Adam filled Lenny in on everything Gabriel had told him over the phone, confirming it with the records that were included in the file—and learning about a few more interesting character flaws in the man.
When he had finished, Lenny suddenly jumped up and started pacing back and forth.
“This guy is dangerous, Adam. I don’t know if I can do this.”
“We have no choice, Lenny. Not if we want to see Carrie alive again.”
Lenny retook his seat, leaning across the small table, his eyes locked with Adam’s.
“I never meant for this to happen, Adam. You have to believe me. All my life I’ve looked out for Carrie. Took the beatings to protect her. Helped her make something of her life. Somehow I just got left behind and stuck in this world of misfortune. I’ve been trying to get out for years. I owe a lot of money to a lot of people. This was my only way out. It was supposed to be easy. I was going to pay off my bookies and then live a simple life in Mexico. I have my ticket booked and everything.”
He slammed his hand down hard on the table and noisily pushed his chair back roughly so it tipped over on the floor.
“Why does nothing ever go right for me, huh? I had it all planned out. Every time I think, now I’m going to be free, I somehow create an even bigger mess for myself. This one being the biggest mess of all. Trouble finds me no matter how hard I try to make something of my life.”
Adam, who had been quietly listening to another five minutes of Lenny’s emotional outcry, finally spoke.
“Sometimes we have to go through the desert before we get to the Promised Land.”
His words left Lenny frozen to the spot. As if something had drained the very life out of him. With dazed eyes, he spoke in a shaky voice.
“That’s the exact thing the drifter in the subway said to me. How did you—why did you say that?”
“Have you ever heard the story in the Bible about the Promised Land, Lenny?”
The way Lenny shuffled uncomfortably told Adam he hadn’t.
“God freed the Israelites from hundreds of years of slavery in Egypt. He promised to deliver them to a land of plenty. All they had to do was trust him. But they didn’t. When their timeline didn’t meet God’s timeline, they decided to take matters into their own hands. They set off in search of their utopia on their own, tried to take shortcuts, turned to false gods and idols, and turned their backs on God. It took them forty years wandering through the desert, enduring trial after trial, on the chance that they’d get to the Promised Land. You see, Lenny, their plan didn’t align with God’s plan for them. God’s plan was for them to stay where they were and to help prosper the nation that enslaved them first. But even though they were obstinate and disobedient, God showed them grace. He fed them heavenly bread when they were starving, protected them from enemies, and eventually made good on his promise. Often God’s timeline and plan veer away from how we want a situation to play out or an outcome in our favor, but his plans for us always turn out for good. All these trials and hardships we go through are God’s way of teaching us along the way, showing us that we can trust him and depend on him. If we choose to accept it. Perhaps the answer has been right in front of you all this time, Lenny.”
Adam lowered his eyes to the piece of writing tucked inside the cast on Lenny’s broken arm. Lenny’s eyes followed but he didn’t say a word.
“Just some food for thought, my friend. Speaking of which, let’s plug these earpieces in and go grab something to eat before we head out to find the girl.”
Chapter Fourteen
Lenny barely spoke a word after they left the motel. And Adam didn’t push him either. He knew their talk would be a lot for Lenny to digest. Instead, he quietly prayed for God to guide him, protect them, help them see his plan.
When they finally got to the newsstand where Lenny had collected the disposable phone, the small square was bustling with employees on their way to work.
“We should wait until they leave and she’s not so busy,” Lenny suggested.
“Agreed. Gabriel, can you hear us?” Adam spoke into his high-tech earpiece.
“Affirmative, Adam. We have eyes on you too.”
“Oh great! Nothing like pressure,” Lenny responded sarcastically, the nerves evident in his voice. “Let’s hope we can get her to talk. Maybe we should offer her money. Ask your guy how much we can offer her,” he whispered.
“We’re not going to offer her money, Lenny. She’ll talk. And Gabriel can hear you even if you whisper.” He teasingly whispered the last bit.
“No way. She’s dead if Diaz finds out. I’m telling you, Preacher, we’re going to need to bribe her.”
“We’ll figure it out. Just do whatever it is you’re supposed to do when you’re picking up a job and let’s take it from there. And stay calm, okay, Lenny? You’ve got this.”
Another five minutes went by before the last of the workforce got their newspapers and the newsstand was clear to approach.
“Here we go. Ready?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Take a deep breath and stay calm.”
Lenny nodded as the pair closed in on the stand. When they stepped up to the window the girl had her back to them while she was digging in her backpack on the floor. When she turned around, she nearly choked on the fresh piece of gum she had just popped in her mouth.
Her eyes lingered on Lenny’s face, then darted to Adam’s. She didn’t speak.
“It’s a great day for a picnic, isn’t it?” Lenny said the code phrase.
Still she didn’t answer.
Lenny cleared his throat and started repeating the phrase. She interrupted him mid-sentence.
“Well, well, if it isn’t my strawberries and champagne guy. I can’t believe you’re still breathing. Who’s he?”
“Alive and kicking. He’s a colleague. We need to talk.”
