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As Lovelle made his way from Casino to Casino collecting his proceeds he had a minor attack of conscience. Before he had ever made his trip to Vegas he had struggled with the ethics of betting on events where he knew the outcome. He questioned himself about whether this was the moral equivalent of stealing. That was something he had considered and had long ago decided not to do. Before relocating he had decided, probably self servingly, that this was not the same. He had reasoned that if he were some sort of clairvoyant he would be within his rights to make bets with others about the outcomes, and that this was really no different. He knew that this was a rather fine distinction, but he decided that as long as he wasn’t involved in the fixing of outcomes he wasn’t actually stealing from anyone.

Still, now that his winnings were mounting, he wasn’t feeling so sure. So, he decided that he should mitigate any guilt he might have by using much of the money for good works. He wasn’t the type that believed that it was okay to steal as long as you do good things with the money. He firmly believed that if you, or the government for that matter, wanted someone, or some entity, to do something good with their money, then that somebody needed to be convinced to do so of their free will. He’d had many a discussion with his professors about taxation and the welfare state. But, Lovelle did not really feel as though he were stealing. However, he did know he was treading on strange ground here. If he had been certain that what he was doing was wrong, then he wouldn’t have hesitated to return the money somehow. Yet, somewhere inside he felt that he should err on the side of caution and quit. So he compromised with his conscience and donated $100,000 to various charities.

Of course, having meticulously avoided being taxed on as much of his winnings as possible, he had to be equally careful in this process. As no fan of taxes, Lovelle would normally have had no qualms about taking some extra deductions at the end of the year, but, he also had no desire to draw attention to his untaxed wealth. His first thought was to make a bunch of anonymous cash donations and be done with it. It would be a banner year for local charities, with nothing to track back to him. Then he decided he didn’t trust his fellow man enough to go dropping hundred dollar bills into jars, boxes or kettles. He could easily picture some volunteer succumbing to temptation and shoving Lovelle’s donation into his own pocket.

So Lovelle set up a bank account with the money he intended to donate so he could easily track what remained. He started off with a few thousand in deductible donations, and then he would just keep making small donations until it was all gone. Anything that seemed like a good cause and didn’t require him to fill out any paperwork would get whatever cash he had on him.  The account came with an ATM card that had a $300 per day limit. That pace would keep him in check and stretch his time out well into the next tax year, at which point he could make a few more deductible donations if he wanted to shorten the process.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

During the summer of 1999 Lovelle had his hiatus from substitute teaching. At the time, Lovelle briefly considered asking the teacher he was dating if she would go someplace tropical with him. He hadn’t been on any sort of relaxing trip since his divorce. But, As they really didn’t know each other all that well, and she probably would have said no, he thought better of it. Instead he decided to take a driving trip back to Detroit. Lovelle did very little driving in Vegas as compared to what he was used to as a salesman, and he actually wanted to just get behind the wheel and disengage.

Along the way he really took stock of his situation. It was kind of funny how that sort of windshield time could do that to him. He certainly had no shortage of alone time in his regular life. But, the isolation of the car always seemed to allow him to dig a little deeper into his own mind. On this trip he thought a lot about what he was going to do about September 11. Since his success in foiling Timothy McVeigh, he had put it on the back burner, almost like a reward to himself. He had thought that the only real decision to be made was on when to call in his tip. So he had relaxed, possibly for longer than he should have. Now, as he thought about it, it seemed to him that maybe he could do something more.

He was still pretty confident that he could put the FBI on the right path with a tip from his Felix the C.A.T. alter ego. But, now it dawned on him that he might be able to give them a bigger head start. After all, he was a man with a good deal of money and a lot of free time. He might be able to spend that capital and use what he knew to find out some things which would jog his memory. If so, he could increase the Fed’s chances of preventing the attacks. And if he couldn’t, the only loss would be time and money, both of which he had in abundance. Having gained both time and wealth due to his time travel, he could easily afford to give some to this cause.

He settled on the idea that he would make this the focus of his life when he returned from his vacation. And when he had learned whatever he could learn, or when 2001 arrived, he would turn whatever he knew over to the FBI and let them takeover.  That gave him about a year and a half to work.

Having resolved to do this, he arrived in Detroit feeling a sense of purpose and clarity. He felt almost as he had when he had first watched that Abu Nidal hijacking and made it his mission to stop the World Trade Center attacks. After a long break, he was going to be proactive once more, and he liked that.

