Checkmate (13 page)

“Listen, I was wondering if I could use the bathroom—your father told me it would be okay.”

“Um. Sure.” She stepped aside and motioned for him to come in. “It's down the hall.” Then she added, “Just past my bedroom.”

“Thanks.”

As he passed her, she caught the scent of cologne. Outdoorsy. Bold. He hadn't had it on yesterday.

He walked down the hall, past her bedroom door that was slightly open, and found the bathroom.

As she waited for him to return she felt her heart pounding anxiously in her chest.

A few minutes later she heard the toilet flush and then water running in the sink.

That was it.

That quick.

But it seemed like forever.

Beck emerged. “Thanks. It's a long time to sit in the car.”

“No kidding. If you want to sit in the living room here, I mean, that's okay with me. If that'd be easier—that's all I'm saying.”

“Thanks. But I should probably stay in the car.”

“Right. Yeah. That makes sense.”

“I'll let you know, though, if I change my mind.”

“Sure.”

Then she got the door for him and he returned to his sedan to protect her.

Once he was outside, she closed the door and just leaned her forehead up against it.

Seriously? You asked him if he wanted to do his stakeout thing in the living room?!

But then another voice:
It's not a stakeout. It's protection duty. He could do that better in here anyway. It made total sense that you would invite him in.

It was weird: She wanted to be with a guy but she also wanted to be independent enough not to need a guy—sort of like this desire to be entangled in a relationship but also free from all entanglements.

Both desires.

Tugging in different directions.

Words came to her as they sometimes did. Fragments. The genesis of a poem or an essay:
A soul is only set free when it becomes constrained by the bonds of love.

It sounded like something her namesake would write.

Returning to her bedroom, she dug out her journal and jotted down the words, and as she did she realized that the deepest, most fervent love entangles us in a way that frees us. Saint Teresa found the truest freedom only in her submission to her Savior.

Tessa heard more words roll through her mind and recorded them in her journal as they did:
We want the benefits of intimacy without the risks of transparency. So our
lives are always made up of games of hide-and-seek. We want to be found and yet we want to hide from the consequences of being found. Intimacy is the license that you give to someone else to hurt you the most.

And also to set you the most free.

She'd tasted that freedom for the first time last winter, following in the footsteps of the faith of her mother. And, strangely, it seemed like she had found what her soul was searching for, but that she was still, in a sense, searching for what she'd already found. To have found God and still be caught up in the pursuit of him, what A. W. Tozer called the soul's paradox of love.

Like Saint Teresa, her soul paradoxically longed for the Savior who had already shown her his love.

While her heart longed for a guy who would do the same.

Afternoon slipped by.

The Lab hadn't been able to come up with any forensic evidence that might lead us to the offender. The straightened shoes in the closet that I'd thought might be significant didn't appear to be. If Jerome Cole's killer did tidy up, he left no trace evidence behind—not even in the rumpled clothes in the dresser drawers. We still didn't know if it was one person working alone or a team of people who had pulled off the attack.

Jerome's neighbors didn't remember seeing anyone suspicious in the area. And despite dozens of tips regarding the identity of the person driving the semi, no one had actually seen him exit the truck.

Three false confessions so far. Publicity seekers. Goes with the territory.

Lien-hua left to go to a late-afternoon physical-therapy appointment.

The team worked, I lost track of time, and then it was evening again.

Eventually, at six I headed home. At the house I told Priscilla Woods, the agent who was there, she could take off.

Lien-hua's physical-therapy appointment must not have gone too well because when she arrived twenty minutes later, she was grimacing and favoring her leg even more than usual.

I had some supper waiting for her, which we ate in
silence. Figuring it would be best to give her some space, I left her to take a quick shower. After cleaning up I looked through my files one more time, seeing if our guy had left us any other footprints in time and space.

I was particularly interested in the timeline that we knew about Jerome: when he had come home, where he was last seen, and what that might tell us about the person or group of people who'd attacked and murdered him.

