CHAPTER TEN

The plane landed at the Montreal airfield and Charles Sinatra walked down the airstairs still pissed about being there. And the fact that Hammer Reese didn’t have the curtesy to meet his plane was an insult too. He wondered why he even agreed to show up. And why did he have to send a limousine, Charles wondered. Why couldn’t he just send a regular car?

But he knew it was because he was dealing with Hammer Reese, a man not known for understating anything he said or did. Opulence was his middle name. And although Charles thought it was a bit much, but he got into the limousine and was whisked away.

Hammer Reese , Charles thought as he rode along the streets of Montreal, Canada. Hammer made the Forbes billionaire’s list once again. Which baffled Charles. How in the world could he become a billionaire working for the government all his life? That shit was shady as hell to Charles. But that was Hammer. Always moralizing about law and order while he would take the law into his own hands every chance he got and twisted it and bended it into what he said the law was, not what it actually was. And this shyster of a lawman was summoning him? Charles shook his head. He still couldn’t believe he agreed to come.

Hammer lived in the mountains of Montreal at an estate he coined Charlemagne. It looked like a castle to Charles every time he rode up that mountain. Something so out there and highbrow that he wondered how Amelia could stand it. But he also knew his baby sister was as out there as Hammer was as she marched around in her chinchilla coats and stiletto heels, doing all kinds of shady shit herself. Cleopatra Jones on steroids was who she was. They matched.

The limo stopped at the main house entrance, the back passenger door was immediately opened by the waiting valet, and Charles stepped out buttoning his suit coat. Standing at the top of the steps was another gentleman in what looked like a butler’s uniform. “Right this way, sir,” he said, and Charles followed him into the castle - ah - house.

But when Charles was led down corridor after corridor and then up to a closed door, the butler stepped aside. “You may go inside, sir,” he said, and then walked away.

Charles watched him walk away. Amelia once took him that Hammer’s butler made more money than many high level executives because he ran Hammer’s household with an iron fist. Nothing got pass the man. But he gave Charles the willies.

But when Charles opened the door and saw seated in that massive room five of his seven children, his son-in-law Monk Paletti, his baby sister Amelia and his kid brother Mick and Mick’s wife Roz all seated in their own high-back chair as if they were a board of governors and he was walking in for a job interview, he was floored. His face was unable to stop frowning. He was dumbstruck. “ What in the world ?” He was outdone. All of them were called here too? He closed the door behind him.

And then his children, as if they couldn’t help themselves because they knew their lonely, depressed father would soon have the most wonderful shock of his life, started applauding and cheering as if he’d just completed some grand performance.

But Mick, who was seated on the front row with Roz and Amelia, turned around angrily looking at them. Did they want to give the man a heart attack before he even found out the truth?

It took that chilling look by their uncle to put a pin in the balloon of their excitement. But although they deflated outwardly, inwardly was another story. They were fire.

“What was the applause for?” Charles asked, still completely dumfounded. “What’s going on here?”

“They’re happy to see you, Charles,” Amelia said to stop the questions. “That’s all.”

It all seemed cockeyed to Charles, but he was too unsettled to question it right away. He took the seat on the front row in the empty chair between Mick and Amelia, as if it had been positioned there for him.

His children had gone through so many emotions that it was taking all they had not to run to their father and just blurt out the truth to him. But they knew Hammer was right. If they weren’t careful, their excitement could only make the truth harder for Charles to bear. He had to be spoon-fed that truth, or he could go into cardiac arrest. He had to know the back story first. They needed to know the backstory too, since Hammer hadn’t told them squat. That was why they were trying to do all they could to conceal their true emotions. They were worried about Big Daddy.

And they all agreed that Uncle Mick, who was the only one that maintained a semblance of control when he saw the truth, should speak for them.

But Donald started thinking about the truth he and his siblings had just uncovered a mere four hours ago and he yelled out, “Thank you Jesus!” before Mick could say a word.

Bobby, who was seated on one side of him, elbowed him as he suppressed a grin. Tony, who was seated on the other side of him, placed his arm around his waist to help calm him back down. Of all of them, Donald was closest to Jenay. But Charles turned around quickly when his youngest son yelled out those words and looked at him as if he’d lost his mind.

