by Greg Iles
“I played music professionally for eight years,” I say evenly.
Lenz settles back in his seat. “Were you successful?”
“Depends on your definition. I made a living. But as far as reaching my dreams, no. I’m a good songwriter and guitar player, but only a fair singer. Some people thought I was better than I did, but I always felt I needed someone else up front as lead vocalist.”
“And this dependence led to conflict? Resentment?”
“Yeah. I’ll skip five years of wasted time. The last band I was in had major-label interest. But by the time we’d gotten that far, the group was ready to self-destruct. I was writing the best material, and the singer—a good friend of mine—couldn’t stand my getting that part of the glory. Forget that he got all the spotlight time. He wanted it to be him singing his stuff or nothing.”
“So?”
“So it was nothing. He’s still out there singing his stuff. The clubs are bigger, but he’s on the same treadmill. When that group split, I decided I’d never again put myself into a situation where my destiny was controlled to any degree by another person.”
“Now I understand the commodities trading,” Lenz says. “No messy humans to deal with.”
“You got it.”
“And you got rich.”
“You’re damn right.”
“You sound angry.”
“Good assessment.”
Lenz drives silently for a half mile, and I’m glad for the delay. Finally, he says, “And?”
“Before all that, I went to college like most of my friends. Majored in finance, the whole thing. But I’d wanted to play music since I was a kid. I used to ride up to Leland and Clarksdale and play blues with the old black cats—Son Thomas, Sam Chatmon, those guys. When I got out of college, I went home and told my parents that before I got a job or went to graduate school, I was going to play music for a while.”
“How did they respond?”
“Not well. When I was a kid, they were really supportive of my music. But during my senior year of high school, things changed.”
“What happened?”
“The second act of a tragedy that started fifteen years before. Summer of sixty-four. The Freedom Summer. The year they killed those three civil rights workers in Neshoba County.”
Lenz nods. “Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman.” He says the names softly, as if those long-dead kids were friends of his.
For the first time I suspect Lenz might be Jewish. “Right,” I tell him. “Buried them in that dam. Anyway, a New York college sent some civil rights workers down to Cairo County, where our farm is. My dad, being who he was, decided to invite a couple of them over—”
“Excuse me? ‘Being who he was?’ ”
“He wasn’t a native Mississippian. He was from Louisiana, down below the hard-shell Baptist parishes. He was raised strict, but not prejudiced, you know? He was a doctor, but he came from working-class people. Grew up working right alongside blacks.”
“Go on.”
“These civil rights workers would come in from a day of running the back roads, teaching blacks how to answer the voting questionnaire or whatever, and my dad would feed them. He’d talk medicine, they’d talk politics. Or maybe they’d talk baseball. I got this from my mother, you understand, much later.”
“Keep going.”
“Anyway, the local yahoos, the Klan or whoever, didn’t like my dad having these guys over to the house. They warned him, but Dad didn’t pay any attention. Then this colored guy got killed at a church outside Itta Bena. They blew him up in his car. He was a patient of my father’s. He’d served in action in Korea. Dad put a lot of stock in a man serving his country in battle. He’d turned a blind eye to a lot that the Klan and the Citizens’ Council did in those days, like everybody else. But he couldn’t stomach the murder of this black vet. He sat down and wrote an editorial that would blister the hide off a rattlesnake. He told it like it was, and he named names. He sent that piece to the Greenville paper, the liberal paper owned by Hodding Carter, the paper printed it, and lo, there came a shitstorm.”
Lenz smiles in the dark. “I’ll be damned.”
“My mother just sat around the house waiting to be firebombed. But it didn’t happen. Dad had been so public with his accusations that the Klan was afraid to do anything too soon after the piece appeared. The fact that my mother was from an old Delta family helped. It wasn’t a wealthy family, but her people—the Grants—had been in the Delta about as long as anybody but the Indians. Quite a few white patients stopped coming to my father, but blacks took their places just as fast, so that didn’t matter much. After about a year, it was all forgotten. At least by my family.”