“Take your paper and leave. I don’t have anything to say.”
“I need your help.”
“I can’t help you.”
“Please, he’s got my sister.”
She clicked her tongue and rolled her eyes.
“I told you you were insane to take on that job.”
“Yeah, about that, that’s what I want to talk to you about. Tell me what you know.”
“I ain’t telling you jack, man. I happen to love my life.”
“Who was the package for? What was in it? Please! Tell me something, anything. Diaz has my sister and he’s going to kill her if I don’t get the package back in the next two days.”
“You lost it? Sheesh man, you really are stupid.”
“Tell me something I don’t know, okay! And I didn’t lose it. Someone drugged me and stole it. So here I am, looking for answers from you. Why did they steal it? Who would do that? Please, help me.”
Lenny was desperate and his voice was low and pleading.
“I can’t help you.”
“Yes, you can. You just won’t. Look, I won’t tell him you told me anything, okay? Just tell me something. Anything that might help me track it down. My sister’s life is at stake, darn it! She has a little girl, a family.”
Something in his eyes must have hit a nerve with her. She paused, her eyes lingering on Lenny’s face.
“Look, all I can do is give you what the last guy had on him when he died.”
“The last guy?”
“Yes, the one who tried his hand at this before you. Unfortunately, he wasn’t as lucky as you and didn’t live through it.”
Something in her eyes had changed when she said that. She ducked below the small counter and popped up a minute later with a bloodstained newspaper that she discreetly slipped into a paper bag.
“Check the classifieds.”
“Ha-ha, very funny. I’m not looking for a job.”
“No idiot. There’s a message somewhere in the classifieds. That’s all I know. And you didn’t get that paper from me, got it?”
“Okay. And you know about a message how?”
&
nbsp; The girl gave a burdened sigh.
“He was my boyfriend. The guy before you. I found this hidden in our apartment a month after they killed him. No one knows I had it, so keep it that way.”
“I will, I promise. Thank you.”
As Adam and Lenny turned to walk away she added, “It will be a great day for a picnic when you bring the house down. Maybe the sun will shine for me again.”
Her words made Adam speak for the first time.
“God willing, we will. Thank you for your help.”
* * *
“I can’t believe our luck! Who knew she had this?” Lenny exclaimed as they walked back to the motel.
“You really think it was luck? How do you figure that?”
Lenny shrugged his shoulders.
“I don’t know. I mean think about it. What are the odds she’d been holding onto a paper that has some obscure message in it?”
“I’m guessing you’ll say zero.”
“Exactly. Pure luck.”
“And luck made her change her mind to give it to us?”
“Well, no. Maybe she just felt sorry for me.”
“So she felt an emotion.”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“So perhaps God stirred her heart, brought her hope at a time she most needed it. Maybe she found that paper as a result of a series of events that happened to her that day. She accidentally dropped something and spotted it under the couch, or decided she’d finally clean the apartment, cleaned out his cupboard after a month of mourning. There could have been a million ways she found that paper and somehow she made a conscious decision to hold onto it. And today, with you, her conscience brought about the decision to give it to you. Luck can’t control your mind or your heart, Lenny.”
Lenny was quiet.
“So you’re saying God planned all of this. Her boyfriend dying and all.”
“I’m saying God has a plan for each of our lives. He didn’t kill her boyfriend, sinful men did. But he’s using the bad event to work out his plan for her life. Whatever that might be. Like a GPS recalculating a route when you’ve taken a wrong turn. And in the same way, he’s working out the plans he has for us. Things don’t always go the way we want them to, Lenny. And yes, oftentimes life kicks us in the shins, but if we understand and trust that God loves us and that it’s all part of a bigger plan, he will help us find our way through it.”
“I’ve never thought of it that way.”
“People rarely do, my friend. They have to blame someone for the bad stuff that happens in their life. So they blame God. Because they don’t know him.”
* * *
When Adam and Lenny got back to their room at the motel they opened the newspaper to the Classified section and spread it open on the small eating table.
“Okay, what are we looking for?” Lenny asked.
“A coded message.”
Lenny watched as Adam grabbed the pen that lay atop a notepad next to his bed. He placed the pen horizontally across the newspaper and slowly glided it up the page and across each ad column.
“I’m not the world’s most academic but where I come from you read from the top down. That makes no sense to me. But maybe you clever people have to read from the bottom up.”
“I’m not reading. I’m looking for anomalies.”
“Sure, I’ll go with that,” Lenny snickered.
“Look, your mind sequences words together that make sense when you read it in the normal order. That’s how its trained. But when you read out of sequence, in this case from the bottom up, your eyes tend to pick out the inconsistencies when it can’t make sense of it.”
Adam continued through the columns, then suddenly stopped.
“Here, look, a cipher. See there?”
Adam circled the piece of writing that to the naked eye appeared to be a misprint in an ad.
“It’s just a bunch of random alphabetic letters.”
“This my friend, is a simple Caesar cipher.”
“Simple to you perhaps. The only Caesar I know is the one on the Vegas strip. I was on a roll that weekend.”
