A Man Overboard (13 page)

“And once it’s official…”

“You have to back down and wait things out, and…” He ran a hand through his hair. “You’re going to have to endure those tough questions we talked about before.”

He threw the door open and swung his feet around, planting them in a puddle. “Think about it. You’ve got an hour to make up your mind.”

“What do you think I should do?”

The FBI agent looked right into his eyes. “Honestly, if I were in your shoes, I would be mostly concerned with finding my son. And then, depending on what I believed was going on, I’d either want my wife back or I wouldn’t.” He stepped into the wetness, and thunder rolled across the heavens.

Jack didn’t notice the door slam shut or Johnson’s sedan roar past him. He was in another world, one connected by a satirical, golden-arched gateway.

“
I’d either want my wife back or I wouldn’t…”

What the hell was that supposed to mean?

19

The next two hours, Jack sat alone in a diner and waited for Donny to call him back. He had no appetite to speak of but somehow managed to force a bacon omelet into his mouth. The coffee, however, had no trouble going down and kept coming. He was on his sixth cup, and his mind was spinning in circles while his foot tapped impatiently on the tile floor beneath the booth seat. He wanted to be doing something. But he was stuck with “waiting”—which was the name of the bubonic rat without teeth trying to gnaw him into a plague-laced skeleton. He thought he might explode, spontaneously combust into a cloud of frustration, the incessant feel of rat gums on his psyche pushing him to the brink of…well,
Falling Down
.

For a moment, he had considered just driving to Connecticut. But that was a stupid idea. Was he going to walk the state asking random pedestrians if they’d seen an old Russian lady with a four-year-old boy? It might
feel
better than sitting here doing nothing, but it wouldn’t accomplish an iota more. So instead, he thought of the choice Johnson gave him, about the cryptic message he’d exited with. And it was halfway through coffee cup number two—an hour after Johnson had left him in the McDonald’s parking lot—that the agent called asking for his decision. And Jack had given it to him.

He needed to find Stacey and Joseph as fast as possible, and obviously, his background in sales didn’t qualify him for that sort of mission. So he relented and gave Johnson permission to make his investigation official. But that didn’t mean he intended to sit around idle like this while the FBI got in a pissing match with Homeland, CIA, NSA, and whatever other departments would want to get involved with what seemed to be shaping into an international charade (if Ivan’s theory was correct, which the KGB photo seemed to indicate). No, he wouldn’t sit still, couldn’t. He wasn’t sure what he would do, but certainly not nothing.

His incapacity to understand Stacey’s involvement with these Anna and Vadim people had him at a loss, and he figured that side of things would be best left to the Feds. Maybe Stacey wasn’t involved at all; maybe the letters were Viktoriya’s. Maybe Stacey had gotten the books from
her
, all this going back to Viktoriya in Russia, Anna and Vadim being old friends from the Motherland. But if that were so, Stacey hadn’t thought to mention it when the topic came up. And were the Pearson books even old enough to be Viktoriya’s? Not that they had to be from Russia, but if not, then… Ah, who the heck knew?

Hopefully, the FBI.

Again, all he could do was wait for a phone call…or make his own. He called Ivan, wanting his friend’s full impression of the letters, of whatever it was that he’d held back before. But of course, he didn’t answer. Swearing under his breath, and finally unable to bear the toothless rat on his back any longer, he stood and went to the register. After paying the bill, he stepped into the parking lot and observed the veiled position of the sun. It was getting close to six o’clock. It had been a long day so far. He’d been shot at, his house reduced to a pile of ash… As he stood searching for his car, he considered going to a bar. If he had to waste time, he might as well be unconscious for it.

A familiar ringtone cut the dreary atmosphere before he could step off the curb.

“Yeah?”

It was Donny.

Jack asked if he could stay with him for a little while, until things began sorting themselves out.

Donny said he’d be home in half an hour.

* * * *

Donny had no wife, kids, or pets to share his house with, just a girlfriend of three months who sometimes frequented the darkness beneath his sheets. So, “
Mi casa, su casa,”
he’d declared upon welcoming Jack through his front door. And from every indication, he’d meant it.

“So, you gonna fill me in now?” Donny asked. It was pushing ten o’clock, and they were sitting on couches opposite each other. They each had a brown, glass bottle in hand.

And finally unable to avoid it any longer, Jack went through the whole ridiculous story again, pausing only to lift the bottle to his lips and brush away an occasional tear.

