Becoming Phillipe Fornier

 

~ 1 ~

Phillipe Fornier was sitting on the stone patio of a beautiful house on the shores of Lake Leman in Switzerland. It was mid-June and the temperature was in the mid-twenties. He was sitting at a glass-topped table and looking out over the lake and the Swiss Alps behind them. His laptop was open in front of him. Beside him sat a couple of buttered croissants and a mug of coffee. He stared at the computer for a while, then took a sip of coffee and began to write.

Phillipe’s real name was Jason Whiteside. But he didn’t use that name anymore. The name and the life that was attached to it was over. Someone had plans for Jason. And Jason wanted nothing to do with those plans. He had another idea, a vague notion that had been floating around in his head since he was in high school. A notion that very much involved being able to decide what he wanted to do with his life. Well, it was his life after all. And what he wanted to do with it had absolutely nothing to do with the life that had been planned for him. So he did what any dreamer would do. He carefully planned and then executed his new life.

~ Three Weeks Earlier ~

Jason Whiteside opened the door to his house in the suburbs, three miles east of the centre of the city of Geneva, Switzerland. The deal had closed. He had paid three million, one hundred thousand Euros for it, fully furnished. 

He dropped his keys on the reception table in the foyer, walked to the kitchen, and deposited a six-pack of cold Dos Equis beer in the refrigerator, taking one out and walking through the large living room to the fieldstone terrace. He sat down at the table there and toasted himself. 

For the first time in his twenty-three years on earth, only one other soul on the planet knew that he even existed.

It had taken about a year for the idea to become fully formed in his mind, then a few months doing the necessary prep, getting his degree in finance and business management from MIT and finally, with some very able help, completely disappearing himself. 

He stared out at the Swiss Alps which rose in the distance. The lake at the end of his property was bathed in the late afternoon pre-sunset glow. It was early in July and the air was warm and a bit humid, just the way he liked it. His neighbours on either side were at least a hundred metres away and not very neighbourly at all, which was fine with him. He took a long slug of his beer and smiled. 

Now all that was left was to decide what he wanted to do with his life.

Disappearing yourself, in today’s world, was not the easiest thing to do. But it was something that Jason Whiteside wanted to do more than anything.

On his graduation, Jason was only a few months from entering the family business, Whiteside Industries. a vast conglomerate of companies in everything from mining to manufacturing to retail. It was a multi-billion dollar megacorp that was owned by his father, Damon Whiteside, and managed from a building in Manhattan. 

Jason had been groomed to take over the business from a very young age. Educated in the finest private schools and business colleges in America.   

After graduation from the MIT Business Management School, Jason was rewarded with a three-month vacation, after which he would begin to work in the head office of Whiteside Industries, shadowing his father until he was deemed ready to take the reins of the company. With a behemoth like Whiteside Industries, that could easily take up to a decade of his young life. 

Whiteside Industries was a multi-generational family business, with plants, distribution centres and stores all across the country.

On his 22rd birthday, nearly a year earlier, Jason gained total control of a trust his grandfather had set up when Jason was born. It was originally twenty-five million. But through very smart money management on the part of the small firm that took care of the various Whiteside trusts and investments it had, over the course of Jason’s life, ballooned to close to eighty-five million.

~ 2 ~

At MIT Jason had shared an apartment with a guy named Toby Rhineman, one of the smartest computer people Jason knew. He could do pretty much whatever he wanted on the web and, had he been disposed to criminal activity, could have made himself very rich without doing so much as a day’s work. 

Jason and Toby were best friends and had been since childhood. They shared a lot of the same qualities. They were good-looking, super smart without being geekish, the sons and heirs of rich families, and neither had any pre-disposition towards the dark side. They were much more like brothers than friends and trusted each other without question.

Unlike Jason, Toby was actually looking forward to joining his family’s business, which was marketing and advertising. He was planning to develop a new division which specialized in AI. He had several ideas that Jason thought were both unique, doable and potentially quite valuable. Also, unlike Jason, there was no pressure on Toby to join and or take over the family business. His father knew and appreciated his son’s gift and was willing to give Toby whatever support he needed to start his own venture within the family empire.

During the last term of Jason’s final year at MIT, Toby, with his vast knowledge of the dark web and his formidable hacking skills, was able to create an entirely new identity for his friend. And he was able to insert that identity into the Swiss Citizen’s Registry as a landed immigrant from Auxerre, France. They had talked about it, on and off, for the better part of two weeks until Toby had a clear picture of what Jason was looking for. Then, within the space of literally a Saturday afternoon, Toby was able to create a completely new Swiss identity for Jason. 

Jason’s new name was Phillipe Fornier. He was from a rich winemaking family in the central part of France. And that was really all anyone needed to know about him. But just in case anybody started asking, Jason had written an entire biography of his false identity and had committed the better part of it to memory. He even managed to teach himself to speak with enough of a French accent to fool whomever he had to fool. 

Two nights before he was to leave for France, Toby and Jason went out and got totally shitfaced. Jason spent the whole evening talking with his French accent, which was, at least according to Toby, quite convincing.

The next day, Jason packed a bag, said so long to his parents and jumped into an Uber in front of their 5th Avenue condo, that would take him to JFK. The only stop he made along the way was at his bank on 48th Street where he picked up all the paperwork for his inheritance account, and withdrew the 100,000 Euros from a separate account he had created when he got control of his inheritance the summer before. He would use this until he got to Geneva and was able to get a Swiss-issued credit card, have the bulk of his inheritance placed into a low risk investment account and give his new self a generous allowance. Since Jason was as well educated in business as anyone his age in America, the financial planning was a piece of cake for him.

When Jason arrived in Paris, he rented a car for cash under his new identity in Paris and drove to Auxerre, where he stayed in a bed and breakfast overnight and spent the next morning wandering around the town. Then he left the town and headed east to the Swiss border. 

At the border, he explained that he lived in Geneva and had just gone home to Auxerre for his parents’ anniversary. His forged driver’s licence and citizen’s card held up beautifully and he was waved through quickly. Two hours later he was driving through Geneva.

 At a Citroen dealership, he purchased a fairly new used Citroen sedan for thirty-two thousand Euro, which he paid for in cash. His dad had always told him never to buy a new car, always buy a low mileage used one because then it would be broken in and anything that could go wrong, would have already happened. He wasn’t sure why he remembered that and he certainly had more than enough money to not give a shit. But there you go, he thought, and marvelled at the strange things that get stuck in one’s head.

He bought the Citroen because he was a big fan of a TV show called The Mentalist, which he watched online, and really liked that the main character, Patrick Jane, drove one, though his was considerably older than the one which Phillipe had purchased. 

The Mentalist was about this guy who was raised in the carnival world and was essentially a con artist, named Patrick Jane.  The part was played by an Australian actor named Simon Baker. Jason always marvelled at how Australian guys could speak without any ‘Aussie’ accents fairly effortlessly. He kind of wondered if he wasn’t actually running a con himself, by wanting to disappear and become someone else. He certainly wasn’t in Patrick Jane’s league as a con artist, but he could not deny that, so far, he had pulled it off.

The car dealer he dealt with arranged for his insurance, which would take a day, so Jason drove his rental car to a downtown hotel, registered, dropped off his luggage and then returned his rental car to a drop-off only a few blocks from his hotel. 

After he did that, he found a Credit Suisse bank, asked to see a manager with whom he arranged the digital transfer of his funds from his BankAmerica trust account. The Swiss banker assigned Jason an account number and also opened a current account and seeded it with two million of Jason’s Euros. 

He gave Jason two cards each with both account numbers on it. He told Jason to keep the second card somewhere safe so that if he lost the first card, he wouldn’t have to go through hell trying to reclaim his money. He also issued Jason a bank card for his current account and a Mastercard. Both were simply numbered. The banker then gave Jason his business card and told him that as soon as he got settled, and set up online they could do all their business transactions by email.

Jason explained his family situation to the banker, whose name was Eldon Strindberg. Strindberg told him that many of their clients preferred to remain anonymous and that guarding that anonymity was a key part of the bank’s reputation. Everything was done with numbers. The paperwork that Jason handed Strindberg was all in order and fifteen minutes later he was good to go. While they waited for the bank card and the credit card to be fabricated they talked about houses. Jason told Strindberg he was looking for something along the shore of Lake Leman. 

