The Architect of Revenge: A September 11th Novel

by T. Ainsworth

  As Morgan rode away, Brosinski forced the Laredo into the traffic and chased his fleeting target down side streets. He finally saw Morgan shouldering his bike up some stairs and opening a door.

  “Too easy!” A conceited grin waxed. “I’ll check out your place mañana when you ain’t there.” There was no need to tell Bonwitt yet. He wanted the checks to keep coming, but he needed the proof just in case.

  Brosinski waited in the oppressive June air. When he was confident Morgan wasn’t home, he grabbed a grocery bag filled with newspaper balls and crowned with carrot tops and a stale loaf of French bread. After puffing up the stairs, he knocked on the door.

  No answer.

  He tapped again. “Hey, sugar…what gives?” He said to the wood. “Open up, baby. Brought your groceries…hope you saved some sweets for me.”

  He slipped on latex gloves. The lock was easy to pick.

  The dark room was stuffy. His flashlight searched the seemingly empty space.

  “Don’t you fuckin’ live here?”

  There were no papers or books. A cot was wedged in a corner behind a bench that was stacked with weights. There was a table with two lamps. The bicycle rested against a wall.

  “Where your fuckin’ clothes?”

  The closet was empty.

  The kitchen cabinets, refrigerator, and microwave looked like they had never been used. There was no garbage of any kind. Brosinski walked to the bathroom.

  The bathtub didn’t even have a shower curtain.

  “I ain’t believing this shit,” he said and removed an ultraviolet lamp from his pocket. The special light would allow him to scour for Morgan’s prints or any DNA evidence.

  “Let’s see how clean this place is, you jerk.”

  There were no fingerprints on the bathroom mirror or fixtures. He kept looking. The lamp scanned the shower walls and tub.

  “Didn’t you ever yank the chicken?”

  There wasn’t a trace of sperm.

  He looked around base of the toilet. “Well, well, well…”

  Several black hairs were curled on the tile. Brosinski lifted them with tweezers into a small bottle.

  “These might be useful…”

  He illuminated the cot then looked underneath.

  “Bingo.”

  Several more hairs went into a second bottle and Brosinski stopped to listen to the nervous quiet. He knew what might happen if Morgan caught him inside. The PI wouldn’t want to pull his gun, so he left. There was nothing more to find.

  Brosinski returned to his office and checked his computer. All morning long, GPS messages had plotted a path that ended in northern Wisconsin.

  “What the hell are you doing up there?”

  The detective entered the final coordinates—a small town west of Green Bay.

  “Enough of this bullshit!”

  After driving ninety miles an hour, he parked in the gravel lot of a humble one-story motel. He strode to the front desk and flashed his badge.

  “Nobody by the name Morgan staying here,” said the owner’s wife. “I’m afraid we don’t get many expensive cars like BMWs.” She shook her head.

  “Nothing else you remember, ma’am?” Brosinski said, proud of his professional performance, but he wasn’t about to drive his weary ass back with just that one answer. The GPS had signaled from this spot. “Maybe a BMW stopped here so the driver could use your bathroom?”

  “Now that you mention it, UPS did leave a small box here at lunchtime. The address was right, but it was sent to the name BMW Spare Parts.”

  “Huh?”

  “Didn’t know what to do,” she admitted, “so a bit ago my husband drove it to one of those drop boxes after writing on it: Return to the sender.”

  “Which was where?” Brosinski asked, his skin flushing with anger.

  “Chicago. To a Jane—”

  “Aw, fuck you, Morgan!” he shouted.

  The woman jumped back to avoid his spit.

  “Janie, you are relentless,” Morgan said while he drove the BMW away from Chicago.

  Since the beginning, even at her conniving worst, she meant well. The introduction to Caroline was proof of that. However, Janie’s persistent meddling had become a tedious distraction. Nonethe-less, this final episode pleased Morgan. From the onset, ascertaining that the Laredo’s appearances were not incidental made the entire contest with its driver a mismatch. Testing the skills Tony taught him, Morgan played aloof until his affairs in the city were concluded, and the time came for him to move on.

