Empire of Lies (29 page)

Jamal staggered up from the table, staggered to his feet. I glimpsed him from the corner of my eyes, heard his raw, hoarse orders amidst the noise.

"Get her out of here! Get the gun!" he was rasping. "Get her out. The gun. Under the stove."

The thug beside me immediately rolled over on his stomach and jammed his hand under the stove, feeling for the gun. I jumped on him, grabbed him by the collar, pulled him back. The other thug grabbed me and the three of us went to the floor again, grappling, tearing, punching, gouging at one another.

Something almost like quiet descended on the room then. The alarm went on whistling its warning and Jamal rasped orders. Serena let out strangled sobs and gasps as she fought to get free. On the floor, we were grunting and panting in our struggle. But most of the shouting was over now, and it seemed uncannily still. It was eerie; frightening. As if all this turmoil were going on unheard, unseen, unknown, in the midst of a vacuum, or in the one lighted
place at the center of a vast surrounding darkness. It felt to me as if my mother's kitchen were floating in emptiness and space, and that, scrabbling and clutching and scratching on its fake brick linoleum floors, I was, in fact, battling for every piece of living territory left in all the world.

And I was losing the battle. The two men overpowered me now. They forced themselves on top of me. They held me down. I fought with one, our arms tangling and flailing. The other, meanwhile, reared up on his knees and shoved his hand into his sweatpants pocket, dug for something, came out with it: a folding knife. He worked to open the blade so he could sink it into me. At the same time, Jamal was trying to get around us to the stove.

"Hold him," he was saying. "Hold him!"—and his hoarse voice was very clear in the grunting, whistling silence. "I'll get the gun."

Over by the sink, meanwhile, the man who had Serena began to drag her out of the room. Her feet kicked out and she twisted in his grip as he pulled her backward across the threshold. I heard her shrieking through clenched teeth, the sound muffled deep in her throat. Then she must've realized it was hopeless. She cried out—wailed—in her rage and despair:

"No! Jason! Daddy!"

I threw the two thugs off me. It was easy. It really was. I don't know whether anyone will believe me or not. Even I look back at it and think my memory must be false or overblown. But the way it comes back to me: I heard Serena cry out, and all at once I was rising off the floor and the thugs were flying across the room to the left and right of me as if I were some kind of comic-book superhero and they my merely human foes.

In an instant, I was on my feet. I could see Serena already disappearing into the shadows of the living room. The man who was dragging her was already just a cowled phantom in the darkness
behind her. I tried to go after them, but the two thugs I had thrown aside lunged at me again. I grabbed one by the throat and drove him down onto the kitchen table. The other came with me as I moved and I turned and drove back again, shouldering him hard into the counter by the stove.

I heard Serena wail my name one more time. I gave a guttural snarl in my desperation to reach her.

Then the alarm went off and every other sound was swept away.

Oh, it was a wild and clamorous cry—a hellacious clarion. It filled the kitchen. It filled the brain. The shattering din of it flooded the house and became the medium through which we moved. The very first blast of it was so overwhelming that it seemed to me everything froze—we all froze—and then went on only thickly, slowly, slogging through the noise like fugitives in a dream.

Once again, I tried to charge after Serena but once again the thugs jumped on me, dragged me back. I thought I saw the flash of the knife blade. But now Jamal was coming at us, too. The thought-pulverizing volume of the alarm must've panicked him. He'd abandoned his search for the gun. He was waving his hand urgently. His eyes were big and white beneath his hood. His shouts were lost beneath the siren, but I could see his mouth forming the words "Go! Go! Go!"

The two thugs tore away from the fight—so suddenly I staggered back a step. They rushed out the door, into the dark, into the living room after Serena. Jamal was right behind them. I tried to throw him aside or climb over him—anything to get by. But Jamal turned and harried me with punches, knocking me back against the sink. I grabbed his throat as he tried to get away, and he grabbed mine. For an instant—it could only have been an instant—we twirled around the room locked together like that,
the siren screaming and screaming. Our faces were close together. The hatred in his expression was startling, shocking—as if a beast of fire had leapt out of nowhere into life.

