It's in my driveway right now." "I thought so." Richard exhaled slowly. "I need you to drive over here, park one street away. Do not come up to the gate. I will call you again in a few minutes and tell you what to do next." Richard ended the call with Anthony and stood very still in the laundry room. Through a small window above the dryer, he could just see the corner of the front gate. The town car was still there. The fake driver was still standing beside it, waiting for a man he believed would walk out, get inside, and not see his own home again. Richard turned to Elijah. The boy was standing near a stack of folded towels, his small back pressed against the wall, watching him. "Elijah," Richard said softly. "I need you to do something very important, and I need you to do it the way I tell you.
Can you do that?" "Yes, sir." "Go to your mother. Tell her you are not feeling well. Tell her your stomach hurts and that you want to lie down. Do not lie about anything else, just that. Then stay in your room until I come and find you." "If anyone, anyone at all, comes and asks where I am or what I am doing today, you say you have not seen me since breakfast. Can you do that?" Elijah thought about it. Then he nodded. "Yes," he said, "I can do that." "Good." Richard knelt down again the way he had behind the cypress trees so that his eyes were level with the boy's. "Listen to me.
What you did this morning was the bravest thing I have ever seen anyone do. I want you to remember that." "Whatever happens in the next few hours, whatever you hear, whatever you see, I want you to remember that you saved a man's life today and that nothing that happens after this changes that fact. Do you understand?" The boy's eyes were very wide and very still. "Yes, sir." "Good. Go." Elijah turned and walked out of the laundry room. Richard heard the soft sound of his shoes on the tile, then on the wooden floor of the hallway, then nothing. He stayed where he was for almost a full minute, listening to the house. It was strange how a house could feel familiar for 26 years and then in the space of a single morning feel like the inside of a stranger's body. Then he straightened his tie, picked up his briefcase, and walked out of the laundry room. He did not go to the front door. He went to his study first because that was where the missing folder was supposed to be. He stood in the study for 30 seconds, opened and closed a drawer, walked to the bookshelf, walked back. He was setting a small piece of evidence in his own mind, the way a chess player sets a piece without yet knowing how he will use it. He did not yet know who in this house was watching, but he wanted there to be a trail of him doing exactly what he had said on the phone. Then he walked to the front foyer. Vivian was already there. She had come in from the patio and was standing by the long mirror adjusting an earring. She turned when she heard him. "There you are," she said warmly. "Did you find it?" For one long second, Richard looked at her. He looked at the woman he had married in a small chapel in Virginia, the woman who had cried during his mother's funeral, the woman who had once held his hand in a hospital waiting room for 14 hours without letting go. He looked at her and he saw, beneath the soft and familiar smile, the cool calculation of a person measuring whether a problem had been solved. He had spent his career reading faces across boardroom tables. He could not understand how he had never read this one. "I found it," he said. He held up the folder he had picked off his desk in the study. It contained nothing important, just printed copies of a quarterly forecast that had already been emailed to him 3 days ago. But Vivian did not know that and she nodded. "Good," she said. "Now go, you'll be lucky to make it on time." "I know." He took a small step closer to her the way a husband does when he is about to leave for the day. He kissed her on the cheek lightly just below the ear. Her perfume was the same one she had worn for 9 years. He had bought her the last three bottles himself. "I love you," she said. He did not answer that. He could not. He simply smiled, the small private smile he had used a thousand times before, and turned toward the door. He walked out onto the front steps. The town car was 30 ft away. The fake driver had straightened the moment he saw the door open and was now standing beside the rear door with one hand on the handle. Richard walked down the steps slowly, looking at his phone the way he always did in the morning. He scrolled through emails he was not reading. He did this for the length of the path. He did this until he was perhaps 15 ft from the car. And then without breaking his pace, without looking up, he changed direction by about 10 degrees, just enough to pass the car and continue toward the small pedestrian gate on the far side of the driveway. The fake driver hesitated. Richard could feel it without looking. The man had been told exactly what would happen. The man had been told that Richard would walk to the car without looking, would get in without looking, would close the door without looking. The man had not been told what to do if Richard walked past him."Mr.
Calloway?" The driver said. Richard kept walking. He raised the phone slightly to his ear as if taking a call and said in a clear and ordinary voice,"Yes, I'm walking out now. No, I'll meet you at the corner. The driveway is blocked." He pushed open the pedestrian gate and stepped out onto the street. The town car did not follow. It could not. The driver had no instructions for this. Richard walked 20 steps down the sidewalk, turned the corner, and saw Anthony's silver sedan idling against the curb, exactly where he had been told to wait. Anthony Reed had been Richard's driver for almost 4 years, and in that time he had seen Richard tired, angry, distracted, and on two occasions slightly drunk after a particularly difficult quarterly review. He had never seen him look the way he looked now, walking down the sidewalk with his briefcase in one hand and his phone in the other. His face composed in a way that did not match anything happening around him. Richard opened the passenger door and got in. He did not sit in the back. "Drive," he said, "anywhere, not toward the office, not toward the airport.
Just drive." Anthony pulled away from the curb. He waited until they were two blocks from the house before he spoke."Mr. Calloway, you want to tell me what is happening?" "I will, but first I need to ask you something, and I need you to answer me honestly. Last week, when you got the message about your car being in for service, who told you?" Anthony thought for a moment. "It was a text from the company dispatcher.