The Road To Ruin

11

ANNE MARIE DIDN’T LIKE it when Andy brooded, because it happened so seldom that it had to mean something serious had gone wrong. He’d been his usual cheery optimistic self when he’d left for Pennsylvania with John and the others, but in the three days since, his mood had considerably darkened. Not unhappy, exactly, or angry. Mostly he seemed to be stymied, to have walked into a wall somehow, unable to move, and therefore unable to catch up with his regular buoyant self.

Generally speaking, Anne Marie left Andy to be Andy, with no interference from her. He was like a smooth-running but intricate machine whose workings were completely unknowable, and therefore not to be messed with. For instance, she knew how to drive a car and considered herself a good driver, but there were some special high-performance vehicles she wouldn’t dare try to take control of, and that’s what Andy was to her: too complex and abrupt to steer.

But this funk had been going on for three days, which was an eternity in the weather of Andy Kelp, and it showed no signs of improving, so finally, in the midafternoon of the third day, a Saturday, when yet again she walked into the living room and Andy was slumped in his favorite chair, gazing glassy-eyed in the general direction of the television set, which didn’t happen to be switched on, she had to try at least kicking the tires a little: “Hi, Andy.”

“Hi.” His smile was as chipper as ever, but there didn’t seem to be anything behind it.

Feeling suddenly like the wife in a soap opera, although she was neither, she sat on the sofa, where she could see him most directly, and said, “Andy?”

His eyes rolled toward her; his brows lifted slightly. The smile on his lips was small and nostalgic, as though he were remembering happy times rather than being in them. “Mm?”

“What’s wrong, Andy?”

He sat up straighter. He looked surprised. “Wrong? Nothing’s wrong.”

“Ever since you came back from Penn—”

“Oh, that,” he said, and brushed it away, as though now he understood what she was talking about and it was nothing, nothing. “That’s not my problem,” he said. “That’s John’s problem.”

“What problem?”

“His.”

“Andy,” Anne Marie said, “what’s John’s problem that you keep thinking about?”

“Do I keep thinking about it?” He considered that. “Huh. Maybe I do, from time to time. You see, Anne Marie, we wanna get into this place—”

“I know,” she said. “That’s what you do.”

“Right.” Andy nodded. “That’s what we do. Get into a place, get what we want, get out, game over. The thing is, this place, you can’t get in. I mean, you really can’t get in.”

“So no game,” Anne Marie suggested.

“Well, the thing is,” Andy said, “John came up with a great way to get in, a really great way. But now we’re stuck. We can’t make that way work. I mean, John can’t.”

Anne Marie said, “Do you want to tell me about it?”

“It won’t do any good, but sure, why not?” He adjusted himself more comfortably in his chair, and said, “The guy has this huge compound surrounded by electric fence and guards, no way through it without being seen and heard. The guy is also a rat, so the ships are deserting him. Not the ships, his crew, his staff, the people that work for him. So he’s got like a skeleton crew there, and John’s brilliant idea is, we hire on. We’re working for the guy, naturally we’re on the property.”

“Well, that is a brilliant idea,” Anne Marie said, “if he’s hiring.”

“Oh, he’s hiring,” Andy said. “Or he would be, if anybody’d show up. Our trouble is, anybody he hires has to be checked by the law. Chester couldn’t work for him any more because he was an ex-con. All of us are ex-cons, Anne Marie, all four of us, John and Tiny and Stan and me. What we need is new ID, and we don’t know how to do that. I mean, we know how to go to Arnie Albright the fence and buy a driver’s license, a credit card, it won’t burn to the ground for another two, three days, but that stuff doesn’t survive an inspection. Not by a bankruptcy court or a lot of feds. How do you get a different identity that stands up? That’s why John is down in the dumps about right now.”

“And you, too,” she told him.

“Well, maybe a little.” He shrugged. “Still, it’s John’s brilliant idea, so it’s John that feels so bad.”

She shook her head, surveying him. “You just wasted three days,” she said.

He gave her his alert look, almost like the old days. “I did?”

“We’re gonna have to remember this, Andy,” she said. “Any time you’ve got a problem, you’ve got to talk it out with me. Mostly, all I’ll be able to give you is sympathy, but that’s not so bad.”

“Not bad at all,” he agreed.

“But this time,” she said, “I’m almost positive I can solve your problem.”

“Come on, Anne Marie,” he said. “You’re gonna run some birth certificates off on your computer? This stuff has to stand up.”

“That’s what I’m talking about. Andy, you know, when I was a kid, my father was a congressman, in Congress, from the great state of Kansas.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Well, for a lot of that time,” she said, “and when I was in college, and after, he was on the Select Intelligence Committee in the Congress, to liaise with the FBI and the CIA and all of those other people in the intelligence community. The spooks.”

“Spies.”

“They call themselves spooks,” she informed him.

“They do?” Andy scratched an ear. “Have they thought that through?”

“It’s what they call themselves.”

“Okay.” Nodding, he said, “Select Intelligence, you said. What’s Select Intelligence?”

“You have all this news coming in,” she explained, “from all over the world, all this intelligence, what they call the raw data. Select Intelligence is when you select the parts that agree with what you already wanted to do.”

“Okay,” Andy said. “That sounds about right.”

“And my father,” Anne Marie said, “got to know this guy called Jim Green that was a substitute identity specialist.”

“Jim Green.”

“He said he called himself that because it was the easiest name in the world to forget.”

“That wasn’t his real name? What was his real name?”

“No one will ever know. Andy, Jim Green’s job was to put together new identifications for spooks, identification packages so real, so secure, they could travel in foreign countries, they could be arrested, they could testify in court, they could do anything and the identification would hold up.”

“That’s pretty good,” Andy allowed.

Anne Marie said, “It’s better than the Witness Protection Program. There’s retired spooks now with murder charges against them, fatwas out on them, death sentences passed on them, living under a new identification that Jim Green gave them, they’re safe forever, die in their own beds at a hundred.”

“Of what?”

“Old age. The point is, he could give you and John exactly what you need.”

Andy, doubtful, said, “Why would he?”

“I knew him for years,” she said. “He and my parents were neighbors in D.C. He’s retired now, but I’m sure I could find him.”

“And you think he’d do this for you.”

“Oh, sure.” Laughing lightly, she said, “He always liked me. He used to dandle me on his knee.”

“When you were a little girl.”

“Oh, seventeen, eighteen,” she said. Getting to her feet, she said, “Let me make some calls.”