Mr Strindburg opened his drawer again and pulled out another business card. There was a name, Louise Strindberg, a number and an email address. The banker told Jason she was his wife and one of the best real estate agents in the area. She knew the suburbs of Geneva and the countryside very well and would make his search easy. She also had good relations with pool maintenance, housekeeping services and lawn and garden care people. Twenty minutes later, Jason thanked Mr. Strindberg and left the bank, with everything he needed to carry on his existence as Phillipe Fornier.

Louise Strindberg was a beautiful-looking French woman who took him directly to a house on the Lac Leman, which he instantly fell in love with. The house was very modern looking without being cold. It was also fully furnished and and had been professionally cleaned and decorated by the wealthy owners, who had decided to move to Italy. 

It was also beautifully landscaped and had a small pool with a built in current that you could swim against, which he thought was pretty cool.

Madame Strindberg agreed to rush the offer through and to introduce him to someone who could take care of managing his estate for him, by setting up and taking care of the various services he would need, like a house cleaner, a gardener and a lawn care person.

Three days later he was moved in. All the power was turned on including the Internet service, for which he was given the password.

~ 3 ~

The sun was setting in the western sky and cast a beautiful reflection on the lake, where several boats of various sizes and configurations moved around slowly. On the far side of the lake from where he was sitting he could see the skyline of Geneva. He was in an area known as Anieres, which was a suburban neighbourhood and not all that far from the centre of the city and only about five miles from the border with France.

As he sat in the quickly fading daylight, his thinking started to shift gears. The thought crossed his mind that while he had successfully managed to cut himself off from his entire world, he was also quite alone in that world. He thought about that for a while and slowly started to realize that he would have to build more of a life than just being some rich young guy living in a big house in the middle of Europe. He needed to become someone who was part of something, whether that was a relationship with a woman, or a friend or two he could hang out with or whatever he ended up wanting to do with his life professionally.

He had never been much of a barfly, mostly just smoked a little weed from time to time, so he thought that maybe he should just get into his Citroen and find himself a place to hang out, have a glass of wine and maybe meet some people. That then got him thinking about where he would do his food shopping, because, at the moment all he had in his house was five bottles of beer. 

He found the nearest main road closest to his house, Rte d’ Hermance, and headed toward the downtown area.

Two hours later he was back home and unloading several bags of groceries he had purchased at huge market at the Coop Supermarche, which was the first supermarket-type store he ran into. It was teeming with humanity and looked like a pretty cool place. In addition to a food and snacks, he also bought himself a new coffee maker and a kilo of the best coffee he could find, which was a dark Arabica blend. After he unloaded all his groceries, he made some coffee and buttered a couple of croissants. 

Then, using his iPad, which he had reset in his new name, he searched for an Apple store, which was on a Street Called Rue de Rive. After he finished his coffee and croissants, he jumped back in the car and drove downtown again. He didn’t mind all the driving he had to do because it was all in aid of getting to know the city. At the Apple store, he picked up a new iPhone, to replace his four-year-old flip phone. After that, he went to a local bookstore and bought himself a new Kindle reader.

He drove back home and spent the rest of the afternoon eating Microwave popcorn and setting up his devices. When the Kindle was set up, he ordered a couple of books by an American writer named John Sandford whom he really liked and a couple of others by another American writer named Stephen Hunter.

 Once the phone was set up, he created a Gmail account on his Mac and sent an email to Mr Strindberg at the bank along with the number on his new iPhone.

He looked at his watch. It was 3:25 in the afternoon, which would have made it six hours earlier in New York. He knew Toby would already be awake, because he was an early riser and he was not planning to start his new job until September. Toby was still at school, finishing up his latest robotics project.

“This is Toby.” Toby said.

“Hey. It’s Phillipe.”

“It took Toby a few seconds before it dawned on him. Then he laughed. “Phillipe my old friend. How are things going?”

“I’m all set up. I’ll send you my email address. I won’t tell you exactly where I settled, in case my folks come after you for information.” 

“Fair enough. So how do you like it over there?”

“It’s fine. Got a big house with one of those current pools. The cities are beautiful. They have amazing respect for their history over here. There are at least as many old buildings in the city I’m in as there are new ones.”

“Well, let’s face it, they’ve been around a lot longer than we have. So, have you decided what you want to do? Surely you’re not gonna just loaf around over there.”

“Haven’t decided yet. Just been busy moving in and setting up. But that’s pretty much done so I can start thinking more seriously about it. I bought a car, so I’m gonna drive around a bit and see some of the country, soak up the culture and all that wonderful stuff.” 

“Sounds like a good time.”

“And how about you, monsieur?”

“I’m officially starting work in September. My dad has given me a pretty decent budget for staff and setting up my office. He already had the space available. So I’m gonna spend the summer recruiting and talking to server companies. We probably won’t be able to afford our own server for about a year. But that’s OK. This is where our MIT connections should really pay off.”

“Well, I wish you a lot of luck with that. When you decide to go public, let me know. I’ll buy a block of your stock.”

“So, tell me, what’s the female population like over there?”

“They’re everywhere, my friend. Lots of career girl-looking types. A few waifs working in the shops. I haven’t checked out the bar scene. You know I never was a clubber.”

“Yeah, well, all that means is it will just take a bit of time.”

“I’m not rushing anything.”

“Don’t leave it too long, amigo. Cause like Steve Miller says, ‘Time keeps on tickin’ into the future.’

They both had a good chuckle and then signed off. 

~ 4 ~

The one thing that Phillipe had left to do was to find a financial manager. Someone could keep track of his finances, pay the bills, deal with taxes and all the other bullshit that came with wealth and home ownership.

But first things first. He got into the Citroen and started driving around his neighbourhood, up and down all the streets, until he had a pretty good idea what was close and what he needed to go downtown for. He found a fruit and vegetable market. He found a small cafe where he could sit outside and play on his computer. He found a pharmacy and a small grocery store. He also found a couple of cool-looking local restaurants. He went into both and got their takeout menus, which were in French and English. The French influence in his neighbourhood was very strong because it actually bordered on France. 

Three hours later he was completely bushed. When he got home, he made himself a salad and watched the news on TV. Then he went to bed and slept like a log until almost noon the next day. 

Sitting with a decent cup of coffee and a buttered croissant on his back deck Phillipe stared up at the mid-day sun, which was in and out of view as the clouds were moving fairly quickly from the direction of the mountains in the far distance. His reverie was interrupted by the front doorbell. He didn’t understand who would be calling on him, since no one, except the Strindbergs and whoever he bought the house from, knew he was living here.

He walked to the door and opened it. A very beautiful woman, about his age, stood before him. She was dressed casually, but there was a real elegance to the clothing she wore. She was definitely some kind of rich girl. Her hair was long and somewhere in between brown and blonde and cascaded down over her shoulders in gentle waves. Her face reminded Phillipe of the famous French actress, Catharine Deneuve.

“Monsieur Fornier?” she asked, in a voice like silk.

“Oui, yes, that’s me.”

“How do you do. My name is Madelaine DuChamps.’ she said in heavily French accented English. “Madame Strindberg, referred me to you.”

Phillipe was still a bit stunned. But he snapped out of it fairly quickly. “Please Ms. DuChamps. Come in.”

They walked to the rear of the house. When they got to the kitchen Phillipe said “May I offer you some coffee?”

“Thank you. That would be lovely. Perhaps with just a little milk or cream.” she replied.

Phillip poured the coffee into a mug and pushed the cream toward her along with a spoon. He then filled his own cup. He guided her out to the back terrace and they sat down opposite each other.

“OK, Mademoiselle. I assume it is, since I see no wedding band.”

“Yes, it’s Mademoiselle,” she replied. “Madame Strindberg thought it might be good for us to get to know each other. I am a financial manager. She called me after you opened your account at Credit Suisse.”

“Wow.” Phillipe said. “You are not going to believe this but that was the very next thing on my to do list. How do you know Madame Strindberg?”

“She is my mother. My father was Alain DuChamps. He unfortunately passed away when I was about twelve years old. Several years later, when I was at university, my mother married Monsieur Strindberg. But I am a DuChamps.”

“And you are a financial manager?”

