Andrew Klavan - Empire of Lies

But none of the things I worried about happened. What happened instead was this:

I was questioned for nearly a week after the explosion. Police officers, FBI agents, spies, lawyers, people who for all I know were just dropping by to deliver Chinese food-everyone seemed to want to hear my story. As I had with Detective Curtis, I stuck to the truth with all of them no matter how awful or embarrassing it was. I told the tale day after day, again and again and again.

Then, after I don't know how long, Detective Curtis himself showed up. I was relaxing between interrogations in a pleasant room on one of the upper floors of One Police Plaza. It was a conference room, with a long table and a wall of windows looking out at the big white clouds over the Brooklyn Bridge. I was sitting at the head of the table, swiveling in a chair, reading about the explosion in the Times. There were the usual angry and fretful stories asking the usual angry and fretful questions that arise after such an incident: How had the terrorists infiltrated security? Where had they gotten the C4? Which conservative politician was to blame? Which American policy had driven the murderers to act? And how could anyone call Christianity a tolerant religion after the Crusades? And so on. There was even a piece demanding to know how Patrick Piersall had gotten into the building with a gun. I knew the answer to that one: celebrity. He'd wangled a ticket to the show from his manager, then found a die-hard Universal fan among the guards, one of those guys who attends Universal conventions dressed up as a Borgon in his spare time. He'd convinced the guard to let him in early so he could tour the theater, and made sure the idiot neglected to put him through the metal detector. Piersall was clever, I'll say that for him. It was a good thing he was on our side.

I was still paging my way through the stories when the door opened and in came Curtis.

His tough brown face went wide with a shockingly friendly smile. It didn't suit him. It looked foreign to his features. Even as I stood up to meet him, even as he swung his hand to me for a friendly shake, I could see in his eyes that he was the same, that he discounted any illusion of decency in me or in anyone. I was just another squirrelly felon who hadn't been caught out yet, that's all. He knew a lot about people, Curtis did, but all of it was bad.

He gestured me back into my chair and sat in a chair beside me. He laid a manila folder on the table between us, but he never opened it. He just liked them, I guess, those folders. He always seemed to have one around.

He pointed casually to the Times open on the table in front of me. "So? What do you think of the coverage?"

I shrugged. "Seems like you haven't told them much yet."

"Not too much. They just get it wrong anyway."

"I notice, for instance, you haven't told them about Rashid." That was foremost in my mind. I figured once the press found out he was involved, the whole incident would become public start to finish.

"Well, we will," Curtis said. "We're going to tell them today."

"All right."

"We're going to tell them Rashid is gone."

My reaction must have looked comical, a comical imitation of surprise. I bolted straight up in my chair, opened my mouth wide, blinked my eyes. "Gone? What do you mean?"

"I mean gone," said Curtis, smiling again beneath those suspicious eyes. "We've searched his office, his apartment, his weekend place: no sign of him."

"But he was in his office. That's impossible. How could he get away? He couldn't walk."

Curtis seemed to consider it. "I don't know. Maybe he had some help. Maybe you didn't hurt him as badly as you thought you did."

I added a few moments of comical sputtering to my ridiculous facial expression. "I… I…"

"Anyway…" Curtis slid the folder off the tabletop into his hand and rose from his chair. I was too flummoxed to stand up myself. I just sat there, staring up at him. "We're gonna tell the media we suspect he may have been smuggled out of the country by his masters and possibly executed for betraying the Wall Street operation. That's it. Anything else you want to tell them is up to you. It's a free country."

He was at the door before I managed to say, "Is that really what you think happened? You think someone smuggled him out of the country?"

Curtis snorted. It was quite a sound. It was hard and mirthless, and yet it registered a deep, genuine amusement of a kind I don't really like to think about. It made my balls tighten and go cold. For a moment, after the door shut behind him, I just sat where I was, swiveling slightly, trying to think. I thought: I'm free then. They're not going to prosecute me. I'm free. But I didn't feel free or, if I did, I didn't feel much joy about it. I just kept thinking about that sound, Curtis's short, snorting laugh. A deep feeling of pity welled up in me-pity for Rashid-and maybe a sense of awe and terror, too. I did not think he had left the country. And I did not think his life was going to be very pleasant from now on, or that it would be pleasant ever again until its end.

So the rest of the story-the story of how I tortured a university professor on what was essentially a hunch-never came out-not until now, at least; not until I told it here. In fact, after that week or so of questioning, the law was more-or-less done with me.

The media, on the other hand-they were a different story altogether.

At first, they treated me as a hero-a second-string hero maybe, next to the celebrity, next to Patrick Piersall, but a hero still. The newspaper writers and TV and radio commentators compared me to characters in movies, guys who hunt down the truth when the authorities suspect them or won't believe them, who stop the killers in the nick of time, and so on. Some of the praise started to sound pretty overheated, even to me.

Then one day, Piersall and I were interviewed on a television show together. It was one of those morning news programs with a sort of domestic feeling-you know, some perky female and some housebroken male acting almost like husband and wife as they chat with newsmakers and celebrities.

Anyway, it was the perky female interviewing Piersall and me. And she was basically asking the same sorts of questions all the other journalists I'd spoken to had asked. "Were you scared?" and "How did you feel?" and "What was the first moment you realized this was really happening?" Even with the bright lights and with the cameras swirling around me and with the perky female's face uncannily sharp and distinct in front of me because of her makeup and celebrity, I grew bored with the whole thing and my mind began to wander. I began to think about the television room in my mother's house. About the fact that I'd programmed the TiVo there to record every show that had Patrick Piersall in it. I wondered if my old friend the enormous TV was recording me right now.

Then, unexpectedly, the perky female interviewer put on her Serious and Thoughtful Face. She leaned toward me over her crossed knees and asked, "When you look at a situation like this, do you have any thoughts about what the root causes of our current troubles in the world might be? Do you think America might share some of the responsibility?"

She was giving me a chance, you see. A chance to show I was deep and nuanced like herself and could understand that sometimes the victim of an attack is really the perpetrator and vice versa. Unfortunately, the question caught me off guard. I had no prepared response. I just began speaking and I said, "You know, Perky (or whatever her name was), I saw one of these fundamentalist imams on TV recently. And he said that when the Soviet Union fell, the forces of faith had triumphed over the forces of atheism. And he said that now, we had to fight a holy war to decide which faith would rule. The more I think about that, the more I think maybe he got it exactly right. Maybe in some sense, this is a holy war…"