Chris Jordan - Torn

“You don’t miss much, do you?”

“Is it a secret, what happened? Some mission you were on?”

“Nothing like that. I was off duty at the time. It was a vehicular accident. A bad one. I sustained brain injuries that may or may not have triggered the sleep disorder, nobody can tell me for sure. Some doctors think the cause is organic, others think it’s purely psychological.”

He finishes his hot cocoa, rinses the mug in the sink, sets it on the drain board. I hand him a tissue, indicate the whipped-cream mustache. He looks embarrassed, doesn’t want to meet my eyes.

The whipped cream isn’t what makes him look away.

“What do you see?” I ask. “When you’re, what do you call it, wakeful dreaming?”

He winces, as if jabbed with a pin, keeping his gaze averted.

“You said you wouldn’t lie,” I remind him.

He nods, admitting as much. “The doctors call them artifacts. Images from my memory so distinct they look real. It can be very…distracting.”

“What do you see?” I insist.

He looks directly at me with eyes that have witnessed an eternity of sorrow. “Sometimes I see my wife and daughter,” he begins. “They died in the accident.”

He’s thinking it’s amazing how young the SAs are nowadays. Some of them look like teenagers in adult costumes, although most Special Agent applicants are in their late twenties by the time they get the minimum college degree, plus law enforcement and/or military experience. He was what, twenty-eight before he finally qualified for the FBI? Something like that. But he never looked this young. No way.

It’s kind of a kick, hanging out in the concrete fortress of the Hoover Building, just observing. In the lobby, agents come and go, speaking of Mafia gigolos. Actually he’s in the mezzanine, not the lobby, and there’s probably less chat about the mating habits of mobsters than there was back in the day. The main mission now being terrorism, both domestic and international. But the old place still has the same feel, the same thrum of energy from ambitious kids wanting to break the big case. They come in all colors and ethnicities, but they have in common the desire to be heroes, to get the job done, no matter the risk.

Most will burn out, that’s a given. Some will leave angry and cynical, disappointed that they hadn’t been able to change the world. Others will take an early out, the result of physical or mental traumas suffered on the job or off. Not that you’re ever off the job. Not when you hold the badge.

“Mr. Shane?” A young, pleasantly chubby lab tech peers at him through small, stylish eyeglasses that give her the look of a pretty goldfish. “Dr. Newman will see you now.”

Shane laughs. He can’t help it, but the lab tech looks startled, and then slightly offended. “Sorry,” he says. “For just a second there, it was like Dr. Newman was my proctologist, and this was an appointment. You know?”

The lab tech says, drily, “You better hope he’s not your proctologist.”

“Actually, I don’t have one.”

“Excuse me?”

“A proctologist. Charley’s an old pal of mine. He didn’t mention?”

“I’m filling in, his regular’s on maternity leave.”

She marches away on squeaky crepe soles, leading him through security, waiting as he’s wanded, collecting him on the other side, taking him to a different part of the huge building-Hoover’s labyrinth. Charley Newman’s lair has obviously been moved since the last time he looked in.

Shane worries that maybe his old friend has been demoted, but that isn’t it. As the Bureau’s senior expert on explosive devices, he’s finally gotten a bump up to bigger and better digs, courtesy of al Qaeda. He actually has an office with a window now, not a glorified closet shared with two assistants and a secretary.

“The prodigal son!” Charley cries, bounding out of his padded chair to grab and shake his hand. He stands back, takes a good look at Shane, appears satisfied. “Your eyes are clear. You’ve been sleeping.”

“Like a log,” Shane replies. Which is not quite true. With the help of pills he did render himself unconscious for several hours the night before. And then on the shuttle leg down from LaGuardia he actually fell asleep unassisted. Okay, twenty minutes of snooze time in a fully reclined exit-row seat isn’t going to make an entry in Ripley’s Believe It or Not, but for Shane it’s something of a breakthrough.

“Interesting stuff you sent me,” Charley says.

“I was hoping you might have some thoughts,” Shane says.

“Thoughts or answers?”

“At this point, I’ll settle for whatever you’ve got.”

Charley shoos away the temporary lab tech, whose antennae have risen-what are the bad boys up to now?-and drags Shane into an adjoining room. Not, as expected, a workshop, but more like a conference room, equipped with a long table, a projection screen, and an old-fashioned chalkboard upon which is scrawled the enigmatic phrase, Kaboom means never having to say goodbye.

Tall and thin, though not quite as tall as Shane, and with narrow, bony shoulders rounded by years peering into microscopes, Dr. Charles Newman, who traded his three-letter school-M.I.T.-for a three-letter agency-FBI-seems as engaged and energetic as ever. When they were both young and full of mustard some of the SAs took to calling Charley ‘Doc Brown,’ for the Christopher Lloyd character in Back to the Future. Despite the thinning, wavy hair and the big proud honker of a nose-and the fun he had blowing things up out at his containment bunker in Quantico-Shane never saw the resemblance. To him Charley is and always will be The Chalk Man, a character all his own. Never a Special Agent himself, he’s one of the Bureau’s many overqualified, underpaid civilian employees. Long married to his high-school sweetheart, he and his wife, Trudy, had been godparents to Shane’s daughter. Death hasn’t broken that bond. Nor has Shane’s bad habit of not making contact for months at a time, and usually only when he needs to pick his old friend’s large and well-stocked brain.

As is his habit, Charley heads for the blackboard and starts thinking with chalk, the dust from which will soon adhere to him from forehead to foot. “Okay,” he begins. “The device was placed in a janitor’s cart, one of those wheeled jobs. Estimated forty pounds of military-grade C-4. So assume the center of detonation is between ten and fourteen inches from the floor. That’s consistent with photos of the blast mark. Sound about right?”

“You’re the expert.”

“Yeah, but I’m working from e-mailed attachments. You were at the scene.”

“Negatory on that,” Shane tells him. “The gym was bulldozed a week after it was released.”

“What?” Charley looks stunned.

“It was determined the damaged structure was a danger to the adjoining school. Which maybe it was. So as soon as the state police released the crime scene, down it went. I got the impression that everybody involved wanted to see it gone. Didn’t like having all those kids walk past the wreckage every day.”

“They maybe have a point,” Charley admits thoughtfully. “Still, I was hoping to have your on-site impressions.”

“Sorry.”

The Chalk Man chuckles. “That was just to be polite. I was going to ignore whatever you said. The scene was very well documented, no problem there.”

“Good. So you figured it out.”

“Nah, I made calculations. Which I then converted into a three-dimensional rendering in my handy-dandy, blow-it-up software.”

“Kaboom.”

“It seems like an appropriate name, no? The foam goes up, the stains go down.”