Dead Man's Rule (33 page)

“Stick a fork in them. They’re done,” Sergei crowed during replays of the Bears’ fullback pushing his way into the end zone for the go-ahead score.

“They’ll come back,” replied Will. “Or they would, anyway, if the zebras would start calling holding on the Bears’ safeties. It’s starting to look like professional wrestling out there.”

“Wow. The game isn’t even over and already the excuses are starting,” Ben said with a grin.

Will opened his mouth to continue his defense of the Lions, but before he could say anything, Ben’s cell phone rang. Ben glanced at the caller ID and saw an unfamiliar number.

That’s odd,
he thought.
Who would be calling my cell phone on Thanksgiving
?

Tony Simeon sat in his den as Pierre LeGrand went about his work. The Bears-Lions game was on the TV in front of Tony, but he wasn’t really watching. He was thinking about Dan Wood’s funeral.

Dan’s colleagues and many friends, including Tony, had spoken to the packed church. For once, Tony’s silver tongue had failed him. He’d spoken haltingly and briefly, searching for words and struggling to collect his thoughts.

After the eulogies, Pastor Johan Wilhelm had given a brief sermon. Tony knew him well through having served with him on several charitable boards of the sort that offered good business-development prospects. One part of the sermon had stuck in his mind: “We mourn today, but we do not mourn for Dan. We mourn our loss of Dan. We are saddened that the light he brought to this world has gone out—but we mourn him no more than a caterpillar mourns a butterfly.”

After the service, Tony had stopped by Pastor Wilhelm’s office. It was a large, slightly shabby room crammed with books; it would have served equally well as the office of a college professor.

“Come in, Tony,” the pastor said. “What can I do for you?”

“I’d like your advice on what I suppose is a spiritual matter. Dan’s death troubled me a great deal.”

“Yes, I could tell you were overcome with emotion during your eulogy.”

“I was overcome, but not by grief. It was guilt and fear and . . .
Perspective
is the best word that occurs to me.”

Pastor Wilhelm looked at Tony over the tops of his glasses. “What do you mean?”

Tony took a deep breath. This weight had sat heavily on his chest since the day of Dan’s death. “When I saw that out-of-control cab, my first instinct was to save myself. Perhaps if I’d had a different instinct, I might have saved Dan. That does not speak well of me, and I know it. I know it in the very roots of my being, and I’m afraid of what it means for me.” He paused with the ghost of a smile on his lips. “Not all caterpillars become butterflies.”

“No, they don’t,” Pastor Wilhelm had said. “But don’t you think you’re being too hard on yourself? At worst, you made one split-second wrong decision that I’m sure you would take back if you could. The fate of your soul is not decided by such things.”

“So what does decide it?”

“Your faith. Your surrender of yourself to God. That surrender begins with a decision to follow Jesus Christ, but it doesn’t end there. It is a process, a struggle that lasts your entire life. During that struggle, you will have bad days. But without the power and mercy of God, you’d have nothing
but
bad days. When you stumble, all you can do is pick yourself up, confess your sin, and pray for forgiveness and the strength to do better in the future.” He looked at Tony compassionately. “And try not to get discouraged.”

Tony sighed. “The problem isn’t that I had a bad day. The problem is that the more I think about what I did, the more certain I am that I was simply doing what came naturally to me. It wasn’t a mistake; it was an
instinct
. I chose to save myself instead of Dan because I’m used to choosing myself. What happened on that sidewalk was a test. I failed it, and a good man is dead as a result.”

Pastor Wilhelm had given Tony a measuring look and smiled. “Congratulations, Tony! You have just discovered that you are a bad man.” Tony had been taken aback and a little offended. “So am I,” continued the minister. “So are all of us. Our hope in Christ is not based on
our
goodness, but on his. It is the guilty who need a redeemer, not the innocent.”

As difficult as urban surveillance could be, Ibrahim decided, it was child’s play compared to suburban surveillance. There was no place to hide on these wide, well-kept lawns and quiet streets. Worse, there was no anonymity. No one would notice a carefully nondescript man walking every few hours along the same stretch of busy city sidewalk, for example. But a stranger wandering around a residential neighborhood would be followed by more than one pair of concerned eyes. On the bright side, at least he was able to confirm that there were no FBI agents lurking outside the target’s home.

Ibrahim finally settled on an old brick grade school about a quarter of a mile from the lawyer’s home. The school was closed for Thanksgiving and was situated on a small rise that offered a good view of the house. He parked his van out of sight between a dumpster and some bushes. Then he cautiously made his way to the rear door of the school that opened onto the playground. The lock was so old and loose that he almost didn’t need to pick it. He was inside in seconds.

