62

Alone in his office, holding the handset to his landline, Jason stared at the telephone and tried to think of what he would say to his father. How do you tell a man his son is dead? Do you drag it out, tell him you’ve got some bad news, try to prepare him for the worst thing he’ll ever experience by giving him five seconds to brace himself? Do you tell him to sit down?

He thought of his father in that old shell of a house, the only sounds the clink of bottle on glass or the scrape of a dog’s toenails against linoleum. The old man shuffling from room to room or collapsing into an easy chair to try for something on television that didn’t make him too angry to watch. No friends. No companion other than the canine that watched mutely from the corner.

The old man might be expecting a call like this. Maybe not today, but knowing his son, knowing the kinds of things he was capable of, the kinds of things he did and people he associated with, he must have expected to get news like this one day. Maybe that’s why he drank so much, to dull the dread of a uniformed policeman showing up on his doorstep or an unwelcome voice on the other end of a phone call telling him his son was dead.

This wasn’t helping. Jason had to call. It was better coming from him than from someone like those two POs.

But Phil. Poor Phil. Before he could distract himself to stop it, a picture came to Jason’s mind: Phil before they were grown, before mom left, when things were . . . no, not good, but at least settled. Jason pictured him as a kid, running through the neighborhood, that stupid corduroy jacket ballooning out behind him, the jacket Jason had worn until the sleeves didn’t reach his wrists anymore. It was threadbare by the time it got to Phil, and it hung nearly to his knees, but he had loved it. He’d loved everything he got from Jason.

How did their lives get so far away from them? They were just a couple of boys with the aspirations boys have. They were going to be astronauts, soldiers, spies, firemen. Anything you could attach the word hero to. But now, before they hit forty years old, their lives were spent.

Poor Phil. His one heroic act had ruined everything. Jason ran his hand over his face. No tears. How could he cry when all this was his fault?

We’re looking for the truth these days, aren’t we? So let’s go for the truth. Let’s really go for it, like we never have before. You’ve been pretending for years. You’ve blamed everyone and everything but the one person who should take all this on his shoulders. It’s all your fault, Jason. You were the one who ran off with Danah. You were the one Phil had to chase down. You were the one who called for help.

His fingers went to the telephone keypad. They touched the same numbers he’d called that night twenty years ago from a payphone outside a bar.

The busy signal beeped back at him from miles away. It churred again and again until the recurring rhythm embedded in his brain.

He hung up.

Brenda bounced in. She laid the consistency letter before him and stood back.

The letterhead, the signature—it looked as authentic as any copy of a consistency letter he’d received from Casey.

“Don’t you want to know how I did it?” She smiled at him. No pain on that lovely face, nothing remotely touching the grief tearing through Jason’s chest.

“Sure.”

“A little copy-machine magic. I printed out the old one, taped in the new text, ran it through the copier, some white out, copied it again, and voila.”

It would have fooled him if he hadn’t known. Surely it would fool loan ops. Even the signature.

“Want me to PDF it to loan ops?” she asked.

“Yeah. Sure. That should do it.”

She turned, and he watched her body shift and the movement of her clothes around her as she crossed the room and left.

He picked up the phone again. Redial. Buzzing busy signal five times, six, seven. Whom could he be talking to?

Jason slammed the receiver down. He would have to go over there. News this bad shouldn’t be delivered over the phone anyway.

While he waited for his laptop to shut down, he looked around his office for the last time. All the years in here cutting deals, winning and losing against the competition, growing the team and driving his region to higher and higher success, and he was leaving in the middle of the worst downturn of his generation.

“They can have it,” he said and shoved the laptop into his briefcase. He walked out in his shirtsleeves.

Brenda looked up. “Where are you going?”

“I have to go to my dad’s. I can’t reach him.” He looked around, but no one was close enough to hear their conversation. “Call me if anything goes wrong with the funding. I’ll watch my e-mail for the alert that it booked.”

She smiled, and that dimple in her right cheek appeared. “Okay, Jason. Good-bye.”

He stared at her. For an instant, her smile faltered.

She whispered, “I’ll see you there.”

His briefcase had grown heavy. His legs felt mired in mud, in quicksand.

Everything in him wanted her. In a day they would be across the ocean together, their pockets lined with all the cash they could ever need. So what was wrong?

What was wrong was that he was committing a federal crime. They would fine him enough to break him for life. They’d give him the full thirty years in prison. What was wrong was that he was risking his life for this girl and the money. That was what was wrong. He’d known it ever since they’d decided it could be done. Now they were actually doing it. They were going to pull it off. That’s what was causing the tugging at his insides, worse than any bad decision he’d ever made. That had to be it.

So why had he only started feeling it when she said good-bye?

He edged away.

She returned to her keyboard and mouse. Her eyes shifted back to him. The dimple returned with her smile.

It was no good. That feeling in his gut wouldn’t go away. Something was wrong, and it wasn’t the crime. The crime was perfect.

He returned to her desk. “What’s going on here?”

She lifted her face to him. “Loan ops is good with the consistency letter. They’re boarding it now. The wire should go any minute.” She looked over her shoulder, whispered, “Oh, Jason, it’s so hard not to kiss you right now. We’re almost there. Everything we want is happening.”

Play it out. That was what occurred to him. Despite everything warning him that it was all wrong, the prevailing thought was to play it out.

He turned away. He had to find his father.