Andrew Klavan - Empire of Lies

I stood in my mother's empty kitchen, trying to get the image of my own execution to stop replaying in my mind, trying to get the images of the fight to stop, the feeling of the bodies swarming over me, the hands grabbing at me, the sound of Serena's hopeless cry -Daddy! -to stop-stop. I felt sick with failure and frustration, helpless, alone.

My suitcase was in the television room, packed but unzipped, ready for my trip home. I got out some fresh clothes. Jeans, a black sweatshirt, and so on. I carried them into the bathroom. I took a shower. I worked the mud and dirt off myself. Put some antiseptic gunk on my cuts and bruises. Brushed my teeth to get the taste of blood and flesh out of my mouth. My face, though… I couldn't do much about that. It was still purple and swollen and misshapen.

When I finished cleaning up, I got dressed. I figured I might as well. I didn't think I'd be able to sleep. I didn't want to sleep. I just wanted morning to come so I could drive into the city, get to the NYPD, track down whoever was running the case, and find out what was going on.

I went back into the television room. The images of the fight kept running in my mind. The images of my execution. Serena's scream. I turned on the set to drown it all out. I put on a local news station for a while to see if they had the story on. They didn't. There was just some nonsense about celebrities flocking to Manhattan for the big premiere. Not just movie stars but dignitaries, too, said the breathless newswoman. The secretary of state, the governor, the mayor. All getting ready to join three thousand people at the New Coliseum for the first movie ever in Real 3-D: The End of Civilization as We Know It. As if nothing were wrong. As if nothing had happened here tonight.

I turned to one of the cable news networks. They were doing the wars in the Middle East. There was a spectacular video of a truck bomb exploding. An Islamo-fascist suicide killer had murdered a dozen Muslim civilians plus an American GI. The bomb sent up a fiery blast that could've come out of a Hollywood action movie. There were the usual frantic handheld shots of bleeding, weeping people wandering dazed through the debris.

I lay down on the sofa, my head propped against the arm. Not to sleep-I didn't think I could sleep-I didn't want to sleep. I thought I would get up in a minute or two and call the airline to cancel my flight home. I would write an e-mail to my wife, tell her I'd been delayed, tell her what was happening. Maybe I'd even call her, wake her up, tell her myself so she wouldn't worry too much. I blinked slowly at the TV screen. There was the usual mother on her knees, the usual body of a child on the ground in front of her, the mother's hands and her screaming face uplifted to heaven…

Then suddenly it was morning-just like that. Late morning, too, by the feel of it. I sat up quickly, surprised, fuzzy with sleep. Something was going on. There was noise. Banging. Someone was banging on the front door, banging so hard I could hear them even in here. On the TV, the news was still playing, the morning report now. I reached for the remote to turn it off. But then I didn't. The pounding at the door went on, but I sat another moment, watching the TV.

Men were standing at a podium-there, I mean, on the gigantic screen that took up the far wall. Men were standing at a podium and cameras were clicking and flashing.

"…recovered over a thousand pounds of explosives," one of the men was saying.

There was a red banner at the bottom of the screen, a caption:

TERRORIST ATTACK ON WALL ST. FOILED.

Now my cell phone started buzzing, its readout lighting up:

BLOCKED CALLER ID.

"Two of them were enrolled as university students," the same man at the podium said in answer to a question called from offscreen.

They got them, I thought, as I came fully awake. Then I thought: What about Serena?

I was holding my breath, afraid to hear the news that she was missing or dead. I could imagine that whoever was pounding at the door was here to deliver the word, whoever was calling my phone…

Pictures flashed on the screen, black-and-white photographs of the five men, five terrorist suspects, who'd been arrested. There were two rows of pictures, two faces on the top row, three on the bottom. My eyes went over them quickly, searching for Jamal, searching for Rashid. Neither was there. I didn't recognize any of the men except

… Except there was one, the man in the middle of the bottom row. He looked like-yes, I was almost certain he was-the young man who had followed me that day I went to the campus to listen to Rashid's lecture. Yes, of course he was: the young man with hooded eyes and a turned-down mouth who had been watching me as I said good-bye to Anne after the class. He was one of the conspirators.

This was it, then: the attack Diggs had predicted; the Friday terrorist strike orchestrated by Rashid. It was all true, and the FBI had stopped it in time. But where was Rashid? Where was Jamal? Where was Serena?

The knocking at my door had stopped for a moment but now it started again. My cell phone went on buzzing. Excited, I turned the TV off. On my way through the garage to the main part of the house, I answered the phone. It was Fitzgerald.

"Where the heck are you?" he said. "I'm outside your front door."

So he was, big as life, in a gray twill suit with the shirt striped red this time and the tie blue. There was a squad car waiting at the curb behind him.

"Did you find her?" I said at once-said before he could say anything.

"Nah, not yet. But NYPD says they want to talk to you right away. I guess they need some more information." He waggled his thumb over his shoulder at the squad car. "We'll bring you there."

I could see now for myself where the ridges on his big Irish face had come from. Because his mouth was smiling easily, but not his eyes. His eyes were watchful and steely as he smiled. I thought he looked like a hunter who was trying to coax a wild beast into a cage without a fight.

Later, I would remember that thought.

That last day, the sky was gray and roiling. The rain had stopped for now, but there seemed a great, surging turbulence in the thick, low clouds. Watching them from the squad-car window, I had the feeling a storm was being prepared behind them, like some spectacular effect being readied behind the curtains of a stage. The sight called forth a physical response from me: a churning in my belly; a sense of portent and foreboding. I was just worried about Serena-that's what I told myself.

But it was more than that, though I wouldn't let myself see it. And when I did see it, I wouldn't let myself acknowledge what I saw. That nausea, that foreboding: It was my brain picking up hints and details faster than my mind could interpret them. It was sitting in the backseat of the squad car like that and looking at the backs of the two heads up in front of me, the head of the young uniformed cop who was driving and the head of Fitzgerald, where he was riding shotgun. It was their terse answers to my questions and their subtle glances at each other and the tense irony in the eyes of the uniform when I caught a look at them in the rearview mirror and when they stole a look at me. I had no reason to see anything ominous or wrong in any of this, but I did see it-I saw it and I convinced myself I didn't.

"So you haven't heard anything at all about Serena?" I asked for maybe the third time.

"Nope," said Fitzgerald, in the tone of a man long comfortable with casual lying. "I guess we'll find out more when we get there."

"They didn't say why they wanted to talk to me?"

"Just, you know, follow-up. Pretty routine in a case like this."

"Those terrorists-I saw on TV they arrested some terrorists who wanted to blow up Wall Street. You think that's part of this?"