The Senator

by Ken Fite

  When Mitchell got to the last warehouse on the right side of the road, he stopped. A faint groaning sound came from the building marked 2300. He walked up the loading dock and put an ear to the bay door. The groaning stopped, but was replaced by a dragging sound.

  A moment later, it was gone. He stayed listening, hoping to hear more, but the sounds had left as quickly as they had come and were replaced by a cold wind that was growing stronger by the minute.

  I found him, he thought and walked back to his bike still tucked away behind the green dumpster where he had hidden it just five minutes earlier. He pushed the heavy motorcycle down the alley, out onto the street, and steered it back to the main road that brought him there before climbing back on and starting it.

  David Mitchell picked up speed as he bolted out of the battered mess of buildings but was careful not to rev his engine more than necessary. He didn’t want to scare off the kidnapper before he could get back to his bachelor pad apartment in the Gold Coast District and write the biggest story of his life.

  FOURTEEN

  JAMI DIDN’T SAY much as we made our way back to the United Center. I had hoped we’d find the guy on the motorcycle, but knew that would be next to impossible. My cell phone rang. It was my dad. I sent the call to voicemail and stuffed my cell back in the pocket of my windbreaker.

  “How do you know him?” asked Jami, breaking the uncomfortable silence.

  I turned and looked at her before refocusing my eyes on the road. “He’s a family friend.”

  “No, there’s more to it. I can tell. How do you know Keller?”

  I waited for a few seconds before answering, considering how much to reveal. “Keller and my dad worked together at the Chicago ATF field office. They met after my family moved here the summer before my senior year in high school. Our families have known each other for a long time.”

  “Where’d you move from?” she asked.

  “Oklahoma.”

  “Never would have guessed that. Why Chicago?”

  “Timothy McVeigh,” I answered and looked back over to Jami, who didn’t respond. “Before being relocated to the Chicago office, my dad worked out of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. I was a junior in high school, and one day right before the end of the semester, I got to school and realized I’d forgotten my football jersey at home and needed it for practice. It was just past eight and I figured my dad would still be home, so I called him. He said he’d bring it by before work.”

  “What happened?”

  “I met him out front and he dropped off the jersey just before nine. I found out a few minutes later that the building had been bombed.”

  Jami was still looking at me. “I’m so sorry.”

  “He was fine, Jami. My dad was still on the road when McVeigh bombed the place.”

  She was quiet for several seconds. “Then what happened?”

  I shrugged in the dark. “We left. My dad was transferred to the Chicago office, so we moved the summer before my senior year. That’s where he met Jim Keller, another agent out of Chicago. Their offices were next to each other. They became good friends. That’s when everything changed. Up until then, I wasn’t sure what I’d do after graduation. After that summer, when the fog lifted and I saw true evil for the first time in my life, I decided after I graduated that next year, I’d join the military. I wanted to be a SEAL.”

  “And that’s what you did,” Jami said.

  “I see you’ve done your homework. It was all I thought about. My dad knew that his buddy Keller was a SEAL before joining the ATF, so he asked him for advice on what his kid could do. Our families had become good friends over that summer. We lived close to each other and we had them over all the time. They did the same. Keller knew me. I was young, but he knew I was serious. Keller was also getting ready to retire from the agency the following year and run for office, so he made a deal with my dad. He said if my dad would help with his campaign for Senate, Keller would train me. He couldn’t guarantee I’d make the cut. That was up to me. But he’d give me a pretty good shot.”

  I turned right on Damen and headed north. We were almost back at the arena.

  “Had to be at his house every day at four o’clock in the morning for a year. He had me swimming, running, weight-lifting. He trained me in basic combat. Gave me a head start before I even enlisted. I owe him a lot.”

  “So that’s why you’re here. I was wondering why the head of the Chicago division of DDC would be out in the field. That’s not how it usually works. You’re beyond doing fieldwork now; you don’t need to be here.”

  “It might not be the norm, but it’s how I do things. If I think I need to be in the field, I’m going to be there. In case something goes wrong.” To that, Jami gave me a look as if she was going to say something, but decided against it as we parked in the same spot as before. I closed my eyes and shook my head.

  FIFTEEN

  INSIDE THE DARK, cold, and dingy warehouse, Senator Keller woke up to find himself handcuffed to what he thought was an old sewer line. He grabbed the metal pipe with both hands and pulled as hard as he could. It didn’t budge at all. He looked up and saw the pipe appear from somewhere in the banisters of the ceiling beyond where the dim light inside the room that the kidnapper had set up to illuminate the small area where he was sitting. Keller realized the pipe wasn’t going to budge, no matter what he did.

  The senator’s vision and hearing were starting to improve as the effects of the chloroform wore off. He felt pain in his chest and looked down and found a small bloodstain on his white dress shirt. Suddenly, he remembered a blurry vision of the Taser being aimed at him by a man wearing a ski mask, a thought that had somehow escaped him. He thought for a few minutes about his kidnapping. What is he planning on doing to me?

