by Steven James
Ralph drained the last of his forty-four-ounce gas station cup of Mountain Dew. I had coffee with me from home, where he’d picked me up.
Guatemalan Antigua.
Never trust gas station java. You can’t even trust most coffee shops if you truly enjoy a cup of good coffee. I’d roasted these beans over the weekend. Normally I would have downed it in the car, but today I’d been waiting to savor it.
Now I tasted some.
Yes.
Excellent.
Although . . . thinking about it . . . I might have gotten by without grinding the beans quite so fine.
Special Agent Debra Guirret finished and, satisfied, waved us over to a door behind her desk. Ralph flipped down the numbered keypad beside it, punched in the entry code, and then we passed through the security checkpoint and started toward the elevator bay.
Debra had been working the front desk here at the headquarters for the Bureau’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, or NCAVC, for the last six months, ever since moving to the area from Baltimore after her divorce.
This building contained the offices of the FBI’s profilers and housed the archives for ViCAP, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, which was the world’s largest repository of investigative material on solved and unsolved homicides, sexual assaults, and missing-persons cases.
Needless to say, this was not a place whose location we wanted to announce—thus, the lawnmower distribution–center facade here in this isolated industrial district near Quantico.
Despite what might appear on the news, and despite the fumbling attempts of the NSA to keep whistleblowers’ revelations about their hacking attempts and covert surveillance programs under wraps, when the Bureau sets out to keep a secret, it does a surprisingly good job.
Admittedly, Director Wellington took a bit of pride in that—although we would see how things moved on from here since she recently announced that she would be leaving the Bureau in the fall to start her campaign for Virginia’s First District congressional seat.
Ralph and I walked side by side down the hall, my friend’s hulking frame filling the space beside me. Even though I was a little taller than he was, he probably had me by fifty pounds. Solid muscle. Before joining the Bureau, he had served a stint as an Army Ranger and before that he’d been a high school All-American wrestler. Not a guy you’d want to mess with.
Glad he was on our side.
We arrived at the elevators.
“So.” I pressed the Up button. “It’s what, five days, now?”
“Six and counting. She was way early with Tony—course, that was twelve years ago. So who knows? She’s all into this natural-childbirth deal: doesn’t want to be induced—any of that. And so we wait.” He sighed and rubbed his hand across his shaved head. “I’m getting too old for this.”
“You’re only forty-one, my friend.”
He grunted in vague acknowledgment. “Just wait till you hit forty.”
I still had three years to look forward to that milestone.
The elevator doors opened and we entered.
“You still thinking Shanelle?” I asked him.
“Brin’s going back and forth between that and Tryphena.”
“Tryphena?”
“It’s Greek. Means ‘delicate.’ Brin came across it the other day somewhere in the Bible, thought it was pretty.”
“It is. It’s nice.”
“It’s growing on me.”
As the NCAVC director, he had an office on the third floor. He punched the 3 button and the doors closed.
I had a workspace set up just down the hall from him, but my actual office was at the FBI Academy, where I taught environmental criminology and geospatial investigation. It wasn’t easy, but I tried my hardest not to undermine the material taught in the other classes, where the instructors covered the importance of searching for means, motive, and opportunity, none of which I was a big fan of.
Or the focus on DNA—which recent studies had shown could be faked with a little know-how and ingenuity, not to mention the existence of multiple genomes in the same person, which, as it turns out, is much more common than we used to think.
Or profiling—and that always promised a spirited conversation when I brought it up with my wife of two months, who was one of the Bureau’s top profilers.
The elevator doors slid apart, and we found our way to Ralph’s office at the end of the hall.
He had his own unique, personalized “filing system” and his desk contained countless stacks of papers strewn in an array of meticulously organized clutter. Ever since being appointed to this position a year ago, he’d shown an astonishing ability to find anything he needed when he needed it, a chore that might have taken someone else hours. “Added security,” he told me once with a hint of pride, “and it doesn’t cost the Bureau a dime.”
Added security.
I liked that.
Maybe I could use that line to explain the condition of my side of the bedroom closet at home.
A photo of Ralph’s family floated across his computer’s screen. Brineesha—his diminutive, pretty, no-nonsense African-American wife and Tony, their twelve-year-old video game–playing, skateboarder son. Ralph had tried to get him interested in wrestling, but Tony preferred soccer, a sport Ralph complained reminded him of France.
Ralph did not like France.
He shuffled through the sheaves of paper and retrieved the file on a missing-persons case the NCAVC was consulting on.
I had taken my rain jacket off and was situating myself in the chair facing his desk when I received a text from Jerome Cole.
Jerome was one of the agents responsible for driving the eighteen-wheelers that delivered the lawnmowers to the back of the building. His text: He wanted me to meet with him in the lobby.
