Terminal Rage (29 page)

He pointed at the screen. “What happened?”

The driver mumbled something Sam couldn
’
t make out. The pharmacist hung up the phone and turned to explain. “There was a bomb blast in the old town of Sharm a few minutes ago,” he said with little inflection or details about the event beyond the facts.

A bomb? It must gone off while we were driving to the pharmacy. We would have felt it otherwise.

A tight knot in Sam
’
s stomach radiated wider, enveloping his heart, and clouding his senses as he broke out in a cold sweat.

Before Sam could completely process the word “bomb,” a thunderous sound erupted outside, followed by a massive vibration that forced the three of them to the floor.

A second explosion.

Hysterical emergency sirens started wailing outside.

Sam leapt to his feet and pulled the driver by the sleeve of his shirt.

“Get up—we need to get back to the hotel. Now!”

They raced along for a few miles until they were stopped by a police roadblock. Two officers with stern faces ordered them out to check their documents, frisk them, and search the car.

They directed their interrogation to the driver in Arabic. Sam could make out the gist of what was being said just by their body language and key words like “Spring Roy” and “Amerekani.”

When the officers
’
suspicions seemed to have been laid to rest, they took the driver aside and started talking to him in low voices.

Sam stood impatiently, fire raging in his chest. All he could think of were Angela and the children. Like a recording playing on loop in his head, he heard Angela
’
s voice cautioning about the choice of this destination for their holiday. And how Sam had countered by accusing her of being close-minded and unadventurous. Bickering like cat and mouse until he finally won her over.

What are they talking about?
Just let us get back to the damn hotel.

It would be unwise to challenge the policemen or behave like a hysterical tourist. Sam had traveled enough around the world to know good people end up getting hurt if they become indignant or overreacted.

The Egyptian cops started flashing him periodic glances. At first he assumed they were still suspicious of him and were trying to rattle the driver. But the more Sam studied their eyes and body language, the less he was convinced of that theory. It wasn
’
t malice or distrust in he sensed, but something far more terrifying.

They are looking at me with pity. They know something.

The driver was ignoring him, purposely avoiding any eye contact with Sam.

In the horizon a fire was raging across the bay, and thick gray smoke was beginning to carry towards them inland.

This can
’
t be happening.
This can
’
t be happening to me.

Sam was desperate for this to be a bad dream he would wake up from. A terrifying scene from a movie he could stop at any time just by pressing the pause button. His racing heart overpowered his lungs, which had temporarily forgotten how to perform their core function of taking in air. Sam
’
s supply of oxygen was fast depleting.

Blood rushed to his head and stunted his vision. His jaw dropped but he couldn
’
t utter a single word. Standing helpless on the sideline wasn
’
t an option any more.

He ran to the driver and pointed to the orange sky ahead of them, still mute, hoping he
’
d understand Sam’s unspoken question.

Still unable to look Sam in the eye, the driver exploded in tears and started slapping himself hysterically.

Sam
’
s mind split in two. One part lagged behind and refused to accept what was no longer disputable.
The Tylenol, I need to get back to the hotel for Ryan. He needs the Tylenol.

And the other part was succumbing to the reality of the nightmare unraveling before his eyes. He dropped to his knees and let out a harrowing scream at the heavens from the depth of his scorched, wounded soul.

His world, his galaxy, and his universe all came crashing down.

TWENTY-FIVE

Monday, July 9, 2012—1:12 p.m.
Toluca Lake, CA

B
lackwell parked his car in front of a small house on Woodbridge Street in the heart of Toluca Lake. This affluent, lush neighborhood of Los Angeles was swarming with multimillion-dollar properties, many of which were occupied by leftfield celebrities too cool for the Hollywood Hills.

The house Blackwell was staking out had been empty for the last seven years. Not that this was immediately obvious from the outside. It had the earthy terracotta façade of a Tuscan villa, but with tasteful Spanish accents. The mowed front lawn seemed computer-generated—a perfect, uniform shade of green, like the work of an animator too lazy to account for the multicolor of nature. A hummingbird suckled with confidence on nectar near the faded white fencing of the house—the first clue this place was vacant.

For the last two months, Blackwell had spent every free minute he could spare away from his kids to investigate the mysterious life of a man he now believed to be a ghost.

Sam Morgan.

But the hunt had turned up nothing. Blackwell was back at Sam
’
s abandoned house to take another look. He
’
d already snooped inside once when he first zeroed in on Sam Morgan as a person
of interest. But the first time he broke into the house, he found it cold, empty and lifeless, without a single clue to help him narrow in on his suspect.

