Resolve (25 page)

The shower at home was steaming and the hour of dampness had pruned my fingers. The steam filled the bathroom and clouded the mirrors. Water washing over water. No real cleansing, just immersion. Facts floating around in the steam, unable to find each other. Unable to connect. The rush of escape was fading and my entire body raged with pain.

Randy had searched the building for the exact apartment in order to find me.

He didn’t know where it was, because he hadn’t been there.

He didn’t kill V.

My message? He received a message with my name on it threatening to blackmail him? Somebody knew that I knew. V had told her killer everything. The flash drive was history. The killer had it. But I knew what was on it.

I was the threat, and the killer had unleashed an angry desperate man on me. What did Randy think that I knew? Merely about the plagiarism, or did he think I had more? It didn’t matter. I couldn’t ask him. Somebody had pulled his strings and counted on one or both of us dying.

This was hand-to-hand combat. Somebody was using my strength against me. They knew the source of my power—I would keep pushing. I would always keep coming. Pursuing. And he just kept pulling. Using my force as a weapon. Letting my momentum pull me right past him, into one obstacle after another.

No more mistakes. Cut the strings. Randy didn’t do it. One more kill, but one less suspect.

It’s always good to look at the bright side.

Mile 19

D
escending through Homewood West the houses stand a little taller. Torn sofas in the front yard are gradually replaced by shrubs. A local business appears on one block, two on the next. A gulp of water from a volunteer’s hand washes down a tasteless piece of my pastry. Continuing hurts, but stopping would hurt worse. This is when the body just keeps moving because it doesn’t know any better. The autopilot is turned on, but can’t be fully trusted. The sun has pushed my shadow in front of me and the dim silhouette is pulling my chest toward the ground. I have to run tall. Maintain form. Don’t even let your shadow see your pain.

Frankstown Avenue is the start of the runway to the finish. The sun on my back means the city is to my front. A few more hills will taunt me, but most of the course will slouch into submission if I can just keep moving.

Ignore the shoulder.

Ignore the legs.

Remember the mission.

Liberty Avenue is up ahead. The beginning of the civilization we choose to accept. Not rich, not poor, the last of the middle-class warriors. Finding the right pace is becoming more difficult than I thought. I have to move slowly enough to stay behind him and fast enough to outrun my doubts. For the first time, I feel them gaining on me—honing in on my location and trying to lock on. I thought I could outrun them, but now I’m not so sure. Can I pull this off? Have I left out any details? Did I miss something crucial? Something damning? It has to be perfect. The worst questions of all creep into my thoughts.

Am I right?

Should I be doing this?

Am I any better than him?

This can’t be the ideal. This is something much more savage. If Dostoyevsky were writing my story, he would have my conscience compel me to fall to my knees and answer for my sins. Confess all and the human spirit will overcome. He would have me lower my head in defeat to the detectives and unload all of my burdens. The ideal is right in front of me. I can still touch it. Questions hit every time my soles compress against the warming road. Stop this madness before it gets any worse. How many hearts have to stop beating to make this right?

I think about Lindsay. The fear that must have been in her eyes when she realized she was overpowered. Her panicked lungs begging for air. Her desperate clawing, knowing it was all coming to an end.

I think about V. Pigtails dipped in blood after what must have been a torturous few minutes with a sadist wielding a fireplace poker. The fear. The pleading. Any remaining innocence extinguished. She gave up everything and it still wasn’t enough for him. Only death was payment enough.

I think about Steven. The blackness in his eyes. The premeditated attack from nowhere. His arrogance. I think about that day in my office when he held up that paper with the misspelled Latin phrase. He pointed to those words with condescending disbelief. He couldn’t believe anybody would misspell that phrase. I mentally focus on those words. I can still read his correction, written in big red letters.

Lex Talionis.

The law of retribution.

An eye for an eye.

Exact reciprocity.

Doubt will have to wait. I have only a few more hills to go, and the wind is at my back.

I
found Brent lecturing in the auditorium of Voorhees Building. The screens behind his head held images of explosions, damaged buildings, bloody sidewalks, and weeping faces. Block letters, spelling out names of locations, identified each tragedy. Lebanon, Cairo, Madrid, Paris, London, Mumbai, New York, Tel Aviv, Munich, Washington, D.C. The screens transitioned and images changed along with the names. New nightmares in new settings.

I stood in the back and looked down the filled rows of the academic arena. Not one student was texting, emailing, or chatting with a neighbor. All eyes were focused on the man in the suit guiding them through this class on terrorism. The day’s topic of assassination was right up the former Secret Service man’s alley.

Walking back and forth on the stage, the lecturer effortlessly discussed the subject without the assistance of notes. He tried to keep the listeners involved by eliciting their opinions.

“Now, let’s look at these scenes. Some of these targets were assassinated and some survived the attempt. Ford even survived two attempts.” Lancaster directed a thumb toward the screens. Names like Caesar, Ford, Reagan, Sadat, Rabin, Truman and others situated themselves into precise positions on top of the images. “What do all these attempts have in common?”

A male student in the second row answered first in a serious, yet questioning tone.

“The attackers were all crazy?”

A few snickers rose up throughout the auditorium.

Brent silenced the light laughs with a raised hand and a smile.

“No, no . . . don’t laugh. Many successful or would-be assassins have been mentally ill. It could certainly be argued that the attacks on Ford were perpetrated by insane individuals even though the courts disagreed. Any other guesses?”

A moment of stumped quietness passed before Brent relented.

“All these attacks took place when the target was stationary. What I mean is, the person attacked was either on foot at a particular site or seated at a designated location when the attacker or attackers struck. Most attempts occur at a point where the target is either coming from or going to, and not between those points.”

