She has big hands and big feet and a big head. The furniture around her always looks like Toys 'R' Us specials built for toddlers, an almost Alice-in-Wonderland effect where the room and all its belongings seem to shrink around her.
She rose when she saw me, nearly toppling her own desk, and exclaimed, 'Mr. Bolitar!'
'Hey, Big Cyndi.'
She gets mad when I call her 'Cyndi' or, uh, 'Big.' She insists on formalities. I am Mr. Bolitar. She is Big Cyndi, which, by the way, is her real name. She had it legally changed more than a decade ago.
Big Cyndi crossed the room with an agility that belied the bulk. She wrapped me in an embrace that made me feel as if I'd been mummified in wet attic insulation. In a good way.
'Oh, Mr. Bolitar!'
She started sniffling, a sound that brought images of moose mating on the Discovery Channel.
'I'm fine, Big Cyndi.'
'But someone shot you!'
Her voice changed depending on her mood. When she first worked here, Big Cyndi didn't talk, preferring to growl. Clients complained, but not to her face and usually anonymously. Right now Big Cyndi's pitch was high and little-girlish, which frankly was a hell of a lot scarier than any growl.
'I shot him worse,' I said.
She let go of me and giggled, covering her mouth with a hand the approximate size of a truck tire. The giggling echoed through the room, and all over the tristate area, small children were reaching up and grabbing their mommies' hands.
Esperanza came to the door. Back in the day, Esperanza and Big Cyndi had been tag-team wrestling partners for FLOW, the Fabulous Ladies of Wrestling. The federation had originally wanted to call themselves 'Beautiful' instead of 'Fabulous' but the network balked at the ensuing acronym.
Esperanza, with her dark skin and looks that could best be described-as they often were by the panting wrestling announcers-as 'succulent,' played Little Pocahontas, the lithe beauty who was winning on skill before the bad guys would cheat and take advantage of her. Big Cyndi was her partner, Big Chief Mama, who rescued her so that they could, together and with the roar of the crowd, vanquish the scantily clad and implant-enhanced evildoers.
Entertaining stuff.
'We got work,' Esperanza said, 'and lots of it.'
Our space was fairly small. We had this foyer and two offices, one for me, one for Esperanza. Esperanza had started here as my assistant or secretary or whatever the politically correct term for Girl Friday is. She'd gone to law school at night and taken over as a full partner right around the time I freaked out and ran away with Terese to that island.
'What did you tell the clients?' I asked.
'You were in a car accident overseas.'
I nodded. We headed into her office. The business was a bit in shambles after my most recent disappearance. There were calls to be made. I made them. We kept most of the clients, almost all, but there were a few who did not like the fact that they could not reach their agent for more than two weeks. I understood. This is a personal business. It involves a lot of hand-holding and ego stroking. Every client needs to feel as if they are the only one- part of the illusion. When you're not there, even if the reasons are justified, the illusion vanishes.
I wanted to ask about Terese and Win and a million things, but I remembered the call from this morning. I worked. I just worked and I confess that it was therapeutic. I felt jittery and anxious for reasons I can't quite explain. I even bit my nails, something I hadn't done since I was in the fourth grade, and searched my body for scabs I could pick. Work somehow helped.
When I had a break, I did some Web searches for 'Terese Collins' and 'Rick Collins' and ' Karen Tower.' First I did all three names. Nothing came up. Then I tried Terese alone. Very little, all of it old from her days at CNN. Someone still kept a Web site about 'Terese the AnchorBabe,' complete with images, mostly head shots and video grabs from news shows, but it hadn't been updated in three years.
Then I tried Google Newsing Rick and Karen.
I'd expected to find little, maybe an obituary, but that wasn't the case. There was plenty, albeit most of it from papers in the United Kingdom. The news somehow shocked me and yet it all made bizarre sense:
REPORTER AND WIFE MURDERED BY TERRORISTS
Cell Broken Up, Killed in Wild Shoot-out
I started reading. Esperanza came to my door. 'Myron?'
I held up a finger asking for a moment.
She came around my desk and saw what I was doing. She sighed and sat.
'You knew about this?' I asked.
'Of course.'
According to the articles, 'special forces working on international terrorism' engaged and 'eliminated' legendary terrorist Mohammad Matar, aka 'Doctor Death.' Mohammad Matar had been born in Egypt but raised in the finest schools in Europe, including Spain (thus the name, combining the Islamic first name with a last name that meant 'death' in Spanish), and was indeed a medical doctor who'd done his training in the United States. The special forces also killed at least three other men in his cell-two in London, one in Paris.
There was a photograph of Matar. It was the same mug shot that Berleand had sent me. I looked at the man I had, to use the journalistic term, eliminated.
The articles further noted that news producer Rick Collins had gotten close to the cell, trying to infiltrate and expose it, when his identity was breached. Matar and his 'henchmen' murdered Collins in Paris. Matar slipped through a French dragnet (though apparently one of his men was killed in it), made his way to London and tried to clean up all evidence of his cell and his 'fiendish terrorist plot' by killing Rick Collins's longtime production partner Mario Contuzzi and Collins's wife, Karen Tower. It was there, in the home Collins and Tower shared, that Mohammad Matar and two members of his cell met their demise.
I looked up at Esperanza. 'Terrorists?'
She nodded.
'So that explains why Interpol freaked out when we showed them the picture.'
'Yes.'
'So where's Terese?'
'No one knows.'
I sat back, tried to process that. 'It says government agents killed the terrorists.'
'Yep.'
'Except they didn't.'
'True. You did.'
'And Win.'
'Right.'
'But they left our names out of it.'
'Yes.'
I thought about the sixteen days, about Terese, about the blood tests, about the blond girl. 'What the hell is going on?'
'Don't know about the details,' she said. 'Didn't really care.'
'Why not?'
Esperanza shook her head. 'You can be such a dope sometimes.'
I waited.
'You were shot. Win saw that. And for more than two weeks we had absolutely no idea where you were-if you were alive or dead or anything.'
I couldn't help it. I grinned.
'Stop grinning like an idiot.'
'You were worried about me.'
'I was worried about my business interest.'
