Bowling Brook Apartments, Laurel, Maryland
It became apparent that staying in the NSA dorms could not go on too long without a visit home. By the time Jana got back to her apartment, she was exhausted. With all the anxiety of losing Stephen Latent and her friend Gilda, the stress was beginning to pile up.
And weighing equally on her mind were the statements Waseem Jarrah had made to her. Jana wished she had been able to record those first phone calls. He said some strange things and she knew they meant something but had no idea what.
When Jarrah had finally stopped questioning her childhood, he had used the phrase “a voice like thunder,” and the word “come.” To her it had seemed as though he were either quoting something from memory or reading a script.
Between those cryptic statements and his taunting about her parents, Jana knew Jarrah was laughing at her. To him this was all a big joke, a game. He seemed like a person having the time of his life. With last year’s successful nuclear attack on United States soil, Jarrah seemed to have achieved his life’s ambition. He was not the same person anymore. Jarrah was right, his whole demeanor had changed.
Prior to the success of the nuclear attack, everyone had believed he was losing his mind. And Jana now realized the psychological profile the FBI had been building on him was completely worthless. His comments about her parents were particularly troubling. She remembered things from her childhood in bits and pieces. Memories of her father were mere flashes. He had died of cancer when she was just two years old. In particular, she had one memory of his standing outside the front window of their modest home in the mountains of North Carolina. She was inside on the couch, looking out the long span of windows, and he was throwing snowballs at the window to make her laugh.
She also recalled from somewhere around the age of six, her mother’s admission that she and her father had never married. They had been in love and living together, but to Jana the knowledge had felt like a punch in the gut.
And then at the age of seven everything seemed to blur together. She remembered sitting in her second grade class on that terrible day when the school nurse had come for her. The nurse told Jana to collect her things and they walked to the front office. Once there she was startled to see a uniformed police officer. The only thing she could think of was that she was in trouble, although she had no idea why.
What the officer said to her was something she never forgot. Her mother had died in a car crash and her grandfather was on his way now. The shock was overwhelming. She didn’t remember anything that was said after that, and her whole world came crashing down around her. There seemed to be no way out.
In the weeks that followed, Jana learned she would go to live with her grandparents on their farm in rural Tennessee. When her grandfather and grandmother arrived in their rusty pickup truck, she knew her life would be forever changed. Her parents were gone and they weren’t coming back. About a week later the trio drove to her grandparents’ farm and that’s where she spent the rest of her youth.
Now, as an adult, Jarrah’s statements began to make her question her own family. Why have I never looked at the newspaper articles that surely would have been written about my mother’s accident? Why did I never ask my grandfather about my father? Jarrah’s statements put everything she knew about them into doubt.
She heard the key turn in her apartment’s front door and looked over as Cade walked in. Although they didn’t live together, each had a key to the other’s apartment.
“Hey,” he said. “You okay? You don’t look so good.”
“Sorry. Just a lot going on right now, obviously.”
“Listen, you’ve suffered a lot of loss in such a short time. And this case is killing all of us. No one would blame you if you took a few days off.”
She glared at him. “A few days off? Cade, I just had a few months off. There’s no way I’m going to miss a minute of this. I’ve got to be there. He killed Latent. I’ve got to track him down. I’ve got to be the one who catches that son of a bitch.”
“I hear you. But it’s starting to feel like last time. You always have this idea that it’s you against him. There are a lot of us working together on this, remember?”
“I know,” Jana said. “It’s just that it’s so personal this time. He’s after me. And I don’t mean he’s trying to kill me. In fact, that’s the last thing he wants to do. He wants to see me suffer, he wants to see me burn.”
“We’re worried about you. Worried about the PTSD returning. You’ve been doing so well over the past few months, but this is all so fresh, so stressful.”
Lines etched into her forehead. “I’m not going to have another episode, got it? I’ve got control of it.”
“Hey, I don’t mean to upset you. But in Spain—”
“Screw Spain! I’m fine. But I feel like I’m walking around on plate glass. Everyone is watching me, especially Kyle, afraid I’m about to blow at any moment. I am not a little girl anymore, and it pisses me off.”
This time it was Cade who had had enough.
“Hey, Kyle cares about you. He just doesn’t want to see you get hurt, and he’s worried. And you, you’ve always had this chip on your shoulder, like everyone around you is treating you unfairly. Sure, the FBI is a man’s world, but there are few agents who have accomplished what you have. Everyone inside the bureau looks at you with respect. They don’t treat you any differently, and it’s starting to show that you are too sensitive about this male-female thing.”
Jana crossed her arms. “I think you should leave,” she said. It wasn’t anger, but Cade could tell he had overstepped his bounds.
“Fine,” he said, but turned before he left. “I care about you, Jana. I always have.” The door closed behind him and Jana slumped into a chair at the table.
“Dammit,” she said to herself. “The one thing Stephen Latent wanted me to do is realize that our relationships are more important than anything else. And I’m going to screw this up.”
With a long exhale she reached down and grabbed her laptop. After all these years without questioning her childhood, she had to know. She had to find out what public records existed about the death of her parents.
In some ways, her lack of knowledge made her feel like a fool. Jarrah was playing with her, and she knew it. She thought to herself, The SOB is probably laughing at me for questioning my own upbringing. But even if Jarrah were playing mind games with her, she did have to admit she should have had more questions about her own childhood. But it never occurred to her that her grandfather would lie. He was such a gentle soul. And why would there be any reason for him to lie in the first place? Cancer happens. Car accidents happen. Jana could not understand what, if anything, there was to hide.
After ten minutes of scouring the Internet for search results, she finally landed on a single article about her mother. However, as was common for the day, the details of the car accident were not mentioned. Reading her mother’s name in print brought those old emotions back, and they bubbled just beneath the surface.
But where her father’s name was concerned, she could find nothing. Since he had died of cancer, the only thing she thought she might find was perhaps an obituary.
“I guess Google hasn’t scanned every document and newspaper article from everywhere in the world just yet.” His death occurred way before the Internet had spread into popular culture, so Jana knew that if any records were to be found, they would be in the form of newspaper clippings at the public library in her hometown in Tennessee. They may even be on microfiche, the old method of archiving newspapers onto a roll of film. But wherever the records were, it was going to take a lot more than a simple search to find them.
Exhausted, Jana closed the lid on the laptop, leaned her head onto the table and drifted into a fitful sleep.