53.
I WAS INSIDE THE CLOSET, TAPPING ON THE BACK WALL WITH MY WAS INSIDE THE CLOSET, TAPPING ON THE BACK WALL WITH MY knuckles. knuckles.
Our motel room was like every other I had ever seen. The front wall facing the parking lot was a prefabricated door and window with a built-in climate-control unit. The room had no other way in or out. In the back was a small bathroom on one side, a Formica counter with a mirror and vanity setup in the middle, and a step-in closet on the other side.
I tapped again on the back wall of the closet.
"What are you doing?" asked Olivia.
"One of my clients once bought a motel chain. I remember him telling me that the rooms don't back up to other rooms. There's usually a service corridor that runs the length of the building."
"So?"
"So if it's true that we're being watched, all we have to do is bust through this back wall, leave through the service corridor, and they'll never know we're gone."
Olivia came into the closet and knocked. "But it's a wall a wall."
"Not a bearing wall," I said. "It's hollow. And these studs are twenty-four inches apart, not sixteen."
"It's still a wall a wall."
I took a wire hanger from the rack and straightened it out. Holding it with both hands, I pressed the tip to the wall and pushed. It went right through, like a poker. This was going to be even easier than I'd thought; there was wallboard on only my side of the studs. The service corridor on the other side was obviously unfinished, the studs exposed. I pulled out the hanger, placed the tip an inch above the previous hole, and pushed again. Olivia caught on to what I was doing, straightened out another hanger, and started on the other side of the closet. In ten minutes we had the dotted outline of a punched rectangle on the wall.
"Stand back," I said.
Olivia stepped aside. I got a running start, jumped at the rectangle, hit it squarely with both feet, smashed right through it-and landed flat on my ass on the concrete floor of the dark service corridor, covered from head to toe with broken bits of wallboard.
"Owww-shit."
Olivia appeared in the opening, gazing through the dust. "Are you all right?"
My breath was gone. "This never happens to Jason Bourne."
Olivia climbed through the hole and helped me to my feet. I brushed the debris from my shirt as I looked around. One end of the corridor was blocked by laundry carts that were over-flowing with towels and linens. The door at the other end was clear.
"This way," I said, leading her down the hall at a medium jog. The door was unlocked, and we stepped into a sunny courtyard. It took a moment to get my bearings. If the entrance to our room was being watched, we were out of view, no longer right on busy Tonnelle Avenue. I led Olivia around the building, away from our room, to the opposite side of the motel. A cab was parked beneath the carport. We hurried toward it and jumped in the backseat.
The driver put down his newspaper.
"Where to?"
"Nutley," I said. Nick, the driver who had taken my grandparents to the airport, lived in New Jersey, and I was hoping he would have some idea what had gone wrong last night.
"Where about in Nutley?"
I'd been to Nick's house for his daughter's First Communion, but I didn't remember the exact address.
"Walnut Street, I think. I'll recognize the house. Just hurry."
"You got it," he said.
The meter started running, and both Olivia and I ducked down to the floor as the taxi pulled onto Tonnelle Avenue.
"Hey, hey," said the driver. "None of that in my cab."
We stayed low until we were a good half mile from the motel, then climbed back into our seats. Olivia gazed out the window at oncoming traffic on the divided highway, a wan expression on her face, as if searching hopelessly for her daughter. I should have let her have time to herself, but something was weighing on my mind.
"Why did it bother you so much when I told you that Burn knew Ivy as 'Vanessa'?"
Olivia glanced back, seemingly puzzled. "I told you: That's the name Ivy used after she disappeared."
"What was her surname?"
Again, she bristled-the same way she had earlier, when I told her that Burn had used the name Vanessa."
"What?"
"When Ivy became Vanessa," I said, "what was her last name?"
Olivia continued to fumble-why, I wanted to find out.
"I don't know," she said.
She turned her attention back to the passing cars and road signs. I let it go. Her reaction was more telling than anything. Something wasn't adding up.
I checked Mallory's smart phone. Back at the motel, calls had come through, but it had been an Internet dead zone. Now I was getting the Web. On a hunch, I linked Vanessa with Olivia's surname-"Hernandez"-and ran it through the electronic white pages. The result wasn't promising: "Hernandez," the search summary told me, was the twenty-second most common surname in America. Slap "Vanessa" in front of it, and the full name was only slightly less popular than "Valerie Clark"-1,950,000 hits. In a last-ditch effort, I typed "Vanessa Hernandez and Ivy Layton" and pressed Search. Only a few hits came up, and I clicked on a link that took me to a photo gallery for "Ivy Layton." Most of the photos looked to be twenty years old or more. My specific link was to a photograph of two high school girls wearing soccer uniforms. I looked closer. One of them was named Ivy Layton. I didn't recognize her. The girl next to her was named Vanessa Hernandez, and I froze.
It was Ivy.
Her hair was longer and darker, her face more girlish, but eighteen-year-old Vanessa Hernandez from Gulliver Academy in Coral Gables, Florida, class of 1990, had grown into the woman I knew as "Ivy Layton."
My head was spinning. Admittedly, I had never known much about Ivy's childhood. She'd told me that she was home-schooled in Chile. That her mother-Olivia-was from Santiago. Her father, long since deceased, was an engineer in the mining business. Details were sparse; Ivy didn't like to talk about the past. "Life's about the future," she would tell me. She was so full of energy, and I was so in love with her, that her forward focus always seemed healthy to me. Now it seemed duplicitous, perhaps nefarious.
