That wasn’t good. I supposed it was understandable for the first race back after a long layoff due to an injury, but it wasn’t good. In the past Jannie had always gone to the starting line confident, loose, and ready for battle.
But she’d broken one of the two sesamoid bones in the ball of her right foot during a race, and it had healed excruciatingly slowly. The sesamoids act like the kneecap of the foot, only much smaller; they protect the major tendons and ligaments coming off the big toe. Without the sesamoids, the only way you can run is in burning pain.
Jannie’s coaches and doctors had cautioned her not to run until it healed. That was like asking a cheetah to sit still, and it had depressed and frustrated her no end. But she’d endured and built her strength, and now the X-rays showed the sesamoid had solidly fused.
That was ten weeks ago. Since then her coaches had been taking her workouts up slowly, trying to get her in shape before—
“Alex?”
I turned to my right and saw a fit man in his fifties with graying hair coming at me in silver warm-up pants, a blue hoodie, and white Asics running shoes. A small pair of binoculars and a stopwatch dangled around his neck.
“Nice of you to come, Coach,” I said, shaking Ted McDonald’s hand.
“Couldn’t miss wonder girl’s return,” McDonald said. “How’s she looking?”
“A little stiff and a little scared, frankly,” I said.
The coach’s face fell. “That’s not good.”
“I know,” I said. “But let’s see how it plays out.”
“Only thing we can do. In the end, it’s up to her.”
McDonald was a private coach from Texas who’d started working with Jannie the year before the injury. At the time, he’d been talking about her track-and-field potential in Olympic-level terms. I wondered if that would be the case an hour from now, or ever again.
“This is a good test for her,” McDonald said, as if he could read my mind. “Good surface. Short track. And tight curves. No matter how Jannie runs, her sesamoid will be stressed.”
“How’s that a good thing?”
McDonald had always been straight with me, so I expected candor, and I got it.
“We’ll know quick if we’re beyond this setback,” the coach said. “And if we are, we can turn our attention to something other than the bottom of her foot.”
No wonder Jannie was feeling uncertain, I thought. No wonder she was afraid. This was like a verdict coming down.
I tried not to let my mind wander to my own upcoming trial, and I kept up an easy conversation with McDonald before the four-hundred-meter competitors were called to the line. Jannie stepped up in lane three of the stagger, as ready as she’d ever be for two laps around the indoor track.
She’d gained ten pounds of muscle since she’d last raced, but she was still built like a gazelle, with long springy legs and arms, and still fairly thin compared to the other, older competitors moving to their starting blocks.
McDonald pointed at the young lady in lane five. “That’s Claire Mason, Maryland high-school indoor record holder in this event. She just signed a national letter of intent to run at Stanford.”
“Our girl know that?”
“Nope,” McDonald said. “She’s just down there to work her plan.”
The starter called the runners to their marks. My stomach was doing flip-flops. In her last race, Jannie fell coming out of the blocks, which may have contributed to the fracture.
“Set,” the starter said, his pistol raised in the air.
Jannie coiled.
At the crack, she broke clean and I heaved a sigh of relief at the way she came out attacking, her legs churning, her torso fighting to get upright, and her arms pumping toward the first curve and the first real test of the injured bone.
She blazed through the tight turn with relative ease in no evident pain and accelerated down the backstretch. The staggering of the runners began to evaporate as they came through the second turn, Jannie in fourth.
“Be disciplined, now,” McDonald said, glancing at his stopwatch.
Jannie raced down the front stretch, picked off the girl in third, then passed the one in second. That left only Claire Mason in the lead with one lap to go.
“Damn it, Jannie,” McDonald said. “That’s not what we—”
My daughter thundered after the Maryland high-school champion, but Mason held her off through the third turn. From my daughter’s past performances, I figured that the second time down the backstretch would be Jannie’s surge, that she’d find some reserve no one had predicted and blow past the girl in the lead.
Instead, Mason pulled away from Jannie. The girl in third overtook Jannie in the fourth turn. Jannie was gritting her teeth, giving it everything she had. But forty meters from the finish, the girl in fourth passed her. The girl in fifth got by her two feet before the wire.
Jannie slowed to a stop, glanced around in bewilderment, then looked up at Coach McDonald and me.
She threw up her hands in despair and exploded into tears.
Chapter 12
I jogged along the reflecting pool between the Washington and Lincoln Memorials. The dawn was cool, almost crisp, and it felt good to be moving and breathing fresh air.
During my morning runs, I usually tried not to think about anything besides putting one foot in front of the other. But that day I couldn’t get my mind off Jannie.
Coach McDonald had told her before the race that she wasn’t there to attack the leaders and win; he wanted her to get a clean start, stay close to the leaders, and kick at the end. A training session and a test of her foot.
Instead, Jannie got full of herself and went after what she wanted instead of staying with McDonald’s program. It had caused a rift between them. The coach told me he was rethinking how much time he had to dedicate to her.
Nonetheless, her foot had held up. No pain. No discomfort.
I checked my watch and picked up the pace until I was nearly sprinting up the marble stairs toward the imposing statue of the sixteenth and greatest president our country has ever known. I’d been inside the rotunda where the figure of Lincoln presided and read his quotes dozens of times, but they always gave me a chill.
I didn’t have a chance to glance at them today because a petite, intense, Indian American woman in a blue business suit and a trench coat stepped out from behind one of the columns. She carried a briefcase and a large Starbucks coffee cup, and she tilted her head, indicating we should leave.
“I should not even be here,” FBI special agent Henna Batra said in a low voice. “I should be talking to Sampson or your wife.”
“But you’re here,” I said as we climbed down the memorial steps. “Did you look at the website link I sent you?”
Batra did not reply, just cocked her head in a way that said I was a fool to have even asked.
Men and women far smarter than me will tell you that we are on the verge of the singularity, a moment in time beyond which all human brains will be able to access all possible information through the power of the Internet. As far as I was concerned, Batra was already at one with the Internet. Plugged in, she could reach across vast digital landscapes, unlock almost any door, and peek into some of the web’s dimmest hiding places.
She was also one of the smartest people I’d ever known. Before Batra had even graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she had eight high-paying job offers with the search-engine-and-social-networking crowd. Instead of accepting any of them, she’d joined the FBI and its growing cybercrimes unit. I’d met her during the course of the investigation that led to the murder charges pending against me.