Nantucket Five-Spot (6 page)

Donnelly squeezed his throat with his thumb and forefinger, pulling at the loose skin below his Adam's apple. It looked like he was trying to massage the words out of his throat.

“I, uh—I have a date tonight, sir.”

Tornovitch clapped him on the shoulder. “Not anymore.”

Donnelly gave me a pleading look, but I was in no position to help. I was sure his surveillance would come to nothing. Tornovitch reminded me of those UFO freaks, stalking the perimeter of Area 51 in Nevada, hoping for a close encounter. But all the Air Force has squirreled away in Area 51 are unmanned stealth aircraft and cruise missiles. And all we had were bored teenagers with free phone service and time on their hands.

Or so I thought.

Ezekiel Beaumont: Ten Months Ago

Zeke Beaumont watched the panda. All he could think was, you're still in jail, my friend. You're a lifer. A swarm of kids tumbled past his legs, shouting and laughing. The panda glanced up, chewing meditatively on his bamboo. He didn't care.

Zeke had been inside for ten years but he had spent every waking minute of that time thinking about freedom, making plans, and organizing the future.

The brig shrink had always advised him to ‘forgive and forget.' Zeke had nodded, but he was laughing inside. That was for saints and Alzheimer's victims. Zeke was proud of his memory. He collected grievances and this one was special. This was the biggest one of all, and ten years didn't mean anything next to that. Neither did thirty years, or forty. It was never too late to set things right.

He strolled back to the hotel on the wide, sun-hammered streets, the tall palm trees lined up like an honor guard against the cloudless blue sky. Zeke was wearing shorts and sandals, a light cotton t-shirt. He could feel the warm air on his arms and legs. That was freedom, wearing shorts on a hot day.

Later he sat in the air-conditioning watching the TV with the sound off, nursing a room-service Tom Collins, assessing his progress. Things went so much faster in the outside world. Scooter had been depositing his money in the downtown Bank of America branch, just as he promised. Well, Scooter had good reason to keep his word. Scooter had his own grievances.

Zeke had checked into the hotel, bought himself a laptop, wiped the operating system and installed Linux so he could work comfortably.

He needed to find someone rich, someone casual about the purchases he made online, someone with a job that kept him moving around the country, someone single, someone with no immediate family, someone who wouldn't be missed.

Because the only foolproof way to steal someone's identity, the only way to really make sure it stayed stolen, was to kill them—unfortunate but true. One slip and the ATM machine would eat the card. Two minutes later the police would have you flat on the sidewalk with your hands cuffed.

Zeke narrowed the candidates to ten, but after studying their employment histories, as well as all the public information on real-estate transfers, driving records, insurance claims, school transcripts, marriages and divorces, income tax returns, travel itineraries, phone logs and e-mails, most of them had some disqualifying detail—a steady girlfriend, a nosy boss, a pimped-out car, some odd habit. One of them always played squash with the same partner. Another one owned a falcon. Any pet was a disqualifier—a dog was bad enough. But a falcon? Well, it took all kinds. This guy's bird had just saved his life, though he would never know it.

Zeke crossed another name off the list.

Fourteen hours later, when the work was done, Zeke Beaumont was officially someone else, someone much more prosperous and sophisticated, someone who had only two things in common with the ex-con from Miramar he used to be: a face, and a mission.

The next step was contacting Scooter. Zeke had maintained an e-mail correspondence with him from a secure address in the Brig office. He had followed Scooter's career as closely as he had monitored those monthly deposits to the war-chest bank account. It was typical of Scooter that he had gotten personally burned in the big bust just as badly as Zeke, but nothing showed. He buried it inside, out of sight. It didn't affect his Army career or his discharge. Scooter's genius for the quick escape, his ice cold ability to just turn and walk away had made everything possible—for both of them.

They both would have loved to nail Eddie, but the General was on the Joint Chiefs of Staff now, all the evidence long buried. Back then, Zeke's CO could have taken Eddie down. The CO could have made a difference, but he didn't. The CO chickened out and walked away. The CO made promises he couldn't keep, and Zeke had paid the price. Nothing else changed. The drug trade was up and running again by Christmas. A few little people got trashed, so what? A few bodies by the side of the road, who cares?

That was the CO's attitude.

But that attitude was going to change. Because the CO was going to find out some old school home truths now—actions have consequences and betrayers pay for their crimes. That was why Zeke had kept quiet for once. He had been offered a sweet deal—he could have ratted Scooter out. They both knew it. But he didn't, and now he was reaping the benefits. It wasn't only the bank account. It was the unity of purpose that mattered now. Scooter owed him and Scooter was still angry and Scooter was still hurting and Scooter was committed to seeing this thing through to the end.

That was worth more than money.

The waiting was over now. For both of them.