  The white lines became unbroken as the BMW accelerated toward Morgan’s last journey to the Southwest. He glanced in the rearview mirror, his dispassionate face cleansed of emotion. As he viewed the receding skyline, nothing there mattered—all that he had once been died with Caroline that September morning.

  “Cay, I love you,” he said, but would give up no more tears. The time for sentimentality was gone.

  His new life would begin in the desert—the final test—one that would require absolute discipline. Tony had argued with him weeks before, insisting on providing support, but Morgan resolutely said no. He wasn’t concerned, reassuring his mentor that the small locked coolers containing the necessary stores of water and food he’d hide in the hellish landscape would not be disturbed by any two or four-legged animals. All Morgan asked was that Tony drop him off at the starting place—the below-sea-level Badwater Salts Pools—and meet him at his BMW sixty hours and one hundred thirty-six miles later at the Mount Whitney Portal.

  Tony still protested.

  “I’m just going for a run in Death Valley,” said Morgan.

  “In July,” Tony reminded him.

  FOURTEEN

  As the desert sun climbed behind him he watched his shadow emerge from the soft glow. In the gentle rays, they ran together, savoring the final traces of the delicious night air. With only momentary breaks for the last twenty-six hours, his muscles long ago ceased begging for pity. Morgan no longer knew if his legs existed.

  He looked at his watch.

  “Good pace,” he said.

  He found his next container a dozen yards off the highway. The coyotes had stayed away from that one too. His knife cut the seal on the cooler. He refilled his water pack with more electrolyte solution, changed his socks, and put on a UV-protective shirt. He drank a premade slur he had concocted of salty rice and sesame seeds mixed with tea and honey. Warm and pasty, his stomach quickly protested.

  “So much for my Badwater libation,” he grunted.

  He looked around while pulling out his penis to pee.

  “As if anybody’s watching,” he said.

  Cola-colored urine splashed on the caked ground. Absorbing the liquid even before the final drops fell, only a shapeless brown smudge remained.

  He started running again.

  You can’t stop…

  The trite words dissipated as swiftly as they came.

  The hills became brushed in orange. His silhouette slowly shrank until he was again alone on the carpet of heat. Hot became hotter until his perception of temperature was gone.

  Shimmering walls of air engulfed him as the world coned tight to become a tunnel. Hypnotized, a monochrome orb ahead pulled him forward.

  The heat will go away again…tonight, he was trying to think, with the altitude…

  In the suffocating brilliance, he measured his progress in single footsteps. For a time he ran backward to look at the death that had missed him, but could find no rationale to acknowledge it again. He turned around.

  By nightfall, miles ahead, the level road would ascend to Townes Pass in the distant hills, and he would cool off. There he would stop and pray. He couldn’t remember how many times his watch reminded him. He couldn’t remember anything.

  Beneath the gibbous moon, he descended from the night air of the five-thousand-foot pass. In the desert glow he saw Mount Whitney touching a solitary flowering cloud. By dawn, he was well over halfway when the furnace returned for the final time.
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  His toes felt on fire, but he ignored the pain and kept his feet moving. He was back in the tunnel, where nothing mattered except survival. The end would come, eventually.

  “Wes…”

  The whisper had no volume. The seductive ripple drifted past like a chord of music plucked from its score. The heat was playing tricks on the brain.

  “Wes…”

  The music in his head receded again.

  A speck in the pale sky carved lazy circles before vanishing in the sun.

  “Morgan…” he spoke aloud, “it’s a bird.”

  “Wes!”

  Startled, he looked to his side. Blue wings flapped in time with his stride.

  “Caroline…” Morgan spoke to the hallucination. “Why are you flying?”

  The ethereal bird said, “Because I can, Wes…”

  She flew away.

  Hours passed.

  Soaring even higher, the bird reappeared near the twin mountain peaks miles ahead.

  “Wes…” she called, “watch!”

  At its apogee, the bird pitched over and plunged toward the ground.

