Tarnished Image (27 page)

“For safety reasons, we had positioned ourselves to the east side of the building facing the ocean. The wind was more intense than expected, but it was the best way to monitor the incoming surge. It came in all right. Bob and Donna were videotaping the ocean as the surge arrived. We watched as the water along the beach began to rise. An eighteen-foot swell rushed over the beach and onto the streets. It carried with it small boats and pieces of beach structures. Bob and Donna were supposed to stay back in the parking structure and shoot through the open areas of the walls, but Donna got too excited. When the water came in she cried, ‘I can’t see enough.’ Before anyone could do anything, she stepped right to the wall. A piece of corrugated metal from a nearby auto shop flew through the opening. It struck her on the forehead. Crushed her skull. She was dead before she hit the floor.”

Osborn’s eyes moistened, and his voice became raspy. “Bob was heartbroken. We all were. He sat on the wet concrete and held her in his arms, rocking back and forth, back and forth.”

“And you were trapped in the parking structure,” David said gently.

“Yes. The storm surge had flooded the streets, and the winds were too high to move her even if she had survived the accident.”

“What happened then?”

“Bob dropped out of school, and I began to withdraw.
My peers never said anything outright, but their glances and forced smiles said enough. It was my team and my responsibility to make it all work.”

“But your team knew the risks when they went into it,” David said.

“Did they? Donna was nineteen years old. What did she know of danger? I was the one with a Ph.D., and I didn’t have any idea how bad it would be.” He rubbed his eyes hard. “Because of me, one of my students became a statistic in the study of hurricanes.”

“I had no idea, Osborn. None at all. I’m not sure what to say.”

“Actually, I didn’t come here to listen to you. I came so that you could listen to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“David, I almost cashed it all in. I was willing to cast off my research, resign my teaching position, and go drive a truck. I couldn’t look at my peers, knowing what they thought of me. But I didn’t. I know how much this must weigh on you, but you must understand that not everyone is against you. I thought I was the butt of every joke told by my colleagues, until one came to see me. Dr. Julius Houston. He was the head of geophysics at the school. He stopped by my office, sat down, and said, ‘Osborn, listen. We are people of science. We study, we research, we write what we learn. We’re very good at those things, but like most people we are very poor at human relations. Nobody hates you. No one resents you. It could have happened to any one of us. Volcanologists lose people almost every year. That happens when you hang around volcanoes. Some sciences require risk. Yours is one of them. Now leave yourself alone and get back to work.’

“He was right,” Osborn continued. “And I did just that. I sought out counseling to help me deal with the emotions, and I dedicated my life to the study of catastrophe. But this time I understood the human element.”

“I’m glad Dr. Houston was there for you,” David said.

“I’m trying to do the same for you. I’m not good at these things. Physics, math, I’m good at. This kind of thing is beyond my understanding. But I do know this. I almost ruined my life by letting things happen
to
me rather than making things happen
for
me.”

Osborn’s last statement splashed on David like cold water. It was simple, but keenly insightful.
Is that what I’m doing?
David asked himself.
Am I just letting things happen?
He had not been completely passive, but he had not been as proactive as he could be.

“Thanks, Osborn,” David said sincerely. “That means a lot to me, and it also makes great sense.”

“Well,” Osborn said standing to his feet. “I have a storm to monitor. I hope I wasn’t butting in.”

“Not at all,” David replied as he too stood.

Osborn walked to the door, then turned back to David. “Those people in Bangladesh and India and Cuba need our help. I hope you can find a way to do that. They may speak different languages, but they are all Donnas who are dying much, much too soon.”

“We’ll find a way, Osborn. I promise you that we’ll find a way.”

Osborn flashed a small smile and left.

David sat down again and looked at his Bible. His eyes fell on another Beatitude.

Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.

Then he read on:
Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and say falsely all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

Something happened deep inside David, at the place where the soul touches the heart, where the spirit touches the mind. He was no longer angry, no longer bitter. A change was happening, an alchemy of the spirit. What mattered was not revenge or even absolution, but the work to which God had called him.

Pictures of people he had never seen flashed in his mind—images of Bangladeshi, Indian, and Cuban families, each struggling for survival, wishing for the simplest basics of water, aspirin, and penicillin.

David turned the pictures over and took in their garish images. He was tired of waiting, weary of being passive. It was time to act. He had not chosen this battle, but he would not walk away from it. His commitment to fight back grew in intensity. There was more at stake here than his reputation, more than jail time. Lives hung in the balance, and his tormentors had tipped the scales.
Well
, David thought,
it’s time to tip them back.

Rajiv watched as the red-tinted sun dropped behind the western horizon streaking a cloudless sky with pink. It was the first time in two days that he had bothered to notice the sun or sky, or even to think that his sunset was someone else’s sunrise. He wondered about the “someone elses.” Did they know of the rubble among which he now walked? Did they care about the decomposing corpses still buried in debris and
mud? Would they send aid to battle the disease and starvation that was certain to come?

