Chapter12

 

Sara stared out the passenger side window of the stolen car at the Christmas decorations lining the streets of the city as they made their way uptown.

Holiday traffic made it impossible to get anywhere quickly, and road signs suggested that there was construction ahead.

Bright lights gave a halo to the darkness where men in hardhats labored to work in the cold, their breath illuminated while waves of heat emanated from the banks of white flood lights above them.

Traffic had ground to a crawl, and she could see into the other cars, and see the faces of drivers showing extreme agitation.

Ponci did not look agitated in the same way. He looked anxious, with his fingers gripping the steering wheel tightly, and perhaps in pain, but the overriding impression she got from looking at him in this light was the sense of thoughtfulness, something stern and determined which oddly enough she’d seen in her brother at times.

My brother is dead, she thought. And this is the man who killed him.

The pain of it remained, but for some reason seemed as remote as the construction site outside, almost like some alien landscape inside herself she was not yet brave enough to explore and yet, she needed to know more.

“Do you know who hired you to kill my brother?” she asked, her normally deep voice sounding a little shrill, like it did when she was upset as a young girl and tried to hide it.

“The only one I know is the man in the sunglasses,” Ponci said.

“But you have some idea of who might be behind him?”

“It’s some kind of government operation.”

“Doesn’t the government have its own people for doing things like this? The FBI? The CIA?”

“Sure. Pretty competent people, too.”

“Then why did they need you?”

Ponci glanced at her for the first time since they got into the car.

“A military operation has its own particular look to it, no matter how you try to hide it, a kind of fingerprint someone might recognize.”

“You mean someone like the police?”

“Them or some other government agency.”

“Why would one group of government people not know what another group is doing?”

“That’s a good question,” Ponci said, turning his attention back to the road and the suddenly moving traffic again. Ahead, beyond the glow of the construction site, the almost frail webwork of the George Washington Bridge glowed against the dark backdrop of The Palisades.

“Have you ever seen something like this before?” Sara asked, pressing the point, guessing that this was a rare moment when he readily talked. She did not want to waste the opportunity.

“A few times,” he said.

“By these people – who hired you?”

“No, this is the first time I’ve done work like this.”

“You don’t like them?”

“You can’t trust the government.”

“Then why did you take the job?”

 

 

“I needed the money, and they were willing to pay a lot more than I would normally get, and I normally get a lot.”

“So the only reason you killed my brother was for money?”

“It’s the only reason I ever kill anybody.”

“But you like killing?”

“I don’t like or dislike it. It’s just a job.”

“There are other kinds of jobs.”

“Yeah, there are. Some pay good too, only I’m not very good at them.”

“But you’re good a killing?”

“Yes”

Traffic picked up a little speed and then slowed again as cars pulled over into a single lane to get around the construction barriers along the outer lanes, unnecessarily long so that whole lanes went unused for more than a mile while the drivers – in a modern day game of musical chairs – bumped along in the remaining lane become more and more frustrated. But Ponci seemed unmoved, and though clearly concerned about getting where he needed to go, did not seem bothered by the insane urgency that plagued the other drivers, turning the steering wheel with deliberate expertise until he had found a space in the single crowded lane as well.

But he did wince with one hand pressing hard against his side.

“You’re in pain?” Sara said.

“A bit.”

“When we get where we’re going, we’ll fix you up better.”

Ponci glanced over at her, his thick brows folding down towards the bridge of his nose in a puzzled expression.

“Why would you want to do that?” he asked.

Sara did not answer right away. She stared out at the side of the road, away from the construction as the bland gray walls that made up that side of the approach to the George Washington Bridge – the huge apartment complex above it, filled with the glow of thousands of windows filled with thousands of strangers part of this alien landscape that she had seen only from the distance of Newark where she had grown up as a skyline.

“I need you alive to get to them,” she said, her voice taunt, barely containing the rage.