“Oui…yes.” I have a degree in financial management. I work with several of Monsieur Strindberg’s clients, taking care of the everyday financial affairs.” 

Phillipe could not take his eyes off the young lady. She was incredibly beautiful, but there was no aloofness about her. 

“I must say.” Madelaine said. “You would be, by far, the youngest of my clients, should you decide to retain me.”

Phillipe was sold from minute one. Having a beautiful woman like Madelaine in his life on any level was like a dream come true. But he didn’t let on, because, even though his experience with women was limited, he understood that ‘slow and steady wins the race’ was an old cliche for a reason.

“You seem very young for someone who is taking care of, you know, millionaires.” Phillipe said. 

“Well, I come from a very wealthy family. My father was an industrialist and a very successful one. I grew up in that world.”

That made sense to Phillipe, because he grew up in the same world.

Phillipe just sipped his coffee and looked at Madelaine for quite some time.

“I’m not sure what to say. But I have always believed that this life is strange. I need what you do, because I really don’t want to do it myself. And here you are, sitting here, allowing me to cross one more big thing off my to do list.” Phillipe said.

Madelaine smiled and held out her hand. “Merci, Monsieur.” she said.
“Bienvenue, Mademoiselle,” he said as he took her hand. It felt like heaven. But Phillipe just smiled. 

“When would you like to start?” Phillipe asked.

Madelaine pulled an iPad from her bag and opened up her calendar. “Today is Friday. How about Tuesday?”

“Tuesday works for me.”

Madelaine smiled. “I will take good care of you, Phillipe.”

“I’m sure you will.”

They spent the next half hour chatting about the area. Madelaine lived fairly close by and had all her life. She volunteered to give him a tour of the city, but he was more interested in the countryside. 

After she left, Phillip went back out to the terrace and just stared at the mountains in the distance thinking about what a lucky bastard he was. And in all the time since he left New York and his old life behind, he had not thought about it, except for the call to Toby, even for a minute.

~ 5 ~

One night in late June, Toby Rhineman received a phone call from Jason Whiteside’s mother.

“Hello, Toby. This is Jason’s mom, Elaine.”

“Oh hi, Mrs Whiteside.” Toby said, and he was thinking to himself, ‘Oh shit.’

“We were just wondering if you had heard from Jason.”

“No ma’am I haven’t. Is there something wrong?”

“No, we were just expecting he would call and let us know he was OK over there.”

“Hmmm. No, I haven’t heard from him. Last I heard he was going to fly to Paris and drive around Europe.”

“Yes, well okay”

“If I hear from him. I’ll be sure to relay your concern.”

“You don’t suppose he’s decided to just stay over in Europe and not return?” 

“No…that idea never came up in any of the conversations we had.”

“Very well then. How are things going for you? I understand you’re still at MIT.

“Yes ma’am. Just finishing up my Masters’ project, a robot.”

Elaine chuckled. ”Well if you hear from Jason, please encourage him to call home.”
“Will do for sure.” Toby said as he hung up the phone. He felt like ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag, lying through his teeth like that.”

He picked up the phone and called Jason. He got a message. 

“Bonjour or bon etee whatever the case may be. This is Phillipe, please leave a message at the beep.”

“It’s Toby. Just spent the last five minutes lying to your mom who called wondering if I’d heard from you. You might want to consider levelling with them. They are your folks after all.”

~ 6 ~

It was Sunday afternoon. Phillipe and Madelaine were driving in the Citroen through the French countryside. There were nothing but vineyards as far as the eye could see. They stopped in a beautiful little town called Bons-en-Chablis and got an outdoor table at a restaurant called Le l’Uche L’Oie, where Phillipe got his first taste of authentic French cuisine. 

After they had ordered and were sipping glasses of a nice chablis, Madelaine said, “You know, Phillipe, ever since we met, I have thought there was something strange about you.”

Phillipe laughed. “Oui, I get that a lot.”

“Why do you think that is?” she asked.

“I don’t know. But I imagine you have a theory.”

“I do.”

“Well tell me what it is and I will tell you how right or wrong you are.”

“Eh bien. First of all, I do not believe you are French. You are trying very hard and you are pretty good at faking a French accent. But…not good enough I’m afraid.”

“Okay. Anything else?”

“Oui. I think you are American or Canadian. Probably American because of all the money you have. I think…perhaps you are, how do the Americans say, on the lam, running away from something. But you do not have any of the desperation of someone who does illegal things, so I think you are running away from some sort of, je ne sais quoi, I don’t know…obligation.”

Phillipe leaned back in his seat pondering the irony of carefully constructing a fake persona and having one of the first real French people he met see through it like it was never there. When he spoke again, it was without any hint of his fake French accent.

“You’re a pretty smart chick aren’t you?”

“Chick.’ Madelaine chuckled. “So you are American.”

“New York City. Born and raised. And you’re right about everything else too. I was educated and groomed to take over my father’s corporation, really a group of companies. And it’s the last goddam thing I wanted to do. So I had a friend create an identity for me and took off for parts unknown. And now here I am sitting in a small town in France with one of the most beautiful girls I have ever met, and she has stripped me completely naked.”

Madelaine took a sip of her wine. Then she smiled. “From what little I actually know about America, I would say that perhaps you have made a wise choice.”

“I am well hidden. There is only one person in America who knows what I am doing and even he doesn’t know exactly where I am. The only people who do know are you, your mother and your stepfather.”

“Well, your secret is safe with us. My stepfather would be fired immediately if he ever let anyone know, and that is the last thing my mother and I would want for him.”

Phillipe then began talking to Madelaine about his life in America. She was amused at how driven the entire culture of that country was. Nobody ever seemed to take the time to stop and smell the roses. 

Phillipe agreed and told her that was a big part of why he left. If he had stayed he would have ended up as nothing more than a cog in the huge machine of American industry. He liked Switzerland because they respected privacy and he loved France because, well,  France was just a beautiful country. He had no idea what he wanted to do. But he was only three weeks out of school and figured he had a bit of time to decide. 

Madelaine reached out and took his hand. “Believe me, Phillipe,” she said “You can be anything in the world you like. Just make sure it brings you happiness. In the meantime, I will help take care of your financial life, so you can focus on…your destiny.”

They were both quiet on the ride back home. Both were lost in their thoughts. Both could tell something was happening but neither was sure exactly what that could be. But they were in no rush.

Madelaine had had a couple of boyfriends but for one reason or another, nothing seemed to stick. What interested her about Phillipe or whatever his name really was, was that he wasn’t coming on strong. She figured that he was still wrapped up in trying to become someone else. But there was time. 

From Phillipe’s point of view, it was a done deal. Madelaine was gorgeous, smart, curious and warm-hearted. Plus she came from money so there would be no worries on that front. But for Phillipe, there was a lot on his plate at the moment. Another helping of anything, no matter how delectable, might simply be too much. 

When they got back to Phillipe’s house, he invited her in for coffee, but she politely refused, and, secretly he was happy about that. Because a big part of what was weighing him down was the secret he was carrying. And he knew it was something he had to do if he was ever going to get truly comfortable in the new life he was creating.  

He stood by the front door as Madelaine drove away, then he went in the house and dug his old phone out of the kitchen drawer where he left it.  

He knew it would be mid-morning and his father would be out golfing, which was fine with him. He had always been closer to his mother.

He dialled her number. She answered on the second ring. “Well hello there, sonny boy.” she said.

“Hi mom. Guess you’re wondering why I hadn’t called earlier.”

“Well sure I was. Is everything alright?”

“Everything is fine, mom. Europe is wonderful. I’ve met some great people here and I’m having a blast. But there’s one thing I wanted to tell you. I’ve thought about it a lot and well, it’s probably best if I just come out with it.”

“Okay. Sounds serious.”

“It is mom. Fact is, I’m not coming back.”

“What does that mean…exactly?”

“It means I have had all my inheritance money transferred to a Swiss bank. I won’t tell you where am at the moment. But I’m going to take all the time I need to figure out what I want to do with my life. Sadly it won’t be working for dad. I wanted to tell you because if I told him directly he would freak out on me. I know he would and it wouldn’t be pretty.”

“When you say you’re not coming back, do you mean never?”