“My bad,” Donald said with that smile he knew always melted his father’s heart. “You know how I am, Pop. I’m just happy to see you, that’s all. Like Auntie said.”

“Yeah, that’s it, Big Daddy,” Monk said too, with a smile, which was unusual for Monk. He was not the smiling type.

None of it was making sense to Charles, including Frankie’s presence there without Ashley, which confused him further. “Where’s Ashley and Carly?” he asked them.

“They stepped out,” Monk said. “But they’re here too.”

Charles gave Monk another hard look. “Don’t you have a syndicate to run?”

Monk could only smile, which caused Charles to give him an even harder look. What on earth was going on? But then he turned back around.

As soon as he did, Monk and all of the siblings started silently grinning. Donald, they all knew, had yelled out exactly what they wanted to yell out. They were giddy as giddy could be, and they couldn’t even show it yet.

Charles looked at his two siblings. “What’s this about? What are all of you doing here?”

“Same reason you’re here,” said Mick. “Hammer asked us to come.”

“Since when do you do what Hammer asks you to do?” Charles knew Mick and Hammer never got along.

Mick had no answer for it, and that, to Charles, said it all. Something was wrong. Or right. He just couldn’t figure out which.

He stared at Mick. Was about to ask him another question, but the door opened and Hammer walked in. Charles was staring at Hammer, but all of his children were staring at him.

“What is this about, Ham? And why did you drag my children into this?”

Hammer decided to launch into it. The emotional aftermath of his children’s reaction had already drained him. He didn’t have much more left inside. “What many people don’t know is that the world’s richest man is not these fleckless billionaires you hear about on the internet or in jazzy magazines. The world’s richest man is a shadowy figure known only as Aristotle.”

Charles looked around wondering what in the world would some unknown rich guy have to do with him. “Never heard of him,” he said.

“No one knows where he lives,” Hammer continued. “Nobody knows of what national origin he claims. No one knows what he looks like. Not even me, or the U.S. government.”

“Which is one in the same,” quipped Mick.

Hammer ignored him. He knew what Mick felt about anybody attempting to uphold the law. They were all crooked rattlesnakes let Mick tell it. He continued. “Aristotle came on our radar eleven months ago when we noticed that certain people we’d already identified as foreign spies of the freelance variety were suddenly getting all of these elite positions in many of our biggest corporations.”

“What do you mean foreign spies of the freelance variety?” asked Bonita.

“Not government-sanctioned,” said her father.

“Right,” said Hammer. “They work for the highest bidder regardless of government. But by the time we got wind of the scheme, those spies had already infiltrated one-hundred-and-sixty-four companies within the top Fortune 500.”

Charles still didn’t understand what any of this had to do with him and his children, but he kept on listening.

“We began a crackdown immediately,” Hammer continued, “and quietly pulled in those operatives we felt posed the greatest national security risk first, but also posed the greatest rewards by getting them to be double agents working for us. That is, they stayed on the job providing the intel Aristotle’s ground crew was expecting, but all the while reporting to us as well. We hoped to get intel from them without even the heads of the corporations they had infiltrated finding out what was happening right under their noses. It’s a major operation with more manpower and man hours than the vast majority of our operations. We then began running clandestine activities to ensure that we had all of them contained.”

“Not picked up, but contained?” asked Monk.

“Right,” said Hammer.

“This is all very interesting, Uncle Ham,” said Bobby. “Don’t get me wrong. It’s all interesting. But what does this have to do with us? Had they infiltrated Pop’s company or Uncle Mick’s company or my City Hall?”

“No, not Jericho’s City Hall. But yes, they did infiltrate Mick and your father’s corporations as well.”

“Mine?” asked Charles. “Who are these people? I want names,” he added.

“That doesn’t matter,” said Hammer.

“Like hell it doesn’t,” Charles fired back. “You tell us we have foreign spies in our companies and you’re telling me don’t worry about it?”

“That’s exactly what I’m telling you because that led to this.”

Charles frowned. “To what ?”

“While we were pulling in operatives, I noticed something even more suspicious about two companies in particular.”

“Pop and Uncle Mick’s companies?” asked Tony.

