THEY kept resisting her.
Until finally…THEY took an interest in her.
Strange people, following her as she came and went from her downtown apartment. Bizarre pops and clicks on her phone. Pieces of mail being delivered late, bent and wrinkled. Some mail not showing up at all. THEY were watching, all right.
Which was exactly what Julie wanted.
The only way to see their faces was to make THEM come after her.
And then one night they did.
Late one icy January night Julie was attacked as she was making her way back from her car. She always parked in the same lot, traveled the same one-block route back to her apartment on Arch Street, right near a massive I-95 retaining wall. The route was desolate and rarely traveled, which made it easy to spot her spotters. In this case, however, the isolation worked against her. The man with the needle came out of the shadows.
Julie Lippman was dead.
She screamed and he punched her in the face, cutting off the sound immediately. Then his hand was around her throat and he was pressing her against the retaining wall and then rudely turning her head and stabbing her in the side of the neck with the needle. She felt the needle slide into her skin. She snapped. It was something in that violation-by-steel that did it; perhaps the instant realization that the same people who stole her boyfriend weren’t playing games and they thought they could just show up and kill her and not lose a second of sleep over it. They shouldn’t be allowed to do this. They shouldn’t be allowed to DO THIS.
Julie Lippman was dead.
She didn’t remember how she escaped, only that she found herself down by an abandoned dock on the Delaware waterfront, heart pounding, fingers raw and covered in blood. She found a dirty Dumpster full of old clothes. She left her own in a bundle by the edge of the dock, like a killer stashing them before making a getaway. She disappeared.
Julie Lippman was dead.
Twenty years ago it was easier to establish a new identity. This was the pre-9/11 world, when certain simple scams, such as applying for a Social Security number using the identity of a dead child, still worked. Much of the first year was spent re-creating herself.
Julie Lippman was dead.
“Eve Bell” was born.
The first part of her new identity came from a faded sign she glimpsed down by the dock—STEVEDORES ONLY, a notice from another era, when Philly had thriving ports. She would be Eve, and the name would always remind her of this moment of her birth.
The surname came from Tim O’Brien’s “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” the story of a young soldier who manages to have his girlfriend, Mary Anne Bell, shipped over to Vietnam.
Bobby’s favorite story.
Eve Bell was everything Julie Lippman couldn’t be. Eve Bell was a professional people finder who kept her own identity permanently buried—to protect her clients, protect herself. Eve Bell found dozens of people over her twenty-year career. Spouses, kids, grandparents, siblings, some of whom were happy to be found, others angry that they couldn’t stay hidden. Eve Bell was smarter than Julie Lippman. Eve Bell was tougher. Eve Bell could take a punch. Eve Bell knew that to wage war against the forces of Secret America you had to become like them. Ethereal. Existing on the fringes of the normal world.
All the while she pursued her original case, hoping to find some trace of Bobby Marchione.
Bobby was her one-armed man; her cure for gamma-radiation poisoning; her one true ring.
The reason for all this.
Then one day a year ago a former FBI agent named Deacon Clark hired her to find his missing friend Charlie Hardie. The case had all the hallmarks of a Secret America grab-and-disappear. She eagerly took the case, once again thinking it would bring her closer to Bobby.
And she woke up here.
Closer to Bobby than she ever would have dreamed.
* * *
Of course, she told Bobby none of this.
She simply said,
“I faked my own death so that I could find you. But it’s me. It’s your Julie.”
“You’re not my Julie,” Bobby said. “You know a little about my life, and you are trying to confuse me. It’s not going to work.”
“Goddamn it, it’s me, Bobby. Your sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong. You used to make fun of me for liking Prince. I still know the combination to your dorm room. Want to hear it?”
Bobby paused before replying, finger hovering on the button.
“It’s twenty-four, three, fifteen, Bobby. Do you remember when you first gave me that combination, told me Pags was going away for the weekend?”
Hardie watched from the ground, where he was still twitching slightly, imagining that little tendrils of black smoke were curling off his body. The underside of Zero’s gurney was full of wires and tricks. The pee tubes and all that medical stuff was a ruse; down here Bobby Whoever was at the center of this facility’s communications hub. Then he saw the grooves on the metal floor, directly beneath the gurney. It took Hardie a minute to realize what he was looking at it. But when he did, hope flooded his heart for the first time since he’d been banished to this place.
“You could have found that information out from any number of sources,” Bobby said. “A simple phone call to a member of the Leland University English department, for instance.”
“It’s me, Bobby. Touch me and you’ll know I’m telling the truth.”
“You’re not Julie. You sound different. Smell different. I would have known. I would have known immediately.”
“I haven’t been Julie Lippman for close to twenty years. I had surgery to change my looks so they wouldn’t know I was alive. So yeah, I am different. Just like you. We both became other people.”
From the floor Hardie braced himself as he saw Eve take a step toward the Prisonmaster. The monster’s button finger twitched, as if waging some internal struggle. To zap, or not to zap. Eve was not afraid. She took another step and pushed her breasts against the Prisonmaster’s chest. This was no accidental touch. Hardie could tell.
So could the Prisonmaster, whose finger dropped away from the button.
“You remember, don’t you?” Eve asked softly.
“No…no, you’re not here. You’re supposed to be in Europe now. With your husband and daughters. Two of them.”
“My what? What are you talking about? I’m not married. I don’t have kids. I’m standing right here in front of you. Listen to my voice, Bobby. Touch me. You used to love to touch me.”
“Julie Lippman is in Prague right now, I know this, because they have eyes everywhere, and they’re making sure she is safe…”
“As far as the world knows, Julie Lippman is dead and buried, just like you. A tragic little footnote. The college sweethearts who died a year apart.”
“You’re lying, Julie is alive, and she’s up in the outside wor—”
“I’m standing right here in front of you!”
“NO, YOU’RE NOT, YOU’RE UP THERE AND YOU’RE SAFE AND THEY’RE LOOKING OUT FOR YOU. THEY TELL ME! THEY TELL ME ALL THE TIME!”
But now Bobby shook his head, quickly, in a trembling, pre-seizure kind of way, as if trying to shake something loose from the inside of his brain.
* * *
That was the arrangement.
Bobby would stay down here and run the secret prison, deal with whomever his employers decided to send his way. Over the years Bobby became quite skilled at manipulating the inmates—and they were all inmates, to be sure, prisoners and guards alike. Including Pags, who had long since lost the mental capacity to be in charge of anything, let alone this facility. Pags was good at following orders, but not much else.