He did another Google search, tying Eric’s name with Henry Shawcross. No results.
He had to get to Chicago. He had no money, no resources. And he couldn’t turn to his few school friends, he couldn’t put them in danger.
But he had people who wanted to be his friends. In the Night Road.
He remembered the other night showing Henry postings from the one who called himself ChicagoChris. He went to his email account through a website that allowed you to surf the web anonymously. He’d learned about it in one of the discussion groups. Chris had sent him a phone number in one of his emails to Luke. He found it in an email from two weeks ago and wrote it down.
Then he surfed to Twitter, the web service that allowed you to send short updates and messages to all your friends in your network. His network included all his grad school friends, a few college and high school buddies. People he cared about.
He sent a message to everyone on his Twitter list: I’M INNOCENT. In case he didn’t make it out of this mess alive, he wanted to make that gesture, to give his friends reason to believe him.
Then he erased the browser’s history and logged off the internet.
He glanced up at the librarian, who sat frowning at a computer screen. He saw two volunteers murmuring over a book cart, sorting volumes. One laughed softly. The librarian stood and vanished into an office. The two women stepped toward the back of the library – Luke could smell coffee, hazelnut on the air.
Luke looked over the counter and saw a purse. He peered inside and found a cell phone. He grabbed it and hurried to the back of the stacks. No one noticed.
He called ChicagoChris’s number.
‘Hello?’ A young smoker’s rasp, sounding tired.
‘I hope this is ChicagoChris. This is Lookout. From TearTheWallsDown discussion group.’
‘Hey, man! Hey! How are you?’ Chris sounded happy to hear from him, but it was the overabundant enthusiasm of someone who spent far too much time alone, and not happily.
‘I hope it’s cool to call. You sent your number.’
‘Sure, glad to finally talk.’ ChicagoChris painted himself online as a badass, a man who wanted to right the wrongs of the world by redistributing wealth on an extreme basis, a prescription for saving the world from over- industrialization, but he sounded like a giddy schoolboy. ‘You in Chicago?’
‘Hardly,’ Luke said. ‘But I need to get to Chicago, and I need help. I’m getting hassled big time.’
Chris clicked his tongue in his mouth, waited.
‘I wrote some truth on a board I shouldn’t have, and the FBI’s looking for me.’
‘You shouldn’t say FBI in a phone conversation. The government picks up and records any conversation in the fifty states that mentions the FBI and it gets played back to the FBI. So if you say, fuck the FBI, they know you said it. They open a file on you.’
‘Sorry,’ Luke said.
ChicagoChris hung up.
Luke dialed again. Chris answered. ‘You have to be more careful. You don’t want to trigger their monitoring software with a keyword.’
Luke thought in Chris’s paranoid world monitoring software was probably a keyword but he didn’t want Chris to hang up again. ‘All right. I know you don’t know me, but we’re brothers in the struggle, aren’t we?’
Chris was silent again. ‘Maybe.’
‘I need to get to Chicago. I need your help. But I can’t travel on a charge card, and I don’t have money.’
‘You want me to send you money.’ He sounded slightly incredulous.
‘I swear I’m good for it.’ Most people would hang up. Help a friend you only knew from online? Not likely. But he was gambling on two things: Chris had sent him the contact information to begin with, because he liked Luke’s postings to the group, and because Chris seemed needy for friendship. And the communities – even being online – still had the feel of closeness, of a bonded brotherhood. These people were so alone in their hatreds, they needed each other to reinforce their certainty about the world’s wrongs. It was a key to terrorist psychology: violence was a group decision. He had to play on that sense that they were partners. ‘Brother, I just need enough to cover a bus ticket to Chicago, and a bit for food.’
‘Where are you?’
‘The library in Braintree, Texas.’ He fashioned a half-lie, one Chris couldn’t resist. ‘I got information on that chlorine accident in Texas. That the government was involved.’
‘What exactly do you have?’
‘Well, get me to Chicago, and I’ll share the info with you. If the you-know-what with three letters doesn’t grab me first.’
‘What’s the info worth?’
‘Send the money and I’ll bring it to you.’
‘You could also be a cop, trying to trick me. The cops would love to get hold of me.’
‘I’m not. I can’t email you because I’m being followed. I’ve got to stay off the grid as much as I can. I’m making the call on a cell phone I stole from a lady’s purse. So make your choice. Help me or don’t.’
Silence again.
‘There’s a bus station in Braintree,’ Luke said. ‘You can buy a ticket online for me.’
‘Do you need cash?’
‘I have zero, Chris, so yes please.’
He heard the background clatter of typing. ‘I’ll find a Western Union close to the Braintree library address, send you cash for food. If you don’t pay me back’ – he clicked his tongue – ‘I’ll find you and I’ll destroy you.’
He sounded different from Mouser. Erratic, not cool and focused. ‘No worry, I’m good for it. And thanks man. Thanks so much.’
‘You’re gonna pay me back,’ ChicagoChris said, and he hung up.
Luke erased the call from the phone’s log. The volunteers had not returned from the stacks. He dropped the woman’s phone back into her purse and walked out of the library.
Snow and Mouser knew Luke would be on the road, and all roads led to Braintree. Luke tried not to let the fever of paranoia build in his heart. He walked a half-mile and found the Western Union agent at a Price-Right chain store. Chris sent him $999 – if he’d sent a thousand, Luke would have had to show ID. It said so on a sign behind the clerk’s head. Luke couldn’t believe the guy was actually doing it. And being smart.
‘Lost my ID,’ Luke said as the customer service agent counted out the money. ‘Lost my wallet.’
‘That sucks,’ the agent said, not caring.
In the Price-Right store Luke bought a bottle of hair color. Blond. He thought: when you’ve decided to color your hair, that’s when you know you’re in serious freaking trouble. He bought a baseball cap and sunglasses; a small backpack, peanut butter crackers, bottled water and apples; toiletries, sturdy sneakers, underwear, socks, and jeans.
It was just like what he’d packed when he ran away from home all those years ago, and Luke missed his mom and dad with a pain that cut to his spine. He threw the stolen galoshes and the oversized jeans he’d stolen from the cottage in the trash after he left the store. He walked to a wireless dealer at the other end of the shopping center and bought a prepaid cell phone.
He hurried to the bus station. His online ticket, courtesy of Chris, had not been processed. He ate an apple and all the crackers. Fidgeting. Waiting for Mouser and Snow to walk through the doors as they shut off every route of escape out of Braintree.
A nerve-wracking hour later his ticket was ready, and twenty minutes after that the northbound Greyhound pulled out of Braintree.
Five miles out of town, Luke Dantry fell into a deep, desperate sleep.
The phone call came as Henry stepped out of the shower. He felt sick from lack of sleep and worry. Please be good news, he thought.
It was the Night Road hacker. ‘You wanted me to find Eric Lindoe. He and his girlfriend were on the passenger manifest for a flight from Dallas/Fort Worth to Thailand yesterday.’ He fed Henry the details. Thailand. Of course Eric could run far; he’d taken the Night Road’s money. It would be most difficult for Luke to follow Eric there, without cash, without a passport. Without help.
‘What about breaking into Eric’s bank?’ Henry asked. It was their chance, without Eric, to find where the fifty
