Generation of Liars (25 page)

“I’m skipping out on a life and I
might need some fake papers to make the transition a little smoother.”

“I’ve got a good variety,” he said,
lifting the lid off a crate labeled GRAPES, and revealing what appeared to be
an elaborate filing system of papers.

“I’ll take something low profile.”

“So Kate Middleton
is out?” He chuckled so forcefully I expected the
pressure of his laugh to dislodge one of his flashy gold teeth.

“No princess
names for me.
In fact, I’ll take a name that traces back to the peasant’s quarter if that
keeps me low profile enough.”

He thumbed through the papers in
his filing system until he stumbled upon something that appeared to delight
him. “I got it. I got the perfect one.”

I peeked at the passport in his
hand. “Pat Leor?” I read the name out loud. The photo was a doughty woman with
mousey, shoulder-length strawberry blond hair. Her small, squinty eyes
disappeared into her face as she smiled for the photo.

“That’s not really Pat Leor,” he
told me. “That’s just the last woman who bought this name and traded it back
in. For six-hundred euro, your picture can be on here.”

“Pat is sort of an ambiguous name.
Are you sure you don’t have something a little more girly in the pile?”

“Nah, this name is plenty girly.
Full name is Patricia C Leor. A British citizen, with additional citizenship in
the United States, South Africa, and Australia. You could have some fun with
this one, traveling and such.”

“There’s no way I can give you
six-hundred euro,” I told him, reaching for my wallet and feeling afraid to see
how much money I even had left to my name. When I opened it up, there was only
forty dollars’ worth of euros and the Russian passport with the physicist
Nadine Blye’s name on it. I held it out for him to inspect. “Is this enough? I
mean I’ll throw in the passport and you can resell it.”

His lips bunched. “I guess it will
have to do. Now smile.” He pulled out his camera phone and snapped my picture.
Within five minutes he handed me a fresh passport with my face and Pat Leor’s
information on it. He lifted the metal shutters. “Take these too.” He thrust a
bushel of apples at me. “Complimentary.”

I grabbed the apples and swung
around to leave, but I smacked into a man who had been waiting on the sidelines
for his chance with the dealer. The brunt of the apple bag caused the papers in
both of our hands to sputter onto the sidewalk.

“Sorry,” I mumbled, bending to
discreetly scoop up my new passport.

“Hey, I know you,” the man said.
“You’re that chic who pointed a gun to my face in Rio.”

“Nebraska?” I shot to my feet.
“What are you doing in London?”

It was Benny Nebraska, alright. The
Hollywood-bank-account hacker I had bribed with a suitcase full of money in
Rio. His hair was still slicked with grease and he had used none of his
million-dollar bounty from Motley to buy himself a new T-shirt.

Benny Nebraska jubilantly slapped
the passport he was holding against his palm. “Got myself the ID of a United
States CIA agent.”

“A CIA agent? Let me see that.” I
gripped it away from him and glared at the passport.  I knew the brown
eyes staring back at me from the photo very well. “This belongs to Pressley
Connard. Do you know him?”

“Sure I know him. I just saw him.”

I bumped my shoulders against his.
“How do you know Pressley? What were you doing with him just now? How the hell
did you get his passport?”

“I only met him once, just now, to
pass off the dynamite stick to him.”

“What? You had the dynamite stick
and you gave it to Pressley Connard?”

“He paid me a lot more than your
cheap-ass boss, Motley, did for the stuff on my hard drive. Or the other guy I
was working with for a while.”

“Who was the other guy?”

“His name is Enoch Sprites. But he
was broke, there was no way he was going to pay up what he was promising. The
CIA agent offered me the best price. Uncle Sam’s money, not his, so he had
green to play with I guess.”

“You made contact with a man named
Enoch Sprites? You really get around, Nebraska.”

“What can I say? I’m good. Now if
you will excuse me, I’m going to go trade up this passport for something
better. I might as well enjoy myself while I can, since it won’t be long before
the Generation of Liars is squashed now that the CIA has the dynamite stick.”

“I don’t believe this,” I said.
“Pressley was visiting Nebraska while visiting London. That snake.” I tucked
the apples under my arm and trudged back towards the hotel.