  “Caroline! Don’t!” He screamed at the dive-bombing bird. “Stop!”

  Morgan halted to watch. With no comfort from the stifling oven, the only breeze in the claustrophobic sea of heat came from his breath.

  As evening descended, iridescent sunlight reflected on the scorched pavement. Morgan had ignored the silvery mirages for two days, but as the sun sank, each morphed into a brilliant crimson puddle with a splatter of blue. He had never seen colors so vivid. Color was everywhere—brown and tan, gold and orange, and the black ribbon that stretched forever ahead under his feet. But this beautiful crimson was the color of—blood. Before this day Morgan had never appreciated its magnificence. With the dying sun, each puddle became scarlet and the blue became darker. Soon the puddles turned black at the edges, and the blue changed from indigo to violet.

  At twilight the last puddle disappeared.

  FIFTEEN

  Morgan’s ordeal ended at the campground below the Whitney Portal. Tony reclined in a chaise lounge by the tent and toasted his student’s arrival with a beer.

  “Not bad! An hour earlier than you predicted,” he said, looking at his watch. “You didn’t hitch a ride the last couple miles?”

  Morgan didn’t smile and barely shook his head.

  “No.”

  A strong handshake followed, then Tony handed him a towel and a bottle of soap. “Go take a cold shower. Check for black toe.”

  Burns on the feet were an ever-present risk running long distances on superheated blacktop. Despite alternating pairs of shoes, all of Morgan’s soles had melted a little. But he knew his feet hadn’t suffered too badly.

  When he returned, Tony asked if he was hungry.

  “Not really,” he said, but Tony had already warmed a meal over a small gas cook-top.

  “Eat, Wes,” he said, handing Morgan a plate of fish, potatoes, and corn. “You need calories and a serious recharge of your batteries.”

  Morgan did as he was told, stretching out on a second chaise lounge with his feet and legs exposed to the cooling air. While Morgan ate and gulped iced tea, Tony opened another beer.

  After letting the silence command the space for a while, Tony smiled.

  “I’m only going to ask you one question…as a final exam thing,” Tony said while Morgan chewed. “How do you feel?”

  As he finished his food, Morgan reflected to the beginning, back to a person who no longer existed, and realized now he didn’t feel much at all. He felt hollow, stripped of any capacity for worry, pleasure—anything that made a person normal. His inside was dead—but his body was alive and ready to kill.

  “Fine,” Morgan said without forethought. This time, he meant it.

  Tony stared at his sunburned student.

  “Then, my friend…our time together is done,” he said.

  At dawn the two men silently folded the tent. Before they placed it in the BMW’s trunk, Morgan lifted the carpet over the spare tire and handed Tony a bulging envelope.

  “No charge, man,” said Tony, giving it back. “This last part’s been on me.”

  “No,” said Morgan. “You take this.” He crammed the envelope in Tony’s pocket. “That was the deal. Too many greenbacks won’t do me any good where I’m going.”

  “I don’t suppose I can persuade you…” began Tony.

  “No,” replied Morgan.

  Both men knew this would be the last time they met.

  “Don’t expect them to canonize you,” Tony said with a smile.

  “Not my intention,” said Morgan.

  The men shook hands a final time.

  “Then may your arrow,” Tony said, “fly straight and true.”

  After a sound night’s sleep, Morgan started east. His brain had recovered from the heat and he could think again. The CD player came alive. It would be that way for many hours. When he stopped for gas the first time, he threw away all his papers and unnecessary clothes and shoes. At the next fill-up, his smashed iPod and destroyed laptop hard drive went into an oily bin. In central Texas his final language CD met the same fate, and the shards of his training were gone. The only things remaining in his life were what he had compressed into his brain, his physical training, and the purified calm earned in the desert. His thoughts focused on his next destination—the Port of Houston Turning Basin.

