by Mark Powell
“This is a Glock 23.”
“Christ, Jimmy.”
“See how small it is. Very easy to hide.” He put it on John’s desk. “But you need to be careful. It has a safety, but it’s on the trigger, you understand?”
“There’s a zero-tolerance policy for guns on campus.”
“Be mindful of it. It’s attention to detail. It’s vigilance. You get what I mean when I say you cultivate it like a practice?”
“Absolutely no firearms on campus.”
“Yeah, and naturally the folks who paid Suleyman Nawaf a visit are going to abide by that.”
“Get it out of here.”
“Let me tell you something first, all right, and then you get back to me on your zero-tolerance bullshit. Our little jihadi wonderboy, I can’t find him. He’s suddenly gone AWOL on us.”
“I don’t care.
“You don’t care?”
“I don’t care because I’m done with it.”
“You’re done with it? This is news to me.”
“I never should have helped you.”
“Helped me? Oh my fucking word. Well, let me be helpful for a change then. Let me ask a few helpful questions like what kind of security does your kid’s school have? You considered that? How about your wife’s level of exposure? You spent anytime considering that?”
“Jimmy—”
“Don’t Jimmy me, all right? My Myers-Briggs tells me I have an aversion to this kind of bullshit.” He heard Stone’s voice go cold and automatic. “You have any clue how that supple leopard of a daughter is these days? Is that helpful? Dear wife keeping an eye on her diet, making sure it’s all lean protein and amino acids?”
“What are you saying?”
“What am I saying? I’m saying touch the gun, John.”
John looked down at the papers on his desk.
“Get it out of here,” he said without looking up.
“Touch it first.”
“Get it out of here.”
“Touch it,” Stone said. “Go on.”
Finally, he did, but with just a fingertip, a single stroke, as if it might otherwise wake.
“Good. Good man. Now hold it in your hand. Be mindful that it’s loaded.”
John held it.
“Don’t point it.”
“What do you mean about Kayla and Tess?”
“Don’t point.”
“I’m not pointing.
“What did you mean—”
“Shh.”
“Jimmy—”
“My father believed the blade of a knife reflected moral worth. My mother said the same thing about posture.” He was whispering now. “Feels kind of nice, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t want it.”
“Nobody ever does.”
“I don’t need it.”
“Of course you don’t. Except did you read that line about the throats cut so deeply they were effectively decapitated? Watch your family, all right? Know where they are, who they talk to. Download a good malware. Keep an eye on phone calls, your e-mails.”
“What?”
“All the things they taught us.”
“Nobody taught me anything. I’m a counselor.”
“Sure you are, John. What else would you be? But the gun.” Stone turned for the door. “Just be sure you keep it with you at all times. At all times in all situations.”
41.
She was up late packing and just sort of got lost, Tess did. All the suitcases and duffels and rolling bags open in the living room, Tess with the laundry basket and the clean clothes.
Wally’s sweater.
Daniel’s corduroys for church.
Laurie’s SleepSack and footed pajamas.
This here, that there, and so on until the day fell into dusk and dusk fell into darkness, a hushed slip like the exhale of breath, and Tess realized she was standing in the living room and had been for she didn’t know how long. Just standing there with a—with a towel in one hand. The children asleep. John in Atlanta.
In the morning Tess would drink two cups of coffee, fill the sippy cups and the snack bag, and drive herself and the children the nine hours to her parents. Would if she could move out of the room, zip the luggage, go to bed. Yet she kept standing there, rooted, but so poorly she threatened not to move but to fall.
The first click she sent out was meant to ground her.
The second was meant to orient.
When it came back to her she knew she wasn’t alone.
“Go back to bed, Wally.”
He was in the corner, a gray shape in the grayer dark.
He clicked again, or something clicked, because she was no longer certain it was her son. Only that something was in the room with her. She felt the small hairs on her neck bristle and it came to her again:
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
“Go back to bed, honey.” She felt her voice break and realized she wouldn’t go to him, she realized she was afraid. “You need your sleep.”
And she did, too, Tess did. Wally did.
Whoever or whatever it was that stood in the corner, silently watching her—surely it was tired.
Yet they went on standing there, Tess and this other who may or may not have been her child, Tess and this other who may or may not have been what she had let in through the ISIS video, through the watching, through the knowing. Tess standing there, not quite seeing it, but almost feeling the space between them, and how that space seemed to be lessening, how it seemed to be coming closer.
The man in the basement.
She had gone to him so many times. Now he had come to her.
Then it occurred to her that perhaps it wasn’t a man in the basement. It was a woman Tess had seen at the mall, the woman Tess had followed, and she was standing so close Tess could feel the heat off her body.
Tess spoke quietly, the merest whisper, and then louder, as if to assure the woman of her attention.
Tess said, “Karla?”
42.
The old Camry was missing from the shed—that was the first thing Jimmy saw when he pulled up at the lake house: the Camry as absent as the kid. The yard empty. The lights off inside. Dawn was gathering out over the water, all bugs and birds, but around the house there was no movement, no life.
