James Grippando - Money to Burn

“Compared to the financial crimes you’re targeting in the undercover operation, that’s all very petty stuff,” Ivy tried.

“Petty? You’re looking at one to ten years of imprisonment for each offense.”

“Okay. But before you haul me in, hear me out. Like I said at the beginning: I’ve known about you for quite some time. Which should make you wonder: Why have I kept it to myself? Why didn’t I just come right out and tell Eric Volke or Michael or my mother that Mallory Cantella’s friend Andrea is an undercover FBI agent?”

Andrea was trying to show no interest-but was failing.

Ivy almost smiled. “I decided to keep my mouth shut until I needed a favor. And that time has come. It’s a simple one, but without it, I can assure you of this: The world will know by sunrise that you are an FBI undercover agent. Then you can watch months of undercover work go up in smoke with no payoff.”

Ivy let her chew on that one for a while, and finally it drew a response.

“And if I agree to grant you that favor?”

“Then I’m willing to tell you more than Eric Volke has already told the FBI. I’ll tell you exactly why Kyle McVee wants me dead.”

Andrea gave her an assessing look. “All right,” she said, extending her hand. “You good on a handshake?”

“I am if you are, Andrea.”

“Call me Andie,” she said as they shook.

“Okay,” said Ivy. “You may want to call me Vanessa.”

“So start talking, Vanessa.”

Ivy leaned closer. And then she told her.

I WAS INSIDE THE CLOSET, TAPPING ON THE BACK WALL WITH MY knuckles.

Our motel room was like every other I had ever seen. The front wall facing the parking lot was a prefabricated door and window with a built-in climate-control unit. The room had no other way in or out. In the back was a small bathroom on one side, a Formica counter with a mirror and vanity setup in the middle, and a step-in closet on the other side.

I tapped again on the back wall of the closet.

“What are you doing?” asked Olivia.

“One of my clients once bought a motel chain. I remember him telling me that the rooms don’t back up to other rooms. There’s usually a service corridor that runs the length of the building.”

“So?”

“So if it’s true that we’re being watched, all we have to do is bust through this back wall, leave through the service corridor, and they’ll never know we’re gone.”

Olivia came into the closet and knocked. “But it’s a wall.”

“Not a bearing wall,” I said. “It’s hollow. And these studs are twenty-four inches apart, not sixteen.”

“It’s still a wall.”

I took a wire hanger from the rack and straightened it out. Holding it with both hands, I pressed the tip to the wall and pushed. It went right through, like a poker. This was going to be even easier than I’d thought; there was wallboard on only my side of the studs. The service corridor on the other side was obviously unfinished, the studs exposed. I pulled out the hanger, placed the tip an inch above the previous hole, and pushed again. Olivia caught on to what I was doing, straightened out another hanger, and started on the other side of the closet. In ten minutes we had the dotted outline of a punched rectangle on the wall.

“Stand back,” I said.

Olivia stepped aside. I got a running start, jumped at the rectangle, hit it squarely with both feet, smashed right through it-and landed flat on my ass on the concrete floor of the dark service corridor, covered from head to toe with broken bits of wallboard.

“Owww-shit.”

Olivia appeared in the opening, gazing through the dust. “Are you all right?”

My breath was gone. “This never happens to Jason Bourne.”

Olivia climbed through the hole and helped me to my feet. I brushed the debris from my shirt as I looked around. One end of the corridor was blocked by laundry carts that were over-flowing with towels and linens. The door at the other end was clear.

“This way,” I said, leading her down the hall at a medium jog. The door was unlocked, and we stepped into a sunny courtyard. It took a moment to get my bearings. If the entrance to our room was being watched, we were out of view, no longer right on busy Tonnelle Avenue. I led Olivia around the building, away from our room, to the opposite side of the motel. A cab was parked beneath the carport. We hurried toward it and jumped in the backseat.

The driver put down his newspaper.

“Where to?”

“Nutley,” I said. Nick, the driver who had taken my grandparents to the airport, lived in New Jersey, and I was hoping he would have some idea what had gone wrong last night.

“Where about in Nutley?”

I’d been to Nick’s house for his daughter’s First Communion, but I didn’t remember the exact address.

“Walnut Street, I think. I’ll recognize the house. Just hurry.”

“You got it,” he said.

The meter started running, and both Olivia and I ducked down to the floor as the taxi pulled onto Tonnelle Avenue.

“Hey, hey,” said the driver. “None of that in my cab.”

We stayed low until we were a good half mile from the motel, then climbed back into our seats. Olivia gazed out the window at oncoming traffic on the divided highway, a wan expression on her face, as if searching hopelessly for her daughter. I should have let her have time to herself, but something was weighing on my mind.

“Why did it bother you so much when I told you that Burn knew Ivy as ‘Vanessa’?”

Olivia glanced back, seemingly puzzled. “I told you: That’s the name Ivy used after she disappeared.”

“What was her surname?”

Again, she bristled-the same way she had earlier, when I told her that Burn had used the name Vanessa.”

“What?”

“When Ivy became Vanessa,” I said, “what was her last name?”

Olivia continued to fumble-why, I wanted to find out.

“I don’t know,” she said.

She turned her attention back to the passing cars and road signs. I let it go. Her reaction was more telling than anything. Something wasn’t adding up.

I checked Mallory’s smart phone. Back at the motel, calls had come through, but it had been an Internet dead zone. Now I was getting the Web. On a hunch, I linked Vanessa with Olivia’s surname-“Hernandez”-and ran it through the electronic white pages. The result wasn’t promising: “Hernandez,” the search summary told me, was the twenty-second most common surname in America. Slap “Vanessa” in front of it, and the full name was only slightly less popular than “Valerie Clark”-1,950,000 hits. In a last-ditch effort, I typed “Vanessa Hernandez and Ivy Layton” and pressed Search. Only a few hits came up, and I clicked on a link that took me to a photo gallery for “Ivy Layton.” Most of the photos looked to be twenty years old or more. My specific link was to a photograph of two high school girls wearing soccer uniforms. I looked closer. One of them was named Ivy Layton. I didn’t recognize her. The girl next to her was named Vanessa Hernandez, and I froze.

It was Ivy.

Her hair was longer and darker, her face more girlish, but eighteen-year-old Vanessa Hernandez from Gulliver Academy in Coral Gables, Florida, class of 1990, had grown into the woman I knew as “Ivy Layton.”

My head was spinning. Admittedly, I had never known much about Ivy’s childhood. She’d told me that she was home-schooled in Chile. That her mother-Olivia-was from Santiago. Her father, long since deceased, was an engineer in the mining business. Details were sparse; Ivy didn’t like to talk about the past. “Life’s about the future,” she would tell me. She was so full of energy, and I was so in love with her, that her forward focus always seemed healthy to me. Now it seemed duplicitous, perhaps nefarious.