Seemingly on cue, that clarity was almost immediately replaced with the fog of uncertainty. The day after his arrival he found out why Trina had kept him apart from her family, and her husband, whenever he returned to town. She and Paul had been having trouble for a while. She had wanted to confide in Lovelle, but Paul had become rather jealous. She hadn’t wanted to make matters worse by bringing Lovelle closer, and had even kept it from Paul when Lovelle was in town. Despite her efforts, Paul had moved out and she had filed for divorce.

“How did you get over it?” she asked Lovelle about his own divorce.

“I don’t know that I have. I think I just adapted. I think maybe I’m still damaged goods, and I’ve just learned to deal with it. I know that probably isn’t helpful to hear.”

“No, no. I need to know.” She implored him to continue.

“Well, I don’t have to tell you that I haven’t had any kind of real relationship since I left her. You’ve seen me jumping around from woman to woman. Maybe I just haven’t found someone I can get close to. But, it feels a bit like I just can’t take the next step.” As he spoke he began to question his own assessment of himself. Trina was forcing him to be introspective in a way he had been avoiding, albeit unconsciously. “But that’s just me. I wouldn’t necessarily expect someone else to respond the same way. Maybe I wouldn’t have responded that way if circumstances were different.” And what Lovelle was realizing was that suddenly circumstances could be different. Suddenly, he might just have someone to fall in love with.

For the longest time Lovelle had been holding out hope that Katie would separate from her husband. She had given him no reason to believe that she might, or that she would be interested in him even if she were available, but, he still held out hope. Now, here was Trina in that very situation. Lovelle knew full well that she had once carried a torch for him. And even though she had told him that she was over him, that was a long time ago. She had even hinted that she had not been resolute in this proclamation when they talked before his wedding. Whatever the case, Lovelle was determined to find out. However, the timing was all wrong. He was not about to cancel his plan to do his own reconnaissance on the terrorists. But how was he to get Trina to wait for him in the mean time?

He saw her twice more before returning to Vegas. When he was with her, he felt like he had rolled back the clock to sixteen years old yet again. Once more he imagined that Trina could be a great love, and again he was compelled to resist the temptation to find out. Once it had been out of love for Katie and his unborn son Kyle. Now it was out of a sense of duty.

The return of those old feelings was simultaneously bliss and pure torture. It had been quite a long time since Lovelle had cried about the loss of his son. He thought about him often, but it was generally just fond remembrances of things they used to do. This reminder of how it had felt to be desperately trying to get his life back put him more in touch with those feelings than he had been in a very long time. The emotional up swell actually felt, in some strange way, good. He had needed the emotional release.

His feelings about Trina were also contradictory. Lovelle was both hopeful and frustrated. Before he had to leave, he asked, or more precisely, begged Trina to come visit him. He was determined to follow through with his investigation, but, he desperately wanted Trina to wait for him. Since he couldn’t ask her to, he hoped that if he kept her close then she might choose to wait for him; at least for a little while. All he needed was about eighteen months.

Thinking about it, Lovelle wasn’t so sure that this would be a problem. A year and a half might actually be a good time frame. Trina was unlikely to be ready to move on yet anyhow. She was surely still stinging from the failure of her marriage. All he needed to do was to keep her thinking about him until he was ready to ask.

*****

Once Lovelle was back home he threw himself into his research project. The first thing he had to do was to take stock of what he knew. This was easy, since he had been logging any and every thing he remembered for the past dozen years or so. What he really had to do was to organize the data and decide on a plan of attack.

The essence of Lovelle’s knowledge was four names, and a little bit of info about each of them. He did not include Osama Bin Laden since the Feds were already quite aware of him, and Lovelle didn’t figure to be able to discover anything about him that wasn’t already known.

He knew Mohammed Atta to be the pilot / hijacker of greatest prominence in the investigation afterward. Lovelle wasn’t really sure why Atta had been singled out, but he was working off the assumption that Atta had a more significant role in implementing the plot than the other hijackers. Frankly it really didn’t matter how prominent his role, because Atta was, in fact, the only actual hijacker that Lovelle knew by name, such had been the focus on him. He remembered that Atta had spent time in Germany, as did others involved in the plot. He was also pretty sure the man had trained at a flight school in Florida. Lovelle figured on spending some time in each of those places.

The other prominent name from the attacks was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Lovelle was relatively certain that Mohammed was the primary architect of the attacks. He knew little else of the man except that he had been involved in numerous other terror attacks by now, and must already be on the FBI’s radar. This meant that he, like Bin Laden, would not be Lovelle’ first concern. He did not want to cover the same ground that government investigators were already covering. Lovelle could come back to him as time permitted.