*   
*    *

Cold and prickly, the water sent
shivers down the length of my neck and made the bones in my back flutter like
the handles of impatient angel wings. All around me was a web of damp hair,
rivulets of water, tinged red, dripping down the side of my face. The box of
hair dye beside the sink said Pink Paradise. The instructions said to leave it
in for twenty minutes. Twenty minutes to seethe over Pressley lying to me.

He still hadn’t returned to the
hotel room. I had enough time to stop at a small pharmacy down the block for
hair dye and I still beat him. I scooted up onto the vanity counter, crossed my
legs and lit a cigarette. I tapped the ashes into the sink and stared at the
clock, hoping he hadn’t already traversed to some CIA contact at the embassy to
turn in the dynamite stick. I was also kicking myself for not asking Benny
Nebraska what Enoch Sprites looked like. I had been curious about him ever
since that day on the train pulling away from Grand Central Station when Motley
told me about him. That had been the last time Motley had ever mentioned him. I
had always been curious if he was still out there in the world, desperately
searching for his rogue creation, the dynamite stick. Now I knew that he was.
Great, one more person to fear.

I heard the jangle of keys from the
hallway. I shredded the box of hair dye and stuffed the cardboard strips at the
bottom of the waste bin beneath the sink. I quickly wrapped a towel over my
head, letting none of my hair poke out.

“Hey.” I emerged coolly from the
bathroom.

Pressley shed his raincoat and
plopped his bag down on the bed. “Where did the apples come from?” He was
glancing at the fruit, which had been tossed asunder.

“Just some fruit from across the
street.”

“Nice.” His teeth were already
sinking into one.

“But I need more than fruit, I’m
starving. I wouldn’t mind fish and chips again.”

“Sounds good.” He reached to unhook
his coat again. “Just tell me when you’re ready.”

“No way, you can’t go out like
that. Take a shower. Gussy up a little.”

“Alice, I’m dressed perfectly
fine.”

“No, I want us to look nice. I mean
I just washed my hair and I can’t have you looking like a bum accompanying me
in the dapper
streets of London.” My fingers gamboled around the rim of
my towel to seek any hairs that might peek out and reveal the pink dye.

“You have very strange priorities.
Fine, I will take a shower.”

“While you’re in there, I will just
watch some TV, or as the Brits call it, the telly.” I did all I could to make
my voice sound playful and assured.

“Whatever you say.” He closed the
bathroom door.

“I’ll be waiting,” I called to him.
I listened for the sound of the shower faucet turning before making my move. I
dug into the pocket of Pressley’s trench coat and pulled out a slim, silver
thumb drive.

I was holding the dynamite stick,
at last.

It felt like something monumental
should be happening to me at the mere touch of it, like electricity should
spark through my veins, but all I experienced was the muffled roar of the
shower faucet and the sound of a maid wheeling a cleaning cart outside in the
hall.

Pressley began humming in the
shower. I snapped the towel off from around my head and shook my hair out. I
shoved the dynamite stick into my pocket, scrambled my stuff into my bag, hiked
my bag over my shoulder and left. The elevator ride down to the ground floor
seemed to last forever. I looked at myself in the reflective gold doors; pale
skin laid over an anemic figure, and a shock of pink hair all in my eyes. The
damp spindles of hair made me look like a pink medusa.  

Once on the sidewalk, I walked a
disorienting few blocks until I found a red telephone box and closed myself
inside and dialed Motley’s number in Paris with trembling fingers. “Motley,
it’s Alice. I’m in London.”

“Alice, you little bitch,” Motley
chided. “Why did you run away? And with that GI Joe wanna
-
be?”

“Motley, I got the dynamite stick,”
I blurted. My plan was to play it off like it was my plan all along. No traitor
here. Loyal as a lamb.

Motley was silent for a moment. It
was a killing silence. “Alice. Get back to Paris immediately.”

“You got it, boss.”

Chapter Twenty-two: Return to Paris

A
S
THE AIRPLANE hovered over the city, following the glitter trail of the Parisian
lights, I looked down at the disk in my hand. Its cold, hard surface felt like
a blade handle. The blade I had used to slice Pressley in the back with.

But he had inflicted the first dig
of the blade, rendezvousing with Benny Nebraska and not telling me that he was
really in London to get the dynamite stick.

