Empire of Lies (30 page)

I nodded, but the fact they were talking to Lauren didn't exactly inspire confidence in me. I could just imagine her shrugging off Serena's story, shrugging off her danger.
I did much worse when I was her age.

The detective waggled the pencil at me thoughtfully. "Gimme this again, though—about why you didn't come to us before. Or NYPD or someone. After Serena tells you about the Diggs kid in the swamp, you just..."

He let that hang there, waiting for me to fill in the rest. I rubbed my eyes wearily. "I was bringing her to them—to the NYPD. I was bringing her back to her mother's house and then we were going to go to the police. That was the whole idea. Then when she jumped out of the car like that and ran away with these guys, I guess I thought—"

"You're talking about the same young gentlemen she went off with tonight."

"Only she didn't go off with them tonight. Tonight they came after her."

"Right, right, I mean, the ones that came after her. These are the same ones she went off with before."

"Yeah."

"Okay," he said. "So I'm just trying to picture this. You were bringing her to the police and then she ran off with these clowns in the Cadillac and so you figured the whole thing was just a cock-and-bull story. About the kid and the swamp and so forth."

"Right. I figured: If they'd really killed him, why would she run off with them like that? It didn't make sense. That's why I didn't come to the police myself."

"And if they did kill him, going to the police might put her in danger—there's that to consider."

"Right."

"Then you just happened to see Piersall's show about the Diggs kid on TV," said Fitzgerald. "Just total coincidence."

"Exactly."

"So you knew there might be something to it now. To Serena's story."

"Well..."

"But you still didn't call the police."

"The whole thing just seemed too crazy, I just—"

At this point, the phone on his desk rang. Fitzgerald tipped his hand at it as if to say,
See? Here we go. Everything is being taken care of.
My heart seized on this in hope: Maybe they had found her. Even if they hadn't, I was glad of the interruption, glad of the chance to stop babbling, trying to explain myself.

"Fitzgerald," the detective said into the phone. He listened. "Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely." He listened and frowned judiciously at me and held up a finger as if to say,
Wait. This is it. All things are being made clear.
But I couldn't shake the feeling that he had passed his rigid papal judgment on me and I had been found sadly lacking. I couldn't shake the feeling that his friendly, helpful demeanor was just a ploy to string me along until he could get at the truth—some other truth, I mean, besides the one I was telling him.

He hung up the phone. "Well, there we go," he said. That was all he said.

"Is there anything...?"

"Yeah, they're all over it. It's covered. The mother's given them some good leads, and they're following up on your story too so it's ... it looks like it's pretty much gonna be in their bailiwick now."
Your story,
I thought faintly.
They're following up on your story.
I forced this inner voice into silence almost before I heard it. "Whoever these gentlemen were she went off with, it's pretty
sure they're based in the city," Fitzgerald went on.
These gentlemen she went off with.
"Thing for you to do at this point is for one of my people to take you home so you can get some rest. NYPD'll probably want to talk to you in the morning."

"In the morning?" This is what I mean: Everything inside me screamed to take up the hunt at full throttle. The bad guys had Serena. She was in danger. They were getting away. If the police needed to talk to me in the city, shouldn't I get on the phone with them? Shouldn't the Long Island cops be racing me to Manhattan in a screaming squad car? The idea of going home, of just sitting there..."Maybe I should just go into town tonight—" I began.

"Ah, no, no, no. You'd just be sitting there like you're sitting here. There's nothing else you can do tonight. They've got enough to go on. And you need your rest, too, I mean, look at you. With luck, you'll wake up and it'll all be over."

Fitzgerald was already rising to his feet to show me out.

A uniformed officer drove me back to my mother's house. I suppose I had some idea that a crime scene unit would still be there, searching for clues, dusting for fingerprints and so on. But if they'd ever done any of that, they were finished now. They were gone. They'd recovered the gun, of course. One guy had fished it out from under the oven, dumped it into a plastic bag, and carried it away. Another guy had taken some photographs of the place. Other than that, there was no evidence they'd examined or dusted or probed much of anything. The kitchen looked exactly as it had when I left.