When I looked up, I saw that Ralph also had his phone out. He glanced my direction, then turned his cell’s screen so I could see it.
“Mine says he wants to meet me in the lobby,” I said.
“And mine says the loading bay.”
“Wonder what’s up.”
He was already on his feet. “Let’s go find out.”
Maybe it wasn’t strange that Jerome wanted to speak to the NCAVC director in the loading bay, but it was odd that he would ask to meet with me in the lobby at the same time.
From here the stairs were closer than the elevators so we took them down to the ground floor.
Ralph gestured for me to follow him. “We’ll check the loading bay first. It’s on the way.”
When we arrived, five other people were already there, milling around.
An array of several dozen riding lawnmowers stood parked in neat lines throughout the expansive room.
A semi was backed up to the dock and, from what it looked like, someone had just unloaded a mower that sat behind the truck.
Two more people emerged from the hallway and entered the loading bay.
“What’s going on?” Ralph didn’t sound angry, but his gruff voice naturally rumbled off the walls. A couple of the agents mentioned texts they’d gotten. One still had her phone out.
As I walked toward the truck, I was able to glimpse the face of the driver in the side-view mirror. Dark glasses. A well-worn ball cap. Hard to tell through the rain, but it didn’t look like Jerome.
“Hey,” I called. “Hang on.”
No reply. The truck was idling.
He glanced my way, but only for a second. He didn’t step out of the vehicle, but instead reached out with his left hand to adjust the side-view mirror. When he did, I saw he was wearing a wedding band.
Jerome isn’t married.
Unholstering my weapon I started for the loading dock. “Step out of the cab. Hands where I can see them.”
He shifted into gear and started rolling forward.
“Clear the bay,” I shouted. “Now!”
Looks of confusion.
“Go!”
I leapt off the loading dock and started sprinting through the rain toward the truck, but I’d only made it seven or eight meters from the building when the explosion ripped through the loading bay behind me, the force of the blast sending me hurtling toward an SUV parked nearby.
Impact.
Then stars.
And then everything went black.
2
Ringing.
A ringing in my head.
Sharp. Distinct. Disorienting.
For a moment it seemed like it was a part of me that’d always been there, lurking just beneath my consciousness, and had only now been set free.
Yes, and it’ll always be there from now on. It’ll never stop.
Never stop.
Even though I could tell I was sprawled against the parking lot and lying on my stomach, it felt like my balance was off and I was about to fall over.
I felt rain splattering against the back of my neck. That, along with the noise in my head, a sore right rib cage, the brassy taste of blood from a cut lip, and the dizziness, all told me something that was obvious, but that also seemed necessary to remind myself of: I was breathing, existing, hurting.
Yes.
I was alive.
Somewhere beyond the sharp noise reverberating in my head, I heard a woman scream.
This is real. This is now. Go.
Trying to gather my bearings, I clambered to my feet, but still off balance, I almost collapsed and had to lean my hand against the side of the SUV to steady myself.
Get ahold of yourself, Pat. Do it.
Finally, the ringing began to subside, but my senses all seemed to fuse together and it was hard to sort out what I was seeing from what I was hearing: the cries for help; the muted gray air billowing ash and dust; the tart, ripe taste of some type of explosive—all became one and then splintered apart again.
Sight. Sound. Taste.
Presence.
I scanned the parking lot. The semi was gone. With cloud cover this thick, there was no way our defense satellites would have caught footage of it leaving and—
The woman screamed again. Louder this time.
I faced the building.
The gaping hole torn through it was spewing out dust and smoke like a great mouth exhaling stained air into the day.
Quickly, I scrambled back onto the loading bay where my friends and coworkers were.
Not far from me, Ralph was lying on his back, unmoving on the concrete. I rushed toward him through the maze of damaged lawnmowers, ceiling beams, and rubble, then stooped and touched his shoulder. “Ralph, you okay?”
He didn’t stir.
Only as I knelt beside him did I feel the sharp slivers of pain on my right side along my rib cage, where there’d been a vague ache since I first came to.
It wasn’t vague anymore. I looked down. Four jagged shards of metal were sticking through my body armor into my side, the largest protruding maybe five or six centimeters, the smallest, two or three.
It wasn’t possible to determine how deeply embedded into my side the pieces were, but when I tried to pry one loose, I found that it was pretty firmly lodged in there.
Pulling my vest off would have ripped them out. At least right now the bleeding was controlled and I didn’t anticipate that any of the wounds were life-threatening.
Okay. Deal with that later.
“Ralph?”
Nothing.
A tremor of fear caught hold of me.
He had to be alright.
He is.
He’s okay.
I felt for a pulse.
It took me a moment to find it, but I did.
Good.
Okay, good.