I clicked on the Home button on the menu bar, and I discovered that I wasn't in just any photo gallery. It was a memorial memorial book-a tribute to Ivy Layton that her friends had created for the tragic no-show at their ten-year high school reunion. She'd died in a car crash. Ivy had not become Vanessa after she'd disappeared from our sailboat. Vanessa Hernandez had become Ivy Layton. For the short period of time I had known her, Ivy-Vanessa-had used the name of a deceased high school girlfriend so that she could become...what? book-a tribute to Ivy Layton that her friends had created for the tragic no-show at their ten-year high school reunion. She'd died in a car crash. Ivy had not become Vanessa after she'd disappeared from our sailboat. Vanessa Hernandez had become Ivy Layton. For the short period of time I had known her, Ivy-Vanessa-had used the name of a deceased high school girlfriend so that she could become...what?
And why?
"Here you go, buddy," said the driver. "Walnut Street."
I looked up. Nutley's former residents included everyone from Martha Stewart to Little Sammy Corsaro, a Gambino crime family soldier. Nick's part of Nutley was more along the Little Sammy lines. To my left, a huge willow tree overpowered the small yard, hiding all but the screened-in porch of an old frame house.
I spotted Nick in his driveway.
"Stop!"
The cabbie hit the breaks. Nick looked over. The black suit and cap that he wore as a limo driver were instantly recognizable, but it was odd to see him dressed that way behind the wheel of his own modest Chevy. He was backing out to the street, on his way to work, giving me no time to confront Olivia about Ivy's real name.
"Go," she told me, "I'll cover the fare."
I jumped out of the cab, ran across the street, and practically threw myself in the path of Nick's car. He stopped at the end of the driveway and cranked down his window.
"Mr. C., what are you doing here?"
I was about to explain my paranoia about using a cell phone-Ivy's warning that McVee might be listening-but skipped it. "I wanted to talk to you about last night. Did you get my grandparents to the airport okay?"
My question put him on the defensive. "Yeah, almost two hours before the flight. Something wrong?"
"They didn't get on the plane. And no one has heard from them since."
He seemed genuinely shocked. "That's weird."
"Did you see anything strange? Anyone at the airport who looked out of the ordinary?"
"Nuttin' that worried me," said Nick. "They seemed in good hands when I left."
"Whose hands?"
"There was a woman who met them at the curb."
"You mean curbside check-in?"
"No, I dealt with that. She was...a friend, I thought. Good lookin', too. Anyways, they seemed to know her and were glad to see her-really glad. Like they ain't seen each other for a long time. I didn't think nothin' of it." glad. Like they ain't seen each other for a long time. I didn't think nothin' of it."
I froze, almost too perplexed to ask. "Did you catch her name?"
"Your grandpa called her Ivy."
Ivy.
"Mr. C.," said Nick, breaking my chain of thought. "I know you got a lot on your mind, but I heard about the bankruptcy on the news this morning. I was just wondering about my stock."
"You own shares of Saxton Silvers?"
"Well, yeah. The wife and me, we been saving for years, but it just wasn't keeping up with the way tuition was rising. You seemed like a successful guy. So we talked it over and put the kids' college fund in the market. That's not gone, is it?"
It felt like a knife in my belly. I wondered how many guys like Nick were out there. "We'll talk about that," I said.
My cell rang. Mallory's cell. I didn't recognize the number, so I ignored it, figuring that it was probably one of Mallory's girlfriends trying to reach her. Immediately it rang again-the same caller redialing rather than going to voice mail, as if the message were urgent. I was so out of sorts from what I'd just heard from Nick that I'd momentarily forgotten Ivy's warning about using the cell phone. I answered it.
"Michael, it's me." Her voice was racing.
"Ivy?"
"Shut up and answer this question yes or no: Are you still in New Jersey?"
Suddenly I remembered the eavesdropping, and I was afraid to say. "Why is that import-"
"Stop!" she said. "I don't care where you are. Get to North Bergen and go to the nearest DQ."
"What?"
"Focus, Michael. Listen to exactly exactly what I'm saying. Meet me at the North Bergen DQ. How soon can you get there?" what I'm saying. Meet me at the North Bergen DQ. How soon can you get there?"
"Well, we just got out of a cab so-"
"Stop it! Less than half an hour or more?"
"Less-I think."
"Good. Get there as fast as you can. You got that? Go to the DQ DQ. Right now! And take the battery out of Mallory's phone before you go."
"What?"
"Just do it! Remove the battery and go!"
The call ended, and she was gone.
Olivia came up the driveway, clearly alarmed by the expression on my face. "Everything okay?"
I slid the battery off the back of the phone, then looked at Nick and said, "We need a ride."
54.
"JUST GOT OUT OF A CAB CAB?" SAID SAID J JASON W WALD.
Wald was in the back of a white van that was parked in the bus lot across the street from the Tonnelle Avenue motel. Seated in the captain's chair beside him, wearing headphones, was his tech expert. Between them was a laptop computer. Weeks earlier, Mallory Cantella's "boyfriend," Nathaniel, had given them everything they needed to program Mallory's cell with spy software. Ivy's conversation with Michael had come through the speakers on the laptop in real time, loud and clear.
"How did they get out of the motel without us seeing them?" asked Wald.
It was their job to let Burn know exactly when Michael and Olivia made a move. A wireless camera on the fence was aimed at the motel room door, with either Wald or his tech guy watching the image on their computer screen at all times.
"What does the GPS say?" Wald said.
"For some reason the spyware still isn't giving me a read from the cell phone."
"What about Olivia's car?" Wald had gone over in the middle of the night and planted a backup under the bumper.
The tech guy pulled up the satellite coordinates on the computer screen. "The car hasn't moved."