I stood still in the silence of the room. In every corner, on every piece of furniture, on the appliances, on the floor, there seemed to be an imprint of the battle I'd fought for my life and for Serena not two hours before. Whenever I turned my gaze on something, the image would flash into view: Serena struggling by the sink; Jamal gagging and rasping orders from the table in the breakfast nook;
the thug reaching under the oven for the gun like a kid who'd lost a marble; me on the floor. It was as if those sixty seconds of fear and violence had burned themselves into the fabric of the place.

There were other images, too. Worse images. Images of things that hadn't happened, but might have. I'd been sure from the moment those bastards broke in that their plan had been not just to take Serena, but to execute me once they'd gotten her out of the room. I still believed that was their plan. I could see it in my mind. I could feel it. I could feel my face pressed into the linoleum, my heart beating against the fake bricks, my mind racing uselessly, looking for a way out and finding none so that I just lay waiting passively like a mouse in the jaws of a cat. I could see it as if I were someone else, someone else watching me. And I could feel the barrel of the gun against my skull. I could even see my body jerking as Jamal pulled the trigger.

Daddy!

The images made me shudder violently. I closed my eyes and shook my head, like a dog throwing off water. I tried to tell myself the police were "all over this," as Fitzgerald said, that they were following leads, pounding on doors, peppering suspects and witnesses with questions. But other things Fitzgerald said—those things I had forced out of my mind—kept coming back to me:
These gentlemen she went off with ... They're following up on your story too ... Went off with. Your story.
As if he didn't believe Serena's kidnapping had happened the way I said it had. As if there were my story on the one hand, and the truth on the other.

I stood in my mother's empty kitchen, trying to get the image of my own execution to stop replaying in my mind, trying to get the images of the fight to stop, the feeling of the bodies swarming over me, the hands grabbing at me, the sound of Serena's hopeless cry
—Daddy!
—to stop—stop. I felt sick with failure and frustration, helpless, alone.

My suitcase was in the television room, packed but unzipped, ready for my trip home. I got out some fresh clothes. Jeans, a black sweatshirt, and so on. I carried them into the bathroom. I took a shower. I worked the mud and dirt off myself. Put some antiseptic gunk on my cuts and bruises. Brushed my teeth to get the taste of blood and flesh out of my mouth. My face, though ... I couldn't do much about that. It was still purple and swollen and misshapen.

When I finished cleaning up, I got dressed. I figured I might as well. I didn't think I'd be able to sleep. I didn't want to sleep. I just wanted morning to come so I could drive into the city, get to the NYPD, track down whoever was running the case, and find out what was going on.

I went back into the television room. The images of the fight kept running in my mind. The images of my execution. Serena's scream. I turned on the set to drown it all out. I put on a local news station for a while to see if they had the story on. They didn't. There was just some nonsense about celebrities flocking to Manhattan for the big premiere. Not just movie stars but dignitaries, too, said the breathless newswoman. The secretary of state, the governor, the mayor. All getting ready to join three thousand people at the New Coliseum for the first movie ever in Real 3-D:
The End of Civilization as We Know It.
As if nothing were wrong. As if nothing had happened here tonight.

I turned to one of the cable news networks. They were doing the wars in the Middle East. There was a spectacular video of a truck bomb exploding. An Islamo-fascist suicide killer had murdered a dozen Muslim civilians plus an American GI. The bomb sent up a fiery blast that could've come out of a Hollywood action movie. There were the usual frantic handheld shots of bleeding, weeping people wandering dazed through the debris.

I lay down on the sofa, my head propped against the arm. Not to sleep—I didn't think I could sleep—I didn't want to sleep. I
thought I would get up in a minute or two and call the airline to cancel my flight home. I would write an e-mail to my wife, tell her I'd been delayed, tell her what was happening. Maybe I'd even call her, wake her up, tell her myself so she wouldn't worry too much. I blinked slowly at the TV screen. There was the usual mother on her knees, the usual body of a child on the ground in front of her, the mother's hands and her screaming face uplifted to heaven...