This time Ponci stayed silent as the traffic again picked up speed, moving steadily, but not fast as the one lane lead them closer to lanes that would eventually lead them over the bridge. When he spoke, he did so with great deliberation.

“This isn’t no vengeance trip,” he said. “You do anything I don’t like, you get the first bullet. We’re going to have enough trouble when we get there without you adding to it.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“It’s most likely a trap.”

“A trap?” Sara said, her head jerking back to glare at Ponci. “I thought you said this guy hired you?”

“He did. But he also thinks I’ve been holding out on him. He tried to kill me last time we met when he found out I didn’t have the stuff he wanted,” Ponci said. “He must think I want more money.”

“And you don’t?”

Ponci glanced at Sara again, his dark eyes glistening with the reflected light of the now more distant flood lights.

“I’m a pro. I don’t work that way. I agree to a price, then that’s the price of the job. But I suspect whatever you got there in that computer is very valuable, and that there are others looking to get their hands on it as well.”

“Others? Like who?”

“I don’t know exactly who,” Ponci said. “But there someone else maybe a lot of people mixed up in this thing. I’ve been feeling it all along.”

“Which means?”

“Which means the sooner we get rid of that stuff, the happier I’m going to be. But it’s not going to be a simple exchange.”

“What do you think he’s going to do?”

“I haven’t completely figured that out yet,” Ponci said. “But I think he’ll try and make sure we have the goods he wants. Then he’ll try and kill us.”

“Which is what you meant by a trap?”

“Yes.”

“Then why are we going there?” Sara asked. “Why don’t you call him back and tell him we want to meet somewhere else?”

“Because they are behind us, too.”

“You mean we’re being followed?” Sara asked, turning to stare out the back window at the line of headlines that crowded the single lane behind them.

“Since we left the hotel,” Ponci said.

 

 

“Where?” Sara asked, squinting against the high beams of several SUVs in the line of cars behind them, and the multiple lights of smaller sports cars that needed the bright lights in order to see passed unnecessary tinted windows cops were too lazy to pull over and ticket. Most of the drivers were lost against the backdrop of the floodlights from the construction project, giving an eerie sense that the world was being operated totally by machines. “I don’t see them.”

“It’s a black Escalade with tinted windows about four cars back,” Ponci said.

Sara looked again.

The large black SUV loomed over the other cars before it, its dark windows looking like the eye pieces to the fictional Darth Vader, reflecting and distorting the headlights of the cars coming down from the George Washington Bridge, and the tail lights of the cars in the lane ahead. Even in New Jersey where wanna-be cowboys strutted along the highways in Dodge Rams and other ostentatious monstrosities, this vehicle would have stood out. In commuter traffic, it consumed the landscape like a black hole. She could see no faces behind the extremely tinted windshield, but felt the foreboding presence of something evil there.

“Are they connected with the man we’re going to meet?” she asked in a hushed voice, as if fearing she might be overheard.

“Not connected, but like him,” Ponci said.

“You mean military?”

“They’re like ghosts,” he said. “I’ve met their kind before, but never been their target.”

“What do they want?”

“The same thing the man wants,” Ponci said, nodding towards the laptop sitting in Sara’s lap.”

“I don’t understand,” she said. “If you’re on your way to deliver this stuff, why are they following us?”

“Because I think they don’t want the man to get the stuff; they want it for themselves. They’ve been on our trail since we left the hotel. That’s why I didn’t bother switching cars. They appear to have been waiting at the hotel for this move, waiting for you to make a move.”

“Me?” Sara said, her voice growing shrill.

“My guess is that they were on you the whole time, trailing you to get to your brother, to get what he had before someone else did.”

“What happened? Why didn’t they catch up with me sooner?”

 

 

 

“I got there first,” he said. “The shooting, the chase, it through their plans out of whack. Some of them must have followed me. Some went to the apartment to snatch the case and found you there ahead of them.”

“I didn’t see anybody.”

“You wouldn’t have. The important thing is that they saw you.”

“Why didn’t they take it from me?”

