Takeoff

by Joseph Reid

  I don’t know how long she cried or how long I held her. But when Max finally grew quiet, I asked, “So he has this tape?”

  Raising her head took visible effort, but she nodded. “After . . . after it was over, he made me watch it. He was trying to tell me it was a good thing. Like, we could cut it a little here or there, and . . .”

  “What did you say?”

  “I just . . . lost it. I went after him, punching and kicking. I’d never been in a fight before, I don’t know how to do any of that. But I just . . . I was so . . .”

  Max sucked air through her nose. “He kept pushing me away, but I was still screaming at him, and then . . . then, he got all weird. He pointed at the screen, told me to take a real good look. He said if I ever tried to leave him, everyone would see the video.”

  Her eyes were bloodshot, nearly totally pink, but that wasn’t the worst part. The blue irises had gone gray and looked hollow. As if whatever energy inside her normally gave them their color had all been sucked away.

  “It was against your will,” I said. “That’s a crime, plain and simple. Plus, you’re only sixteen. What he did, filming you, that’s a crime, too. We already have him for attempted murder, and now this—”

  “No,” she said.

  “No, what?”

  “It’s not a crime.”

  “What do you mean? Of course it is.”

  Max’s mouth had drawn into a narrow line. “When he showed me the tape, he showed me papers, too. I’d signed them. I don’t know whether he got me to do it while I was wasted, or he copied my signature or what. But they say I”—Max’s voice cracked and trembled—“consented.”

  “That’s bullshit,” I said. “You’re only sixteen. You can’t agree to any of that. Child pornography is never legal.”

  Max looked up at me, her eyes locking on mine. “That’s why he flew us to Saint Lucia.”

  All my confidence, all the bravery and strength I was trying to transfer to Max immediately evaporated. The hospital air felt frigid against my skin. “Let me guess, he’d researched the laws . . .”

  She nodded slowly. “He told me it was all legal there. Even though I was only sixteen, it was perfectly fine.”

  “My God, Max. I’m—” I took a breath to try and think, but even by the end of it, my brain couldn’t summon another word, and my mouth stopped moving. For several long moments, I sat there, next to her, silent, as I tried to think of some way through the maze Drew had erected. “Where does he keep it, the tape? At your house? Is there a safe, or—”

  “No, it’s not here. He left it over there someplace, hidden. That’s the thing—I have to go look for it. I have to—”

  “Hang on,” I said. “He told you this? What exactly did he say?”

  “He said, ‘I’ve got copies hidden overseas. You’ll never find them all.’”

  Multiple copies.

  While some parts of my brain were still reeling over the story Max had just recounted, I tried to focus on the tape. Multiple backups made sense. For something this important, you wouldn’t risk something happening to your only copy.

  Copies. Did Drew mean hard copies, like on disk? Or digital copies? In the cloud, even. Could be either. Or both.

  Hiding it abroad also made sense. After all his trouble to ensure the tape was made legally, Drew wouldn’t have undermined himself by bringing it back here. Besides, at every turn—with Irvine, with Garcia—Drew’s game was always the same: he wanted to outsmart everybody else. The only way to do that was to keep the tape legal.

  How big was Saint Lucia? I wondered. It was just an island, right? But there’d still be a million places to look. Safe-deposit boxes. Storage units. Airport lockers—

  No.

  That wasn’t right. He would never risk being thousands of miles away and having the tape inaccessible. For the tape to be a credible threat, he had to be able to reach it quickly.

  Remotely.

  Which meant he’d likely gone electronic.

  There were still plenty of options. Memory was so cheap these days, networking solid and reliable. Commercial cloud services would let you buy a block of online storage. But even if Drew didn’t feel comfortable putting this kind of file on a commercial site, it’d be easy enough to do it privately.

  “Have you seen him check on it?” I asked Max.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The file, the video. Does your father check on it, to make sure it’s safe? Has he ever said anything to make you think he’s monitoring it?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “What did he say? What, exactly?”