  A boat tour the year before had allowed him to mentally catalogue the freighter terminal configurations, dock activity, and the pattern of the crews and shore personnel as they made their way in and out of the wharfs. The time spent driving the roads flanking the filthy water allowed him to determine the best locations to study the inbound freighter traffic. The big ships came from all over the planet, and their crews came from everywhere too. Finding the right ship would take only patience.

  Prepaying in cash, Morgan checked into a nearby campground and pitched his tent. He attached Houston Astros stickers to the BMW’s front and rear bumpers and exchanged his front license plate with the same logo. Wearing an Astros baseball cap, he drove to a neighborhood and parked, spreading an Astros sunshield across the windshield. A passerby might notice the Illinois plate but would quickly relish that fans lived everywhere and ignore the car and its driver.

  Walking with an Astros bag that held water and a pair of small binoculars, Morgan paused on a bridge overpass to read an incoming ship’s name and home port. He strolled several blocks until another ship appeared then walked to a different overpass to look. In the late evening, soaked from the dense humidity, he drove back to the campground to rest. For several days, he repeated the process, each time leaving the BMW on a different street.

  Morgan got his reward when he heard a freighter crew shouting over the engine noise. He looked at the house flag announcing her country of registry and the pennants on the dressing lines boasting of her journeys. The courtesy Stars and Stripes fluttered, respecting the host country as he studied the stern and surveyed the crew.

  The Shindu Sagar would do just fine.

  He watched where the ship berthed.

  Morgan drove to a T-shirt shop and had the ship’s name silkscreened on a green shirt with large white letters, then had the BMW washed and the inside thoroughly detailed. He asked the young attendant to spread a fresh plastic tarp over the driver’s seat and carpet, then handed him a nice tip.

  “Selling it?” asked the teenager with curious jealousy.

  “Yeah,” Morgan replied, “want it looking like new when I trade it in.”

  The kid nodded.

  “Hey, do me a favor,” Morgan said to him. “Don’t want to leave my sweaty fingerprints on the handle. Shut the door for me, will you?”

  Morgan put on driving gloves and drove off.

  With the BMW facing the campground office, he polished the windshield with an auto-glass compound until the sun dazzled off the luster. The manager saw the reflection and pumped his fist in approval, no
t understanding its true purpose of blinding a camera that soon would take Morgan’s picture.

  Morgan returned the man’s enthusiasm with a big wave.

  With the trunk raised so the manager couldn’t watch, Morgan swapped his rear license plate with one he’d pilfered before leaving Chicago, then used a wire cutter to destroy his Illinois plates. Some of those metal pieces as well as the tool, his tent, binoculars, auto-glass cleaner and the Astros bag—whatever traces of his former self that remained—ended in the Dumpster on his way to the camp shower.

  When he emerged, he wore aviator sunglasses, a different baseball cap, and fresh clothes. The towel and any remaining clothes joined the rest of the trash.

  He drove to the long-term parking lot at Bush International Airport. Pausing just before he pulled up to the security gate, he tipped his head down so the cap’s beak covered most of his face, lowered the window, and pulled the ticket from the automatic dispenser.

  Driving around the lot, he carefully surveyed the ocean of automobiles before choosing a space with a rear cement wall. He backed the BMW in and shut off the motor for the last time.

  Morgan put up the sunshield and released the trunk lid. As he got out, he removed the tarp, folding it into a small rectangle. He lifted the backpack from the trunk, strapped it on, and locked the car.

  At the nearby airport bus stop, he dropped the tarp and remaining license plate parts in a trash can. A second can received the gloves and the shredded parking ticket.

  He drew a deep breath.

  Morgan’s only possessions now were what he had learned, carried, and the guile to believe he might succeed—or die trying.

  Boarding the bus, he took a seat in the middle, scrutinizing the smudge on the window. The backpack sat on his lap.

  At the next stop, a man got on, looked at all the empty seats, and came up to Morgan.

  “Hey! Rag-boy!” he said loudly. The man’s halitosis was indescribable, but his body odor was worse. “Move the fuck out of my seat!”

  Without protest, Morgan went farther back and sat motionless until arriving downtown, where he waited to transfer to the bus that went to the wharf.