“A good question,” Ponci said, glancing at Sara.

She could not read him the way she could most men when they look at her. His gaze had the cold look of shark, unsympathetic, if not hostile, as if life meant nothing except the next step in what was needed, and she knew he would kill her without qualms if he needed to. This scared her more deeply than she ever felt scared in the worst parts of Newark. There she understood the rage and the helplessness that got acted out on the streets, where men and women fought for some level of respect, acting out roles that gave them some level of dignity life had denied them.

They killed and were killed for foolish reasons, but for reasons this man’s actions lacked. She seemed to sense that even the money was less important than he made out, and that death was not something of any more significance than an inconvenience. He killed the way a steel workers cut out parts on an assembly line. He couldn’t even rely on the misguided beliefs of patriotism to disguise it.

“I think,” he said after a long time, “somebody screwed up. Someone, who was supposed to snatch the brief case, came after me, and those that were watching you, didn’t know what they were supposed to do next. They might not have anybody on the ground to make up for the mistake.”

“On the ground?”

“I’m only putting this together in my head as we go, but I’m beginning to think part of the surveillance was remote – cameras and maybe a lot more high tech stuff. But I’m not sure they saw you taking the stuff out of the case or watched you when you took it down to your apartment. They only saw me when I came back and grabbed the case, and they assumed like I did, that I had what they wanted, and then they redirected everything towards me.”

“You make all this sound terrifying,” Sara said. “Like they have eyes and ears everywhere.”

Again, Ponci looked over at her.

“They do,” he said. “But they’re not perfect. And all the pieces don’t quite fit.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the guy with the sunglasses tried to kill me when he found out I couldn’t deliver. It doesn’t make sense if they needed the package so badly. The guy seemed scared like someone was going to kill him if he didn’t come up with what they wanted.”

“Maybe they would have. Whoever it is that hired you seems to not care a lot about taking a life.”

“I agree. But that’s not the way the government works.”

“Government?”

“They’re the only ones with these kinds of resources.”

“Are you talking about spies and such?” Sara laughed.

“Sort of.”

“Don’t they kill people, too? They torture people and hide them away.”

“Yes, they do all that and a lot worse, even the good guys. But they don’t over react. They’re not machines. They do what they’re supposed to do. If this guy was one of them, then he would have tried to kill me after he got what he wanted, not before.”

“Are you saying there are more than just one group of them?”

“That’s what I’m thinking.”

“So if they’re watching everything, why didn’t they grab us when back at the hotel when you came back for me?”

“I think they might have tried,” Ponci said. “But they couldn’t act openly with all those cops.”

“You mean the police aren’t involved with them?”

“They use the police, they wouldn’t trust them.”

“You mean the police are that corrupt that even spies won’t trust them?”

“The government won’t trust them because sometimes they run into a honest cop, and it screws everything up for them.”

“So now the spies are behind us?”

“It would see so.”

“What will they do?”

 

 

“My guess is that they will try and keep us from delivering the stuff to the man we’re going to meet,” Ponci said.

“So what do we do?”

“We try to get to the meeting before they get to us, and get out of the way when they show up.”

“But you said the meeting is a trap.”

“It is.”

“It seems crazy for us to go into a trap we know is a trap,” Sara said. “Besides, my brother took this material for a reason, and I don’t think he would approve of either of these getting their hands on it.”

“He doesn’t,” Ponci said, glancing at her again, his eyes filled dread for the first time, not of the men behind or ahead, but of what was inside him.

“Then I don’t want that either,” Sara said.

“We don’t have a choice,” Ponci said, looking ahead again into traffic. “From the moment your brother got his hands on this stuff, he was doomed, and what I’m trying to do now is make sure we don’t get ourselves killed the way he did.”

“By driving into a trap you know is a trap?”

“The secret is to spring the trap before it gets sprung on us.”

“And how are you going to do that?”

 

 

“I’m still figuring that out,” he said “But first, we’ve got to shake our shadows, at lest temporarily.”