Debra discovered that someone had accessed the security archives on Sunday evening around six. It wasn't clear who it'd been, but if that was Jerome, why would he have done it, and why then? Did his killer somehow get his federal ID number and log in to find the information? We were still searching for answers.

I recalled the victim's phone ringing in the NCAVC building. It made me think of who might have been calling, and I decided it might be wise to map out the incoming and outgoing calls of the agents who were on duty that day to see if that led us anywhere.

I was deep in thought when Lien-hua called to me from the bedroom. I found her in her pajamas, getting ready for bed, and realized several hours had passed since I'd sat down to look over the files.

You need to do a better job of keeping track of time, Pat.

Even before Lien-hua and I had gotten married we'd started a tradition of lighting a unity candle, not just to signify our commitment to each other, but to celebrate that unity, to hold on to the moments, the brief, precious moments we had with each other.

Since April we'd gone through three candles.

As I changed for bed, I lit the lavender one on her dresser.

“Brin's thinking about a new name,” Lien-hua told me. “Tryphena. It means ‘delicate.'”

“I heard.”

“What do you think of it?”

“I like it, but I have to say, just the thought that someone like Ralph would name his daughter ‘delicate' does strike me as a little incongruous.”

“Nice Tessa word there: incongruous.”

“Thanks.”

“She's a brave woman.”

“Tessa?”

“Brineesha.”

“For . . . ?” I was a little lost here. “What? Marrying Ralph?”

“For having another baby, Pat.”

I wasn't sure if she was referring specifically to the difficulties Brin had gone through when Tony was born prematurely and almost died, or if she was just referring to raising a child in general.

A decade ago, long before we met, Lien-hua had been engaged but had broken it off after she found out her fiancé had been lying about the extent of a “friendship” he had with a woman at work. And although Lien-hua had been in two other long-term relationships since then, she'd never had any children.

In the past we'd spoken about the possibility of us having kids of our own. She'd said that it'd never been in her plans, and I hadn't been sure if that was her way of saying that she didn't want to have children or her way of saying that she was changing her mind about it. When I'd asked her to elaborate she'd simply said, “It's a hard world to bring a child up in,” and left it at that.

Yes.

It is a hard world to bring children up in.

And it was also true that Brineesha was a brave woman—both for marrying Ralph and for having another baby.

When Lien-hua and I climbed into bed, we spoke for a few minutes about what had happened over the course of the day and how we'd only managed to find more and more ways to fail our way forward.

Tomorrow morning at ten, we would be attending the funeral service for Jerome Cole and the five other agents who'd been killed in the attack.

So, once again death was on my mind as I closed my eyes to go to sleep.

+ + + +

It had been thirty-two hours since the bard had left Corrine in the old Rudisill Mine tunnel. She was probably still alive, but it was hard to say.

Despite himself, he couldn't stop thinking about her.

He wanted to visit her, but he also understood that it would be best to leave her alone, let her die quietly in that mine. However, he might at least stop by, if nothing else to get photos of her body.

Now he was in his fourteenth-floor apartment and, just like so many of the lofts in Uptown Charlotte, it was relatively new.

Charlotte had always been a fast-growing city, with one generation leveling the buildings and then constructing new ones on top of the rubble of what the generation before them had left behind.

Other than the relatively small Fourth Ward historic district, pretty much the only thing that'd survived from
the past, the only real markers of history, were the settlers' cemeteries in the area.

The irony: The gravestones of the dead served as a constant reminder of the fate of the living who were too distracted to notice them while they built high-rise apartments for themselves to live out their brief lives in just down the street.

He knew that Fourth Ward neighborhood. He'd rented another place there just in case this apartment became compromised.

Now he went online and pulled up the maps of the train route. Freight trains don't run on a precise schedule, so he'd taken pains to make sure he could track its progress as it went through signal territory from Spartanburg, South Carolina, to High Point, North Carolina.

