THE LAST WITNESS
The Second Attack
The second time is never a warning. The second time is a message: we know where you are, and we are not afraid.
Attack || Danger || Crisis || Baby
They came on a Wednesday night, which was three days after the conversation with Lore and ten days after the alley. Sara was alone in the apartment — James was at a work dinner for the second time that week, which she was tracking now with the specific attention of someone who was monitoring a variable — and she was at the kitchen table with the laptop and the files when she heard the sound. Not a dramatic sound. Not glass breaking or footsteps — something subtler, the specific quality of someone being very careful at the building’s service entrance, which was the entrance she had been told by her building’s management existed but which she had never used and which was accessed via the alley behind the building. She heard it because she was listening. She had been listening for everything since Monday. She pushed back from the table. She thought in the specific fast way she thought when seconds mattered: laptop closed, USB drive and external hard drive into the interior pocket of the coat she had learned to keep on the chair beside her since Thursday, phone — the prepaid — in hand, back door which opened to the service corridor which led to the fire stairs rather than the elevator because whoever was at the service entrance would expect the elevator. She was moving before the thought had fully finished. She went through the apartment to the bedroom, to the closet, to the box on the top shelf where she had put the backup copies she had made on three separate drives and mailed to three separate addresses — one to Webb at his personal address, one to Lore at a PO box Lore had given her, one to a law school friend in New York she trusted completely and had briefed in general terms. The box was empty. The copies were already gone. Good. She was already at the service door when she heard the apartment’s front door begin to open — a lock turning, not forced, a key, which meant whoever it was had a key, which meant something she was going to think about very carefully when she had the time to think about anything. She went through the service door. She took the stairs. She was on the ground floor and through the building’s back exit and in the alley in forty-five seconds. She walked fast to the street. She hailed a cab. She got in. She said: “Cook County Hospital, please.” She said it because it was a plausible destination and because the hospital was real and there was a legitimate reason to go there in her condition. She called Lore from the prepaid as the cab moved north. “Someone just entered my apartment with a key,” she said. “James is at dinner,” she said. “I’m in a cab. I got out through the service stairs.” A pause, brief. “We’ll have the apartment in two minutes,” Lore said. “Are you hurt?” “No,” Sara said. “The baby?” “Moving,” Sara said. Which was true. The baby was moving with the emphatic frequency of something that had understood that something was happening and was communicating its awareness of this. “Where are you going?” “Hospital,” Sara said. “Genuinely. I’m going to have myself checked. I’ll be there until you tell me it’s safe.” “Stay there,” Lore said. “Don’t go home tonight.” “I know,” Sara said. She ended the call. She looked out the window at Chicago going past — the city at eight p.m. on a Wednesday, people in restaurants, cars at intersections, the normal human world proceeding at its normal pace in complete ignorance of the fact that a pregnant woman in a cab in the right lane was in the middle of something that was going to become public knowledge within the next week and change the landscape of the city’s governance in ways that people would write about for years. She pressed her hand against her belly. The baby pushed back. She looked at the city lights. She thought: I am not afraid. I am a lawyer and a witness and a mother and I am not afraid. She let herself believe it. She continued believing it through the emergency room check-in and the forty-five minutes of monitoring during which everything was confirmed fine, baby fine, vitals fine, stress elevated but within acceptable range. She lay in the monitoring room with the sensors on her belly and the sound of the baby’s heartbeat — steady, regular, the most reassuring sound she had ever heard — and she thought about the key. Someone had a key to her apartment. The possibilities: building management, who she was going to contact tomorrow. James. James’s father’s network, if James had provided access. She thought about James. About the half-second delay. About the payments. About the key. She thought: I married a man who I may or may not know. And the truth about that is going to arrive whether I’m ready for it or not. So I’d better be ready. She was going to be ready. She was going to prepare. She was going to use the remaining time she had to build something that would survive regardless of what James Cole turned out to be — for her, for the baby, for Raymond Doss, for Thomas Greer who was still in a hospital bed with a subdural hematoma. She was going to build something that lasted. She was good at that. It was, after all, what she did for a living.