I’m crazy.”

  “I’m just listening.”

  “I’m not saying they get every word. We understand each other on a different level. Come swim with us and maybe you’ll see and you won’t be so fucking skeptical.”

  “Okay, I might take you up on that. Can we go back now? It’s getting cold, and I have to figure out what to say about Dad tomorrow.”

  “They understand the threat. You might not believe that, but they know there aren’t as many fish in the sea and that the water temperature is getting warmer and that everything is changing in some slow, measured, horrible way that they can’t understand. I think they also understand that we’ve almost ruined it—almost pushed it to a place where it will be too far and too late to pull back. And so when I swim with them, I tell them that there’s finally someone doing something about it. Someone who’s fighting for us. A man who can possibly save us. Unless you catch him.”

  “You can stay out here, but I’m going home.” Tom turned toward the house, and she caught his arm. She was strong from working with her hands, and she held him. “Don’t do this. It’s not who you are. I know you better than anyone alive.”

  He pulled his arm free and looked back at her. “He’s a killer. He kills innocent people. And anyway, what makes you think I can catch him? I’m just a little cog in the wheel. Totally unimportant. I find patterns in data, or at least I search for them, but I haven’t found any yet. I’m sort of beneath the bottom rung of the ladder.”

  “Somebody called from the FBI office in Miami,” Tracy said. “They’re sending a car for you, to take you right from the funeral to the airport tomorrow.”

  “What are you talking about? I’m going to stay with you and Mom for a few days. Who called?”

  “They said to tell you Brennan wants you right away. Wasn’t that someone Dad used to work with? They have your ticket and everything. Doesn’t sound like the bottom rung of the ladder. It sounds like you’re pretty important.”

  “That’s crazy,” Tom said. “I don’t know anything about it.”

  “My little brother,” Tracy said with a smile that was both nostalgic and bitter. “It was always the sibling rivalry from hell. Like I ever had a chance. Always the smartest in every class. Smarter than the teachers. You blew away every project. Got perfect scores on every test they threw at you. You were going to show him that in your own way you measured up.”

  “Trace, I did it for me, not for him. He
barely noticed. And I never competed with you—”

  “Good, because he’s dead. I’m a washed-out dolphin trainer on permanent probation. Mom’s another pill-popping Boca widow. But you’ve got everything going for you, and I want you to make it, I really do, Tom. You’ve done everything right. Go out west, where you trained. Build a castle, start a family, and I’ll come live in the guesthouse in your vineyard. But don’t you dare catch that man as a final attempt to measure up. Don’t set that project for yourself, because we both know you’ll find a way to do it. And he’s really the only hope we have and deep down you know that as much as I do.”

  ELEVEN

  Halfway through the briefing the attorney general’s assistant hurried in and handed her a note. She looked angry to be disturbed, but when she glanced at the note, she immediately nodded and said, “Tell them we’re on our way.” Then she looked up at the half-dozen powerful men in her office and said, “Gentlemen, we’re being summoned, and that means now.”

  Less than ten minutes later, Brennan and his boss, FBI director John Haviland, and the director of Homeland Security, Vance Murphy, and the rest of them were in two cars rolling through the White House gate. They were checked in by the Secret Service and without any wait were whisked inside. Brennan had been to the White House several times before, but he had never experienced anything like this. In what seemed like the blink of an eye, he found himself in the Oval Office, briefing at least ten high-level cabinet members and presidential advisors, not to mention the president of the United States, who sat behind the Resolute desk, sipping a ginger ale and shooting glances at a TV in the corner that was silently playing a college football game.

  Brennan tried not to get too technical as he explained the relative rarity of nylon-and-copper-weave glove fibers and how they might have finally caught a break. By far the most likely possibility was a glove manufactured by a small, family-run company that was popular with deer hunters and was only sold in a dozen sporting goods stores in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. “So you’re saying Green Man’s a deer hunter from the bum-fuck Midwest?” the president cut in.

  “We don’t know that, sir. But yes, the glove was probably purchased in the Midwest, and we can be even a little more precise.”

  “If he’s so smart, why would he wear a glove that is only marketed to a narrow clientele in such a circumscribed area?” the attorney general asked. “Why wouldn’t he choose something generic and untraceable?”

  “It’s actually a wise choice. This particular type of glove is exceptionally sturdy—”

  “Which means exactly what?” she followed up immediately, not even giving Brennan time to finish his sentence. “Sturdy in what sense, in layman’s terms, Jim?”

  “It doesn’t shed fibers. He apparently wears these gloves all the time when he’s on a mission, and we haven’t found any fibers up to now. The odds are he took a sudden swift and unplanned action, like swatting a mosquito, and we got lucky—”

  “Or maybe he was jerking off because he was thinking about how he was fucking us,” the president said, and some of his male advisors dutifully grinned. Brennan had heard about his use of vulgar profanity during meetings, but still it was jarring to hear such things said in the Oval Office with portraits of Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson looking down on them.

  Brennan considered saying “That’s certainly a possibility, sir,” but he kept silent.

  The president jabbed a finger at Brennan. “So what good does this glove fiber stuff actually do for us?”

