Brian Freeman - Marathon

Hey, Dawn, did you see this?

Dawn checked out the tweet from a user named @malvileo. He’d posted a note and a photograph just minutes earlier, and when Dawn examined the picture, she couldn’t suppress the smile of triumph that crept onto her face. This was what she’d been waiting for, and she didn’t hesitate.

She knew exactly what to do next.

Over to you, Special Agent Maloney.

@dawnbasch retweeted @malvileo:

Is this the marathon bomber? Duluth, have you seen this man?

#marathon

#islamismurder

#noexceptions

#surprisehesmuslim

When Stride opened the attached photograph in the retweet from Dawn Basch, he recognized the marathon scene in Canal Park, and he recognized the face of the man heading through the parking lot. They’d met a few hours earlier on a musty set of stairs in a student house near UMD.

“His name is Khan Rashid,” Stride told Special Agent Maloney. “Agent Durkin and I ran into him at Malik Noon’s apartment. Rashid and Noon are friends. We checked him out. Cab driver, married, one child, lives in the Woodland area. Born in Pakistan, naturalized citizen.”

“Criminal record?” Maloney asked.

“Nothing. He’s clean.”

“What about radical connections?”

“He’s never been on our radar, but Rashid lied to us today. Durkin asked him directly whether he was at the marathon, and he said no.”

Maloney’s forehead creased into a deep seam. He’d been angry at the tweet by Dawn Basch, but his anger had already turned to calm again, like the quick passage of a summer storm. The closer he got to a perpetrator, the more his decades of experience took over. He smoothed his gray mustache.

“Get some uniforms over to Rashid’s house to keep it secure,” Maloney said. “This thing is going viral, and we don’t need any vigilantes popping up among the No Exceptions crowd. And let’s make sure Rashid doesn’t rabbit. Guilty or innocent, as soon as he knows his picture is all over the Web, he may try to bolt.”

“I’m on it,” Stride said.

“I’ll get Durkin over there, too, while we wait for a search warrant. What about this @malvileo character who made the underlying tweet? Who is he?”

“I know him. He was part of a murder investigation a couple of years ago, but he was exonerated. His name’s Michael Malville. He was a spectator at the marathon yesterday, and Maggie talked to him during the evacuation. His story matches what he tweeted. He told her he was with his son on Superior Street during the marathon, and a Muslim man with a backpack bumped into him.”

“All right, this could be a serious break,” Maloney said.

Stride reached for his phone to order teams into the Woodland area, but as he did, the phone started ringing. The caller was Haq Al-Masri, and Stride knew why Haq was calling. Word had already spread through the Muslim community about Khan Rashid.

“Haq,” Stride said. “It’s a bad time.”

“You know what’s happening on Twitter?”

“Yes.”

“It’s a mistake,” Haq said. “Khan isn’t involved.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know the man. I know his wife and son. There is no violence in him. None.”

“He’s a friend of Malik Noon. He was at Malik’s apartment.”

“Of course, he was! They’re friends. Khan was the one who first warned me about Malik. He was concerned that Malik was becoming radicalized. He wanted us to do everything in our power to help him.”

“Khan was in Canal Park during the marathon,” Stride said.

“Yes, I know — looking for Malik. We were all trying to find him to make sure no violence occurred.”

“Khan lied about being there. To me and the FBI.”

He heard Haq exhale sharply in frustration. “Well, that was foolish of him, but really, what do you expect? If you were a Muslim fifty yards away from where a bomb went off, would you admit it to the police?”

“I’m sorry. I have to go.”

“He’s not your man, Jonathan,” Haq added quickly. “Believe me.”

“I hope you’re right, but that doesn’t change what we have to do. If you can reach Khan, tell him to come directly to the FBI headquarters at the DECC. We can talk to him, and we can keep him safe. If he’s not involved, we can get the word out and clear his name.”

Stride hung up.

He looked for Agent Maloney and saw that the FBI agent and a cluster of his men had gathered around a large-screen television in the conference room. Maloney kept switching channels, from CNN to Fox to ABC to NBC to CBS. On each channel, Stride saw the same thing. Every news show was already broadcasting the photo of Khan Rashid that Michael Malville had tweeted.

In half an hour, Rashid had become the most wanted man in the country.

Travis Baker held his sister’s hand. Shelly’s eyes were closed. Morphine had kept her mostly asleep since the operation. She wasn’t going to die, but she had the grayness of death. Her plump face looked sunken, and she breathed with a raspy snore. He could see the outline of her body under the white sheet. Below where her knees were, the sheet sank down to the bed. He hadn’t had the courage to look.

The doctors hadn’t told her yet. They’d asked him if he wanted to do it, but he said no, he just wanted to be there when they broke the news. They’d told him that she might cry, she might scream, she might not believe it. Travis knew Shelly. She’d just close her eyes and say that life gives you a challenge and Jesus gets you through it. He wished he could believe that, but he didn’t.

It was just the two of them in this world. Their parents had been gone since Travis was fifteen. Car accident. Shelly was eight years older, and she’d been as much a mother to him as a sister ever since then. He hated that he’d been such a disappointment to her. She never yelled at him for his mistakes; she just urged him to do the right thing or to stop doing the wrong thing. He tried, but he couldn’t stay away from the flame. When the Devil came to Duluth, he always looked up his old buddy Travis.

Shelly kept saying that Jesus had a plan for him, but Travis didn’t think that was true. Life wasn’t about plans. Life was about whatever shit happened to you on any given day. Just ask Joni.

“Hey.”

He looked at Shelly’s face and saw that her eyes were open. Her fingers squeezed his hand.

“Hey, Shell.”

“My legs hurt,” she said. Her voice slurred the words.

“There’s a button. You can get more morphine.”

She shook her head back and forth. “Not yet. Want to stay awake.”

“Okay.”

“Nurse said it was a bomb.”

“Yeah.”

“You okay?” Shelly asked.

“Yeah. Good as new. Lucky Travis.”

“Not luck. Nothing is luck.”

“Aw, Shell, don’t. Not now.” He didn’t want to hear about Jesus. Not when his sister was never going to walk again.

“People killed?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

Her head turned. Her eyes bored into him. “Joni? What about Joni?”

He’d told himself that he would be strong when he told her, but he wasn’t. His eyes filled with tears. His lower lip quaked like he was a scared dog. Hearing Joni’s name, he could still see her face, so clearly that if he reached out, he was sure he could touch that bottle-blond hair. But she wasn’t there. She’d whispered in his ear at the marathon, and those were the last words she ever spoke. Five seconds later, she was dead on the ground.

He couldn’t even say the words or shake his head, but Shelly understood.

“I can’t believe she’s gone,” she said. “I’m sorry, Travis.”

“Yeah. It sucks. There’s nothing else to say.”