Despite the scene around him, Curtis only recognized that he was asleep when he heard Rachel’s voice. She wasn’t in the dream. Mom, Dad and Finn were. The family, back together again. Finn and Curtis as teenagers. A time long, long before he’d met his wife. Hearing her voice calling his name gave him a shot of reality, and the pressure on his upper arm finally roused him.
Groggy. Head hurting. As the dream faded he took a few moments to work over the night before in his head, and the reason for his less-than-spritely state before finally opening his eyes to look up at his wife. She leant over him, already dressed for work in a deep blue suit, hair neat, makeup on.
‘You didn’t come to bed last night,’ she said.
He groaned. ‘What time is it?’
‘Nearly eight.’ She glanced at her watch. More like glared at it, as though blaming it for the passage of time. She usually left closer to seven to avoid the notorious Atlanta traffic. Was she blaming her lateness on him?
Curtis winced as he pushed himself up on the sofa, averting his eyes from the tumbler and near-empty bottle of bourbon on the coffee table next to his laptop.
Laptop. The lid was up, the screen dark, but had he closed all the windows before going to sleep? Had Rachel seen?
‘What’s going on, Curtis?’ Rachel said, looking more worried than angry as her forehead creased over in a frown.
‘Nothing.’
‘How much of that did you drink?’ She nodded to the bottle.
‘It was already opened.’
She didn’t question that further. After all, she was the one chugging wine last night before heading up to bed on wobbly legs before it’d even got to ten o’clock.
‘You’d tell me,’ she said, ‘if there was something wrong. With us?’
Curtis tutted and threw his hand onto the sofa arm, causing her to flinch.
‘You always have to turn things onto you,’ he said, sounding angrier than he’d intended, but he didn’t say anything to try and take the comment back or to explain.
He held her eye for a moment, not sure whether she was upset or about to rage at him. She broke eye contact first, then turned and stomped out of the room, her heels clacking on the wood floor. Each step sent a judder through Curtis’s throbbing head, and he imagined each strike leaving a neat imprint in the expensively finished wood. She knew he hated her wearing her heels in there. Had she done that deliberately?
He pushed the bubbling anger aside as best he could and leaned forward. The smell of stale whiskey wafted up from the empty glass and stuck in his nostrils, making his stomach churn. He tried his hardest to ignore the queasiness as he woke the laptop.
Desktop. That was good. So Rachel hadn’t seen, which meant he had no explaining to do. No unravelling of a years-old lie.
Yet.
He picked his phone up from beside the computer and saw several unread work emails to deal with since he’d gone to sleep last night – a problem of the always-switched-on modern business world. If important, he’d normally deal with calls, messages, emails as and when they came in, whatever the day or hour, if he was awake. This time… His mind remained too busy churning the information he’d delved into the night before, coming back to him beat by beat as his brain fully came round from sleep.
He put his phone back on the table and went for a shower. Got dressed. Ate some cereal. Drank a cup of tea (his stomach couldn’t face coffee, even if his head could do with the caffeine).
He drove to the office in nearby Sandy Springs, a northern suburb of Atlanta that was now a city in its own right, even if it remained intrinsically linked to its nearby bigger brother. He paused outside the revolving doors to the building, a reluctance taking over him.
He’d never had this before. Never felt so conflicted going inside, getting on with his day and his never-ending work. He’d devoted nearly twenty grueling years of his life to this career, more than six of which to this company who’d shown faith in him by making him a partner four years ago.
But today…
‘Hey, Curtis,’ came a relaxed female voice from behind him. He turned to see Heidi, another of the partners, though she was a few years more senior than him and specialized in marital law, which meant their paths rarely crossed in a professional sense. She carried a cardboard tray with four huge takeaway cups. ‘Treat for the team,’ she said, holding the tray up.
‘Lucky them.’
She paused for a moment and the happy, charming look on her face wavered.
‘Everything OK?’ she asked.
‘Yeah, fine,’ he said.
He held the door open for her before heading to the elevators, emerging shortly after on the sixth floor. He made a beeline for his desk in the far corner. He nodded and smiled at the few faces that popped up from the grey dividers in the open plan space. He received a couple of curious glances in return but didn’t bother to question why.
Curtis settled himself down at his desk and reached in his bag for his laptop but hadn’t even set it down before Gerard was up on his feet and striding his way.
‘Where’ve you been?’ the underling said, as though he were in charge.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Harrison’s have been waiting for more than twenty minutes. I’ve done my best to—’
‘Shit! Sorry, Gerard.’ How had he forgotten about the meeting with his client?
‘I did try calling you—’
‘Are they still waiting?’
Gerard checked his watch. ‘Yeah, but only for another five minutes. Wayne said he has to leave the office after that so we’ll have to rearrange.’
Wayne being the CEO of Harrison’s. One of Curtis’s, one of his company’s, most important clients. As Gerard moved away, Curtis grabbed the desk phone, dialed, and Wayne picked up on the first ring. Curtis did his best to smooth things over, apologizing profusely, blaming his lateness on a traffic delay, promising he and his team would be finished with the report by the end of the week, and insisting that he’d make it up to him by taking him to that new steakhouse in Midtown that everyone had been talking about. The last part seemed to do the trick more than anything else.
