At least Buzz seems to be giving heroin a rest. It relieves her that an Estonian thrash band is the most offensive mud Buzz has tracked into the Triangle. She leaves them to their music, then stops in the hall, not sure whether they’ve dialed the volume back up again.
Bitter Rockets. As if naming the band clarifies anything.
With all they’ve lost, her sense of hearing isn’t Allison’s top worry. She can’t ask the boys to close their bedroom door. No shut doors, an adult always home to chaperone. They’ve spent a lot of parental capital to establish ground rules now that Buzz has joined the household. If she capitulates to mere noise, he’ll count it a victory over shaky authority. She returns to the second-floor kitchen.
Allison blames herself.
The bridge was her idea.
She was the one who urged Brendan to stay. If he hadn’t, Zac might have staffed the phones with Nora, and not been on the span at all that morning.
If she’d taken out the truck driver instead of checking Gregor’s overhand assault? Zac would be alive beside her, helping to make dinner. Gregor would have held himself back, or not. If he hadn’t, she would have suffered the tire iron. She could have borne a few broken ribs.
What she can’t bear is reliving the moment. Warding off Gregor’s attack on a man about to deal Zac his deathblow.
Allison rinses peppers in the sink, peels carrots, breaks a bulb of garlic into cloves. She lays a cutting board on the counter, and absently tests the edge of a blade pulled from the knife block.
It didn’t console anyone to learn that Zac’s prognosis topped out at major cognitive disability. Perhaps someday they’ll find comfort in the knowledge—the conjecture, it will always be a guess—that no happy endings were possible.
A freak accident, people say. Hannah Freedman wasn’t the first or last to call it road rage, but to Allison that’s senseless chatter. There are no explanations. There will always be the vacuum where Zac used to be, empty as the hollow Brendan left when he disappeared.
Emptier.
She can’t look full-on at photographs of Zac surrounded by medics on the bridge deck, but neither can Allison put the scene out of her mind. Then there are the images from that festering prison outside Baghdad. Bound, beaten Iraqis being attacked with dogs, stripped and stacked like cordwood. It’s clear now that government-sanctioned torture has knocked genetic engineering off the public map. Hannah got that one right. Everything they’ve done—what Zac died for—has vaporized in the glare of Abu Ghraib.
Even the research center bombing has dropped out of the news. Too bad for the government, given keener motive than usual for pumping threat into the nation’s tele-consciousness. At the Triangle, no one is reassured. As Nora keeps reminding them, the other shoe will drop soon enough, unless the Nebraska bombers are arrested first. Some wait with greater trepidation than others.
They have shredded and burned reams of paper, as Brendan sarcastically foretold. Marty offloaded data from their disks, hid what needed to be kept, scrubbed the hard drives clean. Motion-activated webcams now cling like cockroaches to the library ceiling, like red-eyed bats above the building’s gated stoop. A neighbor’s wireless LAN pipes their video streams to remote storage, circumventing a network cable likely to be cut when the Feds come calling. Allison argued the surveillance goes too far, but Nora is adamant. Recordings of sloppy search and seizure could prove a potent weapon in court. Allison has debated telling Nora and Marty what Christopher all but confessed outside the hospital. But they’re taking all possible precautions; she sees no benefit to widening their legal risk. Or to poisoning the others with her own dread.
She sets down the knife. Allison has filled a mixing bowl with diced eggplant and onion, carrot and bell pepper, crookneck squash as yellow as sunlight. She tosses the bright medley with salt, pepper, and a generous pour of olive oil. Spreads the vegetables onto cookie sheets. Slides them into the oven to roast. A pot of tomato sauce bubbles on the stove.
Buzz and Jonah have eased up on the Bitter Rockets. An Indian raga floats gently down the stairs. Jonah’s calmer tastes have prevailed, at least for now. But the music’s plaintive swell and haunting fade change nothing.
When the doorbell rings, Allison starts. It’s not like her to be so on edge. But perhaps Brendan hit that mark, too, in his fury outside the hospital. Nothing will ever be the same again.