“But not by the Klan.”
“I wouldn’t necessarily say the Klan. The Klan doesn’t even exist in Mississippi anymore. Not in any meaningful way. It’s just a bunch of bitter old drunks now. Anyway, a lot of time passed. And during that time, another facet of my dad’s character emerged, though we knew nothing about it.”
I wonder how far we are from Quantico, but I don’t dare break the flow to ask. “My dad was a doctor of the old school. All he cared about was treating people’s sickness. He never thought about money. Some years he didn’t collect fifty percent of what he was owed. And he’d accept anything as payment when he did collect. Green beans, catfish, peaches, venison, collard greens, whatever. He was still making house calls in 1987.”
Lenz leans his head back and flips on the Mercedes’s headlights. “A dying breed,” he says softly.
“A dead breed. And the country’s worse off for it. Anyway, his entire financial planning strategy was his belief that if a doctor worked hard in America, he’d make enough money to raise his family and pay for his whiskey and cigars, and send in the next patient please. Get the picture?”
“A common failing among practitioners of his generation.”
“Yeah? Well, it didn’t take long for that failing to get him into serious trouble. By 1968 he was a year behind on his income taxes. That meant that every April—every year—he had to go to the bank and borrow the full amount of his taxes to pay off the government—something like sixty or seventy thousand dollars at whatever the interest rate happened to be. And after he’d paid, he would still be a year behind. He did that for twenty years.”
“My God.”
“Talk about pressure. But he didn’t tell a soul about it. It was a secret between him and his banker, who was thrilled by the arrangement, of course. There was enough cash flow that nobody felt the pinch, but it was all an illusion.”
“What about an equity loan?” Lenz asks. “A home mortgage?”
“Not a chance. All he could have used as collateral was the farm or the house sitting on it, and both had been in my mother’s family for generations. She didn’t have any brothers, so hers was the first generation of Grants that hadn’t farmed the land. They leased it out. Anyway, Dad felt the debt was his cross to bear. He just worked harder and harder.
“My junior year of high school, things came to a head. The people we leased the farm to had had two bad harvests in a row. Dad’s income was stretched to the breaking point. And when he went into the bank and asked for his annual tax loan, they said no. They’d never demanded collateral before, because they knew he could cover the debt. But this time they did. He was stunned. He went to another bank and got the same story. After a while he figured it out. The chickens from 1964 had come home to roost.”
Lenz is shaking his head.
“You can see the rest. Dad had to put up the farm as collateral. Carter was president; interest rates were twenty percent. When Dad finally told my mother how things stood, she didn’t hesitate to sign the papers. But it almost killed her. Her father had never believed in borrowing money, and she didn’t either. I mean never. Dad worked harder that year than he ever had in his life. He was nearly fifty then, and he was working hundred-hour weeks. Seventy-two-hour shifts in emergency rooms out of town. Seven months into it, h
e had a coronary. He survived, but the cash dried up. I worked, my mother worked, but it wasn’t any good. The people we leased to had their third bad year, and we lost the farm.”
“All of it?”
“We managed to keep the home place. Where my wife and I live now. Everything else the bank took. They put it up for auction, but somehow the bank president himself bought it for about half what it was worth. He was a smug, redneck son of a bitch named Crump. He loved taking that land. He was about sixty-five then.”
“How did this affect your mother?”
The memory of my mother in those years is something I would prefer to forget. “She became a ghost,” I say softly.
“I beg your pardon?”
“A ghost of herself.”
Lenz nods silently.
“So you can imagine what happened when I arrived home from college four years later with my honors degree in finance and announced my intention to roam the country playing guitar. They weren’t exactly thrilled.”
“Yet you did it anyway.”
