For Money or Mayhem

{19} Hero

I was caught in morning traffic coming into Seattle. I’d sat in the café running searches through the night until I finally ran down the batteries of both the tablet and the laptop. I drove back to Seattle with less pressure on the gas pedal. I still didn’t have a great answer. In fact, I didn’t have an acceptable answer. Andi simply was not who she said she was. I’d even run a search designed to find a news story about a death with a smile, a martini, and a pregnant wife. I was amazed at how many of those there were.

And really—what could I say about it anyway? I couldn’t just open a conversation and say, “By the way, now that I’ve told you I love you, who are you?” Occam’s Razor demanded a simple explanation. Most I could think of meant she was on the run from someone who wanted to hurt her—witness protection program, cops, bad domestic situation, mob, you name it. I wasn’t about to blow her cover.

Now it was Thursday morning. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. I was walking downtown toward the office with my computer in a backpack, but I hadn’t determined whether or not to go in. I showered and shaved when I got home, dressed in a gray suit, and then got online at EFC from home to see if anyone was missing me. I didn’t care if I got there on time and wasn’t sure if I was going back at all. Still, here I was walking up Third toward the office. There were a lot of people on the street for eleven in the morning. Experience told me most people in the financial district at this hour were in offices. The rigid schedule of the financial community meant everyone would flood out onto the streets at exactly noon and the street would be empty again at one. It was always a curiosity to me as to why no one ever changed their lunch schedule, but maybe today was the day.

I hadn’t slept in thirty hours and the world around me was a kaleidoscope of invading sights and sounds. A woman walked toward me looking like she had just come from Capitol Hill herself. She wore a plaid lumberjack shirt with a knit cap. Her motorcycle boots were pulled up over faded khaki denims. Her nose was pierced with a hoop through it. There were several rings in her ears and a tattoo was visible under her left ear. I didn’t really want to imagine where else she had things stuck through her body.

A couple walking behind me argued about something that sounded trivial to me—the time they were supposed to meet a friend—but what is trivial to one person could be the most important thing in life to another. False identity could be trivial or vital.

Two men in black suits and white shirts walked past me. If I lived in the suburbs, I’d automatically assume they were missionaries wanting to tell me about this religion or that. Two-by-two. Another war waiting. Worlds collide. Maybe that was what I was arguing with myself about. This time I couldn’t see either a right way or a possible way. I’d been set up and I didn’t know who on my team I could trust. I’d started my tenure distrusting everyone, and now I had to find a way to expose the right person while exonerating myself.

I still don’t know what alerted me—a scuffle, a gasp, a shout, a scream. It seemed they all happened at once, directly behind me. I spun in my tracks.

I’ve heard people describe events like this with words like ‘everything went into slow motion,’ and then they describe in great detail everything they saw. I can’t honestly say I saw anything that my brain could process quickly enough to comprehend. But my body seemed to act without me. Even after the fact, all I could put together was that a woman was falling into the street, a bus was coming, and as I grabbed her and spun her out of the path of the bus she screamed, “He pushed me.” Then there was a sharp pain in the back of my head and everything went black.

I was being lifted into an ambulance on a gurney when I opened my eyes. I was strapped down securely and could see a blue uniformed police officer standing over me on one side while a med-tech pulled an oxygen mask off my face. My pack was lying on the seat to my right. The EMT was asking if I could see his fingers while I heard the officer rambling on about my rights. “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say or do can and will be held against you in a court of law…”

“Can you raise your finger? Do you feel your toes?”

“You have the right to speak to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you…”

“Is there any pain when I press on your stomach?”

“Do you understand these rights as they have been read to you?”

I couldn’t speak and I couldn’t move my head. My mouth wagged open and closed a couple of times.

“Is there anyone we should contact for you?”

“Why did you push her?”

It was too much. The overload blacked me out again.

I certainly wasn’t expecting Jen there when they wheeled me into a room after x-rays. I’d been summarily stripped of my clothes—an expensive gray suit cut to shreds—while they examined my body for additional damage. Apparently, the twelve stitches the doctor had put in my scalp and a mild concussion from where the bus mirror hit me in the back of the head were all the damage they could find. I felt like I’d been run over. I looked around for the policeman.

“Jen? What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Arnie and Phil were coming back from a morning coffee just in time to see the commotion. When Arnie recognized you, he caught a cab up to the hospital and Phil alerted the rest of the team. I came down because I knew Arnie had a budget meeting this afternoon. Phil came over with me, but both he and Arnie left as soon as we heard you were going to be okay.”

“Police?”

“Big mix-up. One rode here with you and another came with the gal you rescued. Apparently she’d claimed you pushed her, but when asked to identify you, she screamed that it wasn’t you, it was her boyfriend. A woman across the street said she saw you save the girl. As soon as they realized they got the wrong message, one of them got on his radio and called in an arrest bulletin for the boyfriend.”

“Why did you stay?”

“I thought I might be easier for you to look at when you woke up than police and doctors.” She smiled and I realized she was joking. Still, she was pretty easy to look at. She was dressed in a dark suit with three buttons up the front and apparently no more than a black camisole under it. Under other circumstances I’d have been salivating. Under current conditions, however, she was still a suspect.

And my affections, even though tested by what I’d learned in the past twenty-four hours, lay elsewhere. All through the painful flashes and confusion after the accident, the only thing that kept me in the real world was thinking of Andi and that we’d just begun. I knew for a fact that it would make no difference to me why she had changed her identity. I had fully thrown my lot in with her. I had no reservations.

“I need to call Andi.”

“The girlfriend? You can use my cell phone. I think Darlene already called, though.”

“What time is it?” I had no idea how long it had been since the accident and I hadn’t called Andi last night in the turmoil of my net search.