Donny sat open-mouthed, staring at his friend. “The FSB?” he repeated. “
Ivan
said that?”

Jack nodded. He’d introduced Ivan to Donny a couple years ago at a barbeque he and Stacey had hosted.

“I wonder why he isn’t calling you back,” Donny wondered aloud, his eyes drifting. Then they snapped back to Jack. “Hey, I’m sorry about the picture thing. I couldn’t do anything with it.”

“It’s fine.”

“Can’t believe the guy was KGB. What do you think Stacey was doing with it?”

“That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?” After a few passing seconds drowned in silence, he stated, “I can’t just sit here and wait, Don. I need to
do
something.”

“Then go to the gym. Hit the bag all night if you need to, but you can’t go off playing Charles Bronson with this stuff. And like it or not, you’re going to be a suspect.”

“That’s absurd.”

“Is it?
You
were the last one seen with her. Your mother-in-law and son are gone. Your house was burned to the ground—”

“You forgot the part where I threw myself into the ocean, too.”

“Says you.”

“There are thousands of passengers who—”

“—were asleep. And if there’s no video, then all anyone has is
your
word.”

“They turned the damn ship around. They pulled me out of the water.”

Don leaned forward. “And you think the cabin boys are gonna rise to your defense after the cruise line did everything it could to sweep the whole thing under the carpet?”

Jack swore under his breath.

“It would never hold up, of course,” Donny concluded, waving his hand in a dismissing motion while leaning back into the big cushions of the couch. “But there’s enough initial suspicion to hold you if they wanted to. Be smart. This ain’t Hollywood. You can’t just go kicking down doors. You’ll either get killed or arrested, and either way it’d be the end of a very disappointing and
short
movie.”

Jack stared into the opening of the beer bottle, his mind churning in another direction all of a sudden. “I just don’t understand why she’d keep it a secret from me.”

“The letters and stuff? Some secrets are dangerous, Jack. Who knows, maybe she was protecting you. Protecting Joseph.”

He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Viktoriya got us on the boat.”

Donny nodded. “Something to think about.”

Jack started laughing. “I know she never liked me. You think she could’ve hired hitmen to get rid of me? That she took Joe away from the house before it was burnt down?”

Donny fell silent.

“I’m joking,” Jack said.

But Donny didn’t seem amused. “The guy was
ordered
to get some of her things before burning down the house…”

Jack stopped laughing. He’d already assumed this, but there was something more in Donny’s eyes. “What are you saying?”

“How
much
didn’t she like you?”

“Are you freakin’ serious?”

“What if Viktoriya did pay someone off to conjure up the cancer story? To get you on the boat? To get rid of you?”

Jack frowned, started to say something, stopped, started again, and ultimately just took another drink.

The Russian countess…

Donny continued. “She
moved
for god sake. Took your son somewhere. Why the hell would she do that?”

Could it be true?
Jack thought. Could his mother-in-law hate him
that
much? Would she have the resources to pull it off? The black-and-white photo of the man came marching into his mind’s eye, posing in the form of some vague answer spelled out with three single letters.

K.G.B.

He ran an unsteady hand through his hair. “The guy I shot…he was surprised to see me. And not in an ‘I didn’t think you were home’ sort of way. I wasn’t
supposed
to be there.”

“That’s because you were supposed to be
dead
. That’s the thing, Jack. If you disappear out in the ocean, this story’s over. Someone gets away with it, no questions asked. But now here you are asking questions, getting the FBI involved. Hell, you’re connecting dots that no one would’ve thought twice about. You’re
shooting
the people that are trying to clean it up!” He put the bottle to his mouth, letting Jack ponder his words.

Jack looked down at his feet. “If you’re right, if this all goes back to Viktoriya and has nothing to do with the books or letters or the FSB—” He paused, unable to actually suggest it.

Donny chewed at his lip for a second. “Do I think Stacey could be in on it?”

Jack looked up, his eyes submerged beneath fresh domes of water.

A phone rang and startled them both.

Standing up, Jack began tossing cushions, looking for his cell. Finding it, he saw Ivan’s name on the display screen. “Ivan?” he answered. He walked out of the room, leaving Donny behind. “Tell me what you’re not telling me. I know there’s something in those letters that—”

Before Jack could cross the threshold into another room, he froze.

“What do you mean?” he whispered, his voice trembling.

Donny looked up.

Jack felt the floor beneath his feet start to move, and he stumbled sideways, leaning against the wall for support.

