Authors: Robert Kroese
“
Paul?”
“
Yes, Dr. Heller. What is it?”
“
I … Paul, I think you should come here.”
“
What’s wrong, Dr. Heller?”
“
I don’t want to say any more on the phone. Can you please come back here as soon as possible? It has to do with Tali.”
“
OK. I’ll be there as fast as I can.”
When I get there, he tells me Tali
has been kidnapped. We’re sitting in the living room and he’s obviously shaken. I think he’d probably been trying to convince himself that Tali was OK, that she’d taken off for a few days with a girlfriend or something, but now he is coming to grips that something horrible has happened. On the coffee table between us sits a hard-sided leather briefcase.
“
What’s that?” I ask.
“
Ransom,” he says.
“
How much do they want?”
“
Um? Oh, fifty thousand dollars.”
“
Do you have that much?”
He gestures vaguely toward the case. Apparently he does.
“Do you know who took her?”
He shakes his head.
“Supposed to bring the money to Fairway Mall at five p.m.” I notice he left the pronoun off the front of that sentence.
“
Are you going to do it?” Notice that I don’t define
it
.
“
No choice. I can’t let them kill Tali.”
“
Is that what they said? They’re going to kill her?”
“
That was the implication.”
“
Who did you talk to? How do you even know they have her?”
“
Some man whose voice I didn’t recognize. They let me talk to her briefly. She’s OK. Scared, but OK.”
“
Do you know anyone who would want to kidnap her?”
He shakes his head.
“No. I did notice something strange this morning, though. Tali’s been accessing the Tyche data.”
Of course she has, I think. That
’s how she knew about the Alameda case. “Can you tell what she was doing? Why she was looking at Tyche?”
“
No. I can only assume that somebody got wind of what we’ve been doing and thinks it’s some sort of money-making operation. Maybe Tali was trying to show them what Tyche actually does in an effort to get them to realize we’re not doing this for the money. That’s the only hypothesis I’ve got. Anyway, I’ve shut off her access. We can’t risk the data falling into the wrong hands.”
“
Even if it costs Tali her life?”
“
If the knowledge of Tyche becomes widespread, we’ll have bigger problems,” he says cryptically.
I decide not to pursue the matter.
“What about the police?”
He shakes his head.
“No time. And they’ll start asking questions. A lot of what Tali and I do … it’s difficult to explain. We keep it secret because people would tend to get the wrong idea.”
Yeah, I think. Knowing about mass murders in advance does tend to make you an object of suspicion. I regard the briefcase.
“Five o’clock,” I say.
He nods.
“At the fountain in the center of the mall.” It’s after four now.
We sit there for a good minute, not speaking. I know what he
’s thinking: He’s a famous scientist who has figured out a way to predict mass murders, and I’m just some loser who tried to throw himself in front of a train two days ago. Plus, he’s probably figured out by now that I’ve got a bit of a thing for Tali. If one of us is going to risk his life for Tali, it should be me. He’s not going to
say
any of that, of course. He’s waiting for me to volunteer, the crafty old bastard.
“
I’ll do it,” I say. What choice do I have? Tali’s the only thing in my life worth living for anyway.
We waste another minute with him pretending to try to talk me out of it and me assuring him that it only makes sense that I be the one to deliver the ransom. I do get in one jab, suggesting that if things get dicey
, there might be running involved, and it would be a shame if he broke a hip or something. He gets a little mad at that and stops talking.
I put the briefcase in the trunk and drive to the mall. I
’m tempted to open it up and make sure the money is really inside, but he’s told me it’s locked. The combination is Tali’s birthday, which of course I don’t know. To my credit, I never seriously consider taking off with the money, although the possibility occurs to me. I could get that lock open with a hammer and a chisel in about thirty seconds. I no longer have a job and only have enough money in the bank to make my next two rent payments. Fifty thousand dollars would set me up for quite a while.
I park and enter the mall through Sears, feeling acutely self-conscious carrying the briefcase. My heart beats rapidly and my palms are sweating. I force myself to take deep breaths. Some part of my subconscious (my quantum brain?) is telling me something
’s not right here – beyond the fact that I’m walking through Sears to deliver a fifty thousand dollar ransom for a kidnapped girl I barely know. I’m beginning to realize that this scenario doesn’t make any sense. Heller looked like he was reasonably well off, but he hardly seemed like the ideal victim of a ransom scheme. Hell, there are probably software executives in Heller’s own neighborhood worth tens of millions. Why pick on a retired physics professor? And Tali is just Heller’s assistant, not his daughter. How do they even know he’d be willing to pay the ransom to spare her?
By this point I
’m halfway down the mall concourse. The fountain is just up ahead. It’s Saturday afternoon, so the mall is packed. I check my phone: it’s four fifty-eight. I hesitate for a moment, trying to make sense of the situation. If I had more time, I’m certain I could figure it out. My instincts tell me to take the briefcase and run, but if I do, I know I’ll never see Tali again. I keep walking.
I
’m at the fountain. Phone says 4:59. I’m looking around, but all I see are teenage girls loitering and parents pushing kids in strollers. Nobody who looks like a kidnapper.
Then I hear it: the same voice that gave me pause at the BART station, coming from somewhere up above:
“Paul, don’t! It’s a –”
I look up, along with several of the shoppers, who are trying to figure out who is screaming. I see her on the second level of the mall, leaning over the railing. A man has clamped his hand over her mouth and pulls her backwards, away from the edge.
I’m not sure, but I think he’s the same man I saw with Tali in Alameda. They disappear from view.
