in a government class, but they all basically disappeared into their own worlds. After graduation, Zeckendorf and Alex stayed in Boston and the two of them reached out to Will from time to time, usually triggered by reading about him in the papers or catching him on TV. None of them spent a moment thinking about Mark. He faded away, and had it not been for Zeckendorf’s sense of occasion and Mark’s inclusion of his gmail address in the reunion book, he would have remained a piece of the past to them.
Alex was loudly going on about some freshman escapade involving twins from Lesley College, a night that allegedly set him on a lifelong path of gynecology, when his date shifted the conversation to Will. Alex’s increasingly tipsy clowning was wearing on her and she kept glancing at the large sandy-haired man who was steadily drinking scotch across from her, seemingly without inebriation. “So how did you get involved with the FBI?” the model asked him before Alex could launch into another tale about himself.
“Well, I wasn’t good enough at football to go pro.”
“No, really.” She seemed genuinely interested.
“I don’t know,” Will answered softly. “I didn’t have a whole lot of direction after I graduated. My buddies here knew what they wanted: Alex and med school, Zeck and law school, Mark had grad school at MIT, right?” Mark nodded. “I spent a few years knocking around back in Florida, doing some teaching and coaching and then a position opened up in a county sheriff’s office down there.”
“Your father was in law enforcement,” Zeckendorf recalled.
“Deputy sheriff in Panama City.”
“Is he still alive?” Zeckendorf’s wife asked.
“No, he passed a long time ago.” He had a swallow of scotch. “I guess it was in my blood and the path of least resistance and all that so I went with it. After a while it made the chief uncomfortable that he had a smart-ass Harvard dude as a deputy and he had me apply to Quantico to get me the hell out of there. That was it, and in the blink of an eye I’m staring retirement in the face.”
“When do you hit your twenty?” Zeckendorf asked.
“Little over two years.”
“Then what?”
“Other than fishing, I don’t have a clue.”
Alex was busily pouring another bottle of wine. “Do you have any idea how famous this asshole is?” he asked his date.
She bit. “No, how famous are you?”
“I’m not.”
“Bullshit!” Alex exclaimed. “Our man here is like the most successful serial killer profiler in the history of the FBI!”
“No, no, that’s certainly not true,” Will strongly demurred.
“How many have you caught over the years?” Zeckendorf asked.
“I don’t know. A few, I guess.”
“A few! That’s like saying I’ve done a few pelvic exams,” Alex exclaimed. “They say you’re the man—infallible.”
“I think you’re referring to the Pope.”
“C’mon, I read somewhere you can psychoanalyze someone in under a half a minute.”
“I don’t need that long to figure you out, buddy, but seriously, you shouldn’t believe everything you read.”
Alex nudged his date. “Take my word for it—watch out for this guy. He’s a phenom.”
Will was anxious to change the subject. His career had taken a few nonsuperlative turns, and he didn’t feel much like dwelling on past glories. “I guess we’ve all done pretty well considering our shaky start, Zeck’s a big-time corporate lawyer, Alex is a professor of medicine…God help us, but let’s talk about Mark here. What have you been up to all these years?”
Before Mark could wet his lips for a reply, Alex pounced, slipping into his ancient role as torturer of the geek. “Yeah, let’s hear it. Shackleton is probably some kind of dot-com billionaire with his own 737 and a basketball team. Did you go on to invent the cell phone or something like that? I mean you were always writing stuff in that notebook of yours, always with the closed bedroom door. What were you doing in there, sport, besides going through back issues of Playboy and boxes of Kleenex?”
Will and Zeckendorf couldn’t suppress a yuk because back then the kid always did seem to buy a whole lot of Kleenex. But straightaway Will felt a pang of guilt when Mark impaled him with a barbed et tu, Brute? kind of look.
“I’m in computer security,” Mark half whispered into his plate. “Unfortunately, I’m not a billionaire.” He looked up and added hopefully, “I also do some writing on the side.”
“You work at a company?” Will asked politely, trying to redeem himself.
“I worked for a few of