55
BECAUSE OF ITS LOCATION ON THE HUDSON RIVER-ON RIVER Road near the George Washington Bridge, Lincoln Tunnel, and major highways-Palisades Medical Center in New Bergen had one of the busiest emergency departments in New Jersey. Nearly thirty thousand patients came each year for lifesaving care.
No one came for ice cream-and neither did I.
Meet me at the DQ was a reference to the weird dream I’d shared with Ivy right before asking her to marry me-the one about the SUV running me off the road, forcing me to rush my dog to the DQ for emergency medical treatment. Ivy had conveyed her instructions to me in code, alert to the fact that Mallory’s cell was probably being monitored. “Meet me at the DQ in North Bergen” meant “meet me at the ER,” and the closest one to an actual DQ was at Palisades.
By my calculations, Ian Burn was having a hot fudge sundae as we spoke.
“You came to the right place,” she said.
I was standing by the vending machine in the crowded waiting room when the voice had come from behind me. I recognized it right away, but when I turned in response, the face wasn’t exactly the one I had remembered. She sensed my confusion.
“Rhinoplasty,” she said, turning to show me her profile. “Pretty nice work, no?”
She’d cut her hair and darkened it, too, returning to the color I’d seen in the photograph online-but it was Ivy, and instinctively I grabbed her and nearly squeezed her to death.
It’s hard for me to say how long we stayed in each other’s arms. Long-term memories were powerful forces, and just the smell of her hair seemed to unleash an emotional rush that-for a moment, at least-let me forget the circumstances of our reunion. I was remembering things that I had yet to realize I’d forgotten. The ease of our embrace. The warmth of her face against mine. How good her hands felt on my shoulder blades. The first coherent thought to bring me back to earth was a tinge of guilt-a thought about Mallory, about our pending divorce. I pushed that aside as irrelevant, but the magic was slipping away. I was slowly coming back the to harsh reality of the huge problems at hand.
“Your grandparents are safe,” she said, as we separated.
We were standing face-to-face, her fingers still loosely intertwined with mine, oblivious to the typical ER commotion around us-the boys playing soccer with a balled-up wad of white medical tape, the sneezing and coughing old man in the corner with the vomit bucket in his lap, the moaning construction worker with the bloody rag wrapped around his smashed finger.
“You met them at the airport?” I said.
“Intercepted, I guess, is a better word for it. McVee uses any pressure point he can. Family and loved ones are at the top of his list. I was afraid that if he got hold of your grandparents, you’d be at his mercy.”
“Where are they?”
“The FBI is protecting them.”
“According to your mother, you went into hiding because the FBI couldn’t protect you. Why would you put my grandparents in their hands?”
“They’re tertiary targets who don’t know anything. McVee won’t go to the same trouble to track them down as he would to find me-or you, for that matter.”
“That makes sense, I guess.”
“Plus, this time I have leverage,” she said.
“What kind of leverage?”
“If the FBI screws up, I blow the lid on Mallory’s friend Andrea-who, by the way, is an FBI agent.”
It was clear from her tone that Ivy was expecting a serious show of surprise from me. But I wasn’t so shocked. Little things had always made Andrea seem different from Mallory’s other friends-the way she wolfed down pasta at Carmine’s, the blond-in-a-bottle dye job, the way she’d pressed for names when I told her about short sellers. All along, something about her didn’t meet the eye.
One thing still didn’t make sense.
“How did you know my grandparents were going to the airport?”
She sighed and said, “There’s something you should know about me.”
“You think?” I said with a mirthless chuckle.
She smiled a little, then led me to a quiet corner of the room where her coat was hanging on the back of a chair. She sat me down, pulled her coat back on, and took a seat facing me.
“I’ve been monitoring your limo driver’s wireless communications.”
“What the hell?” I said, shaking my head. “Am I the last guy on earth who doesn’t know how to listen to other people’s cell conversations?”
“Cell conversations, text messages, e-mails-none of it’s private. All it takes is simple spyware that you can buy on the Internet. The more sophisticated programs don’t even require me to touch your phone for setup. I just plug in the number, program it, and I can see every message you send or receive, and listen to every conversation you have. I can even program my device to ring every time you use your phone, so I don’t have to sit around monitoring you. The only way to break the connection is to remove the battery from the targeted phone.”
“Which is why you told me to take the battery out of Mallory’s phone.”
“Exactly. Everyone in the business uses cell spyware now.”
“And what business is that?”
“You must have some inkling,” she said.
There was a semblance of a smile on her face, a gentle understanding in her voice. But it was my most disquieting moment with Ivy so far-the sense that she knew what I knew, that she knew what I didn’t know, and that I had no idea how she knew any of it.
“Tell me about Vanessa Hernandez,” I said.
She didn’t hesitate in the least, didn’t even try feigning ignorance.
“Vanessa Hernandez had no problems with her nose,” she said, showing me her profile. “It was Ivy Layton who insisted on getting the work done.”
“I’m serious,” I said.
Her smile faded. “I was born in Miami. My parents were undercover agents for the DEA. My mom was born in Colombia, so she played the go-between for wealthy American dealers trying to hook up with Colombian suppliers.”
“Not exactly the Chilean schoolteacher and ex-pat engineer you told me about.”
“It was the same cover story they told our neighbors in Miami. They were always headed off to another copper-mining project in Chile, when in reality they were infiltrating the cocaine cartel in Colombia. Anyway, when I was five years old, a job went bad in Bogotá. Their target figured out that my father was DEA. My mother watched them drag him out of the car, shoot him in the back of the head, and dump his body on the side of the road.”
“I’m sorry. Your mother obviously escaped?”
“Somehow she was able to convince them that she had no idea he was an undercover agent. They let her go.”
“Did she stay with the DEA?”
“For a while. But she hasn’t worked with them for years. She got into corporate security as a consultant.”
“So…which way did Vanessa go?”
“No interest in law enforcement. But when I grew up and went to business school, the world of corporate espionage intrigued me. I joined a huge corporate security firm and when I was twenty-nine years old, my mother got a call from an old friend on Wall Street. He needed a brainy young woman with guts to infiltrate a billion-dollar hedge fund. That fund was Ploutus Investments. The friend on Wall Street was Eric Volke. Vanessa got the assignment, and that’s when I became Ivy Layton.”
I drew a deep breath, trying to get my arms around the whole thing. “Your mother knows Eric?”
“Yes. She’s in a taxi right now, on her way to meet up with him. Eric promised me that he would keep the two of you safe while this plays out between me and McVee.”
I paused again, still overwhelmed. “So when you and I met, you were doing corporate espionage for Saxton Silvers?”
“No. Eric hired me for WhiteSands.”
I knew WhiteSands. Sometimes its services complemented those of Saxton Silvers, and sometimes Eric was criticized for holding such a large ownership stake in a publicly traded company that, at least on the investment-management level, competed with Saxton Silvers for business.