I run to the escalator, dodging shoppers left and right. The briefcase makes it hard; it weighs at least twenty pounds and keeps me from moving very nimbly. I
’m taking three steps at a time, jostling people and occasionally whacking someone on the elbow or knee with the briefcase. They curse and yell as I pass, but eventually I make it to the top. I turn to see, on the other side of the atrium, a woman Tali’s size being escorted away by two large men in heavy coats and baseball caps. I run after them, rounding the corner of the atrium and skirting the railing. They are walking briskly and I’m running, so I gain on them. Then one of them stops and turns. I realize he’s holding a gun and I instinctively hold the briefcase in front of me. Several loud cracks echo through the mall and I realize a viscous liquid is running down my left arm. Blood?
Not blood. The stuff is charcoal-colored, and it
’s all over the briefcase, which has three holes punched in it. What the hell?
People are screaming and ducking for cover now. The shooter has rejoined Tali and the other man, and they
’ve put some distance between us, because I’m standing there like a dumbass, holding a ransom that seems to be made of some sort of petroleum byproduct. Not really thinking, I hurl the case over the railing toward the fountain and start running again. I don’t get very far.
T
he blast knocks me to the floor. For a moment I’m dazed, not sure what’s happening. Shoppers lying around me on the floor, holding their ears, the three figures retreating toward the Kohl’s sign in the distance. I stagger to my feet. My ears are ringing and I see a rainbow.
I blink but it
’s still there. Not stars, a rainbow. The air is filled with a fine mist, refracting the sunlight streaming through the skylights above into its constituent wavelengths. I stumble through it to the railing, breaking the spell. Down below, carnage. The fountain is wrecked, and bodies are strewn about it, bloody and broken. I nearly puke but force myself to look away. I run after the three figures in the distance.
A bomb.
The briefcase hadn’t held money; it had held a bomb. Why? What good could possibly come from that? It occurs to me that maybe Heller isn’t all that interested in good.
I pursue the trio down the concourse but it
’s too late; they’ve disappeared. I’m aware of people shouting and pointing my direction. I make for the nearest exit, find my car, and get the hell out of there.
I drive away as fast as I dare, passing police cars and emergency vehicles heading the other way, sirens blaring. I watch in the rearview as each police car passes, half-expecting one of them to turn around and begin pursuit. Not one of them does. I wonder how long it will take for an APB to be sent out. I
’m sure I was caught on the mall security cameras. By five after eleven tonight I’ll be famous: the Fairway Mall Bomber. The kidnappers would be on video too, but I’m guessing it will be hard to identify them, since they were wearing caps. The search will center on me. Someone will see me on TV, recognize me as that quiet guy who used to teach high school English in San Leandro. The phrase “history of mental illness” will be used. If they play up that aspect enough, maybe it’ll save me from lethal injection.
I drive aimlessly into the foothills. When I reach a sufficiently secluded spot, I pull over, get out and vomit into a ravine. I sink to the ground, leaning my back against the front tire of the
Focus. My hands are shaking and I’m on the verge of tears again.
OK, pull yourself together. You can explain this. I go over the story in my head and realize that no, I can
’t explain it. I don’t understand what happened, and the parts that I do strain credulity. Before I talk to the cops, I need to figure out what’s going on. I probably still won’t be able to offer a credible legal defense, but at least I’ll have a better idea how I ended up on death row.
Why did Heller send me to the mall with a bomb?
To kill the kidnappers? It seemed a sloppy way to do it. Besides the fact that it wasn’t by any means a foolproof way of killing them, there would inevitably be collateral damage. My mind is overwhelmed by images of bodies lying scattered on the mall floor, a concentric tide washing blood into the surrounding shops like some suburban Normandy. I push the images away. Even if Heller didn’t care about innocent bystanders being killed, didn’t even care about Tali possibly being killed, bombs leave too much forensic evidence behind: timers, detonators, chemical charges – these things can be traced. It made no sense. It was, in fact, the epitome of a senseless crime, just like Ski Mask opening fire on the pier: no motive, no finesse, no thought of self-preservation. Just chaos for the sake of chaos.
So Heller had sent me to the mall to cause chaos. Why? It was a pointless question, at least from an ethical perspective. Chaos was its own reason. But from another angle, a purely causal perspective, the question did have an answer: he sent me to the mall because Tali and her kidnappers were going to be there. Even if the ransom was
fake, the kidnapping was clearly real – or was it? Perhaps the whole thing, even Tali crying out to me, was play-acting. This thought, too, I rejected: no, I still couldn’t believe Tali had anything to do with it. Either the kidnapping was real or she was the best liar I’d ever known. I was going to work on the assumption that Tali was a victim in this. The alternative was that Tali had saved my life in order to execute some absurdly complex ruse involving her own kidnapping. Besides being highly unlikely, that would mean that my life really was as hopeless as it had seemed that day – only three days ago! – I had nearly stepped in front of a train. If that was the case, well, I’d probably find out soon enough – and there wasn’t any harm in allowing myself to remain deluded a bit longer.
So the kidnapping was real. Was the ransom demand? Heller said he had received a call from a man whose voice he didn
’t recognize. He also said that he had talked to Tali, and that she was scared but unharmed. He said that he had gotten the impression they were going to kill her if he didn’t pay.
I don
’t buy it, for the reasons I mentioned earlier. Heller just wasn’t a very good target. Why kidnap the assistant of a retired physics professor? And if they had demanded money, the sensible thing to do would be to either pay the ransom or go to the police. Heller hadn’t wanted to go to the police, supposedly because he didn’t want them looking too hard into what it was that he and Tali did. But the more I think about it, the less sense that rationale makes. What concern would Heller’s work be to the police, unless it was somehow linked to the reason for Tali’s abduction?