“Maybe. It all depends on dad and if he’s prepared to accept the fact that I don’t want anything to do with the life he planned for me.”

“You know this will break his heart.” Elaine said.

“The man is made of steel. He won’t be sad. He will be angry and think that I’m some sort of ingrate. And I think you know that’s true.”

Phillipe could hear a heavy sigh from his mother.

“Well, I assume you have found a place to live and are not just traipsing around the countryside like some vagabond.”

“Yeah,  I have. It’s a beautiful house on a small lake.”

“You know your father is going to want to talk to you.”

“That’s not gonna happen, mom. I’m getting rid of this phone when this call is over.” There was a few seconds of silence, then Phillipe said “Someone I met a few days ago, someone who could be part of my life…when I told her who I was and what I was doing, she understood that whatever I am going to become is something I have to discover on my own. So I’m out here looking for it. Tell dad not to bother trying to track me down I have a new name and a new identity and for the first time in my life, I’m free to figure out who I am. I love you guys. But I just can’t be who dad wants me to be. I’ll let you know when I figure out what I’m doing.”

“Are you sure you’re doing the right thing, Jason?” his mom asked.

“Yeah. I’m totally sure about that.”

“Okay. You’re an adult, you have enough money to take care of yourself and I know you’re a responsible person. I’ll deal with your dad. It will take a while for him to cool down. But I don’t want to lose you forever.”

“I’ll email you from time to time and let you know how things are going. But it won’t be anything that you can trace. I don’t want some private investigator showing up at my door. This is my decision, maybe the first one I’ve ever really made that was just for me. So I’m gonna play it out and see what happens.”

“Okay, Jason. I wish you the best of luck.” she said and he could hear the sadness in her voice and it ripped him up. 

“Bye mom. I love you.”

“I love you too, son.”

When Phillipe disconnected. He opened the phone and took out the SIM card. He broke it in two and tossed it into his wastebasket. “So long Jason.”

And as he did that he, almost immediately started to feel a bit different. It was like the entire burden of his family life had been lifted. For the first time in his life he felt…free. All the strings that connected him to his former life were cut. There was nothing ahead but opportunity.

He found himself wanting to just lay down and go to sleep. He was overcome with curiosity about what kind of dreams he would have. There was no sadness in his life. No pressure. No sense of bondage. It was almost like the buzz he got the first time he smoked some really high quality weed. But this was all natural, and the only thing that could bring him down was his own paranoia, and he was determined not to let that take root.

~ 7 ~

The next day, was the first day that Phillipe woke up and neither knew nor cared what day it was. He walked out onto the terrace that overlooked the backyard and its small training pool. The sun was coming up on his right and he could tell it was going to be a warm day. 

It was time to start doing some serious thinking about what he wanted to do with his life. It certainly had nothing to do with anything he was educated to do, which was figure things out. Numbers, always numbers. He spent four long years with numbers in all kinds of different configurations, formulae and equations, consciously sucking it all in and secretly hating it. 

Today, he declared silently to himself that this would be the first day of the rest of his life and he’d be goddamned if he thought about numbers ever again. Let Madelaine and her stepfather take care of that. Unless he did something monumentally stupid in his life, it would be physically impossible to outlive his money. He was healthy from all the running and swimming he did in college to burn off his anxieties. So he went back inside, put on his shorts, runners and a T-shirt and headed out. 

He knew that his average running speed was about 4.7 miles an hour, so he looked at his watch. 8:03 am and took off. He ran a zig zag pattern through the neighbourhood, waving to all the gardeners and other service people who took care of the big houses. He zig-zagged his way to the French border and stopped to take a swig of his water. His watch read 8:59. So he did his best to reverse his route and got himself back to his house at exactly10:20 am. A little over 11 miles round trip. 

He walked though the house to the backyard, stripped out of his gear and jumped into the pool. The water was cool and refreshing. He flipped open the control panel at the side of the pool and set the current for three knots. The water started to churn and push him. He walked to the front of the pool, slipped into the water and began to swim. He was still getting to know the pool since he had never been in one before he bought this house. Three knots felt like a good pace after a run. On days when he wouldn’t run he could probably do five knots. But he was a little too tired from the run to try it today. He preferred the breast stroke, because it was the easiest of all the stokes in this kind of pool.

After a few moments he got into a nice easy rhythm and his mind began to drift. He thought about America which, to him now, felt like one big distant city from sea to shining sea, Here, even though he was in the what kind of passed for the suburbs of a pretty large city, he felt like he was in the country. As he swam he could see the mountains off in the distance and a sliver of the lake at the end of his property.

Then, about ten minutes into his swim, something happened. It was a thought, a fragment. He let it bounce around in his brain. It was like nothing he had ever thought about before. 

It was the very beginning of a story he was telling himself. It was the germ of an idea. An amalgam of a zillion influences that had hit his brain over the years.

As he swam he let the idea swirl and bubble in his mind. He thought it was strange that someone who had been so indoctrinated into the world of numbers should suddenly be thinking in terms of words. But at the same time, it didn’t feel uncomfortable.

He swam for another twenty minutes, and during that time the idea he had began to clarify itself. He didn’t become excited or agitated by what he was thinking, because he kept telling himself to take it nice and easy. 

He shut off the pool, wrapped a towel around his waist and headed into the house. He picked up his running clothes and tossed them into a hamper in the laundry room. then he went upstairs and took a long shower.

Finally he came down and made some coffee and buttered a croissant and brought them out to the back terrace which was his favorite place to sit.  

He opened his laptop and then a Pages file. He did nothing for quite a while, besides sipping his coffee and munching on his croissant. He was puzzled about how to start. He thought through a dozen different scenarios and then he remembered something he read in one of his elective American Lit classes. Something about how a good story starts at a point in the main character’s life and moves along to another point. It was like a segment a section, a slice.

He got up and poured himself a second cup of coffee and when he sat down he began to write.

“He did not know where it came from, this thing he could do. He didn’t consider it a blessing or a curse. He didn’t think that way. He had been able to do this ever since he could remember. But he really became conscious of it in his teens, and he was smart enough to know that he should probably keep it to himself, otherwise there could be trouble. 

He was a very clever boy, clever enough, in fact, to know that if the wrong people were to find out about what he could do, they could, quite possibly, enslave him. So he kept it to himself. And it served him very well, this thing.

The thing wasn’t really a thing, more like a sense, that regardless of what anyone was saying to him, he could, through whatever alchemy was at the root of it, hear what they were actually thinking. 

It was a hard thing to live with as a teenager growing up in the big city. For this reason, he kept it to himself. He only made a few friends, and that was a relatively easy for him to do, because they were the ones who were saying exactly what they thought. He had come to admire that quality in people, since so few actually possessed it.”

Phillipe stopped there. Something told him to do that. Maybe it was instinct. Maybe he just needed to think about it some more, because it was one thing to have what he considered to be an interesting premise, and quite another to turn that into an actual story.

He leaned back and took a sip of his coffee which had grown cold. He smiled to himself, because while he was conjuring up this idea, he had quite literally lost all sense of time and space. There was only his mind and the screen and keyboard in front of him. And for whatever reasons, that was quite enough.

He thought about the idea all day. He remembered one of the profs talking about how you need to treat an idea like a new friend. Bit by bit you find out more about the new friend. It doesn’t come all at once. Life doesn’t work that way and neither does any creative process.

It was probably how his relationship with Madelaine would develop. Slowly, naturally, over time, bit by bit, as they got to know each other.

~ 8 ~

Monday turned to Tuesday and in the morning he sat down with his four paragraphs and read them to himself again. Then he picked up where he had left off.

One day, when he was just about finished college he decided he had to talk to someone about this thing he could do. He was sharing an apartment with his best friend in the world, a guy named Eric. They had been best friends since they were in public school because they lived in the same area of the city. Jacob’s parents were friends with Eric’s parents and only lived three houses away, in the New Rochelle neighbourhood where they grew up. So Jacob and Eric spent a lot of time together. In high school they double-dated. They both played basketball for their school team, and they both excelled academically.

Like Jacob, Eric was also majoring in maths but had completely different plans for his life than Jacob. Jacob, in fact, had no plan of his own, because his career had already been mapped out by his industrialist father. Jacob wasn’t sure he wanted to be part of the high-end corporate world that his father occupied. But on the other hand, he thought that his gift might come in quite handy, especially in negotiations of pretty much any kind.

