“Wanna guess?” A small smile found his eyes but not his lips.
She put herself back on the boat, back in their conversation. She could see him sitting there so calmly as she confronted him about his second wife and second life. And he just sat there, eating.
“The peanuts,” she said.
He gave her a halfhearted thumbs-up. “Two of them were squibs, yeah.” He shot the gun a wary eye. “What are you going to do here, Rachel?”
“I haven’t decided yet, Brian.” She lowered the gun for a moment.
He lowered his hands. “If you kill me—and I wouldn’t blame you—you’re fucked. No money, no way of getting any, wanted for questioning in a murder, and hunted—”
“Two murders.”
“Two?”
She nodded.
He processed that and then continued. “You’re also being hunted by some very bad fucking guys. If you kill me, you’re staring down two, maybe three more days of free air and picking your own clothes to wear. And I know how you like to be stylish, honey.”
She raised the gun again. He raised his hands. He cocked an eyebrow at her. She cocked one back at him. And in that moment—what in the hell?—she felt connected to him, felt like she wanted to laugh. All the rage remained, all the sense of betrayal and fury at him for dismantling her trust, her life . . . and yet entwined with it, for just a moment, were all the old feelings.
It took every bit of muscle control she could muster not to smile.
“Speaking of stylish,” she said, “you’re not looking it right now.”
He touched his face with his fingers, came back with blood. He looked at his reflection in the window of the SUV. “I think you broke my nose.”
“Sounded like it at the time.”
He lifted the hem of his T-shirt up his chest and dabbed at his face. “I’ve got a first aid kit stashed nearby. Could we go back for it?”
“Why should I do you any favors, dear?”
“Because I’ve also got an SUV back there that doesn’t look like someone drove it off a fucking bridge, dear.”
They drove back to the clearing and then walked into the woods no more than twenty feet and there sat, perfectly camouflaged, a forest green Range Rover, early nineties vintage, some rust in the wheel wells, some dents in the rear quarter panels, but the tires were new and it had the look of something that would run another twenty years. She kept the gun on Brian as he retrieved a first aid kit from a canvas cargo bin in the back. He sat on the bed under the raised hatchback and rummaged around in the bin until he came up with a shaving mirror. He went to work swabbing the cuts clean with rubbing alcohol, wincing occasionally, scrunching his face against the stings.
“Where should I start?” he said.
“Where can you?”
“Oh, it’s easy. You came in during the late innings. I put this in motion a long time ago.”
“And what is ‘this’?”
“In the parlance of my business, it’s a salting scam.”
“And your business is?”
He looked up at her with mild hurt and dismay, like a fading movie star she’d failed to recognize. “I’m a grifter.”
“A con man.”
“I prefer grifter. It’s got some panache to it. ‘Con man’ just sounds like, I dunno, some guy could be selling you penny stocks or fucking Amway.”
“So you’re a grifter.”
He nodded and handed her some alcohol swabs for her knuckles. She nodded her thanks, tucked the gun in her waistband, and took a few steps back from him as she cleaned her knuckles.
“About five years ago, I came across a bankrupt mine for sale in Papua New Guinea, so I formed a corporation, and I bought the mine.”
“What do you know about mines?”
“Nothing.” He worked on the blood in his nose with a Q-tip. “Jesus,” he said softly with something akin to admiration, “you fucked me up, girl.”
“The mine.” She suppressed another smile.
“So we bought the mine. And simultaneously, Caleb created a consulting company, with an entirely fictitious but quite believable deep history in Latin America, generations of it, if you didn’t look too closely. Three years later, that company, Borgeau Engineering, undertook an ‘independent’ study of the mine. Which by that point, we’d salted.”
“What’s salting?”
“You sprinkle a mine with gold in places that are easier to access—but not too easy—than others. The idea is one of extrapolation—if x percentage of gold is found here, then one can assume the totality of the mine is sitting on y percentage. That’s what our independent consultants—”
“Borgeau Engineering.”
He tipped an imaginary cap to her. “That’s what they ascertained—that we were sitting on resources worth up to four hundred million troy ounces of gold as opposed to four million.”
“Which would drive your stock up.”
“If we had stock, but we didn’t. No, what it would do was make us a potential threat to any competitors in the region.”
“Vitterman.”
“You have been doing your research.”
“I did spend ten years as a reporter.”
“You did. So what else did you find out?”
“That you probably got a loan from a VC concern called Cotter-McCann.”
He nodded. “And why would they loan us money?”
“Ostensibly to help shore the company up against a hostile takeover by Vitterman while you pulled enough gold out of there to make the company impregnable to takeover.”
He nodded again.
“But,” she said, “word around the campfire is that Cotter-McCann is predatory.”
“Very,” he confirmed.
“So they were going to eat up your little mine and all its profits anyway.”
“Yup.”
“But there wouldn’t be any profits.”
He was watching her carefully now, dabbing at the last of his cuts.
“How much was the loan for?” she asked.
He smiled. “Seventy million.”
“In cash?” She had to force herself to keep her voice low.
He nodded. “And another four hundred and fifty million in stock options.”
“But the options are worthless.”
“Sí.”
