Out of Time

by David Klass

  On Tom’s fifth night in the war room, he was unexpectedly summoned to Brennan’s office and found the big man seated at his desk sipping hot oolong tea from a thermos and wading through a stack of reports that was at least five inches high. Several of his top aides were there with him, including Earl, his gaunt majordomo, and Grant, who people connected to the investigation often whispered was Brennan’s most trusted advisor and heir apparent. The tall African American agent was ferociously smart and super aggressive yet somehow also managed to be soft-spoken, methodical, and respectful. “I want to know about roads, Smith,” Brennan said, and took a careful sip of the steaming tea. “I want to know what my experts are saying, and I want to know why you think they’re all wrong.”

  Tom gave him the latest projections and filled him in on the most recent work that had been done to collect information along those six different routes. “And now what do you think?” Brennan asked. “And don’t disappoint me and tell me my experts are right.”

  “I’m sorry to be predictable, sir, but I don’t think Green Man would have taken any of those six ways home.”

  Brennan grinned. “And why is that?”

  “They just don’t feel right to me.”

  “And why don’t they feel right? Because other people chose them and you always have to be contrary?”

  “No, sir.” Tom hesitated. “Because I wouldn’t have taken them, sir, if it had been me driving home after blowing up Boon. I’ve studied all six in detail, and they’re too big. Too fast. Sure, they’re the most logical and obvious choices. But they’re just . . . soulless. And they feel wrong to me.”

  Brennan lowered his thermos of steaming tea and glanced at Earl. “What do you think of this guy?”

  The wizened field agent said, “I like his sense of smell. He reminds me of his father.”

  “I wouldn’t go there,” Brennan cautioned. “Okay, young Tom, why don’t any of those highways feel right to you? None of them are big interstates. None of them have toll plazas or CCTV cameras. They’d get him home fairly quick. What’s the problem?”

  “They’re too big for Green Man. And he never makes obvious choices. They say the top chess grandmasters don’t actually look at more moves than average players, but they just intuitively look at the right twenty or thirty moves—the strategically sound yet tactically unexpected moves that lesser players don’t even consider. That’s the way Green Man operates. He’s logical but never obvious.”

  “But if you were Green Man, wouldn’t you want to go home to the Midwest quickly and directly?” Agent Grant asked in his polite way. “Wouldn’t you want to see Green Woman and Green Kids?” It was hard to tell if he was trying to understand Tom’s thought processes or gently mocking him. Perhaps he was doing both.

  “Green Man doesn’t care about what’s quickest because he knows that you expect him to care,” Tom said. “An extra day wouldn’t deter him if he thought that he could take a slower, smaller, more circuitous route and throw us off. I doubt he would try to speed through the Dakotas even though, if you draw a line across the map, that would get him back the quickest. I think he’d jog north or dip south.”

  “What’s this about ‘soul’?” Earl asked. “How can a road be ‘soulless’?”

  “I can’t articulate that,” Tom admitted. “But if you’re Green Man, you’re sure not feeling triumphant. You’re listening to the news about what you’ve just done while you’re driving home. You’ve just killed twelve people. Five were kids. That rips your guts out. There’s a part of you that wants to take your time, gaze out at open countryside, and slowly come to terms with the horror of what’s just happened.”

  “But he totally destroyed his objective,” Grant objected. “He’d be victorious and even euphoric—not miserable.”

  Brennan waved for Grant to be silent. “So what road would you take?” Brennan asked, and the small office got very quiet. “I assume you’ve thought about that?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t go north,” Tom said, “because I’d have to cross into Canada, and even though I’m sure he’s got a valid passport and all the necessary documents, there would be records made of that crossing. Green Man stays far away from borders and any action that generates hard data.”

  “So then you’d go south?” Brennan asked.

  “Yes, sir, if it was me, I’d meander south—maybe loop down into Nebraska.”

  “And when you’re wearing your Green Man hat and you’ve got the steering wheel of that van in your hands, what specific road appeals to you?”

  “Route 55, sir. Through Nebraska and dipping down into northern Kansas.”

  “We looked at it,” Grant cut in quickly. “It’s not even a highway. It’s a two-lane road that in places becomes just one-lane and would take him five or six hundred miles out of his way. And it has stoplights, which our profilers say he’d avoid—”

  “The towns with stoplights are spaced far apart—” Tom said.

  “In a lot of places it’s got speed limits of forty miles an hour or even less.”

  “And it’s got beautiful wide-open vistas that flow into each other,” Tom said. “If I’d just done something that I thought was necessary but was tormenting me, I’d drive slowly and carefully home and try to find some peace and tranquility by the banks of the Missouri River or in the Prairie Lakes region or looking out on the timeless Glacial Hills of Kansas.”

  “We’ve checked with the police departments along Route 55 and also collected images,” Grant said, glancing at his laptop. “Nothing.”

  “It’s been less than a week since Green Man drove home along one of those roads,” Tom pointed out. “Before any more time passes, let me drive Route 55 myself. If he was there, somebody may have seen him, or a security camera we don’t know about filmed him, or maybe he stopped for coffee one night because he was tired and he just wanted to see a smile and hear some human conversation. Give me a few days and let me beat the bushes before everyone there forgets.”

