The Architect of Revenge: A September 11th Novel (16 page)

“In July,”
Tony reminded him.

A
s the desert sun climbed behind him he watched his shadow emerge from the soft glow. In the gentle rays, they ran together, savoring the final traces of the delicious night air. With only momentary breaks for the last twenty-six hours, his muscles long ago ceased begging for pity. Morgan no longer knew if his legs existed.

He looked at his watch.

“Good pace,” he said.

He found his next container a dozen yards off the highway. The coyotes had stayed away from that one too. His knife cut the seal on the cooler. He refilled his water pack with more electrolyte solution, changed his socks, and put on a UV-protective shirt. He drank a premade slur he had concocted of salty rice and sesame seeds mixed with tea and honey. Warm and pasty, his stomach quickly protested.

“So much for my Badwater libation,” he grunted.

He looked around while pulling out his penis to pee.

“As if anybody’s watching,” he said.

Cola-colored urine splashed on the caked ground. Absorbing the liquid even before the final drops fell, only a shapeless brown smudge remained.

He started running again.

You can’t stop…

The trite words dissipated as swiftly as they came.

The hills became brushed in orange. His silhouette slowly shrank until he was again alone on the carpet of heat. Hot became hotter until his perception of temperature was gone.

Shimmering walls of air engulfed him as the world coned tight to become a tunnel. Hypnotized, a monochrome orb ahead pulled him forward.

The heat will go away again…tonight
, he was trying to think,
with the altitude…

In the suffocating brilliance, he measured his progress in single footsteps. For a time he ran backward to look at the death that had missed him, but could find no rationale to acknowledge it again. He turned around.

By nightfall, miles ahead, the level road would ascend to Townes Pass in the distant hills, and he would cool off. There he would stop and pray. He couldn’t remember how many times his watch reminded him. He couldn’t remember anything.

Beneath the gibbous moon, he descended from the night air of the five-thousand-foot pass. In the desert glow he saw Mount Whitney touching a solitary flowering cloud. By dawn, he was well over halfway when the furnace returned for the final time.

His toes felt on fire, but he ignored the pain and kept his feet moving. He was back in the tunnel, where nothing mattered except survival. The end would come, eventually.

“Wes…”

The whisper had no volume. The seductive ripple drifted past like a chord of music plucked from its score. The heat was playing tricks on the brain.

“Wes…”

The music in his head receded again.

A speck in the pale sky carved lazy circles before vanishing in the sun.

“Morgan…” he spoke aloud, “it’s a bird.”

“Wes!”

Startled, he looked to his side. Blue wings flapped in time with his stride.

“Caroline…” Morgan spoke to the hallucination. “Why are you flying?”

The ethereal bird said, “Because I can, Wes…”

She flew away.

Hours passed.

Soaring even higher, the bird reappeared near the twin mountain peaks miles ahead.

“Wes…”
she called, “watch!”

At its apogee, the bird pitched over and plunged toward the ground.

“Caroline! Don’t!” He screamed at the dive-bombing bird. “Stop!”

Morgan halted to watch. With no comfort from the stifling oven, the only breeze in the claustrophobic sea of heat came from his breath.

As evening descended, iridescent sunlight reflected on the scorched pavement. Morgan had ignored the silvery mirages for two days, but as the sun sank, each morphed into a brilliant crimson puddle with a splatter of blue. He had never seen colors so vivid. Color was everywhere—brown and tan, gold and orange, and the black ribbon that stretched forever ahead under his feet. But
this
beautiful crimson was the color of—blood. Before this day Morgan had never appreciated its magnificence. With the dying sun, each puddle became scarlet and the blue became darker. Soon the puddles turned black at the edges, and the blue changed from indigo to violet.

At twilight the last puddle disappeared.

M
organ’s ordeal ended at the campground below the Whitney Portal. Tony reclined in a chaise lounge by the tent and toasted his student’s arrival with a beer.

“Not bad! An hour earlier than you predicted,” he said, looking at his watch. “You didn’t hitch a ride the last couple miles?”

Morgan didn’t smile and barely shook his head.

“No.”

A strong handshake followed, then Tony handed him a towel and a bottle of soap. “Go take a cold shower. Check for black toe.”

Burns on the feet were an ever-present risk running long distances on superheated blacktop. Despite alternating pairs of shoes, all of Morgan’s soles had melted a little. But he knew his feet hadn’t suffered too badly.

When he returned, Tony asked if he was hungry.

“Not really,” he said, but Tony had already warmed a meal over a small gas cook-top.

