Out of Time

by David Klass

  She was tempted to run out in search of Julie, but she knew that her daughter had sped down the stairs and was already out of the building. There was no way to catch her. And Ellen had something else to do that was extremely time-critical.

  She carefully wrote out a warning message about Tom Smith and the questions he had posed. She used special software to encrypt it, and she sent it over the dark web to an email address she had never used before and would never use again.

  FORTY-ONE

  Julie hurried after the young FBI agent and caught him fifty feet before the corner. The usual crowd was hanging out at a bodega up ahead. She had only to shout and they would come running, but she made an instant decision that she preferred to confront him alone. Julie was usually a clear thinker, but her mind was whirling. “Hey, Tom Smith.”

  He turned, puzzled, but figured it out quickly: “You must be Ellen’s daughter.”

  “You asshole. You made my mother cry.”

  “I didn’t mean to,” Tom told her, sounding sincere. “You’re Julie, right? Listen, sometimes I have to do things I don’t want because I’m trying to catch a murderer.”

  “Green Man.”

  He looked back at her. “So you were listening to our conversation?”

  “Aren’t you smart,” Julie said “But then you graduated summa cum laude, right? Where from?”

  “Stanford.”

  “I would think they’d have better job placement.”

  “You seem pretty sharp yourself,” Tom told her. She was surprised by how young and unsure of himself he was—he reminded her of a genius math nerd from her high school. “Do you know a man named Paul Sayers?” he asked. “He probably goes by a different name now. He was an old friend of your mom’s.”

  “Sure,” Julie said. “I call him Uncle Green Man. He stops by for brunch and we discuss what he should blow up next.”

  “That’s not as funny as you think,” the FBI agent said. “Have you really met him?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me anyway.”

  “Probably not,” Tom admitted. “But here’s something you should believe. There’s a way that you can help your mother.”

  “Why would you care about helping her?”

  “I admire your mom, and the more I know about this situation, the more I can protect her. And you.” He was looking at her sympathetically. “We’re not as different as you think.”

  “Then try telling me the truth. How did you find my mother?” Julie demanded.

  “I can’t tell you all the details. But I don’t condemn any of the choices she’s made. I can tell you’re also a very good person, and I’d like to help the two of you get out of this mess.”

  She stepped forward to face him. “Why should I trust you if you can’t even admit the truth to yourself? I can tell that you’re really smart. You must know that what you’re doing is wrong, deep down. You’re trying to catch someone who can’t be caught and stop something that can’t be stopped, or none of us will have a chance. If you went to Stanford, you understand the science as well as I do, and I can see in your eyes that on some level you know I’m right.”

  “On some level you are right,” Tom admitted, “but this isn’t always an easy world. Now let’s talk about how we can both help your mom before it’s too late. . . .”

  His gentleness and sincerity confused Julie, and for a dizzying moment, she was tempted to trust him. She recoiled from the thought, but she had taken in too many things too fast, and she stumbled back, suddenly light-headed.

  “Was Paul Sayers in New York recently?” he asked her softly. “Do you know the last time your mother saw him? Julie, are you okay?”

  She looked back into his eyes and whispered, “Damn you to hell.” And then the pavement under her feet seemed to reel, and she sagged and almost fell.

  He stepped forward and held her up. “Do you need a doctor?”

  “TOLD YOU IT WAS JULIE!” a loud voice shouted from the direction of the bodega.

  “Get out of here,” she said to Tom, trying weakly to pull free.

  “Not till you’re sure you’re okay.”

  “Let her go, motherfucker,” a man commanded from the corner. Tom glanced toward the lights and saw shadows hurrying toward him. He released Julie, and she was able to stand.

  Deep and angry voices boomed: “Jules?” “You okay?” “He messing with you?”

  They were big and street tough, with chains and ripped abs and first beards, and she didn’t hang out with them, but she had grown up with them, and she was one of them.

  “No, he’s not messing with me. He’s getting out of here.”

  But they had circled Tom. “Somebody’s begging for an ass whupping.”

  She warned them, “He’s FBI.”

  “Oh shit, then he’s gonna bust all of our asses,” Terrell, the leader, said, and there was laughter as the circle closed tighter.

  Tom took out his father’s Colt and raised it. His hand visibly shook.

  “What are you waving that around for, you piece of shit?”

  “Let him go,” Julie said to Terrell, and then she crumbled to the pavement.

  Terrell reluctantly nodded that they should let him go, and while they clustered around Julie and tried to revive her, Tom hurried up the block, and soon he was running for the nearest subway station.

  FORTY-TWO

  The Garden State Parkway was wide-open in the weekday morning, and Tom took the express lane and cruised past shore points, never dipping under eighty. He was in a rented Dodge Charger, sipping an enormous cup of coffee from a rest stop and listening to Bruce Springsteen on a local radio station when his cell phone rang. With reluctance he switched Bruce off and took the call from Grant.

  “Tom, where the hell are you?”

  “On the Garden State Parkway, thirty miles north of Atlantic City.”

  “Planning on some early-morning gambling?”