I wondered about his reaction as he
emerged from the shower to find me gone from the room, the moment he realized
the dynamite stick was gone too. He would know exactly where I was headed, no
question about that. He would be staking out Motley’s house the second he had a
chance. But like he had mentioned at dinner the night before, the CIA was never
going to approve a raid or any kind of arrest. They couldn’t take that chance
in case the dynamite stick wasn’t really inside Motley’s house. The publicity,
or any leak on the news, would be detrimental to their cause. Pressley was
going to try and get the dynamite stick back the only way he could. In a
sneaky, covert way.

Motley was waiting for me in his
office. He was seated in his executive chair behind his stately desk. I
couldn’t read his eyes behind the dark shades he was wearing. Rabbit was
leaning with his ass up against Motley’s desk and he had his arms crossed with
a big satisfied smile on his face.

“Welcome back to Lala Land,” Rabbit
said.

“Thanks,” I said, “it’s good to be
back.”

“Do you have something for me?”
Motley asked. He was dressed in a pinstriped suit over a vibrant plum-colored
silk shirt, looking every bit the international mobster.

“Why, yes, I do,” I replied. I
reached into my bag and I threw the dynamite stick down so that it hit the disk
and slid across the smooth mahogany surface right into Motley’s hands.

He raked it up with his fingers and
grinned. “Good work, Alice. I underestimated you.” He was inspecting the
dynamite stick in his hand like a diamond merchant looking for imperfections in
a stone. “For a minute there, Alice, I really thought you had lost it. Gone all
school-girl stupid for that CIA goon.”

“Yeah, Alice. Good job,” Rabbit
said. “We were ready to kill you. But you were just yanking our chain.
Brilliant.” He did a laugh and hit me up for a high five. I gave it to him and
my internal monologue was a big fat gulp.

Changing the subject felt essential
at that moment. “So, I guess Amsterdam was a dud?” I asked.

“Amsterdam doesn’t matter now. We
have the dynamite stick.” Motley’s eyes went to the door, and when I looked
over at the door I saw Cleopatra striding in.

“Hello, darling,” she greeted
Motley, while strutting past me so that her shoulder rubbed against mine with a
ginger touch of aggression. She was wearing a leopard-print blouse that seemed
to bring out the animalistic gold flecks in her eyes.

I gave her the dirtiest look I
could conjure. “I guess it took a girl to do a woman’s job, huh, Cleopatra? Or
didn’t you hear? I got the dynamite stick.”

Without responding, she walked to
Motley’s desk and stood beside him. Her hand rubbed on the thick part where his
shoulder met his chest. Motley cleared his throat and said, “Alice, Rabbit, why
don’t the two of you take the rest of the day off. I am going to review this
disk and make sure it is what we think it is. We’ve been fooled by a dud
before, that time with Etienne and his yacht. Let’s hope this isn’t the case
now.”

“I’m positive it’s the dynamite
stick,” I told him.

“Putting all your eggs in one
basket doesn’t mean it will come out as a soufflé,” Cleopatra said.

I gave Cleopatra a lingering glare while
my lips addressed Motley. “Sure thing, boss, I’ll head home while you verify
it.”

Rabbit and I walked out together
and got inside Rabbit’s car, which was parked in the semi-circle driveway in
front of Motley’s house.

“You really pulled through, Alice,”
said Rabbit. He threw my cell phone onto my lap. “You left this at Motley’s
before you ran off with the CIA chump."

My fingers scrolled through the
phone to spot missed calls. Ben hadn’t even tried to reach me. “So, what
happens next?” I asked.

Rabbit pulled his black shades over
his eyes. “Now Motley begins extorting politicians and celebrities who used
fake credentials to get where they are since the November Hit. Once we have
squeezed all the money we can out of the dynamite stick, we destroy it once and
for all. Then we disappear for good, rich and anonymous. Just how I like it.”

I snapped my seatbelt into place.
“Rabbit, you and Motley weren’t really going to kill me after you thought I ran
away with Pressley, were you?”

“Of course not, Alice.” I drew out
a sigh of relief as Rabbit sped by Sacré-Couer, the Basilica of Montmarte which
looked like a sloppy wedding cake. His head turned to mine and he gave me a
rough pat on the shoulder. “We were going to pay someone else to do it.”