A male child, no more than five years old, sat on a mud-caked piece of lumber, sucking on dirty fingers. He stared emotionlessly across the devastated, alien-looking landscape. Rajiv realized that the boy sat in silence because the same wave that had destroyed his town with its incalculable weight of water had also destroyed the child’s spirit. What the wave had done instantly to the buildings and homes of Puri, it had done more slowly to the boy’s mind. He was now numb, hungry, and patiently waiting for his parents to find him—parents who would never arrive.

A pair of Red Crescent workers struggled past him, carrying a stretcher on which lay the grotesque form of a dead woman. They too were weary, having worked nonstop for endless hours.
No one could be trained for this
, Rajiv thought.
Not this kind of pain, this kind of suffering.
He watched as the two workers, burdened by the load they carried in their hands and the one they carried in their hearts, walked by the boy with the dirty fingers in his mouth. He looked up at them expectantly, but they took no notice of him. Rajiv was sure that they had seen another child like him just a hundred meters away and would see yet another like him a hundred meters farther down.

Rajiv understood. For two days he had lain immobile in the yard of what had been his home, keeping close to him the only possessions that mattered: the tricycle of his missing daughter and the water-stained picture of his family. He had wept. He had cursed Allah. He had been smothered in depression. He had refused help. He had wished for death.

Slowly, however, reason and resolve melted their way back
into his life. Now he could see the damage beyond his own home. Now he understood that many stood in an identical place to his. Rajiv began to walk.

At first he walked mindlessly, shutting out all that he saw, lost in his own grief and bitterness. But slowly he became aware of all the devastation that was around him. The destruction was incomprehensible. He fought the urge to seal himself off from reality, from pain. He forced himself to look, to see, to understand the wreckage of life and property.

He saw enough to scar the most insensitive of souls. But he continued to look, forcing himself to see what his mind did not want to see.

Rajiv continued his walk, his eyes down, his soul weighted by pain and sorrow. The boy who had looked up at the two Red Crescent workers looked up at him as he came close. Rajiv gazed down into the boy’s deep brown eyes. He saw a hollowness there, an unfathomable emptiness.

There were too many boys like that one; too many little girls to help. He was just one man, a man whose life had been stripped from him in a violent act he had been forced to witness.

Too many lost little boys.

Too many helpless orphans.

Too many to help. Too much pain to ease. Too little resources to offer.

Rajiv walked on and thought of his family, of little Jaya, his lost little girl with the infectious giggle and the eyes that danced so beautifully when she laughed. He saw her, felt her, asleep on his lap as she did each night he was home. He could hear the simple, gentle serenade of her breathing, could see the rising and falling of her little chest.

The burning returned to Rajiv’s soul, the conflagration of
grief. He stopped walking. Tears, which he thought had been spent, once again poured from his eyes. He wished for death. He wanted to lie down on the ground and pray that it would swallow him whole.

But Rajiv did not collapse. Instead he turned and walked back to the silent little boy and took him in his arms.

Perhaps
, he hoped to himself,
someone is holding my Jaya right now.

The little boy wrapped his arms around Rajiv’s neck, squeezed weakly, and then lay his head on his shoulder. He was instantly asleep.

Rajiv started walking again.

“Not to put too fine a point on it,” Calvin said. “I think you’re out of your mind.”

“I knew you would feel that way,” David said as he turned the wheel of the white BMW and directed the car north onto Interstate 5. “But I still think it needs to be done.” He brought the car up to freeway speeds and then settled into the far right lane.

“I don’t agree,” Calvin said with agitation. “We should stay the course. Take each legal step as it comes our way. And,” he added emphatically, “we need to get those electronic bugs out of your office and the conference room. If we had taken them out when the electronic sweep first discovered them, we wouldn’t be having this conversation in a moving car. I don’t know why you wanted them left there.”

“Because it’s our only contact with my tormentors,” David said firmly. “Granted, the contact is only one way, but at least we could get a message to them if needed.”

“And what would you say to them, David? ‘Hey, guys, fun
is fun, but it’s time you stopped trying to destroy me and my firm’? I’m sure they would respond immediately.”

“You know what your problem is, Calvin?”

“Yes, I attract crazy clients,” he answered harshly. “Mr. Barringston said you were a bright man, quick on the uptake. At first I agreed with him, but what you’re suggesting makes me rethink that.”

“All right, maybe I am crazy. Maybe this is insane, but your problem is that you think too much like a lawyer.”

“I
am
a lawyer.”

“You were also a successful FBI agent. What happened to that man? The one who wanted to see the bad guys behind bars and the good guys living their lives without terrorism.”

“He’s dead.”

“No, he’s not,” David countered quickly. “He’s sitting next to me. Calvin, this goes beyond the normal criminal case. Many, many lives are tethered to what happens to Barringston Relief, and I can’t allow this to go on month after month. You know better than I that this could take a year in trial or more. I can’t allow Barringston Relief’s assets to remain frozen much longer. It would spell doom to a great many people.”