“What would my father have done?” Christopher called after Brian as he walked away.
“Beats the hell out of me,” Brian answered. “And remember, you’re not your father.”
Thirty
Christopher was waiting for Addy. It was early in the morning. The air outside was still cool, the ground still wet. He had spent enough time with her to know about when she would wake up. No one else seemed to be awake yet. Even the highway running along the hill above the compound was quiet.
Addy nearly jumped when she stepped outside and saw Christopher. He was sitting on the ground in the dirt, his hands resting on the tops of his knees. She didn’t expect anyone to be outside, not this early. She didn’t like being surprised. In her experience, surprises were almost never good and they were far too often final. “Shit,” Addy said after catching her breath. “You scared me. What are you doing here?”
“I thought I’d join you on your run,” Christopher answered, “if that’s okay.” He knew she would be running. Every morning, like clockwork.
“Of course,” Addy answered. What else could she say? Christopher had never asked to run with her before. She remembered that he’d run a few times with Max but never with her. She couldn’t say no. Not to him. Not even if she wanted to. “Of course,” she repeated without any added conviction.
“How far are you running?” Christopher asked.
“An hour.”
“You go by time, not by distance?”
“Yeah. You go as far as you can in the time you’re given. Some days you make it farther than others.”
“Well, if I start slowing you down, feel free to go ahead without me.”
“I’m sure you’ll keep up,” Addy told Christopher. Without any more discussion, they were running. They pushed each other, both running faster than they would have if they’d been running alone. They didn’t say anything to each other for the first thirty minutes. They simply matched each other stride for stride. At the half-hour mark they turned around and began to run home. Their pace slowed considerably on the way back, so much so that they were nearly a full mile from the compound when the hour was up. They began to walk. It was the first time they’d been alone together since they found Dutty.
“Are you happy with how the raid went?” Christopher asked Addy as they walked. She started walking slower, wanting to give Christopher time to get whatever was bothering him off his chest.
“I’m glad we finally did something,” Addy answered him.
“But do you think any good will come of it?”
Addy looked over at Christopher. “Why are you so unsure of yourself? After all of this, after how everyone’s reacted to you, after they put their lives on the line for you, why do you still have doubts?”
“Because I’m not who you want me to be. I’m not the Chosen One. I’m not Harry Fucking Potter. I don’t have any magic powers. Max knew that. I think you know it too, but you’re afraid to admit it.”
Addy shook her head. “No,” she said. “The problem isn’t that you’re not who I want you to be. The problem is that you still think that this story is about you. You’ll learn, though. This story is bigger than you. It started before you were born. I never thought that you had magic powers, Christopher. But I also don’t think that you know what your role in this story is yet.”
“Do you know my role?” Christopher asked, throwing it back at her.
Addy shook her head again. “I’m not sure. I only know that your role is important—that it’s bigger than me and bigger than you. You and your parents mean too much to too many people for anything less.”
“What am I supposed to do with that?”
“Just remember it,” Addy told him. “Remember that it’s not your story. It’s their story. You’re only a character in it. Take that knowledge and try to do your best and know that no matter what happens, we’ll fight for you.” The morning air was growing warm. A thick wind blew in from over the hills.
“Do you think you know what your role is?” Christopher asked Addy.
Addy shrugged. “I think that sometimes it’s easier to figure out other people’s roles than it is to figure out your own.”
“Do you at least know what you would do if the War came to an end?”
“I have no idea,” Addy said. “I’ve never thought that far ahead.”
Christopher thought she might say more, but she didn’t. “I’ll race you the rest of the way back,” he challenged. Addy smiled at him and, for the first time since that day when she saw Christopher walk into Reggie’s compound, Christopher felt like she was actually looking at him. So much more had changed since then. They both knew it. Then Addy burst into a sprint toward the compound and Christopher chased after her.
Thirty-one
The authorities’ attack on the rebels’ base was eerily similar to the rebels’ attack on the Intelligence Cell. They came in the dead of night and announced their presence with gunfire. But they were better armed and better trained. The rebels weren’t ready to defend themselves.
The authorities had their orders. They weren’t absolutely ordered to kill, but they were ordered to take zero risks. Zero. They all knew what that meant. It meant that no one would be facing repercussions for their actions. It meant that no one had to think before pulling the trigger.
“This is the purest battlefield you’ll ever set foot on, gentlemen,” the debriefing officer said. “They are all enemies. Enemies of the state. Enemies of the country. Enemies of human decency. I don’t know what their politics are, and frankly I don’t give a shit. They are criminals, murderers, and terrorists.” The debriefing officer clicked a button on the mouse and a picture was projected onto the screen in front the men. It was an uninteresting picture of a two-story warehouse building on the edge of a desert. A small road ran in front of it. It was the before picture. The chief clicked another button and the serene but dull picture was replaced by a half-burned-out corpse of a building. You could see right into the building where the walls had disintegrated in the heat of the fire. You could see the bullet holes riddling the wall. They’d moved the bodies away before taking the picture. It didn’t matter. They had pictures of the bodies too. “They killed seven innocent employees.” Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. The debriefing officer left the last picture up on the screen. You could see where the bullet entered the man’s head right above his left eye. Either somebody was a really good shot or the man was shot from close range.
