Hidden Threat

by Anthony Tata

  The seated man on the mat waved his hand and said something that Zach did not understand. The guards moved forward and dragged Zach on his knees to within a few feet of the man on the mat.

  They want to film me on my knees in front of bin Laden, Zach thought to himself. No way in hell. With his hands cuffed behind his back, he struggled to regain his footing, leaning forward and then lifting his right knee. The two men tackled him, beating him again, then lifting him to his knees again.

  “I’m not kneeling, so you’ll just have to keep beating the shit out of me,” Zach groaned.

  There were ten guards in the open area, all prepared to kill Colonel Garrett if he made a single move against the man on the mat.

  A knife came from out of nowhere and pressed into his neck, drawing blood. He felt the warmth sliding down his chest.

  “You will kneel before the master. America will kneel before the master.”

  And the camera rolled.

  CHAPTER 14

  Spartanburg, SOUTH CAROLINA

  Tuesday Afternoon

  Amanda had endured another drama filled day at school, returned home quickly and now bounced down the steps from her bedroom, cinching her backpack over her shoulder. As she stepped into the foyer, her mother stood in front of the door, blocking her exit.

  “I don’t want you to go back to see this woman, Amanda.”

  Amanda stopped, looked at her mother, and then found it hard to hold her stare. Twenty-four hours had passed since Amanda’s first visit with Riley Dwyer. During her classes today the child support issue clawed at the back of her mind like a dredge. She dismissed it, though, as inconsequential. What difference did it make?

  “Mom, Jake’s waiting in the driveway. I don’t want to do this either, but if we want that money, I have to.” Amanda was dressed in a long pink skirt with a tight-fitting, matching tee underneath a denim jacket. She had snapped a Tiffany bracelet on her left wrist. She looked at her mother and then at Gus Randel sitting next to her.

  Gus had wavy, light-brown hair that was swept back onto his collar. He had a baby-smooth face that made Amanda wonder if he shaved. He was wearing a black polo shirt and Levis.

  “What’s her name?”

  “What difference does it make? Just some lady in Charlotte. Gus, help me out here.”

  Gus held up his hands in surrender. “Hey, I’m staying out of this one.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “Hey, I got you the keg,” he said with a smile.

  “What have you done for me lately?” Amanda countered.

  “Well, now that you mention it. Melanie, I do think you should let Amanda just deal with this on her own schedule, you know?”

  “Stay out of this, Gus. It doesn’t concern you.”

  Gus raised his eyebrows. “Think I’m getting another beer.” He stood from the table and walked into the kitchen.

  “You’re not leaving until you tell me her name. I need to know, just to make sure you’re safe.”

  Amanda fidgeted. Maybe it wasn’t so inconsequential. She chewed on a nail and then looked up.

  “Okay, but first, answer me this. Remember when you told me dad was always missing child support? Why did you say that?” She shifted her weight and looked at her nails.

  After an uncomfortable pause, her mother replied, “Because he did.”

  “No, mom, he didn’t. I saw the records yesterday. He never missed a single payment.”

  Amanda brushed past her mother, opened the door, and leapt into the truck.

  “Everything okay?” Jake asked.

  “Just go,” she muttered. Amanda stared straight ahead during most of the drive, numbly watching the familiar landmarks tick past.

  ***

  Gus Randel gazed at them through the bay window on the second-floor landing. He stood there in full view, perfectly framed by the transom as if he were hovering.

  He lightly stroked his jaw, deep in thought, wondering about this situation and what opportunities it might present. He decided he would drive to his upcoming meeting in Charlotte, NC. That would give him time to think and outline some writing. He was working on several articles for Charlotte Magazine, but a new idea had just come to him.

  Turning to go back downstairs, he saw Melanie staring at him. How long had she been there, he wondered?

  “We need to talk,” she said.

  And they did.

  CHAPTER 15

  CHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA

  Riley stood as Amanda was introduced by her assistant. She smiled weakly and said, “How’s my expert witness today?”