Zeke touched the screen of his new iPhone and listened to the ring on the other end. When Scooter picked up, Zeke said “I'm ready.”

In the pause that followed he could hear Scooter's breathing. Zeke understood it. He knew that hesitation. He had felt it himself. It was one thing to know you were going to do something important and dangerous, at some point in the future. It was something else when the future ran out and there was nothing but the present, and you had to commit.

“I'm there,” said Scooter.

Then he hung up. As always, Scooter knew exactly what to say—just two words, but they told Zeke everything he needed to know. Now he had a plan and he had a partner. He had a trap and the means to set it.

All he needed was the bait.

The girl was innocent, but so what? She wouldn't get hurt. She was just the primary ignition, something both trivial and cataclysmic—the discarded cigarette in the late August hay barn. The fire was what counted.

And the fire itself, a bizarre scheme, a preposterous conspiracy of bombs and planted evidence? That had nothing to do with Zeke Beaumont. He hadn't thought that one up. No way—that was the CO's idea, coming out of his fucked-up head and his drunken mouth, night after night in the officers club bar at Camp Doha. It was all about him. He figured it out and brooded and added all the neat little extra touches—always adding little curlicues to his perfect revenge fantasy. And that was the point, right there. For the CO, that's all it was—a fantasy, a game he played with himself to stay sane in the desert.

Zeke's inspiration was to take that drunken desert mirage, and make it real—to steal the CO's daydream and turn it against him.

Zeke stood up and stretched. He walked to the big picture window with its view of the cluttered roofs and the smog. It would be time to order dinner soon.

He walked back to the computer and opened the file he had created for relevant data, scrolling again through his pictures of the girl lifted from the hard drive of her mother's computer. He had hacked into it from the girl's Facebook page that afternoon. The mother's e-mails told him everything he needed to know. She was going back home for the first time since the kid was born. The grandmother had died, there was a lot of property, and the will was complicated. The idea was a last family summer on the island, but the girl didn't want to come. There was nothing to do on Nantucket, she didn't know anyone and she didn't want to leave her friends. She couldn't imagine any possible reason for spending a month “during the most important summer of my whole life” getting sunburned on some beach and traipsing through a stupid museum full of harpoons and whale bones whenever it rained. Which was most of the time, supposedly.

She couldn't imagine a reason? That was all right—she didn't need to.

Zeke had a reason for her—the best reason in the world.

It was time for Mommy to learn that no one can keep a secret forever.

He had already composed the posting to the girl's Facebook page. The fuse was lit. Now he had to get to Nantucket. He wanted at least two months lead time. There was a lot to do and he wanted to make sure everything was ready when the girl arrived. He closed the computer and sat back with a contented sigh, whispering to himself, rolling the words on his tongue like ripe fruit.

“It's on, it's happening. I'm making it happen.”

At last.

Chapter Five

Dinner at Cru

Eighty minutes before the first bomb went off, smashing our cozy resort-island summer into a season of rage and blood and terror, I was having a swell old time on my first evening out with an old flame.

I got to the Harbor House early and Franny was waiting for me. She emerged from behind a potted ficus tree while I was checking out the lobby. She was wearing a pale green silk dress that brought out the color of her eyes. The dress left her shoulders bare and fell to just above the knee. Her hair was down and the sight of her caught my breath in my throat for a second. The phrase ‘dressed to kill' flitted through my mind.

“Are you all right?” she said.

I swallowed some air. “That dress should come with a warning label. You need to learn the Heimlich maneuver before you wear it.”

She stepped forward and pressed herself to me. I held her, buried my face in her hair. She smelled the same, the citrus shampoo mingling with some sharp musk of her own. It was overpowering. I eased away from her. People were staring at us. The police chief was making a spectacle of himself with some off-island woman.

She took my arm as we walked outside, along the bottom of the town on South Beach Street toward the strip. The streets were crowded. The rain had finally cleared off to the south. Kids on bikes and bicycle cops whipped past going both directions. Couples of all ages strolled by. You could also see the requisite “Mr. Man” types, captains of industry, talking into their iPhones. A pack of high school girls swarmed past us. They'd spend the rest of the evening hanging out in front of the fast food restaurants on the Broad Street strip. I generally posted a couple of summer specials there. Tonight it was two kids named Jimmy who'd been loitering on the fringes of the in-crowd themselves a few years ago. I nodded to them as we walked past. They straightened up and tried to look—not busy, since there was really nothing for them to do—alert, anyway.

“So,” Franny said. “Did you ever finish that book?”

“It was bad.”

“Not to mention libelous.”

“I could have gotten around the libel part if it was any good.” I pointed ahead of us with a slight chin lift. “I hate these crowds.”

“I'm with you.” We walked along, forced apart frequently as we bucked the heavy pedestrian traffic. “So what else do you hate?”

I thought for a second. “Fat people. Successful writers. Tourists. People who yell at their kids in public.”

