“Bullshit,” says Holland, clearly discomfited by her bravado. “She’s bluffing.”
Jet regards him with regal disdain. “Beau, you shouldn’t think. You’re not good at it. Selling time-share condos in Gulf Shores . . . that’s your ceiling.”
Holland laughs. “Big talk for an Ole Miss grad.”
“You think? I figure my IQ surpassed yours when I was about ten.” She looks around the semicircle. “Make no mistake, gentlemen. Each and every one of you has a sword hanging over your head. Sally Matheson put it there. You want to know if I have a copy of the cache? You bet your wrinkled old balls I do.”
She’s bluffing, I think. She has to be—
“She’s lying,” insists Holland. “She never had it. If Sally was going to give it to her, why bother giving it to Nadine, too?”
“That I can’t tell you,” Jet replies, still radiating supreme confidence. “But I can tell you this: Royal Bank of Seychelles, account number three-seven-six, six-eight-one-five, two-two-seven. That ring any bells for you boys?”
At least six men have gone bone white. Several sit up in their chairs as though a psychic has started reading their credit card numbers on television.
“Is that a yes?” Jet asks in a game-show host’s voice. “Anybody need a Valium? Maybe a little nitro under the tongue? You will. Because here’s the important thing: I don’t just know that information. I’ve set up an automatic trigger to release it in the event that I go missing or die. That’s my personal insurance policy. I set it up months ago, when I targeted Max. You put a bullet in my head tonight? You touch my child? You’re paying a deposit on your prison cell.”
She looks from face to face without a shred of fear. “And you,” she says, poking Holland in the chest, exactly the way she did Paul’s an hour ago. “You will get down on your knees and beg me not to feed you to the FBI.”
Holland gapes at her in astonishment.
“I said kneel, bitch,” Jet repeats.
Holland looks from face to face, gauging his support. “You don’t really believe her? Nobody would memorize account numbers.”
Jet sighs as though bored with this game. “I don’t have to memorize them, Beau. They just stick in my head. For example: CDB Offshore Bank of Seychelles. Account nine-three-six, seven-two-nine-nine, one-six-four-three.”
Gasped obscenities burst from the semicircle of chairs.
Jet smiles with satisfaction. “Aaaand the Prince’s Trust Bank, Seychelles. Account one-one-six, eight-five-one-seven, two-two-nine-six. Anyone . . . ? Bueller? No?”
One man comes up out of his chair.
“There,” Jet croons. “I believe Arthur Pine just wet his diaper.”
I’ve never seen anyone turn the tables on a group of powerful men so fast. It’s as though Jet took hold of the corner of a killing box and flipped it inside out with a single jerk. Suddenly she’s protected, and everyone else is facing destruction.
She steps away from Holland as if to get some distance from a bad smell. “As you mentioned, Claude, I am an attorney. And I happen to know that the penalties for tax evasion and criminal fraud amount to a life sentence for most of the men under this pavilion. My little insurance policy also contains copies of emails between Max and officials of Azure Dragon Paper, which will prove conclusively the selling of U.S. Senate votes. I’m not sure what the Justice Department does to you for that. I’d call it treason. But that’s only the beginning. I suspect the stock value of Wyatt Cash’s company would drop ninety percent by market close Monday.” She turns to Cash. “Say goodbye to this island, Wyatt. Also to your helicopter, which is nice, by the way.”
“Okay, hold up,” Cash says. “This is getting out of hand. It wasn’t my idea to kidnap this lady’s kid. Paul, you’ve got to take my word for that.”
“You flew them here in your helicopter.”
“Claude told me you wanted them here! Tell him, Claude.”
“Your stock’s going to take a hell of a beating, too, Claude,” Jet goes on. “Selling out your country to the Chinese? You’ll be off the board of your own bank in forty-eight hours.”
“Goddamn it,” Holland says. “Everybody’s losing their nerve.”
“Agreed,” says Russo. “She may have some of this cache, or she may just have a set of balls. I know some tough women gamblers. I don’t plan to spend the rest of my days living in fear of what this lady might do. I think she’s bluffing. And I call. Let’s tie her to a tree and spend fifteen minutes finding out exactly what we have to worry about.”
“I second that motion,” says Warren Lacey.
Somebody in the semicircle whoops in anticipation.
Buckman and Donnelly share a glance. They don’t look happy with the turn things have taken. Buckman looks over at Pine. “Arthur?”
The old lawyer runs his hand through his silver hair and regards Jet critically. “Jet Matheson isn’t my favorite person. But she’s smarter than any two of us put together. On the other hand, if her life over the past year has proved anything, it’s that she’s a consummate liar. I think the only way to find out whether she’s bluffing is to do what Tommy suggested—as much as I detest that kind of thing.”
Paul shakes his head in disbelief. “My vouching for her isn’t enough?”
“Regrettably, no,” says Buckman. “Mr. Russo? If you would?”
Tommy signals some security guys at the periphery of the pavilion. “Take her to the skinning room, for the sake of our ears. You guys can watch on TV if you want.”
“Wait!” I shout. “For God’s sake, give me sixty seconds before you start this. You already tortured Nadine, and that was pointless.”
Buckman is busy relighting his cigar. “On the contrary, Mr. McEwan. We learned that we don’t have to honor the deal we made with you.”
“But you do. Remember the audiotape I played you at the bank? Of you talking about the deal you made with the Chinese? I’ve made copies of that and placed them with friends, much as Jet did, I suspect.”
“We’ll find out soon enough,” says Russo. “We’ll take you to the shed, too.”
The two thugs who took Paul’s pistols move toward me.
“You can’t win this thing, guys,” I tell them, trying to hold my voice steady. “Not like this. But the real question is, why are you even trying to?”
“Because,” says Buckman, “Mr. Holland and Mr. Russo have argued quite convincingly that you, as a journalist, cannot be relied upon to honor your end of the bargain. Sooner or later, you’ll be tempted to publish the story. And we can’t risk that.”
“This is where you’re wrong, Claude. We made one deal and you broke it. The result was the newspaper that hit you guys this morning. Then we made a second deal, and now you’re trying to break that. But I fully intend to honor our deal. Nadine wanted that, too. She never wanted to blow up the paper mill and hurt the town. But you had to torture her. Stupid, man.”
“You’re lying,” Holland says. “You’ve got too much ego to sit on this. It would kill you. This is your ticket back to the big leagues. You’d tell yourself you were breaking it to honor your father.”
I shake my head at the Realtor. “Jet’s right, Beau. You’re not too smart. My father died earlier today, at my brother’s grave. Before he did, I told him about the agreement I’d made with the club. I told him I’d betrayed every principle of our profession, and I thought he’d damn me for it. But you know what? He didn’t. He said I’d probably done more good than I could have in twenty years of writing newspaper stories. Once he told me that, I knew I could live with it.”