“Not immediately. For a couple of weeks I just moped around. Then I got mad. I saw that their whole view of the world had been warped and beaten down by bastards like Crump. And worse, that it was going to affect my whole life if I let it.”
“Did you confront Crump?”
“What good would that have done? I had no leverage, no power. I packed up my clothes, my textbooks, and my life savings—five grand—and took the Amtrak to Chicago. One of my professors wangled me a job at a company with seats on the Board of Trade. After a week of trading for the company, I started trading for myself. And I was fearless. I can’t explain it. I was trading like I played music, purely on instinct. Balls to the wall, sometimes risking everything on single trades. I’d have a stroke if I tried that now. I’m a system trader—I cover every conceivable angle before I make a move. But back then I was high on rage. Everything I’d ever learned had somehow been recalled and slaved to my anger. I was like Mr. Spock possessed by a pissed-off Captain Kirk. A fucking superman.”
My pulse races just remembering that rush.
“The market was different then too. Especially the S&P index. You could leverage your position to an unbelievable point. It was like showing up at the Indy 500 with a Ford Pinto, handing them your keys, and them saying, ‘Son, these Pinto keys qualify you to drive a Maserati for the duration of the race. Of course, if you wreck the car, you’ll have to pay for it, but we’ll worry about that when it happens. Please try not to kill yourself.’ And then they let you drive out onto the track.”
“And you won the race?”
“I kicked ass, Doctor. After five months, I resigned from the firm, and a twelve-hour train ride later I was back in the Delta. I went straight to the bank and asked to see Crump. I must have looked like shit on a stick after that train ride, but he didn’t bat an eye. He was past seventy by then.
“I told him I wanted to buy back our farm. Crump said the land wasn’t for sale. I told him I’d give him a good price. He told me not to let the door hit my ass on the way out. I knew what fair market value was, so I named a figure double that—four times what he’d paid for it. Crump said no sale. I was starting to lose my temper, but I didn’t show it. I told him he ought to be sensible, that everything had a price. He told me that wasn’t always the case.
“That stumped me. I’d been relying on his greed, and he’d made a statement that indicated I might have misjudged him. He was staring at me the way a hunter looks at a treed coon, and I decided then that my only chance was to go for broke. I told that son of a bitch I’d pay him four times market value for the farm—an eight hundred percent profit—but that the offer was good for only sixty minutes. I said I’d be back in one hour and if he wanted the money he’d better have the papers ready. I walked out to a cafe, had three slow cups of coffee, took a leak, and walked back to the bank.”
“And?”
“And Crump had his lawyer and two witnesses and the contract sitting there waiting for my signature. After I signed the papers, he told me I was the dumbest egg sucker that ever walked through his door. I said maybe I was, but that I had ten thousand bucks left and I’d have given him that and the shirt off my back for that land, and I hoped he died a damned lonely death.”
Lenz has turned his head to me. He is staring with new eyes. “Is that story true? It sounds like something from It’s a Wonderful Life.”
“An R-rated version, maybe. It’s true all right. Life doesn’t give you many chances like that.”
He nods. “Life didn’t give you that, Cole. You took it.”
“A barber drove me out to the farmhouse. Mom was in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette and drinking a cold cup of coffee. When I laid that deed down on the table in front of her, she stared at it for nearly a minute. Then she looked up and asked me if it was real. If it was real. When I told her it was, she broke into pieces. She just . . . it was too much. She was shaking and crying and trying to hug me, and right then . . . goddamn it, I knew what it felt like to be a man. You know? I finally understood that being a man means taking care of the people you love, no matter how you do it. Even if you have to die to do it.”
“How did your father take the news?”
“I guess relief was the main thing. For four years he’d lived knowing he’d failed my mother and would never be able to make it right. My getting back the land changed things for the better, but a lot of damage had already been done. Dad had spent four years thinking he was worth more dead than alive to the people he loved. Businesswise, his life insurance policy was about the only thing he’d done right. He figured dying was the only way he could take care of his own. He’d started drinking heavily. It wasn’t a perfect happy ending or anything.”