  Max shrugged. “I don’t know. He’s taunted me with it. Like, ‘It’s still right where I put it, don’t you forget.’ Something like that.”

  I thought back to each of the times I’d seen Drew. That’s when I put it together. And when I figured out how to solve it.

  I grinned at Max, and now the confidence in my voice wasn’t just for show. “I know what we’re going to do. I need to call Shen and check on something. And I need to get a couple of things together real quick—a laptop and a thumb drive. But it’s all going to be okay.”

  “I don’t believe you,” she said. “I want to. But I don’t.”

  Looking her right in the eyes, I said, “Trust me. We’re going to fix this, Max. All of it.”

  “Emma,” she said.

  I was already pulling out the burner, doing math on the time difference to LA. A big question was whether I could get Peña to cooperate with what I had in mind. Then I heard what Max had said and did a double take. “Huh?”

  “Emma. My real name is Emma.”

  CHAPTER 29

  By the time I had everything I needed, the cops watching Max’s house reported that Drew was on the move. Driving his black 328i, but not hightailing it. Just steering the Beemer like he was out for a leisurely cruise. The route he was taking—out of their ritzy neighborhood and onto 360—would place him right by the airport.

  Peña promised that his pickup truck was fast. I hoped he was right but didn’t necessarily believe him until Max and I were belted into the thing, barreling down 35. The speedometer said eighty, and the diesel was growling, asking for more.

  We pulled into Austin-Bergstrom’s parking lot in seven minutes. Well ahead of Drew, who—according to the surveillance units—was still ten minutes out. A couple of badge flashes got us into the central security office, which, like JFK’s, was hidden down a hallway behind a nondescript door.

  The TSA shift manager, a hefty African American woman named Janelle Thomson, had large, bright eyes and an easy smile. Once I’d explained what we needed, she led us farther down the hall, to a matched set of doors. “This one’s the observation room,” she said, pointing at the nearer of the pair, “and that’s where we’ll put him for questioning.”

  “Thanks so much,” I said.

  “Anything else you need, sugar?”

  “Is the room videotaped?”

  “Yes, sir, video and audio. Controls are in the observation room.”

  Peña started to lead Max through the first door.

  “Be there in a sec,” I said. “I just need to check something.”

  Poking my head into the interrogation room, I ignored the standard-issue furniture and one-way mirror and instead checked the corners of the ceiling. As I suspected, the eye-in-the-sky camera sat nestled in the corner between the door and the mirror. If Drew sat at the table facing the mirror, the camera would be looking down at him from above and slightly to the left of his head.

  When I joined the others in the observation room, Max sat sprawled across a chair, chewing her nails, while Peña stood by the mirror.

  “How you wanna play this?” he asked.

  I nodded down at my sling. “I might need an extra pair of hands, but otherwise, I think I got it.” Then I turned to Max. “You don’t have to watch.”

  Her eyes locked on me, and the fingers slipped away from her mouth. “Yes, I do.”


  I nodded and turned back to the window to wait.

  Several minutes later, two blue-shirted TSA agents walked Drew into the interrogation room. Dressed in his usual blazer and T-shirt, he wore crisp blue jeans this time. Although he was visibly annoyed, his hair was perfectly combed, his face smoothly shaven. The skin around his eyes suggested he hadn’t missed even a minute of sleep.

  After depositing his bags in the corner, Drew sat in the witness chair facing the mirror. He set his tickets to his left on the table, then withdrew his cell phone from inside the jacket and set it off to his right. Finally, he folded his hands in front of him.

  Double-checking the printout I’d stuck into a manila folder and the hard piece of plastic in my pocket, I said, “Here we go.”

  After thanking and ushering the agents out of the interrogation room, I set the closed folder on the desk and asked, “How are you, Mr. Drew?”

  If he was surprised to see me, Drew didn’t let it show. “Okay. Except now I’m slightly worried I might miss my flight.”

