We got back in the car, and the air somehow felt bleak. We hadn’t learned anything. We were no closer to figuring out this situation. I looked at my father. His eyes were narrowed as he stared out the front window, looking as if his mind were working hard but failing to find any solutions, anything that would help.
I thought back to when I hacked into Michael DeSanto’s computer last year, downloading information from his hard drive. Mayburn and I knew such information wouldn’t be usable in a lawsuit or federal investigation, since it was an illegal search and seizure, but Mayburn used the information to get the ball rolling, used it to direct the bank in the right direction to get enough information for a warrant. Once they did, the authorities found the same information under their warrant, information that was then used to charge DeSanto. The thing was, I was sure Mayburn still had that information from Michael’s hard drive.
I looked at my dad. “Does your cell phone work here in the States?”
He nodded.
“Can I make a phone call without it being traced?” I was still a little nervous about my phone being tapped, and I didn’t want anything to interfere with getting another e-mail from Charlie via Dez Romano.
My father took his phone out of his jacket pocket and handed it to me.
I called Mayburn. “Where are you?”
“Hi, to you, too.”
“Where are you?” I repeated.
“Working from home. Paperwork. You still in Italy?”
“Nope. See you in fifteen minutes.”
66
Christopher McNeil didn’t keep journals. He never wrote his thoughts down. He never left any trace of himself. And that was, in some ways, reflective of what had happened to his soul over the last twenty years.
He pulled up to a single family home a few blocks south of Lincoln Square. He watched his daughter exit the car, make a 360-degree turn, looking every which way, and then head inside to meet John Mayburn.
When she was inside, Christopher scanned the area himself, noting the other shingled houses on the street, the nicely manicured lawns. He didn’t close his eyes-he never did unless he knew he was safe and nearly asleep-and entered the relaxed state of mind where he could write in his mental journal:
I am as flat as a penny. Although I see things outside me in color again, there is little left of me. My child recognized me physically, but no one truly knows me or sees me, because I have all but disappeared. If I give myself up to save my children it will be no sacrifice. There is nothing left to sacrifice.
He exhaled hard, then put away his mental journal.
He and Izzy had decided he would stay outside to make sure they hadn’t been followed. So he spent the next thirty minutes in silence, glancing continually in the car mirrors, scanning the streets with his eyes, but it was rote work. For decades now, he had searched for someone that might be following him. It wasn’t second nature. It was first.
The front door of John Mayburn’s house opened, and Izzy stepped out. She was wearing a black skirt and a teal T-shirt that she had changed into on the plane. She took the stairs fast, and was in the car a second later.
“I think I might have something,” she said, talking quickly. “Last year, after I got into Michael DeSanto’s computer, Mayburn turned over the original copy of the hard drive to his client, the bank where Michael used to work. Mayburn told the bank and the Feds he didn’t keep a copy.” He glanced at her and saw her roll her eyes to the roof of the car. “But of course he did. That’s so Mayburn. Anyway, most of the stuff is financial, encrypted records of transactions Michael put through for Advent Corporation. I asked Mayburn if he remembered anything in there having to do with Dez Romano, but like you said, there was nothing solid that could tie Dez to Michael or Advent Corporation. So, Mayburn and I started opening all the documents on the hard drive and scanning them, trying to see if we noticed anything. But we didn’t find anything that the Feds hadn’t, but then…”
“Then?”
“Well, I started thinking. If Dez and Michael had formed Advent Corporation so they could run financial transactions through it, maybe they formed other corporations. We got on the Secretary of State Web site and searched for Michael’s name and Dez’s, just to check, but of course nothing came up. We thought of the name of the lawyer you mentioned, the one who was the registered agent for Advent, so we searched for his name, but you can’t search by the names of the agents on the site, only the names of the corporations. So I tried to think like Michael. I kept thinking that now that I know Lucy pretty well and have heard her talk so much about Michael that maybe something would jump out. So we did all the searches I could think of, using Michael’s street name or number, stuff like that. And then I remembered from the day I got on his computer that he’s a huge Notre Dame fan. Huge. So we started running searches with Notre Dame words.”
“Like what?”
“Irish, Fighting Irish, ND, Domer. When we found corporations that used those words we’d look at the information on file and check out the registered agents or the officers. We couldn’t find anything at first. It was such a long shot.”
“But then you found something?”
“Yep. When we clicked on the name of one corporation called UND, LLC, it showed a registered agent named Paul Crane. We used Google to search for him and he’s like the other one you mentioned-a lawyer who incorporates for people over the Internet. But guess who the principal officer was?”
“It couldn’t have been Michael DeSanto or Dez Romano or the Feds would have found that.”
“Nope. It was Belle Joseph.”
“Who’s that?”
“Belle is the name of Lucy and Michael’s daughter. Josephine is her middle name. I heard Lucy call her by her full name when we were at the museum.”
“And by using her name, no one would be able to search for it. They wouldn’t know to search for it.”
“Exactly.”