She approaches the video screen Marty mounted in the stairwell, and sees a pair of trim, neatly suited women peering through the outside gate’s metal mesh. Allison immediately recognizes the inevitable. One of the women is holding something flat in her right hand. A wallet.
Allison clutches the banister, but a moment later finds herself riding an absolute calm. They knew this visit would come. She tiptoes upstairs, calling out urgently. Jonah appears at the far end of the hall.
“I think it’s the police. Don’t go near the windows.” She pitches her voice low. “Get Buzz, and bring him to the second floor, quick as you can. Listen carefully when I talk to them. If they’re cops, call Nora at work. She’ll know what to do.”
Jonah’s eyes widen. The doorbell rings again, long and insistent. “It’s okay,” she says. “Do as I ask, Jonah.”
“Mom, be careful.”
“You know I will.” She summons a smile from some former life, then turns and bangs down the stairs. “Coming,” she calls out. As if she hadn’t a care in the world. Allison steps onto the stoop. “Yes?”
Both women are wearing earpieces, audio tubes spiraling under their collars. Allison assumes there’s heat carpeting the neighborhood, that anything she says will be recorded by a sound truck down the street.
The one with the wallet responds. “Is this the residence of Christopher Kalman?”
“May I ask who you are?”
“Agent Roedell, Federal Bureau of Investigation.” She flashes an ID. “This is Agent McKinnock.”
“FBI,” Allison repeats, loudly, for Jonah’s benefit. Without turning away from the agents she raps on the door to the downstairs flat, then steps forward, hands plainly visible, showing her palms. “I didn’t see your identification clearly. May I see it again please?”
Agent Roedell snaps open her thin wallet and holds it to the cut steel of the gate. The partner’s hand hovers by her hip.
Allison takes a proper look at Roedell’s ID. “There won’t be any trouble,” she says, staring into the second agent’s eyes. McKinnock. The door to the downstairs flat opens. Natalie peers out, blinking into the light. Gregor is standing behind her. “These women are FBI agents,” Allison says. “I think you should listen in.”
“Sure,” Natalie says.
She was right to prepare them. Natalie is tough enough to pretend indifference. “You asked whether Christopher Kalman lives here,” Allison says.
“And you haven’t answered.” Roedell continues to speak for both agents.
“Chris lives here, yes.”
“Is he at home? We’d like to talk with him.”
“He’s not here now. It’s not for me to say, but I can’t imagine he’d want to talk without a lawyer present.”
“Open the gate,” Agent McKinnock says.
“I don’t believe I have an obligation to do that.”
“Mom?” Jonah is calling from the head of the stairs.
“Could one of you guys go see what’s up?” Allison asks over her shoulder. Natalie rounds the wall and ascends, calling out softly. “There are children upstairs,” Allison says to the agents. “Two teenage boys. I don’t want them exposed to a police matter.”
“We have a search warrant, ma’am.” Agent Roedell pulls a document from her jacket pocket.
“May I read it?”
The agents exchange a frustrated glance. Upstairs the telephone rings.
“Nobody’s going anywhere,” Allison says. “If you have a legal warrant, we will cooperate. I understand I have a right to read the warrant before I let you in.”
Agent Roedell unfolds the single sheet. Alli
son sees through the mesh that the paperwork cites the Triangle’s street address, but not the downstairs flat. She makes a show of reading closely.
“Jonah, Buzz—come downstairs now,” she calls out, halfway through the court order. She looks to Agent Roedell. “I want them with me when you go barging in.”
Leading with a forefinger, Allison continues to read, stalling. She recognizes Jonah’s step as he descends with Natalie. Only the two of them. “Where’s Buzz?” she asks when they reach the stoop.
Natalie replies. “Leona just called. Chris was arrested at the office.”
Allison’s heart sinks.
Jonah leans to his mother’s ear and whispers. Agent Roedell folds the warrant and replaces it in her jacket. Agent McKinnock tilts her head, pressing a hand to her earpiece.
“The other boy tried to escape out the back,” McKinnock announces. “He’s in custody. Open the gate, Ms. Rayle.”
Allison hasn’t given her name. “Nat, Gregor, go inside and lock your door,” she says. “The warrant is for our address, not yours.”
Jonah presses up against her.