  “Good point. Where are you going, anyway?” Without awaiting his answer, I stepped to the table and spun his ticket jacket around. The topmost boarding pass said DFW, but underneath were additional cards for Los Angeles and Beijing. I whistled. “China, huh? There much demand for Max’s music over there?”

  Drew smiled. “Not yet.”

  “So it’s a business trip, then. Nothing to do with the lack of an extradition treaty.”

  “I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “When I left you, I asked you to keep an ear out for any contact from the Second Guerrillas.”

  “And I did that. But you went off to track down Brad Civins. I had no idea when you’d return, if at all. This trip has been planned for quite a while. I couldn’t risk canceling it.”

  I gave him a nod. “Calling off Max’s nationwide tour was no big deal, but this trip needs to happen?”

  Drew made a face. “Did you ever find him, by the way? Civins?”

  “Oh yeah. Civins. Dr. Roosevelt. Even Petén. I saw her, and the barrel of the Glock she had pointed at my face.”

  Drew cocked his head. “And yet, here you are. You must be a very lucky man, Mr. Walker.”

  I crossed my arms. “Not nearly as lucky as you.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “You hire Petén and the Second Guerrillas to get rid of Max. When they don’t, you call in the FBI, hoping they’ll take down the Second Guerrillas. I come along, you send me after Civins, figuring one of us will take out the other. Everyone does all the dirty work for you, and you ride off into the sunset.”

  “What on earth do you mean, ‘get rid of Max’? I—”

  I rolled my eyes. “Spare me, Counselor. Petén explained your whole agreement to me. There was no debt—you approached them. And not to kidnap Max, but to hook her on drugs, and when even that didn’t work, to kill her. Except they screwed things up by trying to double-cross you.”

  Drew leaned forward, eyes narrowing. “She told you that? Petén? And you believed I could actually do something like that to my own—”

  “Oh, I’m not the only one she told.”

  Slowly, subtly, Drew recoiled in his chair. “What—what do you mean?”

  “Max was there, too. Petén was actually working to take her off the drugs you and Dr. Roosevelt had her hooked on.”

  “Max heard these lies about me? Where . . . where is she? Where’s my baby? Is she safe?”

  “It’s so interesting to me that you waited until now to ask that question.”

  Drew’s face twisted into a sneer. “I have no idea why you’ve chosen to believe the extortionist head of a criminal organization over a father who’s been worried sick over his daughter—”

  I nodded. “You do look worried now.”

  Drew paused and adjusted his face. Then he continued, “—but I’ll tell you, I’m about this close to calling my lawyer and ending this little conversation.”

  “I thought you hadn’t done anything wrong.”

  “I certainly haven’t. But I know when I’m being railroaded. You seem convinced—”

  “I’m convinced an awful lot of the things you did to Max are perfectly legal. Keeping her from working in New York and California to avoid Coogan accounts and all the other child protections they have? Legal. Moving here to Texas, a state where it’s hard for a minor to become emancipated? Another good legal move, Counselor.”

  “I’ve told you before,” he growled, “I’m not a lawyer.”

  “Oh, I know. But you really should be. The way you thought of all that. The way you made sure Max assigned everything to you. The way you banked hundreds of hours of Max’s material so, just on the off chance something unfortunate ever happened, you’d be standing at the ready with tribute albums and greatest hits and never-before-released recordings? I mean, that’s thinking. That’s being a shrewd businessman. But you know what your greatest legal achievement was?”

  Blinking at me, Drew didn’t say anything.

  “By far, it was Saint Lucia.”

  His eyes widened, stretching out the skin that had gathered at their corners.

  “Oh yeah. Max told me all about that. And I did a little legal research online.”

  “Every sovereign state is entitled to its laws.”

  “So you don’t deny it?”

  Drew slid his hands to the edge of the table, then leaned back in the chair and smiled. “Deny what? You know about the video, obviously. But you also appear to understand that it was a consensual act, the filming of it consistent with local standards. It remains where it was made, where it is perfectly legal. So I don’t see why I would need to deny anything.”

