“He lasted ten days,” Señor Rivera said, “then he suffered a nervous collapse. And he was ours. Whatever we asked he answered. Success.”
Señor Rivera sneaked an uxorious peek at his wife and took her hand and they sat plumply and smiled at Littlefield.
“Brilliant,” he said.
“Thank you, Señor Keep,” they said in unison.
“By comparison what you need to do here is very simple.”
“Oh, very, very easy,” Señora Rivera said.
“A piece of cake,” Señor Rivera, proudly American, said, and he and his wife laughed.
It would be a simple matter. Gwen and Chloe had no friends, they had lived under virtual house arrest. Their documents were careful forgeries.
“Cheers,” Littlefield said, raising his glass.
The Riveras lifted their wine glasses and said, “Salud.”
Formalities observed, he stood, causing the Riveras to rise too.
‘Well,” he said, “that was lovely.”
Señora Rivera inclined her head and simpered. “Thank you, Señor Keep.”
“I will be out of the country from this afternoon, so perhaps you could facilitate this thing tomorrow? If it’s convenient?”
“Consider it done,” Señor Rivera said, and his wife clasped her pudgy hands to her belly and nodded.
At the wheel of Lincoln Navigator, speeding toward Dulles International where his jet awaited him, Littlefield felt a new sense of freedom. And he felt a surge of optimism, which increased when one of the burner phones in the glove box rang.
He dug the phone out. “Yes?”
Special Agent Amy Branch said, “Two days ago Pete Town made a call from Los Angeles to his wife using a satellite phone that’s been traced to a man by the name of Joseph Goberman, street name Joe Go, who is part of an ongoing internet fraud investigation.”
“Who is he?”
“Some kind of digital savant.”
“So,” Littlefield said, “you’re still of the opinion that Finch was going solo with the video declaration?”
“Maybe not.”
“And if we get Go we get Finch?”
“It’s something I’d like to pursue.”
“No. Let me handle this.”
“I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that.”
“Fuck comfortable,” Littlefield said. “We’re not talking orthopedic shoes here. Tell me where to find this Go.”
EIGHT
Kirby Chance’s fingers were unsteady as she changed the dressing on Richard Finch’s shoulder. It wasn’t that she was inept, or God forbid, squeamish—for years her mother had suffered from bedsores that were baroque in their suppurating horror and Kirby had cleaned and dressed them twice daily. This wound was quite polite by comparison. And it wasn’t that she felt embarrassed tending a half-naked man—she wasn’t that much of a bluestocking. No, it was who this man was. The sense that by touching him she was, somehow, touching Catherine Finch, as if the dead woman still existed as a sort engram, a memory trace, imprinted on the skin of her husband.
Ridiculous, of course, and not a little, well, eew.
“You’re shaking,” Richard Finch said. “Or should I say trembling?”
He smiled at her in a way Kirby didn’t like and she found herself wondering about a fault line of weakness hidden behind Catherine’s pugnacious exterior, a weakness that had drawn her into the orbit of this man.
Kirby knew that if she were Meryl Streep she would store away this nugget about her subject, this notion of vulnerability, and use it to nuance her portrayal. But she was no Meryl Streep.
“What’s wrong?” Finch said, and placed his hand on hers, giving her a look carefully calibrated to weaken the knees of gullible women.
She moved her hand away and said nothing and continued her work. She could smell his sweat and blood, and the stale tobacco smoke trapped in his oily blond hair.
“You do resemble her,” Finch said, “it’s quite uncanny.”
He used the opportunity of assessing this likeness to stare at her and, annoyingly, she felt a flush creep into her face.
He laughed. “Well, now that’s something I never saw Catherine do. Blush.” She felt the flush deepen when his eyes moved to her breasts. “And you’re a little more, shall we say, buxom than she was. But a jumpsuit should disguise that.”
Kirby adjusted his arm in the sling and stepped away.
