by Glenn Roug
on the door from inside the bathroom. No answer. I decided that he must have gone back to sleep, and finished my business. When I came out five minutes later I used the same tactic as I did when I got in — turning off the light in the bathroom first before opening the door to the room. But before my eyes got used to the darkness in the room, I stepped into something wet. I quickly turned the lights on. Peterson was lying on the floor in a pool of blood.
He was on his side, grabbing his abdomen and whimpering. His gun was lying on the floor three feet away from him. He tried to say something but nothing came out. I turned around quickly. The door to the room was open a crack. A chair that had stood next to it was on the floor, a leg broken. I turned back to Peterson. He motioned me to leave.
"I'm not leaving you," I said. I reached a hand to my cell phone.
He was barely audible and slurred his words. "No not from your own phone. The lobby. Go have 'em call 911."
I still did not know what to do. It felt like a dream.
He clenched a fist in pain. "Quickly. They'll be back. I scared them off but they'll be back. They know you were in the bathroom. Go. Get lost now." He reached a hand inside his pocket and tossed his car keys a few inches towards me. Then he let out a groan.
I grabbed the keys and got up and nodded. The most important thing now was to call 911. There was no time to argue with him. Then, as if he remembered something, he gestured for me to come closer again. "Don't go back to the office. Someone told them you were here. Don't trust. No trust."
"I won't," I said.
"It's the Minotaur."
I thought he was delirious. "Minotaur?"
Another groan, and then he spoke quickly, almost incoherently. "He said Minotaur. He said Minotaur. I don't know what it means. He said Minotaur and then he shot me." He closed his eyes and moaned and did not say anything anymore, not even to rush me to leave. I grabbed my pants in one hand and turned around and ran down the hallway. I did not dare to stand and wait by the elevator, and took the stairs instead.
The receptionist must have recognized the alarm in my eyes, and besides it was probably not often that she encountered guests in their underwear holding their pants in their hand. She reached anxious fingers to the phone before I could open my mouth, maybe preparing for what I had to say, maybe to report me to someone. I said, "Quick. Call 911. Someone in 415 was shot. Quick he's dying."
She did not waste any time to acknowledge my request. She dialed with a quick flutter of fingers and began to speak into the receiver. I turned around and saw that the elevator was at the fourth floor, and now it was coming back down. I was not about to stick around and find out who was to emerge from it: the man who shot Peterson, or just another guest. I took off immediately. The receptionist called after me to come back but I ignored her and she did not have the nerve to give chase.
I got into Peterson's car and drove off. I wondered if someone saw us arriving earlier, someone who had followed the car from the FBI office to the hotel. But no, they did not need to: someone inside the FBI leaked everything to them. Peterson had just told me that. They knew where I was all this time.
I didn't know where to go. I could not go home and did not dare to go back to the FBI office, either. Going to the police was useless as they would only contact the FBI. I drove for a half an hour in circles, making unnecessary U-turns to see if someone was following me. Once I became convinced I was alone and almost developed a sense of confidence, it dawned on me that they might have attached a tracking device to the car before storming the hotel room. It was not safe to drive any car they knew about. I stopped behind the first parked taxicab I came across. I turned the engine off and put the keys under the seat, then got in the cab and asked the driver to take me to a hotel some sixty miles away from Boston, in Portsmouth New Hampshire. I did not know the name of any hotel over there, and made up a story about a convention tomorrow saying the first hotel he could think of would be fine by me.
By the time I entered the Portsmouth hotel I was a bona fide paranoid. I waited at the lobby for twenty minutes, ignoring the receptionist, to make sure I was not being followed. Then I booked a room but decided not to sleep in it, and instead loitered in the lobby pretending to be on the phone and watching every new face who entered the building. I could not sleep anyway. I thought about Peterson and whether he made it, and whether the receptionist from the Boston hotel was now at the police station working with a sketch artist to reconstruct my face from memory. The TV hanging from the ceiling was on, but there was nothing about it in the news. Either it was too fresh or the FBI hushed it up.