  Brennan hesitated. “Nothing ties him to that road. And our people have already checked it out and they came up empty. Seems like a damn long shot. Earl?”

  The gaunt agent studied Tom. “Tell you the truth, we’re not having much luck with all our computers and forensics and recognition software. Maybe you should give this kid a long leash. As we both know, there’s something to be said for driving the roads and beating the bushes.”

  Brennan reluctantly nodded. “Sounds like you wouldn’t mind riding shotgun?”

  “Now that you mention it, I haven’t been sleeping too well in this beehive for the last week. Not that I’m complaining. But I wouldn’t mind a few days on the road, asking questions to folks who just might have seen him drive by in his van.”

  “Then get out of here,” Brennan snapped, almost as if it made him angry. “I’ll give you both three days. Beat the bushes and follow your noses. I’ll have every police station and sheriff station along the way ready to talk to you. Even if they didn’t see anything themselves, they might suggest some nosy neighbor you can talk to or some camera we don’t know about. If you don’t find anything useful in three days, we need you back here.”

  FOURTEEN

  It was one of Green Man’s dark days. He felt the shadow lengthening over him almost the moment he woke up. He was able to push it away long enough to eat breakfast with Gus and Kim and go over their homework. It was starting to get very bad when he drove them to school, but he somehow kept up his side of the fun family banter and promised to try to come to Gus’s soccer game that afternoon, even though he knew that by then he would probably be flat on his back. He finally pulled up near the crossing guard, and the kids got out, spotted friends, and headed up the walk toward their brick elementary school. Green Man watched them tromp happily away, and then—behind the tinted windows of his car—he put his head in his hands and nearly screamed.

  A few blocks from t
he school, the first wave of anxiety broke over him so hard and fast that instead of heading back to Sharon and their home, Green Man fled out of town. He kept pills in the car and swallowed five of them—well beyond the recommended dosage. But the powerful drugs barely cut the crippling dread, and he could feel a second wave coming fast, looming, rising—a much larger and more threatening wave that would crash down at any moment. He craved music or any kind of distraction, but he didn’t dare turn on the car’s radio because every station—even the country music stations—played constant updates about the hunt for him. Fear of being caught was a key trigger of this attack. He had been listening for more than a week to how he had made mistakes when he struck the Boon Dam and the FBI now had clues and solid leads and was closing in on him.

  That feeling of being hunted and closed in on was with him as he drove, constricting his breath and blood flow like the tightening coils of a python. He lived with the anxiety, but he was usually able to keep it at a manageable level. Once triggered, it flared wildly into panic—a fear that he had made some tiny mistake and the hundreds of law enforcement experts who were chasing him had found it and were using it against him, figuring out where he was, finding out the identities of his family members, coming for him in their black sedans, with their guns and handcuffs and decades in isolation wards, coming to the elementary school for his children, coming to his home for Sharon, coming, coming, coming to use that one tiny mistake to destroy everything that he loved and had worked so hard to build. . . .

  “Mistake” was the anxiety trigger. He was careful and meticulous, but it was impossible to avoid mistakes, and he’d spent the past week agonizing about what he might have done wrong. He had definitely made mistakes coming home from the Boon Dam attack—they were small ones, but when the policeman had unexpectedly pulled him over, he had said things he shouldn’t have said and done things he shouldn’t have done, and the patrolman might have seen things that Green Man should never have let him see. His hands were trembling so that it was too dangerous to keep driving. Green Man pulled onto the gravel shoulder a mile from the river, got out of his car, and ran into the forest. There was something freeing about running among the trees, but after a half mile, the second wave crashed down on him, so that he found himself staggering and weaving between the pines.

  His heart was pounding, and he was hyperventilating. He stopped running, clung to a tree, and tried to control the panic by visualizing something specific and calming. He focused on the memory of Gus and Kim walking toward their school that morning, and he used his photographic memory and artist’s eye to sketch in the details—how they had been smiling and Kim had begun skipping along in her red sneakers with her braids bouncing and her silver barrettes flashing in the sun. . . .

  But it did no good. The vivid image of his smiling children ricocheted Green Man to the ten kids who had become a sort of second, secret family to him. He knew each of them by name, knew their ages and faces, and today Andy Shetley was with him—no matter how deep he plunged into this dense pine forest, he couldn’t hide from the boy. Andy, who would have been eleven next week, who played soccer just like Gus, but who had drowned on a houseboat he should have never been on, three hundred miles from his home.

  Andy Shetley was calling out to him now, softly, by name, Paul, Paul, a name no one had used for almost two decades, a name that he had buried six feet under, he was Mitch now, Paul, Paul, telling him that he had made a mistake and that they were closing in on him and he would be caught soon, and he deserved to be caught, that he wasn’t a hero at all but a monster, and then they were all shouting at him, Sam Terry in his tiger-striped pajamas, and five-year-old Anne Ellmore from the deck of her grandfather’s luxurious yacht as the freezing Atlantic closed over her. . . .