“We’re done here,” she said.
“I didn’t mean to offend you,” he said, smirking.
“You didn’t offend me.”
Kirby turned her back on him. As she packed away the medical supplies on the dresser beside the bed she caught a glimpse of the short-haired stranger in the mirror.
Finch said something more but she didn’t hear him, ambushed by the knowledge that this little moment when she was needed would pass all too soon. That only the creepy husband and the gray-haired man who sat in the kitchenette staring at an iPad would ever know what she had done.
And that when it was over she would be shown the door and sent back to a life that had all but flatlined.
- - -
Pete Town watched the screen of the tablet loaded with the videos Catherine Finch had made while in captivity. The device and its contents were courtesy of the ubiquitous Joe Go, who, Town was starting to allow, was fast earning himself the reprieve promised him by Golding.
There were eight videos, shot over a two-year period, all approximately four minutes in length. Town viewed each video three times to understand the content, to understand, as best he could, the mind of Catherine Finch.
He found her opinions unexceptional, hardly more radical than those of his wife’s friends who regularly washed up at the Park Slope house for dinner. Photographers and documentary filmmakers; writers for print, screen and web; trustees of nonprofits (who, Town couldn’t help but notice, always drove smart European cars); social entrepreneurs and a sprinkling of semi-famous stage and TV actors who were known as much for their so-called activism as their acting.
Dinner guests who espoused the usual left-of-center viewpoint that Town, mostly, was not unsympathetic to. Ann’s friends knew that he’d done “something in government” and tended to pigeonhole him as a conservative, which amused him. He was content to dispense wine and clear empty plates and brave the coffee maker that terrified Ann, letting the conversation flow over him like water over a rock.
Just back from their honeymoon, as they’d loaded the dishwasher after one of these soirees, Ann had said that he didn’t need to stay quiet, that he should take her friends on, spin their heads, they deserved it.
He’d kissed her and said, “Now why on God’s green earth would I do that? They’d only keep on coming back for more, and me playing the performing seal would get tired really fast.” They’d laughed and had gone up to bed and had never spoken of it again.
As he watched the videos he kept a spiral notebook open and, using the Montblanc Ann had given him when he’d retired, he jotted down the words and phrases that Catherine Finch used most frequently. The verbal tics that made these monologues distinctly hers: deeply troubling, lack of empathy, war crimes, mindless brutality, illegal regime, hawkish, the myth of American exceptionalism.
The three viewings of Finch’s videos had left Town certain that she was not being coerced. He’d spent too many hours in humid rooms, debriefing questionable assets and enemy agents, patiently chipping away at their lies and evasions like barnacles on a hull, to be deceived.
Catherine Finch had wanted to make these videos. She had believed in what she was saying, believed in the message she was sending out to the world. Believed in her own rectitude.
Town muted the audio and watched all the videos again. Watched Catherine Finch’s face, watched her eyes, watched her hands, watched her shoulders. These mannerisms and gestures were the mother lode. If Kirby Chance could replicate them she would make her performance believable.
She would become Catherine Finch
.
Town laid the iPad on the scuffed, cigarette branded table, pushed his reading glasses back on his head and closed his eyes and rubbed them.
When he opened them Kirby was staring at him from across the room. She quickly looked away, pretending to seal a pack of gauze bandage.
The thought came to Town that what they were doing would destroy this young woman. That he should stop this thing now.
Town opened his mouth to say something but no words came and he shut it and looked at the ugly seascape on the wall. But he wasn’t seeing the painting, he was seeing the drunken woman at the wheel of the small car, the child beside her, as she sped through the red light into the path of the crosstown bus.
NINE
Hunt Gidley had driven down Marmont Lane from the Chateau and was parked with the snout of his rental car jutting into Sunset Boulevard, waiting for a gap in the traffic, ignoring the horns and the angry shouts of the drivers he was causing to back up.
