by Schow, Ryan
After a moment, Agent Straus said, “This license plate belongs to an Audi S5 registered to one Christian Swann of Palo Alto.”
Atticus Van Duyn, he thought with a grin.
After a short conversation, Agent Straus activated the GPS tracker on Savannah Van Duyn’s car, and synched it up with their internal monitoring and control system. Every time Savannah passed under a traffic camera, as well as the private security cameras in gas stations, shopping malls, and businesses both privately owned as well as corporately owned, the NSA’s vehicle recognition system would ping. Basically the system could track her by camera across the entire city while providing a live feed for it all.
Hello NSA.
Good-bye personal privacy.
Upon request, Shelton gave Agent Straus the IP address of the computer system he would be using to run Straus’s program. Straus said it was a mirror program, that he would be mirroring Straus’s own computer. He gave Shelton detailed instructions. Shelton took copious notes.
“I trust you understand the significance of what you’re asking me to do,” Agent Straus said, his voice steadfast and grave, “but in case you don’t, this is treason, and treason is still punishable by death in some circles.”
Gotlieb countered by saying, “‘Thou shalt not kill’ is also a law, punishable by both death and an eternity in Hell, if such a place exists.”
“For this favor,” Strauss replied, “I will no longer be in your debt.”
“Consider all debts paid in full.”
5
Shelton Gotlieb’s computer quietly pinged every time Savannah’s license plate was nabbed on camera. The program ran continuously. Once the GPS on the Audi submitted a voluntary shut-down, a different ping sounded and all remaining cameras with the target in sight were activated and fed into a grid setup to Shelton’s computer.
At first he watched the girl who was once Savannah Van Duyn, the girl who was now someone else—someone exquisitely beautiful—but then he got bored and fetched himself a drink. The different ping sounded as he was making his way back into his office. He moved a little faster, sat down, nearly spilled his soda.
The screen was broken down into a grid with three screens giving him different views of the S5. It was parked at the Embarcadero. Pier 1 ½. She was handing her keys to a valet. He watched the valet open the Audi, get in and start it. Then he watched the girl meet up with a woman he knew well, if only by her love of the tabloids: Margaret Van Duyn. They hugged. It looked forced, both bodies awkward.
“Family issues,” he murmured.
Following the instructions Straus had given him, he isolated and took control of one camera in particular—the one with the best picture (a nearby security camera with surprisingly clear resolution), then zoomed in on Savannah.
She was even better looking up close. Perfect, in fact. He punched the screen-capture function, then transferred the photo of her face to his hard drive.
From there he accessed the “Print” feature, set the settings to “High Resolution Photo” then selected one copy. Within seconds, he had her picture in hand. He studied it for a moment, sipping almost absent-mindedly from his fizzy soda.
“Incredible,” he said as he chewed on a shard of ice. Her beauty defied description. He picked up the secure phone, made the call.
When the Director picked up, Shelton said, “I found her. Savannah Van Duyn. Except she is not the Savannah Van Duyn we all remember. This is Gerhard’s version of her and she’s remarkable.”
The Director said, “Good, prepare the boy. Make sure he studies her photo. After that last failed attempt, I don’t want any more surprises.”
The last failed attempt being the death of an entire family of three and one nosey old neighbor. Delta 1A had gone haywire.
“Yes, sir.”
“I understand the boy’s system is stable now.”
“It is, sir.”
There was a pause on the line. One long enough for Shelton to voice his concern. “Sir, with the Virginia Corporation in ruin, and all the members dead or missing, is this a job we must finish? What I mean to say is, whether the girl lives or dies, I’m not sure our clients are even paying much attention.”
The dream of avenging Autumn and getting back at Gerhard by slaughtering the girl no longer had him frothing at the mouth. He had other things to do. Things that felt like they may be more important.
“We took a substantial fee for that job,” the Director said, “did we not?”
“Indeed.”