It was confirmation of what Jimmy had suspected—that after days of stalking John Maynard’s family Reed was gone. Still, something didn’t feel right and for a few slow minutes he sat with it. Despite constipation and an impending myocardial infarction, Jimmy Stone sat and tried to think his way into the boy’s brain.
Reed, Reed, Reed. What are you up to, Reed? Where have you gone, son?
For days there had been a stream of images: Maynard’s daughter, his wife and boys and infant daughter. Jimmy had seen them at school and at what appeared to be a mall. He’d seen a dark house on a dark street. But nothing for the last few days. Nothing since Jimmy’s visit to Maynard’s office. Reed hadn’t answered his phone and finally Jimmy had driven up from Atlanta. But having come so far he couldn’t quite bring himself to take that last step, to get out of the van and walk inside.
There was a reason for this. The car’s absence was comforting, but there was a part of him that still feared finding Reed’s body. The kid’s head disassembled only to reform itself inside Jimmy as unassailable guilt. It seemed more than a little possible. But he had to know, and finally he got out. Called for Reed from the yard, but not with any conviction. The place was abandoned and appeared to have been so for days.
He walked once around the house, past the dormant azaleas and the upturned canoe, beneath the river birch and finally up the front steps. He had the key but the door was unlocked. Before it was even open he could smell it—the eye-burning stink of gas. The place was soaked in gasoline. When he turned on the light he saw what it was Reed intended to burn. All over the paneled walls—it appeared as some roadside memorial wildly metastasized. First the photographs tacked to the paneling: eight-by-ten print-outs
Reed must have had made at the FedEx two towns over. Maybe three dozen arranged like the sort of collage you might find in a college dorm. They were all of Kayla, all of the girl smiling her crooked grin, Reed beside her in a few. Then the Goya print, crumpled and smoothed. The thumb drive had been smashed with a hammer. The letter was on the table, a scrawl of hand-printed Arabic, the figures leaning and looped.
It went on for three pages and he took out his phone and photographed each. He hadn’t talked to Aida or whatever the hell she was calling herself since that summer day on the street in Atlanta, but he had her in his contacts and he sent her the pictures. No message. No explanation. Let her figure it for what she could. Let her make whatever goddamn call there was to make. Dial the professor if need be, let him translate, let him riddle out the tortured logic. Jimmy should have done it from the start, should have left the boy alone, should have let Agent Hadawi and the rest of the feds run their little sting. Reed Sharma would be in federal custody—or possibly as dead as his meth-head buddies—but at least Jimmy wouldn’t be involved. He’d sworn to John he felt nothing about Site Nine except the grim satisfaction of having done a difficult job well. But that was a lie. He was as guilty as the rest, guilty enough to believe doing one right thing could undo many wrongs.
His eyes watered but still he stared at the graceful Arabic scrawl, looked again at the photos.
Reed and John’s daughter Kayla.
A selfie of the two of them, face-to-face and happy.
The girl smiling so wide her face threatened to split.
He felt like a voyeur—but wasn’t that exactly what he was, seeing things just before they disappeared? Reed was planning to burn down the lake house, to make ashes of it all, maybe even of his life. Coming was a mistake. Jimmy felt the wrongness on a cellular level, a life misdirected, mis-lived. What had Soren Sharma said? Just another bug in counter terror when he should have been a folk singer. The mistake was listening to his mother. Everybody knows that the war is over. Everybody knows that the good guys lost. Yeah, no shit, Leonard. As if the world taught any other lesson.
Too bad you’re such a slow learner, Jimbo.
Too bad—
Then he remembered the day he had brought Reed here, stopping in the state park where Reed had systematically beat the shit out of him.
What was it he had said to the kid?
The worst thing you could do would be to forgive me.
Was that what he was looking at, some sort of forgiveness? The kid could have taken out Maynard’s family ten times over. Yet he hadn’t. At least not yet.
His nose was running.
He rubbed his eyes and looked down at his phone.
Sending . . .
Sending . . .
The signal was weak this deep in the National Forest, but finally gathered to four service bars and the sending . . . gave way to delivered. The time stamp there in the corner. Jimmy was looking at it onscreen and felt his thumb drift to the telescope icon in the lower right. A window opened—he was looking at it—and then he was looking at himself, the scratchy image of his own back, the rear of his thinning vulnerable head. There was a shudder of recognition and then confusion, but he wasn’t confused. There was something inevitable in it, and he turned slowly to where Reed stood behind him, his phone in one hand, a pistol in the other. At his feet stood two five-gallon gas cans.
“I didn’t hear you come in,” Jimmy said.
“You weren’t paying attention.”
“What’s going on, Reed? Are you planning on burning my house down?”
The boy was smiling, but it wasn’t with anything approaching happiness. There was something arrogant to it. The mean tilt of his lips. The long lashes. The eyes like a wolf. He seemed to glow with a dredged-up purity, a malice so refined it became a form of saintliness.
“Where have you been?” Jimmy asked.
“You mean you don’t know?” Reed seemed almost hurt by the question. “You should have been watching.”
“I have been.”
“Good.”