“Wow.” He was filled with awe at his daughter’s ingenuity. What would it have been like if he had been with her for her whole life, getting to witness triumphs like this?
“And get this-Mayburn did some digging and found that UND, LLC previously listed Advent Corporation as one of their subcontractors.”
“You’re kidding?”
“I suppose UND could be a legit business, something Michael is working on outside of Dez, but…”
“But with a tie like that to Advent, there’s a damn good chance UND is just like Advent Corporation. There are so many similarities.”
She nodded. “I think so, too. And maybe it won’t even help when we see Dez, but-”
“Good work!” he said, interrupting her, surprised at the enthusiasm in his voice. He wanted to pat her shoulder, to hug her.
She smiled.
But just then his eyes narrowed as he saw something over her shoulder, through the car window.
“What?” Izzy said, catching his look and swiveling around. “Oh, it’s just Mayburn.”
A guy in his forties, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, was leaning toward the car, holding up one hand.
Izzy rolled down the window. “Mayburn, this is my father, Christopher McNeil.”
His own name, being spoken from the lips of his daughter, made something tremble inside him. But when he reached out his hand to shake John Mayburn’s, he frowned. “Nice to meet you,” he said coldly to the guy who had put his daughter in the line of fire more than once.
Mayburn seemed to understand his look. He nodded. “I appreciate your daughter. I won’t let her get hurt.”
He said nothing. Wasn’t sure this Mayburn guy could protect Izzy even if he wanted to.
Mayburn looked at Izzy. “I called Lucy.”
“You told her about Michael’s company, UND?”
Mayburn nodded. “He swore to her that Advent Corporation was it. He swore they’d never had any other affiliation.”
“Did you tell her about the name of Belle Joseph as the principal officer?”
He nodded. “I told her she couldn’t say anything to Michael for a few days, but the ‘Belle Joseph’ thing, that’s what pushed her over the edge-using the kids in any way.”
“So you think it will make a difference? With the two of you?”
He nodded again. “Yeah,” he said. “I think everything is going to be good. Real good.” He glanced at Christopher, then back at Izzy. “I know you have more important things to worry about, and if there’s anything at all I can do, tell me. But in the meantime, thanks, Iz. Thanks a lot.”
“You’re welcome,” Izzy said.
John Mayburn gave a small wave, then turned and walked back into his house.
Christopher had just pulled away from the curb when Izzy’s phone, which lay on the console between the seats, came to life-the phone trilling, the screen lighting up.
Izzy grabbed it. “An e-mail.” She scrolled with her thumb. Her face lost the excitement that had just been there. “It’s from Charlie.”
Despite his earlier lecture to Izzy about “turning around” negative emotions, Christopher was walloped by fear.
He pulled over, and Izzy leaned toward him, holding the phone so they could both see.
You don’t need the exact address, the e-mail read. Just come to Lake Street, just past Kennedy. Look for the building with the black door. You’ll figure it out. You’d better, or this kid is dead. Your 25 minutes start now.
67
My dad floored the car down Lincoln Avenue, blaring the horn several times to get people to move out of the way.
When we were almost at a light at Sheffield Avenue, I pointed. “Turn there!” I looked at my watch. “Fifteen minutes.” Then I looked back at the phone, despair and panic warring within. “We were supposed to get the address,” I said, still staring at my phone. “And you said when we got the address, you’d have one of your buddies run a search on the address to see if we could find anything out about the building.”
He shot through the light, turning. “And now we can’t do that.”
“So we just go in there cold?” My voice started rising. Keep your cool, I thought.
I watched as my dad reached down toward his ankle with his left hand. When he sat up, there was something in that hand, something black and gleaming. I drew back against the car door. “Where did you get that?”
I had never seen a gun up close before. The men in Naples had guns, and they were pointing them at me, but the proximity of this gun was different. Menacing. And I didn’t particularly like it.
I looked up at my father and into his eyes, and for some reason I was nervous.
“I carried it on the plane,” he said.
“They just let you do that?” I thought back to the security we’d gone through before boarding Theo’s private plane. There was little. We’d been required to show our passports and that was about it. Now that I thought about it, we could’ve packed hand grenades in our bags, which were placed by the pilots into the luggage compartment.
My father tucked the gun into his waistband. I stared at his profile. How quickly I’d sided with him, assumed that because he was my father he must be a good man. But he’d killed Maurizio, even admitted it. And Elena had been a mess around him. That was expected, of course, since she’d lost her husband, but was it something more than that? She was the only one who had known Christopher McNeil all these years. Was she afraid of him?
The air in the car seemed stale. I opened the window a little. My father’s eyes darted to my window, then went back to the road. I pushed myself farther into the side of the passenger door, felt for the handle, just in case.
He saw it. “What are you doing?”
“I don’t know, I’m just…”
“Are you afraid of me?” This almost seemed to amuse him, which was bizarre. I don’t know this man at all.
“I don’t know what I’m afraid of anymore.”