First-aid training kicked in: check airway, breathing, circulation, and look for blood loss.
None visible.
I repositioned his head to make sure his airway was clear.
When he didn’t awaken I shook him gently, trying to revive him. “Ralph, you with me here?”
He still didn’t move and I felt a deepening sense of uneasiness.
Come on, man.
Come—
I tried reviving him once more and this time he groaned, coughed roughly, and opened his eyes.
“You alright?” I asked concernedly.
“Yeah,” he muttered, then rubbed one giant paw against his forehead. His gaze found my blood-soaked shirt. “You?”
“I’m okay.”
He indicated toward the metal protruding from my side. “You sure?”
“Yes.”
There’s no such thing as a “bulletproof” vest. Though body armor is designed to dull the impact of most center-mass shots from the front or back, objects can penetrate them on the sides where the vests Velcro shut. I shuddered to think of what that shrapnel would have done if I hadn’t been wearing this thing.
Though I tried telling Ralph to rest for a minute, he would have none of that and started getting up.
In the end, I helped him to his feet and we turned our attention toward the rest of the loading bay.
Half the ceiling was gone.
Rain fell around us, creating a thick residue of ash that was turning muddy around our feet.
Despite the rain, the tinge of the explosion still lingered in the air, but there was another smell lurking beneath the acidic residue of whatever explosive had been used. I recognized it from arson cases I’d worked.
Flesh.
Burnt flesh.
And then I saw why.
An arm, scorched and blackened and ripped off at the elbow, lay about four meters in front of me on the concrete.
But that wasn’t the only body part I saw.
It looked like a war zone, like the footage you see in the aftermath of suicide bombings in the Middle East—in those rare cases when the news coverage hasn’t been scrupulously edited and tidied up, and the footage actually shows what happened.
Amid splashes of blood, shredded body parts lay scattered across the floor and on the riding lawnmowers that were tipped over and blackened from the blast. Based on the burn patterns on the concrete and the positioning of the debris and the wreckage, the explosion had apparently come from the lawnmower that’d been left behind by the semi driver.
I felt a tight grip of grief and anger.
I’ve been with the Bureau for just over ten years and before that I worked as a cop and homicide detective. You’d think that after all these years of investigating homicides and consulting on some of the most shocking crimes in the country, I’d be able to look at scenes like this with emotional distance or detachment.
But that’s never happened. I always think of the pain, the loss, the finality of it all.
The woman who’d been screaming was silent now and was staring vacantly at the rubble, muttering to herself. She was an analyst named Pamela Neumann and didn’t appear to be seriously injured but was obviously in shock.
She’d drawn her purse close to her and was clutching it like it was some sort of anchor back to the normal world, before any of this happened.
A weak cry came from the other side of the loading bay: “Help.”
Stu Ritterman, one of our ViCAP techs, sat leaning against the wall in a part of the building that lay just out of the rain. Since several riding mowers were in the way, I could only see him from the waist up.
“Go.” Ralph had his phone out and was calling dispatch.
“Get a BOLO out on the semi.” As I hurried toward Stu I relayed the license plate number to Ralph and confirmed that he had an accur
ate description of the truck.
When I was halfway to Stu I realized why his cries were so feeble.
Both of his legs were gone: one blown off just below the knee, the other halfway up his thigh. His femur bone protruded gruesomely from the meaty stump where his leg had been. Beneath him, a widening pool of fresh blood was spreading across the concrete.
He was trying, but failing, to put enough pressure on the stump to stop the arterial bleeding.
I whipped off my belt and encircled his thigh with it; then I slipped him my wallet to bite into. “This is going to hurt,” I said.
As I cranked on the tourniquet I thought Stu might pass out from the pain, but somehow he managed to stay conscious.
It probably would have made it a lot easier on him if he’d blacked out.
It’s too late. He’s lost too much blood.
No!
You can save him. You can.
The bleeding finally slowed, then stopped. After removing his belt from his waist, I started on a tourniquet for his other leg.
A heavy scraping sound behind me caught my attention. I glanced back in time to see Ralph single-handedly heave aside a huge ceiling beam that had fallen onto Wendy Foster and was pinning her shoulder to the ground.
I couldn’t tell if she was alive or not.
Focusing my attention on Stu again, I tightened the second tourniquet, but realized that besides stopping the bleeding, there wasn’t really anything I could do for him.
The truth hit me.
Harsh and cold and real: I was not going to be able to save this man.
He let the wallet drop from his mouth.
Based on the amount of blood he’d already lost, I anticipated that he was only going to be able to survive for another couple of minutes.
What do you say to someone who’s dying? Do you ask him if he’s made peace with God? Do you try to comfort him? Lie, and tell him he’s going to be alright?
What’s more important: hope or truth?
Sirens in the distance.