Marathon

by Brian Freeman

  “Papa?”

  He looked down when he felt a sharp tug on his pant leg. His son, Pak, gazed up at him with his wide, dark eyes. Ahdia had cut the boy’s hair today, but it grew like a weed and wouldn’t stay tidy for long.

  “Papa, it is time for Maghrib.”

  “Is it?” Khan asked. He reached for his phone to check the Athan app, which tracked the daily times of prayer as the sun changed throughout the year. Maghrib, the fourth of the five prayers of salat, had a narrow window between sunset and the end of twilight. However, he had no phone; he’d lost it in Canal Park. He checked the grandfather clock in the corner of the living room and confirmed the time.

  “You are right,” he told his son. “Come, let us do our ablutions and pray.”

  They washed themselves carefully in the ritual known as Wudu, and then Khan took Pak’s hand and led his wife and child up the stairs. Rain thumped on the peaked roof. Their small house had only a narrow attic, which the previous owners had used for storage of their Christmas lights. Mice, spiders, and wasps had made a home there, too. When Khan moved in, he’d cleaned up the attic and made it into a space for daily prayers. It was neat, lit by a single window, and lined in wood paneling, with a niche that he had built into the wall to mark Qibla, the direction they faced during prayer.

  Nothing offered Khan more contentment than the time he spent in prayer, and nothing brought him more love than doing so with his son at his side and his wife behind him. At four years old, Pak was too young for obligatory prayers, but Khan wanted him to make it a habit early in life, and he and Ahdia were proud that their son already took salat as a serious responsibility.

  He stood on the prayer mat with his head bowed, and he cleared his mind, pushing out all other thoughts. To him, prayer was a direct conversation with God, and he wanted nothing unclean between them. Sometimes passengers in his cab asked him if it was difficult to find the time to pray five times a day, but he told them that those moments of his day made more sense than anything else in his life.

  When he was ready, he cupped both hands behind his earlobes and chanted the Takbīr.

  “Allāh u akbar.”

  Standing straight, he took hold of his wrists with his arms over his heart, and, in Arabic, recited the opening verses of the Qur’an:

  In the name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful

  Praise God, Lord of all that exists

  Most Gracious, Most Merciful

  Master of the Day of Judgment

  You alone we worship, You alone we ask for help

  Show us the straight way . . .

  Ahdia followed smoothly behind him, and next to him, Pak did a sweet, clumsy imitation. Pak didn’t know all the words of the prayer yet, but every time he heard Khan say, “Allāh u akbar,” he repeated it earnestly, and he said “Aameen” loud and long at the end of the opening verses. When Khan bowed and put his hands on his knees, Pak did, too. When Khan prostrated himself and lay his forehead on the floor, Pak did, too.

  Subhana Rabbiyal A’la.

  Subhana Rabbiyal A’la.

  Subhana Rabbiyal A’la.

  Khan completed the ritual of the entire rakat, and then he performed it again, repeating the prayers aloud, and then one more time, silently, with only his lips moving as he recited the verses. Finally, he saluted the angels of his good deeds and misdeeds over each of his shoulders with the salaam.

  They were done. Not even ten minutes had passed.

  Pak scrambled to his feet, and as Khan stood up, too, his son wrapped his arms tightly around his father’s legs.

  “I love you, Papa.”

  “I love you, too.”

  Ahdia went downstairs first. Her face was grave; prayer hadn’t soothed her anxiety. When she was gone, Khan hoisted Pak in his arms and carried him from the attic. He knew what he had to do. He let Pak scamper off to play, and he found Ahdia in the kitchen, where she was drying a dinner plate with a towel. Her tension was evident in how she held herself, stiffly, as if she was squeezing her emotions inside.

  He stood beside her and said, “You’re right. Tomorrow I will talk to the police.”

  She put the plate down. He could see her eyes fill with tears. She turned and threw her arms around his neck. “Thank you, Khan.”

  “We will get through this, won’t we?” he asked.

