Free The Sixth Station by Linda Stasi

mouth of any other man.
And a second later he was gone—pulled away by the federal and UN agents, and suddenly the world around us became filled once more with movement and sound. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know why it happened. And for sure I don’t know why it happened to me.
Later, when the tribunal wrapped for the day and the suspect was being escorted back out of the grand hall of the UN General Assembly, Demiel ben Yusef again leaned into me and whispered what sounded like “Annie one rakes lehi.” I have no idea what this means. It sounds like a sports headline for a high school girls’ basketball team. Then he whispered, “Go forth for I am six.”
I’m sure the experts will figure it out. Again, Grimm and every camera crew there recorded it all.
I was, of course, once more stunned. Why me? What does he want? Where is this going? Already, the bloggers are calling for my head, as though I am his co-conspirator. That is probably as unsettling and as awful as everything else that has happened to me today.
You know, today I made some remark to Grimm about “mass murderer” and she brought me up short, saying that I must ascribe to a philosophy of “innocent until proven guilty.”
She was right, and you, bloggers and rumormongers out there in cyberspace, couldn’t be more wrong about me, either. But it made me realize that in the same way that you are rushing to judgment about me, I have rushed to judgment about him.
As Judge Bagayoko wisely warned today, no matter how it looks from the outset and the outside (and that’s you in the blogosphere and all the TV talking heads who don’t know what the heck you’re talking about), “Let us then be guided to find the truth so that justice, not the mindless will of the mob, will prevail.”
Edward Gibbon, the eighteenth-century historian, once said about mob mentality, “Man has much more to fear from the passions of his fellow creatures than from the convulsions of the elements.”
I heard that from a priest today—as I was being chased by a crazed mob.
Again: Why me? What does Demiel ben Yusef want from me? Where is this going? Stay tuned.

 
    6
    Father Sadowski offered us more coffee and then ordered in Chinese takeout.
    “Can I get another cognac?” I asked. Not that I knew one from the next, but the label, “Courvoisier L’Esprit,” sounded calming—and expensive.
    Sadowski poured me a generous snifter full, and I downed it like a frat boy chugs a carton of wine cooler, just as the garden-gate bell rang. He checked the video surveillance monitor, and we could all see it was thankfully the delivery guy from Mee takeout.
    As we were divvying up the moo shu chicken and fried rice, we were astonished to see our delivery man already on TV, and every other outlet, standing terrified outside the gates of Mary’s Garden, saying to hundreds of crazed reporters, “Nobody! I have paper! Legal! Nobody inside. Priest! Fathah! That all!”
    “Oh, God,” I moaned. “How the hell are we ever going to get out of here?”
    “There’s a tunnel,” Sadowski said calmly.
    “A what?” Brunhilda, whom I’d found out was named Sergeant Carol Clements, said. “Why in hell, excuse me, Father, for my language, but why is there a tunnel, and where does it go?”
    “I think it led to a bunch of old storehouses for the riverboats that delivered along the river.”
    We knew he was lying. Why he’d lie about such a thing, I couldn’t say—then—but I knew why we thought he was lying. We were all New Yorkers and, worse, reporters and cops, so we naturally assumed most people were lying about most things most of the time. After all, in our businesses we generally only asked questions of people who had something to hide.
    “Or whatever,” Sadowski continued. “Anyway, there is a tunnel that comes out in back of the Family School next door, and into the back of Forty-eighth Street.”
    It was oddly quiet.
    “Where do you live?” he asked me. Why did I