Zachary Taylor pulled a well-worn MIT sweatshirt over his head. He ran a lazy hand back through his greasy hair and stared at himself in the mirror. Today would be a good day to die.
His phone rang as he laced up his sneakers. Probably a wrong number, he thought. After one last look around his apartment, he closed the door and left it all behind.
The first rays of another April sun shimmered across the Charles River as he made his way to his destination. Soon, the dirty little piles of ice that clung to the curbs, remnants of a March Nor’easter, would surrender to the warmth of spring. The season’s promise of rebirth and renewal held hope for many, but for Zac Taylor, hope was in short supply.
He stopped in front of a six-foot construction barricade on the Cambridge side of the Longfellow Bridge. His tangled mess of black hair, six inches longer than he’d worn it a year ago, danced in the cool breeze. A pair of John Lennon glasses rode low on his nose, and he pushed them up with an index finger.
With a sudden burst of adrenaline, he put hand over foot and scampered over the orange-and-white-striped barrier, jumping the last three feet to the pavement on the other side. He walked toward the center of the 1767-foot, steel rib, arch bridge that connected Cambridge and Boston over the Charles River.
Zac glanced to the east at the twin spires and cables of the Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge, which had been his first choice in terms of probability of success. He’d done all the calculations, crunched all the numbers. However, he faced logistical challenges. That bridge was always busy and not open to pedestrian traffic. In the end, the Longfellow Bridge had won out because of opportunity. It had been closed to traffic for renovations.
With trembling hands, he pulled up the hood of his sweatshirt and yanked on the strings. It had little effect on the uncontrollable shivers. He paused for a few deep breaths. His calculations failed to consider the emotional component and the resultant physiological response. Fearing he might hyperventilate and pass out right there on the pavement, he moved on.
The trajectory of his life had changed dramatically the day Harper Gray died. Zac had been working his way through a doctoral dissertation that would have landed him in the physics hall of fame, rubbing proverbial elbows with the likes of Newton, Galileo, Einstein, and Hawking. He’d fallen so far and so fast that the crash left him unable to complete his work.
A man wearing a hard hat exited a construction trailer and stopped to stare. No one should have been there on a Sunday. He lowered his head and picked up his pace. He slowed his stride again when the shouts he’d expected didn’t come.
For most of his life, at least until he met Harper, he’d been a stranger in a strange land. Studies have shown an inverse relationship between a person’s IQ and their level of social skills. While Zac could have been a poster child, Harper had somehow defied the odds. She learned to balance the rigorous demands of advanced academia and the emotional requirements of normal social interaction, allowing her to travel gracefully between the two worlds.
Except for their love of the physical sciences, the two could not have been more different. She came from privilege, the daughter of a real estate tycoon, and he from adversity, the son of a bus driver. She attended private schools in Chestnut Hill, while he attended public schools in upstate New York. Fate, he believed, had brought them together, the same way it had torn them apart.
None of that mattered now. He quickened his pace again. They would be together soon. He let the thought hang there, and a smile crept across his weary face. His smile disappeared when a police cruiser slowed to a crawl beside him.
Zac didn’t wait for the window to open. He took off in a dead run. Okay, genius. What are you going to do now? His mind raced faster than his feet. He was smart enough to know that he couldn’t outrun the big V-8 engine in the cruiser. In fact, given enough physical data, he could tell you how long it would take and how far they would travel—give or take an inch or two. He considered jumping the curb and vaulting the railing right there, but he wasn’t close enough to the middle of the bridge. The drop wasn’t far enough, and the current that flowed beneath his feet was not swift enough.
Before he could figure out what to do—even geniuses need time to think—the police cruiser passed him and stopped sideways in his path. The words Homeland Security were painted on the door. Two officers jumped from the vehicle, guns drawn.
Seriously? Do they think I’m a terrorist? He couldn’t carry enough explosives to take down such a massive structure. Besides, the bridge has been closed for years. Bunker Hill or Charlestown made better targets. He weighed his options and second-guessed not shaving the beard he’d let grow for the past twelve months.
He knew how this looked—a twenty-something, bearded male in a hoodie running on a major piece of infrastructure that was off-limits to the public. Hardly a stretch in a post-9/11 world.
Zac had no choice but to raise his hands in submission.
