Out of Time

by David Klass

  “I’m sure you’re right. It’ll be tough for them, but they’ll manage.”

  They both sipped tea and lowered their mugs at the same instant. “No more tears, but I’m going to miss you,” she said softly. “The top theoretical physicists say there are an infinite number of universes out there—one in which every different eventuality that could possibly happen has actually happened. So in that multiverse there has to be one dimension where we somehow ended up together.”

  “I wouldn’t listen to theoretical physicists,” he told her. “They’re insane.”

  “Can I just say I wish I lived in that dimension?” she asked.

  “Sure, it’s probably a nice dimension,” he admitted, and put his arm gently around her. She leaned against him in her flannel bathrobe and closed her eyes, and he slowly closed his own. He meant to open them in a few minutes and slip away, but it was a soft couch in a warm apartment, and he could smell her wet hair and the ginger tea. They were old and dear friends and very comfortable with each other. Green Man hadn’t had a night with more than three hours’ sleep in a week, and he didn’t even feel himself drifting off.

  He dreamed of his boat from years ago, rocking under a gentle swell from an evening breeze. They were anchored in a small bay, beneath a rocky cliff on top of which tall trees poked the purple sky. He was sketching the cliff and the trees, and Ellen was reading to him from one of her poetry courses. It was “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” and Wordsworth’s poetic musings were more music than words as rendered by her soft voice. Then they were down in the dark cabin, their lips and bodies gently touching, and the boat had stopped rocking and lay silent and becalmed, and suddenly there was a crack of sound that might have been thunder. . . .

  But it wasn’t thunder at all; it was the front door of Ellen’s apartment slamming shut. Green Man opened his eyes and heard a voice say, “Mom? There was a leak in the gym so they canceled practice, which is a good thing because I have a calc test from hell. . . .”

  Julie had walked into the living room, her dripping coat in her hands, and Green Man bolted to his feet just as she spotted him and Ellen, both in bathrobes. “Well, isn’t this a surprise. Please excuse me for intruding. . . .”

  “Julie, it isn’t what you think . . . ,” Ellen said.

  Julie stepped sideways, giving Green Man the cold shoulder and facing her mother. “I think it’s pretty clear what it is. If you want to bring your boyfriends or hookups or whatever home and dress them in my bathrobe, could you please at least bring them to your bedroom so I don’t have to walk in on you, and just maybe you should consider following your own rules . . .” And she was heading for the door again.

  “Julie, really, come back here.” Ellen followed her toward the door and caught her by the arm.

  “And you dare to give Ron and me shit?” the teen demanded, and pulled loose. She opened the door and ran out, and the door slammed behind her.

  “Go after her,” Green Man said.

  “She’ll be okay. She’s just upset because I walked in on her and a boy a few weeks ago and I threw him out and grounded her, and we made rules—”

  “No, Ellen, she was really upset, and justifiably so. I shouldn’t have let her see me, especially like this, in her bathrobe, a complete stranger, and she kind of has a right to be mad because we—”

  They were both on their feet. “Don’t you tell me about raising my daughter,” Ellen snapped, and the tears had started again, which was a very strange thing. She usually wasn’t a crier, but in the past few weeks she had become more and more emotional, and now she was practically heaving with deep, conflicting feelings that caused her to hold on to the side of the sofa and fight for each breath.

  “Hey, try to calm down,” he urged, genuinely worried. “I didn’t mean to upset you. Just take a few regular breaths and don’t try to talk.”

  But while Ellen was struggling to breathe, somehow fast, short sentences seemed to fly out of her mouth between gasps. “No. It’s not you. It’s her. She’s been all over me lately. And it hurts so much.” Ellen stood away from the sofa to face him and said, “She’s so angry with me.”

  “Why? I can tell you’ve been a great mother.”

  “It’s not enough anymore. She’s mad that she doesn’t know much about her father. I told her his name and a few other details. But she wants more, and it hurts . . . like I’m not enough for her . . . like she feels incomplete, and she blames me for it, so much that part of her now is starting to hate me. . . .”

  He saw her deep pain and wanted to help. “Of course you’re enough. Believe me, she knows how lucky she is. But it’s understandable that she’s curious. She’s at an age where she’s struggling with identity. So don’t take it as criticism. Just tell her all you know about the donor. The truth is always best.”

  “Is it really?” Ellen asked furiously, and turned away from him. The towel wrapping her hair had come loose and fallen onto the wooden floor, and her long, wet hair shook wildly when she whipped back around to face him and said, too loudly, “I don’t know more about him than I already told her. I didn’t want to know any more details about somebody who wasn’t going to be in my life.”

  He glanced at the door, knowing it was long past the time when he should leave, and said logically, “Well, if you call the clinic where it was done, they’ll probably send you some profile stats, because they legally have to keep that kind of info for years, and it’s hard to blame Julie for being curious—I’d be, and you’d be—and, Ellen, look, I’m really sorry to leave you like this, but I’ve got to go now.”

  His calm and reasonable words seemed to infuriate her even more. She lost all control and struck him, a blow to his chest with her right fist, hard enough to knock him back a step.

