‘I’m the only family you’ve got.’ Luke paused. ‘And this greeting card moment is brought to you by The Shawcross Group.’
‘Now, Luke.’ But Henry offered a rare smile. ‘I promised your mom when I married her that I’d take care of you if anything happened to her. To me that was a solemn vow.’
His mother. He put up the photos of her when he knew Henry was coming for a visit; it was too raw, too painful for Henry. The car crash had been only a year ago.
‘Henry, don’t treat me like a child. You don’t have to watch out for me.’
‘Habits are hard to break.’ He cleared his throat, as though preparing to deliver another speech or presentation. He seemed to have trouble looking at Luke. ‘Aside from you, the think-tank is my life. Come work for me. I would love to pass the think-tank on to you one day.’ The final words came in a rush.
‘Henry, wow. I don’t know what to say.’ He felt touched. Honored. Henry was a bit of an oddball – all into his researches, his pondering about the political trends of the world, his books and papers, but he was the only family Luke had. A world without family was a lonely place, and Luke thought it had been an unbearably lonely place for Henry before Henry married Luke’s mom. It had not always been an easy road for him and his stepfather but Luke never doubted that Henry, in his own way, loved him.
On the screen a comment appeared: you’re right, what we need in America is a nice dirty bomb set off in the beltway, clean up the whole act, make the Potomac a toilet for all the human waste in DC, start fresh. Another loon chirping to be heard. A nice dirty bomb, as opposed to an awful dirty bomb. These people made his blood run cold.
‘My God,’ Henry said, blinking at the comment. ‘This is the other reason I want you working with me. You get results. Say yes. Please, Luke. Please.’
Begging was most un-Henry-like and Luke felt a swelling of gratitude. ‘I will sleep on it. After I wander a bit down the Night Road this evening.’
‘Fair enough. I need to make a couple of a phone calls and then we’ll go out to dinner. Go get cleaned up.’ His stepfather patted his shoulder and went off to the condo’s guest room.
Luke turned back to the computer, eight more bits of poison on his screen, and had to smile at the viciousness of the responses. He didn’t want to admit it, but this taunting of people with such strong opinions was addictive. He wondered, despite all his worries about those he angered, if he could give this work up so easily. Behind the mask of the internet he was a badass, a troublemaker, a take-no-prisoners tough guy. Nothing like the mild academic who typed on the keyboard and thought hard about what precise words would evoke what terrifying responses.
Luke went to his bathroom and showered. Rubbing the shampoo into his hair, he wondered about the thousands of people he touched – angry, bitter, so convinced in their hate that they were blind to nuance or circumstance or even to a basic morality. The web connected them all, electronic threads spanning the country, and he had the uneasy feeling that the people he called the Night Road could reach out and touch him, know him for the fraud that he was, in an instant.
Luke hated airports. He had last seen his father alive at Dulles ten years earlier. Every time he stepped into the wide, cool expanse of a terminal he thought of his father; a dark-suited arm raised in farewell, Luke’s clothes still wrinkled from the force of his father’s parting hug.
‘Have a good trip, Dad,’ he’d said.
His father had stood close to him. He was a handsome man, with a trim beard, a full head of hair going gray early and bold blue eyes. ‘I’ll be back soon. Mind your mother.’
‘I will.’
‘You want me to bring you back some fish? In my pocket?’ An old joke between them, from when Luke had caught a perch when he was five and promptly stuck it in his pocket and left it there for a few hours. They’d burned his shorts.
‘No. Mom will get mad.’
‘Mom will be buying you new clothes,’ Mom had said, with a smile, touching his father’s arm.
Then his father had rumpled Luke’s hair, gently. ‘I’ll miss you every moment.’
‘That’s way too much missing,’ Luke said. He was fourteen and easily mortified in public by parental affection. He wanted to get back to the car, crack open his computer game, finish the level he was on. He let his impatience show with a sigh, an eye roll.
‘When you have a kid, you’ll understand what it is to miss someone each moment.’
‘You’ll be relieved to know I just got a girl pregnant.’
‘Ha, ha.’ His father said, then looked at him with mock surprise.
‘Kidding,’ Luke said. ‘Two girls.’
‘Funny man.’ His father kissed the top of his head. ‘Be a good boy. I got to go catch up with the others.’ Then a quick, firm kiss for his mother, and his father had gone. Walking away, with his fellow professors, for a fishing trip in North Carolina. Gone forever. Luke did not even get to see him in the coffin. The Atlantic had hoarded his father’s body in its gray clutches. He had walked on the beach closest to where the plane had gone down, wondering if he could hear his father’s gentle baritone in the crash of the surf. It had been a crazy thought, but after the long darkness of his grief and the long weeks wandering the roads as a runaway, being close to where his father died had been a strange comfort.
His father had become a regrettable haze, defined by only a few sharp memories – swimming at home in suburban Virginia, walking on the Georgetown campus to his father’s office, enjoying a Redskins game when Luke was five, hoisting Luke on his shoulders, a finger moving across the night tapestry, naming every star in the constellations. That light, Dad said in his quiet voice, it’s taken lifetimes to reach us. Starlight is long-term. Big picture. Always remember long-term and big picture, Luke.
He needed his father’s advice now. He knew he was facing a crossroads in his life.
Luke parked the BMW Henry had bought him as a graduation gift in the short-term parking lot. On the passenger side, Henry huffed out of the car. His appointments had run long and they were running late. Luke pulled Henry’s small bag from the trunk of his car.
‘I put a copy of my latest report in your bag, and a copy of the current database,’ Luke said. ‘You can scare your fellow passengers by reading the report aloud. Fun for everyone.’
‘What did you call it?’ Henry gave him a smile as they boarded the parking garage elevator.
‘A Drive Down the Night Road.’
‘It sounds like a bad heavy rock album.’
‘Yes, but the subtitle’s pure jazz: A Continuing Analysis of Extremists on the Internet.’
Henry laughed. ‘Thanks for all your work on this, Luke. Seeing you was the best part of my trip; trying to convince my fellow academics about the threats we face was much less fun.’
‘Your peers won’t listen to you?’
‘I believe huge attacks are coming. But they’re treating me like I’m saying the sky is falling.’ Henry couldn’t keep the anger out of his voice. They walked toward the main terminal of the Austin airport; the spring breeze was cool but the sunshine was bright and hard against their eyes. ‘So. What about the job offer?’
‘If I take it, then my job is now to officially… think. Mom would be amused.’
‘Your mother would have been incredibly proud of you.’ Silence then, for always about ten seconds, when they both spoke of Luke’s mother. ‘Proud of us working together.’ They waited for a security officer to wave them across the walkway, stopping traffic with a gesture. Henry gave the officer a polite nod.
‘I’m not sure this is going to put my psychology degree to real use. But playing tag with the crazies is slightly addictive.’
‘Danger is addictive,’ Henry said. Luke thought Henry’s sense of danger was probably double-parking or placing a five-dollar bet at a casino. ‘But what your research is, Luke, is important.’ Henry stopped in front of the terminal. His sharp-planed face made a frown. ‘The hinges of history are at a critical turn right now, Luke. The world has grown far smaller than we ever dreamed it could be. It’s easier than ever for people with certain… violent intentions to find each other. You could help us find ways to understand them, and fight them.’
‘Us. I wish you’d tell me who your client is.’
‘Take the job and you’ll know.’ They’d stopped at the American Airlines check-in touch screens. Henry tapped in his info and the kiosk spat out his boarding pass. Luke followed him to the line of people waiting to thread through the security checkpoint.