She walked in a small circle, her feet crunching leaves and pine needles, until she got it. “All you’ve been after from the beginning was the seventy million.”
“Yup.”
“And you got that seventy million?”
He tossed the last of the bloody swabs into a plastic bag, held the bag out in front of her. “Oh, did I ever. It’s sitting in a bank in Grand Cayman, waiting for me to walk in and pick it up.”
She dropped her own bloody swabs in the bag. “So what’s the hitch in this great plan of yours?”
His face darkened. “The hitch is that the moment we wired the money out of the account in Rhode Island, we were on a clock. That kind of transaction gets noticed quick, particularly by the likes of Cotter-McCann. We made two mistakes—we underestimated just how fast they’d notice the wire because we had no way of knowing they had someone on the payroll in Homeland who flagged it for an SAR.”
“Which is?”
“Suspicious Activity Report. We knew we’d get flagged, but there’s normally a delay between the flagging and the payer hearing about it.”
“What else didn’t you count on?”
“You got an hour?” he said ruefully. “You try something like this, there’s about five hundred things that can go wrong and only one that can go right. So we didn’t count on them putting a tracker on my car. And they didn’t even do it because they were suspicious at that point. They did it because it’s their standard operating procedure.”
“And they followed you where?”
“Same place you did. Nicole’s.” Something caught in his voice. Authentic grief, she would have assumed, if she didn’t know how good an actor he w
as. “They probably missed me by ten minutes. But they found her. And they killed her.” He exhaled a steady stream of air through pursed lips. He stepped out from under the hatchback abruptly, closed it, and clapped his hands together. “Anything else you really, really need to know right now that can’t wait?”
“About a hundred things.”
“That can’t wait,” he repeated.
“How’d you look so dead? At the bottom of the harbor? With the blood flowing out of you and the . . .” She waved her hands as she trailed off.
“Stagecraft,” he said. “The blood was easy. That’s all squibs. The ones in my chest were wired up before you got on the boat. The ones in my mouth came out of the bag of peanuts, as you know. The oxygen tank was waiting for me as long as I could get to that rock in time. You dove in fast, by the way. Shit. I barely had time to get situated.”
“The look,” she said impatiently. “You looked right at me with dead eyes and a dead face.”
“Like this?”
It was as if someone had plunged a needle full of strychnine into the base of his brain. All light bled from his eyes and then from the rest of his face. It wasn’t only that his face grew impossibly still, its spirit vacated.
She waved her hand in front of his eyes and they remained fixed on nothing and never blinked.
“How long can you do this?” she asked.
He let out a breath. “I probably could have done another twenty seconds.”
“And if I’d stayed down there looking at you?”
“Oh, I had maybe forty more seconds, a minute tops. But you didn’t. And that’s what a good grift always relies on—that people will act predictably.”
“If they’re not Cotter-McCann.”
“Touché.” He clapped his hands together again and the ghoulish aura of death left his face. “Well, we’re still on a tight clock, so mind if I download the rest to you while we go?”
“Go where?”
He pointed north. “Canada. Caleb’s meeting us there in the morning.”
“Caleb?” she said.
“Yeah. Where’d you ditch him, the safe house?”
She stared back at him, no idea what to say.
“Rachel.” He stopped with his hand on the driver’s-side door. “Please tell me you went to the safe house after the boat.”
“We never made it.”
His face drained. “Where’s Caleb?”
“He’s dead, Brian.”
He put both hands to his face. He brought them back down and then pressed them flat against the windows of the Range Rover. He lowered his head and didn’t seem to breathe for a full minute.
“How’d he die?”
“They shot him in the face.”
He came off the car, looked at her.
She nodded.
“Who?”
“I don’t know. Two men looking for a key.”
He looked helpless. Worse, she realized. Bereft. He gave the woods a wild look, as if he were about to faint again, and then he slid down the side of the Range Rover and sat on the ground. He trembled. Wept.
In three years, she’d never seen this Brian. She’d never seen anything close. Brian didn’t cave, Brian didn’t break, Brian didn’t need help. She was witnessing the reduction of him, the essential pieces at the core of him being removed and carted off. She engaged the safety on the pistol and placed it behind her back and sat on the ground across from him. He wiped at his eyes and sucked air in through wet nostrils that still glistened with blood.
His hands shook along with his lips when he said, “You saw him die?”
She nodded. “He was as close to me as you are now. The guy just shot him.”
“Who were these guys?” He blew air through his lips in short bursts.
“I don’t know. They looked like they sell insurance. And not the high-end kind, the kind you get at strip malls.”
“How’d you get away from them?”
She told him, and in the telling, she watched him return a bit to form. The trembling stopped, his eyes cleared.
“He had the key,” he said. “It’s over. Game fucking over.”
“What key?”
“Safe deposit box at a bank.”
She fingered the key in her pocket. “Bank in the Caymans?”
He shook his head. “Rhode Island. That last day? I carried around a bad feeling, an ugly hunch, I guess. Either that or I simply panicked like a fucking child. I dropped our passports in the bank. If anyone got to me, I figured Nicole could get to them. But they got to Nicole instead. So I handed the key off to Caleb.”
