The Accident (45 page)

Hayden stares at Isabel, blanched and bloodied yet filled with resolve.

And the thing of it is that she’s right, and he’s wrong. She should be doing what she’s doing, and he shouldn’t.

To hell with it, he thinks. If she’s going to shoot me, she’s going to shoot me.

He starts walking through the living room, staring straight ahead. He can feel her aim follow him across the room, and he’s braced for the sound of the discharge, the burning, the pain. He can see himself collapsing onto the bare wood floor, bleeding, dying. There wouldn’t be any funeral.

But by the time he reaches the door, he hasn’t been shot again. “Good luck,” he hears himself say, under his breath, audible to only himself. At least he can allow her the satisfaction of thinking that she outwitted him.

I
t was a lifetime ago, during the summer before college, that Hayden sailed from Cape Cod to Iceland, across the North Atlantic all the way to the volcanic-rocky landfall of the Seltjarnarnes peninsula on the 64th parallel, the same latitude as central Alaska, or Siberia, or Greenland.

The water was ice-cold; humpback whales were breaching, and porpoises were swimming alongside the boat. All three sailors wept with
joy at the sight of the craggy black shore, after three weeks at sea, sick of the food and the pitching and the rolling, sick of the boredom, sick of the musty smell of the thin mattresses, sick of one another.

It was a grand irrational adventure, that trip, Hayden and his cousin accompanying his uncle on a mission to sell a beat-up old boat to a distant relative in Scotland—past Iceland, down to the Faroe Islands, then over to Aberdeen—with the sale an excuse for buying a nicer bigger boat, as well as for taking a month-long sail, his uncle spending the entirety of July out of his office, the three of them passing around paperbacks of Norman Mailer and John Updike, heating up cans of Campbell’s. A trip none of them would ever forget.

It will be much harder by himself, but not impossible. He will sail across the Sound to Stonington, Connecticut, or in this wind even make it out to Newport, Rhode Island. He will lay in for a long day of buying food and supplies and spare parts and first-aid replenishments; his gunshot is a minor flesh wound, the bullet grazing his upper arm. He will doctor the hull numbers, buy replacement sails and parts, triple-check all the rigging. Then if the wind is decent, he will be out past the Cape before the weekend, before this sailboat’s owner—a weekender, no doubt—will notice that his boat is no longer floating at its mooring. Or maybe the owner won’t notice for another week, or two. Harbors like this are littered with underused watercraft.

He laughs when he realizes that this gunshot, the little flesh wound, may help him. The investigators might think he died. He dropped a good amount of blood around that house.

They’ll look for him, of course. But no one will imagine that he’d steal a boat, and sail across the Atlantic, and disappear with twenty-plus-million euros hidden in a Swiss-numbered-account slush fund that no one knows exists.

Sitting in the cold Parisian twilight with Charlie, six months ago, Hayden realized that he’d had enough of his life. Of the ethical compromises and the moral dilemmas, of the everyday subterfuges and the
intimate dishonesties. Of a carefully managed existence that he had allowed to elude his control, to fall into the hands of someone he shouldn’t have trusted, to fall under the sway of an ambition he’d never really had. But ambition, apparently, was a thing you could have foisted upon you, by a more ambitious person.

Sometimes, life conspires to put you in a bad situation, to force you to do something you know you shouldn’t. Then what can you do? You do what you have to. You track down and destroy every copy of a manuscript, kill half the people who’ve read it, scare the bejesus out of the other half, and hunt down and erase the author.

O
r you pretend to do all this. And then you disappear.

He identified the town where he will live, a couple of hours north of Reykjavik on the Snæfellsnes peninsula, in the shadow of the Snæfellsjökull volcano. He rented a house, under what will become his new name, and filled it with furnishings and clothing, a skeleton supply of food. The sheep farmer next-door agreed to keep an eye on things.

Sunlight is beginning to seep over the eastern horizon, but off to the west it’s still pure night, the choppy sea glimmering in the moonlight. Hayden secures the rudder. He picks up the bag, and pulls out what is supposedly the last remaining copy of the manuscript, and stares down at the title page, eerily legible in the moonlight.