Then suddenly it was morning—just like that. Late morning, too, by the feel of it. I sat up quickly, surprised, fuzzy with sleep. Something was going on. There was noise. Banging. Someone was banging on the front door, banging so hard I could hear them even in here. On the TV, the news was still playing, the morning report now. I reached for the remote to turn it off. But then I didn't. The pounding at the door went on, but I sat another moment, watching the TV.

Men were standing at a podium—there, I mean, on the gigantic screen that took up the far wall. Men were standing at a podium and cameras were clicking and flashing.

"...recovered over a thousand pounds of explosives," one of the men was saying.

There was a red banner at the bottom of the screen, a caption:
TERRORIST ATTACK ON WALL ST. FOILED.

Now my cell phone started buzzing, its readout lighting up:
BLOCKED CALLER ID.

"Two of them were enrolled as university students," the same man at the podium said in answer to a question called from offscreen.

They got them,
I thought, as I came fully awake. Then I thought:
What about Serena?

I was holding my breath, afraid to hear the news that she was missing or dead. I could imagine that whoever was pounding at
the door was here to deliver the word, whoever was calling my phone...

Pictures flashed on the screen, black-and-white photographs of the five men, five terrorist suspects, who'd been arrested. There were two rows of pictures, two faces on the top row, three on the bottom. My eyes went over them quickly, searching for Jamal, searching for Rashid. Neither was there. I didn't recognize any of the men except ... Except there was one, the man in the middle of the bottom row. He looked like—yes, I was almost certain he was—the young man who had followed me that day I went to the campus to listen to Rashid's lecture. Yes, of course he was: the young man with hooded eyes and a turned-down mouth who had been watching me as I said good-bye to Anne after the class. He was one of the conspirators.

This was it, then: the attack Diggs had predicted; the Friday terrorist strike orchestrated by Rashid. It was all true, and the FBI had stopped it in time. But where was Rashid? Where was Jamal? Where was Serena?

The knocking at my door had stopped for a moment but now it started again. My cell phone went on buzzing. Excited, I turned the TV off. On my way through the garage to the main part of the house, I answered the phone. It was Fitzgerald.

"Where the heck are you?" he said. "I'm outside your front door."

So he was, big as life, in a gray twill suit with the shirt striped red this time and the tie blue. There was a squad car waiting at the curb behind him.

"Did you find her?" I said at once—said before he could say anything.

"Nah, not yet. But NYPD says they want to talk to you right away. I guess they need some more information." He waggled
his thumb over his shoulder at the squad car. "We'll bring you there."

I could see now for myself where the ridges on his big Irish face had come from. Because his mouth was smiling easily, but not his eyes. His eyes were watchful and steely as he smiled. I thought he looked like a hunter who was trying to coax a wild beast into a cage without a fight.

Later, I would remember that thought.

That last day, the sky was gray and roiling. The rain had stopped for now, but there seemed a great, surging turbulence in the thick, low clouds. Watching them from the squad-car window, I had the feeling a storm was being prepared behind them, like some spectacular effect being readied behind the curtains of a stage. The sight called forth a physical response from me: a churning in my belly; a sense of portent and foreboding. I was just worried about Serena—that's what I told myself.

But it was more than that, though I wouldn't let myself see it. And when I did see it, I wouldn't let myself acknowledge what I saw. That nausea, that foreboding: It was my brain picking up hints and details faster than my mind could interpret them. It was sitting in the backseat of the squad car like that and looking at the backs of the two heads up in front of me, the head of the young uniformed cop who was driving and the head of Fitzgerald, where he was riding shotgun. It was their terse answers to my questions and their subtle glances at each other and the tense irony in the eyes of the uniform when I caught a look at them in the rearview mirror and when they stole a look at me. I had no reason to see anything ominous or wrong in any of this, but I did see it—I saw it and I convinced myself I didn't.