She looked at him sadly, as if she knew more about him than he did.
Then he told her about the photos.
“It couldn’t be our Nate, could it?” she asked, incredulous.
“Sure looked like him.”
“There has to be an explanation,” she said. “Maybe he was somewhere where he wasn’t supposed to be, or it was someone who just looked like him from a distance.”
“Could be.”
She paused. “When he was here last year, there did seem to be something different about him. He seemed kind of unmoored, don’t you think? Like he was really struggling with his own code?”
Joe nodded. They’d talked about it several times. He tried not to get miffed when Marybeth’s thoughts turned to Nate after she’d had several glasses of wine, but they often did.
She said, “I know he’s been through a lot and I can’t even imagine what that would be like. But still, I can’t see him turning into some kind of killer, can you?”
Joe said, “That’s what I hope to clear up.”
“I hope you do,” she said, gathering the thick plastic grain buckets and stacking them together near the hay bales.
While she did, Joe turned and pulled down a thick turnout blanket Marybeth used to cover her horses in cold weather after she rode them. The blanket was wide and covered with canvas on the outside but had soft fleece on the inside. He flipped it inside out and unfurled it with a gentle snap.
The sound made Marybeth turn around.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
He spread the blanket over a two-foot-high shelf of hay bales.
She said, “You’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking.”
When he didn’t respond, she said, “Are you?”
He reached behind him and turned off the light. It was suddenly dark, and the only light was from starlight outside the stall doors. The horses continued with the grum-grum-grum sound.
“Joe,” Marybeth whispered, “this is crazy. What if one of those girls comes out to check on us?”
He said, “Listen.”
From inside the house, he could faintly hear:
Black, yellow, brown, and white
Diversity makes the world seem right
Diversity, Dee-verse-i-teeeeee
Joe said, “Our house is filled with girls and I’m going to be gone for a while. Watching you and listening to you tonight… well, you know.”
“Oh, Joe,” she said. But she wasn’t angry.
When they were through, Joe buckled his belt in the dark and helped Marybeth find her missing boot. The singing inside still went on.
She said, “I can’t believe we just did that. I think I have hay stuck inside my pants.”
He laughed.
“And my horses probably watched the whole time. They probably thought you were attacking me or something.”
Joe pulled her close and tilted her head up and kissed her.
They held hands on the way to the house and didn’t let go until they reached the back door. Marybeth took a moment to comb bits of hay out of her hair with her fingers and smooth out her coat. She reached up and brushed several stalks of hay from Joe’s shoulders.
“I think we’re presentable now,” she said. Before going inside, she said, “I hope it’s not Nate.”
Slightly deflated, Joe said, “Me too.”
“And you promise you’ll get out of Medicine Wheel County if it gets dangerous?”
“Of course.”
“By the way,” she said, swatting him gently on his backside, “thanks for the roll in the hay.”
“My pleasure, ma’am.”
“Don’t make it a habit,” she said, with gentle admonishment. “I don’t want you to get the impression I’m easy.”
7
The same night, 1,927 miles away, Nate Romanowski sat behind the wheel of a white panel van outside a closed florist’s shop on 74th Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Since this was the third night in a row he’d been there, he had begun to recognize a few of the occupants of the brownstone apartment buildings on the street. They couldn’t see him, though, due to the dark tint of the windows. There was the skinny lady with large, round sunglasses who left her building every night at six forty-five p.m. sharp, who would blast out the door as if the block were on fire and charge toward Broadway or Amsterdam to find a restaurant, he guessed, since she didn’t return until after nine. There was the professorial-type man in his mid-fifties who came outside and stood on the stoop and furtively smoked a cigarette in obvious fear of being seen by passersby on the street or his wife inside. There was the balding middle-aged Wall Street type who walked his tiny but manically energetic toy fox terrier and looked as if he’d just hooked into a leaping trout.
Twice he’d seen Jonah Bank, the infamous New York stockbroker, financial adviser, and “wealth-management executive” who had bilked investors — many of whom lived within blocks of where Nate was parked — of over $9 billion in one of the largest Ponzi schemes in American history. That a banker was named Bank lent the scandal a twirl of irony.
But both times, the operation had been called off at the last minute.
Nate hoped tonight was the night. He was sick of New York and it made him tired. The thick air was filled with smells — taxi fumes, exotic cooking, the Hudson River, steam from the sidewalk grates — and sounds — blaring horns, sidewalk conversations, the throbbing hum of the city itself. It was sensory overload.
He missed thin air, big skies, vast quiet, and his falcons. He also missed his sense of righteous purpose, and yearned for it in the same way he yearned for Alisha Whiteplume and Haley. He wished that instead of being behind the wheel of a panel van in the middle of more than eight million people he was sitting naked in a tree watching the Twelve Sleep River roll by.
It wasn’t the first time in his life he was completely out of his comfort zone. He could do the job. But he couldn’t convince himself that he would take any satisfaction from it.
Nate had been sent to assist in the operation, which had been in the planning and reconnaissance phases for weeks. He was not the primary on the job. The primary, code-named Whip, had been in New York for over a month shadowing Bank and casing his habits and movements. Bank was in the midst of his first trial for security fraud and was free for the time being to return to his home in The Dakota on West 72nd each night. Nate had never met Whip, although he’d seen a photo and had been briefed on him.
Whip was a longtime associate in the enterprise, and for most of it the only operator. As far as Nate could discern, Whip knew as little about him as he knew about Whip. They referred to each other by the code names given to them: Whip and The Falcon. Nate wondered if Whip liked the idea of an additional operator in the firm.
So far, Nate’s communications with Whip had been via prepaid throwaway cell phones — a new phone and a new number every day — so neither could be tracked or monitored.
Upon Nate’s arrival in New York, Whip had told him that Bank was literally untouchable during the daytime. He was picked up by federal marshals each morning and delivered to the courthouse of the Southern District of New York, and returned to The Dakota by two private bodyguards. Breaching the security at the building was nearly impossible, Whip said, and the problem with taking down Bank on the street was the proliferation of closed-circuit security cameras in the neighborhood: they were everywhere. Whip said he’d never seen so many cameras anywhere else except London.
Whip’s voice was low and flat, and with a hint of a southern accent that Nate guessed was western Kentucky. Whip didn’t try to get familiar with Nate in any way, and used as few words as possible to convey information. Nate was fine with that, and he guessed Whip had a similar Special Ops background because he used the same jargon.