And yet, I felt no hatred for him in return. I remember that clearly. Clutching his throat, spinning around the room in his clutches, I had no feeling about him in particular at all. The philosophy he stood for, the murder he may have done, the beating he had given Serena, even the mass slaughter he was planning—it was as if these were just sad facts of the world to me, symptoms of its soul's disease, like a leper's ugly sores or his contagion. I didn't hate the man for them at all. I simply wanted to destroy him—crush him, kill him, whatever it took—just do the job that had to be done and finish him so I could get free and rescue Serena.

Then we broke apart, flew apart as if hurled from each other's hands by a force outside ourselves. My fingers slipped off his neck as I slammed backward into the refrigerator. He stumbled fast away until he caught himself against the stove. He coiled there with his cowled face twisted, and I thought he would leap at me again. But the next moment, he darted out of the room, darted into the same shadows in which Serena had disappeared.

I shoved off the fridge and went after him. Out of the light of the kitchen and into the dark living room. Through the dim shape of the living-room archway into the den at the back of the house. The siren kept howling, howling and howling, through the rooms, through my skull. I reached the den's threshold just as Jamal banged out through the backdoor screen. I ran after him. Caught the screen as it swung shut. Knocked it open again and tumbled out into the backyard.

The night smelled of autumn and of rain. The air was cool and misty and serene. I saw Jamal's shadow flitting from the glow that fell out of the kitchen window and sinking into the black of the
cloudy night. I ran after him across the grass, slipping—nearly falling—on the damp leaves. The siren went on caterwauling behind me, insanely loud still, but softer out here, almost bearable.

I could hardly see at all, but I knew my way. The pachysandra patch was to my left. When I was a boy, it almost seemed a living beast to me the way it devoured our tennis balls and whiffle balls and never gave them back. The long-trunked sycamore was to my right—the Counting Tree, we called it, because it was the official spot to stand and lay your arm across its ridged bark and hide your face in the crook of your elbow while you counted off the time in hide-and-seek. And straight ahead maybe thirty yards was the old post fence on which, when we were ten years old, I once sat with Susan Patterson and asked permission to kiss her freckled cheek. There was a hedge on the other side of the fence and a gate in the fence where the hedge broke. It led out to Chatham Road around the corner from my house. I heard the gate squeal as it opened and heard it fall shut with a click and a thud—sounds I could have identified in my sleep. Jamal was younger and faster than I was. He had already crossed the yard and caught up to his companions.

I put on an extra burst of speed, raced after him even faster. In my acceleration, I slipped again, the slick leaves sending my feet shooting out from under me. This time I did fall, went down on my shoulder, the jolt of the impact aching in my bones. I slid several feet through the grass and dirt and leaves—then leapt up again without stopping. Even so, as I regained my feet, I could see they'd reached their car. I could see the interior light of it go on through the hedge's leaves. I could hear the engine revving to life.

I made the gate as quickly as I could, but I knew I'd lost her. I yanked the gate open, strangling on helplessness and suspense and rage. Everything in me wanted to get to her, to help her, to stop them from taking her away.

I worked the gate open without thinking. I dashed through onto the sidewalk.

Headlights snapped on and blinded me. The great green Cadillac roared and screeched and sped away, already passing me as I stepped off the curb into the street. I ran—ran after its red taillights, my arms flailing, my hands clawing at the air. I ran until I couldn't breathe and the big car was pulling farther and farther away from me.

Finally I floundered to a stop, bent over with my hands braced against my knees. I panted and gasped for breath. I could still hear the alarm wailing from my mother's house. And there were new sirens now, police cars, approaching fast. And there was the engine of the Caddy, too, gunning, shifting gears—fading rapidly as the car sped away through the streets of the town I knew by heart.

I told the police detective everything. It sounded crazy, even to me. Murder in the swamp; an evil university professor; kidnapping; a terrorist attack in the making; and, oh yes, Patrick Piersall—that was the kicker.

"The admiral of the
Universal?"
the detective mused. "What was his name again?"

"Kane..."

