He looked helpless. Worse, she realized. Bereft. He gave the woods a wild look, as if he were about to faint again, and then he slid down the side of the Range Rover and sat on the ground. He trembled. Wept.
In three years, she’d never seen this Brian. She’d never seen anything close. Brian didn’t cave, Brian didn’t break, Brian didn’t need help. She was witnessing the reduction of him, the essential pieces at the core of him being removed and carted off. She engaged the safety on the pistol and placed it behind her back and sat on the ground across from him. He wiped at his eyes and sucked air in through wet nostrils that still glistened with blood.
His hands shook along with his lips when he said, “You saw him die?”
She nodded. “He was as close to me as you are now. The guy just shot him.”
“Who were these guys?” He blew air through his lips in short bursts.
“I don’t know. They looked like they sell insurance. And not the high-end kind, the kind you get at strip malls.”
“How’d you get away from them?”
She told him, and in the telling, she watched him return a bit to form. The trembling stopped, his eyes cleared.
“He had the key,” he said. “It’s over. Game fucking over.”
“What key?”
“Safe deposit box at a bank.”
She fingered the key in her pocket. “Bank in the Caymans?”
He shook his head. “Rhode Island. That last day? I carried around a bad feeling, an ugly hunch, I guess. Either that or I simply panicked like a fucking child. I dropped our passports in the bank. If anyone got to me, I figured Nicole could get to them. But they got to Nicole instead. So I handed the key off to Caleb.”
“What passports?”
He nodded. “Mine, Caleb’s, Haya’s, the baby’s, Nicole’s, yours.”
“I don’t have a passport anymore.”
He stood wearily and held out his hand. “Yes, you do.”
She took the hand and allowed him to pull her to her feet. “I’d know if I had a passport. Mine expired two years ago.”
“I got you another one.” He still hadn’t dropped her hand.
She still hadn’t pulled it away. “Where’d you get a picture?”
“The photo booth in the mall that time.”
Not bad, she thought. Not bad.
She pulled the key out of her pocket. She held it up and watched him come back from the dead for the second time in fifteen minutes. “This key?”
He blinked several times, then nodded.
She put it back in her pocket. “Why did Caleb have it?”
“Caleb was supposed to get the passports. He and I could impersonate each other in our sleep. Shit, his version of my signature looked more like mine than mine.” He looked up at the hard sky. “You and I were supposed to slip into Canada, meet the others in a place called Saint-Prosper. From there—fuck—from there, we’d all go to Quebec City, fly out of the country.”
She looked in his eyes and he looked back and neither of them said a word until she said, “So all six of us were supposed to leave the country together?”
“That was the plan, yeah.”
“You, your best friend, his wife and child, and your two wives.”
He dropped her hand. “Nicole wasn’t my wife.”
“Then who was she?”
“My sister.”
She stepped back and took a hard look at his face to see if he was telling the truth or not. But then what did she know about that? She’d lived with him for three years and never knew his real name or profession or history. Just two nights ago, he’d convinced her he was dead, stared back at her with sightless eyes from the bottom of the ocean. This was not a man who wore his lies the way normal people wore theirs.
“Was your sister pregnant?”
He nodded.
“Who was the father?”
“We don’t have time for this.”
“Who was the father?”
“Guy named Joel, okay? Worked at the bank with her. Married guy, three kids of his own. It was a fling. But Nicole always wanted a kid, so even after she broke things off with Joel, she went forward with the pregnancy. She didn’t need Joel’s support; we were going to be sitting on seventy million. You want to meet Joel? I can set it up. You can ask him if his dead ex-mistress was six months’ pregnant with his child when someone executed her in her kitchen because her brother”—he was pacing now, agitated—“her dumb fuck brother left his car in front of her house while he went back to Boston to shock you back to reality.”
Her laugh sounded like a bark. “You what? You tried to shock me back to reality?”
He was all earnest innocence. “Well, yeah.”
“That’s the biggest load of horseshit I’ve ever heard.”
“I needed you ready to run. I didn’t expect Cotter-McCann to bite down hard on the hook for, shit, three months. Six? I was hoping for six. But they fucking bit early because they’re aggressive and greedy and they want what they want on their timetable, no one else’s. I didn’t expect them to put the money into our account and hire an independent consulting firm to double-check the mine on the same day. But they did. And I didn’t expect them to put a two-man hit squad on me and my crew simultaneously. But, once again, they did. So I had to skip plan A, dump plan B, and go right to plan C, the one where I shock you the fuck awake. And, whattaya know, it worked.”
“Nothing worked. Nothing—”
“You afraid to drive anymore?”
“No.”
“Afraid to take cabs?”
“No.”
“Afraid of wilderness or wide open spaces? How about elevators? Diving into the ocean? Have you had a panic attack, Rachel, since this whole thing started?”
“How could I tell? I’ve been in a state of panic ever since I saw you walk out of the back of a building in Boston when you said you were in London.”
“Right.” He nodded. “And you’ve overcome that panic, every minute of every day since, to do what needed to be done. Including killing me, by the way.”
“But you didn’t die.”
“Yeah, well, my apologies.” He put his hands on her shoulders. “You’re not afraid anymore because you stopped listening to anyone but your own primal self. You had all the ‘evidence’ you needed to crawl back into your life and stay there. I didn’t paint the clues in neon; I made you work for them. You could have trusted your eyes—the visa stamps looked real enough, to give you just one example—but you trusted your instinct, babe. You acted from what you knew there”—he pointed at her chest—“not here.” He pointed at her head.
She stared at him for a long time. “Don’t call me ‘babe.’”
“Why not?”
“Because I hate you.”
He took that into consideration. Shrugged. “That’s how we usually feel about the things that wake us up.”
31
SAFE HOUSE