the Second Horseman (2006) (15 page)

The most pathetic thing in all this, though -- even worse than allowing himself to fall for the carefully proffered illusion of Catherine -- was that he wanted to steal that money. He didn't even care if he got to keep any of it. He just wanted to pull it off. Oh, and then disappear into thin air before Scanlon could put a bullet in him. How sweet would that be?

Chapter
EIGHTEEN

"Cocktail?" Brandon said, reaching into the backseat and pulling a beer from the cooler.

"Shouldn't you be concentrating?"

He pulled the tab on the can, holding it to his ear to hear the hiss of carbonation. "I am concentrating. Pork rind?"

She crinkled her face in disgust.

"You're one of those health nuts, aren't you? I knew it."

"I am not a hea--," she started and then caught herself. "Seriously . . . Shouldn't we be looking for something?"

"Probably."

Catherine sighed quietly and squinted through the windshield at the strip of asphalt bisecting the empty Nevada desert. The speedometer read seventy but it felt to her like they weren't moving at all. The road was dead straight until it finally disappeared into a horizon of broken rock, dead plants, and burned-out mountains. According t
o t
he digital readout in the rearview mirror, the outside temperature was a pleasant hundred and two degrees.

"Slow down!"

Catherine jammed a foot on the brake and Brandon steadied himself with one hand while using the other to retrieve a digital camera from the glove box. He rolled down the window and snapped a shot of the Highway 95 sign.

"What was that?" Catherine said, accelerating hard enough to slam him back into his seat. "Was it important?"

"Souvenir," he answered, examining the photo in the screen on the back of the camera.

"I wouldn't think a guy in your line of work would be the photo album type," she said, staring into the side mirror. Nothing but empty road and heat distortion. For some reason, though, that just made her more nervous. Instead of accepting the obvious -- that no one was out there -- it made her paranoid that the people tracking them were more sophisticated than that. High-altitude surveillance planes? Satellites? Maybe they had access to those new --

"Can I give you some advice, Cath?"

"Huh?"

"Advice. Can I give you some?"

"Yeah. I guess."

"You really need to try to relax a little. This is going to be kind of a long process and if you wind yourself this tight now you're gonna explode before we even do anything illegal."

"I'm chauffeuring a fugitive around with open alcohol containers in the car," she reminded him.

It was amazing how trivial that sounded now. Obviously, the slope was a lot slipperier than she'd planned on. A month ago, she'd been the type of person who went back into a store to return excess change.

Brandon shook his head. "No, you're not. You picked up a hitchhiker you thought was going to die of thirst in the desert. And all you had to drink in the car was this cooler full of beer that you were taking to a picnic for your coworkers at the Ronald McDonald House."

He might be a psychopath but he was right. At this rate, could a stroke be far off? She sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly, leaning her seat back a few clicks.

"Feeling better?"

"Not really, no. So? What do you think?"

"About what?"

When she turned to glare at him, he countered with a smile so relaxed an
d p
enetrating that it would have acted as a sedative on anyone unprepared.

"You know damn well what I'm asking."

She hadn't slept much the night before, instead rereading the information she had on Brandon and thinking about what he'd told her about his mother -- assuming any of it was true. Maybe you really couldn't fight genetics. If someone programmed a computer to predict the personality and profession of a person born of Brandon's preternaturally charismatic mother and analytical father, it wasn't that far-fetched to think it would churn out a description of the man sitting next to her.

She'd read an article once on the evolution of psychopaths -- how any population of people could be expected to have leeches attached to the society they created. Remorseless people completely devoid of morality, who produced nothing and lived entirely by using others. It was hard to reconcile that description with her feelings about Brandon, though. Not surprising, she supposed. According to the article, most psychopaths had evolved to be incredibly charming and attractive. For obvious reasons, the ugly, obnoxious ones hadn't been all that successful.

"The heist," she said, realizing that sh
e w
as being tested. He wanted to see if she could say it out loud. "Tell me about our chances of stealing this money."

"You want the truth?"

Her smirk at hearing the word "truth" come out of his mouth wasn't as heartfelt as it should have been. She found herself having to constantly remind herself that everything he said was probably a lie. Or was it? Christ . . .

"Yeah. I want your honest opinion."

"Okay. Even with Richard whispering his secrets in my ear, this is going to be dead hard. Impossible might be a better word."

"What do you mean 'impossible'?" she said a little too loudly for the confines of the car. "I thought --"

"You were relaxing, remember? Look, they're all impossible when you first start thinking about them. But there's always something. Some security flaw. Some angle they didn't think of. Unfortunately, as much of an unimaginative asshole as he is, Richard doesn't miss a lot."

"So you think you -- we -- will be able to do it?"

"If I had a gun to my head and a year to plan, maybe. Probably. But all I've got is the gun to my head."

"You talk in circles a lot, don't you?"

"Undiagnosed attention deficit disorder. The truth is, if I'd known then what I know now, I'd have walked away from this deal. Too many unknowns and uncontrollables. Even at two hundred million, the risk-return sucks."

"But the return isn't just money anymore, Brandon. It's millions of lives."

"Yeah."

She went back to staring out the windshield and he went back to sipping his beer until they began closing in on a slightly wider than normal area in the gravel shoulder.

"Stop up there, Cath."

"Why?"

He jumped from the car before it had completely stopped and walked along the shoulder, rolling his cold beer against his forehead. Catherine set the brake and ran after him.