One night, at the end of their senior year, Jacob decided to tell his friend Eric about the gift he had. They were sitting out by the pool at Jacob’s house drinking beers, Jacob’s parents were away at some sort of business conference.

The night was warm, and the cold beer felt pretty good going down.

“You know,” Jacob said. “We have known each other for exactly three times as long as we haven’t known each other.”

“True enough. So what’s your point?”

“In all that time I have been keeping a secret from you.”

“You’re not gay, are you?” Eric asked.

Jacob laughed. “No Eric. I’m as hetero as it gets.”

“So what’s this big secret?”

Jacob took a deep breath. “Ever since I was old enough to understand language, I have been able to hear and sort of understand what people are thinking. Not what they are saying, but what they are thinking.”

Eric put his beer down and looked at his friend. He sensed the sincerity in his voice. “No shit?”

“No shit.”

“And it works on everybody?” 

“So far.”

“Well fuck, man. How does that work?”

Jacob shook his head. “I have no idea. It’s just something that happens when someone talks to me.”

“Does it work on me?”

“Sometimes, but most of the time you say exactly what you’re thinking. That’s an admirable trait.”

“Okay, let me think about something totally unrelated to this conversation we’re having.” Eric leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.”

“You’re thinking about the scene from the movie ‘The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.’ You know, the three-way shootout scene. And how you knew that Clint Eastwood was gonna win it, because there was too much time left in the movie for him to get killed.”

Eric leaned forward and stared at Jacob intensely. “What the fuck, man. I mean what the fuck! You’re a fuckin’ mind reader.”

Jacob took a deep breath. “Yeah I guess I am.”

“Do you realize the kind of advantage you would be giving your dad’s business?” 

“Yeah, I’ve thought about that a lot. But somehow it just doesn’t seem right or fair.”

“I can understand that,” Eric said. “But still it’s a hell of a thing to have in your back pocket.”

“You have to promise me you won’t mention this to anyone, Eric.”

Eric just chuckled. “You know, there are people out there in this world that….well that would make your life pretty weird if they ever found out about this. I would never do that to you, man. Never.”

“Jacob smiled. “I know.”

“Yeah, I guess you do.  Maybe we can figure out some way to use it for, you know, something good.”

Jacob laughed. “Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that for about fifteen years now and I haven’t come up with a damn thing.”

Phillipe read over what he had written and fixed a few typos. He had no idea what he was doing, because whatever this was certainly didn’t feel like a story. Maybe, he thought, that’s what writers have to go through. A lot of blather to figure out what was essentially a germ of an idea.

As he was thinking this he got a call from Madelaine. She was on her way over to talk about taking care of all his financial stuff for him.

~ 9 ~

It was around noon when Madelaine arrived. Phillipe asked her if she was hungry. Madelaine replied that she was always hungry. Phillipe wondered how that worked since her body was nearly perfect. When he asked her about it she just shook her head and told him she could not explain it, but that she had been that way all her life. 

Phillipe made them both tuna sandwiches and they went onto the deck to go over all of Phillipe’s documentation. They talked about expenses, insurances for his house, his health and dental and his car. He told her he was thinking about buying a scooter so he wouldn’t have to use the car so much. She told him she had a Vespa that she really loved and said she would send him the dealer’s number.

Once Madelaine had all the information, she needed, she packed up her briefcase and accepted the offer of a cold beer from Phillipe. She told him that she would bring him a financial services contract to sign and he could authorize an automatic payment to her from his current account. This would cover her management as well as that of a pair of women who would clean his house and do his laundry once a week and a gardener who would keep the grounds looking beautiful. She asked about the pool, and Phillipe told her that the pool was self-cleaning, all he had to do was periodically add a cup of chlorine solution.

“You know I have heard about these current pools. But I have never really been in one.” Madelaine said.

“Bring a swimsuit the next time you come and I’ll show you how it works.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“Oh it’s great, especially for conditioning. Although you look to be in pretty good shape.”

“I have a walking machine, a treadmill, at home. I walk in the evening and read.”

They chatted some more and had another beer, and Madelaine asked him if he had figured out what he was going to do.

“Funny you should ask, because I have actually spent the better part of the past three days thinking about nothing else. And you know what…I think I’ve found something.”

Madelaine smiled. “So tell me.”

“I’m writing a story, or at least playing around with an idea for one.”

“That’s wonderful. What is it about?”

Phillipe got up and went into the house. He came out with a printout of what he had done so far. He handed it to Madelaine, who then started to read it. When she finished, she looked up at him. “What an interesting idea. A boy who can read minds.”

“I’m just getting started, and have no idea where this story will go, although I do like the premise. But I’ll tell you when I am sitting out here writing, the whole world seems to just disappear.”

“That’s your focus. You must have a very formidable mind.”

“I think I do. But for the past several years, it’s been all about numbers. Then, just like that, it was all about words.”

“Perhaps there’s not a lot of difference between words and numbers.”

“I don’t know. But I am enjoying this immensely.”

Madelaine smiled. “Well, I hope you keep on enjoying it. Because it seems to make you very happy.”

“Almost as happy as meeting you, Madelaine.”

Madelaine blushed a bit. She was not a shy person and she knew that she was a beautiful-looking young woman. But the sincerity that Phillipe showed her was really moving. She wasn’t quite ready to respond in kind. But it made her feel warm and fuzzy all the same. 

“What is your real name?” she asked. The question kind of came out of the blue and Phillipe was taken a bit aback.

He thought about it for a moment. “I’ll tell you as long as you promise not to tell a single soul.”

“Agreed.”

“It’s Jason. Jason Whiteside. My family, as you can probably tell, is quite rich. My father wanted me to take over the business. But I could never see myself doing that. So I had a friend forge a new identity for me and, well, here I am. Phillipe Fornier from Auxerre in France”

“Your friend must be very talented. Doing anything like that in this country is next to impossible.”

“Yeah, he’s real good. But doesn’t want to get into the hacking business. Wants to build robots.”

Madelaine looked at him. She was a little bit drunk. She smiled and said “Thank you for letting me know who you really are.”

Then she leaned over and kissed him. It was a soft gentle kiss. It felt like he was kissed by a feather. Then she slowly pulled away and smiled. “You know, I have had a lot of trouble finding someone I could care about.” Madelaine said. “They were either all about sex or all about themselves. But you are different, Phillipe”

“Well I am trying to be someone I’m not and so far, it seems to be working. But underneath the name, I’m still the same guy I’ve always been.”

They talked some more, until they were both sober. Phillipe found out a lot about Madelaine. The things she liked. The things she hated. The things she wanted. The things she didn’t want. But she was not committing to anything. Phillipe admired that. And he knew that she wanted to go slowly. And since he wasn’t going anywhere and he had something interesting to do, he was fine with that.

 

~ 10 ~

After Madelaine had gone, Phillipe sat back down at his computer, but didn’t write anything. Instead, he read over what he had already written and was subconsciously hoping that would jump-start some idea of how to turn this into a story. Because right now it wasn’t a story. It was just a premise, and in order to become a story, it needed to go somewhere. It needed a few twists and turns. It needed a villain if indeed his character was the hero. He needed a cause or a battle to fight. The more he thought about it the more complex his thinking became. It took him all over the place and refused to settle anywhere.

He was a highly disciplined thinker and he was smart enough to know when to forge ahead and when to regroup and let the cascading thoughts settle.

Later that evening he was reading a thriller by John Sandford. John Sandford was really just a pen name. He had forgotten what his real name was but remembered reading something about it when he first started reading his books. Mr. Sandford wrote about the trials and tribulations of being a cop in Minneapolis and later being the head of a group of Minnesota cops in something called the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. 

Phillipe had discovered Sandford in high school and was a faithful fan, having read all 34 of Sandford ‘Prey’ series books which featured a detective named Lucas Davenport. Phillipe liked the books because the writing style that Sandford had chosen was relatively simple and straight to the point. There was also a good mix of cop humour that helped to lighten the fact that they were constantly tracking down cold-blooded killers and not showing them a hell of a lot of mercy. 

