Two for the Show (24 page)

“I’m assuming your original deal was five million. That’s what the Stewartsons would have offered you, fifty-fifty, knowing they’d never share a dime of it with you. They could afford to be fair, since it was only in the abstract. Whereas I am going in there to get you actual money. To transfer to you, in seconds, no shenanigans, straight up. Name your price.”

What would you say? One million—10 percent, like a commission, a finder’s fee? Two million? It’s all fair, because none of it’s fair, because it’s not what I want.

What I want is in the backseat. And has nothing to do with money. Love, affection, connection, family. Precisely the things that money can’t buy.

She looks at me impatiently. I remain silent.

She gets out of the car. “Then I’ll decide,” she says irritably, frustrated, barely audibly, under her breath.

She opens Amanda’s door, and opens mine. It looks as if indeed we are needed again for paperwork. This slick and slippery and fluent transfer of funds still requires Amanda. And me, apparently. Or else she just wants to keep an eye on us. Doesn’t want me grabbing Amanda and making off with her. Disappearing cleverly into the little strip mall, or sprinting desperately out into the surrounding desert. Amanda and I follow her in from the hot sun into the cool lobby, air-conditioning whirring with white noise—an insolent, mocking whisper.

We sit down in a small office with another bank officer, this one an overweight, slow-moving woman with a sweet smile. “We have the paperwork all set for you, Ms. Nuland.” (
New land.
Terra incognito. Good one, Dominique.) “Thanks for calling ahead to arrange this, makes it so much easier, for you and for us. You just begin with these signatures here.”

And watching Dominique and the bank officer hunch over the paperwork, I am not even vaguely aware of any other presence, until I see shadows crossing the desk . . .

Sandi leans toward me. Wiggles her pinky finger at me. Says nothing.

So she did see it.

The tip-off.

The tip of the iceberg.

Dave is leaning in now too, on the other side of me, whispering in my ear: “We checked the transfer. The money cleared. So your loyalty to Amanda, Chas, your fingertip, your self-sacrifice—we thought it wouldn’t matter. But just to be sure, we doubled around after exiting First Desert. Saw you get in the car with the ‘trust officer.’ And the
way
you got in, Chas. Clearly you knew her. A prior acquaintanceship, a relationship of some sort. Meaning, you were possibly
in
on it with her somehow. So we followed you. Thinking maybe it was just your chance for a fresh start. With your daughter, or kid sister, or whatever the hell she is to you. A partial DNA match, after all.”

So they accessed the same lab results that Dominique did. Probably an easy hack for them.

“Your excuse, your opportunity, to take Amanda. So go ahead, we figured. Let the authorities come after
you
. But when we saw you pulling into
this
bank branch, then we knew. Nothing so purely idealistic. Cash. Wired funds. A trick that was one trick ahead of us.”

Tailing us. Old-fashioned detective work. The other kind. The simple kind. As I said: sometimes simpler is better.

Stewartson stands up from his whispering to me.

Amanda, Dominique, the plump bank officer, looking on.

Waiting for the result of all the whispering.

No one knowing exactly what would happen now.

The bank officer’s voice quavers, as she stares up at Stewartson, hovering over her. “Maybe I shouldn’t finalize that transfer,” she offers, preemptively cooperative, as in,
Please spare me
.

“Maybe not,” Stewartson says.

NINETEEN

“Now this is a cozy little
grouping, isn’t it?” The Stewartsons are looking at us, and at their handiwork. They’ve secured my wrists to Dominique’s with plastic police ties, faced us away from each other, our four wrists bound together behind us. They’ve shoved us down into a kneeling position. Amanda crouches next to us, untouched, but confused, bewildered—terrified of the Stewartsons and their brutality, but unsure what to do, who to turn to, who to trust, what her connection is to her new mother and new half brother on their knees a couple of hundred yards into the off-road scrub and empty desert. Once Dominique and I were on our knees, I saw Amanda take a tentative step toward Sandi—and saw Sandi push her away. “I’m glad we could organize this family reunion. We should charge a little family-counseling fee. A finder’s fee for bringing you together. Ten million or so? But oh, I guess you don’t have it.” He is slipping the extra police ties into his pockets, double-checking to see that he has all three of our cell phones. “I guess you can’t get at it right now, because of your financial mismanagement. Because you were a little too smart, and moved the money too far ahead of you. And when Wallace’s consigliere here”—gesturing to Dominique—“doesn’t show up with his daughter, Wallace will have the Vegas police out in force to retrieve you.”

It was nearly a lawyer’s summation from Dave Stewartson. And I had to hand it to him, that was the sum of it.

“One option is to leave you out here in the desert, to give ourselves a little head start. That’s what you’re thinking we’ll do. And you’re right.”

He doesn’t verbalize other, darker options. He doesn’t have to.

