Chapter 7 - The Flight to the Coast
The rain did not stop by morning. It turned into a steady, grey downpour that blurred the towers of Manhattan into long, dark needles against the sky.
In the small room behind the coat check at the private air terminal in Teterboro, New Jersey, Vanessa Blair sat on a leather sofa with three large Louis Vuitton suitcases piled around her feet like a defensive wall. She was wearing a thick mink coat—the one Nathan had bought her for her birthday—but she was shaking so violently that the fur seemed to ripple with her breath.
The glass door opened, and Nathan walked in.
He didn't have his tuxedo now. He wore a plain, dark blue tracksuit and a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. He carried no luggage, nothing but a plastic shopping bag containing four separate burner phones and three thick stacks of hundred-dollar bills he had taken from the emergency locker behind the bar at the Midtown club.
“Is the pilot ready?” Vanessa asked, jumping up from the sofa, her acrylic nails digging into his sleeve. “Nate, the guy at the desk looked at my passport twice. He said there was an administrative hold on the tail number.”
Nathan didn't look at her face. He walked to the window, watching the small twin-engine Learjet sitting on the wet tarmac outside, its engines idling with a low, whistling whine that sounded like a wounded animal.
“The tail number is clean,” Nathan said, his voice flat and dead. “I transferred the registration to a company in Panama three months ago. Clara doesn't have the keys to that server.”
“And the money?” Vanessa whispered, her eyes tracking the plastic shopping bag in his hand. “The Zurich money? Can we get it from the branch in Nassau?”
“There is no Zurich money, Vanessa,” Nathan said, turning his head slowly to look at her. His eyes were bloodshot, the skin beneath them grey with the sudden, ancient fatigue of a man who had aged ten years in twelve hours. “The Zurich account was closed at 3:00 a.m. Clara used the father’s token to transfer the entire balance to the longshoremen’s pension fund in Brooklyn. It’s gone. Every nickel of it.”
Vanessa backed away from him, her hand moving to her mouth, her back hitting the leather corner of her luxury suitcase. “The pension fund? That’s... that’s forty million dollars, Nathan! She gave it away? To those grease-monkeys from the piers?”
“She didn't give it away, Vanessa,” Nathan said, his voice dropping into a quiet, technical whisper that made her skin crawl. “She paid the rent. She bought the next twenty years of silence from every crane operator between here and Boston. She bought the chairs we were standing on.”
A man in a black pilot’s uniform stepped through the service door, his cap held under his arm, his face serious.
“Mr. Whitaker,” the pilot said. “We have a clearance window from the tower, but we need to move now. The weather over the coast is turning, and the New York center is starting to redirect the light traffic.”
“Let’s go,” Nathan said, grabbing Vanessa’s arm with his free hand, not waiting for her to gather her bags.
“My luggage!” she screamed, trying to pull back toward the sofa. “Nate! My things! The silver dress is in that case! My jewelry from the safe!”
“Leave it,” Nathan barked, dragging her through the glass door onto the wet asphalt where the wind from the engines blew the rain straight into their faces. “The silver dress doesn't work where we’re going, Vanessa. There’s no center table in Nassau. There’s just the sand and the people who know exactly how much it costs to change a name.”
As the small jet pulled away from the gate, its tires splashing through the deep puddles on the runway, a single black sedan sat parked by the perimeter fence, its wipers moving with a slow, steady rhythm. Inside the front seat, Leo Vance took a small black notebook from his pocket, made a neat check mark beside a line of text, and reached for his radio.
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“The bird is in the air, Mrs. Whitaker,” Leo said into the receiver. “The tail number is heading south-southeast. The Long Island City office is clear.”
Through the speaker, Clara’s voice came back, calm and cool as the morning rain. “Thank you, Leo. Tell Marcus he can open the dining room at Ashford Hall now. The table is clean.”
