Out of Time

by David Klass

  They were looking directly into each other’s eyes. Tom asked softly, “How can you save the world if you can’t save yourself?”

  “I have no choice,” Green Man replied, and his finger tightened on the trigger.

  The ferry slammed down into a trough and listed wildly, and using that sudden disorienting instant, Tom ducked away into a crouch and in one smooth motion dove as far as he could off the back of the deck. When he was in the air, he heard the gun go off and felt a sting in his side and then he was foundering in the churning and freezing Atlantic.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Tom dove deep in case Green Man tried another shot and stayed down as long as he could. The cold Atlantic revived him, and by the time he shot back up to the surface and sucked in a breath, he could think clearly. The ferry was more than fifty feet away. He could just make out a lone figure standing at the stern. Tom ducked back into a wave and didn’t know if Green Man had spotted him in the churning sea, but no more shots rang out, and soon the boat was out of range.

  He knew his situation was beyond desperate and whatever tiny chance he had of surviving this hinged on his very first decision. They had left Cape May less than twenty minutes ago. The ferry trip was seventeen miles, which meant the New Jersey shore must still be much closer than Delaware—perhaps just five miles away. It was very tempting to follow the ferry, which he could still see and even hear clearly, but instead Tom turned and struck out swimming in the exact opposite direction, into a wild and open sea without any landmarks.

  His left knee throbbed, and there was a searing pain in his right rib area, but he somehow found the awkward rhythm of an unsteady crawl. He had been a strong high school swimmer and had almost made the team at Stanford. He routinely swam two or three miles and trained for longer distances. The waves were the problem. Tom had swum in choppy seas but never in anything this rough. He knew he had to swim over waves that were rising and dive under them if they were breaking, but it was hard to do that and keep moving forward. Sometimes several waves broke in fast succession or a freak one sideswiped him from an oblique angle.

  Then there was the fear of sharks. He had been shot twice and was bleeding from both wounds. Tom had always been fascinated by sharks—the perfect hunting machines of the deep. He remembered reading that a shark could pick up a blood trail from a quarter mile away. He felt terribly vulnerable thrashing his way across the surface, unable to see what might be lurking just below. Sharks struck from beneath, stalking their prey and then darting up to clamp razor-sharp teeth around a limb. It might happen at any second, and there was no way to defend himself.

  He tried to push the fear from his mind and concentrate on keeping a steady stroke. Long-distance swimming was all about mechanics. He dove under a cresting wave, arms forward to protect his neck. It was agony to try to kick with his left leg, but his right was fine, and both arms could stroke and pull water. He urged himself onward with the knowledge that he had just talked to Green Man face-to-face and was the only person who knew the truth and could possibly stop him. If Tom drowned, the vital secret would die with him. Green Man would strike again and again, and more innocent people, including children, would die just the way he had been shot and left to die now.

  He held on to that thought, clinging desperately to it like a life preserver. Green Man had shot him at point-blank range to cause pain and would have executed him in another few seconds. Altruistic motives or not, he was a torturer, a murderer. If Tom made it to shore—no, when he made it to shore—he would tell Green Man’s secret to the world and make them listen. They would catch Green Man quickly and Tom would have done his job, all that Brennan or even Warren Smith could have ever asked of him.

  He could feel himself tiring. The battle with endless cold whitecaps was sapping his energy. A wave slammed Tom from the side, and while he was recovering, another busted him head on, and he swallowed seawater. He retched and lost the rhythm of his crawl. He would die here. Sharks or no sharks, he would tire and give in and sink to an unknown watery grave. Drowning was supposed to be a terrible, painful death. No one knew how long the brain continued to function as the lungs filled with water. Tom felt rising panic and struggled to keep thinking clearly.

  But the panic had him. There wasn’t a setting sun or a starry sky to steer by. He could be heading farther from land with every stroke. Wasn’t that a great last joke? Tom Smith, who had always been so smart, was trying to swim from New Jersey to England! Specters from his past were watching now, laughing at him. His sister brayed: “You should never have tried to catch Green Man. But you thought you were so smart. You betrayed yourself, so no wonder you’re all turned around.”

  His mother’s sad voice reminded him: “You were the one I was closest to, Tom. I gave you your love of reading and the piano, and you were my only comfort and joy. But you left me all alone with a brute I abhorred.”

  Then there was the menacing presence of that brute, who now mocked his every stroke. “You’re swimming the wrong way, fool,” Warren Smith said, laughing.

  “I’m doing the best I can.”

  “You’ll never make it. You’ll never be a man.”

  Tom was twelve years old, and he could smell the alcohol on his father’s breath as his dad slammed him into a wall so hard that Tom’s teeth shook. “Fight back.”

  But he didn’t fight back. He just curled up inside himself and took it silently.

  “Goddamn it, be a man and fight back.” His father’s hand came again, and this blow felt like it had shattered his face, and Tom whimpered as blood poured from his nose, but he still didn’t punch back, he just silently took it. . . .