  He grabbed her, partly out of surprise, and her eyes were flashing at him in a way he’d never seen before in all the years they’d known each other. “What the hell?” he asked. “What is it? Ellen? Tell me! What? WHAT?”

  “There was no sperm donor,” she said, looking into his eyes.

  Green Man held her at arm’s length and looked back at her and read the truth in her face, and he realized why she’d insisted that he come back to her apartment and what had been so terribly important that she’d needed to show it to him since they would never meet again. His hands fell to his sides in stunned shock as he gave a little moan and slumped back against the wall.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The envelope had arrived in the early afternoon. It had come into the FBI’s main mailroom, a large manila envelope with a hand-typed address label. It had taken more than three hours for someone to open it and for it to be passed up the chain till a supervisor realized what it purported to be and that it just might be authentic.

  Meanwhile, Brennan and his team had been busy with honey badgers. There were more than two thousand schools in Michigan that had the badger as their mascot, but only three had had the humor and creativity to select the much more exotic Internet celebrity animal, the fearless honey badger. One was an elementary school up north near Traverse City, the second was a Catholic school in a port town on Lake Huron, and the third was the public-school system in the city of Lansing.

  Hannah Lee’s people made the connection that one of the sporting goods stores that sold the deer hunting gloves with the rare copper-and-nylon weave was also in Lansing, and in a briefing with his top aides, Brennan decided that—for the near future—the van-by-van search would focus on Lansing and radiate out from there.

  Lansing was the state capital and had the government buildings and courthouses. Its population was more than 120,000, and it had a range of industries, from government service to healthcare to automobile manufacturing. Several different environmental organizations had branches in Lansing, since the state legislators were there, and there were also lobbyists from the automobile and fossil fuel industries. It wasn’t by any me
ans a radical hotbed, but it was a place a person concerned about the environment might choose to live near.

  There were depressed sections of Lansing but also million-dollar homes, and lots of hunters and fishermen lived there and in the surrounding towns. Ingham and Eaton Counties had a high percentage of registered gun owners, and more than five thousand vans were owned by residents of Lansing or people who lived in a thirty-mile radius. The sports teams of East Lansing Junior and Senior High Schools were affectionately known as the Honey Badgers, and the cars of many team supporters sported bumper stickers with colorful, snarling, toothy images of the ferocious school mascot similar to the one Dwight had recalled.

  Most of the senior FBI agents in the briefing room were intrigued enough to agree that the Lansing area should be a top priority of the search. A few, like Tom, doubted that Green Man would have made such a foolish slip-up and argued that it was either a false memory or—if the patrolman had really seen the bumper sticker—Green Man was trying to throw them off his trail. But the deer hunting gloves that were sold in Lansing couldn’t be easily dismissed as just a coincidence, and there were strong arguments voiced on both sides.

  In the middle of that contentious briefing, an out-of-breath agent had literally burst into the room with the news that an envelope had been received several hours earlier that contained a thirty-page hand-typed manifesto apparently written by Green Man. It was addressed to “Taskforce Commander Jim Brennan,” and it contained the ten-digit numerical sequence by which Green Man always identified himself—which was a closely guarded detail never released to the media or the general public. The envelope had been mailed two days earlier from Manhattan, and the return street address turned out to be the Central Park Zoo.

  A day that had already been intense suddenly became chaotic. A top forensic photographer shot the thirty pages of typescript from different angles, and the original copy and the packing materials were rushed to the labs at Quantico. Word quickly came back that the preliminary analysis showed almost conclusively that the typeface used in the manifesto matched the one used in Green Man’s earlier letters and that two partial fingerprints had been found on the title page.

  As Brennan feared, the fingerprints turned out to belong to two mail clerks. All the mailroom workers who had had any contact with the document were printed, with the results sent to Quantico. Brennan sequestered the mail workers in a downstairs room till he found the time to go down and personally warn them in the strongest possible terms that any leak about the contents of the manifesto or even news of its existence would be prosecuted as a federal offense.

  Access to the manifesto was tightly restricted to only the top twenty members of the taskforce, all of whom soon sat in a silent briefing room on the tenth floor of FBI headquarters, reading hard copies of it side by side around a large conference table and taking notes. The tension in the room was intense—they had hunted this man for months, and now he was speaking directly to them and challenging them.

  Brennan wrestled with the option of keeping the news of the manifesto from his boss until it could be vetted, but he knew Haviland would want to know about this possible break immediately. Sure enough, the director’s excitement was palpable, and Brennan had to implore him not to share the news with the attorney general yet. “If she finds out, it’s going straight to the White House, and we don’t know what we have yet or how it will help us.”

  “But you’re sure it’s from him?”

  “It has his code. It’s in his distinctive writing voice. And it’s real smart.”

  “Smart how?”

  “In both style and content. Yes, we definitely think it’s him.”

  “And you’ve also got that image of the honey badger from the van tied in with the store in Lansing that sells hunting gloves? You’re following that up aggressively?”

  “I’ve got fifty agents in Lansing and the surrounding towns, but we don’t have anything solid there yet.”

  “Jim, I’ve gotta brief the attorney general on all this. This is good news, and she’ll absolutely want to know. And Carnes from Homeland Security is also following this closely and wants to help. . . .”