I cocked my head to the left, and Franny looked across the street, where a frazzled looking woman was leaning down over her six-year-old, wagging a finger in his face.

“I told you to go to the bathroom before we left the hotel! Now you're just going to have to wait!”

“Well, that's child abuse,” Franny said.

“And the worst part is, she'll never admit she was wrong and she'll never say she's sorry. At least if she's anything like the women in my life. They just can't do it. I don't know why.”

She took my hand. “I was wrong. I'm sorry.”

“Thanks. That was nice to hear. But it doesn't count unless there's something at stake.”

“You just wait. Apologies are my specialty.”

A Cadillac Escalade roared by us, twenty miles over the speed limit. Two kids had to leap back onto the sidewalk to avoid getting hit. The momentary urge to sprint after the big SUV was overwhelming. I must have actually started because I felt Franny tug me back.

“Down, boy.”

“That's something I hate. People who drive like that. Sometimes I want to arrest everyone—throw them all in jail, impound their cars and their cell phones and their computers and their TVs, and give their stupid McMansions which they use two weeks a year to the homeless people who need a roof over their heads.”

“Do the selectmen know you're a communist?”

“I'm not a communist. It's summer on Nantucket, that's all. And I hate the selectmen, too. They're useless. All they do is put up unnecessary stop signs at random intersections so we can write more traffic tickets. Parking tickets and traffic tickets! This town lives on that money. I have forty people working for me and ninety percent of what they do is write tickets.”

We turned the corner onto Easy Street. We passed a few ramshackle galleries and then the harbor opened out to us, amber in the evening light, dense with boats, a whole separate city of pleasure craft, every mooring taken at this time of year. The North Wharf houses marched out into the incoming tide.

Franny stopped to look, caught by the scooped coves of Coatue looping away beyond the boats, merging with the shadow line of Great Point at the head of the harbor. The serene vista opened her face, relaxed it. She looked young and vulnerable.

I remembered the last time I saw that expression. I had taken her high up on the backbone trail above Will Rogers State Park in the Santa Monica Mountains. It had finally stopped raining after a four day monsoon and the air was as clear as stream water. She had paused, out of breath from the steep grade, in the middle of a wood plank bridge that spanned a deep ravine. The dry air was scented with manzanita and eucalyptus. The city spread out below us, vast and intricate all the way to the ocean where Catalina dozed on the Marine layer like a porpoise on a rock. No sound from that glittering mosaic of buildings and traffic reached us—just the respiration of the wind. She took it in, wide-eyed, and I grabbed her and kissed her. It had been a mistake, submitting to that impulse. It might be an even worse mistake now. I let the pulse of desire move through me and disperse out into the harbor, following her gaze.

“It's beautiful,” she said. “You get to see beautiful stuff every day.”

“Washington is beautiful. All those white buildings and monuments.”

“Spoken like a true tourist. There are maybe twelve pretty buildings, and they're surrounded by some of the worst neighborhoods in the Western Hemisphere. I'll give you a tour of south DC sometime. Anacostia is especially nice. If you're wearing body armor.”

I slipped my arm around her shoulder. “So you're an old crank, too.”

“I guess.”

“Well come on, let's hear it. What do you hate?”

Her nose bunched up a little, as if sniffing the air for an idea. “People who don't clean up after their dogs,” she said, side-stepping a little Tootsie Roll turd and lightly kicking it into the gutter with the side of her foot, soccer-style.

“That was brave, for a woman in sandals,” I said.

“Ugh. You're right.” She paused and cocked a knee to check out her foot. “All clear.”

We started off again. “So, go on.”

“Okay…I hate—sports on TV? The old bread and circus.”

“You have to do better than that.”

“How about shoes? I hate the shoes women are supposed to wear. It's like a hundred years ago in China. Binding women's feet.”

“And? Come on—gimme.”

“How about the glass ceiling at Homeland Security? We both know I should be Jack's boss.”

“How about Jack?”

She tossed her hair out of her eyes with a flick of her head. The wind coming off the harbor scattered it again. She held it down with one hand. We were walking beside the Stop&Shop parking lot now, past the cheap tourist stores.

“Jack's all right,” she said. “He's not worth hating.”

“So that's it?”

“What?”

“Tight shoes, football and bureaucrats?”

“Don't forget dog shit.”

“Yeah, that's controversial.”

We passed Harbor Square, the plaza at the base of Straight Wharf. The cupola at the center was jammed with people and every outdoor table at the Tavern was taken. People jostled past us. Franny took a breath, started to speak, then released it as a sigh.

“That was something,” I said.

“Not really.”

“Come on.”

“Okay.” She pulled in another breath. “I was pretty pissed off at you for a while there.”

“What did I do?”

