The Gambit (20 page)

I laughed at her.

“What? You remember what it was like being a kid. You do weird stuff!”

“Yes, yes. I remember.”

She opened her mouth as if she was about to speak, exhaled, and let out a small chuckle. She was shaking her head—like she had dismissed a thought.

“What?” I asked her as I noticed.

“No, it’s nothing really.”

“Oh, come on. You stopped yourself. Just tell me.”

“Okay, okay,” she gave in. “I just, I’ve never told this to anyone besides my mom. I mean, it had relevance with my journalist friends, but this was personal and very sentimental to me. The crazy thing is, it relates to your situation so well. Maybe that’s why my mind decided to bring it back out again.”

“Damn, I’m excited to hear this now.”

“This memory is what made me want to be a journalist. If I get emotional, forgive me. It was also the last time I saw my dad.”

“In Yugoslavia, things were getting pretty bad in 1998. He was gone most of the fall but then came home a week before Christmas. I was so excited. I was actually still six when he came home. I turned seven a week before he passed away. I look back, and that is the Christmas I cherish the most. The night before he flew back with the rest of the crew, he brought me onto the balcony that overlooked the city. He told me, ‘Rachel, I’m going to show you something that you can’t ever forget.’”

I heard her sniffle and she wiped her eye with her fingers. She took a deep breath and composed herself. There it was again, that
fire
behind her eyes. The passion.

“He got one of my toys and hid it underneath a section of the newspaper. He asked me, ‘Rachel, you like your toy, right?’ Of course at six my answer was yes. Then he said, ‘The truth is you like your toy. You know that for sure, right?’ I said yes again. He asked, ‘What if I were to show a stranger, would they believe you like your toy? Would they believe it’s a toy underneath the paper?’ I still hear my little voice answer him back, ‘but I could tell them I did, Daddy. I could tell them it was underneath it.’”

I saw her start to get emotional again.

“That’s when he leaned down, looked me in the eyes, and said, ‘But they wouldn’t believe you. They wouldn’t know for
sure
. They wouldn’t believe the truth that
you know
. That’s what I do sweetie, I write the truth so people will know. When you write the
real
truth, that is a very special thing. Watch.’”

Her lip trembled and she struggled to finish the rest.

“He got a lighter,” she said, “and caught the newspaper on fire. After it had burned to ashes, he asked me, ‘What do you see?’ I answered, ‘My toy.’ I’ll never forget that smile as long as I live. He said to me, ‘You see the truth, Rachel, and if a stranger looks at it, they can see the truth too. Justice is like fire; if you cover it with a veil, it
still
burns.’”

She glanced over at me, her eyes glistening. I was speechless.

“Where the
fuck
is he?” I shouted. My breath was shallow. I walked around the room and waved my hands at the screens behind me. “We have technology that’s decades ahead of what’s available to the public, and we
still
can’t find him? Have any of the street cams found a match with facial recognition?”

“No ma’am,” someone muttered.

“That is bullshit!” I screamed, and knocked over a mug and some papers. The ceramic shattered loudly. “You heard what your director said earlier. We have six hours until we reach the twenty-four-hour mark. In six hours our chances of finding him go down by fifty percent. Everybody better get their shit together! I want something in the next six hours!”

I had to scare them. If they were scared of me, they would listen. The consequences of
not
listening far outweighed taking orders. The colors on the screens behind us flickered and began to change. A new feed was being displayed.

“Ma’am, Raleigh PD just found Owen’s bike in some trees behind the Days Inn South. They checked the guest names from last night and he was never registered.”

My blood boiled, but behind the anger an idea came to me. I turned to the screens and saw the footage playing of the cops around the bike.

“It looks like Owen found a ride,” I announced. “Effective immediately, I want as many roadblocks as we can off the I-95 exits. Owen Marina has to be found before he gets too far, before he disappears like Viktor Ivankov. Make it happen, now!”

