At all costs

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The Donovans needed a pay phone, but they may as well have been searching for the Holy Grail. In this part of southeastern West Virginia, it was hard enough to find buildings with foundations. The Gulf station up the road sported an international symbol for a telephone on the side of one of the service bays, but closer examination revealed that it had been out of service for quite a while-since, say, the Civil War.

They drove for fifteen miles, seeing nothing but shacks and endless forests, all situated on near-vertical slopes. “Why would anyone ever want to live here?” Jake wondered aloud.

Finally, they came to Homer and Jane’s Roadside Diner, whose status as the only restaurant in this part of the state was plainly illustrated by the number of old cars and pickup trucks in the parking lot. The building was classic backwoods construction. The red brick center section may have had some charm in its youth, but as time had worn on, wooden additions had been slapped onto both ends of the place, with an eye toward nothing but efficiency and economy. Overall, the place had a droopy, unappealing feel. Not that it mattered; every window in the place displayed the profile of a live diner. More important, according to the sign affixed to the brick, Homer and Jane’s had not only a telephone but rest rooms as well.

The van’s suspension moaned painfully as Jake piloted the vehicle into the crumbled and pockmarked driveway. “What do you think?”

“I think-” Carolyn stopped before she could complete the thought. “Oh, God… take a look at the newsstand.”

The gravity of her tone brought Travis forward. “What newsstand?”

Jake didn’t see it either at first, but when he followed her finger, his stomach flopped. In the windows of their coinoperated dispensers, three competing newspapers-two from West Virginia and one from Washington, D.C.-displayed pictures of the world’s most notorious environmental terrorists. Instead of the old Wanted-poster shots, however, the press was using current photos lifted from their driver’s licenses.

“Shit,” Jake said. “Looks just like us.” Something about seeing the story in the paper made the threat to them more palpable.

“Well, we certainly can’t go in there,” Carolyn said. “Those people are eating breakfast. Half of them are probably reading about us as we speak.”

It was a very good point. Wanted posters, as such, never posed much of a threat. People rarely made eye contact to begin with, and they certainly didn’t remember pictures of people they’d never met. In a tiny community such as this, though, where everyone undoubtedly knew everyone else, strangers couldn’t help but draw attention. When the focus of that attention was the very people whose pictures appeared before them in the paper, God only knew what might happen.

“I can go in,” Travis volunteered. “I don’t see any pictures of me.”

Instinctively, Jake and Carolyn started to say no, but then stopped.

Jake arched an eyebrow. “What do you think?”

“C’mon, Mom, I can do it.” Travis was anxious to prove himself. “Hell, it’s only a phone call.” Simultaneous glares silenced him, and he rolled his eyes. “I meant, heck, it’s only a phone call.”

“This isn’t a game, Travis,” Carolyn scolded.

“I know that, but Jesus-um, I mean Jeeze- why risk you guys getting recognized when the only thing I have to do is make a phone call?”

Another very good point, drawing another shrug from Jake. “I don’t see why not.”

“But Harry doesn’t know him from Adam,” Carolyn countered.

“He’ll know who I am after I tell him,” Travis offered. “C’mon, you guys, just tell me what to say, and I’ll say it. Then he’ll tell me, and I’ll tell you.”

Maybe it really was that simple. “Have you ever made a collect call?” Jake asked.

“Uh-huh. Remember that time in Amarillo when the Tawingos’ car broke down? I called you collect to tell you I was gonna be late.”

Jake and Carolyn looked to each other for some sound reason to say no but couldn’t find one.

“Okay,” Carolyn said with an uneasy sigh. “Here’s what we need you to say.”

As he watched his son climb out of the back of the van and stride purposefully toward Homer and Jane’s, Jake enjoyed a moment of intense pride. Here the kid’s world had been turned completely inside out, and yet he truly wanted to help. Much was left to be done, of course, and this adventure was far from over, but as ridiculous as it sounded, Jake felt that they were more of a family at this moment than they’d been in years.

“I wonder how Harry will react,” Jake mused aloud.

“I’m sure he’ll be relieved,” Carolyn said.

“Yeah, right.”

Carolyn’s maternal uncle, Harry Sinclair, owned more of Chicago’s Miracle Mile than any other single investor. Widely known for his intense loyalty to his friends, and his ruthless business practices, Harry was both feared and revered, all depending on which side of the negotiation table he was seated. Harry was a man accustomed to winning, regardless of the cost. Rumors abounded of competitors threatened into submission, but none of the accusations were true-at least not in the sense that people imagined.

