by Frank Sibila
“Wonder if she’s headed for New York, too,” said Yorick.
“Really,” said Urich.
“Too many people headed our way,” said the woman with the bracelets. “The East Coast’s gonna sink.”
The newcomer entered, hesitating at the doorway just long enough to peer left and right, like a gunfighter scanning the street for bushwhackers. She did not take off her sunglasses, but instead moved to one of the stools, growling something to the waitress about coffee and plenty of it. Any pretenses of inconspicuousness were doomed, of course, but she might have wanted it that way, in which case they could be more accurately considered suicidal.
“So, ummm,” Yorick said.
Felicia, who had been seeking refuge in the laminated menu, now looked up, waiting. When he failed to say much beyond “ummm,” she prodded, “Yes?”
“What got you started in this business, anyway?”
“That’s more personal than I like questions to get,” she said, addressing the menu as if it had been the one to pry.
“I get it,” he said sagely. “Top secret, right?”
“You’ve got it,” she told the lunch specials.
“Can you tell me what it’s like? Your workday, I mean?”
Her eyes flickered toward him. “And that’s not personal?”
“I’m just making conversation.”
“We can talk about any number of things, honey. Just not why I do what I do. I get enough of that from my mom.”
“She doesn’t approve?”
“Oh, she’s in the business, too. Just like my sisters. Just doesn’t like me working for one of the big outfits.”
Yorick’s eyebrows did strange things before settling together as a neutral, straight line. “I didn’t know you guys had that much competition.”
“What are you, blind?”
“Come on,” he said. “I’m just curious about how it works. I mean, I’ve only seen it from Frank’s end.”
She studied him, examining his bland countenance the same way she would have an abandoned tomb for trapdoors. Eventually she appeared to judge him harmless, because that’s when she put the menu down and sighed, “Frank’s end is the easy end, George.”
“I can imagine. I mean, he had the original idea, he got it all organized, and he’s in charge, giving orders, but you’re the one out in the field, doing legwork. It must be a challenge every minute.”
The many reactions battling for supremacy behind her weary eyes did include a microscopic atom of confusion, shouting and waving its arms and saying, “Here, listen to me! We’re not talking about the same thing at all,” but Yorick failed to pick up on it, and Felicia went for the easier interpretation. “It’s nothing glamorous. I mean, it can be kind of fun sometimes, being naughty, and helping other people be naughty. But when all is said and done, every trick is pretty much like every other trick. You know what I mean?”
Yorick gulped. “I never guessed it would get so old.”
The woman at the counter, the one with the wraparound sunglasses and black wig, trembled a little at that. Her right hand curled into a fist and mimed hitting the counter once, twice, three times. Yorick would have thought she was choking on something had she had any time to order, let alone eat. Maybe she had a neurological disorder or something.
In his zeal to avoid staring, he dove in where he’d already been wading. “Still,” he said, “what’s with you and Frank? I mean, I was a little surprised that the two of you didn’t already know each other.”
Felicia said, “I don’t know what kind of juice you have to get a heavy-hitter like Frank personally involved in your case, but it’s not always like that. It’s a big organization, you know? He’s got people to report to him, and people to report to the people who report to him. Normally, a guy like him, he’s got entire layers of protection between himself and the streets. It’s not unusual for someone like me to work a town and never come within ten miles of him.”
Yorick had looked up Frank’s Web site and seen the TV interviews on YouTube but never imagined that Fake Alibi, Inc., could be such a massive corporation. “I guess I should be flattered he took an interest.”
The waitress emerged from the kitchen bearing a tuna salad sandwich on rye speared with festive purple-cellophane toothpicks, and a bacon cheeseburger on onion roll with a huge side of chips. She placed these in front of Anastasia and the other George, took orders from Yorick and Felicia, and then dealt with the woman at the counter, who seemed to be suppressing hysteria.
Felicia lowered her voice. “Let me tell you something. I get the idea that you might not entirely appreciate the kind of man you’re dealing with. So let me tell you something the people around my agency say about Frank.”
“Sure.”
“I’m not saying that this is a true story or one I’ve been close to. It’s just something I heard.”
“Got it.”
“A couple of years ago, Frank had a business associate—we’ll call him Paco—who was doing something he shouldn’t have been doing with somebody he shouldn’t have been doing it with. Word got out, reached the wrong set of ears, and Paco found himself in serious trouble. You follow?”
“Sure,” Yorick said. “That kind of thing is the whole basis of Frank’s business.”
“Right. So Paco reaches out to Frank for help, and Frank calls, of all places, Vatican City. He gets a certain high-ranking cardinal on the line, someone who owes Frank a favor, and tells him, hey, Your Eminence, I got a friend named Paco who needs to explain where he was on such and such a day, when everybody says he was out getting himself hooked up with the wrong kind of mess. The cardinal says, ‘Sure, Frank, for you, I’ll say he was here in the Vatican with me, having a one-on-one audience with the Pope.’”
Yorick was in awe. “I never knew he had such connections!”