  “Well, sir, if it was purchased in the Midwest, that gives us—for the first time—some directionality in our search. If he came from there, if he was heading back there, we can start to project his route and what roads he might have taken in what we now believe was a van. . . .”

  “Assuming he doesn’t live in San Francisco and he bought some gloves from the Midwest just to try to throw you off,” the director of Homeland Security contributed.

  “I feel comfortable with that assumption,” Brennan said. “Also, we were able to obtain a trace sample of DNA from one of the filaments. Sadly it was tiny and had degraded to the point where it won’t tell us much, but our top experts are studying it, and at the very least it will be useful for verification purposes once the suspect is apprehended.”

  “So when you catch Green Man you’ll know you’ve caught him?” the president asked. “I need better than that.” He leaned forward, propping his elbows on the desk, and looked at the attorney general. “Meg, you’ve got your best people working on this?”

  The question was clearly about Brennan, and they all knew it. “Yes, Mr. President,” she said without hesitation. “We understand the gravity of this, and our very best and most experienced people are leaving no stones unturned.”

  “Just to be clear, I don’t give a flying fuck if the stones are turned or unturned,” the president told her. “I want this guy nailed. But right now I want you guys to head over to the press secretary’s office and help her craft a statement that she will deliver in half an hour to the national press with you standing behind her. It will be optimistic, and it will emphasize the innocent people who died in the most recent attack and in the other five attacks. She won’t take questions, and you won’t, either. And then I want you to catch this fucker before he strikes again. That’s all.”

  They all got up to leave, but the president pointed at Brennan and said, “Hang around for a minute.”

  Brennan glanced at the FBI director, but Haviland shrugged slightly and docilely followed the rest of them out of the office, and someone pulled the door closed.

  “Take a load off,” the president suggested, and Brennan sat back down.

  “You want something to drink?”

  “No, sir. I’m fine.”

  The president watched the football game for so long that Brennan couldn’t help glancing at the screen himself. Duke scored on a long pass to put the game out of reach. “Fucking arrogant Blue Devils,” the president grunted. “You didn’t go to Duke, did you?”

  “No, sir, I went to Penn State.” On a shelf directly behind the president’s head was the Bronco Buster statue by Remington. Brennan had a copy of it in his summer home in Tappahannock, but he knew that this was the original.

  “Hell of a football program down there,” the president said. “You didn’t hear me say this, but Paterno got shafted. He built the place up from a cow town, and they reamed him.” The president pressed a button on his desk and said, “Betty, bring me another ginger and make sure it’s colder than the last one.” He looked back at Brennan and said, “So you were hired by Hoover?” He somehow made it sound like a vacuum company.

  “Yes, sir, in 1972. It was his last year, the year he died.”

  “What did you make of him?”

  “He was a complicated man, sir. I didn’t have much direct contact with him.”

  “He was a great American,” the president said. “Because he got the job done. That’s what it comes down to, isn’t it?”

  Brennan was usually good at figuring out if someone he was speaking with was intelligent, but with this president, it was absolutely impossible to tell. His confidence and bluster might mask a sly competence or a profound ignorance and gross stupidity. “Yes, sir, that’s what it comes down to.”

  “Do you know who Chandler Evanston is?”

  The name was vaguely familiar, but Brennan couldn’t place it. “No, sir.”

  “He’s the CEO of the parent company of the energy company that owns the pipeline in Oregon that Green Man blew up a year ago.”

  “Yes, sir. Now I know who he is.”

  “We had breakfast last week,” the president said. “He mentioned that since his pipeline was destroyed, his company has been facing mounting obstacles, not just out west but in all the places they operate. And there are currently two bills in Congress that would make the kinds of pipe
lines they use a hell of a lot harder to get approved. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  Brennan hesitated. “I’m not sure that I do, Mr. President.”

  “Green Man also hit the Mayfield Chemical plant, in Massachusetts. Among their products, as you probably know, are several that alarmists claim are severe ozone-depleters and are accelerating global warming. Of course, there’s no evidence for any of this, but that’s beside the point. Green Man’s choice of a target created massive resistance by left-wing wackos who are calling for all kinds of regulations and inquiries into the kinds of products that Mayfield and half a dozen companies like it make and whether they should be allowed to manufacture such things. Are you with me now?”

  “You’re saying that when Green Man strikes a target, he not only destroys it but he also galvanizes resistance to that industry.”

  The president smiled, which was a thing he did rarely, and it was menacing. “When terrorism starts translating into popular resistance and even public policy, God help us, because we’re down the toilet,” he said. “Because for one thing, good, hardworking Americans are gonna lose their jobs, which is something I was elected to make sure doesn’t happen. And for another thing, there are a lot of potential Green Men out there with socialist agendas. Capeesh?”

  “We certainly are very aware of the potential for copycats,” Brennan said. “That’s one reason we’re strictly limiting release of information about the specific techniques used in his attacks—”

  “So you were hired by Hoover in another century,” the president interjected, “but you still have your edge?”

  “I want to catch Green Man very badly, sir. I’m doing all I can.”

  “Then why haven’t you caught him?”

  “Because he’s smart and very careful. But we’re getting closer, and I will catch him.”

  “And you’re aware that there’s a presidential election coming up in a little less than a year, and it will be hotly contested? You don’t have a dog in this fight?”