He was currently reading the most recent of Prey novels when it hit him that maybe he was going about this whole ‘idea’ of his all wrong. It was too personal. It had no background and no environment in which to function. In short, it was an idea in search of an execution.  

To Phillipe, the thing that made the Sandford books work so well was the group dynamic that every story possessed. What Phillipe was doing, in fact, was oversimplifying. A real amateur move, he thought. And he reasoned that if he continued along that course he would run out of story to tell rather quickly.

He needed a setting. He needed his character to be more than just some kid telling his best friend that he had this talent and then sitting around trying to figure out what to do with it. What he had written so far was nothing more than a bit of backstory, if that.

It was at that precise moment in his life that Phillipe realized that writing was not like math because it involved shaking off all the discipline of solving equations and starting to show some creative initiative. In short, he had to stop thinking like a math guy and start thinking like a storyteller.

This insight, as simple as it was, stopped him in his tracks. But it did not frighten him, not in the least, because he had the kind of mind that welcomed a challenge. His only problem was that he was a novice, and almost everything about writing was new to him. There would have to be some kind of learning curve, as there was with just about every area of human endeavour. So he didn’t beat himself up about it. He simply modified his thinking. 

When he came out of this reverie, he noticed that the sun was setting and the air was cooler. So he packed up his computer and water bottle and headed inside. He rummaged around the kitchen and decided to cook some pasta. As he got busy preparing his meal he thought about everything that had just occurred to him. He wondered if he could pull off writing a story about a police officer, or some kind of detective, who could read minds. 

But he was a bit conflicted. Maybe he was just jumping on the first thing that came to mind. Maybe there was something better. Maybe not a police officer but a private investigator. A modern-day Sam Spade or Hercule Poirot. Something like that. Someone with a partner to bounce things off and keep him from going off the deep end. 

He ate his pasta slowly and kept reading his Sandford story on his Kindle. ‘What if someone like Lucas Davenport, who was John Sandford’s hero cop, was a private eye?’ he thought. ‘Now that would be something. Or what if someone like the Patrick Jane character from The Mentalist could actually read minds?’ That character was part of a group of cops but not really a cop himself. 

While he ate and read and looked out his window at the rising moon a lot of different ideas flashed through his head. But the thing they had in common was that they were all kind of derivative in nature. They were characters that already existed but with a special power. And then, as he was cleaning up the kitchen he started thinking ‘Well, what’s wrong with that?’ Suddenly he began to feel very tired. It was as if all the thinking that he had been doing had somehow drained him of all his energy. So he headed up the stairs and fell into bed. And just before he fell asleep. he thought. ‘What if it’s a man and a woman? Nothing to do with law enforcement or private detecting. Just an ordinary guy with an extraordinary power, and his girlfriend.

He stopped thinking after that because he knew he had arrived at the place he was trying to get to. He picked up his Kindle and read another couple of pages then closed it up and shut the light. He figured if he still had the same idea in his head in the morning, that’s what he would do.

~ 11 ~

The next morning, Phillipe woke up with the same idea in his head. As he got his morning coffee and croissant ready he thought some more about it and by the time he sat down to write he had at least the germ of an idea in his head.

His name was Dexter Fox. He was born in Atlantic City New Jersey. His father, Jonah was a Blackjack dealer and his mom, Viv, was a cocktail waitress. A fairly common pairing in that town. 

Dexter was raised by a series of Mexican and Puerto Rican nannies who looked after him at night. From the time he was about five, he pretty much took care of himself, walking then riding his bike to school. What his parents couldn’t provide in terms of actual parenting they made up for with cash, which was fine with him. He always had plenty of money and learned to respect it as he grew. He had a couple of friends who lived close by and they were in the same sort of situation, so they kind of all raised each other, with the help of the odd big brother or sister.

It was a pretty good life. His friends were good friends. His parents were as good as could be expected for casino people.

When Dexter was about seven, which most religions will tell you is the age of reason, things began to change. All his life he had heard voices in his head. Since he didn’t know better, he figured everyone did so it was no big deal. But at around the age of seven, the voices changed from a dull murmuring to clear language.

It took Dexter about three years to figure out what the hell was going on in his head. But what was going on was that he could hear what people were thinking. The voices were only clear and understandable when the people were talking to him or were very close by. Otherwise, they were muddled and low volume.

 After a year or so he started to figure out that he only heard what people were thinking if it was different from what they were saying.

Even though he was only eleven, he instinctually understood that there were probably more dishonest ways to use this talent than there were honest ones, and being in Atlantic City he was genuinely afraid that if the word ever got out, he could be putting himself in a good deal of danger. So he kept it all to himself. Because he was no dummy.

When he was about sixteen and halfway through high school he started to think about what this ability could actually do.

One night he even sat down and made a list of the things he could possibly do. It wasn’t a very long list because he was still pretty young. But one thing he realized quite clearly was that if he figured out how to use his talent he would always be able to make some sort of living. 

Atlantic City basically a casino town. There was nothing much else going on there. All the kids he knew had two working parents and half of them had just one parent who worked two jobs. There was very little to do there except read, swim in the ocean in the warm weather, and make out with girls. In his teen years, Dexter was fairly adept at all three of these pastimes. The making out with girls part was the best, because he could hear their thoughts, and could respond to their feelings and draw himself close to them because he really ‘understood’ them. It felt a little dishonest at first, but Dexter figured that as long as he didn’t do anything for which he could be arrested, everything was fair game. And besides, he reasoned, it was good practice for adulthood.

As he continued to grow, his control over the voices he would hear became more manageable. And eventually, he was able to simply tell what people were thinking just by tuning into them and listening. 

Dexter finished high school at eighteen, but gave no thought to higher education. He figured the world would teach him everything he needed to know. His parents loved him but both suspected that he was a little bit different from the other kids they knew in the neighbourhood. They had saved up fifty three thousand dollars which would have gotten Dexter through a community college and into some sort of career. But after a lot serious talk, they simply gave him the money, told him to buy a half-decent used car and go see the world.

Three days later, and just two weeks after his 19th birthday,  Dexter loaded up a three-year-old, low-mileage Volkswagon Passat, which he had purchased for twenty two thousand dollars, kissed his mom and slapped his dad’s hand and headed off for parts unknown, specifically Canada, with thirty thousand dollars, which he reckoned was almost forty thousand in Canadian money safely stashed, and a very definite plan in mind.

Two nights later he was in a motel on a road called Lundy’s Lane in the small city of Niagara Falls, Ontario. Niagara Falls was a huge tourist attraction and the home to a couple of casinos where the legal age was nineteen. He had exchanged ten thousand of his American dollars at a Royal Bank of Canada branch in Niagara Falls. Here at these casinos he would be able to test his abilities and see just how good he actually was when he was sitting across from a professional dealer. 

His father had taught him the games of Blackjack and poker and considered his son to be what he called a ‘dangerous’ player. He had no idea that Dexter was actually reading his mind. He just thought the kid had inherited some of his card sense.

That evening, he put on a pair of nice slacks, a black T-shirt and a light sports jacket and headed to The Fallsview Casino. He walked around the casino for a while taking it all in. He stopped by each of the several Blackjack tables, watched the players and listened to the dealer’s thoughts. 

He knew he would have to be careful because the casinos monitored the playing tables for any suspicious activity and any player winning a lot of money would be classed as suspicious.

He finally settled on a table and purchased $500 worth of $50 chips. The dealer wore a name tag that just read ‘Charles’. Charles was your typical dealer. Mid-thirties, white shirt, bow tie, slicked back hair and professionally manicured nails. He was obviously not a novice and handled the cards with smoothness and confidence. He had no tells that Dexter could notice but the thing that Dexter called his ‘inner voice’  was clear as a bell. 

Dexter was careful to build his winnings slowly, even make the odd amateur bet, but two hours later, he was up more than $3000. He gathered up his chips and pushed a $50 chip across the table to Charles who was happy to see the ass end of him as he walked away to the cashier’s window. Streaks were part of the game and Dexter’s raised no red flags in the back room. 

