The Vanishing Gary Brown (booksvooks TXT) 📖

at their office by some anarchist whack job. It was Mark’s job to be sure the fanatics behind that way of thinking never got the chance to make their point. Yet even with all the intelligence gathering and resources the Bureau has available to them, things can still go wrong. Unfortunately, in Mark’s particular case, all hell broke loose one morning in Oklahoma City.”

“My God,” Claire said. “The bombing of the Federal Building.”

“That’s right. Mark was to have been at the office that morning to attend a seminar, but his wife had been rushed to hospital with a ruptured appendix, so they excused him. Everyone who was in that seminar room at 9:02 a.m. was killed when Timothy McVeigh drove a van packed with fertilizer and fuel oil to the front of the building and detonated it. Emergency services pulled one hundred and sixty-nine bodies from the rubble that day, even children from the daycare center inside the building. Hundreds more were injured in the blast.”

“But Mark can’t blame himself for their deaths,” Claire said. “He had no way of knowing what was going to happen.”

“You’re right,” Martin said. “He shouldn’t feel responsible, but he does. It goes deeper than that. Let me explain. Go back two years, before the bombing in Oklahoma. Do you remember what happened in Waco, Texas?”

“The FBI raided some kind of religious group.”

Martin nodded. “It was a compound for an anti-government sect that called themselves the Branch Davidians. Their leader was a fanatic named David Koresh. I wrote about them in my book, An Unholy Path. Mark oversaw that raid. His team was to have executed a no-knock warrant with the help of the ATF, who had reason to believe the group was stockpiling weapons. Right out of the gate they met with armed resistance. Shots were fired, and from that moment on things went from bad to worse. The result was a standoff that lasted for the next fifty-one days. When Mark finally decided it was time to put an end to the ordeal he ordered in HRT, the Bureau’s Hostage Rescue Team. Together with ATF agents, they stormed the grounds. By the time it was over, the Branch Davidian compound had been burned to the ground and four ATF agents were dead. Eighty other men, women, and children trapped inside the buildings within the compound died as well, either during the assault or from the fire, including Koresh. Because Mark was the agent in charge of the HRT assault, the Office of Professional Responsibility, which is the FBI’s internal affairs department, took him to the mat for the actions he took that day.”

“What happened?”

“Eventually, nothing. Mark was cleared of any improper conduct. But the OPR investigation was extremely hard on him. They had set a committee up to investigate the incident. They tried to tag him with use of excessive force and not following the FBI’s rules of engagement. Some higher-ups blamed Mark personally for the deaths of those agents, which of course was crap. But that was just the beginning. They really put his feet to the fire when it came out that the bombing in Oklahoma City two years later had been sanctioned by the Branch Davidians. Turns out it was payback for Waco. The brass believed if Mark had handled things differently at Waco, Oklahoma might never have happened.”

“So that’s when he left the FBI?”

“Yes. That’s when I told him about my plans to start this organization. By then he’d had enough of the bureaucracy of the Bureau and had been giving thought to retiring. I guess the timing was right. He took the package and my offer the same day. It’s been four and a half years and we haven’t looked back since.”

“You both should be immensely proud of yourselves,” Claire said. “You’re making a difference, helping people. That’s an admirable way to live your life.”

“Thanks, but if we didn’t do it, somebody else would. Mark and I both have our independent motivations. In my case, I want to help the families of the Anne’s out there whose lives have been ripped to pieces by people like Krebeck. And though it’s not for me to say, I think Mark does this for the people who died at Waco and Oklahoma City. He may seem like a strong guy on the outside, everything always under control, but I know the inner torture he deals with every day. He keeps a folder in his desk drawer filled with pictures and newspaper articles about the incidents at Waco and Oklahoma. I came across it one day when he asked me to get a file for him. I mentioned nothing to him about it, didn’t even bring it up. That he keeps it close at hand tells me it’s there for a reason.”

“He’s internalized the responsibility for their deaths. He never wants to allow himself to forget what happened.”

“That sounds like Mark. Carrying the burden of the world on his shoulders.”

“It’s more than that,” Claire said. “It’s not healthy for him, or you, to assume that guilt. You both need to put what happened behind you and move on with your lives.”

“We both know that’s a lot easier said than done.”

“I agree,” Claire said. “But you need to take consolation from the fact that you’re doing all you can. To accept any less is simply unfair. Look around you, Martin. This organization you’ve created, the people who work for it, the many lives you’ve saved, the families you’ve reunited. These are the successes you and Mark need to celebrate every day. It’s that file of memories Mark needs to keep stored in his desk drawer, not of lives lost for reasons beyond his control. Those positive events should be the motivators that drive you and give meaning to what you do and why you do it, not the negative events of the past. The past is valuable to us for only one reason. It gives us a baseline for how we’re going to