Jeff Abbott: Trust Me

The Austin air was cool, not too humid: it was mid-March, and the long steamy summer bake hadn’t yet gripped the city. The breeze felt delicious on him, clearing his head of his worries, if for just a few moments.

Luke crossed the bridge into downtown, slowed his pace. He bent over, breathing hard. His medal slipped free from under the tacky T-shirt, the silver of the angel’s sword cutting the sunlight. He was careful to tuck the medal back under his shirt; it lay cool against the sweat of his chest. He stood and walked the last three blocks to the high-rise condo his stepfather had bought him when he’d moved back to Austin for college. He waved at the doorman, who gave Luke a slightly disapproving look as he waited.

‘How many miles?’ the doorman asked.

‘Only two.’

‘Only two? Get your lazy butt in gear.’ The doorman was a more devoted runner than Luke.

‘I was up late.’

‘Why you bother to live downtown if you never go to the clubs, go out and party?’

‘How do you know I don’t?’ Luke gave the guard a half-smile.

‘On night shift, I see who parties, who’s been down in the Warehouse District, who’s been on Sixth Street. You never stagger in late.’

‘I’m on the internet most of the time right now.’

‘Well, get the hell off.’ The guard gave him a grin. ‘Life’s too short.’

The elevator arrived and Luke said, ‘I’ll try to fix that partying deficit.’

‘Not tonight. Your stepfather is waiting for you. Got here a few minutes ago.’

‘Thanks.’ The doors closed and Luke punched the tenth floor button. Henry was back again, all the way from Washington, and Luke hadn’t finished the project. He took a deep breath.

The elevator door slid open and he walked down a short hallway to his condo. The door was slightly ajar; Henry had forgotten to shut it. Typical. He opened the door and called out, ‘Hey, it’s me.’ Luke closed the door behind him and he could hear the scratch of pen on paper, the sound he always associated with Henry.

Henry sat at the dining room table, his luggage at his feet, writing on a yellow legal pad, a thick book open in front of him. Luke knew better than to interrupt Henry when he was thinking, and Henry’s thoughts could be long, tortured affairs. Henry raised one hand slightly from the table as he wrote, begging for patience, and so Luke went and got a bottle of water from the refrigerator, drank deeply, listened to the scratch of Henry’s pen, looked at the stunning view that faced the lake and the green stretch of Zilker Park beyond.

‘Sorry, Luke,’ he said with an embarrassed smile. ‘I’m working on a dozen position papers at once, and all my ideas are sprouting like weeds.’

‘That’s too many.’

‘I think a lot of change is in the wind. Did you have a good run?’ Henry looked up from the paper. Fiftyish, lean, but with slightly mussed gray hair – standing in stray stalks from his fingers constantly running through it as he spoke – and an equally rumpled suit. Henry never traveled well.

‘I only sweat in front of the computer these days.’ He went over and Henry stood and gave him an awkward embrace.

‘Well, go get showered and I’ll take you out for a decent dinner. You’ve got nothing edible in that fridge.’ He leaned back, studied his stepson. ‘You’re pale, thin and you need a shave. I’ve been working you too hard.’

‘I wanted the research project to go well. But I worry I’m not delivering what you need.’

Henry sat down, put his glasses back on his face. His nose was slightly crooked – he’d always kidded Luke that it had been broken in a bar fight, but Luke knew Henry had never set foot in a bar. ‘The data you’ve sent me has been extremely… compelling.’

‘I’m afraid it’s nothing more than the crazy internet ravings of vicious losers.’

‘But you never know when the crazy raving is the seed of something bigger. Something dangerous.’

‘Collecting crazy ravings isn’t necessarily going to help identify and stop extremists before they turn violent.’

‘That’s for me to decide.’

Luke finished his water. ‘I would like to know who your client is. I want to know who wants to find potential extremists on the internet.’

Henry folded the paper he’d been writing on, tucked it in his pocket and shut the book. The title of the book was The Psychology of Extremists. Henry’s own masterpiece; he’d written it some years before in the aftermath of the McVeigh bombing, to little acclaim, until 9/11 changed everything and his theories about the mental makeup of terrorists bore fruit. After holding a series of professorships around the world – sort of a traveling scholar, much like Luke’s own father had been – last year he had set up a small but successful think tank in Washington called The Shawcross Group. They studied and wrote about psychology and the role it played in governance, in terrorism and extremism, in international crime and in a host of other topics. His clients were the movers and shakers in Washington, London, Paris and around the world: key government decision-makers and multinational companies who wanted to protect their operations from terrorist and extremist threats.

‘I can’t tell you. Not now. I’m sorry.’

‘I just think… we should give this information to the police. Or your client should.’

‘Have you found evidence of actual criminal activity?’ Henry took off his wire-rim glasses.

‘Um, no.’

‘But you’ve found the potential for criminal activity?’

‘Come see the latest from the Night Road for yourself.’

Luke sat down at his computer.

He had a list of more than a hundred websites, discussion groups and online forums to survey, where he would try to draw in and talk with people who had extreme and even violent responses to the world’s problems. A window opened to report on the responses to his many varied comments from before he’d gone on his run. He kept his user names and passwords in a text file on his Mac because he could not remember them all. He logged onto the first online discussion group, where topics ranged from immigration reform to privatization of Social Security. This one tended to be far right wing and multiple retorts to his mild comments had sprouted up since yesterday. Luke scanned them; mostly, the contributors agreed with each other, but they fueled each other’s anger. He signed on as MrEagle, his pen name, and posted a far more moderate view of the immigration issue. It would not take long for venomous arguments against his position to flow in for him to collect and measure. He would also post under other names, agreeing with those who attacked his initial postings, seeing if they were interested in violence as a solution.

Sometimes they ignored his prods; other times, they agreed that violence was the answer.

Luke jumped to another forum, found another pot to stir on a farleft discussion group. His middle-of-the-road comments, left last night on the issue of military contractors, had produced everything from abrasive disagreement to incoherent fury that practically blazed fire through the computer screen.

‘The Night Road?’ Henry asked. ‘Oh, yes. Your nickname for these people.’

Luke had been using the nickname for weeks, but typical of absentminded Henry to forget. Henry had been traveling a lot in the past few days and apparently the jet lag weighed hard. ‘I used to call them the Angry Bitters but that sounded like a punk band. I dreamed one night that an angry mob of extremists of every stripe were chasing me down a long road into an endless night. So I call them the Night Road.’

‘The Night Road. Right. Rather dark of you.’ Henry had an odd look on his face, as though a light had suddenly shut off behind his eyes. Then he smiled.