Harry Sinclair knew only one subject-business-and he played the game with a passion matched by only a few. Jake had met the man only twice, yet he had the old bastard’s mantra down cold: “You can always tell a sucker,” he’d told Jake back when he and Carolyn were just dating. “He’s the guy who believes that the game is over when the other side gives up. Growing up on the South Side, I learned the real secret to winning. As long as the other guy can stand, the game’s still on.”

The lecture was the only form of speech that Harry Sinclair knew; and from that very first day, Jake couldn’t stand the man. He was the embodiment of everything that was wrong about business-the very attitude that allowed the Pennsylvania coal-mining barons to send Jake’s father into hell every day, knowing full well that the fetid atmosphere in those tunnels would corrode his lungs. For people like Harry, business was just a euphemism for crushing people who didn’t have the means to fight back. They were bullies, pure and simple, differentiated from the schoolyard variety only by their expensive suits and silk ties.

During that first meeting, convened out at Harry’s estate, and carefully orchestrated to intimidate the unsophisticated coal miner’s kid who was sniffing around his niece, Harry laid it all out on the table. Sitting in his $2,000 chair and sucking on a thirty-dollar cigar, he told the story of a Korean grocer named Kim Po, who refused to sell his store to make room for Sinclair Plaza, a sprawling, fifty-story granite and glass office/retail complex on Michigan Avenue.

A man who prided himself on always playing by the rules, Harry got zoning approval to build his vanity tower, anyway, bringing his building within six inches on three sides and the top of Po’s grocery. The Korean filed suit, of course, at which point Harry began his siege, filing a countersuit alleging emotional distress, and beginning an escalating war of legal fees which Po knew he could never win.

After six months of warfare, fought in the trenches of the courthouse, Po caved in and offered to sell his store. Harry refused. “I’d already spent that money on legal fees and architectural changes,” he relayed to Jake. “I offered him forty cents on the dollar, though, and he turned me down.”

With the value of his property dangling below the payoff price for the five college educations he’d leveraged against it, Po did the honorable thing. He dug in to make the best of things.

But, as Harry pointed out, he could still stand. When Sinclair Plaza finally opened, the old man made sure that the space just inches away from Po’s store was leased to a competing grocery, which coincidentally specialized in everything that the Korean sold, only more of it at a lesser price.

Harry ended up declaring victory on the day he finally bought the ruined grocer’s real estate as the only bidder at the trustee’s sale.

Predators like Harry Sinclair drove federal regulators nuts. For the last two decades, they’d worked tirelessly to keep the old man honest. They’d nabbed him only once, back in the late seventies when the IRS found enough indiscretions to justify a five-year prison sentence.

To Jake, Harry would forever be a jailbird, even as Carolyn worshiped every step the old man took. As the only girl among a sea of boy cousins, Carolyn had always been Harry’s “Sunshine,” and the real estate mogul played his role to the hilt, bringing her silver dollars and chocolate bars every time he saw her. There was an unbreakable bond there, part of the great mystery that was Carolyn’s childhood.

Distasteful business practices aside, Jake recognized loyalty when he saw it, and while he detested much of what Harry Sinclair stood for, there was no denying that the old man had come to Jake and Carolyn’s aid at a critical time. As the entire world bore down on the Donovans in 1983, Harry provided them with everything they needed to disappear, from identities to cash-all just months after Harry himself had been released from prison and stood to lose a great deal in the transaction.

Sitting there in the van outside the diner, Jake shook his head in disbelief. This was the man from whom Travis was soliciting assistance? The punch line of an old joke popped into his mind, making him squirm in his seat: We’ve already established what you are, madam, now we’re just haggling over price.

As he waited for Travis to return, Jake let his thoughts drift back to his second meeting with Harry Sinclair-Jake’s first in the role of fugitive. The old man had sent a car to pick up Jake and Carolyn at a prearranged spot downstream from Buford. He remembered the driver’s name to this day. Thorne: a sinewy, large-torsoed military type who rarely said a word but whose dark eyes continually cast a threat. The pickup had been late at night, as Jake recalled, and they drove straight through till morning to a house somewhere in southern Illinois.

Jake had slept most of the way, finally awakened by the heat of the rising sun. Carolyn was already awake, sitting upright and talking in hushed tones to Thorne. Jake stretched noisily, and slowly worked his way up to a sitting position.

“Hey, sleepyhead,” Carolyn said happily. “About time you woke up.”

“What time is it?” He was too sleep-dumb to think of checking his watch.

