Pray for the Innocent

by Alan Orloff

  He focused his attention a hundred yards away at the entrance to the Metro. Hemingway was long gone, so if a car had been following them, it would be long gone, too. And if, by chance, someone had gotten out to follow King onto the subway, they’d probably already be gone, too.

  Just to be safe, King took his time walking back toward the station, then spent ten minutes waiting on a bus stop bench, staring at the same page of a Pennysaver.

  When he was sure the coast was clear, he tossed the freebie rag aside and headed for the station, squeezing between a row of newspaper boxes and a guy playing a clarinet next to a hat with a few dollar bills poking out of it. Most of the people were entering the station, so he rode the wave until he reached the farecard plaza. He stuffed a ten-dollar bill into the machine and waited for a card to spit out.

  Down the escalator, onto the platform. Before boarding, King tossed his Virginia Tech cap into the trash and removed his shirt. He turned it inside out to hide the heavy metal design and put it back on. No sense making it easy for anyone who might still be following him.

  With a quick glance around, he hopped into a waiting Metro car. Because Vienna was the terminus of the Orange line, there was almost always a train in the station, loading up, and today was no exception. King walked all the way to the back of the car so he’d be able to see everyone else who boarded.

  King slid into the rear seat and shifted position a few times until he got comfortable. Which wasn’t easy when you had a knife stuffed in your pants pocket.

  The train took off and rode above ground, high along the median strip of Interstate 66, through Vienna and Falls Church. Mesmerized, King watched the highway traffic ebb and flow, like a swarm of angry insects, gathering, regrouping, slowing, and speeding.

  The transportation artery—the combination of the highway and subway, connecting Fairfax County with DC—cut through myriad neighborhoods, sheltering residents from the unending traffic noise by ivy-covered sound barriers, ten- and twenty-foot-high ugly concrete walls. Off in the distance, towering cranes loomed next to half-constructed high-rise buildings. Development was everywhere you looked, and King couldn’t remember a time when it hadn’t been that way.

  The Metro car rattled and squeaked, rumbled and screeched as it negotiated the curves on the track. None of the passengers seemed to mind or even notice. They were too engrossed with their smartphones and e-readers. Listening to their iPods or fiddling with their iPads. The days when most riders read a carefully folded newspaper were far behind.

  At each stop, a two-chime ding-dong preceded the doors opening, then ten or twenty seconds later, the doors closed following a four-chime ding-dong-ding-dong.

  After the East Falls Church station, the train dove underground for the remainder of the trip into town, reminding King of the movie Journey to the Center of the Earth.

  At the Ballston stop, a twentysomething girl got on, clutching a skateboard. She had a stripe of pitch-black hair down the middle of her head, Mohawk-style. Half a dozen piercings decorated her face. King was immediately reminded of Amanda, when she came home from BU for Thanksgiving. She was a sophomore, and she’d been struggling with her classes, increasingly unsure about her major. She’d come bursting through the door, hair dyed a neon green, eight earrings in one ear.

  King hadn’t handled it well. After a ten-minute shouting match, Amanda had stormed out, spending the entire break bouncing between a couple of friends’ houses. He’d gone to a restaurant, alone, on Thanksgiving and had a cheeseburger.

  Kids and their rebellion. Luckily, Amanda had gotten herself back on track the following semester, but that episode had been just another one of the many paybacks Amanda had delivered to him as she processed her mother’s death.

  Although she’d said she didn’t blame him anymore, King wasn’t 100 percent positive. He prayed he’d get the chance to ask her again if she really meant it.

  He leaned back in his seat and watched the station names roll past. People got on and got off, smiled at each other, played with their electronics. Some fell asleep. Others stared blankly out the windows at the dark walls.

  But King hardly gave any of it a second thought. All he could focus on was Amanda.