“What was the building?” one of the officers asked.
“A corporate warehouse,” the chief answered. “That’s all you need to know. That’s all anyone needs to know. We’re not dealing with intelligent criminals here. We’re dealing with a domestic terrorist group.” The officer continued without moving the slide off the last picture of the dead man. “We’ve got some good information on them. We think we know all three of their locations in the greater Los Angeles area. We’ll be splitting into three teams.” Three of the lieutenants stood up and began dividing the officers and giving each of them his assignment. It looked a little bit chaotic, but there was a method to the madness. Each group had its own set of specialists: marksmen, pyrotechnicians, drivers, and grunts.
Donald was given his assignment. He’d be with the group hitting an abandoned building in a desolate section on the western edge of Los Angeles. It all seemed strange to him—the shoot-first, don’t-ask-questions orders; the vague details about the terrorist group; the massive amount of resources being dedicated to this job; and, probably most curiously, the one-job-only alliance between LAPD and the FBI. “We’ll break you up momentarily so that your team leader can go over the plans with your group,” the chief said once everyone in the room had been given his assignment. “Off the record, I just wanted to give you all a word of warning. These are domestic terrorists. They’re American citizens. They’re not going to look like what yo
u expect them to look like when we throw around the word terrorist. They’re going to look like any one of you. They’re going to look like normal people. I’d like to give you more detail than that, but we’ve only got one picture.” The chief clicked the mouse on his computer again, finally letting the last dead man rest in peace. A new picture came up on the screen. It was a picture taken at night, a close-up of a boy’s face as he aimed a gun at a man standing in a window on the building’s second floor. Even though it was dark outside, it was light enough to make out the details of the boy’s face. It was also possible, if you squinted a little bit, to make out the figure in the window. All the officers knew what had happened to the man in the window. They all knew that there had been no survivors.
Donald knew something else too. He didn’t realize it at first. He only knew that he recognized something in that picture. He looked at the building again, trying to remember if he’d seen it somewhere before, but it wasn’t the building. Then he looked at the boy’s face again. He’d seen the boy before. Well, he hadn’t seen the boy himself before, but he had seen the boy’s picture. Then Donald remembered where he’d seen the boy’s picture and suddenly everything started to make sense. Donald tried to hide his epiphany. He tried to stay calm. He knew that he’d have a life to live after that night and that having people know that he was part of the War wasn’t going to make that life any easier. At the same time, he tried to look around to see if he could spot anybody else who recognized the Child in the picture. He couldn’t be the only one. Did the chief know? Was that what this was all about? Did the guys at the FBI know? How high up did this go? Donald knew that he’d probably never get answers to his questions. Still, here was his chance to be a hero.
Even though he didn’t catch anyone else reacting to the picture of the Child, Donald was sure that he wasn’t the only one in the room who recognized him. He knew that they would pull in as many people with a vested interest in this as they could. Donald didn’t have anything against the kid. In fact, he kind of felt bad for him, but the kid had made his choice. They all make their choice. Even though he kind of felt bad for the kid, Donald knew that he’d be pissed if the kid wasn’t at his target but was at one of the other two.
Christopher sought out Brian later on the same day that he’d gone on the morning run with Addy. He had made up his mind. Even if she didn’t know it, Addy helped him. Brian, hoping all along that Christopher would come to see him, made sure that he wasn’t difficult to find. “So, you figure out what you want to do?” he asked Christopher after the two of them were out of earshot from anyone else.
“Yeah,” Christopher said, his voice nearly shaking. “I’m in. I’ll go back to see Reggie, but I want Addy and Evan to come with me.”
Brian looked at Christopher and then looked down at the floor. “What makes you think they would even want to come with you? Didn’t Addy drag you here in the first place?”
“Addy didn’t drag me here. I agreed to come here. And Addy and Evan will come with me if I ask them to. I know it.”
Brian paused for a minute. He lifted his eyebrows and the wrinkles it caused on his forehead made his face look pained. “Well, it doesn’t work that way, kid. They can’t come. You’ve got to do this on your own.”
“Why?”
“Because the whole point is to get people to trust you, and you don’t get them to trust you by traveling with a fire-breathing rebel and an outsider.” Brian put his hand on Christopher’s shoulder. It was a brotherly touch. “You have to come alone, Christopher. That’s just the way it is.”