"Is this it?"

"Is this what?"

"It! Where it's going to happen?"

He stopped and faced her, examining the white cotton sundress she'd chosen that morning mostly because she figured it made her look less likely to commit a major felony than the rest of her wardrobe. The moment the scrutiny began to make her feel uncomfortable, he started walking again.

"Nah, this isn't it. It's just nice out here. Prison's funny. Everything's so closed in. So crowded. At first you hate it, then you get used to it, then you get to kind of rely on it. This --," he motioned to the silent emptiness around them, "it's like the ocean."

He tossed his empty can on the ground and sat on a low boulder.

"But it seems good," Catherine said. "We've only passed five cars in the last hour -- I counted. I'll bet there isn't anyone within thirty miles of us right now."

"It's probably less perfect than you think," Brandon said.

"What, you'd rather be in Manhattan? We could hijack the truck right here and no one would even know."

"Stealing money is easy, Cath. Keeping it long enough to spend it is hard."

"But we know everything! Richard's given you this thing on a silver platter."

He sighed quietly. "There are a thousand details. And if you miss just one of them, you're done. I mean, if every piece of information we have is dead-on and I can actually figure out a workable plan, our chances of getting busted are still about seventy percent." He motioned aroun
d t
hem again. "Enjoy the open space while you can."

"You can stop trying to scare me. I've made my decision."

He nodded thoughtfully and began appraising her with even more intensity than before. This time he either didn't notice her growing discomfort or he chose to ignore it.

"Are you sure you want to be involved in this, Catherine? I mean, I have no real choice, and as much as I hate to admit it, I got into this line of work because I love it. What about you, though? You're a million miles from where you started."

"I don't have any more choice than you."

"Sure you do. These Ukrainians aren't really your responsibility. Besides, what if you do manage to stop them? What's to keep the next group of Eastern Eurotrash freaks from doing the same thing? Are you potentially giving up your whole life to just postpone the inevitable?"

Of course, she'd asked herself the same questions a hundred times. Almost verbatim, in fact. And she always came up with the same answer. "What if everyone took that attitude, Brandon? Then where would we be?"

He poked at his empty beer can with his foot. "Funny how things can escalate, isn'
t i
t? One day you're sitting in some office at the NSA programming a computer to pick out Arab-sounding names, and the next, you're hijacking trucks full of cash."

"Yeah. Funny."

A low hum began to encroach on the silence, and they both turned toward the sound. The glimmer of a chrome grill became visible, followed quickly by the unmistakable outline of a semi moving toward them through the haze. They watched it close on them, listening to the shifting of gears as it began to slow. A moment later, the passenger-side window slid down.

"You kids okay?"

"Fine," Brandon said. "Just enjoying the view, you know?"

"Whatever you say," the driver responded, obviously not sure why anyone would want to be outside the safety of their air
-
conditioned car in the middle of the Nevada desert. "You wouldn't want to break down out here."

"Can't argue with you there," Brandon said while Catherine held her breath and pretended to look out at the landscape, positioning herself so the driver couldn't see her face. She tried to will him to drive on, but then Brandon spoke again. H
e s
ounded like he didn't have a care in the world.

"You travel this road a lot?"

"All the time."

"Doesn't get much traffic, huh?"

There was a grinding of gears and the truck finally started moving away. "Like being on the moon, son."

Catherine realized she was still holding her breath and let it out in a noisy rush. When she turned back toward Brandon, he was sitting cross-legged on the boulder watching the semi through unfocused eyes.

What was he thinking about? How to steal the money? How to escape?

When he had been working his way into Scanlon's good graces, had it been a calculated effort? Or had Brandon genuinely liked the man and separated that from what he was really there for? Scanlon, even after being substantially harmed by Brandon, was the first to admit he wasn't evil -- that he'd never really injured anyone in a material way. Who the hell was Brandon Vale?

"Can I ask you a question?"

For a moment she wasn't sure if he'd heard her, but then he seemed to come out of his trance. "Go ahead."

"How much of you is real and how much is a lie?"

It had come out sounding more like an accusation than a question, but he didn't look angry or insulted.

"If I knew that, I wouldn't be as convincing, would I?"

Chapter
NINETEEN

"What the hell's going on?"

Paul Lowe, the director of the CIA, and Edwin Hamdi both rose from their seats when President Morris walked in and slammed the door behind him. Lowe, a little more slowly -- a mannerism designed to make clear his long personal friendship with the president.

Morris, though, was a much more complex man than his old friend gave him credit for. He tended to encourage what Hamdi saw as Lowe's arrogant flights of fancy, but was generally good at separating them from fact. The president's preference on most difficult issues was to listen to diametrically opposed sides and then make his own decision based on the effectiveness of the respective arguments. It was a reasonable approach, Hamdi supposed, but one that gave Lowe a dangerous amount of power. The man's knowledge of the history an
d p
olitics of the region was admittedly encyclopedic, but because he viewed those facts through a filter of American, Israeli, and Christian patriotism, many of his conclusions were utterly wrong.

"Can't we get two goddamn months of peace and quiet?" Morris said. "Is that too much to ask? What happened, Paul?"

"We have a video, if you want to see it."

"Turn it on."

"It was taken by one of the attendees," Lowe said, standing and aiming a remote. The screen came to life, showing the steps of a New York City synagogue crowded with well-dressed people clapping as a bride and groom descended.