Then, as if he’d been contemplating the move for mile, Ponci twisted the steering wheel abruptly to the left, street the car passed the warning cones and onto the still incomplete portion of road where workers and equipment sat, weaving the stolen car around each obstacle as workers leaped out of its way.

He maneuvered the car as if he had done this hundreds of times, a regular stock car driver with a reckless but purposeful abandon that both scared and amazed Sara, who was helpless to do anything but cling to the door handle with the hope that she survived.

Ponci’s expression did not change; he did not seem moved by the obstructions or concerned by the near misses, or even the angst of pursuit Sara was too scared to look back at to see if there was.

Finally, unable to resist, she forced herself, and blinked against the glare of the headlights, and noticed no dark phantom of an SUV pulling out behind them. Instead, she saw the flash of blue and red lights from a state trooper car, which had pulled out from the construction area and was in pursuit instead. The siren sounded a moment later, but the police car would not navigate the obstructed course as savagely as Ponci did, and therefore fell back.

Ahead, the sign for the exit showed with a line of orange cones marking the passage towards it. Ponci steered the car in that direction, and slipped back into the flow of traffic just in time to turn off for the bridge. But he did not stay in the line, but moved onto the wide shoulder to the right of the line of cars and rushed ahead, catching a cone under the front bumper that held on for a short way and finally, torn up by the friction against the asphalt, fell away from the car.

Horns blared as Ponci passed; angry drivers made obscene gestures as he stepped harder on the gas to gain even more speed, the wheels on Sara’s side sometimes catching snow and gravel from the side of the road.

Then they were on the bridge, weaving their way through traffic, an easier chore than Sara ever imagined, reaching the Jersey City relatively unscathed, through traffic on the far side was heavy as well.

 Finally, Ponci steered onto a two-lane road, which was crowded, but he managed get around, weaving from lane to lane or onto the shoulder, to advance, other cars slamming on their brakes in a series of near misses, and sometimes, if they did not get out of the way fast enough, he scraped by anyway, leaving streaked sides of other cars amid the sparks.

“We have to get off this road,” he said, “And get another car.”

“Where are we going?”

“That depends on the time,” he said. “What time is it?”

Sara pulled out a cellular phone, its face illuminating with the time.

“About 8:30,” she said.

He looked at her and at the phone. “Get rid of that.”

“What?”

“The phone.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s probably how they’re tracking us.”

“What do I do with it?”

“Give it here,” he said.

She handed it over. He opened the window and threw it onto the road. Behind them, a car ran over it.

Sara glanced back, but kept silent.

“We’re near Hackensack,” Ponci said, looking at a highway sign. “We’ll go there.”

 

 

 

The turn seemed to end the final pursuit, and the police car from New York flashed ahead on the highway, unaware of the last maneuver. If Ponci was concerned, he didn’t show it. His hands did not shake on the steering wheel, while Sara could do nothing to keep herself from quaking, especially, when a patrol car passed going the other way along the two lane road they had descended to.

“Don’t do that,” Ponci scowled.

“Do what?”

“Shake like that.”

“But I’m scared.”

“Everybody gets scared. The trick is not to show it.”

“I’m sorry, I’m not like you. I can’t help it.”

“Like me?”

“A cold hearted killer,” she muttered.

“You would be if you had to,” he said. “Everybody has it in them, they just don’t know it until they need it.”

“I don’t,” Sara said, stubbornly.

Ponci stayed a quiet for a moment as he steered the car along the road, a river appeared to the right, not the Hudson, Sara thought, and not the Passaic, which she was most familiar with, concluding that it had to be the Hackensack, a river that ran between the two, but eventually came together with the Passaic farther south, near where she lived.\

“Where are you from?” Ponci asked suddenly.

“You mean where was I born and grew up?”

“Yeah, all that.”

“Newark.”

“You’re brother, too?”

“He is my brother.”