However, he did know that because of its two thirty-five departure time, it would be traveling through Charlotte sometime between three fifteen and four o'clock on Saturday.

He was expecting it at about three thirty, which would be perfect, actually.

A six-thousand-foot train. One hundred cars. Three engines.

When he first started preparing to tell this story, he'd discovered that the railroad line that ran alongside the open-air Bank of America Stadium was a Knoxville Southeast Railway line, mainly used for freight, although a few passenger trains used it.

Now he confirmed the manifest.

Yes, the number of hazmat tankers it was carrying hadn't changed. And neither had the contents.

It hadn't been difficult for the bard to find a young man who was skilled enough at hacking to get into the
Knoxville Southeast Railway dispatch office and get past the firewalls.

It had been harder, however, trying to decide if he should let the young man live.

In the end he'd decided against it.

Now he had the code that he needed and he was in the system.

When he came to the information regarding M343's Saturday route, he paused and thought back through the past three months.

So much had changed.

And not just his face, from his plastic surgery. Everything.

A hundred days ago he was in prison.

He'd had his “lawyer” bring him a tube of toothpaste. But it wasn't just toothpaste inside that tube. There was just enough of it on the end to fool the guards if they squeezed it to make sure it contained toothpaste.

But there was something else in the tube.

Mikrosil.

It's a paste that hardens and can subsequently be used to lift intricate patterns off solid surfaces. It comes in a tube similar to toothpaste. In his previous career that's how he'd come across it.

The bard had injected it into the lock of his cell to form a key.

Then he'd removed the elastic waistband from a pair of underwear, slit it down the middle with the handle of a toothbrush that he'd sharpened by rubbing it against the concrete floor of his cell.

He waited until the guard who was his size was stationed outside the door.

After all, he needed a change of clothes.

The bard picked the cuffs they kept him in, used the
key to get out of his cell, then looped the elastic band over the man's head in a clove hitch, yanked it tight around his neck.

And tugged.

The elastic band was narrow enough so the skin on the guard's neck folded over it and it would have been pretty much impossible to pull loose even if the bard hadn't been yanking it tight.

There was no sound.

The man died quickly, quietly, with very little fight.

The clothes fit well enough.

*   *   *

Though the bard had planned as carefully as he could, he had several things to take care of before Saturday afternoon.

(1) Stay in touch with his contact so he could remain informed on how things were progressing in DC.

(2) Check the pressure sensor on the tracks.

(3) Look in on Corrine and see if she had died yet so he could take photos of her body for the website he was going to use. And, perhaps, spend a little time with her while he was there.

Before returning to the mine, however, he had business to attend to back in DC: a funeral he needed to show up for. Needed to take pictures of.

And while he was up there, he could pay a visit to the person he'd left locked in a secluded basement in the city—a guarantee that the final act of his story would be told even if he wasn't in the area.

Now he pulled up the app that he was using to disguise the origin of his texts. He verified the wording of
the message in Latin that he would be sending tomorrow to Agent Bowers.

Then he went to the parking garage beneath his apartment building, found his van, and took off to drive through the night to DC for the joint funeral service of the six people he had killed earlier that week.

Thursday, August 1

Ralph, Lien-hua, Brin, and I parked in the graveyard close to the place where they were having the service so Brin, who was now more than a week past her due date, wouldn't have too far to walk.

The sky above us was a stark summer blue, marred only by a handful of cumulus clouds. Bright, optimistic sunlight betrayed the occasion and mocked the tears of those standing around their dead.

The mourners gathered in their drab suits or black dresses—the clothes we keep in the back of our closets and don't pull out until we have to bury someone we know.

Our grieving clothes.

In a world as full of finality as ours, we all need them. Because the truth is—and this is the truth that we don't like to bring up, that we pretend isn't there, the one that lurks behind every conversation, every smile, every pat on the back—one day soon we'll either be saying a final good-bye to everyone we know or they'll be saying one to us.

Wearing their grieving clothes.