“Then we finish. Simple as that.”
“Yes, sir.” The disappointment in his voice shined through. Inside, he chastised himself for his transparency.
“Despite the…nature of our work, we are still men of honor. If we’ve been paid for a job, we finish the job, regardless of the circumstances, peculiar as they may be.”
Without a proper good-bye, the Director hung up, leaving Shelton with an empty line. On the camera facing Pier 1 ½, Shelton watched Savannah and her mother walk into La Mar, the Peruvian restaurant best known for its upscale décor, amazing seafood, and a charismatic staff.
He lost sight of the women, but time escaped him, too. Finally, Shelton picked up the phone to tell the boy’s handler to ready their assassin. Before he could make the call, however, he set the phone back down. Why this battle of conscience? he wondered. Why these second thoughts?
Shelton fought to clear his mind. When he was finally resolute, when his mind was unclouded, he picked up the phone, dialed the extension. The boy’s handler came on the line.
“I have the girl,” Shelton said. “Delta 1A is to eliminate her with extreme prejudice.”
“Method of cancellation?” the man asked.
“Use whatever means necessary to completely end her. I want her in a million bloody pieces, only her face recognizable. Then I want the slop of her dumped like wet garbage somewhere public. Like down by the Warf, or on Broadway. Someplace with maximum exposure. How you achieve this result is up to you, but it must be messy and it must be done right away.”
“That will not be a problem.”
The Unf*ckable Princess
1
The monster just stares at me. I feel her eyes on me, which is why my eyes are fixed firmly upon the menu. All I hear for a moment is her breathing.
Ugh.
Sitting on teal blue chairs on the outdoor patio with tall plants all around me and the salty smell of ocean water wafting through the air, I imagine I’m alone, that the thing that calls itself my mother is somewhere else doing something else.
My eyes skim La Mar’s menu. The various dishes are worthy of my undivided attention. At last I pick the empanadas de tamalito verde, an empanada filled with sweet corn, cilantro and queso fresco, served with salsa criolla and huancaina rocoto sauceis. How can I resist?
It feels perfect for a day like today.
When it’s time to order, Margaret gets some variation of the Dungess Crab. I ask the waiter for the empanadas. He smiles and leaves to place our order, and I let out a deep breath and stare across the table at Margaret. Honestly, I don’t want to be here. Margaret insisted.
Whatever.
At least I’ll be uncomfortable. The upside is there are people all around us, so we’ve got white noise to mask the screaming silence of our overtly dysfunctional relationship.
Thank God for small favors.
“I want to fix us,” Margaret finally says. She looks amazing from head to toe. Even her makeup is flawless. Something she couldn’t get right when she was drunk or high. Even as perfect looking as I have become, I am envious of her. Stupid, I know. Sometimes I just don’t understand myself. Maybe I never will.
“You can’t undo the past, Margaret, and if having a future means more awkward luncheons like this, you’re going to have to let me start drinking.”
It’s uncanny how easily cruelty comes to me.
“You look great, by the way,” Margaret says. “Are you doing crossfit or something?”
Sh
e’s talking about the muscle definition in my arms and how small my waist has become. Because of karate, because my sensei is the most ruthless, unforgiving man I’ve ever met—a relentless, heartless perfectionist—my body looks better now than when I came out of the glass canister. My arms are chiseled, the lines in my stomach like something out of a fitness magazine, my legs shapely without being bulky.
The monster is basically saying I look perfect.
But to be honest, with Rebecca gone, my confidence in tatters, and me being overwhelmed by fear and anger and the driving need to exact swift and bloody revenge on Dr. Heim, how I look barely even matters anymore.
“Karate,” I answer. “Crossfit is for pussies compared to the way my sensei works me.”
Margaret looks like she doesn’t know what to say. If she knew the things I’ve done lately—the horrors I’ve survived, how three times now I’ve shamelessly escaped death—she’d be the first to insist on self-defense lessons.