“That doesn’t mean anything these days.”

“Yes, he’s from Newark, too.”

“What made him join the army?”

This was a question Sara had wrestled with since it happened, this idea that her brother would go off and join something that was bound to lead him to violence. She had thought at the time he would wind up in the middle of one of the pointless conflicts going on in the world, some bloody effort at nation-building her friends were so critical of, white man’s domination of the world in order to keep people of color oppressed.

“He said he didn’t want to wind up in a street gang,” Sara said.

“You sound like you didn’t like the idea,” Ponci said, glancing at her briefly before turning his gaze back towards the road.

“Very perceptive of you, Sherlock,” she grumbled.

“Why not?”

“Because it was a scam.”

“I don’t get you?”

“Black men with little or not opportunity to get a good education get invited to go off and get killed doesn’t sound like such a good deal to me.”

“Your brother obviously disagreed.”

“He was on the fence about it until one day he walked out our door, looked down the street at the New York Skyline and saw two towers smoking.”

“9/11?”

“It pushed him over the edge,” she said. “I tried to talk him out of it, telling him it was a white man’s war, and he didn’t need to die fighting a white man’s war and how he ought to stay home and fight for his own people.”

 

 

 

“Obviously, he didn’t listen.”

“My brother always thought funny,” Sara said. “He claimed I listened too much to bad preachers and other radicals, who steered me in the wrong direction. Black people are on the rise in America, he told me. After all, we finally had a black man for president. My brother said he intended to take his place in the big white society, rather than scurrying around like a rat in a ghetto for the rest of his life.”

“I see his point,” Ponci said, slowing the car for a traffic light, and bringing it to a stop in the left lane. When the light changed, he turned left.

The headlights illuminated a sign pointing left for Hackensack.

“You would,” Sara said with more than a slightly sour tone. “You’re white.”

“White or not, my family had issues when they came over,” Ponci said. “They had to work to get respect.”

“That’s what my brother said, too,” Sara mumbled. “That’s why he joined. He said the army had rules and rituals that made everybody equal.”

“You don’t believe that either?”

“To me, it was like saying you’re equal when you make poor blacks and poor whites slaves. I didn’t think that at first. I started out afraid he would die in this war or that. The truth hit me later.”

“What truth?”

“That white society holds your future hostage, and if you wanted an education, you had to risk dying for it.”

“Fighting and dying is part of the cost of freedom.”

“Yeah, tell that to all those spoiled white kids that don’t have to risk anything to get their education.”

“Did you get used to it and finally accept things when he went into service?”

“No way,” Sara said. “I kept on him, determined to convince him he needed to get out. But he resisted me at every turn.”

Sara started out the window at the passing landscape.

“I don’t think he every believed the stories my grandparents used to tell us, even through we grew up near the ruins left after the riots. You can read a lot of history about discrimination and not get it into your head that it is real. He loved being a soldier. I think he found it easier to take and give orders than to figure out how to act out here in the civilian world. He said if he worked hard, he got rewarded – and he worked very hard. He loved it so much, he forgot why he went into service in the first place – about getting into college. 9/11 plagued him. He was always angry about it. He wouldn’t let it go. When he did go to school, it was only so he could become a better soldier.

“Yet the more he learned and the further he advanced, the more distance he became from me, and the more he changed.

“We used to talk a lot. But that changed, too.

“After awhile, he could say very little about what he was doing, always telling me it was a security risk.”

“He called you about this, didn’t he?” Ponci asked. “About the briefcase and what’s in the all these storage devices?”

“That came out of the blue,” Sara said, “and it shocked me. Suddenly, he was telling me everything I always told him was true, and that he has proof, and that he needed to meet with me in New York so that he could give it all to me.”

“What did he expect you to do with?” Ponci asked, drawing her gaze.

“He knew I knew the right people,” she said, “and I do.”

“Someone else clearly knew he had the information, and if those guys are behind us, they know we have it, and it seems that a number of people want what he had.”