The property was Sam Morgan
’
s last known address, where he had lived with his family until 2005. After his wife Angela Bright and their children Maya and Ryan were killed in a terrorist attack in the Egyptian resort town of Sharm El Sheikh, Sam never returned to live there.

The records revealed he hired a moving company to pack the contents of the house and ship it to an undisclosed location. He then transferred ownership of the property to a corporate entity, and delegated the responsibility to a small legal firm in Encino to pay the bills, the taxes, and maintenance costs on the house.

One year after Sam Morgan lost his wife and children, he disappeared off the face of the earth. There was no record to indicate he passed away or traveled out of the country permanently. No one had reported him lost or missing. Overnight, the typical trail of life transactions an average adult in the United States leaves behind ceased to exist for Sam Morgan.

In a swift move before he disappeared, he
’
d sold out his business to a competitor and resigned from his position as director.

His bank accounts and retirement funds were withdrawn and closed. Credit cards cancelled. Memberships, subscriptions, affiliations, and even recurrent donations were all terminated. Email accounts deleted. His entire online trail was erased. He sold the investment property he and his wife had bought in Santa Barbara, along with their stocks and vehicles. Just like his deceased wife and children, Sam Morgan had simply stopped being.

Blackwell had learned a lot about Sam from sources close to him. He was an only child of foreign-born parents who had met as postgraduate students in the sixties. His father, Ryan Morgan, was a respected economist, author, and professor at UCLA, of mixed Irish and Circassian roots. Chiara Ferracane, Sam
’
s mother, born in a small fishing village in Sicily, was a much-loved pediatrician in her community.

Sam
’
s Sicilian, Celtic, and Circassian blood reflected in his dark features, which made it difficult to determine his roots. He spoke Italian and Russian fluently, and had dabbled in Asian and Semitic languages. His parents had an insatiable wanderlust, and he had traveled the world with them, growing up with a nuanced appreciation of other cultures and languages.

As a teenager, he developed a passion for computers and movies. He double-majored in film and economics at UCLA, where he met his future wife, Angela, a marketing student. They were on-again, off-again college lovers.

When he graduated, Sam found himself at the crosshairs of the dot-com era. A talented, self-taught programmer, he
’
d seen the writing on the wall when he considered his career options right out of school. The dot-com bubble was about to burst, so he chose a safe route and took a junior position at a San Francisco venture capital firm. And he continued to moonlight as a software contractor.

After a two-year stint at his job, like many entry-level professionals, Sam grew restless and wasn
’
t sure what he wanted. The dot-com bubble had all but burst, and his software gigs were getting thinner by the day. So he put his passion for film and computers aside and hedged his bets on economics, listening to his father, who all along had prodded him to follow in his footsteps. After all, he had the right surname and if he wanted, he could inherit his father
’
s intellectual heritage with little effort.

Through his Irish citizenship, Sam enrolled as a European student at the London School of Economics to study for a master
’
s degree in Finance and Private Equity in
’
ninety-six. During that year, Sam had two major epiphanies.

The first was realizing Angela was his great love and the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. He had dated a few girls in London, but nothing ever amounted to much.

The second realization Sam had was that software was his future. Never again would he try to walk in his father
’
s footsteps. His interaction with his fellow students—the future policymakers and elites of the global economic system—had put him off the entire discipline of economics for good. He hadn
’
t even completed nine months in London when he dropped out and flew back to Los Angeles in the summer of
’
ninety-seven.

Apparently, Sam drove from the airport straight to Angela
’
s boutique public relations firm in Century City. Still single, she too had never stopped loving him. He proposed to her in front of her colleagues, on bended knee.

And he won more than her heart. He got her brain as well. Sam lured her to quit her job and launch a software company with him. Their game plan was for him to focus on building the core products, while Angela would unleash her marketing wizardry and leverage her contacts in the film industry to help grow the business.

They started their venture from a tiny room in a converted warehouse in North Hollywood. And by the turn of the century, less than two years after launching, Entertainment Sciences
,
Inc
.
hit the two-million-dollar mark in annual revenue. They moved from their humble premises to a modern building in Santa Monica, and hired twenty full-time staff, as well as hundreds of freelance programmers across the globe.

Sam
’
s gamble to focus on the specialized software needs of the film industry was beginning to pay off. Entertainment Sciences developed everything from intuitive casting databases that matched talent to production, to complex applications that modeled dangerous stunts before they were performed to determine and eliminate risk. A niche slice of the software market that satisfied Sam
’
s love for two disparate industries.

By the time Angela gave birth to their daughter Maya in 2000, she and Sam had decided it would be best if she stepped back from the company to take care of the new arrival. Three years later, their son Ryan came along and Angela all but retired to become a full-time mother.