Hammer nodded. “Mick’s empire and Charles’s corporation, yes, those were the two.”

“What was even more suspicious?” Mick asked.

“They had spies in higher positions at those two companies just like at all the other major corporations that had been targeted, but something else was at play at Mick and Charles’s companies. I noticed something underneath the top layer. I noticed a secondary path of infiltration at their two companies only. And we triple checked this.”

That intrigued Mick. “What secondary path?”

“Spies with fake credentials were being placed in lower level positions throughout your two companies. Secretarial and assistant type positions that had access to your schedule and Charles’s daily schedule. They knew where the bosses were at all times, in other words. And not just the bosses in Mick’s case. They also knew where Roz and your children were at all times too. That’s when I realized all of this infiltration of all of those other companies were a ruse, or at least a useful tool. We were being duped on a scale unlike any we’d ever seen.”

“You’re saying they went through all that shit, infiltrating all those companies, just to find out our schedules?” Charles asked.

“No.” Even Hammer had to smile at that. “They had an agenda with those companies too. But it wasn’t the main event the way we thought it was. That was just the beginning of what they wanted.”

“And they had to do it that way, Pop,” said Tony, “in order to keep the government’s eyes off of what they were really up to.”

“Right. In other words,” said Hammer, “they had to keep us distracted. And you don’t keep us distracted with bullshit. The main spies in the major positions were the shiny objects we felt a sense of urgency to catch, which were actual spies doing actual spy work. They were stealing secrets from those corporations, no doubt about it. But while we were dealing with them, those front line, lower level people were the real stars of the show. And it was an elaborate show. They were feeding info to the field guys, and the field guys were tasked to first destroy the people Mick and Big Daddy loved the most, one by one, and then the ultimate goal was to destroy Mick and Big Daddy. Ursula was supposed to die in her attack, but Bella wasn’t marked to die in her attack.”

“Why not Bella?” asked Roz.

“We don’t know yet. Mick stopped the attack on you, so we aren’t certain how far that was really going to go beyond what was confessed. That’s why we began wiretapping and following the low level spies in your organizations. And that’s how Fourtaine got on our radar.”

That was when Charles sat at attention. Fourtaine was the guy who killed Jenay. Now he was seeing a connection.

“Fourtaine is the man that shot Ma,” said Donald.

Hammer nodded. “Yes. We had just gotten wind of him the day of the cafeteria incident, but we got there when the shooting had already started.”

“Why are we talking about that?” Charles wanted to know. “What does my wife’s death have to do with any of this?”

“The paramedics rushed her to the hospital with a faint, almost non-existent pulse. Our guys followed them there.”

Hammer hesitated. They all waited with great anticipation, as if they knew the heart of the matter was about to be exposed. But he remained silent.

“What happened next?” Amelia asked him.

Hammer didn’t even glance at his wife Amelia, as if that would be a distraction for him. Which, they all knew, meant trouble was in their marriage again.

“While Jenay was in surgery,” Hammer said to all of them, “I made the call to institute DCP, which stands for our Death Cover Protocols.”

Everybody frowned. “What’s a Death Cover Protocol?” Charles asked.

“When we have a situation that can help another situation that could lead to the main event, we find a way to distract those who might get in the way of the main event by pointing them in a different direction.”

“Hammer, what the fuck are you talking about?” Charles asked him. “Make yourself plain.”

“After four hours, Jenay was out of surgery.”

Charles shook his head. “You mean after seven hours. She was in that operating room for seven hours before those doctors came and told me she was . . . that she didn’t make it.”

“Those were our doctors, Charles,” Hammer said.

“Your doctors?” asked Tony.

“What do you mean your doctors?” asked Charles.

Everybody was staring at Hammer.

“While Jenay was in surgery, we flew in our DCP team. Our Death Cover team. It consists of world-class doctors, nurses, plastic surgeons, makeup artists, and other skilled professionals who are paid fantastic money to do their government’s bidding.

Charles continued to frown at Hammer. “What are you getting at? You’re saying all of this to say what?”

Hammer took a moment. But then he spoke the words. “Charles, you were told that Jenay died on the operating table. But that’s not true.”