  Amanda looked at her and shrugged. “Jake’s waiting. What do you need me to do today?”

  Riley figured it was too much to ask to make any real progress in a week’s time, but she would continue to try. She had not slept much last night, and the alcohol hangover still tugged at her brain even this late in the afternoon.

  “Let’s just have a seat, shall we?”

  Amanda took the same seat she had before and remained silent. “Rough night?”

  “You’re so good for my esteem,” Riley replied, smiling thinly.

  After an awkward moment of silence, Riley made the first move.

  “Amanda, I wrote down last night the four or five things you said bothered you most about your relationship with your father.” She held up a yellow legal pad of paper. “Missed child support, no visitation, mean to your mother and grandmother, always created problems, and disrupting stuff, whatever that means.”

  “Well, exactly, like if I had something planned, he would plan something on top of it. That happened a lot, and it got to the point where I, you know, just had to put a stop to it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, we took my dad to court to reduce his visitation.”

  “You did what?” Riley was open-jawed. Her arm dropped limply off the side of the chair. Her David Yurman bracelets rattled around her wrist like a slinky.

  “It got to the point, like, I would want to go to a soccer game with some friends or maybe even a trip to the mall, and dad would say he had already planned stuff. So I just took control of my life.”

  “Took control of your life . . . by cutting your dad out of it? How is that taking control?”

  “One less distraction.”

  Riley thought she might be ill. Clearly the evidence that Zachary had never missed a child support payment had not been enough to convince her that she needed help, though she had suspected this might be the case. Riley was now convinced that she had been a victim of what was called parental alienation syndrome or PAS. There were emerging fields of study that were making some, but not much, headway in the courts. A few judges were beginning to listen to arguments of noncustodial parents who were being carved out of their children’s lives by scheming custodial parents. The child was nothing but a tool, a weapon, in the fight. The children were the hidden threat, the argument ran. They were unknowing spies who were taught to lead a life of double agency.

  The custodial parent was able to shape the child’s world and scale her prism the way an optometrist measures eyesight and fits a pair of glasses. The mother, in this case, became the lens through which Amanda viewed the world. Amanda’s personality lived in the shadow of her mother’s rage.

  Riley had handled several similar cases and had even testified as a witness in family law court. After reviewing the files of the Amanda Garrett case, and now speaking to Amanda in person, she suspected that she had not seen any case quite so intricate or elaborate.

  “Well, I made this list yesterday of bad stuff. Let’s make a list of good stuff,” Riley chirped cheerily. She grabbed her pen and rested her hand atop the legal pad.

  “Short list.”

  “A short list is better than no list,” she responded.

  “No list. I was being sarcastic the first time.”

  “Boy, I missed that,” Riley sighed. She thought to herself that she could rattle off pages of Zach Garrett’s high quality attri
butes: honorable, loyal, loving, compassionate, funny, sensitive, strong . . .

  “Hello?” Amanda was waving a hand in front of her face.

  “I’m sorry. I just find it rather unbelievable that you have nothing good to say about your father. No good memories, nothing?”

  Amanda shrugged. “There’s nothing there, nothing to say.”

  After a moment, she relented. “Okay, let’s do it your way, then. Tell me all the bad stuff.” She leaned forward when she spoke, as if wanting to hear a secret. “What’s the second worst thing he ever did to you?”

  “Like I was saying, he would always be trying to pull me away from my friends and even stuff my mom and Nina had planned, especially in the summer.”

  “Did your father have any visitation rights in the summers? Most divorce decrees include at least a few weeks for the noncustodial parent.”

  “I guess he didn’t want any block of time, but he would watch my schedule, you know, and then plan stuff over top of it.”

  “How does one watch your schedule, dear?” Riley sounded a bit like Audrey Hepburn when she asked the question. She even smiled at her own authentic throaty voiced impersonation.