Now, here in the graveyard, I wondered what we might look like from the air—a dark huddle around these open graves.

Like insects—

Scuttling little insects gathered around a burrow that will one day be their home.

Tessa doesn't do well at funerals and, since she hadn't known Jerome or any of the people who were killed in the explosion, we left her at Ralph's house this morning so she could stay with his son, Tony.

Special Agent Priscilla Woods was parked on the street outside, watching the house.

My daughter had studied Latin back in middle school and has been reading the Vulgate—a Latin translation of the Bible—and before I left, she pointed out to me that in the second verse of the seventh chapter of Ecclesiastes it says that it's better to go to a funeral than to a party.

It seems like a morbid and disheartening thing to say, especially to record in the Bible, but on the ride here I'd thought a lot about it and I could see some wisdom in those words.

Going to a funeral forces you to acknowledge your mortality, to ask the questions of life and meaning and beliefs that matter most:
Why am I here on this planet? Does my life matter? Does the afterlife exist? Where will I go when I die? Will I ever see my loved ones again? What is the meaning of it all? Does God care? Is he even there?

At a party you distract yourself with pleasure, you drink and laugh and indulge yourself past those questions. At a funeral they're right there out in the open, hitting you full force like a fist in the gut.

Clarity.

Percipience.

That's what funerals can teach us. That's what the final good-bye offers those willing to let the questions in.

Keen awareness. The ability to finally understand.

Or at least to finally understand how important understanding is.

*   *   *

I've never been to a funeral where there was so much security.

Killers often attend the funerals of their victims, so we had video surveillance set up for everyone who was at the wake and at the graveside service. Only friends and family were supposed to be allowed here in the graveyard itself, but still we had facial-recognition software running to make sure no one had come who wasn't supposed to be there.

I noticed nothing unusual, saw nothing suspicious.

Director Wellington attended, as did the rest of the people who'd been at the briefing at HQ earlier this week: the Department of Justice and Homeland Security reps, Sheridan, Gonzalez—all of them.

Even Jennings, the National Security Council member, showed up, although he seemed to be more interested in checking his texts every couple of minutes than in interacting with the grieving family members.

When I saw Sherry Ritterman, I remembered telling her that her husband's last words concerned how much he loved her.

She'd seemed touched by what I'd said, and from what I could tell, hadn't been able to see through my lie.

No, this was not the time to correct it.

She was staring blankly at the open grave beside her where her husband of ten months was going to be buried.

Lien-hua glanced my way and I wondered if she was thinking of what I'd said when I'd promised that I would never lie to her, that I would always be honest with her, even if I thought the lie would protect her.

Truth or hope?

It's not an easy decision when you have to choose between the two of them.

At the far end of the graveyard, news-crew vans and bystanders were lining the street, ready to feed a waiting world whatever tidbits they could from this ceremony. Whoever had pulled off this attack and beaten, tortured, and killed Jerome Cole had a worldwide audience.

*   *   *

I had no idea what to say to the surviving family members of the agents who were killed.

When my wife died two years ago, some of my friends gave me advice on how to get through it and some didn't seem to know what to say.

In the end, the ones who'd ended up helping me the most weren't those who tried to give me answers, but those who just walked with me quietly through the questions without necessarily offering me any solutions.

Today, when I met the family members of the deceased, I told them the perfunctory things we always say: that I was so sorry for what had happened, that I was here for them if they needed anything. I added that I was going to do everything in my power to bring the killer to justice.

But I knew it wasn't enough. It's never enough.

Even though I wanted to somehow comfort them, no other words of comfort came to me. But maybe silence was what they needed.

I hoped that was the case.

*   *   *

As the service was about to begin I took my place beside Lien-hua.

Brineesha had her arm in the crook of Ralph's. She was a devout woman and clutched a well-worn Bible in her free hand.

Even in her loose-fitting dress she was obviously well along in her pregnancy and, although she was petite and not nearly as tall as Ralph, by her poise she appeared to be his equal in every way. Which she was.

