After a barrage of questions, Prescott returned to the podium, checked his watch conspicuously, and began winding things down. I was admiring his media-management savvy—if he’d scripted the entire event, it couldn’t have gone more smoothly—when a voice from the back of the room interrupted brashly. “What about the FBI’s arrest warrant for Richard Janus?” Everyone, including Prescott, suddenly sought the speaker. The crowd parted slightly as a young reporter—the reporter the FBI agents had frog-marched to the TV news helicopter a few days before—stepped into the center aisle. “Mike Malloy, Fox Five News,” he announced. Prescott raised both hands, pointed to the rear corners of the room—corners where two FBI agents were standing—and then aimed both fingers at Malloy. “My sources tell me the FBI was planning to arrest Richard Janus the night he died,” Malloy shouted over the din. “What role did the FBI play in Richard Janus’s flight, and his crash? Did the FBI drive him to suicide?” By now the two agents had muscled through the crowd and taken hold of Malloy’s elbows. But the damage was done: half a dozen television cameras had swiveled toward the reporter and recorded the dramatic turn of events, and Prescott—his jaw clenched, a large vein at his forehead standing out like a purple tree root—gestured to the agents to release the reporter.
Prescott gave the microphone three quick, attention-getting taps—taps so hard, they popped like gunshots. “As most of you know,” he said, “we have a policy of not commenting on open criminal investigations. But in view of the inflammatory, irresponsible nature of the question, I will respond briefly.” The crowd fell silent. “We have no indication that Richard Janus meant to commit suicide. In fact, we believe he was attempting to flee to Mexico. As you’ve heard, he had filed a flight plan to Las Vegas, Nevada. Almost immediately after takeoff, though, he changed course, turning directly toward Mexico. He was less than two miles from the border when the aircraft struck the peak of Otay Mountain. A hundred feet higher and twenty seconds more, and he’d have made it.” Again the room buzzed; again Prescott signaled for quiet, waiting for quite a while before he got it. “The night of his death, we were indeed preparing to take him into custody, on charges of drug trafficking and money laundering, among others. Behind the fa?ade of a humanitarian organization, Richard Janus was a drug trafficker. He faced multiple felony charges; he faced millions of dollars in fines—and life behind bars.” Over the din of shouted questions and whirring cameras, Prescott raised his voice one more time. “That concludes this briefing. No more questions.” He stepped away from the podium, beckoned curtly to Maddox and me, and led us toward the side door.
We were followed by a hail of questions about the criminal allegations—amid the din, I heard the words “cocaine” and “DEA” and “cartel” and “Guzmán”—but Prescott paid no attention. As he opened the door, I glanced back at the clamoring throng, and suddenly I caught sight of a familiar face at the edge of the crowd—a face that looked oddly out of place in the scrum of scrubbed young journalists. The face belonged to a man who was fat and aging; even from a distance, his reddish-gray hair and sallow skin looked unkempt, unclean, and greasy. And somehow, over the noise of the crowd, I heard—or imagined I heard—a moist, whispering sound: the sound of labored breath, wheezing in and out of a mountain of flesh.
It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up, and I froze. A moment later, I felt Prescott’s hand on my elbow, leading me out of the room. Ten minutes later, still shaky, I was in a black Suburban, with one of the younger agents driving me to the airport. This time the airport was San Diego International, not Brown Field; this time my ride wouldn’t be the FBI director’s sleek Gulfstream, but a cattle-car commercial airliner—one where I’d been assigned a middle seat in the last row.
But it didn’t matter. I’d done my job, as Kathleen had urged me to do, and I was finished.
I was headed home.
Home to Kathleen.
The Cudgel
No mortal could cross the threshold of birth or death until Janus had wielded both the objects he held in his hands: both the key and the cudgel. Passages and transformations are never easy or cheap, and the price is often reckoned in pounds of flesh and buckets of tears.
—Sofia Paxton, Ancient Teachings, Modern Wisdom
And the LORD said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil?” Then Satan answered the LORD, “Does Job fear God for no reason? Hast thou not put a hedge about him and his house and all that he has, on every side? Thou hast blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. But put forth thy hand now, and touch all that he has, and he will curse thee to thy face.”
—Job 1:8–11
You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.
—Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety