by Andrew Mayne
“What’s the status?” Winstone asks.
“We’re hot for EMF. The truck is broadcasting. I repeat, the truck is broadcasting. Backup has picked me up from the lobby. I’m heading to the lab with the sample I got when I brushed up against the truck. The field sniffer says there’s a high probability of explosives inside the SUV.”
“Did you get a look inside?”
“Negative. The windows were tinted.”
Dr. Chisholm, the head of behavioral analysis, is ushered into the room by one of Winstone’s assistants. Winstone briefs him on the latest details. Chisholm nods his head slowly, occasionally glancing at me.
Damian was a career liability before. Now . . . I can’t even begin to process what I’m thinking. I thought I knew him, the real him.
Finally, Chisholm walks over. “This is rather . . . unexpected behavior.”
“No kidding.” I’m trying to understand why in the world Damian would do this and can’t come up with an explanation. I heard what he said, but it just doesn’t feel right. Maybe that’s the wrong word. Nothing about him is “right.”
“Mad bombers don’t usually call you and run through what they’ll do in different scenarios and then advise you how to protect the target.” He pauses for a moment and looks directly at me with his analytical gray eyes. He lowers his voice just so I can hear him. “Is this real?”
“If Bancroft thinks there’s a bomb in the car, then there’s a bomb there.”
“Why?” asks Chisholm.
“I don’t know. Damian is insane, but this doesn’t make any sense.” There is something about the wording he used. Damian loves his wordplay. He chooses what he says carefully.
“Do you think he’ll blow the bomb if he sees you go near it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think this is an exercise in reverse psychology, if that’s what you mean. The threat is real. I think the conditions are exactly as he stated them.”
Winstone steps over to us. “Any suggestions as to how your boyfriend expects us to pull this off?” I ignore the taunt. I can tell Winstone is on edge. It’s a situation you can’t prepare for.
This is a fucked-up place to be, and I’m right at the center. I can say Damian’s obsession isn’t my fault, but I haven’t done everything under my power to stop him. And to be honest, if I had, I’d have died back in Mexico or in the caldera of a volcano.
Jesus. When this is over, I need to think seriously about going back to doing magic tricks for a living.
“We have to get the people out without anyone seeing. There are no open cameras in the building itself, just the garage.” I point to an aerial image of the complex in the corner of the screen. “However, assume the streets are being watched. We need to get everyone together and make sure they don’t call for help.”
Winstone nods. “I can get a couple dozen people inside the building in the next half hour. We’ll drive them in and have them walk in as residents and visitors. We’ll use radio silence.”
“No cell phones either,” I remind him. “He was specific about that.”
“We can go door to door and have the building cleared in twenty minutes. But then what? How do we get them out?”
“There’s a bus stop at the end of the street. What’s the schedule? Can we park a city bus in front of there and just move everyone out?” asks Knoll.
Winstone shakes his head. “He’ll be watching for that. It needs to be something more clever. We need a trick.” He turns to me. “That’s your department, isn’t it?”
“Solving them.” I gesture to the screen. “Not this.” Magic? Hmm, maybe I need to think this through like it’s a trick? Is that what Damian wants me to do?
“This is an unconventional situation. We need an unconventional solution.”
Now I remember where I know Winstone from. He was one of the special operations people who rescued me from a similar situation in a Michigan warehouse. Only this time, I’m not the one in danger.
He shrugs dismissively then turns to his head of tactical operations. “We need to move people to the safest part of the building then prepare for an evacuation.”
“The roof? Helo them out?”
“It’ll have to be fast.”
I can’t believe they’re going to do this. “They’ll die! The moment a helicopter is spotted the whole building is going to get dropped!”
Winstone jerks back around to face me. His eyes narrow. “You have a better idea?”
It’s a fair challenge. “Hold on.” I have to let my mind work on this in the background. “Any word on the drone spotted over the campus?”
Knoll lowers his phone. “Snipers took it out a few minutes ago. The thing was a smoking mess when they pulled it from the trees. We got some still shots of the thing. Big lens on it.”
“What about the cell sniffer?” Winstone glances up from a display.
“It could look like anything,” replies Knoll. “It could just be a plastic rock sending out bursts every twenty minutes.”
I hadn’t factored in our campus being under surveillance. “If the bomb was meant for me, then we shouldn’t touch it if we find it. It could be set for when I leave the campus.”
“What if you don’t leave?” asks Winstone.
“I’m sure the bomb will still go off at some point. He was clear enough on that.”
Winstone gives me a suspicious look and grunts. “For fuck sake, who is this guy?” He’s asking if I can be trusted.
Chisholm speaks up. “He’s clever. I’ve been thinking it over. I don’t think he wants to kill Agent Blackwood, but I wouldn’t assume anything he said is an outright lie.”
He suspects what I do, that there’s something more at play here. The one thing I know for certain is that all the people in my apartment building are in danger unless we figure out a way to get them away from the bomb as quickly as possible.
Assuming all the entrances and exits are being watched, which isn’t too difficult with readily available fifty-dollar wireless webcams the size of lipstick cases, we have limited options.
A tactical specialist unfolds a large printout of sewer tunnels on the table. He points to a pipe conduit. “We could try to enter through here.”
“Is there access from the building?” Winstone leans over to study the plans.
“No. We’d have to blow a tunnel using a shape charge.”
“They’ll know something is up,” I reply. “We can’t go digging our own subway tunnels through there. The moment they see us trying that, they’ll blow the whole building.”
“You keep saying, ‘they.’ Do you believe he’s working with someone?” asks Chisholm.
“I don’t know any more than you do.” If I try to defend Damian right now in opposition to the facts at hand, they’ll lose all respect for me. “And that’s not relevant right now. We can’t do anything that would suggest we’re doing some kind of tactical operation.”
The tactical commander looks up. “We can take over the feed of the cameras and send it to a loop.”
I shake my head. “Any glitch and they’ll know. We have to assume they’ll be looking for that.”
“Are you sure?” asks Winstone. “It worked before.”
He’s referring to my rescue from the Warlock’s warehouse. “To be honest, I’m not sure it did. We don’t have any room for error.
“We have to assume they’re as smart, or smarter, than us. If we can think of a trick, they’ll probably already have figured out how to watch for it.”
Knoll points to the garage. “What about loading people up into cars, packing them in, and taking them out that way?”
“All the cameras in the garage are on the same open network,” I reply. “There’s one in front of the elevator. They’ll see that happening.”
“We’re running out of time,” says Winstone. He gives
me a sharp glare, “Unless you have any ideas, we’re going to have to try running people out the front as quickly as possible.”
All eyes are on me. The pressure crushes down. The people in the building are my neighbors. I don’t know them well, but I see their faces every day. One mistake and they’re gone. All of them. “You can’t . . .”
“Then how?” He needs a plan, not just a list of reasons why they all suck. There’s an edge to his voice he didn’t have before.
How?
How do I make one hundred and twenty-two people just vanish from a building when it’s being watched from every direction?
Maybe I’m looking at the problem the wrong way.
I do it when I’m not being watched.
“I got it . . .”
“What?” asks Winstone.
“It’s time for really out-of-the-box thinking.”
Sometimes your only choice is to destroy the box.
“Meaning what?”
“We blow it up ourselves.”
CRISIS
SO MUCH OF the way I think about things is influenced by what I learned watching my father, my uncle and my grandfather sit around the large table in our kitchen and dissect a problem to come up with a solution. Usually they were fun problems, like the creation of a new illusion. Occasionally, there were not-so-fun ones, usually financial ones. The worst nights were those they spent drinking large cups of coffee while trying to figure out what to do about Brutani.
My father is mechanically inclined. He tends to see things as physical problems, to be solved with physical solutions. How could you use a mirror to hide someone onstage?
My uncle is more psychological. His mind would leap to how you could hide someone in plain sight, maybe through a visual distraction.
Grandfather likes to see the problem as a matter of theater. How you hide the woman is irrelevant unless you have a good reason to make her disappear. Simply vanishing a woman has no dramatic value. Vanishing a woman an instant before she is about to be pierced by a rack of swords creates dramatic tension, and a climactic solution with meaning.
After Grandfather and Dad met with Julia Vender, they spent several nights trying to figure out how to use the information about Father Devalo. Arranging a meeting with Devalo, who lived in a sprawling estate near Lake Tahoe, was a challenge unto itself.
Before I could walk, Dad and Grandfather taught me how to hide inside the razor-thin magic tables and secret compartments magicians use. They’d had no idea they were also teaching their little girl to be a ninja capable of spying on them from any room, even if it wasn’t bordered by a secret corridor. I’d wedge myself behind cabinets, under tables, or just disappear quietly into a dark corner.
This was how I followed their conversations with visitors and people on the phone as they tried to deal with the crisis.
Before becoming, and then “unbecoming,” a priest, Devalo had lived in Sicily. He left the Church and started his own, almost cult-like, following in America when his passion for women got the better of him. His mother had been a half-gypsy tarot reader back in Sicily, and Devalo adapted and expanded this skill considerably for his own ends.
Criminals are probably more superstitious and religious than anyone else. You only have to look at the tattooed crucifixes and Virgin Marys on gang members to understand this. Devalo soon found himself doing psychic readings and even acting as a confessor of sorts for a number of high-ranking mobsters. All of them, without fail, wanted to speak with their departed mothers. From there he built himself a reputation as a spiritual adviser to some of the roughest criminals in the country. Always discreet, he was rewarded lavishly.
About a week after our meeting with Julia Vender, the phone rang late one night and I was ushered into the car for the drive to Devalo’s estate. Dad and Grandfather were still too scared to leave me out of their sight. The introduction came from an old actor friend of Grandfather’s.