It took a moment for Charles to process what he’d just heard. Everybody else seemed to be holding their breaths. “What do you mean it’s not true? What’s not true?”

“She didn’t die on the operating table.”

It was still like a fog of confusion for Charles. His handsome face had been contorted into a fixed frown. “What are you talking, Hammer? She didn’t die in surgery?”

“No.”

“Then where the fuck did she die? I thought she was dead at the cafeteria, but those paramedics said she had a faint pulse when they put her in that ambulance. It didn’t look good, but she wasn’t dead yet. They said they were operating on her and she died in surgery. That’s what they told me.”

“What I’m saying is that she survived the surgery, Charles,” said Hammer. “That’s what I’m saying. Thanks in large part to our doctors, she survived that surgery.”

Charles was so confused it hurt. “Hammer, what are you trying to say to me? They took her somewhere else to die? That she was kidnapped and died somewhere we don’t even know about ? And then they brought the body back to the hospital? This makes no sense! What are you saying?”

Even his children realized the truth was so unbelievable to their father that he couldn’t fix his brain to even consider it. He was willing to consider the completely implausible idea that she had been kidnapped after surgery rather than face the truth that was right in front of him. But that would have been too good to be true when nothing felt good to him after Jenay died. He was afraid to grasp it.

Hammer saw his fear too. “No, Charles, she wasn’t kidnapped. But yes, she was taken somewhere else.”

This was not making any sense to Charles. His face was laced with so much confusion that his children began looking at each other, wondering if they could do a better job than Hammer explaining it to him. But they didn’t know what really happened themselves!

“Why would somebody take her somewhere else to die?” Charles asked, his big, green eyes darting from Hammer’s right eye to his left eye as if he was desperately searching for the answers he wasn’t getting.

“She was moved by our DCP team,” Hammer said, “because there was a possibility that she might survive.”

When Hammer said that word, Charles felt as if he was going to pass out. “Wait a minute. Are you telling me that. . .” It was too incredible for him to even speak out loud. “Are you saying to me that . . . That Jenay . . . That Jenay didn’t . . .” He couldn’t utter the words. His children wanted Hammer to speak plainly now. To take him out of his misery now!

And Hammer spoke plainly. “Charles, your wife, your Jenay , is alive.”

When those words rose from Hammer’s mouth, Charles rose to his feet so fast that he knocked his chair backwards. Everybody else in that room rose too.

“It’s true, Charlie,” Amelia said, unable to stop the tears from flowing from her eyes. “She’s alive.”

Charles looked at Amelia as if she was an alien. He looked at Hammer as if he was alien too. And his children as if they were suddenly strangers.

Then he looked at Mick. Mick wouldn’t lie to him! And when Mick nodded his head, and said with his voice cracking it’s true, Charlie, it’s true , Charles’s entire body was on the verge of shutting down. His heart was hammering. His knees were buckling. His eyes were unable to focus on anything or anybody.

He would have fallen, but Mick placed his arm around his brother’s waist and held him up.

Charles’s eyes were beyond surprised. They were frightened. They were scared witless that he was dreaming, that he was hearing things, that he was about to wake up from yet another one of his nightmares and curse the darkness again.

He ran his hands through his hair. His face was a mask of anguish. “But I saw her,” he was looking into nothingness. It wasn’t true. How could they play this cruel joke on him? How could they?!

“I saw her,” he said again. “She was in my arms with all that blood. They told me she had . . .” Then he kept shaking his head, and he looked at Hammer. “Is this some kind of sick, perverted joke? Is this some kind of cruel-ass --”

“No, Daddy.” Bonita, Jenay’s only biological child, had hurried up to her father. With tears streaming down her face, she held her father’s big hands. “It’s the truth, Daddy. I saw her myself. We all saw her. And we hugged her and talked to her. Mommy’s alive.”

“But her body was in that casket. I saw--”

“It was the work of our DCP team, Charles,” said Hammer. “It wasn’t an embalmed Jenay. It was a mannequin of Jenay. They’re that good.”

Charles didn’t know if he could bear this. It was a dream. It had to be another one of his dreams that once he was awakened from would turn out to be another nightmare.

“It’s true, Daddy,” Bonita said again. “She’s alive.”