  Amanda looked at her and screwed up her face. “You can be really strange.”

  “I know, don’t you love it?” It was all an act. It had to be. The weight she was carrying was so heavy that she had to skim along the surface. If, for an instant, she allowed herself to get in touch with her own feelings in the presence of Amanda, it would be fatal to any potential therapist-client relationship. Riley wasn’t confident that one was going to develop, but Amanda was here today, and that was a good sign.

  “Whatever. Mom would tell Dad when I had stuff planned and then at the last minute he would plan on top of that. He never asked for any blocks of time in the divorce decree; that’s what mom said.”

  Amanda looked up at Riley, as if to recognize a point that Riley would make. Amanda continued. “But we did hide sometimes; you know, leave the house when he said he was coming, because I already had stuff locked in, you know, planned, paid for and all that good stuff.”

  “You hid from your dad? How long has that been going on?”

  “Ever since I can remember. I mean, if he’s not supposed to be there, then what was I supposed to do? He’s in the Army, and Mom kept telling me he could get violent.”

  “Violent? Did you ever see anything like that?”

  “No. Well, maybe once.” Amanda seemed to reel back in time. Riley was particularly interested that she seemed to have only negative memories of her father. Parental alienation syndrome labeled this “the programming effect.” If a parent repeats the same message over and over again to a child, they will emphatically believe it as true. If the Soviet Union could do it to millions of people, then certainly one parent could abuse the trust of a child and easily accomplish the same task, Riley had written in one of her books.

  “Go ahead,” Riley urged in a soft voice.

  “Well, I don’t remember it all that well, but Dad had come down and forced Mom to drive to the local elementary school to meet him. He was taking me for the weekend somewhere; I can’t remember where, or when, for that matter. I just remember being in the back of Nina’s car, and Mom getting out to talk to Dad like she was asking him for something. Dad was shaking his head, then Mom ran back into the car real quick, and Nina hauled ass in the car.”

  “What did you hear from the back seat, Amanda? Surely your mother and grandmother spoke of the incident as you drove away?”

  Amanda sat speechless for a minute. Riley could see she was clearly struggling to recall the incident. She placed a box of tissues next to Amanda with the reach of an arm. Amanda looked at the Kleenex as if it were an unwanted nuisance.

  “Something like, He wouldn’t give me the money.”

  “How old were you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I remember something; I don’t know!” She was emotional now. Amanda snatched several of the tissues and wiped her eyes. Her mascara was running.

  “Ooh, Alice Cooper, I like that look,” Riley quipped.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’ll see. Now continue. Your mom gets out of the car, your grandmother is in the driver’s seat, and you’re locked in the back seat.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Not hard to fill in the blanks, Amanda. What then?”

  “Well, when Nina started leaving, she was going real fast, you know? I turned around and saw my dad.” She stopped talking. It appeared that she couldn’t reestablish the memory, as if it was a radio signal losing strength when her mind collapsed back onto more comfortable thoughts.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Nothing,” she said. “He was just screaming. I remember him screaming.”

  “What were you doing?”

  Amanda looked at her with teary eyes. “Nothing. I just sat there,” she said, and sat still.

  “Amanda?”

  “Nothing, lady. I was cool. It was cool.”

  “Okay, we’re cool,” Riley responded, holding out her hands. “We’re cool. How old were you?”

  “I don’t remember. I’ve tried to forget all of that.”

  “Did you try to forget, or were you expected to forget?”

  “I don’t know what you mean by that, but I do remember that it happened right after 4-H camp in Clemson.”

  “Yes, I know the 4-H camp. I was a counselor at that camp when I was an undergrad at Clemson. If I recall, it’s mostly kids who are seven to ten.”

  “That’d be about right.”

  “You know, Amanda, that’s the most impressionable time for a young lady.”

  “I’m exhausted. Can I go? Will you just sign this stupid piece of paper?”

  “Not yet. But eventually, if we keep talking like this. First, though, I want you to take a look at something.”