  But now he was fighting back, stroking and pulling water and kicking with every bit of rage he had. He must have been swimming for an hour or even two, and his last reserves of strength and stamina were gone. Still he battled on, but finally, almost mercifully, it was time to give in and let the ocean swallow him, because there was no point, no point at all. Green Man had bested him, and Warren Smith was right that he wasn’t strong enough, and the world would take whatever sad course it would take with him gone. If there was a God in his sunny white heaven, far from this cold ocean, Tom was ready to meet him and ask some tough questions.

  He stopped stroking and accepted the inevitable as a whitecap slugged him full in the face. Let it end here. He was ready for heaven. He swallowed a bitter mouthful of seawater and choked as he felt himself turning off, on some deep level, switching off, starting to sink. But even as he gave up and was ready to die, there was something else, something distant but there, yes, unmistakably there.

  Tom had been sinking, but an angry wave had grabbed hold of him and dragged him back up. Rising with it, he’d glimpsed the tip of a finger upraised as if to say fuck you to life itself. But no, it wasn’t a finger, it was a distant white conical lighthouse, sharp against the dark storm clouds.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Heaven had white walls and bright lights, and there was an angel in a bonnet who smiled at Tom and softly called him by his name. He looked up at her and felt her hand gently gripping his as he sank back into blissful sleep. When he returned to heaven, it was more crowded because there were police in the room, and one of them was asking him questions that he couldn’t find a voice to answer, and who had stolen his voice, and what were police doing in heaven? The bright lights hurt his eyes, so Tom sank away from them. The third time he woke it was dark outside and the police were still there, but so were several men in khakis and jackets, and then Grant strode into his hospital room and said, “Tom, Jesus, who the hell shot you, and everyone who doesn’t need to be here, I want you out now.”

  Tom was still very weak, but he was able to gasp out a little about what had happened on the ferry. Grant at first had trouble believing that Tom had escaped from Green Man and survived a long swim with two bullet wounds. But then he seemed to accept it and even admire it, and he asked Tom a bunch of excited
questions. A doctor intervened: “That’s enough. He needs some rest now.”

  When Tom woke again he was much stronger. Morning light filtered in through a curtained window. He was given hot soup, a doctor examined him, and then he was lifted into a chair that was wheeled swiftly down a hallway into a larger and more secure room where a camera crew was waiting to record his answers. Grant was there, but he wasn’t the one asking questions. A short and aggressive man with a pencil mustache introduced himself as Harris Carnes and did nearly all the talking.

  They had already spoken with Lise, so they knew what Tom had found out and how he’d uncovered the secret of Paul Sayers. Carnes was far more interested in Tom’s encounter with Green Man than he was in Tom’s meetings with Ellen Douglas and Willa Sayers. He kept probing Tom’s account of what had happened on the ferry from different angles, as if he didn’t quite believe the whole thing and might eventually find a way to get Tom to agree that he’d made it up.

  “So he paid some random kid to get you? That doesn’t sound like the master planner we’ve been chasing.”

  “All I know is that it worked. The kid brought me down to the parking deck and took off.”

  “And just when the kid vanished, Green Man punched you?”

  “He was behind me. I don’t know if it was a punch. I didn’t see it coming.”

  “After that, you never attempted to fight back?”

  “He had my gun pointed at my head.”

  “Did he admit to you that he was Green Man?”

  “He never used those exact words, but it was clear from our conversation and that he knew I had uncovered his past identity.”

  “You two had a nice little chat while he held the gun on you?” When Carnes was doubtful or displeased, he had a habit of stroking his thin mustache inward with his thumb and index finger, so that he seemed to be trying to erase the lower half of his face. “He acknowledged that you were right about Paul Sayers?”

  “Yes. He spoke his own real name before I did.”

  “And he also spoke your name? He knew things about you?”

  “He knew that I worked for the FBI. I could tell that he’d read up on me, probably online.”

  “That must have been very flattering to you. That Green Man would take the time to consider you his adversary.”

  Tom shrugged.

  “Did he mention Jim Brennan?”

  “He knew who Brennan was and what had happened with the investigation.”

  “And did he mention my name?” Carnes asked.

  “No.”

  Carnes pinched his upper lip in a way that looked painful and almost made his mustache vanish between his fingers. “And he had this chummy conversation with you while holding you at gunpoint on a crowded ferry, but no one saw it?”

  “We were on a deserted parking deck.”

  “He didn’t happen to mention anything about his next strike?”

  “No. He wasn’t there to try to explain himself or talk about his future plans. He wanted information from me. Specifically, he wanted to know who I had told about his Paul Sayers past identity and whether I knew where he now lived or anything about his family.”

  “Not his old family in Cape May but his new family, presumably in Michigan?”

  “Right. He started over.”

  “Why would he even mention this new family to you? He’s gone to great lengths to conceal everything about himself.”

  “I guess he felt comfortable doing it because he was about to kill me.”

  “But you got away? If he really wanted to kill you, why didn’t he just shoot you?”

  “He did shoot me. Twice. But I dove into the ocean.”

  “And then you swam five miles to shore while he drove your car off the ferry at Lewes and disappeared? We haven’t been able to find it.”

  “He said you wouldn’t.”