  “No, I’m on my way back to DC. I’ll take the ferry from Cape May to Delaware and get back this evening. How’s Brennan?”

  “Not so good,” Grant said. “He’s tried everything to turn this around—reached out to every friend he ever had and called in every favor he was ever owed—but I’m afraid that ship has sailed.”

  “Meaning what?” Tom asked.

  “It’s over. Let’s just say it wasn’t the most graceful transition to retirement, but I think he’s finally accepted that it’s a done deal.”

  “That’s fucking unbelievable,” Tom said with real anger. “I tried to call him a few times, but he’s not taking my calls.”

  “He’s not taking anyone’s calls right now,” Grant said. “He’s in self-imposed seclusion. But he knows the way this town works, and he’ll get over it.”

  “I doubt that. And Earl?”

  “Also took retirement. I heard he was on some tropical island. Hopefully at a hotel that allows smoking in the rooms.”

  “So I guess that puts all of us outside the investigation.”

  There was a noticeable hesitation, and then Grant said, “Not exactly.”

  “What does that mean?” Tom asked, suddenly on his guard.

  “Of course no one feels worse about Brennan than I do. He was like a father to me. But they’ve asked me—”

  “Who asked you?”

  “The attorney general asked me to be a bridge to the continuing investigation at DHS, making sure they have what we had and they know what we knew.”

  “Someone has to do it,” Tom said.

  “This investigation has to go forward, and Green Man has to be caught.”

  “Sure, you had no choice,” Tom agreed, thinking that even Grant, for all his ambition, couldn’t feel very good about himself.

  “And Carnes is moving forward very aggressively, with the full cooperation of the administration.”
<
br />   “I’m sure he is.”

  “I also have to help clean up the loose ends of what the FBI was doing. And it’s come to my attention that nobody knows exactly what the hell you’re up to.”

  Tom spoke carefully. “I came up with an idea, a hunch, and Brennan let me pursue it.”

  “What was the hunch?”

  “That I might be able to profile Green Man based on his engineering skill set.”

  “You were doing this alone?”

  “No, I was working with a professor at Carnegie Mellon.”

  “Any luck?”

  Tom glanced down at the pad on the seat next to him, on which he had jotted down notes. An address in Cape May for Willa Sayers was written at the top in blue pen. “One or two possibly interesting things. I’ll brief you as soon as I’m back.”

  “Tomorrow morning.” It was not a request but an order.

  “Sure. Are you in the war room, or did they close that down? Are you in the Hoover building?”

  “I’m over at DHS,” Grant said.

  “I see.”

  Grant didn’t like Tom’s tone, and his own voice hardened noticeably. “Be in my office at nine A.M. I want it clear that you are no longer considered operational on this investigation. Whatever you’ve found out in the past week—or think you may have found out—write it up tonight and send it to me. Brief me in person tomorrow and then you’ll check in with Hannah Lee, who will reassign you to another case. Clear?”

  “Crystal,” Tom said.

  “So why the hell are you taking the roundabout scenic route?”

  “It helps me think clearly.”

  “Like Green Man driving through Nebraska,” Grant suggested in his mocking tone.

  “Same concept, I guess. And I’ve heard the ferry to Lewes is worth the ticket.”

  “Well, just ferry your ass back to DC tonight and be in my office tomorrow morning bright and early,” Grant commanded, and rang off.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  Green Man sped southward, trying to deal with mixed feelings of nostalgia and dread. His loaded gun was in his right jacket pocket, and this time he was ready to use it. He had gotten Ellen’s encrypted message a little before nine P.M. and had spent a half hour furtively learning all he could about Tom Smith online. After a brief conversation with Sharon, he had set out in his Jeep and driven through the night. Despite the wide-open roads and his anxiety about this meddlesome FBI agent, he’d forced himself to stay close to the speed limit and made it from Michigan to South Jersey in ten hours. As he drove into the beach city where he had grown up, he fought unsuccessfully against a rising tide of decades-old guilt.

  When Green Man had made his break, he’d reluctantly said goodbye to this entire part of his life. His mother was an unstable and emotionally volatile woman who could neither keep secrets nor be trusted to follow a set of protocols, even if her son’s life depended on it. If she’d known that he was alive, she would not have been able to keep it to herself or let him have the separation he needed to make the break work. She would have endangered everything about his new life.

  Luckily she had two other children and a growing brood of grandchildren who lived close. Green Man had provided for her in his will, and with terrible reluctance he’d let her believe that he was dead. For twenty years she had carried the grief of having lost her son, and not a week had gone by that he hadn’t thought of her and felt guilty about having let her believe that he was dead. He knew there had been no choice, but as he drove by the stately Victorian bed-and-breakfasts, he hated himself for telling such a lie and causing such pain to the woman who had given him life.

  He skirted Lake Lily and saw the famous lighthouse in the distance. He had spent many days in his teenage years at the three-mile strip of town beaches, breaking all the rules as a rebellious adolescent and then enforcing them as a town lifeguard. He had learned to surf and scuba dive and had bought a sea kayak and fished from it much farther from shore than was safe. He recalled gleaming dawns, a mile from shore, watching the sunrise as he rode swells and chased schools of bluefish.