“Two o’clock. Darlene called Lars and he suggested she call Andi.”

“Which I did, and she’s on her way,” Darlene said coming into the room. “I’m sorry we didn’t call her sooner, but she wasn’t on your contact list. Your mother is on her way as well. She’s the emergency contact in your personnel file.” Poor Mom.

“Thank you, Darlene,” I still grasped Jen’s phone, dialing in Andi’s number. Even if she was on her way… Darlene fussed about straightening the room and arranged a big bunch of flowers in a vase next to the bed. They looked a little wilted.

“Sorry I didn’t have time to go to a florist for you. These are left over from Admin Day last Friday.” I laughed a little, but my head was beginning to throb.

“I hope I’m out of here before they lose all their petals,” I said. I pushed the connect button to dial Andi. A second later I heard a phone ring outside the door and Andi in stereo saying “I’m here.” I heard her through the phone and from the door as she came into the room.

I dropped the phone on the bed in time to catch Andi in my arms as she practically threw herself on me.

“You said it wasn’t dangerous! You said you’d be okay! We just got started, don’t get yourself killed yet!” She was laughing and crying and smothering my face with kisses between words. Beyond her, I saw Jen reach to the bed beside me to pick up her phone. The next time I looked, she was gone.

“I guess none of us is needed here,” Darlene said as she, too, edged away.

“Wait,” I said. “Andi, this is Darlene, the Admin in our department at EFC. She’s the one who called.”

“I don’t know how you knew to call me, but thank you,” Andi said extending a hand to Darlene. She still kept one hand clutching me.

“If it hadn’t been for his boss seeing the accident, none of us would have known he was in the hospital at all,” Darlene said. “I’m sorry it took so long to reach you.”

“I appreciate all you did, Darlene,” I said. “Please thank the guys at the office for me.”

“You’re a lucky man, Dag,” she said looking at both Andi and me. “I hope your luck holds.” With that, she nodded goodbye and left Andi and me alone.

During the remainder of the afternoon, my mother, Lars, and Jordan all showed up. The doctors told me they wanted to keep me for observation overnight to be sure there were no lasting effects from the concussion. They also seemed to think I was a lucky man.

I was pretty exhausted from the effect of the accident, the drugs, and having been awake most of the previous night. I drifted in and out of sleep as people milled about. My mother was suitably impressed with Andi when I introduced her as my girlfriend. Andi outright giggled at the pronouncement. Before Mom left, she looked at me sternly and said, “Keep this one.”

Once she was satisfied that I was not in danger of dying on her and that I was really a hero and not a target, Andi reluctantly left to take Cali to final dress rehearsal. I asked her to stop by my apartment and pick up some clothes for me. She waved away my offered keys and said she’d ask Jared to go get some for me. She seemed hesitant to enter my private living space without me.

When it was just Lars and Jordan and me, things got serious.

“We can’t get a positive ID on the bastard,” Jordan said. “Somehow we’ve got to flush him out in the open. If we walk in there with less than an open-and-shut case, the courts will eat our lunch. Even the attack on your systems yesterday came by such a circuitous route that it looked like a dozen different sites were downloading to your computer at once. It’s nasty.”

“He’s a gamer,” I said. “We’ve got to think of him that way. To him it is just another game.” John Patterson was one of the few entrepreneurs who emerged from the dot com bust with both his reputation and his fortune intact. He’d been investigated for insider trading, but no evidence ever emerged on that either. He built a billion-dollar fortune in a matter of three years and then surprised the world by signing most of it over to a charitable foundation. At that point the investigations stopped. He was chairman of Patterson Trust, but drew no salary, living what was deemed an exemplary life within the means of the small fortune he had retained for himself. Only in our small group was he suspected of being an online predator and brutal murderer. And only I knew that his trust controlled the vast charitable network I’d dubbed Philanthropolis. I’d found enough evidence to make him a person of interest, but even with the threat I’d received we couldn’t positively make a link between the online harassment and the series of unsolved kidnappings I’d uncovered.

I told my colleagues what I suspected was happening at EFC as well. Lars was appalled, but he said that the accident in front of the building might have bought me enough time to sort it out. He was not happy that I was contemplating walking back into the building.

“Stay out of there until you get the evidence,” he said flatly. “Use your recovery time as an excuse. If nothing else, that might force them to change their timeline and tactics. If they have to move in a different way, they could expose themselves.” We were using the term they, not knowing yet how many of the employees at EFC were involved in this scheme. I was content to stay out of the building for now.

I was relieved when visiting hours were over. I needed rest. My brain was still whirling, though, so just before Lars left I asked him to hand me my backpack. I figured I could at least check my mail. I said goodbye and for the first time during the day I was alone.

I dozed off with the backpack still clutched in my arms. When I jerked awake the digital clock across the room read 10:17. There were no sounds and no movement anywhere near. I’d been told to ring if I needed a pain reliever. There was no longer an I.V. drip or monitoring device connected to me. The scene from the morning flashed through my brain and I found myself sweating. I didn’t know what instinct had caused me to dive in front of that bus, or how I’d escaped being killed. It just happened.

I unzipped the backpack and pulled out the big laptop, intending to take a look at my other search results to see if I could make sense of them. When the computer came out of the bag, it caught on the zipper and the bag slipped sideways. An envelope fell out of the bag onto the bed.

I stared at it in disbelief. We’d just said they would have to adjust their schedule, but I hadn’t prepared for this. I reached for a paper towel on the bedside table and used it to pick up the envelope. I’d seen several identical envelopes just two nights ago when I was trapped in the robotics room. I could feel the card through the envelope addressed to someone I didn’t know in Kansas.

I upended the bag and a dozen more credit card mailers fell onto the bed.

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