Gregor takes a step back. “Allison?” he asks.
“Go inside.” She speaks as if she has no doubts.
Allison drapes a protective arm around her son’s shoulder. With her other hand she reaches for the latch.
EPILOGUE
August 2007
The AgBio bombing was a loss: empty, humiliating, a bitter defeat. Our impotence was laid bare. All the trouble I took, a lifetime of secrecy and dissembling, of positioning myself. All vanquished.
Everything I ever sneered at in my brother’s openly activist life has come back to bite me. And if that isn’t enough, Christopher has been collared by secret police. Eight days after the bombing, the government spirited him off to they-wouldn’t-say-where.
I set loose a monster. Christopher is paying the price.
It’s my fault our father spent his last years hovering on the edge of nervous breakdown. It’s my fault that Christopher is strapped to a gurney someplace, someplace dark and infested with vermin, wired up for electroshock more likely than not. Maybe they’re keeping him awake for days on end, maybe they’re raping him with police batons. I can only imagine, because why would the government tell?
The government isn’t telling, and nobody knows it’s my fault. Does the fact that I’m to blame and nobody knows give me a card to play? Or does the truth that I haven’t stepped up and confessed make me a sniveling coward?
Chagall has vanished.
I drove my father to hysteria and sent my brother to hell on Earth.
How’s a man supposed to repent for that?
—
I am writing these words in late summer. The house where Christopher and I grew up is silent. Sold. Escrow closes in a few days, and I’ll walk out our door for the very last time.
An extrajudicial cabal swallowed my brother whole on the sixth of May, 2004. How all that went down, what we know of events that led to his government-sponsored disappearance, everything we’ve tracked or deduced afterward—that’s the puzzle I’ve been piecing together these past three years. It took patience, especially to win the trust of Christopher’s housecomrades, who knew just how much my brother despised me. They thought it was family duty that brought Marshall Kalman to their door again, that I was acting out of unwelcome obligation. Only after months of common cause, of running into brick walls right alongside Allison and the others, did they begin to take me seriously. To tell me what they know and what they guess.
Leona saw it happen. She told how the men who snatched him flashed badges as they burst into the Reporter’s office, but never named their agency. They drew weapons, she said, shouted the staff onto the floor, hauled Christopher up off his belly and made for the exit. Barry Bortman, the newspaper’s publisher, tried to block the plainclothes thugs as they dragged Christopher away. For his trouble, they knocked the old man flat on his ass.
Meanwhile Duboce Avenue was crawling with FBI. As Allison had guessed, Roedell and McKinnock were only the advance guard. Marty’s webcam recorded twenty-two agents coming through the front door in four minutes. Then one of the goons ripped the device off its mount. They scoured the place, turned it upside down, sealed off Christopher’s room and the library, and confiscated every piece of digital media they could find. Computers, optical discs, flash drives, even Jonah’s MP3 player.
Allison and Nora told how they found books scattered, desks emptied, dresser drawers dumped, closets upended, and the kitchen a disaster when the Feds finished late that night. Zealous lawmen had dumped Allison’s tomato sauce into the sink, seeking evidence among the diced onions at the bottom of the pot. Marty’s countersurveillance technology was ripped off the windows and walls. Buzz had gone missing after the Feds let him go. Days later, Allison and Jonah tracked down his friend Jaggery in the Haight. Buzz had come through the neighborhood frantic, he said, like his pants were on fire, desperate for a ride out of town. He might have hitched north, to Portland, Jaggery told Allison. Or maybe east, to Denver.
It’s been three years, and Christopher has not been charged with a crime. Civil rights powerhouse Tracey Braun is his lawyer, but they’re permitted only occasional meetings, under full surveillance. We know now that the government is warehousing Christopher at a high-security prison in Atwater. Braun isn’t permitted to carry messages in or out, not even for family. He reports that my brother is gaunt, coherent, easily upset, and in solitary lockdown.
That’s as far as it’s gotten. A few compromised meetings. No charges, no hearings, no trial.
The Triangle has not faltered from the struggle to rescue Christopher. They engaged local activists; they got Amnesty International on board; they rattled the cages of newspaper editors in San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, and LA. They made peace with Meg Wyneken, who has thrown her weight behind the media campaigns, the letter writing, the dead-end hearings in Federal District Court.