He continues reading where he left off. And as he finishes each sheet of double-spaced type, he feeds it into the sea, where it floats briefly, absorbing salt water, until it sinks below the surface.

The secret to throwing a fight, Hayden knows, is for absolutely no one to know, ever, that you took the dive.

CHAPTER 56

I
sabel can’t feel her toes, her feet. Everything below her waist seems to be numb. It takes great concentration to force her legs to move, but she manages it, one small step on each foot.

“Why didn’t you shoot him?” Jeffrey asks.

“It’s not …,” Isabel begins, staring at the thing in her hand. “The bullets aren’t real.” Naomi’s gun was used as a prop in one of her bizarre movies. “They’re blanks.”

Jeffrey considers his bleeding foot. “Could you, uh …” He gestures down.

Isabel walks to the bathroom, grabs a hand towel. She returns to Jeffrey, and wraps his wound tightly. She uses the landline to dial 911, intruders, man shot, hurry, thank you.

“What are you going to do with the video?” Jeffrey asks. He’s looking blanched, ill, worried.

“Are you okay?”

“Well not really.”

“An ambulance is on the way.”

“And the video?”

“I don’t know. Probably nothing.”

He stares up at her.

“What good would it do?” she says. “How could I use it?”

He doesn’t answer.

“We can’t send it to the cops,” she continues. “Or the CIA, or the FBI. Who can we trust? Anyone could be on their side.
Any
one.” Isabel shakes her head. “And anyway, punishing the guy who just left, that wouldn’t be the justice we’re looking for. He’s not the bad guy.”

“He
shot
me.”

“Not the justice
I’m
looking for.”

Isabel hears something, cocks her head. A siren, far away.

“So do you think he’s still alive?”

“Who? Dave?”

She can picture her ex-husband, in some third-world paradise in another hemisphere. Africa, maybe, or the South Pacific. He knew Latin America pretty well, and romanticized the various unknowns on the other side of the world. He’d have let his hair grow long, and would be wearing a scraggly beard. But those blue eyes would be unmistakable. “Yes.”

“So does this stop him? Or will he just send another copy, maybe to someone else?”

“No. He’ll learn that all these people were killed, and he’ll want to protect me.”

“Is that why you’re still alive? Is that why they didn’t kill you?”

“Yes. I’m useful, alive. I’m leverage. So the threat of killing me can still hang over Dave.”

The sound of the siren is growing more distinct.

“And you really don’t have another copy?”

Isabel stares at Jeffrey, wondering again about his loyalty, his honesty. “No.”

“Are there others in your office? With your assistant?”

Alexis. Poor girl. That seems like years ago. “Nope. And you?”

Isabel and Jeffrey stare at each other. She’s pretty sure he’s hiding something. And he looks as if he suspects her of the same.

He shakes his head.

“Then I guess that’s the end of it.”

I
t’s hard to say which was the most explosive revelation in the manuscript. For the majority of readers, Isabel thinks, it would be that Charlie Wolfe killed a girl. Or that his unwavering instinct was to cover it up, with the help of his Washington-insider father and his business partner.

Other people might be floored by the later actions. How Charlie Wolfe conspired with the CIA to entrap, frame, or otherwise compromise foreign businessmen and politicians, to further American policy interests and to ensure success for the Wolfe websites. How people were killed in this effort. How despite having no political beliefs whatsoever—Charlie’s career was driven by the much simpler convictions that his show should have high ratings, that his business should be profitable, and that he should become immensely influential and prosperous—he intended to run for high political office.

But for Isabel, the earth-shattering news was that Charlie Wolfe and Dave Miller once conspired to commit murder of the potential witness to their role in the car accident back in college. They hunted down that witness, tested her, and found that she couldn’t recognize them. And Dave ended up marrying that witness. Me, she thinks. I was that witness.

