Chapter 16

We were married about two weeks later, a lovely little ceremony at a small pavilion in a riverside park not far from the place I'd rented. We'd actually had to book a time, it seemed that a lot of couples used the pavilion for the same purpose. We had no friends on hand, of course, no wedding party, but a few passers-by hung around to watch and congratulated us afterwards.

Lee had to use her real name for the license form, of course, but it was meaningless to anybody local, and Spook said he'd buried the digitized record so deep that even he would have trouble finding it. And now, as Lisa Carstairs, she'd be mostly invisible to the meddlesome Feds even without Spook's protection.

There'd been one last loose end to tie up after we got to Charleston. I hadn't had to worry about it when I'd gone on the run, I'd always been kind of a loner except for Lisa and of course there had been all those initial news reports about me being a fugitive. But Lee was more gregarious, there were no official alerts about her, and her friends would be concerned if she just vanished into thin air.

There'd been such a case a few years earlier, a Congressional intern who abruptly disappeared, and there was a big public outcry about it—especially after it turned out she'd got pretty close to one Congressman. The Congressman lost his election, but the hunt for the missing intern went on very publicly for a couple of years until her bones, or what they thought were her bones, turned up in a nearby park; apparently some transient (not the Congressman) had been responsible. Even much later the case kept being revisited on some of those missing-persons TV shows.

We didn't need that; Lee shouldn't be anybody's "missing person."

I'd helped her compose an e-mail to go, with minor personal variations, to each of her closer friends. The vanilla version went like this:

"Don't worry, I've gone to be with Jack. We can be together now, and we want to be. I don't know where we'll go, too soon to tell you, but we don't want to come back, not right away at least. I'll write again after we've settled. Love, Lisa."

It had only "anonymous" as a return address, which Lee explained in a p.s.—"I'm sending this from a public system, you can't reply. See you later!" Official diggers would trace it to an Internet café in Colorado with considerable effort. I figured the inquiry might generate a little local fame for the café, if anything.

Because Ashley and his people were keeping their search for us strictly on the q.t. With the heavy-heavy hanging over their heads—as they saw it, anyway—they couldn't afford to make anything public; no more media stories. I was pretty sure they wouldn't even risk circulating privately along police channels, they'd be too worried I'd learn of it and publish their dirty little secrets, or at least some of them, as I'd threatened.

I'd isolated them the same way they'd initially isolated me. Which suited me fine, it was what I'd intended.

What we had was an old-fashioned Mexican standoff. If they moved on me I'd told them what I'd do, and they were willing to give up a lot to keep me from doing it. And they had to figure they had me stymied, too, since they could always turn the manhunt back on.

All they had to do was leave it alone.

But I knew they wouldn't. People work to get power because it means control; you can make others bend to your will, do your bidding. To them I was a loose cannon, outside their control, bending to no-one's will and doing no-one's bidding, and they wouldn't, they couldn't, stand for that.

So they'd still be after me. They'd keep it quiet to protect their own interests, but they'd always be out there, always looking and waiting for me to make a mistake. And ready to pounce when I did. If I did.

My life was a true bed of roses right now, but even the most beautiful rose has thorns. I guessed Ashley and his people were my personal thorn. Somewhere out there they were being constantly vigilant, waiting for Jack Heyward to show himself. The threat might hang over my head for most of the rest of my life.

But I had Lisa, I had more than I could ever have hoped just a few weeks ago. I could live with one thorn.