“About nine. We’re almost there.”

“Correction,” Thorne interrupted. “We are there.”

The only building in sight was a largish farmhouse planted in the middle of a huge expanse of green farmland. Thorne slowed the Cadillac nearly to a halt to catch a rutted dirt path. The house was gorgeous, in a uniquely midwestern way. Probably dating back to the 1920s, it vaguely resembled a squatty Aztec pyramid, anchored at its base by a huge, wraparound porch, and rising two more stories in classic Victorian style to a slate roof and an intricate collage of gables.

Harry was waiting for them at the front door, and Carolyn started to cry the instant she saw him. The years in prison had been hard. Heavy creases had invaded his boyish face. Last time they’d seen each other-could it possibly be eight years? — his hair, which now resembled a disheveled cotton ball, had been a lush auburn mane, carefully coiffed and proudly displayed. Despite his ever-present paunch, he’d always been obsessive about his wardrobe, sporting the very latest in men’s fashions. Now his clothes just looked rumpled and old; not unlike the man wearing them.

Carolyn was out of the car as soon as it pulled to a stop, and she became a young girl again as she glided up the manicured path and into Harry’s outstretched arms. “Little Sunshine,” he whispered gently, “I’ve missed you so much.” As she buried her face in his shoulder, he stroked the back of her head.

“Shh, Sunshine,” Harry cooed. “Shh. Settle down now. Everything’s going to be just fine…”

Jake watched it all from the driveway, trying to ignore Thorne, who seemed to regard Sunshine’s husband as a threat. As Jake felt the driver’s eyes burning through him, he found himself oddly aware of his hands, feeling fidgety as he fumbled for an appropriate, nonthreatening place to put them.

A minute passed before Carolyn pulled away from her uncle, and even as she did, he continued to hold her at arm’s length, examining the face he hadn’t seen in so long. “You’re beautiful,” he said. “You look like a Sinclair. You have your mother’s eyes. And her mouth, too.”

“So, her mom cussed, did she?” Jake quipped, trying to be recognized as something more than a lawn ornament. He smiled, but no one else did.

Harry’s scowl spoke his mind: Haven ’t you left yet?

Jake extended his hand and stepped forward, bringing Thorne in close behind. “Hello, sir. Nice to see you again. You look well.” Again, he smiled alone.

Carolyn half turned, keeping one arm wrapped around Harry and beckoning her husband with the other, as if to include him in a group hug. “You remember Jake, don’t you, Uncle Harry? We dated back in high school? You had him to dinner once…”

“Of course.” Harry took Jake in with an extended glare as he shook his hand. His face twitched a bit around the eyes, as if he smelled something unpleasant or was perhaps enduring a sudden gas pain. The look prompted Jake to take a look at himself. At once, it seemed, everyone realized just how filthy the new arrivals were.

“Thorne,” Harry commanded, “send somebody to get my niece and nephew some new clothes, will you? Plain vanilla, understand? Nothing fancy. What size shoes do you kids wear?”

“I’m a ten-D,” Jake answered. “I think Carolyn’s a five.”

“Five and a half,” she corrected.

Thorne looked from one visitor to the other as they spoke, and then back to Harry, who dismissed him with a nod. “Please come in,” Harry offered.

“Nice place,” Jake said. Dominated by tasteful yet not extravagant antiques, and accessorized with cloth wall coverings and Oriental rugs, the farmhouse felt lived in; well loved.

“Thank you,” Harry acknowledged. “It’s not mine. Actually, it belongs to a friend of mine. He agreed to let me entertain you here.” He led the way into a spacious living room, where he lowered himself into a wing-backed chair. Overhead, one of the three fans churned the heavy air to create the illusion of a breeze. “Carolyn, why don’t you and Jack sit on the sofa there?”

“It’s, um, Jake, sir.” Harry looked at him oddly. “As opposed to Jack.”

Harry smiled. “Right. And you can call me Harry. So… what have you kids heard about the media’s take on all this?”

“We haven’t seen or heard a thing,” Carolyn said. Since the explosion at the plant, she and Jake had been so immersed in staying beyond the reach of the police, they’d suffered a virtual information blackout.

“Hmm.” The old man inhaled deeply through his nose and leaned back into the cushions of his chair, interlacing his fingers across his chest. “Well, I hate to break it to you, but you are the news. Very hot news, indeed. The minute you ran from that motel room in Buford, I’m afraid you lost any benefit you might have gained by turning yourselves in.”

“But we didn’t do anything!” Carolyn protested. “My God, surely we can prove that much!”