None of us said anything, but the steel in Ralph's eyes spoke volumes.

The minister pulled out a Bible that, compared to Brin's, looked like it had never even been cracked open. “Our scripture for today comes from 1 Corinthians 15:54 and 55.” It seemed to take him longer than it should have to flip to the right page. Finally, he read, “When this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, ‘Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?'”

I'd heard those words at funerals before and, honestly, they seemed more like wishful thinking than anything else.

Where is the sting of death?

Well, right here, in the hearts of the surviving family members and friends.

Where is the victory of the grave?

Spread out now, all around us. The grave always wins in the end.

Most of his homily was benign and easily forgettable. He spoke of how in times like this we'll be tempted to question God's goodness or his power but that we needed to hold on to our faith, to trust in the power of hope, the power of the future, rather than be overcome by thoughts of the inevitability of the grave.

But then he said, “That is what it means to live as a believer. That is what it means to find victory in apparent defeat. These men, these women came from different backgrounds, from different faiths, but they all shared a common goal: Creating a better life for their families, for their country, for other Americans. They served us all bravely and we can learn from their example of service. They are gone but not forgotten. They will live on in our hearts and in the love that we offer to others.”

No, I didn't buy it.

Clichés and worn-out half-truths.

These people wouldn't live on in the love we share with others—they were dead. Simple as that. Yes, for a little while they would be remembered, but soon enough they would be forgotten—the destiny that awaited us all. Soon enough their names would disappear into the sands of time and more people would fill the void they'd left behind.

Just like taking a handful of water from the ocean. The waves roll in and roll out again. And a moment later, in the cosmic sweep of time, no one notices the water is missing.

Sure, I understood where this pastor was coming from. He was trying not to offend anyone and just give us all a feel-good message, but I wished he would just be straight with us: The last thing people have power over is death, regardless of how many positive thoughts and common goals they may have. And if God doesn't have
power over the grave, then let's just admit it: there's no hope for us overcoming it either. No matter how long we might “live on” in someone's heart.

*   *   *

Afterward, Brin, who was not one to shy away from a confrontation when it dealt with something she believed in passionately, told the minister, point-blank, “You forgot the rest of the passage.”

“Excuse me?”

“The rest of the passage. You only read the first part.” She didn't even need to open her Bible, but said the words from memory: “The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

She waited.

“And?” he said.

“And it's not the common goal for a better world that makes a difference, it's the Lord who does. The victory doesn't come from us showing love to each other but from God showing love to us.”

“Yes, well,” he said at last. “I wanted to be inclusive. Now, if you'll excuse—”

“Really? Inclusive?”

“That's right. Inclusive.”

Ralph's eyes narrowed:
Careful about that tone of voice, buddy. That's my wife you're talking to.

Brin went on undeterred. “Jesus died for all, sir. What's more inclusive than that?”

“That's your viewpoint.”

“If it's only my viewpoint and not the truth, then I am to be pitied above all people. Read the first part of the chapter. Reverend.”

Then she took Ralph's arm, spun, and led him away.

As Lien-hua and I followed them to the car it struck me that the minister, though he may have had the best intentions in mind, had edited the truth by not taking into account the broader context of what was being said.

The very thing you did when you lied to Sherry Ritterman.

The pastor had tried to give hope without offense by softening the truth. But when you do that with the truth you only end up with a lie wearing fine clothes.

If your goal is to offend no one, you'll never tell the truth, at least not the whole truth.

Remember, Pat: The truth is the one thing no one needs to be protected from.

Yes, I needed to tell Sherry what Stu had really said. I would clear things up, not for my conscience, but because the truth, even when it hurts, heals.

However, as we climbed into Ralph's car, I found myself wondering who this minister was and why Brin seemed to know her Bible better than he did. Something didn't seem quite right about it. Who had hired him? Which family knew him? It was something I decided to look into.

We'd left the graveyard and were about five minutes from Ralph and Brin's house when the text message came through on my phone.