  My stomach muscles tensed, and although my left arm was immobilized in the sling, my right fist balled up. Nothing would have made me happier than to knock the sonofabitch’s head right off.

  But there was something better I could do.

  Looking to the mirror, I jerked my head to signal Peña I needed him. When he entered the room, I introduced him to Drew.

  “Always good to meet one of the people who work so hard to keep us safe,” Drew said. “Thank you for your service.”

  Peña crossed his arms and remained stoic as I stepped to the table and retrieved Drew’s phone from across it. “Wonderful little piece of machinery, isn’t it?”

  “It truly is.” Drew nodded, still not betraying any nerves whatsoever. “I don’t know what’s more impressive, honestly: all the things it can do, or the fact it’s locked with such strong encryption, no one can hack into it.” He smiled again.

  Now it was my turn to grin. “Encryption can be a wonderful thing. Except when a user does something completely idiotic to undermine it. Stick out your right thumb, Mr. Drew.”

  “I don’t have to do that.”

  “Yes, actually, you do. US v. Arnold, Counselor. I’m surprised you’re not fresh on that one—it’s one of the Air Marshal Service’s favorites. This”—I gestured around the room—“is considered a border of the United States. I don’t need a warrant to search you here, and I’m allowed to inspect your electronic files. Now please, give me your thumb, or I’ll have Agent Peña help you give it to me.”

  Drew glanced at Peña, licked his lips, then grudgingly presented his thumb. I touched the phone’s little sensor to it, and the screen sprang to life.

  “I have no idea what you think you’re going to find on there.” For the first time, Drew’s voice didn’t drip with confidence. “Certainly nothing illegal. Nothing but e-mail and my calendar and address book.”

  “We’ll see.” I opened the browser and selected the Internet history. Sure enough, mixed between visits to Forbes.com and the New York Times were several long, strange URLs. “I started thinking to myself, if I wanted to keep tabs on an electronic file I didn’t want anyone else to know about, how exactly would I do it? And you know, I wouldn’t use some commercial cloud service. I think what I’d do is rent a spa
ce on some private server rack somewhere. That way, I could log on to it over the Internet, but no one else would know where to look.”

  I glanced over at Drew. Small dots of perspiration on his brow told me everything I needed to know. So I hit the first of the weird-looking links. A log-in screen appeared on the phone.

  “Of course, if you did that,” Drew said, “you’d put some security on it. That way, even if someone did figure out where to look, they’d still need to know a username and password to access the site. Otherwise, all they get to see is an empty web page.”

  Sure enough, the navy-blue page on the screen held two empty white boxes where you could type in your access credentials. With the company’s name printed down at the bottom with a couple of other links, it looked like cheap, commercially available software. But that was still enough to do the trick.

  I glanced at Drew as my thumbs started typing.

  His lips spread even wider, showing off his perfect teeth.

  “Go ahead, Mr. Walker. Try every combination you like. But I warn you, after ten tries, the web page will lock, and you’ll never be able to access it from there again.”

  I glanced over at the mirror, imagining Max behind it, crumpling into her chair at her father’s words. Then I looked down at the screen again, moving back and forth between the browser and Drew’s e-mail.

  Drew’s history contained three of the mysterious links, and it took me several minutes to visit each one. As time ticked by, I felt Peña staring at me, too. I moved my fingers even faster, but Drew seemed to be emboldened by each passing second. “Come on, Mr. Walker. How long is it going to take you to realize you’ve lost? You can check all the sites; they’re all the same. You’ll never break into any of them.”

  Lacing his fingers behind his head, Drew leaned back so the front feet of his chair lifted up off the ground. His eyes gleamed.

  Once I’d visited all three sites, I scrolled farther back through the history, checking to make sure I hadn’t missed any. Then I clicked the phone off and flipped it at Drew, hitting him in the paunch that protruded over his belt.