Donald had never actually ridden in a SWAT car before. He’d been on assignments where they’d been used, but he’d never been inside one. He felt like he was inside an army tank, though he’d never been inside one of those either. After the chief finished his debriefing, the officers split up into three different groups and walked outside. Nine SWAT cars were parked next to the station, waiting for them. Donald wondered what this felt like for his fellow officers—at least for the majority of his fellow officers who didn’t know a thing about the War. He wondered how insane this must feel for them. Donald had never seen this much firepower before. No one had ever seen the LAPD gather this much firepower before. Maybe it made sense to them. Maybe it made sense that they’d be working together with the FBI to nab a bunch of kids who had murdered seven people and burned down a building. It’s not like that type of violence happened every day—not even in Los Angeles—not that they knew about anyway. So they thought that everyone had been rounded up to go after some punk domestic terrorist kids, probably anarchists or environmental wackos. But Donald knew better. He was pretty sure that the chief was in on it too, and there must have been others. He reminded himself that when all this was over he needed to try to figure out which side of the War the chief was on. People above the chief must have been in on it too. It would take somebody pretty serious to bring all these resources together just to kill the Child. Well, to kill the Child and rip the hearts out of all those suckers clinging to the hope that one kid could do to two armies what neither of the armies could do to the other. Donald had never heard of them pulling in civilian resources to help on a matter related to the War before. He didn’t like it.
They were packed into the back of the SWAT car. There were ten of them in this one car—the driver, the guy in the passenger seat, and eight in the back. The guys in the back sat on benches facing each other, four on each bench. Four of the guys in the back were LAPD and four were FBI. Donald sat in one of the middle two spots, shoulder to shoulder with somebody from the FBI and someone from the LAPD that he’d never met before. “How long until we get there?” one of the FBI agents yelled up to the driver. Donald could feel every bump in the road in his seat.
“You’re not from L.A., are you?” the driver replied with a laugh.
The confused FBI agent looked to Donald for a translation. “L.A. traffic,” Donald told him. “You can never tell how long it’s going to take to get anywhere.”
“Can’t we put the sirens on?” another FBI agent asked.
“Not on this job,” the guy in the passenger seat replied. “We were ordered to keep a low profile. We’re not supposed to draw any attention to ourselves.”
“That’s why we’re riding down the highway in an armored SWAT car,” the cop sitting next to Donald said, and everybody laughed.
“What’s your job?” one of the FBI agents asked Donald when the laughter died down.
“Firebombs,” Donald answered and he began to think about how much more advanced his equipment was than the Molotov cocktails used by the rebels in their attack and, for a moment, he was really impressed. “You?” Donald asked the FBI agent.
“Sharpshooter,” the FBI agent answered. There was no need for anyone else to say anything, no need to go around the car and have everyone else name their job. Everybody knew it. Everything that needed to be said about their mission had already been said. Firebombs. Sharpshooter. Flush ’em out. Take ’em out.
“You ever actually shoot anybody before?” Donald asked the FBI agent.
“Yeah,” the man answered. “For this mission, they only picked the ones who have.”
It was getting late when Christopher went looking for Addy. He knew that he was running out of time. He’d spent most of the day with Evan, though he’d never built up the courage to tell Evan that he was leaving. Instead they spent the day talking about . . . what did they talk about? Not about the future. They talked about the past. They reminisced about old times, about how much more those old times would make sense to them knowing what they know now. They reminisced about the days when they were ignorant. They tried not to pass judgment on which times were better. They took turns starting sentence after sentence with the word remember. Remember when. Remember that time. Remember. Remember. Remember. Remember the past because it is certain, unlike the future.
Christopher wasn’t going to waste any m
ore time telling Evan to walk away. He wasn’t going to tell Evan to go home again. He knew that it would be pointless and he didn’t want to spend his last day with his old friend arguing over things that neither of them had any control over. Evan wasn’t going to leave the War now that he’d seen what he’d seen. He had spent his whole life training with Christopher for something like this. Abandoning it now, with nothing resolved, would seem like too much of a waste. Even so, Christopher would have liked to tell Evan that he was leaving. He would have liked to say good-bye like a true friend, but he didn’t. Instead, he now had to go looking for Addy because he wanted to make sure that he told someone that he was leaving and he wanted to tell Addy to keep an eye on Evan. He had no idea what else he was going to say to her.
Addy was with Dutty when Christopher found them. They were talking, making plans for a future that would never occur. Brian would be picking Christopher up in twenty minutes. Christopher was supposed to wait for him on the side of the highway at the top of the hill. Then they’d start the long, lonely drive back across the country to Florida, where it all seemed to start anyway.
“Christopher,” Dutty called out with joy in his voice when he saw Christopher walking toward them.
“I need to talk to Addy,” Christopher said, cutting Dutty off before he could launch into details about the next raid that he was planning or the next message he was going to send to the masses. Christopher said the words with more confidence than any words he’d said to Dutty since they’d met and with more confidence than any words he’d said to Addy since she’d turned her hair the color of fire.
“Okay,” Dutty said to Christopher, acquiescing not because he wanted to but because he knew that if Christopher was going to start making demands, he had to. “I’ll leave you two alone.” Then he walked out of the room.