—Why don’t we wait until this is over? I hope my staff made it to UN Headquarters.
—They are young. They can run the whole way. I believe they will make it.
—I hope they made it two minutes ago. Look at the main door.
—It is also coming in through the walls.
—It won’t be long before it fills the lab completely.
—I hope this glass will be more efficient than the laboratory walls.
—It’s very expensive glass—
—Let us hope our tax dollars have been wisely spent. I would hate for us to perish because someone saved a few pennies on substandard materials.
—We’ll know soon enough, there’s gas all around us now…See! I told you we’d be safe in here.
—Look down, Dr. Franklin.
—No! It’s seeping in through the floor!
—And now through the glass.
—No it’s not!
—Look closer.
—How does it…? I thought—
—It was a good idea Dr. Franklin. Come sit with me.
—It’s coming in slowly.
—Indeed, this glass is slowing down the gas considerably. It was well worth the price you paid.
—I mean it’s really slow! We might have enough time. It takes—
—Dr. Franklin, it takes hours for the gas to dissipate. Even at this rate, we might have…ten, twenty minutes before it fills this room.
—Maybe if I turn on the ventilation—
—Dr. Franklin—
—There’s got to be—
—Dr. Franklin!
—I don’t wanna die!
—I know. Come sit with me over here.
—It seems I won’t get that meeting with your…friend after all.
—Perhaps not. Is there anything you want to know that I might be able to answer?
—…
—Dr. Franklin?
—What? There are…There are so many things I wanna know.
—We may not have time for so many things. If you could only ask one question, what would it be?
—That’s easy. Who are you? Who do you work for?
—I said one question.
—I—
—It does not matter. The answer to both questions is really one and the same. I am…no one.
I was a college professor. I taught American literature at Montgomery College. I was…I was a different person. I married really young. My wife wanted me to become a writer. I never…She died of cancer when our son was twelve years old.
—I’m sorry.
—That is kind of you. It was a difficult time. I was not the worst father that ever lived, but I certainly was not good enough to raise a young man on my own. Henry, my son, seemed to forgive my shortcomings easily. We had a good relationship for a while. Parents feel a great deal of responsibility for the way their children turn out, but there is very little a parent can do that will remotely rival the influence a friend or lover can have. My son met a girl when he was fifteen, the daughter of a US senator. Nice girl, a year older than him. I thought she would be a good influence on him. My son turned out to be a bad influence on her. He had tried drugs before, but he could not afford an addiction. I had chosen to keep the house after my wife died—I wanted some stability for my son—and there was little money left after the mortgage. But she had money—her parents did. Two rebellious teenagers in love, with what must have seemed like unlimited means. A few months later, they were but shadows of themselves. I thought cocaine would claim the life of my son, but it was alcohol that did it. They got into a head-on collision with a drunk driver on their way to the video store.
The driver had two prior convictions for driving under the influence. He was charged with vehicular homicide but was found not guilty because of a tainted blood sample.
—You must have been angry.
—I was. I was left with nothing. My wife and I had lots of friends, but they were her friends and they forgot all about me soon after she died. I had stopped going to work. I lost the house. All I had to hold on to was the anger. I withdrew whatever money I had left from my bank account—a thousand dollars or so—and I asked a friend of Henry’s to buy as much cocaine as he could with it. Then I found out where the driver lived. I put on my best suit, told his landlord I worked for the government, and asked to be let into his apartment. I hid the drugs and left. Later, I made an anonymous call to the police.
—Did it work?
—Of course not. I had made my discontent very clear to the police on several occasions. It did not take long for them to figure out who that mysterious government employee really was. They arrested me four hours after I made the call. I knew I was caught. I did not wear gloves. They would soon find my fingerprints all over the bag of cocaine.
—Then what happened?
—I was let go. Two men, both wearing a better suit than mine, picked me up and drove me home. A week later I received an invitation to the home of the senator.
—The father of the girl your son dated.
—Exactly. I did not know it at the time, but he was also the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. You do not get to that position without knowing the right people. Just one more favor called in and I was a free man. We had a long conversation about parenthood and the world we live in, some very good whisky.
—Did you talk about what happened?
—Not a word. It took nearly a month before I heard from him again. We met in a fancy Italian restaurant in Washington. That time we talked. He said I had shown both courage and stupidity, but that to achieve what I had set out to do—
—To get some justice.
—No. What drove me was not a sense of injustice but pure, unadulterated rage. All I wanted was vengeance. The senator told me that to get it, my commitment would need to be much greater. I remember feeling ashamed when I told him I would not murder the man who took the life of our children. He then asked me what I would be willing to sacrifice. I felt such a relief. I had nothing left, not even the desire to live so I did not hesitate before giving him the answer he was looking for.
After dinner, I was taken to a small apartment outside the city and a nurse came in to draw my blood. I do not know how much blood I gave, but I had to lie in bed for two days afterwards. I got up when a man dropped a large envelope at the door. It contained five hundred dollars, a bank card, and a copy of the newspaper from that morning. On page three, it read: “Man arrested in murder of college professor.” The driver of the car that killed my son had been found unconscious in his own bed, covered in blood—my blood—with a knife on the floor. My home had been ransacked, there were signs of struggle, a large pool of blood on the living-room carpet. Witnesses said they saw his vehicle stopped on the side of the road near the Potomac River…