  “Not again. Okay, he never missed a child support payment.”

  Riley laughed. “We got that point through last night, did we?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Ah-ah. Do I need to put you back on the witness stand?”

  “No, please, I’ve seen better acting in high school. I admit he didn’t miss a child support payment.”

  “I’ll have you know I was the drama queen of my high school. I played Annie.” Riley held up a big swatch of her reddish-brown hair and then pointed at her fair skin. “It was almost blonde way back then.”

  Amanda laughed. “I took drama. Then I got into modeling. Revlon used my lips for lipstick advertisements.” Amanda puckered her lips so that they were plump.

  Riley looked about nervously, then leaned forward, her eyes darting back and forth. She held a finger up to her lips. “I think I hear the paparazzi. There’s a back way out of here,” she whispered.

  Again, Amanda giggled.

  Riley stood, and so did Amanda. “Not so fast, young lady, we’ve still got ten minutes. I want you to read something for me. Classwork, you know,” she said looking down her nose. Riley handed Amanda a legal document. “Have you ever seen this?”

  She eyed the first sentence that read: CASE #0456 MELANIE GARRETT PLAINTIFF vs. ZACHARY A. GARRETT RESPONDENT. “No, I don’t think so. What’s a plaintiff?”

  “The plaintiff files for divorce. The respondent, your father, is the one who didn’t want it.” It was a leap, and it was a liberal interpretation, she knew, but it was a subtlety that Riley felt was important.

  “That’d be about right. If my dad was abusive, Mom would have been the one to put her foot down and get out of it.”

  “We’ll get to that later, dearie. There you go, getting ahead of yourself. Now, turn to page two and read paragraph one.”

  Amanda shuffled the pages and remained silent as she read.

  “No, out loud, please. I want to hear it too.”

  Amanda looked at Riley and then back at the document. “Captain Zachary Garrett cedes all financial assets to include stocks, bonds, mutual funds
, and present savings accounts to Melanie Garrett. The estimated sum of these accounts totals $98,042.00. In exchange for the lump sum grant, Melanie Garrett agrees to full joint custody of their daughter, Amanda Garrett, and that in addition to every other weekend, and every other major holiday visitation, Captain Garrett is granted, authorized, and awarded sixty days of residential custody in the summer months, provided there is no conflict with Amanda’s schooling.”

  Amanda rested the paper in her lap.

  “What do you think, sport? Did you know any of that before?”

  A long moment of quiet passed between them. Amanda dabbed at her eyes with a few more tissues. Riley sat in the chair, allowing Amanda to have her moment.

  Amanda’s eyes moved to Riley’s. “I cried,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I screamed and cried, ‘I want my daddy!’ ‘I want my daddy!’ That’s what happened in the back of that car!” She was sobbing now. “I can’t believe they did that to him.” She was convulsing. “I just wanted to spend some time with him, and all they wanted was money.” She was heaving. “I just wanted my daddy. Why couldn’t they let me be with him? And now he’s dead. He’s gone. He’s really gone.”

  Riley moved over to the couch and pulled Amanda close to her. She was crying too.

  A half an hour had passed when they heard a knock on the door. Riley stood and opened it.

  “Hi, ma’am. I’m Jake, we spoke in the parking lot—”

  “Yes, Jake, come in.”

  “Is everything okay? Her mom’s freaking out, calling me every five seconds, telling me she’s going to report Amanda as missing. Then her grandmother called, demanding to know where we were and who you are.”

  “I understand. Why don’t you have a seat?”

  Jake sat next to Amanda, whose head was in her hands. He could see she had been crying. “You okay, babe?”

  Amanda lifted her head and slowly turned toward him.

  “My father’s dead. How could anything be okay?”

  ***

  Nina Hastings drove her minivan hunched over the wheel, speeding up I-85. To an outside observer, she would have looked like Cruella De Ville with her silk scarf fluttering in the breeze from the open window.