“What passports?”
He nodded. “Mine, Caleb’s, Haya’s, the baby’s, Nicole’s, yours.”
“I don’t have a passport anymore.”
He stood wearily and held out his hand. “Yes, you do.”
She took the hand and allowed him to pull her to her feet. “I’d know if I had a passport. Mine expired two years ago.”
“I got you another one.” He still hadn’t dropped her hand.
She still hadn’t pulled it away. “Where’d you get a picture?”
“The photo booth in the mall that time.”
Not bad, she thought. Not bad.
She pulled the key out of her pocket. She held it up and watched him come back from the dead for the second time in fifteen minutes. “This key?”
He blinked several times, then nodded.
She put it back in her pocket. “Why did Caleb have it?”
“Caleb was supposed to get the passports. He and I could impersonate each other in our sleep. Shit, his version of my signature looked more like mine than mine.” He looked up at the hard sky. “You and I were supposed to slip into Canada, meet the others in a place called Saint-Prosper. From there—fuck—from there, we’d all go to Quebec City, fly out of the country.”
She looked in his eyes and he looked back and neither of them said a word until she said, “So all six of us were supposed to leave the country together?”
“That was the plan, yeah.”
“You, your best friend, his wife and child, and your two wives.”
He dropped her hand. “Nicole wasn’t my wife.”
“Then who was she?”
“My sister.”
She stepped back and took a hard look at his face to see if he was telling the truth or not. But then what did she know about that? She’d lived with him for three years and never knew his real name or profession or history. Just two nights ago, he’d convinced her he was dead, stared back at her with sightless eyes from the bottom of the ocean. This was not a man who wore his lies the way normal people wore theirs.
“Was your sister pregnant?”
He nodded.
“Who was the father?”
“We don’t have time for this.”
“Who was the father?”
“Guy named Joel, okay? Worked at the bank with her. Married guy, three kids of his own. It was a fling. But Nicole always wanted a kid, so even after she broke things off with Joel, she went forward with the pregnancy. She didn’t need Joel’s support; we were going to be sitting on seventy million. You want to meet Joel? I can set it up. You can ask him if his dead ex-mistress was six months’ pregnant with his child when someone executed her in her kitchen because her brother”—he was pacing now, agitated—“her dumb fuck brother left his car in front of her house while he went back to Boston to shock you back to reality.”
Her laugh sounded like a bark. “You what? You tried to shock me back to reality?”
He was all earnest innocence. “Well, yeah.”
“That’s the biggest load of horseshit I’ve ever heard.”
“I needed you ready to run. I didn’t expect Cotter-McCann to bite down hard on the hook for, shit, three months. Six? I was hoping for six. But they fucking bit early because they’re aggressive and greedy and they want what they want on their timetable, no one else’s. I didn’t expect them to put the money into our account and hire an
independent consulting firm to double-check the mine on the same day. But they did. And I didn’t expect them to put a two-man hit squad on me and my crew simultaneously. But, once again, they did. So I had to skip plan A, dump plan B, and go right to plan C, the one where I shock you the fuck awake. And, whattaya know, it worked.”
“Nothing worked. Nothing—”
“You afraid to drive anymore?”
“No.”
“Afraid to take cabs?”
“No.”
“Afraid of wilderness or wide open spaces? How about elevators? Diving into the ocean? Have you had a panic attack, Rachel, since this whole thing started?”
“How could I tell? I’ve been in a state of panic ever since I saw you walk out of the back of a building in Boston when you said you were in London.”
“Right.” He nodded. “And you’ve overcome that panic, every minute of every day since, to do what needed to be done. Including killing me, by the way.”
“But you didn’t die.”
“Yeah, well, my apologies.” He put his hands on her shoulders. “You’re not afraid anymore because you stopped listening to anyone but your own primal self. You had all the ‘evidence’ you needed to crawl back into your life and stay there. I didn’t paint the clues in neon; I made you work for them. You could have trusted your eyes—the visa stamps looked real enough, to give you just one example—but you trusted your instinct, babe. You acted from what you knew there”—he pointed at her chest—“not here.” He pointed at her head.
She stared at him for a long time. “Don’t call me ‘babe.’”
“Why not?”
“Because I hate you.”
He took that into consideration. Shrugged. “That’s how we usually feel about the things that wake us up.”
31
SAFE HOUSE
They left Caleb’s smashed-up SUV in the woods and drove the Range Rover three hundred miles south to Woonsocket, Rhode Island, just south of the Massachusetts border and about fifteen miles north of Providence. They’d had a lot of time to talk on the drive but hadn’t really, except about the essentials. They’d listened to the radio long enough to hear they were both considered “persons of interest” in the deaths of two people in two different states. Police in Providence and Boston were tight-lipped as to why they believed the murder of a small-town bank employee in Providence was connected to the murder of a businessman in Boston, but they were determined to meet with Brian Alden, the brother of the Providence victim and business partner of the Boston victim, and with Brian Alden’s wife, Rachel Childs-Delacroix. Handguns registered to both “persons of interest” had not been recovered at their Back Bay home, so they were to be considered armed.