Mary McDonald - No good deed

“I don’t understand how you could have all those pictures, and dreams, yet not know that you knew the people in them?”

He stood and ran a hand through his hair. “Yeah, I sound stupid, but think about it. How many people are you acquainted with? You know, faces you nod to as you pass them in the supermarket, or at the bank. When you see them out of context, you don’t know where you know them from. Hasn’t that ever happened to you?”

Jessie pursed her lips. How many people did she come into contact with every day whose faces were a blur to her? Too many. “I see your point. You said most of your photos take place right around here, right?”

Mark nodded and began pacing behind the couch. “So, Sheridan-he came to Chicago, right? If he hadn’t met me, the camera wouldn’t have produced his photo.”

Jessie stared at the silver label lying crinkled on the table as she thought things through. She still had questions. “So…what about nine-eleven?”

“What do you mean?” Mark stopped mid-pace, his brows knit in confusion.

“It took place a thousand miles from here.”

He nodded and bent his head for a moment. When he raised it, his eyes had a haunted expression. “Yeah. That occurred to me too, but I have a feeling I must’ve had a connection to someone who died that day.”

“You knew someone who was in one of the Towers?”

Mark shrugged. “Maybe, or maybe one of the planes. I don’t know for sure. For days afterwards, I avoided all the coverage. I-I couldn’t even look at a newspaper.”

Jessie imagined that it would have been torture for Mark to watch all of that when he had tried to stop it. It had been hard for her, and she didn’t have the guilt factor. “I’ll bet you did know someone. I think just about everyone in the country knows someone who knows someone who died that day.”

He was right. She felt it in her gut. “There were a lot of people from the Chicago-area killed.” There had been lists in the Chicago papers and she had recognized a few names. Nobody she knew personally, but she had felt saddened by even the small connection.

She became lost in her thoughts and barely noticed when Mark wandered to the windows again. A woman she had gone to school with had lost her husband on one of the planes. And a guy from her precinct had lost a brother who had been a New York police officer caught when the towers collapsed.

“So, I guess I had to meet Jim Sheridan so that I could save him.”

Jim scrolled through his newest memos. In the last month, intelligence chatter had picked up clues to something big, but details were sketchy. The only intelligence they had said the plan was going to happen soon, and the code name for the operation was ‘Cracker Jack” He skimmed the memos again, jotting down anything that might be of importance.

On the top of the legal pad, he’d written Cracker Jack, then listed questions he wanted answered. Timing, location and target. He closed the memos and opened another file with older memos. Maybe there was something in them that didn’t mean anything at the time he’d read them, but might point to something now. He pulled up the notes from current investigations. A gun dealer in the suburbs had reported a couple of men trying to buy ammunition for automatic weapons. When told that wasn’t possible, they’d asked if the owner knew how they could get it. He’d declined to help them. Security tapes had provided pictures of the men, but without names, it didn’t help much.

“Damn it.” He rolled his chair away from the desk and put his hands behind his head, elbows out as he searched his mind. If he were a terrorist, what would be an inviting target? It would have to be somewhere with lots of people, so that they could instill terror. That’s where the terror in terrorist originated. Blowing up a government warehouse out in the desert didn’t strike fear into the heart of the average person. Terrorists’ goal was to create fear in hopes that citizens of a country would blame their own government for whatever policies that the terrorist groups had issues with.

Grabbing his pencil, he scooted up to the desk again. It was July but past the fourth, which would have been a likely date. He clicked through his calendar to see if anything stood out. Nothing major until the air show in mid August. That was still a few weeks away. The Taste of Chicago had already passed. There were always music festivals and concerts. Other likely targets included important buildings, but measures taken in the last few years had made it more difficult to destroy them. Jim hoped that the newer security rules at airports and around likely targets made them less desirable. Trains and subways had been targets in the past, and hard to secure. The possibilities were endless. He glanced at his watch. Almost noon. He’d been in the office since seven, and had worked sixteen hours a day for the two weeks. His team had done the same. To show his gratitude, he’d bought tickets to tonight’s Cub game for all of them. They all needed a little break to clear their heads.

“Excuse me, Jim?”

He glanced at the door to his office. “Yes, Beth?”

His administrative assistant leaned into the room. “There’s a guy on line two who’s called a few times for you while you were at your meeting earlier. I offered to transfer him to another analyst, but he insisted on talking to you. He wouldn’t leave a message or a number. Said he was calling from a pay-phone.”

Curious, Jim nodded. “Okay. Thanks.” He reached for the phone. “Sheridan speaking.”

He could hear someone breathing rather hard and he almost made a smart comment about how unwise it was to prank phone call the FBI. He decided to give them the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps the person hadn’t heard him answer, so he tried again. “Hello? Is anyone there?”

The person on the other end cleared their throat. “Uh, yeah, I’m here.”

The voice tugged at his memory but he couldn’t place it. “Who am I speaking with?” He put his hand over his other ear to block out the noise from some colleagues trooping past his door.

“It’s…it’s Mark Taylor.”

Jim’s grip on the phone slipped as the shock hit him. He recovered quickly. “Taylor. What can I do for you?”

“I have to talk to you, Sir. It’s urgent.”

“I’m listening, so talk.”

“Not on the phone. It’s gotta be in person.”

Suspicion piqued but so did his curiosity. “Why can’t you tell me now?”

“I can’t take the chance. I know this call is probably recorded.”

Taylor didn’t have to say anything more about recorded phone calls. Jim remembered that detail as the lynch-pin of their case against him. “Okay. Fine. I’ll meet you, but it has to be somewhere public.” It wouldn’t be wise to meet the guy in a back alley; that was for sure. Taylor probably wanted nothing more than to stick a blade in him.

“Yeah, okay. You know where O’Leary’s Pub is. Can you meet me there in an hour?”

It was on the tip of his tongue to ask how Taylor was sure that he knew where that pub was, but then he recalled seeing Jessie Bishop at the establishment. It wasn’t hard to put two and two together. It might not be a bad idea to request her presence at the meeting. “I’ll talk with you on the condition that Detective Bishop is present. I think she’s someone we both trust.” He hadn’t thought of it before, but he did trust her. She was a straight shooter.

Taylor didn’t answer for a moment and Jim wondered if the guy even knew that he and Jessie Bishop had met last summer. It had only been a couple of months since he’d seen Bishop at that pub. At that time, she hadn’t seen Taylor yet.

“I’ll ask her. I can’t promise though. She’s working.”