I wake up as we lurch forward and begin rumbling down the runway. Two hours later we land in Atlanta. At Passport Control, I manage to avoid the counters manned by black Customs agents and instead pick a beefy young white boy who seems to be bored and indifferent. He takes my passport, glances at a nine-year-old photo of Malcolm Bannister, quickly compares it to the revised face of Max Reed Baldwin, and sees nothing unusual. We all look the same.

I am assuming Customs has by now notified the FBI that I left the country two days earlier, on a private jet bound for Jamaica. What I don’t know is whether the FBI is still monitoring any possible movements by Malcolm Bannister. I’m betting they are not, and I want the FBI to think I’m still somewhere in the islands having a grand time. At any rate, I’m moving quickly. Since Malcolm no longer has a valid driver’s license, Max rents a car at the Avis desk, and forty-five minutes after landing in Atlanta, I’m leaving the city in a hurry. Near Roswell, Georgia, I stop at a Walmart and pay cash for two more prepaid cell phones. As I leave the store, I drop two old ones into a trash can.

After dark, Vanessa parks the truck for good. She’s been driving it for almost twelve hours and can’t wait to get rid of it. For a moment she sits behind the wheel, in a space next to her Honda Accord, and watches a commuter airliner taxi to the Roanoke terminal. It’s a little after 9:00 on a Sunday night, and there appears to be no traffic. The parking lot is almost empty. She takes another deep breath and gets out. Working quickly while watching everything around her, she transfers the backpacks from Nathan’s front seat into the trunk of her car. Eight backpacks, each seemingly heavier than the one before it, but she does not mind at all.

She locks the truck, keeps the keys, and leaves the parking lot. If things go as planned, Nathan’s truck will not be noticed for several days. When his friends realize he’s missing, they will eventually notify the police, who will find the truck and start piecing together a story. There’s no doubt Nathan boasted to someone that he was headed to Miami on a private jet, and this will cause the cops to chase their tails for a while.

I have no way of knowing if the authorities can link their missing man to Nathaniel Coley, the clown who recently left town with a fake passport, four kilos of coke, and a pistol, but I doubt it. He might not be located until someone down in Jamaica finally allows him to make a phone call. Whom he calls and what he tells that person is anyone’s guess. He is more likely to count the hours and days until I return with a sackful of cash and start bribing people. After weeks, maybe a month, he’ll realize his old pal Reed stiffed him, took the money and ran.

I almost feel sorry for him.

At 1:00 a.m., I approach Asheville, North Carolina, and see a sign for the motel at a busy interchange. Parked behind it, and out of view, is a little blue Honda Accord with my dear Vanessa sitting behind the wheel, the Glock at her side. I park next to her and we step inside our first-floor room. We kiss and embrace, but we are much too tense to get amorous. We quietly unload her trunk and toss the backpacks on one of the beds. I lock the door, chain it, and stick a chair under the doorknob. I pull the curtains tight, then hang towels from the rods to cover the slits and cracks and make certain no one can see inside our little vault. While I do this, Vanessa takes a shower, and when she emerges from the bathroom, she is wearing nothing but a short terry-cloth bathrobe that reveals miles and miles of the prettiest legs I’ve ever seen. Don’t even think about it, she says. She’s exhausted. Maybe tomorrow.

We empty the backpacks, put on disposable latex gloves, and make a neat arrangement of eighteen cigar boxes, each secured with two precise bands of silver duct tape. We notice two have apparently been opened, with the tape cut along the top, and we set them aside. Using a small penknife, I cut the tape on the first canister and open the box. We remove the mini-bars, count them—thirty—then put them back inside and re-tape the lid. Vanessa scribbles down the quantity and we open the second one. It has thirty-two mini-bars, all shiny, perfectly sized, and seemingly untouched by human hands.

“Beautiful, just beautiful,” she says over and over. “It will last for centuries.”

“Forever,” I say, rubbing a mini-bar. “Wouldn’t you love to know what part of the world it came from?”

She laughs because we’ll never know.

We open all sixteen of the sealed boxes, then inventory the mini-bars from the two that had previously been opened. They held about half the number as the others. Our total is 570. With gold fluctuating around $1,500 an ounce, our jackpot is worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $8.5 million.

We lie on the bed with the gold stacked between us, and it’s impossible not to smile. We need a bottle of champagne, but at 2:00 on a Monday morning in a cheap motel in North Carolina, champagne does not exist. There is so much to take in here, at this moment, but one of the more glorious aspects of our project is that no one is looking for this treasure. Other than Nathan Cooley, no one knows it exists. We took it from a thief, one who left no trail.

Seeing, touching, and counting our fortune has energized us. I yank off her bathrobe and we crawl under the covers of the other bed. Try as we may, it’s difficult to make love without keeping one eye on the gold. When we finish, we collapse with exhaustion and sleep like the dead.

CHAPTER 38

At 6:30 Monday morning, Agent Fox walked into the large office of Victor Westlake and said, “The Jamaicans are as slow as ever. Nothing much to add. Baldwin arrived late Friday night on a jet chartered from a company in Raleigh, a nice plane that is currently being seized by Jamaican Customs and can’t come home. No sign of Baldwin. His friend Nathaniel Coley tried to enter with a fake passport and is now locked up just like the airplane.”

“He’s in jail?” Westlake asked, chewing on a thumbnail.

“Yes sir. That’s all I can get as of now. Don’t know when he might be getting out. I’m trying to get the police to check hotel records to find Baldwin, but they’re hesitant to do so. He’s not a fugitive; they don’t like to piss off the hotels; it was the weekend; et cetera.”

“Find Baldwin.”

“Trying, sir.”

“What’s he up to?”

Fox shook his head. “It makes no sense. Why burn that much cash on a private jet? Why travel with someone using a fake passport? Who the hell is Nathaniel Coley? We’ve done a search in Virginia and West Virginia and found no possible hits. Maybe Coley is a good friend who can’t get a passport, and they were trying to beat Customs so they can play in the sun for a few days.”

“Maybe maybe.”

“You got it, sir.”

“Keep digging and report back by e-mail.”

“Yes sir.”

“I’m assuming he left his car behind at the Roanoke airport.”

“He did, in the parking lot of the general aviation terminal. Same Florida license plates. We found it Saturday morning and have it under surveillance.”

“Good. Just find him, okay?”

“And if we do?”

“Just follow him and figure out what he’s doing.”

Over coffee and gold, we plan our day, but we do not linger. At nine, Vanessa turns in the key at the front desk and checks out. We kiss good-bye and I follow her out of the parking lot, careful not to crowd the rear bumper of her Accord. On the other side of it, hidden deep in the trunk, is half the gold. The other half is in the trunk of my rented Impala. We separate at the interchange; she’s going north and I’m going south. She waves in the rearview mirror, and I wonder when I’ll see her again.