Trust Me Read Online Free

slightly, as if under a weight.
    Henry was a giver of speeches, and his phrases worked at podiums, not at dinner tables. He’d spent so much time with his books and found his family so late in life that Luke had gotten used to his stepfather’s well-meant but flat-footed phrases. ‘I know. But I would hope this research would find the next asshole who wants to kill innocent people for a cause.’ Luke didn’t look at Henry. He didn’t look at the photo of his father, the one decoration on the fireplace mantel. A photo of Warren Dantry and Luke, age seven, holding a freshly caught bass, dripping from a Virginia lake. He could remember the smell of the clean fish, the scent of the pines, the warm sun against his skin, his father’s quiet laughter. A happy memory of a rare time with his dad, long before evil in the form of a cold-blooded airplane mechanic named Ace Beere stole his father away from him. Evil that Luke felt compelled to understand.
    Reading Ace Beere’s rambling, incoherent suicide note - left at the airport hangar after he had killed Luke’s father and several others - had fueled Luke’s desire to understand the psychology of the violent mind. I did it because God said I must, the only way to get my pride back, to strike back at my employer and I had to pick a flight to kill and since they were professors, they were useless to society, no one will miss them . Rambling garbage, but inside the long letter there must have been the seed of an answer, a cogent reason why. Luke had never found it.
    ‘Tell me this,’ Luke said. ‘Your client. Whoever it is, they want to find nascent terrorists before they move from ideology to violence. This isn’t just a fancy profiling project.’
    ‘Luke. Identifying terrorists is far bigger than simply drawing out the disaffected on internet forums.’
    ‘But we already know that plenty of extremists connect through the internet. If we could narrow in on them, discourage them before they take those final steps, make the choice of violence unappealing or impossible …’ Luke got up from the computer, went to the window. ‘Any of these people might be harmless or be a time bomb. Ten thousand comments, hundreds of people, but I can’t prove any of them will turn terrorist. Really, the next stage of the project should be to follow them, to see if there are ways to convince them that violence isn’t an option.’
    ‘You’ve done a fantastic job, and my client will sift through all the data. You never know, maybe you did find the next McVeigh or the next person who’d mail anthrax to Congress or decide to take up the mantle of al-Qaeda. But you’ve spent so much time on it; I’m starting to think this is an unhealthy obsession.’
    ‘No. I want to finish the project. But.’
    ‘But what?’
    ‘The mail accounts I had to set up - the emails make clear that these people all think that I’m ready to join their battle … I’m worried they might find me. Even though I post from different addresses, use a bunch of fake names. I could be traced if someone tried hard enough.’
    ‘But they’re on the other side of the glass, in Wonderland.’ Henry tapped the computer monitor. ‘You don’t exactly live in a dangerous world, Luke.’
    ‘I suppose not.’ Not any more. He never spoke with Henry about the time after his father died, when he ran away and lived on the streets for two months. There was no point; that was a darkness in his life where he’d long ago shut the door.
    ‘I wonder if you might take me to the airport tomorrow. My flight’s in the afternoon. I have meetings at the university all morning.’ As though his stepfather hadn’t heard his concerns. Henry, he thought, had just moved on to his next idea.
    ‘Sure.’ A response to one of Luke’s fake comments popped up on the screen: Your right, A race war is in-evitible in this country. What’s got to be done is get all the un-desirables to leave this country. Killin em will encurage em to go