“I’m not dealing. I told you that.”

“Then there’s no downside. You’re doing it for Gene and for all of the DEA’s murder victims. You’re doing it for justice.”

“And you’re gonna love South Beach,” Gwen adds.

I close the deal by saying, “We can leave tomorrow afternoon out of Roanoke, fly straight to Miami, do the shoot on Saturday, play on Sunday, see the DEA file on Monday morning, and you’re home that night.”

Gwen says, “I thought Nicky had the jet in Vancouver.”

I reply, “He does, but it’ll be here tomorrow afternoon.”

“You have a jet?” Nathan asks, and he looks at me in pure amazement.

This is amusing to Gwen and me. I laugh and say, “Not mine, personally, but our company leases one. We travel an awful lot and sometimes it’s the only way to get things done.”

“I can’t leave tomorrow,” Gwen says, looking at her schedule on her iPhone. “I’ll be in D.C., but I’ll just fly down Saturday. I’m not gonna miss the three families in the same room at the same time. Incredible.”

“What about your bar?” I ask Nathan.

“I own the place,” he says smugly. “And I got a pretty good manager. Plus, I’d like to get outta town for a few days. The bar is ten, twelve hours a day, six days a week.”

“And your parole officer?”

“I’m free to travel. I just have to notify him, that’s all.”

“This is exciting,” Gwen says, almost squealing with delight. Nathan is smiling like a kid at Christmas. Me, I’m all business as usual. “Look, Nathan, I need to nail this down right now. If we’re going, then say so. I have to call Nicky and line up the jet, and I have to call Tad so he can arrange flights for the other families. Yes or no?”

Without hesitation, Nathan says, “Yep. Let’s go.”

“Great.”

Gwen asks, “Which hotel would Nathan like, Reed?”

“I don’t know. They’re all good. Your call.” I tap keys on my phone and begin another unilateral conversation.

“You want to be right on the beach, Nathan, or one block off?”

“Where are the girls?” he asks and laughs at his own incredible humor.

“Okay, on the beach it is.”

By the time we return to Radford, Nathan Cooley thinks he’s booked into one of the coolest hotels in the world, on one of the hippest beaches, and he’ll arrive there by private jet, which will only be fitting for such a serious actor.

Vanessa leaves in a mad dash for Reston, Virginia, D.C. suburbs, some four hours away. Her first destination is a nameless organization renting space in a run-down strip mall. It’s the workshop of a group of talented forgers who can create virtually any document on the spot. They specialize in fake passports, but for the right price they can produce college diplomas, birth certificates, marriage licenses, court orders, car titles, eviction notices, driver’s licenses, credit histories—there’s no limit to their mischief. Some of what they do is illegal and some is not. They brazenly advertise on the Internet, along with an astonishing number of competitors, but claim to be careful about whom they work for.

I found them several weeks ago after an exhaustive search, and to validate their reliability, I sent a $500 check drawn on Skelter Films for a fake passport. It arrived in Florida a week later, and I was floored at its seeming authenticity. According to the guy on the phone, a real expert, there was an eighty-twenty chance the fake passport would clear Customs in the event I tried to leave the country. There was a 90 percent chance I would be able to enter any country in the Caribbean. Problems will arise, though, if I try to reenter the United States. I explained that this will not happen, not with my new fake passport. He explained that nowadays, in the age of terror, the U.S. Customs Service is much more concerned with who’s on the No Fly List than who’s fudging with phony papers.

Because it’s a rush job, Vanessa forks over $1,000 in cash, and they get down to business. Her forger is a nervous geek with an odd name that he reluctantly divulged. Like his colleagues, he works in a cramped, fortified cubicle with no one else in sight. The atmosphere is suspicious, as though everyone there is violating some law and half expecting a SWAT team any minute. They don’t like drop-ins. They prefer the shield of the Internet so no one sees their shady business.

Vanessa hands over the memory card from her camera, and on a twenty-inch screen they look at the shots of a smiling Nathan Cooley. They select one for the passport and driver’s license, and go through his data—address, date of birth, and so on. Vanessa says she wants the new documents in the name of Nathaniel Coley, not Cooley. Whatever, the geek says. He could not care less. He is soon lost in a flurry of high-speed imaging. It takes him an hour to produce an American passport and a Virginia driver’s license that would fool anyone. The passport’s blue vinyl binding is sufficiently worn, and our boy Nathan, who’s never traveled far, has now seen all of Europe and most of Asia.

Vanessa hustles into D.C., where she picks up two first-aid kits, a pistol, and some pills. At 8:30, she turns around and heads south for Roanoke.

CHAPTER 33

The airplane is a Challenger 604, one of the finer private jets available for charter. Its cabin seats eight comfortably and allows those under six feet two to move around without scraping the ceiling. A new one costs something like $30 million, according to the data and specs online, but I’m not in the market. I only need a quick rental, at $5,000 an hour. The charter service is out of Raleigh, and it has been paid in full with a Skelter Films check drawn on the bank in Miami. We’re set for a 5:00 p.m. Friday departure out of Roanoke, just two passengers—Nathan and me. I spend most of Friday morning trying to convince the charter service that I will e-mail copies of our passports as soon as I can locate mine. My story is that I have temporarily misplaced it and I’m turning my apartment upside down.

For trips outside the country, a private charter service must submit its passengers’ names and copies of their passports several hours before departure. The U.S. Customs Service checks this information against its No Fly List. I know that neither Malcolm Bannister nor Max Reed Baldwin is on the list, but I don’t know what might happen when Customs receives a copy of Nathaniel Coley’s fake passport. So I stall, hoping and believing that the less time Customs has with both passports, the luckier I might get. Finally, I inform the charter service that I’ve found mine, and I kill another hour before e-mailing it and Nathaniel’s to the office in Raleigh. I have no idea what Customs will do when it receives the copy of my passport. Quite possibly, my name will trigger an alert and the FBI will be notified. If this happens, it will be, to my knowledge, the first trace of me since I left Florida sixteen days ago. I tell myself this is no big deal because I’m neither a suspect nor a fugitive. I’m a free man who can travel anywhere without restrictions, right?

But why does this scenario bother me? Because I don’t trust the FBI.

I drive Vanessa to the Roanoke Regional Airport, where she catches a flight to Miami, through Atlanta. After I drop her off, I drive around until I find the small terminal for private aircraft. I have hours to kill, so I find a parking place and hide my little Audi between two pickup trucks. I call Nathan at his bar and deliver the bad news that our flight has been delayed. According to “our pilots,” there is a bug in a warning light. No big deal, but “our technicians” are hard at work and we should take off around 7:00 p.m.

The charter service e-mailed me a copy of our itinerary, and the Challenger is scheduled to be “repositioned” in Roanoke at 3:00 p.m. On the dot, it lands and taxis to the terminal. The adventure at hand makes me both nervous and excited. I wait half an hour before calling the charter service in Raleigh to explain that I will be delayed, until approximately 7:00 p.m.