I slept in the backseat most of the way to Lake Tahoe but woke up as we pulled onto the gravel drive that led to the three-story stone mansion. I remember it looking like a castle, but not an inviting one like Cinderella’s Castle at Disneyland. More like a Roman fortress. I stayed in the car with Dad as Grandfather met with Devalo for what seemed like several hours.
Finally, as the sun came over the horizon, Grandfather climbed into the car. He was tired as hell from being up all night, but was all set to head back to Los Angeles.
“That is the strangest man I’ve ever met,” was all he would say as we drove off.
Sometime later, Dad prodded him for more information. “What do you mean?”
“I had to spend an hour convincing him I wasn’t Satanic. I showed him a half-dozen card tricks and had to explain how I did each one. The man has no idea how conjuring works,” replied Grandfather.
“But he’s a fraud, right?”
“A peculiar kind. Not like Vender. He did a cold reading on me. I think he genuinely believed it was divinely inspired.”
“You sure it wasn’t an act?” asked Dad.
Grandfather was too exhausted to call out the question as stupid. “If so, he’s the greatest actor in the world. I think the mob guys go to him because he doesn’t go in for the blackout spookshow stuff. Apparently he talks in the voices of the dead. All these guineas want to hear the same thing from their dead mothers, so it’s not hard to keep them happy. I think Devalo genuinely believes he’s channeling their relatives.”
“Is he going to help?”
“He’s going to let me come to a séance with Basso in a week. He says I can ask for intervention there.”
“You mean, ask Devalo to pretend to be Basso’s mother and ask for intervention?”
“I don’t know.”
My father glanced at me in the backseat, where I was pretending to sleep. “That’s not good enough, Dad.”
“I know.” Grandfather sounded almost defeated.
“If all you had to do was ask their dead mother to forgive a debt at a séance, there wouldn’t be too much point to loan-sharking. I get the feeling they’re not in the habit of saying ‘yes,’” my father continued, agitated.
“You don’t think I don’t goddamn know that?” Grandfather shot back tersely. “Where were you with all this wisdom when you were telling me to take Brutani’s money? Huh?” Under his breath, he muttered, “Just one more goddamn disappointment.”
“Don’t say that in front of my daughter,” my dad snapped, trying to keep his voice low.
“Your daughter? Heh. Whose roof is she living under? Where’s her mother? You’re a child. A goddamn child. I have three children.”
“You’re an asshole.” My father turned back and gave me a guilty look when he realized my eyes were open and I was awake. “Sorry, hon, we got carried away.”
I just stared back at him, not sure what I was supposed to say.
“She knows that. Christ, the girl sees everything. Don’t you know that by now?” chided my grandfather. “Always watching, never speaking. She sees everything,” he emphasized. “I wish you had a fraction of her common sense.”
These moments were my least favorite ones. I could handle it when their criticism was directed at me, but not when it was pointed at each other. Especially not when Grandfather would rip into my father.
I love my dad. He is, at heart, a sweet man. But I think I sometimes look down on him because of the way my grandfather talked to him. You can’t help but notice someone’s flaws when somebody else is constantly shouting them to the world on a megaphone.
Dad would rarely defend himself. He would just take it all in, quietly accepting that he was a failure. Uncle Darius is different. He would have no qualms about calling Grandfather a righteous bastard to his face. Grandfather would retort that he was a cheat and a thief, but Darius would just throw up his hands and say he had no trouble admitting what he
was. At least he knew.
But what was I? Who am I?
I am all of them. The good and the bad, I think. Right now, I need the good.
43
WINSTONE SWEATS AS he watches the monitor. My fists are coiled so tightly, I’m afraid I’ll draw blood. The tension is carved into Knoll’s face. But Chisholm is rock steady. He’s watching me. I can tell he’s trying to figure out, as always, what the connection is between me and Damian. It’s not so much from suspicion—I’ve told him just about everything and I think he believes me—as much as from clinical fascination.
ESPECIALLY RIGHT NOW, there’s no solace in knowing that Damian’s mind is just as much a mystery to one of the world’s leading psychologists as it is to me.
Tapping into the building’s surveillance cameras give us multiple views of the street around the apartment complex. Occasionally a car comes and goes. Nothing indicates that inside are one hundred and twenty-two people worried that they’re about to be blown to hell.
A blue Honda Civic pulls into the parking garage and appears on the open network cameras. Our bomber is seeing the same thing we are. The car takes the ramp to the lowest level and pulls into the space directly behind the SUV.
Everyone in the room leans in and squints at the screen as it draws closer.
The driver of the Civic misjudges the gap as he backs up, overestimating the distance beyond his rear bumper, and heads straight toward the SUV.
Someone in the control room gasps. It might have been me.
It’s a slow-motion crash in real time.
The Civic is one foot away from the back of the SUV when the camera feed goes dark. Switching to an external view on the monitor, we see an explosion rip apart the front of the apartment complex, blasting through windows and sending shards of glass and smoke into the street. It’s so loud our microphones make a garbled chirping sound. Cars waiting for the light to change vanish in billowing clouds of dust.
The building is obscured as the smoke conceals the entire block.