Brian Freeman - Marathon

“You spend a lot of time down here?” she asked.

“This is my life.” Ralston had a smile on his face, which made him look like a grinning skeleton in the flashlight beam. “People don’t like thinking about how meat gets into those grocery store packages. They don’t like knowing how we keep critters out of their nice warm buildings, either. Kill them all, but don’t tell us how you do it.”

“I suppose that’s true,” Maggie replied, feeling a twinge of discomfort.

Ralston didn’t move. “So that Muslim guy Rashid blew himself up, huh? I’m not shedding any tears over him. Guess it saves us taxpayers the cost of a trial. Sorry about your cops, though.”

Maggie said nothing.

“I should tell you,” Ralston went on, “I’m not defending what Travis did, but I know where he was coming from. People are angry about these Islamic terrorists, and they want to hit them back, you know? Especially when all they get from Washington is politically correct bullshit.”

“Let’s just get this done, okay, Mr. Ralston?”

“Yeah, okay. Come on.”

He led the way through the heat and darkness. Being down here, among the rough brick walls, was like going back in time. At street level, the world had changed, but down here, the decades peeled away. Men who were long dead had layered this mortar and brick in a deep hole in the earth.

Ahead of them, she saw light and heard static-filled rock music. They continued into a basement room lit by a flickering fluorescent tube and lined with metal shelves, bankers boxes, and filing cabinets. Rock dust littered the floor, making it slippery. The air baked. She was conscious of her gun in the holster, and she was ready to slip it into her hand if necessary.

“Hey, Travis, you here?” Ralston called.

“Yeah, glad you’re back, man. What took you so long?”

Maggie let Ralston walk ahead of her. From behind a wall of boxes stacked as high as the ceiling pipes, she saw Travis Baker bound into view. He wore a tank top that showed off his sweaty muscles and tattoos. His long, greasy brown hair hung loose.

Travis spotted Maggie, and his face screwed up in fury.

“What the hell, man,” he barked at Ralston. “What the hell. You called the cops on me?”

“I’m trying to keep you alive, kid.”

Travis twitched; he was ready to run. Maggie wondered if he’d taken any drugs while he was down here, because he looked wired. His eyes shot past Maggie to the dark tunnel behind her that led back to the world. Maggie stood between him and freedom, and they both knew it.

“Mr. Baker, turn around, get on your knees, and put your hands on your head,” she ordered him.

Travis didn’t move. He focused his anger on Ralston. “I thought we were friends, man.”

Ralston leaned casually against the open top drawer of one of the filing cabinets pushed against the wall. Old, yellow-streaked paint cans were perched atop the cabinet. The two men were ten feet apart, and Maggie worried that Travis might charge the smaller man. She could see Ralston keeping a wary eye on Travis for the same reason.

“You thought wrong,” Ralston said. “You’re my employee, Travis. You work for me. That’s our relationship, kid. Maybe if you’d remembered that along the way, things would be different.”

Travis pointed a finger at Ralston and then shouted at Maggie. “The whole thing was his idea! He said God saved me for a reason. God wanted me to do it!”

“Yeah, like me and God are so tight,” Ralston replied, chuckling.

“Mr. Baker, get on your knees,” Maggie repeated. “ Right now .”

Behind his bluster, Travis was used to taking orders. He did what he was told. He slid to his knees on the dirty floor. He put his hands over his head. Maggie came around behind him, her cuffs in her grip. She grabbed one of Travis’s wrists, yanked it behind his back, and snapped the cuff tightly around it. She did the same with his other wrist.

“On your feet,” she said.

Awkwardly, Travis stood up. She kept her fist around the belt on his jeans. The heat in the tight space felt like the blast of a furnace. She could see Ralston, who hadn’t moved from where he stood beside one of the filing cabinets. There was something odd about him. He watched her and Travis with a strange, self-satisfied look. The dying fluorescent light made his face flicker in and out of darkness.

Travis’s hair spilled across his face. “Is this about Joni, Wade? You knew, didn’t you?”

Ralston didn’t say a word, but Maggie saw the man’s expression mutate into a hatred that he made no effort to hide.

“Let’s go, Travis,” Maggie said, but pushing on the kid from behind was like shoving the trunk of a tree. He didn’t move.

“Say it, Wade!” Travis demanded. His voice grew louder as he threw his words into Ralston’s face. “You knew I was screwing Joni, didn’t you?”

Maggie felt the danger in the room. The silence between the two men crackled with electricity. When Ralston finally spoke, his voice was low and venomous, like poisonous sulfur boiling out of a hot spring.

“ You’re fucking right I knew .”

Travis bellowed like a warrior and attacked. He ripped himself from Maggie’s grasp and lurched across the dark space toward Ralston. He was fast. Ralston didn’t have time to react, and neither did Maggie. Travis crossed the room in two steps and hurled the weight of his body against the smaller man, knocking him away from the filing cabinet and upending him onto his back. The filing cabinet crashed down, spewing drawers and papers. Paint cans spilled onto the floor and bounced, and their lids popped open and rolled away.

Travis planted his weight on one foot and launched a vicious kick toward Ralston’s head. Seeing the blow coming, Ralston rolled clear, and Travis, off-balance, skidded backward. He lost his footing, banged his skull against the stone wall, and swayed like a drunk. Blood leaked from his mouth where he’d bitten his tongue.

“Knock it off!” Maggie shouted at both of them. She yanked Travis’s tank top with two hands and pushed him face-first to the wall. “Don’t make this any harder on yourself, Travis.”

She spun him around and pushed him forward.

“Both of you, let’s go!”

Ralston was on his feet again, watching her closely. His hands were in his pockets. Between Maggie and Ralston was the fallen filing cabinet. Two of its drawers had slid out, leaving the frame looking like an open mouth. The concrete floor was littered with debris from inside the old paint cans. The light flickered on and off over her head, as if they were in a disco.

It took a moment, with the light blinking, for her brain to register what her eyes were seeing.

The stone floor was strewn with ball bearings and nails. Round silver balls, no bigger than marbles. Sharp, one-inch nails.

Shrapnel.

Fine powder spilled from inside one of the paint cans. The black dust looked like coffee. It wasn’t.

One of the cabinet drawers had overturned, spreading its contents at her feet. She saw coils of copper wire. Sticks of fireworks and rockets. Circuit boards. Half a dozen rubber athletic fitness trackers, cut open to reveal electronic components. Everything the homegrown terrorist needed to build a bomb and construct a remote-control trigger was on the floor in front of her.

It was only a second before the reality of this place caught up with her. Automatically, her hand dove for her holster, but she was too late. Looking up, she saw Wade Ralston pointing a gun at her head.

Dawn Basch sipped ice water as she stared out at the Duluth panorama through the restaurant’s tall windows. The motion of the revolving floor was almost imperceptible, but even so, she felt the slightest nausea. Right now, the window faced northeast, where the land hugged the giant lake on its way into the arrowhead that ended at the Canadian border.