Out of Time

by David Klass

  “The First Lady has been strongly advised to stay back, sir—”

  “Tell the Secret Service it’s unsafe for her to be that close. NOW!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  An aide held a mirror, and the president carefully checked his own appearance as the chopper came down. He smiled almost flirtatiously at his own reflection.

  Then they were on the ground and the First Lady was hurrying forward across the lush lawn. The president stepped out of the cabin and kissed her on the lips, while photographers snapped pictures.

  Brennan eased his bulk carefully out of the copter and watched the circus. Several aides were standing on either side of the president, trying to get his attention to inform him of different pressing matters, but the First Lady was speaking over them all and complaining about how the White House chef’s oysters had given her diarrhea, while a small cluster of reporters—held back by security—shouted questions from thirty feet away.

  Brennan had never liked or trusted helicopters, and with the rotor blades still turning above his head, he walked a short distance away. Suddenly an arm snaked around his back and the president was leading him forward. “Come on, Jim, let’s have some fun.”

  Brennan looked around wildly for the attorney general, but she was nowhere to be seen. Before he knew what was happening, they were standing in front of the pack of reporters and the president was saying, “Listen up. This here is Jim Brennan, an American law enforcement icon who was hired for the FBI by J. Edgar Hoover himself shortly after the Civil War. And this old heroic son of a bitch just broke the Green Man case!”

  Photographers snapped pictures furiously while reporters called out questions: “Is it the lobbyist who was taken off the plane at JFK?” “Is Roger Barris Green Man?” “Are you charging him with multiple homicides?” “His lawyer said his detainment is the biggest legal travesty since O.J. was found innocent. Do you have a comment?”

  “It would be premature to say anything yet . . . ,” Brennan started to tell them, but the president’s arm tightened slightly around his back and guided him forward.

  “O.J. was one hell of a running back,” the president noted, “and a jury of his peers found him innocent.”

  “Mr. President, does ‘broke the case’ mean that you’re charging Barris with being Green Man?” a reporter shouted.

  “What do you think ‘broke the case’ means?” the president asked, horrifying Brennan. But even with his five decades of experience, he couldn’t quite figure out how to politely correct the president on live camera on the South Lawn.

  Meanwhile, volleys of questions were flying at them: “Did Roger Barris confess?” “When they searched his house in Lansing, did they find hard evidence?” “Are other people being charged as accomplices?” “Does this look like a death penalty case?”

  “You’ll be given all the answers at the appropriate time,” the president assured them with a big smile. “The important thing for you to get out there now is that Americans can finally sleep safely. All credit to Jim Brennan—this big, modest warhorse of an FBI agent who’s as much of an authentic American hero as . . . Secretariat. Flash them a thumbs-up, Jim.” Brennan found himself arm in arm with the president, flashing the photographers a thumbs-up.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Tom woke in darkness. He was hungover and sore in strange places—the sexiest Rhodes scholar since Kris Kristofferson had scratched his back and bitten his neck. He lay happy and drifting, listening to Lise breathing next to him. He thought of the women he’d dated in college and grad school. Few had challenged or really understood him. It was his own fault—some of them had been nice, but truth be told, he had pursued the kinds of women his father would have liked.

  Well, his father damn sure would have hated Lise. She would have bitten his head off. The thought of them meeting made Tom smile, and he felt a little guilty. Warren Smith was dead, and it was time to forgive and forget. Yet the dead and buried can unquestionably have a strong power over the living.

  That thought led Tom to something, but he couldn’t quite grasp it. Then he did. A name. Sayers. He slipped out of bed, left the bedroom, and quietly descended the stairs. His laptop was on the table in the back study. He turned it on and started to research the fourth name on the list—the name he had discounted because Paul Sayers had been dead for nearly twenty years.

  Tom called up information and read more and more intently, suspicion giving way to fascinated shock. Undergrad at Yale. Mechanical engineering at MIT. After graduating, Sayers had worked at impressive jobs that required interdisciplinary skills. He’d ended up in the Bay Area, where he’d become involved with several nascent radical environmental groups. And he’d started a company that designed airplane guidance systems and had sold it for more than twenty million dollars.

  Paul Sayers had pumped some of his new fortune into radical environmental activism. He was linked to several destructive attacks, and the FBI had begun hunting him. Sayers had evaded the FBI in a very original and convincing way. He’d died. A radical group he was associated with had struck a natural gas company, there was a massive explosion, and his badly burned corpse was found in the wreckage. There had been a big public funeral with several notable environmental activist speakers and a celebrity folk singer. . . .

  “Are all FBI agents trained to skulk away from bed like that?” Lise had come down the stairs and found him, and she was smiling, but her smile vanished when she saw his face. “What’s wrong? Is it the news from DC?”

  “Do you believe in ghosts?” Tom asked her, glancing up from his laptop screen, where he had just called up an obituary photo of a young-looking Paul Sayers.

  “Not normally,” she said.