Until he died of a heart attack last fall, our father served as the family’s face to media. Christopher’s illegal imprisonment killed him. The doctors called it “stress-induced cardiomyopathy,” but strip away the Latin and you’re left with “the government took my son hostage.”
They should have written exactly that on Dad’s death certificate.
—
Some weeks after the kidnapping I received an e-card for Flag Day. Flag Day! If that wasn’t strange enough, the name of the sender looked like spam scramble, something translated by a Romanian with terrible English. I nearly deleted it unread, but then the message came into focus: Fraturnel Catastrafee. This was the start of my reevaluation. Christopher wasn’t nearly so helpless as I believed all those years. He must have scheduled the card between the day Chagall struck and his own arrest. I opened it and found a cryptic payload, literally. Two hexadecimal strings and concise instruction: “Keep carefully, keep secret. More to follow.” Christopher had also squeezed in reference to an obscure event from our past, to prove the communication was his. I won’t share that. Some details are best left a little vague.
More electronic cards followed, months apart, like slow-release breadcrumbs. They promised a key piece of information to be delivered through his attorney, but Braun had nothing.
I didn’t tell anyone about the e-cards. I tried to be a friend to Allison and Nora and Marty, and did everything I could to help keep Christopher’s plight in the media and the courts. I corresponded with Brendan. I met Leona. I was trying to get to know who my brother had been, way too late. Eventually the e-cards stopped. Brendan agreed to meet me in a bar out in Concord about a year after everything went down. Allison arranged it, and Marty drove me there—Brendan didn’t want me to know the location beforehand. He described late-night walks with Christopher, and their drive up to Eddie Bourgeaut’s place, the hinting around Christopher did. Brendan put pieces together after the fact. He feels bad for my brother, not so angry anymore. He spent long enough in Tlaxitlán to know a
thing or two about captivity. About betrayal. And he knows, as we all do, that Christopher’s got it worse.
Two years into my brother’s incarceration I stumbled across an 80mm mini-CD folded into a recipe clipped from an old newspaper, in our mother’s recipe box. It was labeled in Christopher’s handwriting with a blue marker: Chagall (1 of 2). A quick spin-up revealed the disk was filled with images of work by the eponymous artist. A single file—deceptively named ParisWindow.jpg—was actually just half an image. Half an image and then some. Paris par la fenêtre, the painting whose reproduction hung above our kitchen table all the years of our childhood. And, grafted onto a rootstock of digitized art, several megabytes of encrypted data.
There was one other file on the disk. It was simply named “brother,” and it was also encrypted. When I ran the file through an MD5 generator it yielded one of the hexadecimal strings Christopher sent in that first e-card: an MD5 hash. That proved that the same person who sent the electronic greeting had planted the CD. The e-card’s other hexadecimal string was a key that decrypted “brother,” but didn’t unscramble the data hidden behind Paris par la fenêtre.
Much of the history Christopher detailed in “brother” is—how to put it?—dramatized in the account you’ve just read. Christopher described how he was contacted anonymously, and enumerated exchanges with the correspondent he nicknamed Chagall. He laid out conditions established in his dealings with the saboteur. Christopher speculated, in brutally self-critical retrospect, on ways the government might tie him to the Nebraska bombing: the Triangle’s bridge action, analysis of his writing style, intercepted communications correlated with surveillance video. Or maybe a call to the FBI tip line from Suvali, uncertain of whom she really met in that Marina café; or from Buzz in a fit of fear and anger; or from Buzz’s humiliated mom.
The rest of “brother” was a set of instructions. Christopher had thought out how to offer a ransom to his abductors. Again, a deeper game than I knew to expect from him. The mass of data fused to ParisWindow.jpg is a scrambled half, he wrote, of e-mail and chat transcripts he kept to document communication with Chagall. He held onto them as insurance, protected by software that renders the transcripts indecipherable unless a strong key is applied to both halves of the data at once. Christopher didn’t explain how to find the other half of the communication records. I assume that’s a message he intended to convey through his lawyer.
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