"Augustus Kane, right. That was a hell of a show. I used to love that show."

The detective seemed a patient and jovial civil servant but I thought I sensed a rigidly precise system of moral accountancy at work in him. I suspected he had the Official Catholic Church Graph drawn inside his mind on which he could chart the right and wrong of every thought and action. Maybe it was just his name that gave me that idea—Detective Fitzgerald. But I thought I saw it in his steely blue gaze as well, and in the pattern of ridges dug into the pasty flesh of his rather enormous face. The smile lines around his mouth subtly became squint lines around his eyes, as if he could sit there and laugh with you while sending a narrow look into your soul at the same time.

Anyway, I knew myself the whole story sounded nuts. I told him I knew. I sat there next to his gunmetal desk in the remarkably spacious and spotless detective bureau in the Nassau County Police headquarters and I said, "Look, I know how this sounds. I
really do." I said it several times. It didn't seem to help. Fitzgerald tilted back in his swivel chair and played with a pencil in his two hands. He considered me closely from under his bushy red eyebrows in a way that made me feel like a very suspicious character indeed.

The detective was neatly, even nattily, dressed in a white shirt with blue stripes and a jolly but professional orange tie. His red brown hair was close-cropped. His jacket was carefully draped over the back of his chair. I couldn't help but feel conscious of my own appearance under his gaze. My face was all banged and bruised, my right eye half closed, my lip split and bulging. My slacks and shirt were stained with dirt and grass. There were scratches and mud stains on my arms, mud caked under my fingernails. I'd refused to go to the hospital, but I had gone into the station bathroom when we'd first arrived to try to clean up. I got a good look at myself in the mirror there. So I knew I not only sounded crazy, I looked—worse than crazy—
disreputable.
Like some guy who'd been hauled in after a drunken, violent set-to with his wife.

I also knew—though I did my best to sound calm—that there was a fever of urgency in my eyes, signs of incipient panic in my fidgeting hands. Somewhere, Jamal and his cronies had Serena. Only his feelings for her had kept them from killing her after they'd cut Diggs's throat. Would that be enough to stop them now? And what about the attack they were planning? It was already two in the morning—a minute or so after. It was Friday, the eve of Yom Kippur and Ramadan. This was the day Casey Diggs had predicted they would strike.

You know, you have this idea in your head—I had this idea in my head, anyway—that once you go to the police, the machinery of law enforcement kicks into high gear. I had this idea there would be fast action: terse questions and quick answers followed by even quicker action, phone calls, racing to crime scenes, arrests. In fact, what happened was exactly the opposite. It felt like that, anyway. Once the police arrived, it felt as if everything just stopped. It was a matter of perspective, I guess. With the police on the scene, my frantic efforts to rescue Serena screeched to a halt. The active role in the drama passed over to them. All I could do now was describe the events of the week and then ... well, then nothing. There was essentially nothing else for me to do. I sat there with Fitzgerald. We talked sometimes. Sometimes he made a phone call. Sometimes he wandered off and chatted with other detectives. Sometimes he tapped at his computer. And all the while, I just sat there. The clock ticked on the wall.

"Shame about what happened to the guy," he said now.

"To . . . ?"

"Piersall. Patrick Piersall."

"Oh."

"That scene down at City Hall the other day. Made a fine mess of himself over the years, it looks like. I guess a guy like that—he kind of has his moment in the sun. Then it's over and"—he made a drinking gesture, lifting and tilting his hand as if there were a glass in it—"I guess that's showbiz for you, huh."

I tried to smile as if I were not hysterical with anxiety. "Well, he's definitely a drunk, no question. That's why I didn't listen to him at first. But if they did murder this kid in the swamp..."

"Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I follow you," he said, playing with his pencil, observing me, seemingly unconcerned. "Makes sense. I'm just saying."

He lapsed into silence. I watched the pencil moving in his hand. My eyes went to the clock on the wall.

"We should hear something soon," Fitzgerald said at once. He was watching me, reading my thoughts. "We got our guys all over it. NYPD, too. They have the mother in now. They're talking to her. That should help."