  Keller looked around the room, scanning his environment, as he’d been trained to do many years ago. Someone’s watching me, he thought to himself after feeling like eyes were upon him, but dismissed the thought as quickly as it had come. He couldn’t see anyone. Maybe there was a hidden camera set up by the kidnapper, but he couldn’t be sure. Keller’s cell was being lit by a battery-powered lantern, the kind a parent might bring to his kid’s Cub Scout camping trip to light the campground.

  A moment later, the kidnapper walked in from the adjacent room, which was also illuminated from what Keller figured was another lantern, although he couldn’t see because of the wall he was secured to.

  “Make yourself at home, Mr. Keller,” the man said. His voice was gruff and unnatural, almost like he was trying not to sound like himself. The kidnapper walked closer to the senator and stepped in front of the light coming from the lantern, a light so bright it had been almost blinding to him.

  Keller saw that the kidnapper was still wearing a black ski mask. Even if he hadn’t been wearing a mask, it would have been hard to see much of anything with the light to the kidnapper’s back and Keller’s current state. Keller could hardly remember the ride to wherever he was or how he even got in his cell. It was as if he had a collection of fuzzy memories that he needed to piece together, like trying to complete a jigsaw puzzle without knowing what image the puzzle pieces were all supposed to make once connected.

  “Why am I here?” asked Keller, his words less slurred than before, but still not as sharp as they could be. “What do you think you’re going to get from taking me?”

  The kidnapper laughed to himself, barely audible to the senator. “It’s not always about you, Mr. Keller,” the kidnapper said and paced the floor back and forth, causing the bright light from the lantern to force the senator to close his eyes to keep from being blinded every few seconds.

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean? You kidnapped a nominee for President of the United States. Of course it’s about me,” Keller said in a condescending tone.

  “I suppose in a way it is about you. You play a critical role in the plan.”

  “What plan?”

  “I made the point I wanted to make
. And in the next day or two, I’ll be driving that point home. Sleep well, Mr. Keller.”

  The kidnapper walked away and reentered the next room.

  “What’s with the mask?” Keller shouted, but there was no response. Keller thought about the reasons why the man might be wearing a mask. He didn’t want to be famous, he figured; otherwise he wouldn’t be hiding.

  Is he wearing it in case he has to escape so I won’t be able to identify him? Keller thought to himself. Then a more chilling thought entered the senator’s mind. Would I recognize his face? Do I know this man?

  SIXTEEN

  ONCE DAVID MITCHELL found his way out of the industrial park and was sure he was far enough out of earshot from the run-down and abandoned warehouse he had followed the kidnapper to, he dropped a gear and twisted the throttle.

  That helped increase his bike’s RPMs, so it was more powerful and quicker at the already high speeds. The bike jerked. It felt like someone had kicked him in the back. He headed north and kept the engine revved up close to the redline as he made his way back to his apartment.

  It was starting to get late and Mitchell was sure that the sounds of his bike roaring through the backstreets and residential neighborhoods of McKinley Park and Bridgeport would wake up any children trying to fall asleep and aggravate their parents. But he didn’t care. He had to get home and publish the story he knew would send shockwaves throughout America. The biggest story of his life.

  As he arrived at his Gold Coast apartment building on Wells Street, a twenty-minute drive he’d been able to navigate in just ten minutes, David Mitchell parked his bike. Then he jogged inside and entered the elevator.

  He punched the button for the third floor and impatiently punched it a few more times before the elevator doors finally closed. When he made it to his floor, Mitchell exited the elevator quickly just as the doors were opening without caring if anyone had been waiting to enter on the other side.

  He walked down the ritzy hallway of the seventy-year-old building kept in pristine condition. Once as a reporter for the Tribune, he had visited the Gold Coast area while on assignment to write a story about the ten wealthiest neighborhoods in Chicago.

  The Gold Coast was at the top of the list with a mean household income at just over $150,000 a year. He was new to the Chicago area, and it was one of the first articles he wrote. After visiting the neighborhood, he became determined to live there somehow.

  When Mitchell was fired from the Tribune and struck out on his own, the news website he created took off and started receiving just over a thousand visits a day. To his surprise, it generated enough revenue from ads that he was able to pay the $675 monthly rent for his loft in North Lawndale. Now, he received that many visits in an hour and made from ad revenue in one month working for himself what he used to make in a year working at the “World’s Greatest Newspaper” and moved to the ritzy neighborhood to show the world and himself that despite being fired from his dream job, he still made it.

  He opened the door and flipped on the light. It was an open-plan apartment with very few internal dividing walls except for the office and bedroom. He had wood floors, recessed lights in the ceiling, and furniture that had been chosen by an interior decorator he had hired when he first moved in. It looked like the kind of apartment that might be owned by a movie star or an athlete.

  In some ways he still acted like a kid. Empty pizza boxes were stacked on the granite countertop in the kitchen, and a Sony PlayStation was hooked up to his big-screen TV with controllers and empty bags of potato chips sprawled out on his coffee table. Despite success, some things never changed.

  Mitchell walked into his office and moved the mouse to wake up his laptop. Three additional monitor screens illuminated and displayed a number of news websites, the competition he monitored each day.