“Eat, Wes,” he said, handing Morgan a plate of fish, potatoes, and corn. “You need calories and a serious recharge of your batteries.”

Morgan did as he was told, stretching out on a second chaise lounge with his feet and legs exposed to the cooling air. While Morgan ate and gulped iced tea, Tony opened another beer.

After letting the silence command the space for a while, Tony smiled.

“I’m only going to ask you one question…as a final exam thing,” Tony said while Morgan chewed. “How do you feel?”

As he finished his food, Morgan reflected to the beginning, back to a person who no longer existed, and realized now he didn’t feel much at all. He felt hollow, stripped of any capacity for worry, pleasure—anything that made a person normal. His inside was dead—but his body was alive and ready to kill.

“Fine,” Morgan said without forethought. This time, he meant it.

Tony stared at his sunburned student.

“Then, my friend…our time together is done,” he said.

At dawn the two men silently folded the tent. Before they placed it in the BMW’s trunk, Morgan lifted the carpet over the spare tire and handed Tony a bulging envelope.

“No charge, man,” said Tony, giving it back. “This last part’s been on me.”

“No,” said Morgan. “You take this.” He crammed the envelope in Tony’s pocket. “That was the deal. Too many greenbacks won’t do me any good where I’m going.”

“I don’t suppose I can persuade you…” began Tony.

“No,” replied Morgan.

Both men knew this would be the last time they met.

“Don’t expect them to canonize you,” Tony said with a smile.

“Not my intention,” said Morgan.

The men shook hands a final time.

“Then may your arrow,” Tony said, “fly straight and true.”

After a sound night’s sleep, Morgan started east. His brain had recovered from the heat and he could think again. The CD player came alive. It would be that way for many hours. When he stopped for gas the first time, he threw away all his papers and unnecessary clothes and shoes. At the next fill-up, his smashed iPod and destroyed laptop hard drive went into an oily bin. In central Texas his final language CD met the same fate, and the shards of his training were gone. The only things remaining in his life were what he had compressed into his brain, his physical training, and the purified calm earned in the desert. His thoughts focused on his next destination—the Port of Houston Turning Basin.

A boat tour the year before had allowed him to mentally catalogue the freighter terminal configurations, dock activity, and the pattern of the crews and shore personnel as they made their way in and out of the wharfs. The time spent driving the roads flanking the filthy water allowed him to determine the best locations to study the inbound freighter traffic. The big ships came from all over the planet, and their crews came from everywhere too. Finding the right ship would take only patience.

Prepaying in cash, Morgan checked into a nearby campground and pitched his tent. He attached Houston Astros stickers to the BMW’s front and rear bumpers and exchanged his front license plate with the same logo. Wearing an Astros baseball cap, he drove to a neighborhood and parked, spreading an Astros sunshield across the windshield. A passerby might notice the Illinois plate but would quickly relish that fans lived everywhere and ignore the car and its driver.

Walking with an Astros bag that held water and a pair of small binoculars, Morgan paused on a bridge overpass to read an incoming ship’s name and home port. He strolled several blocks until another ship appeared then walked to a different overpass to look. In the late evening, soaked from the dense humidity, he drove back to the campground to rest. For several days, he repeated the process, each time leaving the BMW on a different street.

Morgan got his reward when he heard a freighter crew shouting over the engine noise. He looked at the house flag announcing her country of registry and the pennants on the dressing lines boasting of her journeys. The courtesy Stars and Stripes fluttered, respecting the host country as he studied the stern and surveyed the crew.

The
Shindu Sagar
would do just fine.

He watched where the ship berthed.

Morgan drove to a T-shirt shop and had the ship’s name silkscreened on a green shirt with large white letters, then had the BMW washed and the inside thoroughly detailed. He asked the young attendant to spread a fresh plastic tarp over the driver’s seat and carpet, then handed him a nice tip.

“Selling it?” asked the teenager with curious jealousy.

“Yeah,” Morgan replied, “want it looking like new when I trade it in.”

The kid nodded.

“Hey, do me a favor,” Morgan said to him. “Don’t want to leave my sweaty fingerprints on the handle. Shut the door for me, will you?”

Morgan put on driving gloves and drove off.

With the BMW facing the campground office, he polished the windshield with an auto-glass compound until the sun dazzled off the luster. The manager saw the reflection and pumped his fist in approval, not understanding its true purpose of blinding a camera that soon would take Morgan’s picture.

Morgan returned the man’s enthusiasm with a big wave.