  “We will.”

  The darkness lifted from her face. She was his wife again, with pink roses on her cheeks and teasing eyes and a smile that never went away. “Now I have an even more important errand for you,” she told him.

  “Oh?”

  “One of the women in my office is coming back from pregnancy leave tomorrow. I want to make laddu for her, and I have no coconut. Could you run out to the market and get me some?”

  “Now?” he asked, eyeing the heavy rain that hammered the kitchen window.

  “Please,” Ahdia said.

  He smiled, because he could never resist her or say no to her. “I’ll get soaked, you know.”

  “You’ll dry,” she told him.

  “Just coconut?” he asked.

  “That’s all.”

  He turned to leave, but Ahdia took his hand and leaned close to him and placed a soft kiss on his cheek. “You’re a good man, Khan.”

  His heart felt full. He grabbed his jacket and went to the front door, but he stood at the threshold without opening it. Music played from Pak’s room. He heard the clatter of dishes in the kitchen. He smelled the sweetness of ginger from dinner. They were little things, but he closed his eyes and concentrated, wanting to remember them forever. Then, not looking back, he ventured into the thick of the storm and left behind his perfect house, his perfect wife, and his perfect son.

  16

  That’s him, Michael Malville thought.

  He examined the photo that had been posted online by a Twin Cities tourist named Janet Waller. She’d been standing near the Hampton Inn, facing Canal Park Drive, using an old camera phone that took two-megapixel images. The time stamp on the photo was seven minutes before the bombing. In the crowd across the street, in profile, he saw the torso of a tall, bearded man with dark hair and what looked like a casual, untucked, button-down shirt. When Michael enlarged the photo, the resolution made the details of the man’s face impossible to distinguish.

  Even so, he repeated to himself: That’s him.

  Or was it?

  He’d had similar breakthroughs throughout the day, but each time, he’d concluded that he was wrong. There was no way to be sure based on a single photograph, particularly a low-quality jpeg taken at a distance. After hours of frustration, Michael had developed a system. As he analyzed photos, he classified them in a spreadsheet by time and location, so that he could easily call up corresponding images of the same crowd scene at the same time from different angles.

  Instead of the back of someone’s head, he could see his face.

  Instead of a partial image of a head or body, he could see the entire person.

  The photo taken by Janet Waller showed a crowd of marathon spectators in front of Caribou Coffee. He searched his spreadsheet: Caribou. And then he narrowed down the photographs he’d reviewed near Caribou Coffee to those taken six to eight minutes before the bombing. Half a dozen photos met the search parameters, and he loaded them to his screen.

  A minute later, he knew he was wrong.

  He matched the man in Janet’s photo to one of the other Caribou photos and realized that what had looked like a beard from a blurry distance was actually a shadow. This man was clean-shaven.

  He wasn’t the man who’d bumped into him on Superior Street.

  Michael rocked back in his chair and exhaled in frustration. He grabbed his mug and drank cold coffee. He didn’t realize that his wife, Alison, had joined him in the attic, until she called to him from the doorway.

  “Are you ever coming downstairs?” she asked. “You’ve been up here in front of that computer all day.”

  “I know. Sorry.”

 
She came up beside him. Rain pummeled the roof over their heads. “Are you having any luck?”

  “Not so far,” he admitted. “There are thousands of photographs posted, and I have to examine each face in each picture. When I see one that’s a possibility, I cross-reference with other photos, but a lot of the pictures aren’t time-stamped, which makes it harder.”

  Alison chuckled. They’d been married a long time, and she knew he had an OCD streak that came out in projects like this.

  “Seems to me there are people who do this for a living,” she told him gently. “People called the FBI.”

  “Yes, but they weren’t there,” Michael replied. “They didn’t see this guy.”

  “Honestly, did you really see him yourself? It happened so fast. Will you ever be sure?”

  “I don’t know, but I have to try.”

  She bent over and kissed him. “Well, come down soon. Evan misses you. So do I. I’m not going to let you stay up all night again. I have other plans for you tonight.”