“I’m sure dad told you some maniac attacked us in our home and kidnapped Rebecca back.”
“I wanted to talk to you about that,” Margaret says, solemn.
“Did dad tell you exactly what happened?” I want to know if Margaret told my father how I’m officially death-proof. For some reason, I don’t want him knowing my secret. And I don’t want her to know what really happened. She would never again sleep a peaceful night in her life.
“He said you were asleep when someone came in and stole Rebecca. I didn’t know you had seen the man.”
The look on her lovely face is concern. So my father didn’t tell her the whole story, about him finding me tied to my bed with my shirt and bra burned open. With the ashes of my miraculously healed chest sitting on me like a dozen stamped out cigarettes, sans the cigarette butts.
“I’m getting Rebecca back,” I tell her. “That’s why I’m doing karate. And that’s why discussing our relationship seems so trivial to me right now. Barely even important.”
“You can’t stop, can you?” Margaret says. “You can’t try to be nice, just this once?”
My brain stalls. Makes me slow down and consider the crap coming out of my mouth. If you ask anyone with a sense of etiquette, these days, it’s rude to say whatever’s on your mind.
“I’m sorry. It’s just that I don’t know what’s happening to Rebecca, what’s being done to her, and I need to get her back.”
Margaret’s eyes glisten. She looks away. By now, others have heard our conversation—parts of it anyway—and they’re looking at me like whatever’s making Margaret cry is all my fault. Jesus, is she really crying? I’m the one with the problems here!
“What?” I say to an old woman who’s looking at me with something like disappointment in her eyes. Then to Margaret: “Can you please stop acting like such a drama queen? People are thinking I’m abusing you.”
There’s a remorseless chill to my voice that has me wondering if her and I will ever get along. That old saying about there being too much water under the bridge, I know exactly what it means. It means a parent can do enough bad shit to a child to later insure no apology in the world will ever right their numerous wrongs.
“Will you ever forgive me?” Margaret says.
What I want to say is my training this morning absolutely kicked my ass. I’m dehydrated, fresh out of puke, bled dry of any patience. Plus, my body is still smoldering from the healing taking place. The thing about me being super human to my sensei is he pushes me harder and harder. Today he and I sparred straight for three hours without rest. The fact that he’s not super human and can still dominate me absolutely terrifies me. I want to tell Margaret I’m preoccupied, that forgiveness is a luxury I will not offer her right now. I can’t afford to be even the slightest bit weak.
“I asked you a question,” Margaret says, wiping her eyes. The old woman at the table next to us, she’s abandoned her own conversation to monitor ours.
I’d rather be asleep than having this conversation. I want to be anywhere but here. I want to tell Margaret if I didn’t have my hatred for her stored like burning diesel fuel inside me, I don’t know who I would be. But how do you say such a thing to your mother?
“I don’t know.” Lying, I say, “But if it’s any consolation, I’ve officially stopped thinking of you as a monster.”
“Yet you can’t think of me as a mother either.”
Now it’s my turn to look away. “No,” I whisper. Next to us, the old woman is all exasperated sighs and rolling eyes. When you’re eavesdropping, sometimes all you really ever get is half the story. If I was to paint that old broad a picture of my life with Margaret Van Duyn, she might switch sides and start rooting for me.
“Eat your yellow-tail lady, it’s getting cold,” I say to her. She makes a face and shakes her head, like she really can’t believe the audacity of…well, me.
“Like father like daughter,” Margaret mutters.
“Whatever that means.”
“It means you both could stand a lesson in manners. Like not being rude to strangers, or in your father’s case, not chucking food at the paparazzi.”
“He threw food at the paparazzi?” I say, stunned, half laughing.
“Yep,” Margaret replies, her mouth curving into a smile so spare I almost miss it. Now I’m smiling and it feels like a moment, but the moment passes and once again, we return to the funk that is our relationship.
