The Program

by Stephen White

  “Which meant what to you, Peyton?”

  “It meant, be grateful. Appreciate what we have.”

  He waited.

  “But after Robert was killed, I wasn’t sure I wanted life to go on. I didn’t feel blessed anymore. My complete life had been Robert and my baby and my work. Now all I have is my baby and as much as I love her I haven’t been able to feel like what I’m living is a complete life anymore. He used to say that all the time. He’d say, ‘Life is what life is.’ Well, I want what life was.

  “And I feel that’s wrong of me.”

  Dr. Gregory composed his next words carefully. He asked, “And this has what to do with Khalid?”

  She said, “Something, but I don’t know what. But I think I need some legal advice. Consultation. About my position.”

  “From another prosecutor?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you do that confidentially?”

  She nodded. “Sure.”

  “Do you know someone whose advice you would respect?”

  “There are people I could call. People I know from New Orleans. I can’t really call the people I worked with in Florida.”

  “But?”

  “I’d rather find someone I don’t know. Someone who doesn’t know my history. You understand?”

  He didn’t. “But you would also like me to be your net?”

  “Yes.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Robert would warn me sometimes. He’d see me struggling with something about work, or life, or our daughter—something—and I’d ask him how he dealt with it inside, how he never seemed to be conflicted or troubled by the things that would torment me so much. And he’d say, ‘You have to learn to cover your heart, K.’ That was one of the ways he was my net. When I was most vulnerable, he’d warn me when it was time to cover my heart.”

  “Was he doing you a favor?”

  “What?”

  “I’m just wondering whether he was doing you a favor by encouraging you to insulate yourself from your fears.”

  “What are you saying?”

  The therapist paused and considered his words. “Maybe Robert wasn’t always right with his advice.”

  “And you are?”

  “I’m not aware that I’m giving any.”

  She seemed taken aback. Her next defense of her dead husband was clumsy. They both sensed it. She said, “He was a good man.”

  “Yes.”

  Peyton pulled the lollipop from her mouth and pointed the little nub of candy at her therapist. “I don’t understand. What are you saying?”

  He moved slightly in his chair, shifting his posture slightly in her direction. “From your descriptions, it sounds like Robert protected you from your feelings. He encouraged you to hide from them, especially when whatever you were feeling made you uncomfortable. I wonder if he was really protecting you or whether he was protecting himself from things he didn’t want to face with you.”

  “He didn’t need protecting. Robert was strong.”

  “Perhaps so are you.”

  “He protected me.”

  “Did he?”

  5

  Prowler’s work space was tucked into the gable end of a hypercooled attic in a renovated antebellum house not too far from Atlanta, Georgia. The attic space was devoid of decoration or affectation. It contained two state-of-the-art computers—one PC, one Mac—both with twenty-one-inch monitors. A T1 line for the modems. Two fax machines, one of them color, on separate phone lines. Two televisions, one tuned to CNN, the other to MSNBC. Prowler was considering adding a third set for FOX News.

  The floor in front of the machines was a polished gray terrazzo. The man scooted from keyboard to keyboard to phone to fax on the wheels of a Herman Miller Aeron desk chair.

  One of his telephones chirped shortly after noon. He adjusted the microphone on his headset and poked a button to answer. He said, “Yes?” The second the phone chirped he’d made a silent guess about who was calling, and his caller ID had already confirmed that he was correct with his assumption. Prowler was always pleased when the caller ID worked even though the call was originating from another state.

  The voice on the other end asked, “Prowler?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m returning your call. I hope you have something for me.”

  Prowler had already decided how he was going to handle the problem with this client. He said, “The task may not be as easy as I had hoped. We still don’t know where she has been relocated. My contact at WITSEC doesn’t have access to any of her placement records. He says she’s buried deep, but we suspected that she would be. If he looks around any more closely, he’s sure he’ll draw undesired attention to himself. We can’t risk having anyone know we’re looking, right?”

  “And?”

  “And … I’m exploring other avenues.”

  “My friend and I? We don’t have unlimited time.”

  Prowler hated the way this guy referenced his “friend.”

  “I’m aware of the time constraints. What I need from you is more information on the child. Whatever you can put together. Her friends, interests, hobbies, clubs, sports. School performance, strengths, weaknesses. Medical history. Confirm her birth date while you’re at it. Quickly.”

  “You think that you can find her through—”

  Prowler lightly touched the phone button that disconnected him from the call.

  As a favor to another client, he had agreed—reluctantly—to work for this man’s friend. He felt no responsibility to be cordial to the flunky who was acting as intermediary.

  6

  After my extra session at Dr. Gregory’s office I called in sick at Q’s.

  I didn’t really need to lie about my symptoms. The tendons at the back of my head had solidified into pipes, my temples were pounding, and it took a conscious effort for me not to kneel down and vomit the contents of my stomach into one of the brick planters full of flowers on the Pearl Street Mall.

  The sous-chef at the restaurant was more understanding than I would have been were I in his shoes.