  “Another hour, and I’ll stop for today,” he promised her.

  “Deal.”

  Alison left him alone. He got up and stretched, and he made fresh coffee. He put his 1980s music collection on shuffle, because he was afraid the rain would lull him to sleep. He sat down and opened up the next series of photographs.

  He blinked, and an hour passed.

  And then another hour.

  The process had a strange, addictive quality to it, like a video game. He felt as if he were peering into the lives of strangers. Some of the people showed up again and again in different pictures, and he began to think of them as friends. He saw the faces of people who were laughing. Arguing. Kissing. Singing. He watched face after face after face, until it felt as if he’d seen every runner and every single person on the sidelines cheering them on. He’d seen the entire marathon over and over, every mile, every inch of Duluth and the North Shore, every tree, every house, every store, every street sign.

  The evening quickly bled away. Alison didn’t return to hassle him; she knew he’d come down when he was ready, or he wouldn’t come at all. Another hour passed.

  He yawned. He clicked. His mind wandered, and he had to pinch himself to stay awake.

  And then he saw him.

  The photo was part of a collection that had been uploaded only half an hour earlier. A man with the screen name Shoe Geek had watched the race in the heart of Canal Park in the hour leading up to the explosion, and he’d posted dozens of high-resolution photos. Michael opened up a picture that was time-stamped ninety seconds before the bomb went off. Shoe Geek had taken a picture of the sidewalk heading up Canal Park Drive toward the lift bridge. When Michael enlarged the image on his screen, the resolution was crisp and sharp. He could see every face, and he could even clearly see the sign for the Duluth Outdoor Company shop suspended over the cobblestones. He was so focused on the crowd that he almost overlooked the empty, closed-off parking lot across from Grizzly’s restaurant.

  There, framed against the brick wall of an old paper mill, was the man he’d spent the entire night and day hunting. He zoomed in, and he could see exactly what the man looked like. Tall. Dark hair. Beard. Loose, untucked, flowered shirt. Black jeans. The photo captured him in mid-stride, alone, rushing, looking back over his shoulder.

  As if he were waiting for something. Waiting for the noise. The blast. The fire. The screams.

  And one more thing: His backpack was gone.

  Michael lurched out of the chair and paced under the high roof. His breathing accelerated. So did his heartbeat, thumping in his chest. He pounded his fist rhythmically against his chin as he went from wall to wall. He tried to concentrate, but he knew he was exhausted and light-headed. He was overwhelmed with the sheer volume of information he’d pumped into his brain during the past twenty-four hours.

  He asked himself: Are you sure?

  He went back to the desk and enlarged the photograph until only the man’s face filled the screen. Then even larger, until they were eye to eye. This man wore silver glasses. Had the man on the street worn glasses? Was that what had made his eyes seem so large and hostile?

  Yes.

  It was him.

  This was the man on Superior Street. Thousands of people lined the marathon route, thousands with dark hair and beards—but this was the man. He was absolutely sure. This man had hammered into Michael and pushed Evan into the street. This man had looked back with nothing but cold hatred in his face. This man had continued on to Canal Park, shouldering a heavy navy-blue backpack.

  There, in the parking lot near Grizzly’s, ninety seconds before the explosion, this same man didn’t have a backpack anymore. He’d left behind a killing machine in the Duluth Outdoor Company shop.

  Michael had found him.

  He’d found the bomber.

  He was too tired and drunk with adrenaline to think about exactly what he was doing. His emotions carried him down a rushing river. He opened up his Twitter feed and dragged the photograph of Canal Park into a new post. He tapped out three simple sentences, and then he slid his mouse over the button labeled Tweet.

  He hesitated for a moment.

  A moment that was no longer than the entire time he’d spent staring into the man’s eyes during the race.

  Michael thought: I’m about to change the world. And his finger tapped the mouse.

  * * *

  @malvileo tweeted:

  This man passed me with a backpack on way to Canal Park. Photo here is 90 seconds before blast. No backpack.