“I sensed something was wrong when strangers showed up in our neighborhood asking questions about me, my parents, even my grandparents.”

“When did this happen?”

“A few days after my brother called.”

“Who were they?”

“The best I could guess was the FBI,” she said. “I thought it was because of my organizing. But all this suggest a different reason.”

“Which explains why you still went to meet your brother?”

“How was I to know any of this would happen, that you were going to do what you did or that those others – the ones from the highway – were watching me? Thinking back, I remember seeing something – like ghosts – haunting the old hood, waiting and watching. I think some of them were even on the PATH when I made my way into Manhattan. But if they followed me to the hotel, I didn’t see them. I saw no one when I got to his room. I was too started to find the door ajar and the apartment empty. I could still smell the gun power from the shots, though I didn’t exactly know what that meant at the time.”

 

 

Sara looked hard at Ponci again, her gaze thick with rage and her face hot.

“I knew something was wrong right away,” she said. “Not just from the smoke and the door, but the brief case was open and the laptop exposed.”

Ponci glanced over at her.

“That’s right,” he mumbled. “You’re brother was bent over it when I came out of the bathroom. I should have remembered that. I should have thought something funny when I came back and found everything locked up again. That was your doing, I suppose?”

“Yes,” she said. “But at first, I just stared down at the laptop. I kept thinking about all the secret things he always warned me about. I pulled the letter out of my pocket again and re-read it. I remember his warnings about using cell phones and laptops when he talked to me on the phone. But I didn’t connect anything until that moment. Even then I didn’t realize people could track you that way – just by turning something on.”

“They can. They sometimes even have a way of tracking things when they are turned off,” Ponci said. “But no doubt you’re brother took precautions to make sure this computer wasn’t being tracked. Why didn’t you leave the empty briefcase?”

“At first, I was going to pack it all up and take it with me,” she said. “It occurred to me that someone might come back and look for it, and figure out I’d been there, and then come looking for me.”

“So you took the computer and flash drives downstairs to your apartment?”

“No,” she said. “Once I had the stuff my brother brought, I ran down the street to the local Fed Ex office. I got there just before it closed.”

“Are you telling me this computer and the flash drives are not the ones from the brief case?”

“They’re not.”

“What are they?”

“This is my laptop and these are blank flash drives I bought on my way back to the hotel. I thought I could stick them back into the brief case before anybody noticed. But when I got back and saw all the police, I panicked. I decided to go to my apartment instead.”

“Is that when I saw you in the elevator?”

“That’s right.”

 

 

Ponci remained quiet for so long, Sara feared he might kill her.
He just stared ahead as the car plunged into the heart of the old city, court house, county building, and municipal center rising up like graves to either side, and beyond it, a business district that struggled to retain life after suburban sprawl and malls sprung up like bad mushrooms elsewhere. Most of the city had closed its doors for the night with metal gates drawn down over windows, through some cheap electronic goods glared with the phony promise of happiness – cellular phones, digital camera, I-pads and I-pods just beyond reach. In places where the gates were solid, graffiti artists had decorated them with slogans and secret code of street gangs.

Finally, in a low, growling voice, Ponci said, “This does complicated things a bit.”

“I don’t see how,” Sara said. “We just give the man this stuff, and he gives you the money. Everybody’s happy right?”

She did not mean it the way she said it, her tone thick with mockery and bitterness. She was thinking about her brother again, and felt more than a little satisfaction out of being able to fulfill his dying wish to keep the material away from the man who had ordered his death.

“Don’t be so smug,” Ponci said. “This isn’t just about the money anymore. The people don’t just want the stuff we have, they want us dead.”

“And still you’re going to where they’re waiting?”

“It’s complicated. But if we don’t meet them, they’ll keep coming after us.”

“You mean those that are chasing us?”

“All of them. I don’t know who they all are, but they all want what we have, and want us dead for holding out on them. We can’t outrun them, but we might be able to make a deal. Or maybe if we hand over the stuff to the one I’m supposed to meet, then the people behind us will go after him and pass over us.”