Charles was just beginning to process it. And it was a reality that still wasn’t real to him. “She’s alive and she’s well?” Charles asked his youngest child, although nothing but doubt still filled his eyes.

But Bonita was nodding her head. “She’s still recovering,” she admitted, “but she’s well, Daddy. She’s alive and she’s very well.”

When Bonita said those words, Charles still didn’t know what to believe. He looked at Hammer with such a perplexed look on his face that even Hammer was devastated that he had made the call to put this man he loved through so much agony.

“Why would you keep this from me all this time?” Charles had a plea in his voice. “ How could you keep this from me all this time?”

Mick’s jaw tightened. It was the question Mick wanted answered too. And he was going to get an answer before the day was through. But he wasn’t going to put not an ounce more of distress on his beloved brother. He held his peace. For now.

“We had to make sure the threat was neutralized before we could reveal anything,” Hammer said.

“But she was shot? She was shot in that cafeteria?”

“Yes, she was shot. That did happen. And yes, she was barely hanging on, with an extremely faint pulse, when they placed her in the ambulance. And yes, she was operated on by the local Jericho doctors, and when our doctors were flown in, they took the lead. They flew her out of Jericho that seventh hour when she stabilized after surgery. That was when our doctors gave you the death notice. The hospital doctors were no longer in charge of her care. They knew nothing.”

“But why ?” asked a distressed Amelia. She lived with Hammer and had no clue Jenay was downstairs in a part of his house she didn’t even know existed. It felt like such a betrayal to her that she didn’t know how to compute it either. “Why did you have to use Jenay? Why did you have to put my brother and his children through all of this hell?”

Hammer was accustomed to using people for the greater good. That was his job. His brother Trevor became an assassin, trained by Hammer, for the so-called greater good. But this was the first time Hammer had to use what was a heartless normality in his world to nearly destroy the world of a lot of people he actually cared about.

And suddenly trying to explain his actions were ringing hollow. “We didn’t know what we had,” he said. “Over one-hundred-and-sixty of our largest corporations had been infiltrated. The positions they replaced were men and women that had been murdered, even though their deaths were made to look like natural causes. That’s why it wasn’t caught earlier. Executives were dying, but executives in these major corporations of hundreds of thousands of employees die all the time. And it wasn’t all at once either. But spaced out over time. And with the spies in place, secrets had been passed on. We had to find Aristotle and every one of his spies without jeopardizing our sources and methods, which is one of the hardest things to do in my line of work. And we had to protect the corporations not yet infiltrated so that they didn’t get infiltrated. We had to make sure the rest of our major commerce chain was uninterrupted by this scandal. It’s one of the single largest spy rings we’ve ever had to staunch.”

“And Jenay and Charlie were just collateral damage?” asked a still pissed Amelia.

Hammer stared at his wife for the first time. “Yes,” he admitted.

“You are such an asshole!” Bobby blurted out. But he didn’t continue. He knew, like all of them knew, this was not the time and place for recriminations.

“And Jenay went along with all of this?” Roz asked.

Hammer shook his head. “She’d been in a coma the entire time. She came out of her coma only two days ago. I explained to her what happened, which had to be a slow process, a process that took an entire day for her to fully grasp. And then I phoned Charles and the rest of you the very next day.”

But Charles didn’t even hear any of that. He was still hearing the words that the woman he thought was dead was actually alive and well. That was all he could hear. “Where is she?” he asked whoever would answer it.

“She’s here,” Bonita said, wiping her tears away. “Mommy’s here. Alive and well.”

“If she’s alive and well, why are you crying?”

“I’m happy, Daddy,” Bonita said. “I’m sad that you had to suffer so much for so long, but I’m so happy that your suffering is over.”

Over? Was that even possible? Charles hugged Bonita. Not a dry eye was in that room as he looked around it. But he was still unsettled. His heart was still hammering. His vision was still blurring. But when he stopped embracing Bonita, he steeled himself. “Take me to her,” he said to Hammer. “If she’s here like y’all claim, take me to her.”

Hammer nodded. And Charles, with his entire family beside him and behind him as close as they could get, walked out of that room and down those stairs that led to his wife.