  Green Man cruised past the wetlands and turned north into narrow side streets. His part of Cape May was less than a mile from the fashionable B and Bs that beckoned to rich weekenders, but it was a completely different world. He drove past his elementary school, and as the houses got smaller and the yards knitted closer together, he slowed and tried to contain the memories, few of them good. When he was in fifth grade, his father—whom he had been very close to—had died of a massive stroke. He’d died in a wicker chair on the back porch, and Green Man had found him slumped over the next morning and tried in vain to wake him.

  He had never been that close to his mother and two siblings, who had stayed in South Jersey. He had been the one to get out, and from New Haven to Boston to San Francisco, he had never looked back. Now he was turning onto his old street, and damn this FBI agent for bringing him back to this sad block that hadn’t changed in twenty years. Green Man’s guilt about his past was also forward-looking—one of the horrible things about making his break had been leaving family and dear friends behind, and he knew that if Sharon, Gus, and Kim made a similar break in a few weeks, they would suffer the same way. A break from the past was exactly what it sounded like—even if it was successful, it left a life smashed and forever in pieces.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  Tom found Topsail Street and parked in front of a white clapboard house. It was a block of modest two-story dwellings with neat yards, many of them festooned with small garden plots. Far up the street, two boys punted a football back and forth and laughed when it bounced off a parked car. Tom watched them for a moment, imagining Green Man marching past these flower beds on his way to school and sitting up in a bedroom of this run-down white house, studying high school chemistry on his long path to trying to save the world. It was exactly the kind of house Tom had lived in in about six different states, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was hunting himself as he trudged up the front walk to the screen door.

  Grant’s words rang in his memory. He was off the Green Man investigation and no longer operational. So he had no real authority to be doing what he was doing, and he knew he had to be very careful. If he alarmed this woman enough that she called the FBI, he could be reprimanded or fired or probably even worse. But at the same time, he was almost certain that Green Man had grown up in this house, and Tom had been on the trail so long that he had to see it for himself. He cautioned himself to go easy and rang the buzzer.

  He had called her from the road, and she was expecting him and came quickly. Willa Sayers was thin and even starting to look a bit frail, a white-haired woman in her seventies with a nervous, birdlike tick of moving her head from side to side. “Come in. I called my daughter, Robin, because she’s really smart about these things and I thought maybe she might be able to help answer your questions, but she has to work this morning. She said you can call her if you need to.”

  The house was low-ceilinged and dreary, badly in need of a paint job and some new furniture. The matching sofa and love seat looked like they had been purchased thirty years ago, and a large cinnamon-colored tabby curled up on a footstool eyed Tom suspiciously. “I’m sorry, what question did your daughter want to help me with?” he asked, sitting down on the edge of the love seat.

  “This is about taxes, isn’t it?”

  “No,” Tom said with a smile. “I’m sorry for the confusion, but you can relax, I’m not from the IRS, and I have nothing to do with taxes. I hate paying them myself.”

  She was sitting facing him, and he could see her visibly relax. She was not good at hiding her feelings, and her thoughts were immediately reflected in her facial expressions and nervous gestures. “Well, that’s a relief. But why are you here?”

  “I’m from the FBI, but please don’t worry. You’re not in any trou
ble, and no one you know is, either. I’m just following up on some old cases, and one of them touches you slightly. If you could give me some answers, I’d really appreciate it.”

  “So these are cold cases?” she asked. “I think I heard that term on TV.”

  “Yes, ma’am. That’s exactly right. Very cold cases. In fact, the one I need to ask you about is almost twenty years old.”

  Willa Sayers did the math, wet her lips with her tongue, and leaned slightly forward. “So you’re here to ask me about Paul?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I wanted to ask you a few questions about Paul William Sayers. I understand he never liked the William much,” he said with a smile.

  “That was his name, and he liked it fine.”

  “What was Paul like as a child? Was he happy here in Cape May?”

  “Of course he was happy. At least when he looked up from his books. He read all the time. But you didn’t come here to ask me about any of that. Forgive my directness, but what do you want?”

  “Okay,” Tom said, “maybe it’s best if we jump in. I hope this isn’t painful for you, and I promise to be brief. I’m here to review what happened at the Gunderson Logging plant. As you know, the FBI, at the time, felt that Paul—”

  “My son had nothing to do with that fire.” Her tone had become shrill and was unequivocal.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because Paul was a good boy and he had a heart of gold. Some people died in that fire, and Paul wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  “So you think the FBI was wrong?”

  “Yes, you were wrong.” She clasped her hands together.

  “Actually I was only three years old,” Tom told her with a grin, and she gave him a nervous smile back. “So I had nothing to do with what they thought back then. I’m just trying to clarify the old records. From those records, I know Paul was involved with some environmental groups that did things like that. And he had a girlfriend, Ellen, who was also involved in a bit of radical behavior. Did you ever meet her?”