Chapter 6
Surviving
Pasadena – May, 2010
Brandt found it difficult to comprehend - Almost nine years had passed since 9/11, and it had now been a mind-boggling thirteen years since that fateful night in Las Vegas. He was beginning to come to the realization that his obsession with Patience was waning. He had long since accepted her death, but lately he had even begun to believe that he and Frank might never assemble enough evidence to indict Hakeem Al-Wadi. The obsession that had been the driving force for most of his adult life was finally drawing to a close. Before long he would have to let go of Patience altogether.
Sipping a resuscitative cup of coffee on a Saturday morning, he was surprised by the sound of his phone ringing, the ringtone slicing like a knife through his reverie. Yanking the phone irritably from its cradle, he heard a feminine voice on the line inquire, “Dr. MacCauley?”
“Yes, this is he, to whom am I speaking?” he replied.
“Dr. MacCauley, this is Jennifer Pettigrew. I’m from New York City. We met a few years back. Perhaps you remember me?”
“Yes, I do indeed remember you. You have short blonde hair, right?”
“Yes, that’s right. Well, at least I did then. I’ve grown it out since then.”
“What can I do for you, Jennifer?”
“Dr. MacCauley, Brandt if I may, I have bad news for you. Our mutual friend Barbara Moreland was found dead three days ago.”
“Oh, my God! That’s terrible news. What happened?”
“We’re not sure yet. The coroner’s report has not come back, but it appears that she died of a drug overdose. She was found in her apartment. She had been dead for two days.”
Shocked by this revelation, Brandt queried, “Drugs? She didn’t do drugs! At least she never did when I was around her.”
“Me either,” Jennifer replied. “In fact, none of her friends ever saw her do drugs. We’re all in shock. She didn’t seem upset or depressed, and she was recently engaged to be married. It’s all rather strange and disconcerting.”
Suddenly developing an ominous feeling, Brandt nonetheless held back, querying politely, “When is the funeral?”
“I’m afraid you’ve missed it, Brandt. It’s in a couple of hours. Listen, I called about something else, something specific.”
“Yes,” he responded inquisitively, “What is it?”
“Well, it was several years ago. In fact, it was shortly after the last time I saw you, right after 9/11. You remember, when her friend Christine, who as we now know was Patience, was killed in the terrorist attack at the World Trade Center.”
Now experiencing a positively queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach, he replied, “Yes, go on.”
“Well, Barbara gave me something. It’s a letter for you. She told me if anything ever happened to her, that I should give it to you. So I have this letter for you from Barbara.”
Lurching forward in his chair at this revelation, Brandt blurted apprehensively, “Have you opened it?”
“No, I assumed it was private,” she responded.
“Good, don’t open it!” he exclaimed with obvious urgency, “Whatever you do, do not open it, Jennifer. It is vital to your own safety that you do NOT open it!”
“Okay,” she responded in obvious concern, “What would you like for me to do with it?”
“Could you send it to me? Can you Fed Ex it today? I believe that it might be something important.”
“Yes, of course. What’s your address?”
Brandt gave her his address and subsequently hung up, wondering what in the world was going on. He would have liked to have had Jennifer scan and send it to him right away, but he was afraid that it might have something in it related to Barbara’s death, thus also endangering Jennifer if she were to read it. He was thus forced to wait another day.
As it turned out, it took two days, during which Brandt paced endlessly about in agitated anticipation. Camped out by his door, he was awaiting impatiently when the package arrived on Monday morning. The moment he closed and locked the door, he tore it open. Inside was an envelope with his name on it, and the envelope contained a single sheet of paper. It read as follows:
Dear Brandt:
I hope that you never have to read this message, because if you do it means that I am dead. Unfortunately, since you are, it means the worst for me. Perhaps I should have told you this sooner, for I would not now be deceased, but I felt it was worth taking the risk for the sake of both you and Patience. I reasoned that the less said the better, but since you are reading this, I was obviously incorrect in that assumption.
Patience was acting strangely the last few weeks before her death. In fact, she was behaving somewhat distantly towards me. Then, a couple of days before 9/11 she came home from work in a terribly agitated state of mind. She wouldn’t tell me what it was, but she was clearly terrified of something. I probably should have told you this, but on the morning of 9/11 she left for work quite early. It was 2:30 in the morning. I remember, because I checked my clock when I heard her close the apartment door. She normally left for work early, usually about 6 A.M. But I don’t recall her ever leaving for work that early in the morning.
There is one additional thing that I need to tell you. Patience had a barrette. I remember the day she arrived at La Guardia Airport from Dallas back in 1997. She was a wreck that day, but she was clutching that barrette as if her life depended on it. Aside from it, she had nothing personal with her of any value whatsoever. She might as well have been penniless when she came to me. I asked her several times about that barrette during the four years that she lived with me, but she would never open up about it. Somehow I knew that it held some special dark secret for her.