“It's what you didn't do.” We headed up Straight Wharf toward Cru. She veered off to look at the harbor. A pair of sea gulls were fighting over some discarded junk. A white paper bag floated on the dark water. “I kept track of you after I left L.A.” she said. “I used the computer.”

“You were a Google-stalker?”

“No. That's for amateurs. There's a program at DHS called CARGO—Coordinated All-Region Government Oversight. It can track anyone's personal data. Not just meta-data, like the NSA. We monitor phone calls, web searches, and e-mail. Combined with the new facial recognition algorithms and license plate identification and the real-time information from your smart phone, we can figure pretty much everything you do, everyone you know and everywhere you go.”

“Well, Snowden blew the lid off all that,” I said.

She shrugged. “Not really. Everyone knew it was happening and nobody really cares. Kids don't even want privacy any more. They want to post their drunk party pictures on Facebook. They get pissed off when no one reads their blogs. Nothing is real if you don't tweet it.”

“And that's all fine until the government decides you're a problem. So everyone stays in line. Fit in, don't draw attention to yourself.”

She smiled. “Sounds like small town life.”

“Ain't it the truth?”

“Anyway…I worked on the CARGO software and I had access. I didn't initiate any surveillance protocols—I didn't snoop on you. But I knew you got divorced. So I got your number and I called you.”

“Yeah. And I called you back. Three times. It was a work number. I tried using my own contacts to figure out your home number, but I got nowhere. Finally I called the D.C. police and tried to con them into letting me have it. No dice.”

She was staring at me through the gloom “You called me back?”

“Three times, over two weeks.”

“Shit. Goddamn it.”

“What?”

“People suck. And just when you think you've figured all the ways they suck and how much they suck, they find a new way to suck and they suck worse.”

I had to laugh. “Okay, but I don't see what—”

“It's Jack. All my calls went through his office. They screened every in-coming message.”

More seagulls had joined the fun. They got the bag open and were feasting on water-logged potato chips and crusts of bread, cawing at each other to protect their share of the booty.

“Why would Jack—?”

She shrugged. “A couple of reasons. I'm sure he'd say that the Department of Homeland Security had mandated a moratorium on personal calls during high alert episodes. Which is about ninety percent of the time.”

“What if I had called on a low-risk day?”

Franny took my hand and we started back up toward the restaurant.

“He suspected we'd been…intimate.” I started to protest. “Well, you did kiss me that day.” I subsided, pleased that she was willing to acknowledge the kiss after all this time. “You had made some negative comments about religious profiling…kind of like what you said today. That made you a security risk. Our connection rendered me unreliable. It was his responsibility as the special agent in charge to eliminate any possibility of a breach.”

“And he was jealous.”

She nodded “Mostly he was jealous.”

“What a turd.”

“Come on. He had a crush on me. I think that's sweet. It shows his human side.”

Cru was perched at the end of the pier, with big open windows looking out on the water. A girl at the podium in front checked our reservation and then turned us over to an eager young Brazilian guy who showed off his English as he led us to our table in the front room, recommending special entrees and encouraging us to take a walk along the longer spit of dock beyond the restaurant, if we “chose to partake of some postprandial exercise.”

Franny saw the look on my face and bit down on a laugh as we seated ourselves.

“No postprandial exercise for you, buddy,” she said. “You're lucky you're getting dinner.”

“That is so unfair. My motives are pure.”

“That's what I'm afraid of.” I must have made some little grunt of amusement as we passed the bar, because Franny said “What?”

“See that guy, the tall thin blond one—blue blazer, khakis, top-siders?” I realized I could have been describing half the men in the restaurant, but Franny followed my glance and nodded.

“Check out the girl next to him,” Franny said. “She's drinking her Scotch with a straw. That's bizarre.”

“At least it's not a flavor straw.”

“They still have those?”

“My kids love them. The last hold-outs against healthy products and natural flavors.”

The girl laughed at something the man said. The smile lit up her austere Slavic features. She laid a hand on his knee. I was impressed. “Anyway, this guy—Tyler Gibson—-”

“You remember his name?”

“I remember all their names. It's a curse. So, anyway—Gibson storms into my office a few weeks ago. He wanted a resident parking sticker because he was renting a house. He'd have been in the office all day if some other angry jerk hadn't shown up. I remember thinking, what a useless bullying punk this guy is. No style, no charm, no social graces—just money and a mouth. But somehow or another he's about to score with that incredible girl over there.”

Franny shrugged. “Money helps. So does a mouth, sometimes.” Franny stole another look as we sat down at our table. “She looks Eastern European.”

“I'm sure she is. Every attractive woman from Krakow to Vladivostok seems to wind up here eventually.”

The waiter came to the table and I ordered a Mojito. Franny chose white wine. She looked around the bright, high-ceilinged room. The last light was just touching the yachts moored nearby.

“Look at those boats,” she said.