Isabel had sat in the Ithaca police station, leafing through mug shots, then through the pig books of every current class at every college in the Finger Lakes region, tens of thousands of small black-and-white photos. This was well before 9/11, before surveillance cameras everywhere, before everyone could be tracked wherever they went. She’d never met the boys who’d left the dance club with Lauren; she couldn’t begin to generate a lead.

After a couple of hours, she’d shrugged. “This is impossible.”

The cop had nodded, then handed her another book of photos.

Now she knows that at some point that afternoon she had indeed seen
head shots of those frat boys, glanced at their faces, glazed over them, moved on to the next, ignorant. And she was still ignorant years later, when she met one of them in a bar, and agreed to have dinner with him another night, and then another, and eventually married the guy, and had a child with him, and went to their baby’s funeral together, and split up, and divorced, and she eventually mourned his illness, his death.

His faked death.

T
he creaky front door is hanging open three-quarters of the way through its arc, affording a view up the packed-dirt driveway cut through the woodland, whose trees are coming alive with light, the sun just below the horizon out there, about to crest the curvature of the earth, dawn breaking clear and cloudless in golden summer light.

Isabel’s handbag lies on the floor in the foyer near the door, its invaluable contents now seized, impounded, no doubt destroyed. There’s a small tear in the leather where she yanked off the tracking device that had been installed by a man in the employ of her ex-husband, trying to keep her safe. There’s the pen and the pad where she and Jeffrey exchanged notes, trying to hide their dialogue from phantom enemies who turned out to be protectors.

There are loose business cards floating around in there, as well as bent and wrinkled and torn receipts printed on flimsy paper, which were meant to be submitted to ATM’s accounts-payable for reimbursement. Though now Isabel will have to file them away, as self-employed business expenses on next year’s tax returns. She’ll need to label new file folders. She’ll need to
buy
file folders, and pens and Post-Its and copy paper, and a copy machine maybe, and a desk and a chair to go in the office that she’ll need to rent, somewhere. Maybe she’ll move her business downtown.

One of the receipts in her bag is for eighty dollars, drinks with a prospective client at an overly swanky hotel bar. Another for fifty-two dollars and change, for new hardcover books. Eighteen for a handful of magazines.
There are little slips for taxi fares and movie stubs and an airport sandwich with a bottle of water and a packet of spearmint chewing gum.

And there’s yesterday’s receipt, paid in cash to the twenty-four-hour copy shop: 8¢ per page times 488 pages, for $39.04.

Times two.

CHAPTER 57

T
he author extracts himself from the deflated airbags that surround him in the driver’s seat, like bubble-wrapping around an expensive ceramic vase, packed carefully in a custom-made crate. But someone didn’t notice the
THIS SIDE UP
stenciling, and the car is upside down, all four wheels spinning in the air, going nowhere.

Dave crawls out onto the forest floor. He’s not sure if he should try to stand, not confident that his body is intact, functioning. There’s nothing that particularly hurts, but maybe that’s because he’s in shock. Maybe everything is broken, and he’s about to die, but can’t feel it.

He looks himself over, pats himself down. Astoundingly, he appears to be fine.

He turns his gaze up the side of the hill, to the roadway a dozen feet above, the twisted shards of the retaining barrier. Then he looks in the other direction, past the small uneven plateau upon which his crumpled car is resting, to the steep drop hundreds of feet down the ravine, a deep crack carved by a snow-fed stream through the Alps.

That was an awfully close call. Another one.

He walks around to the passenger side of the car. He sees his phone in there, reaches in, grabs it. He opens the e-mail that he received just before he drove off the road, reads the message. As he hoped, it’s from his ex-wife:

Dear D,

I am glad to know that you are alive. I cannot say I will ever forgive you, but I do understand most of the things you’ve done. And I do appreciate what you are trying to do now with this book.

But it is impossible to publish now. Wolfe is having people killed and copies of the manuscript destroyed. As you know he has many resources and many friends, and he will stop at nothing.

So I will let him believe that he has succeeded in eliminating every single copy of the manuscript. Until the police investigations have ended, until the FBI and CIA have come and gone, until the funerals and obituaries. Until this part of the story has ended.

Then we will begin again.