He was heading for a drugstore, ready to gunpoint a pharmacist if necessary to get hold of the penicillin he so direly needed. Then he saw a pet store in the strip mall directly across from him, and he remembered a lunatic survivalist he’d used as a source years ago imparting some arcane post-apocalyptic lore. Gidley floored the car and scythed across four lanes of traffic and bumped into the parking lot.
He flung the car door open and left it ajar and fought his body into the store, the shelves blurring, the yapping and mewling of the caged animals almost driving him to reach for his sidearm.
An elderly party holding a little white dog close to his throat like a fluffy choker recoiled from Gidley. But a sturdy woman with a bowl haircut reminiscent of Moe Stooge’s held her ground and said, “May I help you?”
When Gidley spoke he sounded as if he were speaking a foreign tongue and the woman blinked at him, shaking her head.
He swallowed and tried again. “Fish penicillin.”
This time she heard him and waddled off to a shelf and held up a plastic container, shaking it like a maraca. Gidley ripped the bottle from her hand, tore it open, and threw a handful of capsules into his mouth, dry swallowing them, ignoring the woman’s protests.
He helped himself to another two containers and dropped banknotes like confetti on the checkerboard tiles as he shambled out to his car.
He lowered himself into the seat and found a bottle of lukewarm water in the door bin. His phone rang and he wrestled it out of his pocket and snarled something as he drank.
A voice spoke to him from very far away and it took him a moment to recognize Kip Littlefield.
“Can you hear me?” Littlefield said.
“Yes.”
“I’m on a plane so I may break up.”
“Okay.”
“Where have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you?”
“Busy,” Gidley said.
“Town is somehow hooked into a character by the name of Joseph Goberman, or Joe Go. You got a pen?”
Gidley grunted and found a ballpoint in the glove box, searched for paper, couldn’t find any, and applied the nib to the underside of his forearm where he was less hirsute.
“Shoot,” he said.
Littlefield rattled off an address in Venice Beach and it took Gidley a while to engrave it onto his skin, and he had to get Littlefield to repeat himself a few times.
“What’s wrong with you?” Littlefield said.
“Nothing,” Gidley said. “Got it.”
He ended the call and sat for a minute, trying to resettle his head on his shoulders. He hoped to hell that the survivalist had been right about non-prescription fish penicillin being identical in composition to that for human consumption.
Gidley rammed the car into drive and bumped out onto Sunset and turned left toward the distant ocean.
TEN
“Samsung Galaxy S9,” Joe Go said, slinging the device onto the bed beside Rick Finch. “Smartphone of choice of the Islamic State propaganda machine.”
Pete Town, carrying the Remington, shut the door after Go. The hacker stared at the shirtless Finch who scratched at his bandage and gazed back in that vaguely insolent way of his.
The small man blinked first and turned away and said, “Hey,” to Kirby Chance who stood leaning against the table in the kitchenette. Her arms were folded across her breasts, chin lowered a little, as if she were still looking out through a curtain of hair.
Her head was bandaged, one eye covered, and she’d used some of the cheap cosmetics she’d bought at Costco earlier to manufacture quite convincing bruises on her face.
Her idea. A good one.
Go unslung a pack from his shoulder and lowered it to the bed and opened the kitbag he’d carried into the room. He held up an orange garment identical to the one worn by Catherine Finch in the videos.
“Sweet, huh?” Go said.
“Very convincing,” Town said.
“Yeah. Still got blood on it.” Go saw Kirby’s face and laughed. “Whoa, relax. Prop blood. This comes off of a movie set.”
He slung the jumpsuit over the back of a chair.
“Islamic State shoots some of their videos on these?” Town, said, picking up the phone.
Go nodded. “Their more impromptu stuff, yeah. Firefights. Bombing raids.”