His feet made a soft
slap-slap
on the linoleum floor tiles as he jogged along the half-lit halls. Brightly colored announcements and artwork hanging on the walls rustled like autumn leaves as he passed. He looked quickly from side to side as he went, searching for a staircase.
There
.

He took the steps two at a time, then stopped when he reached the top. He quickly surveyed the second floor and walked into a north-facing classroom. No good—a pine tree obscured his sight line to the house unless he stood close to the window. The next room had an unobstructed view, and he quickly went to work.

Twenty small desks were arranged in clusters of four in different parts of the classroom. For his work area, Ibrahim picked a cluster in front of a large bulletin board festooned with construction-paper cutouts of children’s hands decorated to look like turkeys. The cluttered background would break up his silhouette, making him more difficult to see if someone happened to look in through the window.

He set up his tripod and rifle on one of the desks, which bore a hand-printed sign announcing that it belonged to Anna G. He sat down in Anna’s chair and looked through the rifle’s powerful scope. He trained the crosshairs on the target’s front door, made a slight adjustment for the breeze blowing outside, and waited.

At the end of their meeting, Pastor Wilhelm had given Tony the standard materials he provided to those he called “seekers”—C.S. Lewis’s
Mere Christianity
and a list of key Bible passages. Tony read through them in one weekend, then went through them again more slowly. A week later, he asked Pastor Wilhelm for other recommendations. He suggested Saint Augustine’s
Confessions
and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s
The Cost of Discipleship
, which Tony promptly bought and devoured.

Reading these books made Tony curiously nostalgic. He had never ceased to believe in God, in the same way he had never ceased to believe in chocolate sodas—both had been weekend fixtures during his childhood but had faded from his life as he grew up. Every Sunday morning, his father had packed the family into their well-maintained 1938 Ford Tudor and driven them to Saint Thomas Episcopal Church. They all sat dutifully in hard, dark-varnished pews for an hour and a half. Then they piled back into the car to drive home, where they listened to the Bears game on the radio and Tony’s mother prepared Sunday dinner. That was how respectable middle-class families in the Chicago area spent their Sundays in the 1940s.

But when Tony went away to college, he soon discovered that his professors and fellow students viewed his childhood faith as old-fashioned and simplistic. And, truth be told, Tony’s childhood faith
was
simplistic. It amounted to little more than a collection of Bible stories, some bromides about loving his neighbor, and a collection of half-explained prohibitions against cards, tobacco, and alcohol—all staples of life at a state college.

Tony hadn’t consciously rejected his faith. Rather, he’d simply packed it into a dark corner of his mind and forgotten about it. He had outgrown it in the same way that he had outgrown the suits he used to wear each Sunday to church.

Now, for the first time, Tony saw Christianity presented by men who backed their faith not with simple Sunday-school axioms but with powerful, clearly reasoned arguments.

If they could speak even half as well as they could write,
Tony thought on more than one occasion,
they would have made outstanding lawyers.

A week later, Tony had met Pastor Wilhelm for lunch at the Metropolitan Club. They’d sat at Tony’s customary table by the ceiling-to-floor window, low clouds wrapping the club in an opaque white fog. The two men made small talk for several minutes, chatting about mutual friends and a recent charity dinner they had both attended. When their salads arrived, Tony broached the topic he had wanted to discuss.

“Thank you for recommending those books, Pastor. I’ve read them and found them quite illuminating.”

“You’re a fast reader.”

“Not particularly. One of the advantages of being a senior partner is that junior lawyers are always willing to do anything I don’t want to—and probably do it better. So if something important comes up and I decide that I should spend most of my week reading and thinking, I can do that.”

“I see. And did something important come up?”

“Yes. In fact, the most important thing possible came up: God. I suppose he has always been there, but I had never seen him. Or, more accurately, I had never looked. And now . . . now I find that he is much more real and near and alive than I ever imagined. And that changes everything. It’s really quite inconvenient.”

Pastor Wilhelm laughed. “Change is always hard, particularly for men of our age.”

“It truly is. I had a terrible time when my doctor told me to quit smoking twenty years ago. I have a feeling this is going to be much worse.”

“I’m very happy for you, my friend. You have made the most important decision of your life, and you made it right.”

“Thank you, Johan. It’s good to have a purpose bigger than winning in court, particularly since I’m not likely to be able to do that for much longer.”

“Have you given any thought to what that purpose might be?”

“Yes, I have.”

“Would you like to talk about it?”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t. At least, not now.”