  He hit refresh on all of them and waited patiently for each individual page to load to find out what they had reported about the kidnapping. The Drudge Report was the first to load and displayed the headline “Chaos in Chicago.” Next, HuffPo loaded and revealed their headline about the story, “Senator Delayed.”

  “What?” Mitchell said, and clicked on the links to read the stories. They were written quickly with a lot of spelling mistakes and bad grammar, which he knew meant they had been published without going through the hands of an editor. But the content—they didn’t say that the senator had been kidnapped—only that he was delayed. He quickly skimmed through a few more stories on other news websites and they all had the same spin: Keller was delayed because of traffic.

  David Mitchell smiled. He drafted a new post on his blog and titled it: “Senator Keller Kidnapped in Chicago—Developing” and hit publish.

  SEVENTEEN

  THE CONVENTION FLOOR was electric. After Agent Davis left Debra Stewart and the off-duty cops working security for the event, the chairwoman had developed a plan for controlling the chaos that would soon break out.

  Stewart led the men upstairs to the executive suite where Jim Keller had been preparing for his speech. She needed a place where she could think and talk about the plan with the hired security team. Stewart didn’t realize that this was where Keller had been kidnapped until she entered the room.

  The door to the suite was propped open with a chair from inside the room. When she and the men walked in, Stewart saw the large air return grille leaning against the wall right next to a gaping hole and noticed the drops of blood on the carpet. She knew something bad had happened in the suite.

  The sight took her breath away. Debra Stewart was a powerful woman who prided herself on straight talk and aggressiveness. The kind of woman who felt perfectly comfortable in a boardroom and especially if she was the one leading the meeting.

  Stewart could be found a few times a week on one of the cable news channels, debating with pundits and operatives on the other side of the aisle, piped in from her home office that was equipped with cameras, elaborate lighting, and a bookshelf with books she never intended to read. She loved to argue and back opponents into a corner.

  But for the first time in what felt like forever, she didn’t know what to say. She crouched down and looked inside the hole in the wall and could see light coming from the other end of the pathway. She turned around and looked at the officers.

  One of them spoke up, standing in for the chairwoman, who needed a moment to compose herself. “I say we call the damn FBI. They need to see this. All we can do on our end is damage control, try our best to keep the place from turning into a melee.”

  Another man spoke. “What about Agent Davis, the lady who just met with us? Is she not FBI?”

  “Davis is DDC,” Stewart finally said. “Senator Keller declined Secret Service protection. Said it would put a layer between him and his constituents. It doesn’t matter right now, he’s been taken, and we need to figure out what we’re going to do.”

  “We each cover a different area until someone who can actually control these people gets here,” the first officer who had spoken said. He pointed at one of the other men. “You take the north side, Jason covers east, Mark takes south, Daryl handles west. I’ll head to the middle of the floor. And you,” he said, pointing at Stewart, “you get on the damn phone and call the FBI right now. This place is about to turn into the biggest cluster you’ve ever seen—the nominee for president has been kidnapped—do you get that? Call them.”

  Stewart blinked and was visibly startled by the officer’s aggressiveness. In the boardroom or on TV, she’d have put the man in his place. This was her convention, after all. She had coordinated everything. She planned the speakers. She hired the security firm and the men she was talking to now. They worked for her, actually. But she had also agreed to Keller’s request to defer Secret Service protection until after tonight and let him rely on a handful of DDC agents, one of which he thought the world of, named Jordan.

  Out on the floor, delegates and people from around the country who had previously been overjoyed at the nearing climax of the four-d
ay event drawing to a close to cheer their nominee were now wearing angry, confused looks on their faces.

  There were loud discussions over the blaring music, some of which turned into shouts of frustration over what was happening. It was close to nine o’clock. As each minute passed, the crowd became more impatient and tempers began to flare. You don’t get stuck in Chicago traffic for this long on a Thursday night. Wouldn’t Keller have a police escort? Where is the senator?

  Stewart realized she could have prevented all of this. “I’ll call. Now go,” she told the men.

  Just when they got to their posts, word spread that one news website was reporting something different. “He’s been kidnapped!” the officers heard from every corner and braced themselves.

  EIGHTEEN

  WHEN JAMI AND I started to walk back into the building, we saw a group of people standing over the bodies of agents Rob McGovern and Matt Flynn. One man held a cell phone with one hand and held the other to his forehead. Another man and woman stood nearby watching.

  “Follow me,” I said, and walked west along the building to avoid the scene.

  “Blake? What are you doing?” Jami asked.

  We kept walking the length of the building and I looked at the many exit doors along the way. They were like the exits at a movie theater, no handles on the outside. As we walked, someone exited from one of the many doors up ahead, too far away from where Jami and I were. Then one of the doors close to us opened, and a man in a suit exited and ran out to the parking lot. I held the door and Jami and I entered.

  “I noticed that this building and the one across the street both have cameras all over them. We need to find the security office and review the footage and see what happened. I think it’s on the fourth floor.”

  We were almost to the third floor when more people started flooding out of the convention center and leaving. We could hear shouting over the music. Jami and I stopped and looked at each other.