On the iPad there had been one video of Catherine Finch that had been unlike the others with their almost studio feel. A clip that had been shot handheld, the image grainy, showing Catherine dressed in her jumpsuit walking through a makeshift morgue, the bodies of women and children scattered across the floor, casualties of an international coalition air raid. As she’d moved among the corpses she’d held forth about atrocities and war crimes, her words at times hard to hear because of the poor audio quality.
Although Kirby’s resemblance to Catherine was uncanny, Town didn’t want to expose her to the pitiless gaze of a high-definition digital camera. And, despite the talent for mimicry that she’d shown over the last few hours as Town and Richard Finch had coached her through the videos, her voice was pitched a little higher than Catherine’s, and a pristine audio recording would allow a discerning ear to identify regional differences between Kirby’s soft southwestern drawl and the dead woman’s slightly nasal Midwestern locutions.
Town had no doubt that once their clip hit YouTube it would be downloaded and subjected to every kind of scrutiny and analysis, so a few hours before he had called Go and expressed his misgivings about producing a video that was too pristine in quality.
“No worries,” the tech-head had said. “We’ll go smartphone. She’s been hit by a fuckin Hellfire and patched up by Mash and she’s on the run, so it makes sense they’re gonna do this on a phone with available light and no trimmings.”
Go reached into the kitbag on the motel room’s floor and hauled out length of black cloth and dragged it across to the window.
“Help me here, Kirby,” he said.
The girl joined him and they blacked out the window, Town clicking on the lamp beside the bed.
Go cast a look around the room and then removed the ugly painting from the wall and placed a wooden chair in front of where it had hung.
“She'll sit here and I’ll frame her head and shoulders and that wall’ll be neutral enough to be anywhere from Dogtown to Damascus.”
While Go busied himself with his gear, Town came up close to Kirby Chance and said, “If you took off those bandages and cleaned your face and walked out that door and forgot all about this I would not say a word.”
She shook her head and lifted the orange jumpsuit from the chair and went into the bathroom.
- - -
Kirby closed the bathroom door and switched on the light.
As she looked at herself in the chipped mirror she heard her mother’s voice coming in loud and clear: “And just what do you think you’re doing, missy? Is this what I raised? A liar? A traitor?” Kirby stared at her reflection, feeling her courage flow from her like drain water. “You walk away. You walk away from th
is right now, you hear me?”
Kirby shut her eyes tight and went deep into herself, deeper than she had ever gone, and by the time she opened her eyes her mother’s voice was muted.
She removed her clothes and stood a moment in her bra and panties before stepping into the jumpsuit that was made of some floppy synthetic material. When she saw herself in the mirror she experienced a shift, some kind of transference, as if she were a conduit between this sleazy motel room and something nameless.
Kirby felt a calm and a certainty that she had never felt before, and as she opened the door she stood tall, just as Catherine had on the videos, and stepped out into the room.
There was an intake of breath and Richard Finch said, “Jesus.”
She sat down on the chair that was now lit by the angled bedside lamp, and put her hands in her lap and drew her shoulders back.
“Do you want to rehearse?” the gray-haired man said.
“No. Shoot it, please.”
She had rehearsed enough. Earlier the gray man had given her a short script written in neat, cursive handwriting. She’d read it through and, with the two men helping her, had honed it so that it was coming less from her mouth and more from Catherine’s.
Richard Finch had watched her as she’d spoken the words, his eyes narrowed, no longer flirting with her.
“When she was anxious,” he said, “she touched her right index finger to her chin. Just for a moment.”
Kirby nodded and put her finger to the slight cleft in her chin. “Like this?”
He leaned forward and took her finger and moved it to the base of the mandible. “No, like this.”
She spoke the line again and lifted her finger and touched her face and looked at him and said, “Okay?”
“Yes,” he’d replied, his voice softer than usual. “Okay.”
Kirby sat waiting. Ready.
Joe Go crouched before her holding the smartphone and said, “Action.”
She looked straight into the lens and said, “My name is Catherine Finch and I am alive.”
Double Down Page 15