I quietly rush into my office, grab my laptop, slap it shut as I tuck it under my arm, like a little black dog I’m rescuing from a fire, and we hustle together—me, Debbie, and the fragile but improving Archer Wallace—out into the darkness.
As we scurry for Debbie’s car—mine they know, hers they don’t—I am dealt one more surprise, this one not as welcome as Debbie.
Archer Wallace, fragile Archer Wallace, just behind us, without warning, limps off to the right and into the desert blackness.
Away from my rescue. Away from my heroism. Away from me.
Just like Wallace the Amazing, when I rescued him from Big Eddie’s thugs. The same trot off into the desert. As if to return me to my previous nonexistence, to ghostliness. As if what had just occurred had never occurred at all.
Debbie—surprised and confused, but sensing that he is somehow on our side, is one of us, that he needs us—wants to call out to him, stop him, but I brusquely cover her mouth, stifle her. We’re still just outside the condo’s bedroom window, and if the Stewartsons hear anything, they’ll be off each other and out here in a flash, armed. No, the first sound they hear needs to be Debbie’s car pulling away, only taillights visible—if they hear or see anything at all.
The real Archer Wallace—emboldened? possessed? not thinking clearly after the physical and mental strain of a day and night taped to a chair? or thinking extremely clearly?—disappears into the desert darkness.
Debbie fires up her old Triumph, and we slip away, down the bland desert street into the night, into the unknown, into a new world.
SIX
Debbie’s place is cozy, lived-in, quaint, a comfortable cottage she has rented for years. I’ve never been here before. Not because of some arrogant she-comes-to-me-I-don’t-go-to-her reason, and not for some if-I-stay-there-it-escalates-the-relationship, fear-of-commitment reason, but simply because my work for Wallace has generally required me to be at my own house, with my computers. Now I’ll have to figure out an abbreviated way to do it, to deliver off my laptop only—of course, I know now that he has a backup system and may not need me anyway.
My first real visit to Debbie’s house is as a fugitive from my own, a man on the run. On the night I say a furtive good-bye to my own home, with not even time for a glance back, I am finally saying hello to hers. Noting the contrasts between the two, noting the striking similarities—the same cutlery, the same glasses from the same Sam’s Club sale—telltale signs of adults living alone.
Of course, two things have happened to alter the dynamic between us: the strangeness of my occupation has intruded, coming alive in the person of the emaciated real Wallace; and Debbie has rescued me. To say nothing of the fact that I can’t go home right now, which leaves me to stay here or at a motel, which we both know is riskier. Holed up at Debbie’s, I am—in the short term at least—effectively lost. In this case, a very good thing.
“I won’t ask you who he is,” she says. “I know you’re not going to tell me. But can you tell me where he’s going? Does he have somewhere to go?”
I shake my head. “He’s got no money. He knows no one. He’s got nowhere to go or hide. They’re going to find him . . .”
“Who are they, anyway? Who are these people?”
I look at her. I can tell her honestly. “They use the name Stewartson. Dave and Sandi. But who are they really? I have no idea.”
The Stewartsons standing up in the audience that first night, to make themselves known. I think about it. (It’s the one kind of stage entertainment where there’s such an intimate interaction between performer and audience, isn’t it? Singers, rock stars, dancers, tumblers, and illusionists, staging spectacles, take no such risks. They have no such intimacy. And of course, Wallace’s “act” is more intimate than even another magician’s. It is, ironically, an “act” that is all about intimacy, and honesty, and exposure.) The Stewartsons’ behavior after the show led me to an erroneous judgment about their amateurism. Their ability to follow me as I was following them, to uncover and hold Wallace, to so efficiently find and trap me, indicated something far more than the enthusiastic amateur Vegas grifter. (Vegas is of course rife with grifters. And I have to accept the fact that, behind all the technology and sophisticated data management, I am in truth only a grifter myself.)