“I’ve been watching,” Jimmy said, and Reed nodded his head in appreciation.
“You know then,” the boy said. “You understand.”
“What do I know?”
“I was in their school. One day they went shopping. Another day, night actually, he was sleeping. I stood in the other room—maybe ten feet away, Jimmy—and listened to him breathe.”
“What do I know, Reed?”
“He was talking in his sleep. He was scared.”
“What do I understand?”
“Your eyes are red, Jimmy.”
“What is it I should know?”
“You should know what I’m capable of doing. You should know what I could have done to them. What I could have done. But I didn’t.” He took a step forward. “Hey, guess what,” he said, “I’ve always wanted to ask you. Do you know what was in the box?”
“What box?”
“The box I carried. Know what was in it?”
“What are you doing here?”
What he was doing was approaching, steadily narrowing the space between them. But that wasn’t what Jimmy meant. The question wasn’t physical so much as metaphysical. The question had something to do, perhaps, with God.
“It was a little statue.”
“Reed.”
“A little bronze Buddha. Did you know that? You were laughing at me.”
“Reed, listen, the gun—”
“It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you. There’s only one person left for me to hurt and it isn’t you. I’m going to bless you. I forgive everyone for everything. Do you understand?”
“Put the gun down, all right?”
“You don’t get what I’m saying. I forgive you. I want to bless you. I have a gift for you.”
“Reed.”
“It just came to me, Jimmy. Fire is the one thing I can give you. Do you remember you called it a gift? Well, I can give you that. You showing up here. It’s so perfect.”
“The gun—”
“It’s so perfect. But first I want you to admit you were laughing at me.”
He was closer now, and drawing closer still. Jimmy had his hands out, palms open in a way that was meant to signal not so much surrender as calm control of the situation, that he wasn’t afraid. Even if he was. Because nothing could change the fact that the barrel was close enough to his face for the image to blur. Reed pressed it to his forehead and it was cold, as Jimmy had known it would be. But rough-grained in a way he hadn’t. As if the world might surprise you right up until the moment it ceased to be, or you ceased to be, if there was any difference. Jimmy shut his wet eyes.
“Please,” he said.
“Just say that you were laughing.”
“Reed.”
“Say it, Jimmy. Say I was laughing.”
“I was laughing.”
“Say my name. I was laughing at you, Reed.”
“I was laughing at you, Reed.”
“I was laughing but now I’m sorry.”
“I am sorry,” Jimmy said. “I truly am.”
“I’m not going to hurt you. I am going to ask you to sit down. I’m going to tie you up. But I’m not going to hurt you. I’m going to bless you.”
“Reed—”
“I’m going to bless you. Do you believe me?”
“Please just put the gun down.”
“Tell me you believe me.”
“I believe you.”
“I hurt you before but I won’t again. Even though I could, I won’t. That’s what you have to understand. It’s what I’ve learned. It’s what you’ve taught me. Sit down, Jimmy. Are you carrying anything?”
“No.”
“Please don’t lie to me.”
“It’s in the car.”
“See, I believe you. I trust you. I won’t even search you. Sit down and put your hands behind you.”
He sat, put his hands behind him, and felt the zip ties bind his wrists to the chair
legs.
“That isn’t too tight?”
“You don’t have to do this. You can walk away, disappear.”
“But how would he see? How would I know he was watching?”
“Who was watching?” He felt the ties go around his ankles. “Who?”
“He has to see it.”
“Who, Reed? Allah?”
Reed looked at him as if to determine whether or not he was serious.
“No,” he said. “Not Allah.”
“Who then?”
“People like you,” he said. “People like my father. The professor. You all took something from me.” He stood up, the ties in place. “But what amazes me is you don’t even know it. The most basic simple human thing and you have zero awareness. But I’ve beat all of you. Because I’ve found a way to get it back. And I’ve found a way to make everyone see.”
“Reed.”
“So simple and you took it. But I know now what bombs do.”
Jimmy’s phone rang. Reed froze for a moment and then moved to it, held the screen so that Jimmy could see the name on the incoming call: JOHN MAYNARD.
“Leave his family alone,” Jimmy said.
Reed shook his head.
“That isn’t for you to say.”
“His daughter.”
“You need to be quiet.”
“She’s done nothing to you.”
“You don’t know anything.”
“She’s innocent.”
“Jimmy”—it was the first note of strain in his voice—“honest to God, I’m speaking from my heart when I say it’s best if you’re quiet now.”
“Don’t hurt her, Reed.”
“I’m going to let him watch, Jimmy. I’ll let you watch, too.” He took Jimmy’s phone, tapped at the screen, and then held it where Jimmy could see: John Maynard’s contact information, his number and e-mail. “I think you deserve that much.”
“Reed.”
“Sit still for a minute. You showed up before I could finish.”
He took the two large red canisters and began to splash them in the back room. Jimmy could smell it, stronger now, and what it smelled like was pain, but only a moment’s worth. After that would come the nothingness. And it was the nothingness he wanted.
“You used to talk about it all the time,” Reed said. “You asked me once if I would be willing. You said heat and light.”