In my mind I’m thinking, it’ll never work between us.
Never.
Margaret says, “These things you say to me, the hostility you feel, I don’t know where we go from here.”
The food is arriving and it looks just delectable.
“Our separate ways, perhaps.”
Margaret eyes her crab and says, “I don’t think so. Even though you look nothing like me, and most of my genetic influence in you is gone, I’m still your mother, and you’re still my daughter.”
“You say tomato, I say—”
“Don’t minimize this with your shitty sense of humor, please.”
“You let them make me white, Margaret. I’m not complaining, it’s just, at this point, if I wanted anything from you, it was to at least share the same heritage.”
“That wasn’t my fault.”
The waiter looks at us like it pains him to interrupt, but he has a job to do. “Can I get either one of you anything else?” he asks. Me and Margaret shake our heads politely and thank him. “Well, enjoy your meals then.” The way he says it is like he knows for sure we won’t be enjoying anything.
I say, “I think you want the impossible. Some hyped up mother daughter relationship that can’t possibly exist. Not with our history.”
“This is all that matters to me, Abby,” she says. “Not the hyped up part. The relationship part.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to love you, because I’m done being selfish, because I want us to be a family for once. A real family.”
I can’t stop the laughter that erupts from my mouth. If I would have taken a bite of my food, it would have sprayed all over the table. Margaret stares at me in disbelief. Everyone else is staring, too.
“I’m sorry,” I say. But really I’m not.
2
All in all, having lunch with Margaret pretty much sucks ass in the summer. Her good mood earlier, I quickly learn it’s paper thin.
The only time we actually get along is when we see this wrinkly old woman with brunette hair and a fake ponytail that doesn’t match the sheen of her real hair, and we both agree she looks ridiculous. Other than that, the silence between us could suffocate a Grizzly bear, so we spend the bulk of the time eavesdropping on the glossy, plastic conversations of everyone else.
When we leave, Margaret’s eyes start to water again, and honest to God, she’s so emotional it’s making me mental.
“What now?” I ask, making no attempt to hide my irritation. She shakes her head no, so I say, “Thanks for lunch?” and it’s the absolute wrong thing to say. Fig
hting like crazy to keep her emotions in check, but losing, she gets into her Bentley, starts it up, then puts on her big sunglasses, slams the car into gear and takes off.
“Bat shit freaking crazy,” I mutter to myself as I get into my Audi. How I ever got a mother like her, it makes me believe in a past life I was the soggiest douchebag ever. Is this my karmic punishment? It has to be! It’s the only reasonable explanation.
3
The minute I walk through the front door of Netty’s home, Netty wants to know how lunch went.
“How do you think it went?” I say.
“Like Visitor’s Day at the loony bin?”
“Sort of,” I say, flopping down on the couch, “but more subtle. More like drip torture than water-boarding.”
“I don’t know how you deal with her,” Netty says. “If my mother was like that, I swear I would institutionalize myself.”
“Trust me, the thought’s crossed my mind. Speaking of mothers, is yours home?”
“Not for couple of hours. This single guy wants to host a swinger’s party, but he doesn’t have a ‘wife,’ so my mother is at an escort service getting him one.”
“An escort service?”
“She’s getting him a girl he can pay for, a girl he won’t have sex with. Basically he’s going to buy a date so someone else can have her while he hooks up with some other guy’s wife.”
“That makes no sense at all.”
“My mother says he’s worth half a billion dollars. Guys worth that much are into money, drugs and the kind of kinky shit you and me and our virgin minds can’t even begin to imagine. At least that’s what my mother said.”
“What do you mean, kinky shit?” I say with a sly grin.
Netty laughs out loud and says, “I said the same thing to my mother,” and we both start laughing. The thing is, we’re not little girls anymore. We’re becoming women.
“And what did she say?”
“She said I had my whole life to become sexually dysfunctional and now wasn’t the time for me to start.”