“All the way to the top, George. So Frank gets the documents and travel records proving that Paco was in the Sistine Chapel on the night of the seventeenth, when in reality he was in Passaic, New Jersey. And everybody knows it’s bullshit, but hey, it’s the Holy Catholic Church saying otherwise. So everybody’s happy … except that the Pontiff himself somehow gets wind of it in between waving at people, gets angrier than you ever imagined that smiling old man capable of being, and calls the cardinal on the carpet. And he says, ‘What’s this I hear about you using your office to sell alibis?’ And the cardinal says, ‘I’m sorry, Father, I won’t do it again.’ And the Pope says, ‘That’s not good enough. You’ve done us some serious damage here. You better make it right if you still want to have a job this time tomorrow.’ So the cardinal calls Frank and says, ‘Sorry, but my hands are tied. I have to take another look at my appointment calendar and admit I made a mistake.’ And Frank says, ‘Don’t worry about it, Excellency, I’ll take care of it.’”
Yorick now had stars in his eyes. “Wow!”
“And the bottom line,” Felicia said, “is that according to the story as I’ve heard it, Frank made one more phone call, I’m not saying to who, and the whole thing went away. Immediately. I don’t know whether it was a threat or a bribe or just an exchange of favors. I don’t even know if the story’s true, but the cardinal kept his job, the Holy Father kept his mouth shut, Paco kept his alibi, and everybody was happy except for the people who would have liked to put Paco at the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong person. They got nothing. And that’s the kind of guy we’re dealing with, George. And that’s why it’s not surprising that he and I never met before. I’m just one of his spare parts.”
Conversation in the next booth had stilled, save for a single loud gulp from the mysterious George Urich. He said, “You know something, Anastasia? We’ve had some fun, but I’m not sure I still see this as a carefree whim….”
“It isn’t,” the woman at the counter said. She whirled, whipping off her sunglasses in the kind of
gesture that demanded, but failed to receive, a dramatic guitar chord. “My name’s Vanessa. Frank sent me.”
Vanessa was, of course, Monica Custer.
And she was ebullient.
Trailing Frank and Yorick and Felicia all morning long while waiting for Frank to leave the pair to their own devices had been a challenge and a half, even if it hadn’t quite caused her to break the sweat the tension and Vegas heat would have demanded.
Trailing their rental car had been somewhat less difficult, thanks to Yorick’s vainglorious choice of a convertible. All she really had to do was keep up till the first rest stop and then toss a GPS device purchased at Spy Shop into their backseat. It helped that Felicia seemed determined to test the bathroom facilities at every rest stop, gas station, tourist information office, and fast food restaurant in the time zone. Frankly, with that many stops, Monica had barely needed the technological assistance at all. She’d barely needed her own car. She thought she almost could have walked the distance and still caught up with Yorick and Felicia here in time to do what she had to do before they ate and called for the check.
Monica hadn’t expected or hoped for this other couple, Anastasia and the other George, but her advance knowledge that Yorick had found himself the wrong escort (so to speak) had armed her for the logical leap that the correct escort (so to speak) might have found herself the wrong George.
Connecting with Yorick and Felicia was like getting an ice cream sundae. Accidentally connecting with the other two was like being offered a free second scoop. And connecting with both at the same time was like confirmation that her mission was sanctioned in the palace of Heaven.
Really. She hadn’t had this much fun since getting married.
Now that he heard her speak, Yorick had the vague impression that he’d seen the woman in the black wig before, sometime, somewhere. He knew it must have been a brief encounter at best, in part because he’d always prided himself in his ability to place a face, and in part because brief encounters divorced from any actual sex were all he’d had since embarking on this heroic quest of his. He was so busy mentally removing that black Natasha wig and placing it atop the heads of several other attractive women whose paths had crossed his in the last few days, so distracted by suspects like the barista who had sold him a double mocha latte at the airport and the policewoman who had called scornfully called him “Valentino” during his few hours in custody, that he completely overlooked the woman Frank had hustled from his suite the night before. In the end, he could only assume her familiar features were corroborating evidence of Frank’s globe-spanning network. The guy had undercover agents everywhere.
Yorick’s ears pounded so hard at the scale of all the effort being expended on his behalf that he almost missed Felicia saying, “Frank? You mean Frank from New York?”
Anastasia perked up at that as well. “Alibi Frank?”
Felicia and Anastasia made stunned eye contact, their jaws dropping open in mutual shock at fate’s tangled web.
“One and the same,” declared the woman at the counter with a delivery so heroic that had she been carrying a sword, she might have chosen that moment to carve an F into the curtains, had there also been some curtains. “Did you really think he was going to trust a situation this critical to chance? Don’t you believe it! Even before you all left Vegas, he had a team following you to make sure nothing went wrong!”
Only the one-story design of the diner kept Yorick from expecting a crack squadron of black-clad ninjas rappelling down the face of the building. He said, “A team!?!”
“I don’t understand this at all,” Urich told the world.
“It’s not your responsibility to understand!” Vanessa assured them. “Frank’s the one on top of things! And a good thing he is, because circumstances in New York have changed for the worse. Our lines of communication have been compromised. The cell numbers he gave you are no longer safe. Our location and itinerary have been hacked. Frank had no choice but to send me in! Effective immediately, you’re all incognito and must consider me your only source of instructions!”