Patience never took that barrette out with her, but it was always in the same place on her nightstand by her bed. After she disappeared on 9/11, I looked for it on her nightstand. I looked all over for that barrette. I never found it.
Brandt, I think that she’s alive. I’ve always thought that she didn’t die that day. Something spooked her, and she left the City that morning. I’m sorry that I never told you, but please believe me when I tell you that I was thinking of her. I thought that she would be safer if nobody knew about the barrette.
And now you will have to find her, because the fact that you are reading this means that I may well have been murdered by whomever it is that is searching for her. I hope that you find her, my friend, I really do, because my death quite likely means that she, too, is in mortal danger.
Farewell-
Barb
By the time Brandt had completed reading the letter, his mind was racing forward in frenzied anticipation. The possibilities were simply mind-boggling. Patience had survived 9/11! He was absolutely certain of it. He had never completely given up hope, but here was indeed more than hope. Here was evidence, however circumstantial, that she had survived, and if so, she might yet be alive. The fact that she had disappeared the same day that he had come looking for her had always appeared to him to be more than coincidence. And now Barb’s suspicious death seemed to indicate that Al-Wadi was closing in on Patience as well.
He reasoned that if Al-Wadi’s associates had tortured Barb into telling them what she had divulged to him in her letter, they would be searching relentlessly for Patience at this very moment. He therefore set frantically to the task of searching for her himself.
Given that she had left the apartment at 2:30 in the morning on 9/11, where would she have gone? There seemed to be only three possibilities for her mode of escape. First, she might have rented a car. Second, she could have taken a train or a bus. Third, she might have taken a plane. In all three cases, it was unlikely that she would have used either her real name or her fictitious New York name. Accordingly, it appeared more than likely that she had assumed yet another fictitious name, and if she had left the country, she would have found it necessary to obtain a passport
under that name. This distinct possibility seemed to be a perfect opportunity to deploy his latest and most advanced pattern recognition algorithm.
Accordingly, he encamped within the solitude of his apartment that very afternoon and, constructing a simple algorithm for the purpose of searching buses, trains, and flights from New York City on the morning of 9/11, he commenced this new search. He reasoned that her departure time would necessarily had to have been between 3:30 and 8 A.M.
He wrote this new algorithm to perform the search in such a way as to pick out any potential passengers that fit certain general parametric indicators that matched Patience’s profile, such as age and sex. By the following day he had a list of several hundred women who fit the generic profile. He then hacked into the TSA system and, checking photos of these women using his most advanced pattern recognition algorithm, he had a match by mid-afternoon.
The photo, sufficiently similar to the way that he remembered her, was accompanied on the passport by the name Margaret Smith. The record showed that she had caught an Amtrak train at 4 A.M. on September 11, 2001 for Boston south station, arriving at 7:43 A.M., almost exactly an hour before the 9/11 attacks had commenced.
She had been heading north and, there being not much further north that one could go in the U.S., he reasoned that she had therefore been headed either for Canada or somewhere in Europe. Assuming that it was the latter, he immediately began checking flights on the major airlines for dates directly after 9/11.
Before long he found the name Margaret Smith in the American Airlines files. She had flown to Heathrow Airport in London on September 22. He searched back in his own memory to that time, realizing that he had still been in New York when she had made the transatlantic crossing. Suddenly, the trail was warm again. After nearly nine years, Brandt’s obsession had been reignited.
Las Vegas – The Same Day
Wassim came into Mr. Al-Wadi’s office, looking worn and frustrated from the trip to New York. Mr. Al-Wadi rose immediately and, coming forward, he proclaimed, “My, you look like holy shit, Wassim!”
“Yes, we came straight back, sir. We assumed that we needed to get out of New York quickly. It was quite a long drive back to Las Vegas from New York.”
“Well, did she spill anything to you? Did you finally find out where that bitch is?” Mr. Al-Wadi inquired.
“No, sir, we couldn’t get anything at all out of her. The only thing she said was that she thought Patience might be alive. We tried everything, but she wouldn’t give. Since we couldn’t leave any signs of torture, it was really difficult. It might have been useful to pop her once or twice, but we just couldn’t risk the possibility of an autopsy, so in the end, we had to just execute her with a drug overdose.”
“What! You didn’t find out anything at all?” Mr. Al-Wadi expounded furiously. “What did you do to scare her?”
“We did absolutely everything we could, under the circumstances! We couldn’t risk leaving any marks on her, so we stripped her and scared the crap out of her. We hung her upside down off her balcony on the fifth floor. But we couldn’t risk leaving her up there too long because somebody might have seen us. Believe me, if she’d had something to say, she would have done so.”
“Okay, I get the picture, Wassim,” Mr. Al-Wadi replied, his disappointment nonetheless apparent. “Well, after all these years, it seems that bitch Patience just might still be alive. Damn, we need to restart from 9/11 in New York City. Get our agents to work on it right away.”
“Yes, sir. Will do.”