  “We also haven’t been able to find the kid he sent to get you. Or any witnesses to your conversation with him on the deck. In fact, we have no corroborating evidence that anything you say actually happened.”

  Tom looked back at him. “Do you think I shot myself and dove off the ferry?”

  Carnes’s tone became almost derisive. “So this man who’s destroyed six targets, most of them heavily guarded, caused billions of dollars of damage, and killed more than forty people had a gun pointed at your head and yet one-on-one you escaped?”

  “He could have killed me if he’d wanted to.”

  “You’d uncovered his past identity, and he knew you could use that to track him down. Why wouldn’t he want to kill you?”

  “He couldn’t execute me in cold blood.”

  “Green Man has moral scruples? You two bonded and he showed mercy? He didn’t have trouble blowing up a dam and killing twelve people.”

  “They’re two very different things.”

  Carnes snorted and then moved on to the fact that Tom had set up the meetings with Ellen Douglas and Willa Sayers after he had discovered Green Man’s past identity. “So you’d discovered the secret of who Green Man was but you didn’t report it to anyone? Instead you decided to follow up all by yourself?”

  “Yes, I had a theory, but it seemed a little far-fetched.”

  “So far-fetched that you didn’t make even one phone call or send one email to let a superior know the rather enormous thing you had found out?”

  “I wanted to be sure that I was right.”

  “You were sure enough to travel from Pittsburgh to Manhattan and from Manhattan to Cape May.”

  Grant tried to intercede. “He did just take two bullets and swim five miles in heavy seas to bring us some vital information. . . .”

  Carnes gave Grant a furious look that silenced him and then demanded: “Did it not occur to you that if you asked questions of people who might still be in touch with Green Man, one of them might notify him and he might try to stop you?”

  “I didn’t think he could possibly react so quickly. Ellen Douglas must have contacted him, or maybe it was her daughter.”

  “Or it could have been his mother.”

  “No, I don’t think Willa knows that her son is still alive.”

  “You don’t know what she really knows,” Carnes snapped out disdainfully. “You don’t know what any of them really know. They’re all denying that they contacted him and we haven’t found any connection yet. If one of them did reach out to him through some secret prearranged channel, we’ll suss it out. The point, Tom Smith, is that you put him on his guard. Once you found out about his past identity, we had a clear chance to catch him, and your bumbling cost us that chance. As soon as you found out what you did in Pittsburgh, it was your duty to report it.”

  “I was going to,” Tom said.

  Carnes leaned forward, furious. “After you talked to Ellen Douglas, when you were driving to Cape May, did you not have a phone call with Agent Grant?”

  Tom glanced at Grant and nodded.

  “And did he not ask you specifically what you had found out? Wasn’t that a direct request for information from a superior? Did he not also inform you explicitly during that phone call that you were no longer operational on this investigation? So when you had the meeting with Willa Sayers, you in fact had no authority?”

  Anger finally came to Tom’s rescue. He sat up in the chair and glared back at Carnes. “Look, if I hadn’t found out what I did, you wouldn’t know squat about Paul Sayers. I broke this case and I was right. And you can keep tearing into me if you want, but what should be important now is catching Green Man and how you use the information I’ve brought you. And I’m the only one who’s met him, so you should let me help instead of attacking me.”

  Tom’s outburst quieted the room. Grant whispered to Carnes, “Tom has had an uncanny feel for this guy right from when he first came on board.”

  Carnes scowled an
d asked reluctantly, “Okay. Let’s hear it. What would you do?”

  “Now that we know who Paul Sayers was, it should be relatively easy to figure out who he became,” Tom said. “We know exactly when Paul Sayers went missing, which will tell us when Green Man started his new life. He must’ve found a way to keep some of his fortune, so there will be a money trail leading from San Francisco to the Midwest. You’re looking for a millionaire, twenty-eight or twenty-nine years old, with a distinctive engineering skill set who suddenly appeared in Michigan. He would’ve moved to a small town and bought a house on a large lot—”

  “Why do you think that?” Carnes asked.

  “Because that’s what feels right to me. He had just shed a skin. He craved privacy. But there are some things he couldn’t change. If you get some family DNA from his mother or siblings in southern Jersey, you can search genetic databases and health records in Michigan. It’s the same way the CIA caught Bin Laden—using his family’s DNA to zero in on him in his hiding place.”

  “They could do that in Pakistan. I can’t search public health records in Michigan.”

  “He’s a major terrorist, and I’m sure the president is willing to let you bend a few rules to catch him. Jim Brennan wouldn’t have done it, but I think you might.”

  Carnes looked back at Tom, and his eager eyes gleamed. “What else?”

  “I don’t think you’ll have to start from scratch. The FBI was doing a lot of local legwork, so I’ll bet somebody somewhere has already talked to this guy. You should go back to the reports from local Michigan law enforcement about well-off families in small towns who own black vans.”

  “All twenty thousand of them?”

  “Now we have a much better idea of what Green Man looks like, right down to his hazel eyes. We know when he first appeared in his town, and how well off he is, that he has a young family, that he’s been traveling a lot lately, and even that he’s an artist with a talent for nature paintings. It should be enough to find him quickly.”