So at three in the morning, after Debbie and I have held each other, wrapped ourselves chest to chest, alive, relieved, together—after we’ve found our connection again and felt that connection drift naturally, powerfully, familiarly yet freshly too, from our hearts to our loins—I get up out of bed, tiptoe out to the breakfast nook, and power up my trusty laptop. I turn to my sources that I have nurtured, to my databases that I have cultivated like plants, to my special network. For twenty-four hours, I’ve been reactive. It’s time to be proactive. I’ve been playing defense. It’s time to grab the ball back and march down the cyber-field into enemy territory.
Fake Dave Stewartson. That smiling quintessentially American visage. Let’s dig a little deeper.
At first I can find nothing. Which backfires on Dave. The fact that he is able to manage his Internet presence—or absence—so well, only confirms my suspicion that I am dealing with someone who is no amateur. I dig deeper. Deeper still. I tap into my reliable government and police and military sites. I use a graphic interface that allows me to do identification from a photo portrait only. I’m in full research mode. I’m awake. I’m alert.
And in an hour, Dave is a different dude. Though not a very surprising one. First of all, it’s Stewart Davidson—of course. Practically mocking me. Navy Seal, segueing to highly trained servant of the US intelligence services. Forced retirement on an internal violation in a diplomatically sensitive situation in South America. Pension adjustment reflecting this forced early shift in duties and subsequent forced “retirement”—which I take to be some form of termination (this obvious from Stewart Davidson’s pay stubs, tax returns, etc.). Six intensive years of training. Three years of active service. Then, finished. Not a very happy math. One that explains both his bitterness and his footlooseness—if that’s a word. Some of the actual dates are unclear, even redacted, but the nature and tone of Stew’s bio, of his service to his country, of his life, comes through loud and clear. It’s startling to realize how quickly and thoroughly he built an online “Dave Stewartson” (or simply added one to the thousands of existing Dave Stewartsons) to compete with the Dave Stewartson I had found. There is no rich Dave Stewartson in a ditch or dumpster somewhere, I realize. This former US intelligence operative just created him out of whole digital cloth with the click of a few buttons, probably swiping enough details from existing Dave Stewartsons to construct a credible new one. He had then simply intercepted a “real” Dave Stewartson’s show tickets—the easy trick of a forwarded address or mailbox grab—correctly suspecting that with Wallace’s incredible visual memory, or whatever system Wallace used, he would know immediately which photo didn’t match which live audience member. And maybe too, Wallace recognized Davidson from somewhere, which just confirmed the imposture for him.
My “trusty” Internet—I know it and use it as a place to uncover the truth. But it’s even more effective as a place to create lies. Lies I fell for easily and completely.
Perhaps more interesting is his companion, “Sandi Stewartson.” Hardly. Sheila Barton. Special Forces. Currently on active duty. Active duty? What, keeping an eye on Stew/Dave? Or managing to be in two places at once—not an unimaginable accomplishment, given the suspect organizational skills and record of the huge US military. Do they think she’s in Managua or Montevideo, when she’s actually in Vegas?
Anyway, it explains a lot—about their tracking of, sniffing out the real Wallace, etc. At least I know who they are. It doesn’t, as you can imagine, make me feel much better. They presumably still don’t know who I really am, or where I am, or much about me at all, which, considering their training and skills, mak
es me feel a pinch of pride there in Debbie’s breakfast nook. But that pinch of pride is of course overwhelmed by fear and uncertainty—and sympathy for the real Wallace, making his way somewhere in the desert.
It occurs to me that knowing their names and pasts has made the two of them, paradoxically, even more unknown to me, even more foreign and opaque. Because based on their biographies, they have led lives of action, of movement, of exposure, of physicality. They’ve dropped into and out of cities and countries; into and out of dangerous, fluid, chaotic, dynamic situations; into and out of the line of fire—in utter contrast to my own life spent in front of computer screens, utterly cautious, predictable, and unchanging. Our experiences are antithetical. I have uncovered their identities, but who they truly are, what makes them tick, is still impenetrable to me.