Dexter treated himself to a nice dinner in the Casino’s buffet and sat watching the poker tables. The players at these tables were older and better dressed than the Black Jack players After he finished his dinner, he wandered through the tables, listening to the players as they thought through their games. After about half an hour he sat down at a fifty-dollar table and bought two thousand dollars worth of chips. There were three other players and the raise limit was a hundred dollars. These were the amateurs and their inner voices were all crystal clear. He had decided beforehand that he would spend no more than three hours at a table. This would give him a modest amount of winning. And he needed to do enough early folding to avoid raising the suspicions of the dealers, who, if they were anything like his dad, were all pretty damn sharp.

When his three hours were, his three thousand dollar winnings ballooned to more eleven and a half thousand. He looked at his watch and then gathered his chips and took them to the cashier. 

Fourteen thousand for the night was a pretty decent haul, he reckoned. He went to the lounge and sat at the bar nursing a beer and just watching all the action. He figured that two nights in each of the three casinos would net him enough money to buy into a high stakes poker game where he could probably take down several hundred thousand or more. 

He stayed in Niagara Falls a little longer than he had anticipated, because once the word got around that there was a ‘kid’  who was winning big at the casino poker tables, he found himself being invited to more private games in parts of the hotels that no tourist would ever see. These were the big money players; scary looking people with intense focus and burly bodyguards. But they accepted their losses gracefully, and the three nights he spent in these games added much more to his stash than he could have imagined in his wildest dreams. 

This, in turn, led him to other ‘private’ games and a few poker tournaments in Toronto and Montreal. His plans to head off to the reservation casinos were nullified by the opportunity that the big money games represented, and he carefully and slowly built his winnings far beyond his anticipation. 

Phillipe stopped writing and looked at the clock on his computer. It read 2:45 am.

He was pretty tired but not sleepy. So he made a cup of Camomile tea and went back out onto the deck to watch the clouds dance past the half moon. He was writing a story now, and he was happy that he had figured out what he was doing so quickly. Being a mathematician, his mind was very agile and making the transition from numbers to words had been easier than he thought. But he wasn’t about to get cocky about it. He was a long way from his goal, and the best thing he could do for himself right now was to stay focused and not give into any daydreaming.

When he finished the tea he went up to bed and read some more John Sandford until he was ready to conk.

~ 12 ~

He slept in the following morning only to be awakened by his phone. It was Madelaine. It was just after ten am, so he tried to sound as awake and alert as he could. She told him she would be over at around three o’clock with the agreement and the budget in place.

He got up, put on his trunks and headed downstairs. He got into the pool and swam for half an hour just to wake himself up. Then he went back upstairs and had a quick shower. Fifteen minutes later he was sitting at his writing spot, with his usual breakfast, and reviewing what he had written the night before. Then he continued.

By the time he had made his way to Montreal and the border crossing that would take him home he reckoned he had won the American equivalent of more than seven million four hundred thousand dollars, which included a deliberate second place at the Poker Stars Tournament in Montreal, and a couple of lucrative sides games, which netted him five and a half million.

He left Montreal heading south on Highway 87 which would take him directly into New York City, a place where he had actually never been. 

Once he had gotten through the border crossing and was just starting to pick up speed, he noticed someone standing at the side of the road with their thumb out. The closer he got the more he realized it was a female. She was wearing tight jeans, some sort of  T-shirt and a denim jacket. Her hair was brown and tied back. Her sunglasses were perched on her head. On her feet she wore a pair of white Nikes. He wasn’t sure why, but he pulled over about thirty yards past the girl. She picked up a large bag and slung it over her shoulder and ran toward his car. He opened his window. 

“Where you heading?” she asked.

“Atlantic City by way of New York City.” He said. 

She looked him over carefully. and nodded. “Sounds good to me.”

“Toss your bag in the back seat.”Dexter said.

She walked around the car and opened the passenger door, pulled the seat forward and tossed her bag in the back. She put her smaller bag on the front floor and climbed in, fastening her seat belt.

“What’s your name?” Dexter asked.

“Roxanne. Roxanne Doyle. But everybody calls me Rox.

Dexter laughed as he pulled the car back out onto the highway. 

“That’s funny. My name is Dexter, Dexter Fox but everybody calls me Dex.”

“That is funny. A Dex and a Rox. Whoda thunk?”

“Where you heading, Rox?”

“South.”

“That covers a lot of territory.”

“No, I’m actually heading to New York City. What about you?”

“Heading home to Atlantic City.”

“You’re a long way from there, Dex.”

“Yeah I came up to Canada to make some money.”

“Doin’ what?” Roxanne asked.

“Gambling. Blackjack and poker. Mostly poker.”

“No shit. You any good at it?”

“I do OK. Just getting started. Had to go to Canada because I’m only nineteen and everywhere I want to play in the States, you have to be twenty one.”

“So you’ve been up in Canada playing poker and Blackjack. You win anything?” 

“Yeah I did pretty well.”

“What does that mean? ‘Cause I know nothing about gambling.”

“It means about seven and a half million, which included a couple of lucrative tournaments.”

“Holy shit.”

“Yeah. So what about you, Rox? What’s your thing?”

“I just graduated from McGill University. Computer Sciences.”

“So why are you comin’ to the States?”

“Bigger companies. Bigger money. Bigger challenges. I’m gonna try New York. If that doesn’t work out I’ll head west to California. Silicon Valley.”

“You must be pretty good if you’re aimin’ that high.”

“Well, that’s what I’m gonna find out.”

Dexter turned on the radio to an oldies station and they sang songs together all the way to Albany, where they stopped for dinner. Dexter found himself extremely attracted to this girl. She was a little on the wild side and nothing like the stereotypical computer nerd. She liked him too. And he couldn’t hear her inner voice at all.

They decided to stay in Albany overnight and then make the drive to New York City the next day. They found a nice motel and both had showers then laid on separate beds watching the news. 

About half an hour after they turned out the lights, Rox slipped off her double bed and crawled in with Dexter. He was pretty sure that would happen and so there was no surprise when it did. They didn’t make love, they just did a bit of necking and touching and then both of them fell asleep.

The next day, they drove into Manhattan and checked in at the Pierre Hotel in mid-town. Dexter had made a reservation from the motel in Albany. They arrived at the Pierre at around four in the afternoon and then after checking in and changing, headed down to the street to walk around and take in the city. 

Roxanne had never been out of Canada. Montreal was the biggest city she had ever been to, because she grew up in a smaller city called Cornwall which was about sixty miles west of Montreal. They were both overwhelmed at the population density in Manhattan. They walked around in Central Park, then headed down 5th Avenue all the way to 42nd Street. They saw all kinds of different people along the way. And it seemed like almost everyone was walking much more quickly than they were  Since they weren’t in any hurry they just ambled down the street taking in all the beautiful stores, and staring up at the massive buildings on the neighbouring streets. 

When they got to 42nd Street, it was about 7 PM and they were getting hungry. Dexter checked out the Google Maps app on his iPad and saw a place called Dave & Busters, a sports bar just three blocks west on 42nd. They went in and took seats at the bar. The Yankees were playing the Boston Red Sox tonight so the place was crowded. They ordered beers and roast beef sandwiches with fries, which came in less than five minutes, and were pretty damn good. While they ate, they watched the game on one of the large flatscreen monitors above the bar. 

“Atlantic City has no major sports teams, so the team everybody there rooted for the Philadelphia Phillies, which were a National League team, unlike the Yankees and the Red Sox who were in the American League,” Dexter said.

“My dad likes the Toronto Blue Jays, but they have been sucking lately.”

 “What does your dad do in Cornwall?” Dexter asked.

Roxanne laughed. “He’s the mayor.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, he also owns a hardware store and likes that job a lot better. What about your folks?” Roxanne asked.

“They work in the casinos. My dad’s a Blackjack dealer. Mom’s a cocktail waitress. If you can believe it she makes more than him. They’re nice people but I always got the feeling they never wanted a kid. But they tried really hard to be good parents. It just wasn’t in their nature I guess.”

After dinner, they took a cab back to the hotel. They were too beat to do anything. Roxanne liked it that Dexter wasn’t all horny like most of the boys she had known. And because Dexter could hear what she was thinking, he deliberately held back, although he had to admit that making love to her wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

That night as they both lay in bed together lost in their own thoughts Dexter wondered if he should talk to her about his gift. It was unlikely he would ever see her again after the next day. So he figured he had nothing to lose. But he was really taken with her and something inside him told him that together, both of them could do some amazing things. He wasn’t sure what they were just yet. It was just a feeling he had, since she seemed to always say exactly what she was thinking. She was the only person he had met recently that he could say that about.