“What about JFK?” yelled a rumpled-looking young man near the back row. When he leaned up I could see a shirt with the logo of a mixed martial arts company that had become popular.

“Oh, don’t get me wrong. There have been several attempts made on targets in moving vehicles, but they aren’t quite as common. There are a couple of reasons why. Would anybody like to venture a guess as to what those reasons are?”

“It’s harder to hit a moving target.” came one response from the middle of the sea.

“That’s one,” agreed the professor.

Thoughtful faces stared at the screens.

Brent paused for a few seconds and then said, “The second one is easy.
Predictability.
Most of the time an assassin knows where the target will be coming
from
or going
to.
Whether it’s Caesar sitting in the Senate or Reagan exiting the same Hilton hotel he had been to a hundred times, it is predictability that becomes our adversary.”

With a slight touch of a button the screens changed to a map of Washington, D.C. Two buildings were circled.

“So let’s say that the target lives here.” Brent used a laser pointer to identify a street in Washington’s Northwest quadrant. “And an assassin knows that the target is going to be here.” The green dot moved to a block in Southeast. “Do you think the attacker would rather try to anticipate which of these fifty different routes the target might take,” the dot bounced all over the nation’s capital. “Or, do you think he would prefer to set up at one of these fixed locations.”

Nobody answered. Nobody needed to.

“Predictability
is what gets people killed. Now does that mean that threats should be ignored along the routes? Of course not. People in the security business have a tendency to drop their guard when they are in between the departure point and destination. That should never happen. Those of you who go on to work in law enforcement or security would be well served to remember that.”

Following a brief look at his watch, the speaker dismissed the class with a reminder about a reading assignment. As the students filtered out, he looked up at me and nodded hello.

On the stage, we shook hands.

“Hello, Brent. It’s good to see you.”

“Same here. Your face seems to have healed up nicely.”

When he said it, I saw his eyes move to the fresh bruise above my left ear which my short haircut did nothing to conceal. He seemed to be in a good mood, and there was no indication that word had gotten to him about Randy’s death. If I was right, I still had a few hours.

I liked Brent. There wasn’t anything phony about him and he didn’t put up with anybody who tried to snow him. Since I started at TRU we had gotten together on a few occasions when the weather kept me from running, and I let him mop up the racquetball court with me. We weren’t close friends, but we were certainly friendly. Last year, I had tried unsuccessfully to get him to join my running group. Boy, was I glad now that it didn’t work out.

He gestured to a desk at the corner of the stage and said, “Well, I brought the paperwork with me, and there isn’t another class in here for a couple of hours. Want to knock it out right here?”

I agreed, and let him have the “control side” of the desk. Nothing to fear. Just a formality.

Brent asked me to give a recounting of my initial comments to the police about Steven and his subsequent attack on me. Despite having gotten no sleep the previous night, I told the story perfectly, leaving out all the right details. I was afraid that Brent would slip back into law enforcement mode and start asking more pointed questions, but he didn’t. A half an hour passed before I’d finished the story and Brent had written out my statement. He asked me to read it, and if I agreed with the content, to sign the document at the bottom. I did, and I did. Packing up the papers, Brent stood and I mirrored him.

“I’ll type this up later and get you to sign the final version. Do you have a fax at home?”

I told him I did and gave him the number.

“It must suck being on that side of the table.”

“It does,” I said.

“Every time I had to take a polygraph or get re-interviewed for my security clearance, I walked out of there feeling guilty for breathing.”

“I just hold my breath.”

We shared a tension-breaking laugh.

Smiling and putting a hand on my back, he said, “Come on. You look tired. Let’s go grab a cup of coffee. If you promise not to whack any grad students on the way, I’ll even pay.”

“I can’t make any promises. I’m a little irritable until I have two cups.”

We walked out of the building into sunlight that was drying out the night’s rain. We were surrounded by a return to normalcy that I knew was about to be disrupted by more news of death. When the news about Randy made its rounds, the school would be in a frenzy. Three TRU people—dead in a matter of weeks. Another girl at a nearby university—found bludgeoned. Parents would flood the university switchboards demanding action. Police patrols would double if not triple. Reporters would write heartless headlines and teleprompter jockeys would paint themselves with sorrowful looks as they spoke through a camera to a rattled populace.

Brent looked up at the struggling sun as we stood on concrete steps that unfolded down to an active pedestrian-filled street.

After a long inhalation, Brent spoke. “I think spring is almost upon us. It’s about time. Winters in Atlanta were sure a lot easier. Hell, even D.C. was a little better.”

He looked down the street at some approaching runners.

“Isn’t that your running group?”

I tried to focus my eyes on the passing runners. They were making a turn around the corner.

Three of them.

Three.

I could see Jacob and Aaron paired together, talking and smiling. It looked like Jacob turned his head just enough to address the runner trailing them.

Speechless, I stood and stared as the new addition appeared behind Jacob and Aaron, and then vanished around a brick building.

“Well, what do you know?” asked Brent. “You never told me that ol’ Silo was a runner.”

Still looking at the corner as if it was going to reveal something new, I could only answer, “I didn’t know he was.”

Mile 20

T
his is the wall. When you enter the community of runners, you always hear them talk about hitting the wall. The twentieth mile is that wall. Even for the most experienced runners, something happens at this point where the tank runs empty and the sleek sports car you were cruising along in becomes an antiquated contraption. Some people are limping; others are flat on the side of the road. The medical crews were wisely placed in the middle of this mile so they could attend to the delirious and unconscious. A lady in a pink tank top is bent over crying. Her hands are on her knees and tears are splashing between her laces. Tomorrow, she’ll be embarrassed for crying and she will wonder what caused her to react that way. She’ll eventually realize that it wasn’t from pain or frustration, it was her mind and physical being saying—
enough.