With the trunk raised so the manager couldn’t watch, Morgan swapped his rear license plate with one he’d pilfered before leaving Chicago, then used a wire cutter to destroy his Illinois plates. Some of those metal pieces as well as the tool, his tent, binoculars, auto-glass cleaner and the Astros bag—whatever traces of his former self that remained—ended in the Dumpster on his way to the camp shower.

When he emerged, he wore aviator sunglasses, a different baseball cap, and fresh clothes. The towel and any remaining clothes joined the rest of the trash.

He drove to the long-term parking lot at Bush International Airport. Pausing just before he pulled up to the security gate, he tipped his head down so the cap’s beak covered most of his face, lowered the window, and pulled the ticket from the automatic dispenser.

Driving around the lot, he carefully surveyed the ocean of automobiles before choosing a space with a rear cement wall. He backed the BMW in and shut off the motor for the last time.

Morgan put up the sunshield and released the trunk lid. As he got out, he removed the tarp, folding it into a small rectangle. He lifted the backpack from the trunk, strapped it on, and locked the car.

At the nearby airport bus stop, he dropped the tarp and remaining license plate parts in a trash can. A second can received the gloves and the shredded parking ticket.

He drew a deep breath.

Morgan’s only possessions now were what he had learned, carried, and the guile to believe he might succeed—or die trying.

Boarding the bus, he took a seat in the middle, scrutinizing the smudge on the window. The backpack sat on his lap.

At the next stop, a man got on, looked at all the empty seats, and came up to Morgan.

“Hey! Rag-boy!” he said loudly. The man’s halitosis was indescribable, but his body odor was worse. “Move the fuck out of my seat!”

Without protest, Morgan went farther back and sat motionless until arriving downtown, where he waited to transfer to the bus that went to the wharf.

The bus left him near a large plywood wall plastered with handbills for nearby restaurants, massage services, and gentlemen’s clubs. He smiled. All men had the same needs.

Weaving through the large overfilled parking lot toward the port’s main security entrance, he casually knocked the cap off his head. Bending down to pick it up, he tossed the sunglasses under a car and kept walking. A few cars later, he dropped his head to sneeze, leaving the cap wedged behind a truck tire.

In his frayed oxford shirt tucked into tattered jeans, his running shoes pressing in the cracked pavement, he leaned against a chain-link fence with the backpack at his feet, dawdling in the torpid air. He rubbed his hands across his leathery skin, waiting.

At shift change, exiting workers milled past him, dispersing to the parking lot. From every direction he heard beer cans pop open. Interspersed among the noises were the crews coming for shore leave. Morgan studied their faces.

Three men exited the security gate, one using a black walking stick to balance an ungainly limp. The person who gripped the dervish-style carved wood stick with streaks of inlaid ivory had caught Morgan’s attention as he’d evaluated the incoming
Sagar
that morning. He was pleased to see the man with the gimpy walk coming his way.

Morgan studied the man’s two companions. One was tall, bald, and very dark skinned; the other was shorter and more round.

Morgan unbuttoned the oxford to display the T-shirt. After scratching his neck, he used an index finger to rub his eye. With a slight grimace he shook his head.

The men approached him.

Touching his lowered brow, Morgan said in Arabic, “As-salaamu ‘alay-kom.”
Peace be with you.

With a raise of his open hand, the man with the walking stick returned the greeting.

“Enta Wasalt a’la
Shindu Sagar
?” Morgan asked, wrinkling the space between his eyebrows.
Have you arrived on the
Shindu Sagar
?

“Na’am,” the man replied.
Yes.

“Hal Fouad Mutallah a’la elmarkab?” Morgan added a hopeful smile.
Is Fouad Mutallah aboard?

“I do…not know…him,” the man said in broken English and looked at the other crewmen. “You…know him?” he asked.

They shook their heads.

“I’m expecting to join him,” said Morgan. He looked into the sky, exhaling frustrated breath. “Patience is difficult. I do not know what to do. I do not wish to remain in this country.”

The man gave a sympathetic nod. “What is your name, friend?” he asked.

“Barif,” said Morgan. “Barif Ali.”

“I am Jamil.” He used no surname.

The two men shook hands, and Jamil introduced the others. The big man was called Hamid, a Somali; the other was Nidal, from the southern Philippines.

Jamil asked, “How long…have you…been—”

Hamid interrupted. “Blond girl!” he said loudly. “No dress…” Placing a finger on his head, he spun once underneath. “Dance!” he shouted, cupping his hands over his chest to imply large breasts.

Nidal agreed excitedly.