The waitress emerged from the kitchen with a plate for Vanessa. “This your chicken salad?”
For a moment Vanessa seemed about to respond with a barked “ten-four!” Then she seemed to remember where she was and modulated herself. “Yes, thank you. Can I have an iced tea with that?”
“Sure thing, dear.” The waitress adjusted the pencil in her beehive hairdo and returned to the kitchen, hesitating at the threshold just long enough to turn around and remark, “But I’ve got to say, you people sure sound like you lead interesting lives.”
“Not until now,” both Yorick and Urich said, in perfect unison. They looked at each other, then at their respective companions, and shivered, still synchronized in ways that defied simple chance.
Vanessa’s mouth worked for a moment, testing out various possible responses before hardening with resumed urgency. “Ladies. I assume you both have cell phones?”
Felicia and Anastasia both nodded in mute compliance.
“Very well.” Vanessa opened her leather handbag, revealing a cavernous space that might have been able to swallow a small car. “I’m afraid I must insist that you turn them off and hand them over.”
“Hell no!” Felicia said. “All my personal numbers are in that! My manager’s number is in that! I hand that over and I might as well be under a rock somewhere!”
Vanessa’s response was a staccato recitation, timed to an unheard military drumbeat. “My budget includes funds for anonymous phones with rechargeable minutes. We’ll get a pair of those as soon as we pass a town big enough for an electronics outlet, and you’ll be able to call your loved ones as much as you want as long as you don’t give your precise locations. But your current numbers are security nightmares, and dangerous in that I need to prevent you from acting on any false intel the other side might try to send while we’re still in the field. I promise you’ll get them back, but you still have to do without using them until the mission’s completed.”
“Mission,” Urich mused at the same time Yorick repeated, “Intel.” It had been a concerted effort to speak in unison again, and they both looked notably unhappy at fate’s refusal to permit that miracle a second outing.
“I dunno,” Anastasia said. “I didn’t exactly sign on for this.”
“Me neither,” said Felicia.
“I understand,” Vanessa said, neither judging nor condemning, clearly understanding in her own paramilitaristic way that some matters would always be too formidable for mere civilians to comprehend. She peered at Anastasia and then at Felicia, alternating eye contact with one and then the other, projecting the certainty and professional confidence of a woman who had been through situations just like this a thousand times before, each time surviving and prevailing even if that meant fleeing on foot through the jungle while angry headhunters threw poison-tipped spears at her back. “But this is important to Frank, and we’ve gone too far to turn back now. So let’s see if we can come to an agreement. Agree to these terms, and Frank will pay an additional thousand dollars a day to each of you at the completion of the contract. Frank will be happy to accommodate you there. Will that be satisfactory?”
In the several seconds it took Felicia and Anastasia to find their respective voices, Urich flashed Yorick the expression of a man who had been watching his logical universe unravel and still wasn’t entirely certain whether he disliked the experience or not. It was the look of a man who had opened the glove compartment of his car and found a camel in there: startled, amused, and in no small measure delighted, but afraid to allow the moment a replay, lest fate replace its first choice of bizarre animal with something more dangerous, like bats. He begged, “Are you understanding any of this at all?”
Yorick’s voice was very soft and small, like something you’d hear from a little boy trapped at the bottom of a very deep well. “I don�
��t know. I mean, I thought I understood it at the beginning, but I seem to have taken a serious wrong turn somewhere around breakfast.”
Urich was aggrieved. “That’s about where it went wrong for me, too.”
Felicia, on the other hand, was just about completing her calculations. She unclipped the slim cell from her belt and tossed it underhand into Vanessa’s bag. Less than half a second later, Anastasia’s landed on top it.
“A wise decision,” Vanessa said.
By wonderful coincidence, both of the confiscated cell phones started vibrating in the instant before she would have sealed the bag shut. Vanessa seemed a little startled, but she recovered quickly and picked up the phones one at a time to read the caller IDs from their screens. The first name brought a delighted half-smile to her lips before she hardened and turned off the power. She seemed to take the second as confirmation, though she didn’t let on why. She just grinned with the special satisfaction of a game player delighted by the success of a well-timed gambit, dimmed that screen as well, and sealed away in darkness both lifelines to the outside world.
Yorick’s heart was pounding. “Gee, that was a close one. Do you think we need to bug out?”
Vanessa’s eyes turned toward his. “What?”
“Bug out,” he said. “Retreat. Flee the area.”
Vanessa’s gaze, camouflaged by her wraparound shades but still readable from the ballet of her eyebrows, flickered toward Urich and Anastasia before returning to Yorick and Felicia. Furious emotions played behind features icy with control. And then the corners of her lips turned upward in a smile that startled everyone with its capacity for empathy and warmth. “No,” she assured him. “I think we can survive taking enough time to enjoy our lunch. After that, there’ll be plenty of time to debate our choice of destinations. I assure you, this country has any number of places where people in our position can lie low if we need to.”