The midday sun beats down on us. The Stewartsons turn to head back to their idling Nissan. But Dave turns back. Has something more to say. He looks at me. Shakes his big square head. I look again at his oddly chiseled features, their off-kilter angles. “Thing is, Chas, it was never about the money.”

And I already feel the sense, the force, the logic of what is coming before he even says it. I already feel how it is going to fit together, before I even hear it. Because originally, they had wanted to
expose
Wallace. To bring him down. So isn’t the financial motive really only secondary? To give a little meat and meaning to the exposure? It had only become more important, come to think of it—the right sum, the right deal between us—
after
I suggested the kidnapping.

“The money was just a consolation we were letting you sell us, because we figured we could get close to Wallace that way. We figured the kidnapping would draw him close, put us eye to eye with him. And we assumed you were the only behind-the-scenes operative, Chas”—looking at Dominique—“never thought there’d be two.”

They hadn’t imagined or conceived it, any more than I had.

“It was simple all along. We wanted to get him, have him, alone.”

To kill him? No—you could assassinate him anywhere. Pros like the Stewartsons could engineer it easily. To get him alone—so they could whisk him away? Without anyone knowing? That would be the reason, the need, to get him alone. So no one else would know. To take him away. To where? To whom? To face retribution? To face justice?

“Who
are
you?” I ask them.

They stare silently. Debating how much to say. Dave shrugs. “Contractors.”

And of course, when I thought about it, they had always worked for someone else. They were the type. Like Dominique. Like me. Were we all so alike after all? And yet here—pissed off, offended, frustrated by something in their shadowy careers—I figured they were striking off on their own. Like me in my rage, when I found out the truth about Wallace. Like Dominique, with this plan of hers. Were Dave and Sandi Stewartson disgruntled employees from some previous venture I knew nothing about? Part of that past I had helped erase and couldn’t find much of to begin with? Part of those long-ago events in South America, as I’d imagined? Jesus, were we all really on the same mission after all? Nursing a grudge, discovering the depth of his falseness, all working for Wallace’s downfall and yet at cross-purposes, tripping each other up?

“Contractors. Who do you work for?”

Dave shakes his head. “Can’t tell you that.”

And as I thought about it—thought about
their
past, their skill set, their style, who they really were, how this had all begun, it didn’t take much insight to imagine who their employer had been.

A huge employer. Huge enough to have the Stewartsons invisibly on their payroll.

The hugest.

And suddenly the world expands, far beyond a Vegas act and my silent profession and clean little condo and routinized existence, beyond its interruption by the Stewartsons and a seamy, twisty little case of kidnapping and extortion; it expands suddenly into an enormous realm I know nothing about—never even think about beyond a glancing headline or one-minute story on the evening news. An amorphous ocean of geopolitics, national security, national interests, threats and counterthreats, secret operations. A realm where a detective’s dogged efforts hit a brick wall—or perhaps a razor-wire fence. A realm where there will be no answers, only multiplication of questions. I feel it.

Because their employer, I suddenly realize, was the US government.

Whose case against Wallace fell apart? After they had invested so many years, so much energy? No matter. They were going to get him. And if they had to leave the justice system to achieve justice, they would.

They had
faith
that they would.

And I realize that this was not just a case of identity theft. Wallace had done something bigger. Something more elaborate. Somewhere in the past. Somewhere in South America.

Something more elaborate than what he had done to me? Some deal more sinister and draconian than the one he had struck with my mother? But he had proved to me, over these past few days, that he had the skills, the cold calculation, the will, the discipline, to pull that off. I began to feel the detective’s dread of stumbling onto something deeper, of being pulled, lured from the edge into the swirling water . . .

Stewartson looks at me, reads my mind perfectly, confirms. “Yes, Chas. Bigger than what was done to you,” he says darkly. “Makes yours look tame.”

And once they had discovered it, stumbled into it, now they were doing what the federal government always did, using a time-tested tactic that usually worked for prosecutors, DA’s, the criminal justice system:

Attempting to convict on a lesser charge. Fraud. Identity theft. To get him into the criminal justice system, where they can engineer the outcome, apply the justice, that they
really
want.

So “Dave and Sandi Stewartson”—even in their previous incarnation as Stewart Davidson and Sheila Barton—are not who they had seem to be, any more than Wallace is. Even their “identity”—my sense of the unrepentant thieves and seedy opportunists behind their fake names—has morphed again into a new identity: They are zealots, patriots, idealists, vigilantes. Uncompromising. True believers. The faithful. Even when America, perhaps, abandoned them in their effort.

And they had worked tirelessly, behind the scenes, unknown, thanklessly, for a paycheck and little else. Unacknowledged. In the shadows.

Gee—who does that remind you of?

How could I not have seen it? How could I not have seen myself reflected in that mirror?

But mirrors had been misleading me.

