“But are you sure they look enough alike, Jess?”
“We're like a pair of twins,” Darwin assured him.
“It's still too damned risky.”
Jessica ignored Richard's negativism. “We could get you inside and him out,” she said to Darwin.
“Then what?” asked Richard. “We all become fugitives except for Darwin who is executed in his brother's stead?”
“No, we videotape Towne, hold him someplace, and we stick it to Hughes. We get him to grant the stay of execution on the grounds that it is the wrong man-literally the wrong man now-that he has on death row.”
Richard vigorously shook his head. “That's blackmail of a high-ranking public official, isn't it?”
“So our combined list of criminal activity grows?” she asked. “And at this point, what other recourse have we? What help or support has been offered? Even from our own FBI field offices here?”
“So we go to death row and we break a man out as if it's to be as easy as… as changing out a roll of toilet paper.” Richard remained skeptical.
“It's our only recourse, Richard! The only one the system's left us. I didn't wake up this morning and say, 'Why don't I break the law, today?' but you went your rounds with Hughes, you know what we're up against.”
“Whoa, I didn't say it lacked nobility, just common sense, Jess.”
She suggested, “I say we use the media.”
“Leak the story at the crucial right moment, ingenious,” replied Darwin. I can see the governor choking on the headlines now: 11th Hour Stay for Towne in STRANGE TWIST As Towne's Twin Surrogate Laughs in Governor's Face. Hey my fifteen minutes of fame!”
“Will the real Robert W. Towne please stand up?” joked Jessica.
“How can you two be so cavalier about this?” asked Richard. “A thousand things could go wrong with this so-called plan, one of them horribly wrong.”
Darwin only replied, “Here's another headline: Officials Unsure When and for How Long the Amazing Switch Took Place.”
“Dramatic Desperate Act to Save a Brother from Execution,” added Jessica.
Sharpe gave up, joining in the speculation about headlines. “Towne's Whereabouts Still Unknown While Brother Is Executed.”
“It's the only fucking way we're ever going to get a stop-execution order,” said Darwin.
“And Big Jim Hughes will get his well-deserved hefty dose of the Geraldo moment coming to him,” Jessica added. Laughter filled the car. Sharpe added, “It may well be worth it to be handed our walking papers just to see Hughes brought down.”
“And if we all go to jail for it?” asked Jessica. “For a conspiracy to save an innocent man from execution by the state… Gentlemen, sometimes morality is more important than the law.”
“Ask Huck Finn,” said Darwin.
Sharpe replied, “Here here. I like it.”
“If it is the only way to stop this gross injustice,” said Jessica, wrapping her arm around Richard's, “then it is the only way, and if it means our jobs-”
“Then may God blind me… ahhh… if we don't act.”
“Just do it. Trust me, Nike will be calling us to do an ad.”
Darwin didn't hesitate. “I'm in.”
“If you harbor any doubts, Richard, you go… fly back to Quantico before it goes down,” Jessica said to Richard.
“You mean no point in our losing both incomes?” he asked, patted her hand, and added, “No, dear one, I'm like Darwin put it… in. I'm in. I'll stay and see it through, Jess.”
“Then we do the bait and switch.”
SEVENTEEN
Dancing in the lion's jaw.
GILES Gahran made for a strange sight standing at the concrete barrier wall created by the Chicago Parks Authority, dressed in black with a long coat flapping around him in the breeze-Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, minus the cool elan. But he carried with him an interesting-looking, curiously irregular shaped, ornately ribboned leather-bound box. Where he stood staring out at the oceanlike enormity of Lake Michigan. Dusk had come on. He'd hoped for darkness by now as a blackening sky had rolled in from the lake to cover Chicago in a blanket of metal-gray turning to onyx.
His knuckles had gone white holding so tightly to his father-in-a-box, as he fully intended to do away with the parasitic mind-leeching holdover from his childhood. Mother's final gift to him.
He had come to the enormous great lake of the Great Lakes here in Chicago, with a wind whipping so treacherously up at him from the stone barriers erected along this section of Lincoln Park that he felt as if the Devil of the wind wanted the box, that it meant to rip it from his hands and do with the box what it willed rather than see him throw it into the pounding waves. He imagined the contents spilling out and flying in all directions, flyers to the world here disseminating who he was-the sins of the father making tomorrow's Tribune and Sun-Times. He clutched the box against the wind even tighter. If he pitched it whole into the water, it might float for hours, and some fool might fish it out. But if he dared open it, the wind would stab at its contents with its draconian fingers and lift out whole sections of loose news clippings, photos, documents and send them off like blind birds in a fit of flapping and squawking.
A true Chicago storm was brewing overhead. A darkness like night had crept like evil itself over the city as if to hold it ransom to darkness, Chicago turning from daylight to midnight within the hour owned now by the power of the storm edge.
It seemed to Giles that all the forces of nature had aligned with him to be in agreement, in sync, chanting in the powerful wind and the threatening lightning streaks out over the water, and in the rolling thunder, all as if to say, Do it! Do it! Do it now, Giles! Fuck the consequences, just rid yourself of Mother's nasty little legacy box, bequeathed from so enormous a hatred as to set your backbone to quivering.
The voice in the wind now pounded his psyche and inner ear. It sounded like his dream father's voice from the far off other side, telling him to go ahead and hurl any and all knowledge locked away in the box into the raging waters to be swallowed whole there in the pounding waves, that it wouldn't float, that no one would ever find the box buried below the lake.
He lifted the box overhead, preparing to do as all of nature and all of his instincts told him; an it was to destroy any vestige of the carefully guarded, carefully accumulated, carefully passed on reams of information detailing the man who had fathered and abandoned him.
“Sonofabitch… son of one motherfucking bitch is what you are!” he shouted at the box as a female jogger hastened her speed to get past the strange figure in black with the box held overhead, talking to himself.
A second jogger along the lake path stopped and stared. The man faintly asked against the wind, “Hey, buddy, you all right? Not thinking of jumping, are you?”
Barely hearing this, Giles turned to the sound, half expecting to see his dead mother or his living father. His mother had told him that his father would live on forever. Somewhere in the box. Also somewhere in the cumbersome box-no doubt-she had left Father's last known address here in Chicago. Mother had said he'd once lived in Chicago, and that he was killed under strange circumstances in New Orleans, but that could all have been fabricated, he imagined. Perhaps Father was as alive as Giles and living right here in the city? Perhaps his address lay just beneath Giles's fingers, in the box. He imagined a large house filled with rooms, his father coming to the door and welcoming him in with open arms.
Subconsciously, he supposed it a reason underlying all others for his coming to the Windy City. To finally face his father. To see if he was the monster Mother portrayed after all, and to ask him why he had left Giles with so vile a creature.
She'd said his father liked hurting people, that he had even killed some people and was thrown into a prison for the mentally insane. “That's why I say, boy, you're just like him, killing my goddamn cat, my innocent cat, and for what? So you could suck out its spinal fluid and its bone marrow! My dear God you are born an evil spawn of Satan, evil incarnate, and I can't stand the thought of your having once occupied space and time in my womb! Like some fucking real-life Rosemary's baby is what you are.”