  “Neither do I,” Tom told her. “Until now. But I think this guy is haunting us,” and he nodded toward his screen, where the news photo stared back at them. And then Tom blinked and said, “Wait a minute. What news from DC?”

  “I don’t think you’re going to like this,” Lise told him, and she showed him what she had just been watching on her cell as she’d come down the stairs. She was streaming a live CNN panel on which they were discussing the breaking news from Washington. Roger Barris had incontrovertibly been able to establish his innocence, and he had been released. On two of the attack dates he had rock-solid alibis and had been thousands of miles from the targets. His family members also couldn’t possibly have done it. He was back in DC with his big-ticket lawyer, who was now threatening to sue the government for one hundred million dollars for defamation of character.

  Meanwhile the president had reacted swiftly, transferring jurisdiction and leadership of the Green Man investigation from the FBI to the Department of Homeland Security. Assistant Director Harris Carnes of DHS was now in charge.

  The news show played a clip of the press secretary announcing the shake-up and denying that Barris’s exoneration had anything to do with it. “This realignment simply reflects jurisdictional realities that the president has recognized for a while. The investigation is now where it should have always been. Green Man is a terrorist and poses a direct threat to the security of the entire world.”

  “But didn’t the president say just hours ago that Jim Brennan had broken the case and was a law enforcement icon?” a newscaster asked her.

  “The president retains the highest respect for Jim Brennan,” the press secretary said, “and wishes him well in his retirement. And there are other factors, including health issues, that make this prudent and necessary. But the important thing is that the Green Man investigation will be ramped up under the auspices of DHS, and positive new results will be announced shortly. No more questions.”

  Tom felt paralyzed for a moment—he literally couldn’t move or even breathe.

  “I’m sorry,” Lise said gently, touching his shoulder. “I liked Brennan.”

  “That’s it,” Tom finally gasped. “That’s what Green Man w
as trying to do.”

  “Get Brennan fired? He couldn’t have known it would work out this way.”

  “Not exactly, but he knew the president. He knew the incredible pressure Brennan was under to get results. With his manifesto, he increased that pressure and made it personal. He knew we were getting close, so he created the perfect red herring and let it play out. Jesus, I should have seen this coming.”

  “I don’t think anyone could have seen this coming,” Lise told him. And then: “If you’re right, what does it do to you? From what you’ve told me, you were kind of Brennan’s pet project. . . .”

  “I’m just a lowly computer analyst he jumped about ten rungs up the ladder,” Tom said. “I’ll go back to being what I was, if I have any role in the new investigation at all.” He glanced down at the photo on his laptop screen and said, “And I think I know who Green Man really is, or at least was, but now I have nobody to tell.”

  “If you have solid evidence, I’m sure they’ll listen to you,” Lise consoled him, and then added warningly, “but you’d better make damn sure that you’re right.”

  Tom nodded at the good advice and studied the biographical information on Paul Sayers that he had pulled up. In one of the news articles, there was a photo of a young and dynamic-looking African American woman who was identified as Sayers’s girlfriend and who had delivered his eulogy.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Green Man and Sharon walked down a leafy path toward the hunting shed. They had just turned off the news. It had worked out better than he could have hoped. Brennan was gone, and Carnes was an aggressive fool who would sweep in with a new broom. He was bringing in his own leadership team, and all that the FBI had found out would now be cast out or at least regarded with suspicion.

  One shelf of Green Man’s library contained the writings of Roger Barris going all the way back to when he had been an environmentalist. Green Man had known him slightly back in the day and had always disliked and distrusted him. When Barris had changed his colors and become a pro-development lobbyist, Green Man had followed his profitable new career with growing fury but had also seen an opening.

  He had studied stylometrics and found the pseudoscience relatively easy to subvert. Barris’s fatuous musings and faulty analysis contained many distinctive phrases that Green Man could co-opt for his own purposes, rewording them and weaving altered versions into his own letters and manifesto. It had been hard work, and he’d disliked the echo of Barris’s voice in his own writings, but it had paid off.

  A month earlier, he had driven four hours to Lansing and covertly poured three gallons of solution into Barris’s backyard pond. Heading home, he’d passed a young girl at a lemonade stand outside her Lansing home. In addition to lemonade, she was selling Honey Badgers T-shirts and bumper stickers for loyal fans. Green Man had bought a glass of cold lemonade and a decal and stuck it on his back bumper, just in case his van was ever photographed while on a mission.

  “Even with the shake-up in DC, I still think you and the kids should go to the summer house ahead of schedule,” Green Man said. He had checked all security monitors on his property and knew they were alone, but they still spoke softly.

  “No, we should go together, as we always planned. If we make the break separately, we raise all risk factors. The cleanest break is one break.”

  “Then let’s go right now,” he told her. “Tomorrow or the day after. I can set it up with one phone call.” Eagerness rang in his voice. “We’ve already achieved so much. We have a moment of daylight now, when Carnes takes over and everything is up in the air. Let’s use it to just disappear. We’re both starting to make mistakes. I can feel them getting closer. Let’s just go now.”