We were half an hour from the Florida state line, and the drive had been filled with conversation. Rachel and I kept exchanging stories and getting to know each other. It had been so long since I did this with a woman, and it was refreshing. I found out that Rachel went to college at UNC Chapel Hill for journalism, and her mother lived on the ocean in Melbourne Beach. Her father’s name was Emilio Flores, and he left them a small fortune when he passed away. Rachel was thankful, but that wasn’t important to her. She would have traded it all to be with him again. I was beginning to see that materialism wasn’t significant to her. Despite the foreign car and the clothes, she hadn’t spoken of any of it.

With her, it was like I had forgotten that I was in trouble to begin with. She made it all melt away.

“Have you been to Florida before?” she asked.

“Only to Disney World and Universal.”

“Typical answer from someone not from Florida,” she laughed.

“Oh, come on, Florida is like the Devil’s armpit. The humidity is miserable.”

“Yes, it is horrible, but Central Florida is the worst. The coast is breezy, it keeps you cool. So I understand why you think
all
of Florida is like that, but it’s not.”

“Well, that’s what it’s like where we are going.”

“Not now,” she smiled. “It’s fall. It’s starting to cool off.”

“I thought you were a journalist, not a meteorologist.”

“I wear a lot of hats in life.”

I chuckled at her idiom.

“I assume you do too,” she said. “Chemist turned politician?”

“Don’t forget terrorist,” I replied, keeping a straight face.

“That’s the one we are trying to get rid of.”

“We could at least donate it,” I joked. “Give it to the real criminals.”

“We have to figure out who they are first.”

I nodded in agreement.

A chime sounded.

“The gas light just came on,” she said. “After all of this talking I wasn’t paying attention.”

She got off exit 36 in Brunswick. The moment the ramp declined I saw something that made me cringe—cop lights.

“Oh my God. The cops. It’s a roadblock, Owen. What do I do?”

I was already pulling at my hoodie and putting my shades back on. My heart was pounding.

“Rachel, stay calm, please. They aren’t looking for you, remember? Just act normal and give them your license.”

There were only two cars ahead of us.

“Okay, okay—but what do I do if they question you? I need to know what to do. Fuck! There’s only one car ahead of us.”

I could feel my gut tremble. “If they ask me for my ID, floor it.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes. Floor it,” I said, and put my hood as far up as it could go.

I tried to control my breathing as I heard the power window slide down.

“License and registration, please,” the cop instructed.

Rachel grabbed the registration from the dash and looked at her feet for her purse.

“Honey, can you give me my purse?” she asked in a loving tone and stared at me with wide eyes.

I didn’t answer. I scrambled to grab it and hand it to her.

She quickly slid out her license and gave it to him. In my peripheral I could see him hand the license back to her. There were two cop cars on each side. My palms were sweaty.

I saw the cop lean in toward the window.

“Sir, if I could see your ID also?” his gravelly voice asked.

My heart sank. I barely turned to him.

“Officer, my husband was released from the hospital yesterday. He had a tumor removed from his kidney. I’m taking him to see my family in Jacksonville. You don’t really have to see his, do you? That can’t be standard.”

Good
.
She lied
.

Her voice was feminine yet firm. I saw her adjust her hair, and I couldn’t see clearly, but I thought she was flaunting her bust to the officer.

“Ma’am, your husband is going to have to give me his ID. This
isn’t
a standard roadblock.”

She didn’t respond. She just stayed quiet. My heart was in my throat.

“Ma’am, is there a problem?”

My head slammed against the headrest. The smell of burnt rubber filled my nose. The shrill sound of tires screeching along with bullets being fired were a deafening combination. She drifted left into traffic and accelerated as fast as she could.

She
did
floor it. She listened.

Jerkily, she darted around other cars. I saw cops far behind us in the rearview. We had a head start.

“Owen! What the fuck do I do?” she shouted.

“Drive! Just drive!”

I had no idea what to do. The back windshield was cracked from a bullet. The low-gas chime sounded again. Fuck. We had to get
somewhere
. Horns were being honked all around us. People swerved out of our way. The signs said Highway 25. The road was becoming smaller and we were coming into town. Rachel blew through red lights and laid on the horn as she approached them. If we got hit it would all be over.