Chapter LXVIII
CHAPTER LXVIII
Seeley was angry at being forced to abandon his life in Tennessee, though it was not the first time he would be required to reinvent himself. Eugene Seeley would cease to exist, but then Eugene Seeley had never really existed, just as Vernon Barnett had not existed, or Howard Lindikoff, or—briefly—Leonard Dolan. The man who called himself Seeley had always been capable of shedding identities like skin, and sometimes he struggled to recall his birth name, so long had it been since he’d had cause to use it.
The rub this time was that he had grown comfortable as Eugene Seeley, so much so that he had become the Seeley persona, the character fitting so snugly that his existence had ceased to count as imposture. Seeley wondered if it was a function of aging, so that building a new self in later years was akin to trying to learn a new tongue, the rules and constructions of the primary language becoming so fixed that they impaired one’s ability to add another idiom. The specters of previous selfhoods haunted Seeley, manifesting as half-remembered tastes or opinions, rusted skill sets that he could still draw on by instinct when required, even flickers in his signature when one name briefly threatened to become another. It was among the curses of a life built on impersonation: behind one, many.
In the case of Eugene Seeley, he had also grown to love working with books. Calligraphy and lettering had fascinated him since he was a boy, but the Seeley persona represented the first opportunity to turn that interest into a profession. Then there was Mertie Udine, who had formerly shared his bed and—until recently—his life. Over time, he had revealed much of his past to her. He trusted her, which was as close to love as he had ever felt for another person. Now she was dead, which added to his rage, even as a colder part of him recognized that in dying she had left him compromised.
Mertie lived alone, but she had relatives with whom she was still in contact, and a small circle of friends. Seeley had considered having her body removed from the house in Madison, before deciding that it might cause more problems than it solved. If he left her to be found, the police would access the same Blink footage as Seeley’s expert, which would pin the blame for her murder on Aldo Bern and his associate. The police might investigate the Nashville Codex Corporation, if only to establish the circumstances through which two men known to be involved in organized crime had arrived on its doorstep, but they would delve in vain. Inquiries into the NCC would lead them to Varick Howlett at Shining Stone Senior Living, where the trail would peter out. As far as the NCC was concerned, Eugene Seeley was barely more than a signature in a checkbook. Already, he was melting away, and a new identity would accrete around a man of below-average height who might, as a hobby, engage in the conservation and restoration of books. Three clean passports were immediately available for his use: one Maltese (by investment), one Israeli (by the Law of Return), and one Belgian (by theft from a safe in Tongeren town hall in 1998, during a run on blank Belgian passports). There was also a U.S. document, but he was reluctant to bring it into play until the fuss had died down.
La Senora sat in the back of the car, leading Seeley to feel like her chauffeur. She made sure not to sit directly behind him because she knew it made him nervous. Whoever or whatever she really was, Seeley wasn’t convinced that la Senora was operating under Blas Urrea’s instructions or control. In fact, Seeley was beginning to fear that, rather than being Urrea’s creature, Urrea might be hers. Regardless, the remaining children had to be recovered, and the last of the thieves punished. That was the deal Seeley had agreed.
According to the now-deceased Aldo Bern, the third child was being kept at Devin Vaughn’s Manassas home. The antiquities dealer Mark Triton had the fourth, but Bern didn’t know where. Triton had galleries and warehouses scattered across the country, and the child could be in any of them. But Triton owned both a house and a gallery in Maine, and Vaughn was in the cannabis business there. Wyatt Riggins, too, had briefly surfaced in Maine. Were Seeley in Triton’s position—holding treasure stolen from Blas Urrea, in the knowledge that Urrea would do all in his power to retrieve it—he might have sought to keep someone like Riggins nearby.
Seeley and the woman were within striking distance of Manassas. Seeley considered it mildly amusing that Devin Vaughn had built his primary residence barely twenty miles from the FBI Academy near Quantico. Had they chosen to do so, the feds could have organized field trips for trainees with Vaughn as their subject.
Later, when the shooting was over, Seeley would reflect on how a man could inadvertently and simultaneously be so right about something—and also so wrong.