  * * *

  Dawn Basch stood at the window of her hotel room at the Radisson, where her tenth-floor view was of the lake and the silver lift bridge. It was almost dark, and the rain fell in a steady downpour. Her long fingers with their red-tipped nails held a glass of minibar Chardonnay. She was still dressed for business, but she’d kicked off her heels, and she stood in stocking feet. She kept the room ice-cold. A late room-service dinner—egg-white spinach omelet, fruit, whole-wheat roll—was on the way.

  It had been a long day of interviews. TV. Radio. Bloggers. Newspapers. The phone never stopped ringing. She was exactly where she wanted to be—at the center of everything. It didn’t matter that some people hated her. It didn’t matter that some people wanted to kill her. Sooner or later, one of them might get lucky, but if the Islamists could be martyrs, so could she.

  With her phone in her hand, she reviewed the tweets about herself. She was pleased to see that she was trending and that her followers were winning the fierce tweet war. Whenever a liberal called her a racist, an army of defenders rose up to slap that person down. She’d gained ten thousand new Twitter followers from around the world since the bombing. People were listening. They were finally paying attention.

  Dawn had traveled a long road in twenty years. She’d been one of the early online-news pioneers, starting her own website in the days before HuffPost and hustling ads from her Jersey City office while she wrote most of the content herself. It was all about clicks, because more clicks meant more ad money. That was why every serious post about politics and trade policy usually also teased readers with photos of celebrity nipple slips. Everybody clicked on those.

  She’d never set out to be a First Amendment activist. Islam found her, not the other way around. After her website expanded to Europe, she’d published a freelance profile of a bizarre Swedish artist who liked to decorate his penis and take photographs of his erections. One of his strange creations was a turban-clad, bearded version of his genitals that he photographed in mid-orgasm and titled Spewing Muhammad.

  Seeing it, Dawn had never laughed so hard in her life.

  After she posted the article, it went viral, blowing up like a bomb. Lots of clicks. Millions of clicks. It also led to days of riots in Stockholm in which six buildings were burned and two people were killed. The artist himself fled the city, but a radical Islamist found him in Gothenburg, and he was castrated and beheaded.

  Live. On video.
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  From that moment forward, Dawn Basch was never the same.

  What horrified her almost more than the violence was the reaction from the left-wing media in New York and D.C.—people she’d considered colleagues and friends. They blamed her. They blamed the artist. They called his satire a needless provocation of Muslims. When they talked about the First Amendment, it was always with an asterisk for critics of Islam: “Free speech, but”; “Free speech, although”; “Free speech, unless.”

  Their attitude made Dawn furious. In response, she sought out every portrayal of Muhammad she could find and posted it on the home page of her site. She began planning a First Amendment conference to send out the message that censoring anyone’s speech to avoid violence was the first step in giving up your free-speech rights altogether. That day, she coined the phrase “no exceptions,” which had become the slogan for her entire movement. It had made her enemies, but it had also made her rich.

  Dawn didn’t care if people called her a hater, an Islamophobe, or a racist. If Christians were blowing up people over cartoons, she’d attack Christians, but they weren’t the threat to civilization. Only one religion was trying to stamp out freedom and kill nonbelievers, and that was Islam. People didn’t understand that this was a battle between two completely incompatible visions of human values. There was American freedom, and there was Islamic tyranny, and the former would never bow to the latter. Not as long as Dawn Basch was alive.

  As she searched through tweets in front of the hotel window, she spotted a retweet in which she’d been tagged by one of her many followers. The woman’s message was:

  Hey, Dawn, did you see this?

  Dawn checked out the tweet from a user named @malvileo. He’d posted a note and a photograph just minutes earlier, and when Dawn examined the picture, she couldn’t suppress the smile of triumph that crept onto her face. This was what she’d been waiting for, and she didn’t hesitate.

  She knew exactly what to do next.

  Over to you, Special Agent Maloney.