  Green Man reached the river and saw the crab-apple tree. It was old and gnarled and sat above a mossy bank with branches dipping low over the water. He didn’t know why he came here, but this was where he always waited out his worst attacks. He staggered toward it, and he could smell the fruit—the tree had blossomed in mid-summer and now it was dropping crab apples the size of Ping-Pong balls onto the grassy bank, where they were rotting in the sun. Paul, Paul, and now it wasn’t just the children but someone deeper, from much further back, a woman who loved him dearly, and he had done something beyond horrible to her, left her with a gaping hole in her heart.

  She must be seventy now and have white hair, but he saw her in her fifties, as she had looked when he last saw her standing behind the screen door of the small house in the New Jersey beach city where he had grown up, and he had buried the memory deep, but she had found him by this grassy riverbank, Paul, Paul, why did you leave me with such pain and longing, you monster? He sat down beneath the crab-apple tree and stopped fighting them because they were all too strong.

  There was no point in running from the people he had victimized. He understood that the guilt he felt over them was deeply linked to his own fear. He had caused great pain and suffering, and rather than deny that, he sat very still under the tree and practiced the meditation of acceptance, inviting the children into his mind and apologizing to them one by one. Green Man admitted to himself that the manhunt was indeed taking place and that he was being chased night and day by hundreds of police and FBI agents and might be caught at any moment. To deny it just made the panic worse, feeding it like a fire, so he forced himself to look at the truth squarely and to accept the reality of what it might mean for the people he loved most.

  The third wave rose, and he desperately reminded himself of the reasons why he had decided to put those people he dearly loved at risk. Green Man had a deep understanding of the gravest threats to the global environment. He had studied them for decades, and taken together, they had convinced him that humanity was in terrible peril and he must fight back, whatever the costs. He repeated those reasons to himself, knowing how valid they were, and he ranged them with his acceptance of the manhunt and the dangers to himself and his family, and he sat with it all and half shut his eyes and tried to control his breathing for as long as he could stand.

  But when the third wave broke over him, it was absolutely shattering, and there was nothing he could do. Somewhere in town, on a grassy soccer field, Gus was playing midfield, but the afternoon found Green Man on his side among the rotting apples, curled into a fetal position, moaning in agony and wishing he were dead and that it could all just be over.

  FIFTEEN

  It wasn’t till they left the Tetons behind that Earl let Tom ask the questions. In every police station, ranger station, and sheriff’s office along the first thousand miles of their route, the old field agent insisted on doing all the talking while Tom sat there smiling like a dummy. Earl stuck very much to his script, literally—he had written out ten questions in black pen on a white pad from the crummy Holiday Inn where they had spent the first night. They knew exactly when Green Man had blown up the dam, so assuming he’d jumped into his van and headed east, staying just under the speed limit and not pausing to sleep, they could predict almost to the minute when he would have passed through each town and campground.

  “My young colleague and I want to thank you for taking the time to meet with us,” Earl would begin. “We know how busy you are, and we appreciate it. This could not have a higher priority. We’re looking for one man, age and appearance unknown, driving a van with a thirteen-foot wheelbase.” And then would come the ten rote and generic questions, always asked in the same order with exactly the same words in the same slow cadence, about whether any tickets had been issued or anything out of the ordinary witnessed by any of the officers on duty.

  “You’re not giving them enough,” Tom told him as they wound through the mountains. “You’re not taking enough creative chances to make this valuable.”

  “It’s not about taking chances,” Earl told him. “It’s about being accurate. What we can ask is limited by what we know. Look, son, I’ve done these for forty years
, probably more than five hundred times. Listen up and learn.”

  “The reason you won’t catch Green Man is because you’ve done this for forty years and five hundred times, and if you think those ten questions of yours will unlock this, you can forget about it, because they won’t,” Tom fired back. “And please stop calling me your young colleague.”

  “You are my young colleague, and slow down on the curves. There’s a thousand-foot drop.”

  “This was my idea,” Tom reminded him, speeding up slightly. “You were just supposed to ride shotgun. Those were Brennan’s exact words. He knows what I’m like, and if he sent us on this mission, it was so that I can do what I do.”

  Earl lit a cigarette and took a puff. “Keep your eyes on the road. And just what is it that you do?”

  “I’m really good at being a pain in the ass. Don’t smoke in the car.”

  “It’s an SUV, and yes, you are good at that. Slow the hell down.”

  Tom took a curve so fast they almost brushed the guardrail that rimmed the cliff. “If you don’t like me taking the turns this way then roll down your window. If you want to experience the joys of lung cancer, that’s your choice but not mine.”

  Earl gave in and rolled down the window two inches. He tilted his straw hat to screen out the sunlight and thought it over for a minute. “Okay, hotshot. Now that I’ve shown you what it should sound like, I’m going to give you a chance to ask the questions. But stick to the script.”

  At the next small police station, Tom addressed a chief and two deputies, starting off haltingly. “My colleague and I want to thank you for taking the time to meet with us. We know how busy you are. This could not have a higher priority.”

  Earl nodded encouragingly, as if to say, “Stick to the script and you’ll do fine.” Tom broke off and asked him, “Earl, could I have the list of questions?”