  And on getting to the rendezvous spot alone. King was willing to trade himself for Amanda, straight up, no questions asked. But he got the feeling Dragunov had something else in mind. What it was, King didn’t have a clue; however, he knew relying on someone as unstable as Dragunov was a huge mistake. King figured he had the best chance of anyone to reason with Dragunov—after all, he had created the man. On some level, he was Dragunov. It might be a very far removed level, but still . . .

  King knew the negotiation with Dragunov would be anything but easy, and that something was bound to go wrong. If he were the only casualty, he’d call it a qualified success. He felt the hard lump of steel in his pocket. Of course, if he got close enough to Dragunov—and lucky enough—Dragunov might be the only fatality in King’s folly.

  King examined the map of the subway system on the wall. He needed to change to the Blue line, but instead of taking it to the Smithsonian stop, he would get off at Federal Triangle. Although the Smithsonian stop would be closer to his destination, they might have already closed it for security reasons, in anticipation of the huge crush of people coming to see the fireworks.

  The Metro swooshed into Metro Center, and King disembarked, immediately getting swept up in the stream of humanity. King first swung left, dodging confused tourists, then hooked a right up a flight of stairs. He feinted as if he were heading for the exits, then ducked left behind an exit fare kiosk. Doubling back along the upper platform, he cut left and rode the down escalator—stand on the right, pass on the left—toward the Red line transfer platform. He paused for a moment to catch his breath behind a pylon listing all the stations on the Red line.

  No one seemed to be following him. Of course, in the teeming throngs it would have been just as difficult to spot a follower as it would be to keep a target in sight. Sometimes paranoia was a life-preserving quality. Satisfied he was alone, King walked quickly through the underground station to the platform where he could catch the next Blue line train headed to Largo.

  Blinking lights on the platform edge signaled the train’s approach, followed by a whoosh of air being pushed through the tunnel. The train screeched to a halt, and King stepped aboard, along with a hundred other people, jostling and maneuvering for position. For what, he didn’t know. He claimed a spot by the door and held on to a metal pole for the one-stop trip.

  A few minutes later, the train screeched to a halt, and the doors flew open. King burst out, again getting swallowed in a sea of people bound for the exits, most headed for the Mall to celebrate the country’s birthday.

  King doubted any of them were going to switch places with a hostage, ready to give up their own life in exchange for that of a loved one.

  Thank God for that.

  King spilled out from the Federal Triangle Metro station right into Woodrow Wilson Plaza, a courtyard outside of the Ronald Reagan Building. He turned left, past a large abstract metal sculpture, and walked down a brick cobblestone driveway, now closed to traffic, through two archways, moving neither too fast nor too slow. Just another lost DC sightseer making his way around the city.

  He emerged from the driveway onto Constitution Avenue, smack in the middle of the block. Way off to the right, the Washington Monument rose majestically into the sky, and every time King saw it, he was reminded why he’d written his thrillers. Not to point out America’s flaws, but to highlight her greatness. Only by putting the country’s ideals in jeopardy—fictionally speaking, of course—could he portray how much they really meant to people. To readers, to fans, to himself.

  That’s why he’d written thrillers in the first place. The violence and destruction he glamorized, however—that festering cancer he’d woken up to later—was what had made him stop churning out the thrills.

  As if to illustrate his though
ts, King walked past a row of large concrete planters placed strategically in front of the EPA building. King didn’t know who these planters were fooling—they hadn’t been erected for their contribution to the floral landscape. No, these immovable cylinders of concrete functioned as security bollards to prevent terrorists from driving truck bombs into the government buildings.

  Of course, deep down, King knew the books he wrote had little influence on the behaviors of people, especially those already bent on destruction. Terrorists were around before his thrillers, and they’d be around long after he’d penned his last story. But from a personal, moral standpoint, he wanted to be clear. He now abhorred the violence he once wrote about in such loving detail.