Blackwell knew all these details about Sam
’
s life from Angela
’
s parents. He had interviewed them at their house in Portland. After their daughter and grandchildren had perished in the Middle East, they had stayed in touch with their son-in-law until his disappearance in mid-2006. So they were eager to speak to Blackwell when he hinted Sam may have resurfaced.

Sam had come to visit his in-laws one last time that summer before he vanished. He told them he found it impossible to adjust to a life without Angela and the children, and he needed to go away to get better. Blackwell could identify with that—he was the leading expert on the need to disappear to get well.

Angela
’
s parents told him Sam had come to ask for the space and time to heal, and to make sure they didn
’
t worry about him, regardless how long he
’
d be away. Angela
’
s mother and father were the only family Sam had left. His own mother had died a year after he returned from London, and his father passed away days before his son Ryan was born.

Despite his claims of being haunted by the death of his wife and children, when Sam
’
s in-laws last saw him he looked as though he had made some sort of peace with the tragedy. They assumed he had either met another woman, or was just ready to move on with his life. This “healing” business could have just been an excuse to make a dignified exit. It felt like Sam had wanted to sever the final connection tying him to the painful memories of his past.

Although it hurt them, they empathized with him. Sam was a young man who
’
d lost every person in his life he cared for within a short span of time—his parents, his wife, and his kids. No one could withstand all that unscathed.

Looking at the abandoned house, Blackwell couldn’t get his mind off the man who once lived in it. He stepped out of his rented Chrysler 300 and strode with purpose to the majestic villa.

Dressed like a realtor, he had a plausible cover if a suspicious neighbor intercepted him. Other brokers from across the San Fernando Valley had flooded the patio with business cards, flyers, letters, and shameless pleas to whoever owned the house to consider putting it on the market.

Bypassing the main entrance, Blackwell jumped across a gate to the backyard. He took out the requisite tool and surreptitiously jimmied the master bedroom window to let himself in. Still cool inside, despite the warmer temperatures sweeping the Valley.

Walking around the house felt different this second time, with the insight Blackwell had gained about Sam
’
s tragic life. He tried to imagine the daily routines that must have transpired here during happier times. How Sam and Angela welcomed their children to their lives and adapted the house to their needs. Childproofing, painting more cheerful tones in the rooms that would become their nurseries, and trying to create a safe and happy environment to nurture and inspire their kids.

He walked through the open-plan kitchen and glanced at the fixed breakfast table and the restaurant-style booth. All the meals on the run, the first days of school, and the baking adventures that must have been had there. It reminded him of Milo and Calista and the joy they sparked in his life just by existing.

Blackwell was not a man upon whom emotional nuance was wasted. He traveled in his mind back to his suburban Rockville home during happier times.

Melanie was baking cookies with Calista, who was three. He tried to sneak in on them in the kitchen, but Calista had heard his footsteps and jumped off the chair to hug him. She smudged his black suit with cookie dough. He picked her up. Light as a feather but she weighed a universe to him. She hugged him hard and held his face with her tiny hands to smother him with more kisses, and even more gooey dough.

The stabbing pain Sam must have suffered when he lost his children was unbearable for Blackwell to even consider. For a brief moment, he became him and his stomach churned and his heart palpitated as he stared at his worst nightmare—to lose his children.

What kind of strength did Sam have to endure coming back home that very first time alone, without his family? To see the food left in the fridge. The toys his children had scattered on the floors of their rooms. Angela
’
s clothes, her shoes, her makeup. Breathing in her scent from her nightgown or her pillow. The strands of her hair caught in a brush on the vanity. The herbs and vegetables she and the kids must have planted in the backyard. The crafts and paintings she created with them.

Blinking voicemail messages left by close friends wanting to organize events and outings with the family upon their return from their sun-filled holiday at the Red Sea. Snapshots of a life on pause waiting for the people who inhabited it to come back and resume their living. People who never came back. All that injustice and treachery that had befallen Sam.
How could anyone recover from a tragedy like that to lead a normal life?

He left the kitchen and wandered into what he assumed was Maya
’
s bedroom, judging by the color of the walls. A barcode sticker underneath a set of plugs caught his attention. He must have missed it the first time he had come through. It looked like a Universal Product Code that had been stuck on a purchased item, like a toy, which was then removed and affixed to the wall. Perhaps Maya had done that.
He snapped a picture of the sticker with his phone, and made a mental note to look into it later.

Even though the house was devoid of any physical items, Blackwell sensed a profound energy of trapped memories that belonged only to Sam. Maybe he had decided to keep the house as a shrine to the life he once had. Perhaps he never sold it to avoid having another family manufacture its own memories, which could somehow diminish what Sam wanted to keep locked there. Eternally.