He stood for a long time, looking at his past. It was not easy to give it all up. The prestige, the celebrity status, the acclaim. The women. The power. Everything he had worked for. He hated all the intruders with a force that was almost physical in its energy. It took him only a minute, sixty perfect seconds, to set the battery that would start the timer that would blow his past and everybody involved in it into eternity. There would be nobody left to come searching for him, no Chad, no Colonel, no woman wondering where he was, no walls left holding the Matisses and Picassos. He had the only painting that mattered in the boat with him. The Turner landscape, shrink-wrapped and weatherproofed, exactly, though of course he did not know that, the way it had arrived in Iron Man Matthews’s own hands, many years before.
The Riva purred down the coastline, heading for a small cove he knew well and had made his own. He used no lights, not even the starboard and port markers. He saw no other craft, no lights except for those dotted along the shore, marking homes or small coastal communities. When his instruments indicated he was close to his destination, he killed the engines.
The Riva rocked on the swell. The silence was total. In the darkness, the sky seemed to lower itself over him, pressing in a fine mist that immediately coated everything. Steadying himself, he stripped off all his clothing, stood, naked for a moment, then threw the garments into the sea. He watched until they disappeared. His old self had just died. The new self would begin.
Half an hour later, a man, slightly stooped, with too-long gray hair, wearing rimless glasses, a well-worn Panama hat with a brown band around it, an expensive blue short-sleeved shirt, khakis, and a pair of John Lobb loafers, docked at a small fishing jetty. Beyond the jetty was an asphalt airstrip, well-known to drug smugglers flying in under the radar from various points in South America. A large barnlike structure with a corrugated metal roof housed several small but powerful aircraft, many of which were capable of long-haul flights without refueling. Such as the flight to Columbia, where the Boss owned property. Under another name, of course. Another identity.
He grabbed his suitcase and boarded his expensive plane with its cream leather upholstery and its top-of-the-line equipment. He settled into the pilot’s seat and checked the briefcase containing his papers: a passport with a foreign name, scattered with stamps from various cities around the world, and a photo of the man he had become. It would not have done to have a brand-new passport, though he did not expect to encounter any immigration officials, not where he was going to land, and flying under the radar as he would. Still, it had become a lifelong habit to be prepared for any eventuality. Any emergency.
He had flown planes since he was twenty years old, been taught by a Russian pilot who flew an ancient propeller plane back and forth to tourist locations in the Crimean resorts. After that, when he’d started on his upward climb, he’d had a professional teach him all over again and afterward he had always chosen to pilot his own aircraft. It had been, he told himself now, facing the long journey ahead, a good decision.
He filed no flight plan, skimming the French coast under the radar, then soaring high above the clouds, away from the commercial jet routes, away from the world that knew him as the Boss.
He was smiling as he left all that behind, though he did still regret not making Mirabella his own woman. Still, there was always time for that. Maybe later. In some new life.
It was then he remembered the painting, the Turner landscape, the cause of all his troubles in the first place. He’d left it in the boat. He’d lusted after that painting, a man in heat for it. And he’d lost everything because of it.
The smile disappeared. And then the plane’s engine began to stutter. The plane shook, wiggled its wings from side to side.
The Boss groaned. No problem, he told himself. Nothing I can’t take care of. I always can. Can’t I?
55
Verity
I’m a miracle, or at least that’s what Mirabella tells me. I certainly don’t feel much like a miracle, certainly nothing as grand as that. What I do feel is alive. If anyone had been intended for the other world, whatever that might be, it was me. I escaped that fate thanks to Chad and the Colonel, who I shall now call “my Colonel,” and of course to my friend Mirabella’s determination to save me, and to both Chad and the Colonel’s own instincts about “the super man” himself. The Boss. The Colonel said even the police dogs, the German shepherds, bristled and sniffed and growled when out searching for him. A good dog knows a bad guy, my Colonel told me. I knew he was right.
When I was in that terrible room with the donkeys’ heads skewered to the wall next to me, the intense light trained on my face, blinding me, too weak to so much as voice a protest or even to scream, I’d thought there was no way out. I’d waited for that burst of strength, the energy surge that would make me leap from my lofty place; waited to find “myself” in all the destruction heaped upon me, but it had taken my friends to save me.
How can I ever thank you, I asked Mirabella later, when it was all over and done with and the Boss was gone.
“Thank me?” she’d said, astonished. “Why, if you had not met me on that Paris-to-Nice train you never would have gone through all this. You never would have suffered…”