“Okay, this has nothing to do with gambling. It’s a cipher that was used by Julius Caesar to protect military communications between him and his men. It was later used in World War II. The original cipher used by Caesar shifted in threes.”
“Like I said, smart people.”
“You are smart too, you know. If you know the alphabet, you can decipher this code. Shifting three literally means each letter here was shifted three places in the alphabet. So the letter D becomes A, E becomes B, and so on. When you replace the letters, you have your message.”
Lenny watched as Adam worked his way through the code, replacing the letters then copying one letter at a time onto the notepad.
“Well, what’s it saying?”
Adam read the message out loud.
“Noon. Bellevue Road. Shoes.”
“So it’s a secret meeting, a rendezvous.”
“Indeed it is.”
Adam flipped the paper over to the front page.
“This newspaper is six months old. I guess we missed the meeting.”
“Now what?”
“Not sure. Let me think.”
A knock at the door startled them both.
“Who is it?”
“Tanisha.”
Adam dashed across the room to find Tanisha standing outside the door peering over her glasses.
“Here, it’s today’s paper. You might want to check for another message.” She turned as soon as she pushed the folded newspaper against his chest.
“Uh, okay. Thank you!” he yelled after her.
“Sheesh, Preacher, now I know why you’re trying to avoid her. She’s not the friendliest, is she?”
“I can hear you, Lenny,” Tanisha announced over the ear piece.
Lenny’s face drained as he recalled they were under surveillance.
“Not that it’s not appealing. I happen to like a little bit of attitude in a woman,” he tried to correct his blunder.
“I think you should quit while you’re ahead,” Adam said amused.
He flattened the daily newspaper onto the table and followed the identical method with his pen. Lenny watched in silence.
“Got it!”
Again he copied the message onto the notepad.
“We have another meeting. Sunset. Warehouse eighty-one. MC two.”
Chapter Fifteen
Adam wasn’t sure who out of the two of them was most nervous. But unlike Lenny, he remained calm—at least on the outside. Inside, his nerves were out of control and his stomach had pulled into a tight knot. So much so that he didn’t touch the tray of sandwiches Tanisha had brought to their room.
Lenny, on the other hand, devoured most of the platter—evidently, he ate when he was stressed. But truth be told it was nothing more than him currying favor with Tanisha after his previous slip-up.
Tanisha’s gourmet platter of sandwiches had nothing to do with catering to their every whim. That was a smokescreen to maintain her cover—“one can never be too careful,” she’d said. The real reason she was there was to run them through a safety sequence and to ensure they were well equipped and prepared for any unforeseen incidences at the warehouse.
“Remember, you’re not there to confront anyone. Only to gather intel. Stay out of sight at all times. And if anything does happen, use the safe word,” she said in a stern voice as she secured a tiny microphone to Lenny’s chest.
“So, are you like a secret agent or something?” Lenny asked her.
Tanisha ignored him.
“I’m just asking because I kinda feel like I’m being used for bait or something. Microphones, hidden cameras, what if they catch us?”
“They won’t, as long you don’t do anything stupid,” she said, her voice steely.
“But you’re watching my every move though, right? Who’s gonna be there for us if things go wrong? Everyone’s watching and listening, but who
’s got our backs, huh?”
“We’ll be fine, Lenny. We’re not the FBI trying to bust a drug-smuggling ring. We’re trying to get Carrie back. Keep that in mind. We’ll find someplace safe to hide, find out who’s running this meeting and why. That’s it. If they have the package, we let Gabriel know and they’ll take it from there,” Adam assured him.
“Do we even know where this warehouse is?”
Tanisha spread a large city map out on the bed and pointed at the red circle to the east of the city.
“How can you be certain that’s the right one? There are a million possibilities scattered all over the city.”
“It’s the right one,” Tanisha said.
Lenny’s nerves got the better of him.
“What if you’re wrong? Then we’ve wasted all—”
“It’s the right one. We don’t make mistakes,” she said again.
Lenny raised his arms as if a gun was pointed at him.
“Okay, okay, I’m just saying. I mean who am I to doubt a secret spy?”
He was intentionally mocking her and she knew it. The look in her eyes told him she wasn’t impressed.
Adam, who had been quietly poring over the coded message in that day’s paper, looked pensive. He had gone through several more backdated newspapers and found further clues. Something nagged at him. Something he just couldn’t put his finger on.
“What are you so deep in thought over, Preacher?”
Adam didn’t answer. His mind was trying to work through the problem.
Tanisha moved to stand next to him, her arms folded at her waist as if she was waiting for him to give her something.
“If there’s something on your mind best to say it,” she urged.
He stared back at her, his mind still with the newspaper in front of him.
“I’m just puzzled by the clues. They’re not the same. In fact, I went through a few more papers, some dating back as far as a year, and in each one there’s a different tail clue.”
“I’m listening.”
“The message tells them where and when to meet, that’s obvious, but what do these last bits mean? They’re totally unrelated. Look here: prospect, shoes, M C two, triple long…what’s up with that?”
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