Lenz raises a finger and points to a turn in the road at the limit of his high beams. “But the best ending possible under the circumstances, in my view. You have my respect, Cole.”
The Mercedes takes the curve with the grace of a racing hound and glides toward a lighted gatehouse in the distance. “A lot of men go through life the way your father did.”
“Silent desperation, right?”
“Thoreau knew a thing or two.”
“Actually that’s James Taylor. Thoreau said quiet desperation.”
Lenz snorts. “My mistake.”
The Mercedes stops at the gate long enough for a uniformed marine to come to the window, check Lenz’s pass, and wave us through. Before we’ve driven fifty yards the rattle of gunfire rolls out of the darkness. I feel as though we’re moving through a ghostly skirmish in these historic Virginia woods, but it must be marines on night maneuvers. After we pass a second gate, a complex of lighted buildings much like a college campus appears. Lenz picks up his cellular and hits a speed-dial code, mutters into the phone, then hangs up and makes a sharp turn off the main drive.
“Hostage Rescue touches down in Dallas in twenty minutes,” he says. “They’ll be at the apartment in thirty-five, maximum. Strobekker’s still online.”
I shudder with the sudden exhilaration of impending action. “This is unbelievable.”
Lenz nods. “And we’re going to have a front-row seat.”
“What do you mean?”
“Wait.” He stops the Mercedes near the rear of a parked semitruck and looks at me. I hear a heavy metallic ching, then watch in amazement as the rear panel of the semitrailer rises into the roof and dim red light bleeds out around the silhouette of a man. I have only seen him once in my life, but every fiber of my instinct tells me that black shadow belongs to Daniel Baxter, chief of the Investigative Support Unit.
“We drove all this way to get to a truck?”
Lenz chuckles softly. “Don’t say that word anywhere near the people you’re about to meet. They call this vehicle Doctor Cop. For MDCP—Mobile Digital Command Post. You’re about to see interactive media like you never imagined, Cole. As close as the FBI ever gets to Hollywood.”
Chapter 18
The silhouett
e at the back of the truck does belong to Daniel Baxter. After shaking hands with me, he leads us into the strangest environment I have ever entered. The interior of Dr. Cop—the Mobile Digital Command Post—feels like a mobile home from some world’s fair exhibition fifty years in the future. It is long and narrow and stuffed to the ceiling with rack-mounted shockcushioned computers, CRTs, satellite receivers, surveillance gear, and pale technicians with bona fide nerd packs in the pockets of their short-sleeve poly-cotton shirts.
A constant thrumming vibrates the floor of the command post. Soft radio chatter emanates from several sets of speakers, none of it in sync. I assume the nerds are somehow following all of this. Baxter leads us along a cramped walk space to a curved bank of video screens. Most are blank, but two show black-and-white views of what appears to be a detached apartment building much like the ones I lived in during college.
“Is that it?” Lenz asks.
Baxter nods. “Two apartments per unit. Strobekker is six seventy-two. Six seventy-three is empty, thank God.”
“Is that a live feed?” I ask.
He nods.
“The resolution’s unbelievable.”
“Digital video. We’re getting it encrypted over a secure channel.” Baxter points at a screen. “Notice the windows of the apartment? Covered with aluminum foil on the inside.”
“Bad sign,” says Lenz. “How long until HRT gets there?”
“Touchdown in five minutes at Love Field. Another ten, give or take, to get on site. The complex is about halfway between Love and Dallas–Fort Worth International, just one in a sea of complexes. Anonymous as you can get.”
“Anything I can do before Hostage Rescue goes in?”
Baxter shakes his head. “He’s using the only phone, so we can’t call and ask him to come out. I don’t think I would anyway. He might do the hostage.”
Lenz nods. “Mr. Cole and I need to speak privately. Any chance?”