“Like the angel of death?” Sara said. “All we need is some lamb’s blood.”

“No, all we need is the stuff,” he said. “and you need to tell me where you sent it so we can go get it back.”

 

 

“No,” Sara said. “I’m not going to tell you. And you won’t get it back by killing me either.”

“Killing you isn’t half of they’re do to you, when they get their hands on you,” he said, his voice rising out of his usual calm, as he steered the car to the curb and stopped.

She laughed weakly, but felt the rush of despair as if she sensed how close she had come to the edge of it, and wondered if she was about to become another voice inside Ponci’s head, and if by going there, she might meet her brother again.

“This is not a game,” he said, turning in the seat so he more or less faced her. “You might be willing to die for your brother’s cause – whatever that is – but I have no intention to.”

“Nobody knows I took the stuff from the briefcase,” Sara said.

“It won’t be hard for them to figure out since they know you’re with me. They might even have tailed you to the Fed Ex office.”

“I was very careful to keep out of sight,” she said.

“Of people, maybe, but these guys have ways of watching you that you wouldn’t expect,” Ponci said. “They also might have grabbed the stuff once you left.”

“I don’t think so,” Sara said. “I got to the place just before it closed, and saw them put it on the last truck out. It went with the rest of the Wall Street traffic. If they saw anything, they would have a hard time catching up with it. Besides, if they had it, why are they still following us?”

“A good point,” Ponci mumbled.

“So maybe we can give your man this stuff, and you can get your money, and everybody will be happy.”

“I don’t think so,” Ponci said. “My guy will want to check out the stuff before he gives us our money -- even if it’s a trap. When he finds out it isn’t what he paid for, he’ll be even more convinced we’re holding out for more.”

“What will he do?”

“He tried to kill me last time, but that was a mistake,” Ponci said. “He’ll want us alive this time. He’ll want us to talk.”

“You mean torture?”

“And worse,” Ponci said.

“But you said this is somebody associated with our government?”

“Yeah, exactly. There are no good guys in this game. These are the same people who hired me to kill your brother, remember?”

“Okay, if we can’t go to him, what can we do?”

“We stall for time.”

“How?”

“We stay ahead of them until we get the stuff back.”

“But I don’t want to give it back to them.”

“You have someone else in mind?”

“My brother did, people who might be able to make it all public.”

“Then we’re both dead. And so is anyone else we give the stuff to.”

“What about justice?” Sara asked. “We’re going to let these people get away this?”

“We don’t know what they’re getting away with.”

“My brother did.”

“You’re brother’s dead, and he left us with a package of goods we can’t even look at without bringing death down on our heads.”

Ponci shook his head as if trying to clear it.

“Justice is bullshit,” he said. “Everything is about power – those who have it, and those who don’t. Right now, the only power we have is in that package. They want the stuff, we have it. We have the power to buy back our lives, and that’s what I intend to do.”

“But if we brought it to the right people, maybe they could protect us,” Sara said.

“The right people? Like who?”

“Maybe The New York Times?”

“And not know who exactly we’re handing it over to?” Ponci said. “The guys after us have their people inside media. And even if we could trust the person, that person couldn’t protect us. Not from what is after us now.”

“I have friends who could help,” Sara said.

“Is that who you sent the papers to?”

“Sort of.”

Ponci sighed, then looked out at the street and the handful of passing cars – traffic bound for the nearby ramp to the highway.

“Let’s take one thing at a time,” he finally said. “We got to go meet this man.”

“But you said it’s a trap and we don’t have what he wants.”

“It is a trap, but he won’t unleash it until he’s sure we have what he wants. I want him to agree to meet someplace else, someplace of our choosing.”

“Then why go? Why not call him.”

“Because he won’t believe me unless we meet him in the flesh,” Ponce said, putting the car back into gear and steering it towards the onramp to the highway going west.