  “I’ll bet he’s following it closely,” Brennan said, and couldn’t keep the anger out of his voice. “But for the time being, this is my investigation and not his, so as long as I’m still running it, you’ve got to let me decide when to share information and who to share it with.”

  “Okay, sure, Carnes can wait till you’re ready. But the AG said very specifically she wanted to hear about any possible new leads. . . .”

  “And she will very soon,” Brennan promised. He knew he couldn’t keep it under wraps for long, but he was fighting for every half hour. “I just want to be on firm ground so I don’t embarrass myself or you.”

  “Sure, I get that. How long do you need?”

  “We’ll know much more very soon. I’ll call you in an hour or less.”

  “Make sure it’s less. And well done, Jim. I can feel you getting close.”

  Brennan returned to the conference room looking so uncharacteristically exhausted and harried that several senior agents sitting around the big table who had known him for a long time stopped reading and stared at him, concerned. He told them that he had succeeded in buying them a little more time but that every minute counted. “We have only two considerations now,” the big man told them urgently. “Is this Green Man speaking to us, or is it a clever copycat? And if it is him, which seems increasingly likely, what in these thirty pages can we use to catch him fast?”

  TWENTY-SIX

  In the tense briefing room, surrounded by older and more senior agents, Tom read the thirty pages very carefully. The more he read, the more his initial skepticism gave way to utter confusion. This manifesto puzzled him even more than the honey-badger bumper sticker had, because he was certain Green Man would never tip his hand this way. Releasing a long and personal manifesto was exactly the way the Unabomber had been caught, and Green Man knew that. It didn’t make sense that he would send his enemy a thirty-page screed chock-full of personal references and observations—every one of which might potentially break this case.

  But Tom was confounded because the farther he read, the more he also became convinced that this was indisputably the work of Green Man and that on some deep level, the release of this manifesto right now did actually make a great deal of sense. Simply put, it was an eloquent call to action. Green Man sensed that the net was closing around him, and he was reaching out to his global audience and especially his young fans in a way he never had before. He called on them to organize, rally, and spread his message to the world. For the first time, he made his cause overtly political, challenging the president by name and describing his policies with scorn. And he encouraged his followers worldwide to take bold and direct actions of their own.

  They would not be terrorists, he assured them, and he was not one, either. He described himself as an environmental activist pushed by necessity to extremism—an Earth Defender, to use his own catchy phrase. He claimed to be taking up the honorable mantle from American heroes like John Muir and Aldo Leopold. He mentioned Edward Abbey and his writings, which had sparked the formation of Earth First! and the Earth Liberation Front in the 1980s and 1990s. Tom made notes on his laptop about several obscure activist organizers whom Green Man mentioned by name. It seemed likely that Green Man had known some of them personally, and by placing himself among them in the Bay Area and New Mexico in a specific time period, Green Man was providing the exact type of material needed for a metadata search that could unmask him.

  Green Man seemed concerned by how he would be judged from a moral standpoint. He used his manifesto to place his actions in the honorable tradition of civil disobedience that he traced from Thoreau to Gandhi and Martin Luther King. He was doing what had to be done to right a wrong—and it happened to be the greatest and most dangerous wrong in the history of
the planet—so he claimed that his actions not only were moral but were in fact mandated of him and every other right-thinking person. He explained to his followers, almost apologetically, that the fact that what he had done was more violent and destructive than Gandhi or King was not at all his preference—it had been forced on him by the scale and immediacy of the threat. The ringing focus of the body of the manifesto was about that threat—that the earth was at a dire crossroads, and the moment when its destruction would be irreversible was breathtakingly imminent.

  Green Man reached back to his six earlier attacks and the letters he’d written to the public about how those targets posed grave dangers to the environment. He now sewed them all together with the most current science to create a frightening tapestry of a nearly doomed planet, its atmosphere trapping heat, its temperature rising, its oceans acidifying and emptying, its biodiversity dying off at an unprecedented rate, with all the harm driven by a species that had named itself “homo sapiens,” or “wise man,” but was seemingly hell-bent on its own annihilation. Soon, soon it would be too late, he warned his young fans, and they would pay the terrible price.

  Tom found his loyalties divided in an almost painful way. Part of him followed Brennan’s urgent injunction, and he read looking for any clues in the science or the references to specific people and places that might lend themselves to a metadata search that would ID Green Man. He parsed every sentence for obscure facts that could be sourced, or names or dates that might be cross-referenced to reveal where Green Man had met a specific person or when he had traveled to a remote location. For example, the manifesto described the destruction of two Caribbean coral reefs in such vivid detail that it seemed likely Green Man had swum over them, and a vanishing glacier in the Andes as if he had climbed up and seen it with his own eyes.

  But even while Tom was making notes that might help catch Green Man, he couldn’t stop himself from agreeing with the manifesto’s central argument that time was running out on humanity and extreme remedies needed to be taken. He glanced up at the faces of Brennan, Grant, Lee, and Earl. They were committed law enforcement agents but not dumb people. How could they not be affected by this powerfully argued warning that all the rules had to be broken?