At the same time, I begin some corollary detective work. I start sifting through local public records, to find out who else moved to Vegas the week that I did. To find out which of those thousands of Vegas immigrants was single. And who, of those hundreds of singles, had also moved around Branson, Missouri; and Billings, Montana; and Nashville, Tennessee—living in hotels, motels, or short-term rentals during the same weeks or years that I had. Because if I can narrow it down to one name, then that’s the person, my unknown psychic twin, who is doing my work now. My backup. (Or else I was always their backup.) Could there really be three or four of us? A half dozen? A dozen? Impractical. Expensive even for Wallace. And way too risky that one of the six or more of us would slip, be a little sloppy, inadvertently reveal him or herself. But there is at least one person other than me. Someone who presumably doesn’t know that I exist, who is still working away unaware, just as I would have been, except for the advent of Dave and his action-figure companion babe.
Who is it? Where are they? Would they even begin to believe me, if I find them, if I tell them? Or do they know already? Did they know it all along and thus never mythologized their boss, who has us laboring, after all, on nothing more than a glorified, clandestine factory line.
Research monkeys, in different cages, with blankets hanging between us.
So the Stewartsons (Stewart Davidson and Sheila Barton, yes, but I have gotten to know them and will always think of them as the Stewartsons) now have two roundups to perform. It will be pitifully easy for them to find Archer Wallace, I’m afraid. Cruising the avenues, his lean fragile body lit garishly in the Las Vegas night. He won’t be able to disappear into the crowds of tourists—exuberant college kids in shorts and tees and baseball caps and tattoos, midwesterners plump as chickens, waddling short of breath along the Strip from hotel to hotel, as if wandering among sacred ruins. He could blend into the underworld of Vegas bums and vagrants, but would they accept him into their small fraternity? Does he have the strength to live on the streets? They are a particularly and surprisingly hearty and resilient bunch. If the Stewartsons are the pros they seem to be, it will be easy for them to find Archer—and maybe not much harder to find me.
SEVEN
Wallace the Amazing, of course, is the perfect blackmail candidate. A criminal past to hide. Everything to lose. A public that will be merciless. A persona that will be destroyed. In his vulnerability, he is pretty much irresistible. I could see that. Here in Vegas, he is like a walking slot machine, overloaded with coins, ready to pay off. And the real Wallace—he is the found coin, the dusty roadside quarter, ready to be pushed into the slot. Pull the lever and coat yourself in riches.
I could understand it, Wallace suddenly peeling away from me and Debbie, deciding to do it on his own. What did he need any of us for? This was to retrieve his own identity, after all. Yes, to compensate himself for the financial loss, to force financial redress, but also to retrieve and restore his self. I could understand the impulse. But he was a babe in the woods. He had no idea what a high-stakes game he had entered. Blackmail was not blackjack. This was a mirrored casino, and everyone at the table was disguised, and nothing was as it appeared.
Blackmail. You’d think the word’s origin would be straightforward: an incriminating or threatening piece of mail, a practice you’d assume arose in the shadows of the spread of literacy. But online, I see it actually comes from the black “mail,” the dark coat of armor that a knight wore—a mounted, intimidating form of threat.
It has evolved, of course, with technology. The written missive became the telephone call: furtive, intimate, the insinuating whisper of violation or rape, before the line goes dead with threat, with intent. The twentieth century’s most celebrated version, of course, was the cutout letters from various sources, forming words and phrases into a jagged and untraceable message of threat, the letters ironically cheerful and colorful and angled jauntily. The typeface of a clown, if you ignored its content.
Today’s blackmail message? It arrives cloaked in the same electronic anonymity as a hundred other daily marketing come-ons, sexual solicitations, unfiltered spam, delivered via Facebook, text message, Twitter, LinkedIn, or conventional e-mail, and its job is to stand out in its anonymity as not anonymous at all—as in fact, more intimate and targeted than any of the messages around it. An old nickname will do it. A small tantalizing piece of a shared long-ago secret. Any concise form of “I know. And you know that I know.”