He blinked as if surprised, then his face cleared and he nodded. “I understand that.” His voice had been full of life when I was telling him about finding Michael’s UND corporation, but now it was flat again.
“Is there any reason I need to be nervous of you?”
He stopped the car at a light at Armitage and looked at me. He didn’t look amused now, but rather wounded. He shook his head. “But I understand if you don’t believe me. I have given you no reason for trust.” He looked back at the road. “Let’s just focus on what we have to do, and then I’ll be out of your way again. In one way or another.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He shook his head, not answering. “Let’s concentrate on Charlie.”
The reminder of Charlie made my heart skip. I looked at my watch. “We have eight minutes.”
Just then the light turned green and my dad pressed on the gas.
I glanced toward his waist. “I don’t want you to use that gun. Not even on Dez.”
“I won’t use it unless I have to.”
“You did with Maurizio.”
A single nod.
“You had to?” I said.
“I did.” His tone was grave and regretful, but resigned.
I looked out the front window, pointed at Clybourn Avenue. “Turn left here,” I told my father. “Then right on Halsted. We can take that to Lake.”
He did as I told him, flooring the car down Halsted, dodging around slower cars, edging up to the front at lights and shooting ahead of the others.
“Go faster if you can,” I said, looking at my watch. “Six minutes.”
He ran a light that had just turned red.
“What’s going to happen?” I asked, scared and overwhelmed.
He shook his head. “I don’t know. I want to tell you not to worry, but I haven’t dealt with a hostage situation since my training at the academy.”
I exhaled loudly and looked at my father. I realized that I’d allowed myself a tiny false sense of security. It was a sense that assumed that my father, who’d been able to survive for the last few decades, would not only allow us to survive today, but to succeed. I saw now that he was fallible, that I was going to have to continue to be part of our survival.
“All right,” I said, “so let’s think. We know Dez wants something from you.”
My dad nodded. “Right. Hopefully, I possess whatever that information is, whatever he wants. If so, I’m hoping to keep stringing Romano along, maybe using the UND corporation. I’m hoping to do that long enough to determine the setup of the place and to get Charlie and you out of there.”
“But earlier you said he wants you, too. Like he wanted you as a person, not just information you have.”
My dad nodded. “If Dez Romano were able to kill me today, it would be huge for him. He’s a somewhat small fish in the System, but if he took me out, it would catapult him to Camorra stardom.”
I studied his profile. “Why don’t you sound upset by that?”
He glanced at me, then back at the road, veering around a car that was parallel parking. “I’ve fought the Camorra long enough. I’m done. And I’m willing to give Dez Romano what he needs just as long as it means the two of you are safe.”
I stared at him. “You can’t go away again.”
We came to a stoplight. My dad looked at me. “You don’t know if you trust me. Why would you want me to stick around?”
“So you can give me time to figure it out.”
He laughed. And it made me feel good.
Another glance at my watch. “Three minutes.”
He looked back at the road and shot through another yellow light. “How am I going to accomplish anything if you don’t want me to use my gun. Why would you care whether Dez is hurt or not?”
I stared past my father at the side of a building where a fat, smiling Buddha was painted in bright colors-an advertisement for a bar called Funky Buddha Lounge. “Two months ago, I found my friend a few minutes after she was killed. And I saw Maurizio yesterday. I don’t want to be a witness to any more death.”
H
e said nothing.
“Plus, I don’t believe in an eye for an eye. If we hurt Dez, or someone else, when we don’t need to, it just hurts us in the long run.”
My father stayed silent.
“You don’t agree with that?” I asked.
“No.”
I held up my wrist to my face. “Two minutes. Thank God we’re almost at Lake Street. When you get there, take a left.”
My father nodded and leaned forward a bit as if he could make the car move faster. His mouth moved back and forth, his eyebrows pulled together under his copper-rimmed glasses. He opened his cell phone and started to dial.
“Who are you calling?” I asked.
“One of the men you saw outside the airport. I’ve changed my mind. I’m calling them in as backup.”
“But we were told not to bring backup. He said if we do that, he’ll kill Charlie.”
My father’s jaw worked more intensively. He breathed out a loud puff of air through his nostrils and threw down the phone. “No one should ever have to be in this situation. No one should ever have to do this on behalf of their son.”
“You brought it on yourself,” I said, then immediately regretted it. “I’m sorry.” My words shot out fast. “I shouldn’t have said that. I know you did the best you could do but…”
My father pulled to a stop at the light at Lake and looked at me. “You’re right. I brought this on myself, and I will handle it.”
68
We found the building easily. We got out of the car and looked at it. My heart thumped as we walked to the door. I looked at my dad. What were we supposed to do here? I had left my purse in the car, putting my cell phone and my ID in my pocket-in case they need to identify me-and now I felt naked, unarmed.
But my dad wasn’t.
His head swiveled, his eyes searched the neighboring buildings. What was he looking for? Snipers? I had no idea.
I let my eyes do the same, trying to learn from him, even though I wasn’t sure what we were studying.
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