  I used a pay phone to call my Hmong babysitter, Viv, and told her that I would meet Landon at the school myself. I felt so good that she asked me if I was enjoying the weather. I told her that I was. The code I’d worked out with her dictated that if I called to change any plans about babysitting, any plans at all, even by only a few minutes, she should ask me if I was enjoying the weather. If I said that I was enjoying the weather, that was my message to her that everything was cool. If I said anything else, it meant that Viv should immediately take Landon to another location, one I’d already chosen and shown to her.

  Before I drove home I went into the bank. Inside, I stopped twice and looked around casually, checking the foot traffic on the Mall, looking for Ron Kriciak. I didn’t see him lurking anywhere. At the teller window, I cashed yet another check. This one was for eight hundred dollars. I took the money in fifties and twenties.

  Even if Ron were following me, he’d think I’d gone into the bank to cash a check for pocket money or make a deposit or something. That’s all. He wouldn’t know I was collecting so much cash. He certainly wouldn’t know why.

  Why was Ron Kriciak following me?

  Landon wanted to study some new lists of spelling words that a tutor I’d found for her had given her to prepare for the next big bee, one of the school district’s qualifiers for the big state contest. She disappeared into her room and moments later I heard her switch on a CD in her little boom box. I couldn’t have identified the group she was listening to if my life—or hers—depended on it. Girl singers, though.

  I thought they were girl singers. It could have been prepubescent boy singers. There were a lot of those around.

  I had to get more involved with that part of her life. Robert, where the hell are you? Her music was your job, damn it.

  The eight hundred dollars from the bank were still in my purse. I removed the money and placed it with the rest o
f my stash inside a book I’d hollowed out. The book was The Cider House Rules by John Irving. I bought the big hardback at a used bookstore that was going out of business on the Mall. I’d read the book once before in Louisiana and I loved it and it broke my heart to cut it up inside. But it was the only book that I had with me in Boulder that was fat enough for all the money I needed to hide.

  LANDON AND I lived in a rented town house on the east side of the Foothills Parkway, near Arapahoe Road. If you’ve never been, that’s on the side of Boulder that’s farthest from the mountains. The layout was town house typical. Downstairs was a living room, dining room, and kitchen–family room combination. Upstairs were two bedrooms, each with a bathroom. A laundry closet with one of those stacked washer/dryers opened onto the landing at the top of the stairs.

  I didn’t feel safe in the town house.

  I hadn’t felt safe anywhere since Slaughter.

  That’s not completely true. Right after we’d left Slaughter, the marshals had taken us in a van with darkened windows to a location that was more than a day’s drive from Louisiana. From there they’d driven us to a city that I guessed was Washington, D.C., but I was never really sure. They put us up in a little apartment that was in some big government building. The tidy apartment had no windows. It was inside that building that the marshals began to examine me and evaluate me and orient me to what I might expect life to be like in WITSEC.

  For those few days in that boring government building I’d felt safe.

  THE FURNITURE IN our Boulder home was rented. All that Landon and I actually owned in the town house was a small television and some kitchen things and a few personal items and our new clothing. The marshals had arranged storage for everything else before we’d moved to Boulder from Louisiana.

  I wanted to feel safe again before I sent for our things. Safe and settled. I knew that meant being out of the program. Why? Because the marshals had made it clear that they would never let me possess anything that tied me back to my life with Robert. And those were the only things I really wanted to have with me.

  I wondered sometimes when I was despairing if I’d ever send for our things, ever see them again.

  The truth was that I felt as though my life was in storage along with our belongings. The assassin had killed me just as cleanly as he’d felled Robert.

  The only difference was that I hadn’t yet died.

  • • •

  FROM THE KITCHEN I couldn’t see the landing at the bottom of the stairs, so I sat instead on the dining room floor, precisely where the dining room table would rest if I had bothered to rent one, which I hadn’t. I wanted to make sure I could hear Landon’s approach if she was coming down the stairs. But I didn’t want to be so close that she might overhear my conversation.

  I held the portable phone in my hand. I’d already memorized Carl Luppo’s number. I hadn’t tried to remember it, but like an annoying commercial jingle, I couldn’t get the darn thing out of my head after I’d read it once from the piece of paper that he’d handed me while we were leaving the teahouse that first time.

  I tapped the number into the phone and waited while I listened to three sequential rings. I was about to hang up when I heard, “Hello.”

  “Carl?”

  “Hello, Peyton.” The greeting wasn’t enthusiastic. No inflection at all. I wouldn’t even characterize it as pleasant.

  “How did you know it was me?”

  “I don’t get too many calls. Anyway, I recognized your voice. A little accent, you know. Me too, I’m told.”

  Although it was tempting, I skipped the small talk and prepared to use my DA voice. It felt odd. “Earlier, when we were walking on Pearl Street, you remember?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You said that you think Ron Kriciak is following me. Is that right?”

  “You got it mostly right. But I didn’t say ‘I think.’ I know he’s following you. I thought you’d want to be aware of it, too.”

  “How do you know? Were you following me, Carl? Or were you following Ron?” I tried not to sound accusatory but I’m sure I failed. I couldn’t pull it off with Landon, either. Robert used to tug me aside and tell me when I was backing her into a corner with my questions about her friends or her schoolwork or about her undone chores.