Zaccarias Moussaui was the most significant other name Lovelle could produce. If he remembered correctly, there was some confusion as to whether Moussaui had any direct roll in 9/11. But he was quite sure that Moussaui had been arrested before the actual attacks. So why hadn’t he tipped anyone off while in custody? Was it because he didn’t know anything, was strongly resistant to the interrogation, or simply wasn’t pressed very hard? Moussaui could potentially be a productive target. Lovelle just had to decide how to play that card.

The final name was Richard Reid. He was the infamous ‘shoe bomber’. Lovelle was pretty sure that Reid had no real attachment to the plot, but, he was hoping that Reid knew about it and could provide that info under pressure. Lovelle knew him to be British, and he thought that Reid might be the easiest to put under scrutiny if he could get the British authorities involved. He also realized that his perception of British counter-terrorist capabilities might have been skewed by its portrayal on television, but, he saw the Brits as a little more aware of the terrorist threat, at least prior to 9/11. That kind of stood to reason, because, like the rest of Europe, England had not been as isolated from terrorist attacks as the U.S. had been.

Although Lovelle had some idea of where these men were before the attacks, his notions were pretty general. He had little idea of how he might actually find them within those general boundaries. Of course, he wasn’t really looking to play hero. He had no desire to make contact with these dangerous individuals himself. All that was likely to lead to was his premature death and maybe an increase of caution on the part of the terrorists. But Lovelle thought he might be able to learn something valuable if he could observe them. He might learn the names of some of their associates. He might jar his own memory and reveal another name or detail. Or he might learn some little tidbit that would assist investigators when he finally handed things over to the authorities. Or maybe he could just give his own story added credibility.

Lovelle decided that the first order of business would be a trip to Germany. His recollection was that Atta was living in Hamburg, but he didn’t have a great deal of confidence in that particular memory. He did a little checking on the background of the city, which added nothing to that confidence. Lovelle had hoped to find that the city was a hub of Islamic fundamentalism, or even just host to a large number of Middle Eastern immigrants like his own hometown, Detroit. Instead he found nothing to implicate the city in any way. But, he could find nothing to point him toward anywhere else either.

That being settled, he booked his trip to Hamburg. He gave notice to the school district, which left Lovelle with just enough time for a short notice visit from Trina.

*****

Trina called less than two weeks after his return. She was going to be in town for a long weekend with a friend from work. That left him wondering if the point of her trip was actually a getaway with a friend, or a visit to him. She hadn’t even mentioned a name, which had Lovelle entertaining the terrible idea that she might be coming with a guy. She certainly wasn’t acting as if it were a visit instead of a vacation. She booked a hotel on the strip and rented a car. She informed him that she would just call him when they arrived.

That Friday he drove anxiously to meet her and her ‘friend’ for dinner. He was instantly relieved to find that her friend was a very pleasant woman in her late 50s. She was a Vegas veteran who had asked Trina to go with her several times in the past. Trina had previously refused out of concern that it would only exacerbate her already troubled relationship with Paul.

After dinner, Trina said good night to her travel partner and she and Lovelle went off on their own. From there on out, other than breakfasts with her friend, Trina spent all of her time with Lovelle. By the time of their dinner on Sunday he was compelled to make mention of this.

“I feel guilty. You haven’t spent any time with Lois. She’s been asking you to come out with her for two years, and now it’s almost as though she had come alone.”

“Don’t worry.” She reassured him. “This is her idea. She knows how much I wanted to see you.”

“She’s a sweet lady.” Lovelle said appreciatively.

“Yeah, she is.” Trina took a bite of food then added tentatively. “She wants to see us get together.”

“Get together?” He was so caught off guard by her bluntness that he didn’t even have to feign astonishment.

“Mm-hmm.” Trina nodded in assent, almost as if she wished she hadn’t said anything. Now Lovelle wondered if his reaction had made it seem as if the idea was somehow preposterous.

“Where’d she get an idea like that?” He continued, knowing full well that at the very least Trina must have told her about their past.

“Don’t be coy!” she snapped, no longer shying away from the subject.

“Me? Coy?” he teased. “I’m not the one beating around the bush here. If you have something to tell me, why don’t you just have at it?” Although he had previously decided that he wanted to avoid this subject until after what he was now calling his “research project”, Lovelle couldn’t help himself. He was uncontrollably anxious to find out where she stood on the subject.

“Fine.” She said as if to say
you asked for it
, “I want to know if there’s still some reason that we can’t be a couple. Are you still hung up on whatever was keeping us apart?”

“No.” he said seriously, “That went away a long time ago.”