Harry inhaled deeply again, searching for the words that would cause this all to make sense. “While it should matter whether one is guilty or innocent, I’ve had some conflicts with the authorities myself, as you know, and I can tell you that culpability is frequently irrelevant. What is relevant is that you two seem to be the victims of a rather sophisticated conspiracy. Having kept one eye on the television for the last twelve hours, I’ve heard the words ‘airtight case’ dropped at least a dozen times.”

“But how can that be?” Carolyn said. “If we just-”

“Obviously,” Harry cut her off, “someone wants the world to believe that you did these horrible things. And it appears that they’ve accomplished that goal. Accomplished it in a way that is beyond refute. Since your guilt is assumed, you must behave accordingly. Remember: the police don’t differentiate between guilty fugitives and innocent fugitives.”

Harry let the words hang in the air, allowing time for the Donovans to absorb them. Jake noted the old man’s smile as Carolyn unconsciously sought her husband’s hand and squeezed it lovingly. Clearly, it was important to Harry that she be happily married.

“So what do we do?” Carolyn asked.

Harry broke eye contact. “You disappear,” he said to his hands. “You evaporate; cease to exist.”

“For how long?” asked Jake.

Harry looked up. “Assume forever. There’ll be a huge investigation, of course. Motives examined. Evidence sifted. My hunch is, the finger will still be pointing at you when they’re done. Something about this smells. It’s too neat and tidy. The game is rigged.”

The enormity of what Harry was suggesting pressed down on Jake like a block of granite. “But what about our friends?” he blurted. “All our things are back at the apartment, and the car…”

“ Forget about them. Forget about everything but survival.” Harry had made it sound so effortless, so ordinary. Like pumping gas or buying an apple at the grocery store.

Carolyn shook her head fiercely, on the edge of panic. “There has to be another way.”

“There is no other way,” Harry insisted. “You asked for my advice, Sunshine, and now I’m offering it to you. There is no other way.”

“What about money?” Jake asked. “And jobs? How are we going to support ourselves?”

Harry seemed pleased by these questions, as if comforted by the thought process behind them. “Thorne will bring you a briefcase in a moment,” Harry explained. “In it, you’ll find eighty thousand dollars. I’m sorry it can’t be more, Sunshine, but what with my recent vacation courtesy of the IRS, my business is not what it once was.”

Eighty thousand dollars! Jake’s mind screamed. And he’s apologizing for it?

Harry saw their looks of wonder and worked quickly to bring them back on track. “Listen to me, you two,” he said, extending a reproachful forefinger. “This will be your survival money, and you must dispense it wisely. If either one of you spends it on a fast car or a night in Vegas, I swear to God I’ll beat you both.” What might have sounded like an empty threat coming from someone else sounded like the most sincere of promises.

“Now, I can help you to establish new identities,” Harry went on. “Thorne, he has contacts who can take care of things. But from that point on, you’ll be on your own, do you understand?”

Carolyn nodded, but her mind had already left the conversation, racing ahead to God only knew what complications lay in wait. People couldn’t just cease to exist! They had fingerprints. They had faces, and as Harry pointed out earlier, those faces were plastered all over every media outlet.

“Sunshine, you’re not listening,” Harry barked. “We don’t have a lot of time here.”

“What about our faces?” There, she asked it.

“Creating a new face is not as difficult as you might think. Or so I’m told. A new nose here, some collagen there, a new hairstyle-you’d be surprised how easy it is. The paper trail is the hard part-giving you not only a present to live in but a past to explain it. But don’t worry about that. Thorne’s friends will take care of you there. What’s important is how you behave. You must never buy or produce or even own anything that you can’t walk away from in a heartbeat. Even with the identity work we’ll be doing for you, you must never forget that a single mistake can bring it all down. No homes, no stocks, no pets, and no kids.”

“No kids!” Carolyn objected. “But we were planning a family!”

Harry laughed; a release of frustration. “For God’s sake, Carolyn. You were planning a lot of things. And none of them involved any of this. Open your eyes. Kids weigh you down; slow you down. When it’s time for you to move, you’ll need to move instantly. You won’t have time to run by the grocery store for Pampers and formula.”

“Come on, Harry,” Jake interrupted. “We’ve got to have some semblance of a life. What you describe-we’d be as well off going to jail.”