TO: Archer Wallace
FROM: Archer Wallace
SUBJECT: Archer Wallace
Need to settle our account. Let me know if you receive this e-mail. Details for payment to follow.
This was the e-mail that Wallace—the real Archer Wallace—sent to Wallace the Amazing. The e-mail I saw a day after I was settled into Debbie’s and went online. And probably the most remarkable and mysterious thing about it was that I was copied on it, put right away into the coiled, tightening loop, a bystander shown the precise twists of the hangman’s knot. Archer Wallace must have seen my e-mail address over my shoulder at some point while he was in my apartment. Does he want to impress me with being bold enough to take on the blackmail project himself? Does he want me to be a witness should something happen to him? Does he want Wallace the Amazing to know that he knows about me—although he doesn’t know the nature of our relationship exactly—and knows that we’re meaningful, important to each other, and he wants to threaten Wallace the Amazing with that, hold it over his head? Does he intend to cut me in? It’s mysterious to be included in the communication. And nothing says that Wallace my employer will include me in the response, if he responds at all.
Of course, everyone knows that e-mail can be traced, that it’s not ever truly anonymous, that there is a tech-geek subset that knows how to follow its trail, that the digital fumes can be sniffed to their source. But you need experts for that. And you know by now that I am one.
A little research shows me that the e-mail was sent from the Las Vegas public library. (Yes, there is such an entity—a gleaming but sleepy and somber downtown institution whose very existence is steeped in a half century of irony; its existence, in an age of municipal cutbacks and a challenged local economy, is increasingly precarious, but like any other desert creature, it somehow persists and survives.)
So innocently direct, that e-mail. The Stewartsons will eat Archer Wallace alive, swallow him whole.
I can picture the Stewartsons searching the early dawn. Scooping him up off a sidewalk like some wild-eyed, skulking piece of wildlife with the broad swift net of their combined expertise. Unlicensed fishing. An unfair contest. Reaching out of their red Mustang, grabbing his twiglike arm, hustling him off the street . . . but if they’ve been looking, so far they’ve missed him. So far he’s slipped their net.
I don’t say a word to Debbie. She wouldn’t understand. She’d never let me go. I slip out to her Triumph. I need to get to Wallace, the real Wallace, before the Stewartsons do. To extort the money from the Amazing Wallace, to threaten his successful present with the reality of his past, they need Archer Wallace alive, yes, but not by much. And not for long.
Presumably, the e-mail gives me a considerable head start in finding him. The public library is one place he might actually blend in—where his bald head, wisps of white hair, translucent skin, and fragile physique might not stand out amid the shut-ins, the blinking bespectacled researchers, the nocturnal, the dispossessed, the pallorous, the vampires caught here in Vegas through some chain of error.
But he is not here. He has not installed himself in a research carrel, as I had assumed. Has not unobtrusively set up shop. He is gone, on the move, stealthy, thinking at least a step ahead, observing and adapting the professionalism of his previous hosts; he will pick up e-mail responses from somewhere else, if he doesn’t circle around and retrieve them here later. He’ll issue his instructions from elsewhere. I search the periodicals room, double-check every one of the easy chairs where the bums are stretched out, snoring, muttering, off their meds. I slip up the long, silent aisles of books like an explorer heading upriver into deep jungle. But there is no one here except the occasional hunched, bespectacled native. Archer has disappeared into the Vegas ether. Maybe he only cc’d me as a test, to see if I could track him here through e-mail, so he’d know if he needed to be more careful or not, to check how far my technological powers extended, to see if he was safe or not.
And what was I going to do if I found him? Advise him not to go through with it? Tell him how dangerous blackmail is? He already knew all this. It was hardly information. I was only here to somehow protect him from the Stewartsons. And if they weren’t here, if they hadn’t found him, then perhaps he was protected enough, and there was no reason for me to be here.
Is he looking at me from the window of some standpipe? From behind some air-conditioning or heating vents or machinery?
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