Brian Freeman - Marathon

Her jaw hardened.

Her fingers tightened around the gun. She could do it right now. She’d waited long enough. He wasn’t going to give up. He wasn’t going to put the gun down. If she waited, if he fired first, then she’d failed. No one would blame her or judge her for taking the shot.

No one would know what it was really all about.

The truth screamed at her, like a monster baying for blood. She hated this man. She hated him; she wanted him dead. She wanted all of them dead. Every single one of them who had killed her brother, who’d killed hundreds, thousands, who cut off people’s heads, who threw people off buildings, who sent children to die.

She hated them.

And even if she couldn’t kill all of them herself, she could start here, with this one man. Pull the trigger. He dies. It wasn’t much, but it was something. Ron would never forgive her if she did nothing at all. If she let him go unavenged. If he was in Paris in a million pieces of dust, and she simply accepted it without striking back.

Right?

This is what Ron would want her to do.

“Durkin.”

She heard the voice beside her, calm and quiet. Her eyes didn’t leave Khan Rashid, but she knew who it was.

Stride.

“ Durkin . Put your gun down. I’ve got this.”

Stride ran through the now-empty restaurant with his gun in his hand. His officers had cleared out the guests and staked out positions on both sides of the semicircle where the confrontation was taking place. He saw the three of them, in and near the window-side booth. Dawn Basch, Khan Rashid, and Gayle Durkin.

As he got close to them, he slowed to a walk. One step at a time. He could feel the electricity in the air. One wrong word, one wrong motion, and they would all burn. His focus was on Khan Rashid, with his arm outstretched, pushing a gun into the face of Dawn Basch. He could see that Rashid was torn and exhausted. He didn’t know whether Rashid would really pull the trigger, because the man clearly didn’t know himself.

Then Stride looked at Gayle Durkin and realized he had a more immediate problem.

Durkin’s face was a stony mask of loathing. She didn’t see Rashid at the end of her gun. She saw something else, and whatever it was, she was going to kill it. Her arm was as rigid as a steel pipe. Her fingers were tight enough to crush the butt of her Glock. Stride read her face and knew that she was a millisecond away from pulling the trigger.

“Durkin.”

He extended his gun at Rashid and edged close to the FBI agent, feeling the aura of violence from her body like a black cloud.

“ Durkin . Put your gun down. I’ve got this.”

“No.” Her voice was robotic.

“I have Rashid. Stand down. Lower your weapon.”

“He’s going to fire.”

“ No one is going to fire,” Stride said.

“He’s a terrorist.”

“This man? He’s a taxi driver. He didn’t blow up the marathon. He didn’t blow up our officers. He’s a man whose wife and child were murdered, and he’s out of his mind with grief.”

He wanted Durkin to hear him, but he wanted Rashid to hear him, too.

“He’s not going to put the gun down, Stride. I tried that. He’s going to shoot her.”

“Rashid isn’t going to shoot anyone.” Do you hear me, Khan?

“You don’t know that. Let me do my job.”

“ Gayle . Listen to me. Officer Kenzie’s death was an accident. You’ll learn to live with it. But if you pull the trigger now, that’s it. You’re done. There’s no going back. And if Ron were here right now, he’d be saying the same thing. You know that.”

Stride’s eyes were focused on Rashid, but he could sense Durkin turning her head toward him. He’d broken through. Ron had broken through.

“Come on, Gayle,” he went on. “Help me. Talk to him.”

Her Glock, which was at the corner of his vision, sank toward the floor. Durkin holstered her weapon.

“He’s right, Rashid,” Durkin said. Her voice took on a quiet urgency as she pleaded, one human being to another. “He’s right. This isn’t the answer. Don’t listen to Basch. You’re not a terrorist. Put down the gun.”

Stride saw tears in Rashid’s eyes.

“I can’t,” the man said.

“Think about what you told her about Ahdia,” Durkin went on. She squatted beside the table. “Your wife was a good woman. A good mother. An American. She would tell you to put the gun down. This isn’t you. This isn’t who you are.”

“Khan, the man who murdered your family is dead,” Stride told him. “My team found him. You don’t have to get justice. You have justice.”

Hesitation flickered on Rashid’s face. “Is that really true?”

“It is. I got the call coming over here. His name was Travis Baker. He set the fire. And he’s dead. We know who killed the people at the marathon, too. He’s on the run, but we’re going to get him. It’s over, Khan. It’s a tragedy, but you don’t have to make it any worse.”

“This woman...” Rashid murmured.

“This woman wants you to kill her, but if you do that, you become exactly what she says you are. And I know you. Haq told me about you. Right from the beginning, he said you could never turn to violence. Never. That’s why you called me about Malik, isn’t it? You didn’t want him to hurt anyone. You knew that was wrong.”

Khan blinked. His body began to shake. “But Ahdia is dead. Pak is dead.”

Stride kept his gun trained at Rashid’s head, but he lowered his voice, and he tried to catch the man’s eye. To make him turn his head.

“I know. They’re gone. So is this agent’s brother. So are good people at the marathon and good police officers who were friends of mine. We’ve lost too many people already. It’s time to stop. It stops right now with you, Khan. Put the gun on the table. Please.”

Time seemed to stand still.

The silence was complete.

He could feel the movement of the rotating floor under his feet, slowly going in circles.

He didn’t know what Khan would do, but he was ready either way.

Tears fell down the man’s cheeks. His body convulsed in sobs. He lay the gun on the table and pushed it with a fingertip toward Gayle Durkin, who scooped it up and secured it. Rashid put his hands up. Stride took out his cuffs and helped Rashid out of the booth and cuffed the man’s hands behind his back. Rashid continued to cry, as if there would never be an end to his tears.

Before Stride could lead him away, Rashid leaned over and spoke to Dawn Basch, whose face was as pale and motionless as a museum statue.

“There is a hell,” he told her quietly. “It exists, and I’m sorry for you, because someday, you will see it.”

Wade Ralston heard the throb of the helicopter.

He squinted through the windshield of the Cadillac and saw it floating over the evergreen trees not even a half mile ahead of him. It was an FBI helicopter, black, with its logo painted in huge white letters on the side. They’d found him. It hadn’t taken long. The chopper was low enough that they could broadcast a message that blasted through the windows of the car.

“ Pull over and stop .”

Like hell. That wasn’t going to happen. Wade accelerated, taking the engine of the Cadillac up to seventy miles an hour. He was on the old scenic highway, the marathon route, two miles south of Two Harbors, heading toward the Boundary Waters wilderness. Railroad tracks paralleled the road, both of them arrow straight. Lake Superior was just beyond the trees, but he couldn’t see it.

He had survival gear in the trunk. He always did. His plan had been to take refuge in the wilderness and hike his way into Canada. The trouble was, he wasn’t going to survive. He knew that. His leg continued to bleed where the cop had shot him. Blood pooled and soaked into the front seat and dribbled down to the floor. The blood was turning dark, and that was a bad sign. It didn’t hurt or burn anymore. He didn’t feel anything.