  The hunting shed swam into view through the thick tree cover. It was a hundred-year-old stone shed with no windows and a heavy iron door with a massive padlock. Since they had bought the property, only the two of them had ever been inside.

  “I want what you want, Mitch,” Sharon told him, “but we’ve come this far, and we have to finish.” Her steely resolve was improbable—she was loving and supportive but beyond obdurate. “One more attack, one more loud message to the world, and then we’re gone. You’ve bought us the extra time we need, so let’s use it. We can move up the timeline. Texas is all set. It’s the most important strike of all. The president has taken you on personally. So if you carry this attack off, it’ll have tremendous symbolic and political impact.”

  “And if I don’t carry it off?”

  “You’ve done it six times before. Brilliantly. No one else could have.”

  “Texas is different. I’m worried.”

  “The hard work has been done.”

  He slowed as they neared the shed and swatted away a gnat. “Shar, I’m positive that security guard recognized me.”

  “How could he possibly?”

  “I don’t know. But he did. And the police came to this house.”

  She looked just a bit uncomfortable. “As they did to twenty other houses in this town and ten thousand in Michigan.”

  “But they came here.”

  “One goofball cop came. Saw nothing useful. And he left.”

  They reached the shed, and Green Man took a key from a string around his neck and unlocked the padlock. The heavy door creaked open. Sharon stepped inside and flicked on the overhead light, and he followed her in. It was cool and windowless, and the space somehow seemed bigger inside than it looked from the outside. Green Man pulled the door closed and drew the heavy inside bolt, and they stood side by side looking at the workbenches.

  The diver propulsion vehicle he had been building for weeks was finished. It was little more than an underwater scooter, modeled on the ones that Navy SEALs used to deliver swimmers and equipment to targets. He had built it from parts, and it consisted of a watertight casing with handles and equipment mounts, a battery-powered motor, and a hard-plastic propeller. His DPV was exactly the black color of the Kildeer River’s basalt bottom. The engine was strong enough to drive the eight-inch propeller and carry him and a hundred pounds of demolition equipment down the river at nearly three hundred feet per minute.

  The time fuses and other incendiary equipment he would take with him lay spread out on the workbenches in various states of readiness. He would need a few more days of tinkering to get it all mission-ready, but Sharon was right. He could move up the timeline if necessary and head to Texas in less than a week. The thought excited and terrified Green Man. In less than a week, he could strike the Hanson Oil Field, triumph brilliantly, and vanish forever. Or in less than a week he might screw things up and die or be caught and never see his wife and kids again.

  As if reading his mind, Sharon took his hand and said, “Mitch, I know.”

  He lifted his gaze from the workbenches to her sympathetic hazel eyes. “I’m so tired. I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in months.”

  “We’ll both sleep well soon.”

  “That security guard in Texas said he recognized me, and I really think he did.”

  “How is that possible?” Sharon asked. “You have a great memory, and you said you never saw him before.”

  “I do have a very good memory, but it’s not perfect. There are people who are called super-recognizers. They literally never forget a face. Scotland Yard uses them to crack big cases.”

  “You think that’s what the guy was?”

  “I’ve never been looked at the way he was looking at me. It was like a camera in his eyes. Many super-recognizers gravitate to law enforcement or private security. They work for the police. They work for casinos and identify card counters.”

  “So even if he was a super-recognizer, where could he have seen you? You’ve never been to Texas before.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that. He might not know Mitch, but he might have known Paul. The FBI circulated posters of Paul Sayers when they were hunting him. That
security guard wasn’t a young man. If he was in private security back then, he could’ve seen the wanted poster. . . .”

  “And remembered a face for twenty years? A face that’s aged and been surgically altered?”

  “I know it’s a stretch, but they literally never forget a face.”

  “So, even if it’s true, what of it?” Sharon asked. “He recognized someone who no longer exists.”

  “I just don’t like the feel of it,” Green Man said. “I never should have walked down to the oil field. I should have left after checking out the river. I wanted to see the field at the exact time when I would strike, but there was no specific need to do it. It was a mistake.”

  “And I shouldn’t have told Ted Dolan that you painted that landscape,” Sharon admitted. “That was a mistake, too. You told the trooper in Nebraska that you were an artist. So that information could be on the profile the FBI is sending out to local law enforcement.”

  “The real mistake was for me to tell that Nebraska trooper something true about myself,” Green Man said. “But the point is that we’re both making little errors and they mount up. Someone smart is going to catch on and follow one up.”

  “Not Jim Brennan,” Sharon said.

  “No, not Brennan. But someone.” He took her in his arms. “I love you very much, Sharon. And the kids.”

  “And you’re the strongest and bravest man in the world, and you’re doing this for them. And for our grandchildren.”

  “If I don’t make it—”

  “Don’t even say that. You will.”

  “Tell them that I’ll be there with them in spirit—”

  “No, I won’t listen.” Her eyes were almost fanatical as she looked up at him. “You will strike in Texas. You will complete this vital last mission. And then you will come home and we’ll make the break together. Yes? Say it.”