“You okay, Jack?” Donny got up and stepped toward him.

“Thanks,” he whispered into the phone. Then he hung up. Turning to face Donny, he said, “I think I’m gonna need something stronger to drink.”

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Ivan thinks that the Anna in the letters…is Stacey.”

20

He woke up from the dream to discover that he’d fallen off the couch. The dream—unreachable moonlight shimmering through moving darkness above him—lingered for a while after, and relief didn’t erase the absolute feeling of abandonment until he was back on the couch and listening to the
tick-tick-tick
of the wall clock hanging from a nearby wall. Each passing second escorted him up another step and into Donny’s house…to the reality it belonged to. After five minutes, the nightmare fantasy was forgotten, replaced completely by the reintroduction of real facts just as terrible. And the tears began to fall again.

* * * *

Donny came down the stairs and passed through the morning light that was streaming through the dining room window. He was dressed in shorts and a faded T-shirt that was clinging desperately to what remained of an NFL shield.

“Hungry?” he asked Jack. He disappeared into the kitchen.

Jack was still on the couch, staring into the mysteries of life as seen woven into the throw rug beneath his feet. “No,” he muttered.

“You have to eat,” he called back.

“Don’t you have to work?” He dropped his head and grabbed handfuls of his hair, as if pulling it might tug at his brain and unclog some vital clue.

“It’s Saturday.”

Saturday.
It’s been a whole week?
He forced himself to his feet and padded into the kitchen. In some ways, it felt like seven years had gone by and in others, just seven hours. “Cops don’t work on the weekends?”

“Not this one.” He got some coffee brewing. “When are
you
supposed to go back?”

He didn’t think he could ever go back. “The cruise was supposed to last another week.” He didn’t want to think about work. Or whatever would have to be done about his house. He didn’t care. Not right now. Not in light of Ivan’s revelation. That Anna was Stacey.

He sat at the table and stared out into the morning, watching little birds dart around the bushes surrounding the small patio out back. What was it that the Bible said? Something about not worrying for your life, what you’ll eat, drink, or wear? That the birds don’t gather more than they need day to day and yet God takes care of
them
? But he’d seen birds fly into plate-glass windows and drop dead, just as he knew people were starving to death all over the world. But did that make Jesus a liar? Why did he care? Maybe it was the possibility of his wife’s death and her belief in nothing hereafter that was priming this part of his brain. The nothing hereafter was just so depressing. To think that she just blinked out of existence like she was never alive to begin with…her personality, past, feelings…all gone forever. Nonexistent. Pointless.

Jack sighed, still watching the birds. It was only natural, he thought, to think about what came next. Especially after coming so close to finding out for yourself. Though if Stacey was right, you wouldn’t find out at all, would you? You’d have no conscious awareness left to compute the next act because the next act wouldn’t include your existence. You’d never discover what did or didn’t follow. Again, depressing. He marveled at her willingness to believe it, to embrace it. Not that he held any one religious belief over another, or even espoused to religion at all, but to be so sure that everything in existence only existed by dumb luck, that nothing had any meaning beyond whatever some evolved feelings had decided to trick us into believing… He could never buy it. And that no one acknowledged the hypocrisy of it disturbed him more than the belief itself. For if life was an accident with no purpose or value and the human race wasn’t any better than the rest of the animal kingdom, then no one had the right to hold anyone else accountable for anything. The establishment teaches kids they’re animals and then acts surprised and throws them in jail when they act like it. He knew some said that the concept of God was a product of human evolution, the morality-maker that enabled a greater chance of survival for the greatest species. But there were two things wrong with that. First, if they believed that devotion to a God was seen fit by the evolution they espoused, why then reject it? In rejecting it (at least this was how he saw it, anyway), they were rejecting the wisdom of their own god. It didn’t make sense. And second, to believe that natural selection and evolution deemed it necessary to trick mankind into believing in some deity so as to prolong its existence via moral barriers would be attributing some form of self-consciousness to evolution, making it the god they didn’t believe in. But still, even if it was the way they said, in the end, it was still pointless. An old apologetic from school came back to him. He couldn’t remember the details or what the argument was called or who had come up with it, but he remembered the basic question. If God didn’t exist, then how could mankind ever have come up with the concept of Him? The argument rested on man’s inability to create something from nothing. It said, in a nutshell, that if God didn’t exist in some way, shape, or form, then there was no way possible that the human mind could invent it from scratch. Like trying to come up with another color for the rainbow, or another element for the periodic table…