As if Stewartson could further read my mind, could know how far I could get on my own, and what he would have to fill in to get me the rest of the way:

“The case fell apart,” he says, as if we have just been discussing it. “So sensitive, so potentially explosive, the federal government didn’t want it discussed in open court . . .” He looks at me, the anger still alive in him. “He was working with someone. Someone he was very close to, whom we knew he would trust. But someone he ultimately had something on. Some point of leverage and control over this key witness of ours, who suddenly refused to testify . . .”

And suddenly the abstractly geopolitical goes personal. Comes back from the amorphous world stage to an inadvertent detective tied up in desert scrub at the side of a Vegas highway. Because I had a hunch who that someone was. And a sense that the balance of control and power had gotten cemented with a child.

A hunch that I was born not in a nameless and unnotable American town, but in South America, in the middle of this case—maybe the deus ex machina—the very reason for it.

Pulled from the curtains, to center stage.

“We started as federal agents. The highest ideals. And have ended up as criminals, kidnappers,
failed
kidnappers, who now need to go on the run.” He shakes his head. “He’s done it again, Wallace. He’s pulled it off.” He straightens, brushes the dust of his trousers, squints out at the desert and at his rented Nissan waiting for him at the side of the highway. “But that’s how important it was. How important to at least try.”

With Dominique and Amanda now so long overdue (and probably assuming that I have taken them somewhere), Wallace has likely called the Las Vegas police, who are undoubtedly on their way. Or he has somehow realized what Dominique is truly up to. Or else the timorous, overweight Western Loan and Trust branch officer, seeing the Stewartsons forcefully hustle us out of the branch, has stopped cowering and notified the authorities.

Whatever the reason, we can hear the sirens. Several now. Baying into the desert with high-pitched excitement.

It will be just us here with Amanda. The Stewartsons will be gone. Our wrists will still be tied. I can’t imagine what the police will make of the picture.

But then the picture changes.

For the worse.

Amanda stands up.

Amanda takes off.

Turns on her heels, and heads out across the desert into the midday sun.

First walks, then breaks into a trot, then breaks into a run, as if afraid, expecting, that one of us—that any of us—will follow.

But no one does, of course. Dominique and I are tied together. We could never catch her.

And the Stewartsons simply watch her go.

The ten million has been delivered, after all. Who gets it, what the allocation is, where the money is exactly, that is all up in the air now. Dominique has stopped the Stewartsons from getting it. The Stewartsons have now stopped Dominique from getting it. But the ransom has been delivered, so Amanda is free to go. No longer a hostage. Released.

She has no further value to the Stewartsons. They just admitted they were never concerned with the money anyway—and even less with her. And now they are more preoccupied with the approaching sirens.

Dominique and I watch powerlessly as she goes.

Her biological mother. Her protective half brother.

“Amanda! Amanda!” I call out to her. Does she even hear me over the approaching sirens, over the wash of highway noise? Or is she ignoring me? Refusing to look behind her. Refusing to see, to deal with, any more of it.

Look what she’s just learned about her past. Look what she’s overheard about her father. Look what she’s at the center of.
I’m your mother, Amanda. Your mother, and your rescuer, but now I am intercepting the ransom money and you have to come with me. I’m your half brother, Amanda. Your half brother, and your kidnapper.
She doesn’t know what to think, doesn’t know who to trust anymore, needs the room to think it through, to figure it out. A fifteen-year-old whose world has turned upside down. Who can blame the impulse for escape?

Come back here, Amanda. Right now, young lady. For your own protection. For your own good. You’ll be in danger out there.
But we don’t say it. Because we recognize the absurdity. The danger is
us
. She is heading to safety. Away from us all.

And I, at least, have seen how determined she is. How smart. How strong-willed. And I know that words, argument, persuasion, will never work on her. And we are unable and unwilling to physically, forcibly, hold her anyway. That would only add a wrong to the wrongs we have already amassed.

She hears the sirens as well as we do. She knows this would be her rescue. That the police would save her from all of us, return her to Wallace and Sasha, her mother and father. So heading off into the desert is to escape that rescue, that safety, that return. Why? What is she thinking? Something about me? About Dominique? What has gotten under her fifteen-year-old skin, that she wants to avoid the reunion, be somewhere, anywhere, else? Maybe the impulses of any fifteen-year-old, writ large, amplified by circumstance, made suddenly and necessarily actionable.

Amanda heads off into the desert. A shrinking figure, soon a black dot, disappearing against the endless scrub and distant peaks. I cut off my fingertip for her, and now—just as cleanly, almost as physically—she has cut herself off from me.

The sirens draw closer, their tones broadening, deepening, as if sniffing prey.

Sandi and Dave Stewartson check our plastic ties once more. Then hustle to their rented Nissan and pull away, smooth, unobtrusive, onto the untrafficked boulevard. Disappearing sleekly. Pros.