  He’d tell me it was the tone of my voice that was the problem.

  That’s a baby beluga, by the way.

  Carl paused in response to my verbal challenges and I considered the possibility—no, the likelihood—that he was using the time to construct a lie. I was constructing a prodding follow-up question when he surprised me by saying, “I’m not sure you’re prepared to believe my answer. So why should I give it to you?”

  I exhaled my exasperation in a little burst. Carl had to have heard the noise I made. Had to.

  He said, “Face it. You’re not who you used to be, Peyton. What you’ve gone through has changed you. Am I right? Well, the same for me. I’m not the man I used to be.”

  “But… you were a killer, Carl.” I whispered that part so that Landon couldn’t possibly overhear. “That changes?”

  I could almost hear him shrug over the phone. “You know what? Maybe you’re right. I haven’t been to mass in twenty years and I still consider myself a Catholic. I haven’t killed anybody in more than a dozen years, but maybe in my heart I’m still a gorilla and I’m just kidding myself that I’m not. It’s something I’ll ponder some more. These days I have plenty of time to ponder.”

  A gorilla?

  Carl continued. “In case you care, and I think you do, Kriciak followed you to that big old place on Baseline Road up near the mountains. You know the place? It’s like a park or something. But with a lot of buildings. Chautauqua? Is that what it’s called? I think so. There’s a place with that name in New York, I think. You went into the restaurant there.”

  “Yesterday?”

  “Yeah. Is it good there? I’ve never been.”

  “Oh God. Landon was with me. A little girl was with me? That’s my daughter, Landon.”

  “A little girl, yeah. She’s pretty. I have a granddaughter ’bout that age. But I haven’t seen her in a while. Actually she was a baby when I was last with her. I didn’t know till I saw you two that you were in the program with a kid. I would think that would be better in some ways and worse in some ways. You’d have family with you, you know. That would be a blessing. A true blessing. But I’m sure you worry about her, too.”

  I think he wanted to talk about his family. The one he’d left behind in Philadelphia or Boston or Miami or wherever he was from. I was too consumed with terror about my own situation to digress and talk about Carl’s family. I felt guilty as I asked, “Why would he follow me, Carl?”

  He paused for half a breath. Then he asked, “You been threatened at all since you moved here?”

  “No.”

  “Any reason to think you’ve been made by anyone?”

  “No. No one’s acted like they’ve recognized me. Ron’s never said anything. But I suppose that it’s possible. What’d Ron do once he followed Landon and me up to Chautauqua?”

  “I like her name. Landon. Pretty. I suppose it’s not real. It’s like Carl and Peyton, right? Ron drove away after he saw what you were doing.”

  “You mean while we were in the restaurant?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He didn’t wait around until after we were done eating?”

  “No. Maybe five minutes after you went into the Dining Hall, he left.”

  “Do you know where he went?”

  “No.”

  “Why, Carl? Why would he follow us? Is that part of what the marshals do at first for people who are new to the program?”

  “I’m no expert on the marshals. But I don’t think it’s usual. I’m 99 percent sure that nobody followed me around at the beginning. I’m pretty good at covering my rear and I never noticed a tail. Certainly not one as sloppy as the one that Ron was painting on you.”

  “Then wh
y?”

  “I don’t know why Kriciak’s all over you. Maybe the marshals have a reason to be concerned. Maybe they’ve heard something, got a tip, something that they think makes you … you know, hot. Maybe it’s something else. Like I told you once, far as I’m concerned, the book’s still out on Kriciak.”

  “They wouldn’t tell me if they thought I was hot?”

  “They give you that 800 number in Washington? The one to call in an emergency?”

  I said, “Yes.”

  “Then you’re hot enough. I had an inspector tell me once that not everybody gets that. But I don’t know exactly how the marshals think. Been trying to figure them out since I joined up. If they think the risk is acute enough—and I can promise you this is true—they’ll whisk you and your little girl away to someplace new with a couple of babysitters before you can open your mouth to complain.”

  “You mean we’d have to move again?”

  “That’s the way it works.”

  “No warning?”

  “No warning.”

  “Have you had to move?”

  “This is my second stop.”

  “You don’t trust Ron do you, Carl?”

  I could almost hear him shrug.

  “Why don’t you trust him?”

  “You develop a sense for these things,” he said. “It’s how you survive in the jungle.”

  And that, I thought, is where the gorillas live.

  “I’m gonna go now,” he said.

  “Wait. Please. There’s another part of my story I should tell you. Something I didn’t tell you before.”

  “Yeah?”

  “When I was a prosecutor in New Orleans? I was a … critic … a very public critic … of the Witness Security Program. I’m sure I made some enemies with my criticism.”

  He made a grunting noise before he asked, “How public were you?”

  “I testified before Congress. Did a lot of interviews. Even went on the Today show once.”

  “You’ve been on TV?” I thought his voice carried alarm below the surface, the way the surf drags seaweed to the shore.