There was not much left of the night, anyway. By eight in the morning I ate breakfast and snuck out and walked the streets for an hour until I was satisfied that no one was following me, and then I went to a different hotel and slept there until eleven. That was when my phone rang. It was her on the other side of the line. She never volunteered her name, not back in that little office, and not now.
"Are you okay?" she asked. There was some background noise, as if she was in a busy public place.
"I'm okay. How's Peterson?"
She sighed. "Not good. In a coma. The doctors are not optimistic."
"I'm sorry," I said. "He's a good guy. I owe him a lot."
"Where are you?" She asked. She was not much given to sentimentality. I bet she did not visit him at the hospital yet, just made a call to see how he was. Or maybe she asked someone else to do that for her.
"Not in Boston," I replied, and immediately realized that she could have my phone tracked. Maybe they could, too. I have been an idiot.
"Where? I'll send someone to pick you up."
"I'm sorry, I can't. You guys have a mole there. Someone in your organization let them know where I was. If it was Peterson in the bathroom and not me I wouldn't be standing here talking to you right now."
Silence. She knows I'm right and trying to come up with something to say or just stalling for time so they could track me down. I could not trust her or anyone else for that matter. Only Peterson, and he was in a coma. Finally she said, "What if we hand this over to a new team? Would you feel more comfortable working with a different team?"
"The mole will find out where I am," I said. "I'm not taking chances. Do me just one favor, will ya? Put my kid in a safe place. They might go for him next."
"I agree. But we need to stay in touch, Al."
"I'll call you. What's a good number to reach you? I don't trust your Bureau lines."
"I'm speaking from a payphone so I can't be tracked," she said. Maybe she had also lost faith in her own organization.
"Give me an e-mail address," I said quickly. "Better we e-mail than talk." She did so without argument. I took the address down, then said, "Bye now," and hung up. I did not know how much time I had. I took the battery out of the phone and put the device inside a pretzel wrapper and threw the whole thing in a trash can. Then I left the hotel. Anyway they would know I was here as I was stupid enough to leave my credit card information with the receptionist. I was too innocent for a life on the run. I had to change my ways. I went to the bank and withdrew ten thousand dollars in cash. I took out my credit cards and cut them to pieces and threw them away. Then I went to the bus station with the intention of getting on the first bus out of town. But on the way I saw a delivery man leaving his truck unattended with the engine on. I had never stolen anything before in my life. Not even a pen at work like most of my coworkers. But now I got in the truck without giving it a second thought and put it in gear and headed somewhere, anywhere. I did not care about the law and I did not care about my destination so long as they did not know where I was going.
III.
I had no idea where to go. At first I thought of Manhattan. It would be easy to blend in while there and, should it come to a chase, I could run into a subway station and lose them. But sooner or later I would have to find somewhere to stay, and this meant that someone would check m
y ID and make a record of it, and those Horsemen of the Apocalypse will find out. If they managed to infiltrate the FBI, how hard would it be for them to search for records of my ID? No, whatever I do next must be in cash and without showing any identification to anyone. Manhattan was not a good place for that kind of a life.
But I headed southwest anyway. I did not have much choice, starting from New Hampshire. After six hours I was in New Jersey. Now I was tired. I parked somewhere in the back of a distribution center among other trucks and got in the back of the vehicle and closed the gate. There were cases of soda in there, on the polished metal floor. I pushed some of them together and threw a canvas that I found there on top and used it as a bed. I was lucky it was October: not too hot, not too cold.
It was not very comfortable and I did not get much sleep. When I woke up it was evening. I went into a nearby supermarket and bought some supplies for the trip ahead. I came back to the truck with many plastic bags. For a moment I entertained the thought of taking the soda cans from the back of the truck, but that would not be right as they were not mine. I did not want to make a habit of stealing. I bought the same cans in the supermarket, though it seemed ridiculous even to me.
I drove further south. Then, in Maryland, it hit me. Tennessee was where I wanted to be. I vacationed there once with Jane and the boy