  He walked to the end of the block and waited for the light to change so he could cross Constitution. He loved the Mall, ringed with museums and art galleries and book-ended by the Capitol and the Washington Monument, with the Lincoln Memorial completing the immense rectangle farther east. One of the special things about living in the area was behaving like a tourist and coming into town to explore the various sights.

  And like most parents, he’d seized every opportunity to bring Amanda down there to expose her to the country’s history and culture. Whether she wanted to come or not.

  They’d spent many a summer day wandering around the Mall.

  King slowed his pace, pretending to check out a couple of the food and souvenir trucks that lined the street in front of the Museum of American History. T-shirts fluttered in the breeze, and the smell of hot dogs—and who knew what else—tickled his nose. He checked the area around him, trying to spot anyone who seemed to be looking in his direction, but there were too many people to tell if someone was targeting him.

  He didn’t think his paranoia was misplaced, not after what had transpired.

  He considered taking a shortcut through the museum, slipping in and out of the exhibit halls to confound any potential followers, but he had wild thoughts that maybe, somehow, Locraft had alerted every security guard within a five-mile radius to be on the lookout. Instead, he bought a hot dog at a Sabrett food cart and casually continued his stroll toward the Mall.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  “Still moving south toward the Mall,” one of Locraft’s techs called out as the map on the video wall shifted slightly.

  Locraft inched forward until he reached the edge of his seat. “Feed in his latest coordinates and give me PAM’s projections.” They’d fed in the data retrieved from Amanda’s house, most notably the pictures from a childhood photo album, and their list of thirty possible locations had shrunk to ten much stronger possibilities. With each step King took, the numerical probabilities of their mathematical model changed, but in general, the stronger possibilities kept getting stronger, and the marginal locations became less likely.

  A moment later, the map reduced in size and shifted right, while an inset appeared on the left of the wall with the top five potential locations ranked in order.

  Carousel on the Mall: 26%

  Museum of Natural History: 18%

  Museum of American History: 14%

  The Air and Space Museum: 9%

  US Capitol: 7%

  “Positions?” Locraft barked out.

  The tech responded without hesitation. “Tac teams one, three, and five stationed around the carousel, as you directed. Teams two and four are at the two museums on Constitution, and team six is covering the Air and Space.”

  “Any sign of Dragunov?”

  “Negative.”

  “Keep looking.”

  “Yes, sir. But with the size of the crowd, I don’t think we’ll be able to get a visual.”

  Locraft cursed under his breath. Dragunov had to pick today, of all days, to have a hostage exchange on the Mall. Of course, that’s exactly why he did pick that time and place. To make their job near-fucking-impossible. “Okay. We’ll shift the teams around as things change. Reiterate that we’re in Beige Mode. We don’t want to take any chance of spooking Dragunov.”

  “Yes, sir.” The tech picked up his phone and got busy.

  Because of King’s location, direction, and speed, Locraft knew their hot area was shrinking—there was only so much ground they had to cover before they were up against the four o’clock deadline. As long as King remained on foot, anyway.

  New numbers appeared on the video wall, and Locraft’s excitement level grew. Now the probability that the carousel was their location had surpassed 33 percent. He’d commissioned PAM, but the design, development, and all the nitty-gritty details had been handled by his interdisciplinary team. He knew what she was supposed to do, yet he was utterly amazed how she could deduce outcomes based on both relevant and seemingly irrelevant information.

  For instance, King was within spitting distance of the two older Smithsonian museums, yet PAM had them ranked two and three. Obviously, she “knew” more than he—and twenty analysts—did. And Locraft wasn’t complaining in the least.

  He was already thinking about rolling PAM out to more services and agencies, imagining all the accolades that would come his way to celebrate the resounding success. Hopefully, the kudos would be loud enough to lessen the fallout from the failure of Gosberg’s memory project.

  Locraft called Slattery, who was somewhere on the Mall, near the carousel. “Will, we’re now feeding you live data from PAM.”