‘I’ll get Sarah to rearrange the conference call asap, and to make the dinner reservation,’ Curtis said.
‘Yeah. OK, I gotta go,’ Wayne replied, before the line went dead.
Gerard, sixth sense as ever, poked his head up before rising to his feet and scuttling over.
‘Sorted?’
‘I think so.’
‘You OK?’ he asked, with what Curtis thought was genuine concern.
How many more people were going to ask him that question today?
‘I’m fine.’
He left it at that and before long Gerard had skulked back off.
Curtis tried. He really did. But only half an hour later, his brain burst with thoughts and questions and worries. The Harrison’s report would have to wait. He opened up Google and typed the short query. He didn’t have to try hard to find several recent stories about the previous day’s attack in Washington.
Reward Offered for Unidentified Hero
He clicked on that headline first. Saw the now familiar still shot from outside the Capitol Building. The blurred image of the man everyone was calling a hero. Unidentified? Except Curtis knew who he was. Did no one else?
But if Curtis was so sure of the hero’s identity, why had he told no one?
He read the story. An offer of fifty thousand dollars for the ‘hero’ to come forward – cash from Elliott Charlton himself, the self-made multi-millionaire businessman turned politician. Well, self-made if you ignored the obvious lifelong societal connections gained from private schooling, followed by being a shoo-in at Harvard, and a substantial leg-up from rich parents to start his own financial consulting business.
Curtis clicked on the link to an interview with the politician, posted only minutes before:
‘I’m profoundly grateful to this man,’ Charlton rattled in his clipped accent, his voice direct and authoritative. ‘Who knows how many innocent people would have been hurt were it not for this hero? I’m absolutely sure I wouldn’t be standing here today without his help.’
‘You’ve offered to make a cash reward to the hero,’ a female reporter said. ‘Can you tell us why?’
‘It’s a simple gesture of gratitude,’ Charlton replied. ‘I’m hoping the offer will encourage this reluctant savior to come forward, so he can be properly thanked and given the attention he deserves.’
‘Do you have any more information to provide on the identities of the attackers?’
‘No, I do not. You’ll have to wait on that information from the police. I’m not party to their investigation other than as a witness.’
‘Don’t you wonder why this person, this man of the hour, hasn’t yet come forward? Do you think they might be in hiding? Scared that they might be a target of whoever organized this attack?’
‘It’s possible. I can only reiterate and reassure this person that, like myself, they are a witness to this terrible crime. I’m sure they will be given full protection by the authorities—’
‘Bizarre, isn’t it?’
Curtis jolted in his seat and looked over to see his assistant Sarah hovering, pen and paper pad in hand. He hadn’t seen her approach. Hadn’t seen her come in at all. Her desk had been empty when he’d arrived; she was probably off chatting somewhere like she often did.
He quickly closed the browser window.
‘Scary,’ Curtis said.
‘Just think, if that guy hadn’t been there to save the day.’
‘Yeah.’
‘A lot of people are saying he must be military, even special forces or something, the way he reacted.’
Finn? Special forces? Curtis didn’t know exactly what his brother had been up to these last few years, but it definitely wasn’t that.
‘You know, I heard two of the attackers are still alive,’ Sarah said. ‘The police have been really secretive, but you know how these things get out.’
Did he?
‘I heard one of them’s in critical condition. The police must know by now who they are, though. Don’t you think it’s odd they’re not saying anything about that?’
‘I really wouldn’t know the protocol for this sort of thing.’
Sarah frowned, as though his comment was unexpected.
‘What can I help you with?’ he asked.
She paused a moment. ‘Gerard said you needed another meeting set up with Wayne. A dinner too?’
Curtis explained the situation, and asked Sarah to arrange the meeting as late into the week as she could, then dinner sometime after that. He waited until she’d returned to her desk and had her phone pressed to her ear – its usual resting place – before he looked back at his laptop.
This wasn’t the time or the place to continue his research. And really, he had no time anyway. He opened up his calendar. Back-to-back meetings starting in half an hour all the way through to one thirty. Then again three until six. Most likely a few hours needed after that to get everything in order.
A usual day for him, really. His head hurt all the more just thinking about it.
How had his life come to this point? More than that, why was he only questioning it now?
He simply couldn’t face another day like this. Not today.
And yet he would have. He would have ground out day after day like this. He already had – for years, in fact. Even he couldn’t explain it, or maybe didn’t want to think about it, but seeing Finn had changed… everything.
Or perhaps just woken him up, finally.
He put his laptop into his bag and stood up and grabbed his coat. Gerard looked up, an eyebrow raised. Sarah pulled the phone from her ear and cupped the receiver as she glanced at him, looking aggrieved.
‘I’m really not feeling good,’ he said to her. ‘I’ll be on the phone, but I need to go home.’
‘Oh, but—’
‘Can you do your best to rearrange everything, please?’
‘I– But—’
He carried on out without giving her the chance for a proper response. He did feel bad about putting her in the shit like that – Gerard and the rest of the team too. But not bad enough to change his mind. And he hadn’t lied as such; he did feel like crap, even if it was self-inflicted.
But he had lied about going home, because he had absolutely no intention of doing that.
Instead, he had a drive ahead of him. The start of the hunt for the man the whole nation had on their minds.
The hero.
Curtis, his long-lost selfish prick of a little brother.