Chapter 13

It was three days later that she called mid-afternoon.

"Hey, honey," I said tenderly.

"Yes," was all she said.

I took a deep breath. I'd been hoping hard, but I knew how much I was asking of her.

"Everything, Lee? All of it? Cut off the past completely—?"

She didn't let me finish. "Yes, everything, all of it. I'm sure, Jack, I love you very much and it's worth it. I decided the other night after we talked but I wanted to sit on it for a day or two and see if there were second thoughts. There haven't been, not any that matter."

I felt a giddy rush. "Sweetheart, I can't begin to tell you how happy I am."

"Me, too, Jackie. Can we do it soon? I've missed you so bad, and I can't wait to see you. Can we do it today? I'm ready. I can be."

"Not quite that quick, honey," I told her. I did a mental calculation. Today was Thursday. "Sunday." The weekend was best anyway, they'd have the second team on her. "Now, here's the way it's going to work..."

I gave her detailed instructions and told her she'd need to cross every t and dot every i. I figured I could make Ashley promise to lay off her, and he'd do that overtly, but I had no confidence he'd really let go so I had to cover quite a few contingencies.

We talked for another half hour. She sounded really excited, so much that she didn't balk a lot when I told her she couldn't bring anything with her. Her furniture, her books, her clothes, even her hair curlers and makeup would have to stay. Only her sweet self. And her car. Partway.

After we signed off with another explosion of I-love-yous I logged back on to Spook with the new laptop to which I'd treated myself. I'd yanked the hard drive out of the old one and beaten it with a hammer—literally—before I'd turned the machine over to the recyclers, to make sure to destroy any link to John Joseph Heyward. Reformatting would probably have been enough, and of course I'd done that too, but I'd wanted to be completely certain.

I pulled up the script I'd written for myself and then made the call.

"Hello, Jack," he said. "It's been quite a while, I was beginning to wonder if you were still out there. Ready to get your life back now?"

I felt a quick rush of annoyance. "Richard, if you're going to quote what I've said, try to make it something I've said to you, not to Lisa. You've known damn well I was still out here, you've been listening in every day with your friggin' illegal warrantless tap."

"As I remember we've already been over this," he said. "Under the Patriot Act—"

"The Patriot Act the way you read it," I cut him off. "Congress feels a little different about it, as I understand it. Maybe the courts, too."

"You've become an amateur lawyer in your time in hiding?" he asked in a tone I'm sure he meant to be withering.

"No, just a pissed-off citizen who's sick of having his government badgering him," I replied. "You're going to call off the dogs, not just on me but Lisa, too. Drop the phone tap, quit following her, leave her alone completely. And give up the hunt for me."

"Now, Jack—"

"Because here's what's going to happen if you don't," I continued. "Get a pencil and paper because you'll need to take notes, I've got a lot to say. You ready?"

"Jack, this is—"

"Quit talking, Richard. This is a me-talk-you-listen call. Just do it, pencil and paper, got them?"

There was a pause. "I'm ready," he said carefully.

"OK, write these names down." I gave him twenty, reading off the laptop screen. A ­couple I couldn't even pronounce, I had to spell. "And then these." I named a handful of celebrities, including one U.S. Congressman.

"Now, these are just a few of the other people whose phones you're tapping under your distortion of the law," I said. "How'd you like to see the whole list splashed all over the Internet, in lots and lots of places? Way too many places for you to contain."

"I— Jack, I have no confirmation of any of this." He sounded pretty badly flustered, I suspected he did know some of the names. "Even if you're right, though, you can't—"