  “Roger.” There was a pause. “Okay, I see it. I’m with tac team one. Colonel, I think it’s best if I coordinate things on the ground here. You relay orders to me, and I’ll filter them through my eyes and ears and pass things along to the tac teams. That way, I can respond immediately to changing conditions. Dragunov is a fast mover, and the large crowd size will make instant action critical.”

  Locraft chewed on that. In the fog of war, it was essential to have someone with a level head right in the middle of the action. And Slattery was the only one there with intimate knowledge of Dragunov. “Very well. Just remember that if there’s an assault, the team leaders have tactical command. You relay the order to go, then step out of the way and let them carry out those orders how they see fit.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And for God’s sake, watch out for the civilians,” Locraft added. “Has anyone heard from Gosberg?”

  “Negative.”

  “He’s not with King?”

  “Not that we know of. For now, assume they’re working together. Remember, we’re not entirely sure of their motives,” Slattery said. “Okay. I’m moving into position. Keep me posted.”

  Locraft hung up on Slattery. Expect the best, but plan for the worst. He’d been through hundreds of delicate, dangerous operations, commanded a majority of them. But each one seemed to have its own idiosyncrasies. Usually, he was confident in his ability to achieve a positive outcome. The results were not always perfect—casualties were often unavoidable—but they were usually acceptable.

  Now, he had his doubts. Something didn’t seem right.

  #

  King continued his stroll down Constitution, then turned right on Twelfth Street, cutting between the two museums. There was more foot traffic here, and King swatted at an imaginary bee, spinning around quickly, trying to get a glimpse of any pursuers.

  Nobody in a dark suit.

  King took a few more bites of his hot dog, then tossed the remainder into a trash can. With slightly more than thirty minutes before four o’clock, he could afford to be cautious. He resumed his trek, but after crossing Madison Drive, he couldn’t take the most direct route to the carousel because huge blocks of the Mall had been cordoned off for security reasons. To get to those areas, people had to pass through a security checkpoint.

  But the carousel wasn’t King’s final stop, because it wasn’t Amanda’s favorite place in DC. He’d misinformed Hemingway because he didn’t know whose side he was on. King’s plan was to swing by the carousel, stay hidden in the crowds, and see what developed. If Locraft’s goons were there, then he would assume Hemingway was working f
or Locraft, and King would take his chances confronting Dragunov by himself. If Hemingway remained alone, King figured he would trust him—he’d welcome help freeing Amanda.

  King could have told Hemingway any of a dozen plausible spots: the Natural History Museum, the Air and Space Museum, the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, whatever. He’d picked the carousel for two reasons. First, most kids would have picked it as their favorite, so it was an easy sell. Second, King needed to be able to get from Amanda’s “bogus” favorite place to her real favorite place in a short time frame.

  King slowed and gazed across the expanse of the Mall. It was covered with people, standing, playing, walking, camped out on picnic blankets. Although still afternoon, people came down and made a day of it as they waited for the fireworks display to kick off just after dark fall.

  He directed his attention to the carousel. The top rose like a circus tent, with alternating blue and yellow triangle patches forming the “big top.” Riders sat on brightly painted horses that went up and down, while less adventurous riders sat on stationary horses. Although he couldn’t hear the music from this distance, he knew it existed, and if he remembered correctly, it was the same tired organ music played at every carousel since the beginning of time.

  To King, it looked like it would be right at home in any kiddie amusement park in the country—a mundane carousel elevated by one thing only: its location on the Mall, in the shadow of some of the world’s most recognizable buildings and monuments. King wondered how many tourists’ children, when asked what their favorite thing on the visit to Washington had been, answered the carousel, much to their parents’ chagrin.

  A generic refreshment stand stood off to one side, and King could almost taste the stale popcorn. It had been part of their ritual. He’d buy a container, Amanda would eat three pieces and start spitting it out, and they’d spend the next five minutes feeding the pigeons. They’d been the fattest pigeons he’d ever seen.