Harry’s eyes turned to ice, and he set his jaw angrily. “What I’m giving you is a semblance of a life. I’m trying to show you how not to blow it. You say you want kids. That’s terrific. How screwed up do you want them to be? Here’s the one absolute truth in your life from now on, and never, ever forget it: whatever you had planned for the next sixty years or so doesn’t mean anything anymore. You’re going to have to move every year, some years more than once. You’ll never get a job that requires a background check, ’cause that would be stupid. You’ll never get another job in your chosen field, because you’re more likely to run into people you know. And when we’re done, you’ll never be called Donovan again. Whatever family you have, you’ll never talk to them again. Got a best buddy? Maybe the best man at your wedding? Well, to him, you might as well be dead.

“Are you understanding me, kids? You can’t afford friends anymore. I know it’s a raw deal, but it’s all you’ve got. And if you can’t have friends, then how the hell can you have kids? Don’t you see? It’s stupid.”

Again, he let the words hang in the air. This was their first great lesson, and with it the weight bearing down on Jake seemed to increase a hundredfold. As he listened to Harry’s speech, Jake realized for the first time the abiding injustice of it all. In the ensuing years, he and Carolyn would search repeatedly for the Greater Good in all of this, but the bottom line-and the point Harry had been trying to make-was that there was no Great Plan; no acceptable reason for it all. It just was the way it was. Period. It was a lesson for which they hadn’t been prepared; a lesson that Jake’s complacency would ultimately allow him to forget.

“And Jake,” Harry concluded, aiming a finger between his eyes, “don’t ever assume that prison is an alternative to anything, do you understand? I’m tougher than you’ll ever be, and it damn near broke me after five years. You two are looking at spending the rest of your lives there. If it comes to that, you’re better off dead, do you understand? Dead is better than prison.”

Jake and Carolyn both looked away. They held hands tightly enough to turn their knuckles white. Harry softened his voice, and as he did, his eyes moistened. “Sunshine, you know I’d rather cut off my arm than see you go through this. You know that, right?”

She nodded glumly, her eyes still cast downward.

“Now, there’ll be temptations. Come Christmas, or maybe your anniversary, you’ll want to call home; or maybe even call me. But you can’t. The FBI is going to turn the world inside out looking for you, and the search won’t stop in the next year or two or five. They’ll know more about each of you than you know about yourselves, and every one of your friends and relatives will be watched. They’ll be warned. The picture that the U.S. Attorney is going to paint of you will be so awful that there won’t be a friend or relative who isn’t tempted to turn you in. You can trust no one. Ever. Remember that.”

Thorne arrived at the archway to the living room, briefcase in hand, waiting to be recognized. “Give us another minute,” Harry said, and the assistant retreated.

Harry scooted forward in his chair and held his hand out for Carolyn’s. She took it, linking herself to the two men she loved more than anything else in the world. “If there were another way, I’d take it,” Harry said, his voice thickening. “Any other way in the world. But there isn’t. The feds hate me, you know. Enough to be a risk to both of you, so I have to leave. If you get jammed up one day-I mean, really boxed in, and there’s no other alternative-you call this number.” He handed them a blue slip of paper, produced from his shirt pocket. “Read it, memorize it, and destroy it. I’ll do whatever I can for you, but remember that the IRS and the FBI are likely to be watching me all the time. It’s not impossible that a call to me would cause more problems for you than it would solve.”

Cupping Carolyn’s jawline tenderly with his fingers, Harry’s eyes filled with tears. “Sunshine, if things go well, we’ll never see each other again, sweetie.” His voice disappeared entirely as he leaned forward and gave her another long, tender hug. Then it was time for him to go. He pushed Carolyn away.

As he stood, he extended his hand to Jake. “You can’t imagine what your bride and I have been through together, Jake. You take good care of her.”

Jake rose as well. “I’ll do my best, Harry,” he said.

Harry fixed him with a menacing glare. “Do better than your best. You protect her at all costs. From here on out, she’s all you’ve got.”

He exited quickly, leaving the Donovans alone in the living room. “Oh, my God, Jake,” Carolyn said through bitter sobs. “What are we doing?”

Jake chewed on his lower lip, trying to come to grips with it all. “I guess we’re surviving.”

“Excuse me, folks,” Thorne interrupted, startling them both. “Mr. Sinclair said it was important to move quickly. We have some new clothes for you upstairs, if you’d like to change. And there’s time for a shower, too, if you’d like.”

Unable to think of a proper response, Jake just nodded, his expression blank. He looked like a man who’d just been handed a death sentence, his brain too overloaded with emotion to deal with the facts one at a time. With his bride tucked tightly next to him, he followed Thorne out of the living room and into the future.