The next morning, they packed up and had breakfast together.

“So do you have any idea where you are going to stay?” Dexter asked her. 

“No. But it sure as hell won’t be here. It’s a little on the pricy side.”

They didn’t say anything for quite a while just picked at their breakfasts. Finally, Dexter said. “How much do you think you could make here if you got the right job?”

“You know, I really don’t know for sure. It would have to be at least one fifty, because the rents here are off the charts and then there’s food and getting around and clothes.”

“Here’s what I’m thinking. Why don’t you come and work with me. I’ll pay you a hundred twenty thousand a year, and we can find our own house, somewhere on the ocean.”

“But what would I do?”

“This is the leap of faith part. Because I can’t tell you that until you agree and we’re on our way to New Jersey. But I will tell you that your skills could come in very handy.”

Roxanne took a sip of her coffee. She thought this was all pretty weird. What did she really know about this guy except that he was a gambler? Did he really have all the money he said he did? And what the hell would he need her for? Pretty major league concerns. But despite all that she found herself incredibly curious about what this was all about. And the only way she could find out was by saying yes.

So she did.

They finished their breakfast, went up to their room and got all their stuff. Dexter paid cash for everything and half an hour later they were on the Garden State Parkway heading toward Atlantic City.

~ 13 ~

Phillipe sat back in his chair and sipped his coffee. He was now convinced that he was starting to turn this into a story. Where it would go next was anybody’s guess. He had a number of alternatives but hadn’t settled on anything in particular.

A few minutes later, Madelaine walked around the side of the house. 

“Bonjour. I knew you would be out here.” she said.

Phillipe got to his feet and accepted a kiss on the cheek from her.

“Would you like some coffee?” he asked.

“Oui. That would be wonderful.

Madelaine set her small briefcase down on the table and they both walked inside.

“I see you are doing some more writing.” she said.

“Yeah. I think I have finally found the thread of the story.” Phillipe replied. I’d love for you to read it.”

“Certainly. I’m dying to know where your character goes. I have also brought my swimsuit, so you can show me how your marvellous little pool works.”

They went back out onto the patio and sat down. “First things first.” Madelaine said as she reached into her bag and pulled out two copies of the contract document. All the services and costs were itemized. There was also an ‘extras’ cost of 10%, which she explained would be a kind of slush fund for any remodelling or repair work that would need to be done. 

Phillipe looked over the budget and thought, ‘This girl is very professional. She had covered off everything but the kitchen sink.’ A few seconds later he said. “This looks fine. Is it fair for you?”

“Mais oui, yes.” Madelaine replied.

So Phillipe signed a copy of the budget and another document which would transfer the first year’s budget total from his current account to her business management account.

“Okie Dokie.” Madelaine said, and it sounded kind of funny coming from a sophisticated French girl. “We will meet once every three months and formally discuss how things are going.” she said. “So that’s business taken care of, so now I’m dying to see what you have been writing.”

Phillipe opened his laptop to the story file. “It doesn’t have a title yet. And it’s changed quite a bit from what I showed you last week, which was really just my feeble attempt to get the idea down.”

He turned the computer around. “I’ll get us some more coffee, while you read.” he said. 

“Merci” she said absently, because she had already started to read.

Phillipe got up and took the two mugs to the kitchen, rinsed them out and futzed around making a new pot of coffee. He was very nervous. He waited until she appeared to have stopped reading, then filled the cups and came back outside.

Madelaine smiled. “This is quite a bit different than what you showed me before.” she said.

“Yeah. After I wrote that I figured out what was wrong with it. The main thing was that it was just a way to get the idea figured out. It wasn’t a story, because there was no movement. So I scrapped all of that and concentrated on movement.”

“I can see that. So where does it go next.?” Madelaine asked.

“Well, it could go a lot of places. right now I’m thinking that it could go into the criminal world. Have you ever seen a TV show called The Mentalist?”

“Mais oui. My first star crush was Simon Baker. The show was quite ingenious in the way he used observation to solve the crimes.”

“Exactly. I watched that series all through college. He was far and away my favourite TV character.”

“Well, you certainly have the makings of a Patrick Jane type character here.” Madelaine said. “And now that you have explained it, I can kind of see where you are going.”

“So you liked it.”

“Mais oui. You know, an old friend of my father’s is a television producer. When you finish this story I would love to introduce you to him. I think he would be very interested in something like this.”

“So are you saying you think this could be a TV series idea?”

“Pourquoi pas…why not?”

Phillipe just chuckled. “I hadn’t really got that far in my thinking.”

“Just a suggestion.” Madelaine replied.

But it was a lot more than that. It was a very concrete thought and it solidified a lot of things in Phillipe’s head that had been just rolling around there kind of aimlessly. He was smart enough to know that, especially with the way the publishing business worked, it would take forever and a day to get a novel published, unless he chose to publish it himself and then there would be a ton of time and someone else’s labour needed to keep posting in order to get anyone to buy it. But to create it for a medium like television, now that would be something interesting as hell, at least to him.

Phillipe thought about that for a while and then he said. “Okay, the TV thing sounds like a great idea. And it really helps with my focus.”

“I’m glad,” Madelaine said, as she got to her feet. “So where can I change?”

“Change?”

“Oui. You told me you would show me how your big bathtub works.”

“Right. I forgot about that.” Phillipe said. “Use the bathroom on the first floor. There are lot of towels and a shower for later.”

Madelaine dashed off into the house. Phillipe followed her and went upstairs to change himself. When he came back down Madelaine was sitting at the kitchen counter with her hair tied back and tucked into a swimming cap. She was wearing a bikini and for the first time, Phillipe was able to see just how perfect her body was. It was all he could do to stay cool. So he just nodded and off they went to the pool. 

Madelaine, it turned out, was very strong swimmer. She could handle a current of five knots and literally fell in love with the whole idea of the small current pool. Phillipe just smiled and thought, another dab of cement in our relationship. He told her she could feel free to come and use it anytime.

After the swim, they drove across the border and sat in a small bistro overlooking a beautiful valley and sipped chablis. They talked about Phillipe’s story and where it could possibly go. As they talked the idea became clearer and clearer in Phillipe’s head.

Madelaine listened attentively and saw that he was structuring the story not to be something that would be printed, but that could easily become a pilot for a series of some sort. She admired the gusto with which he had approached this, and being a numbers person herself, appreciated the amount of sheer effort required to switch gears like that. But she noted the joy that this seemed to bring him and was feeling her attraction to him grow.

~ 14 ~

They spent the rest of the day, driving around then went back to Phillipe’s house and worked on making dinner together. 

“Look at us,” Madelaine said. “We’re like an old married couple.” 

As she walked by him to get something from the refrigerator, he took her hand drew her in. He kissed her gently and she returned the kiss. Then they both smiled because they knew.

Madelaine stayed that night, and the next night and the night after that. Slowly, over the course of the next couple weeks  she brought all her stuff to Phillipe’s house. She hung all her clothes in one of the spare bedrooms and they slept together every night in the big bed in the master.

Madelaine worked mostly on the computer but two or three times a week she would get up early and drive off to see a client in person. Every day, rain or shine Phillipe would sit down at the computer and continue the story. In many ways, it mirrored his own life, at least from the relationship point of view between Roxanne and Dexter. But apart from that the story veered off into its own world.

As they drove through Atlantic City, Roxanne’s only comment was, “It’s really not much to look at, Dex.”

“Yeah, I know. But we’re not gonna live here. We’re going further south. I just want to pick up some more of my stuff.”

Dexter had called his bank from New York and ordered a Visa card. When he gave the bank his account number they told him that they would expedite it and that he could pick it up in two hours.

They picked up Dexter’s card when they got to Atlantic City and it was mid-afternoon when they arrived at Dexter’s house. His parents were having breakfast after which they would leave for work.

Dexter introduced Roxanne to them and they had some coffee and chatted for about half an hour. Dexter made up a story about driving Roxanne down to Virginia Beach, which was where she lived and that he was gonna stay there for a while and check it out. His parents just smiled, cleaned up the dishes and were out the door. Dexter spent the next few hours doing laundry and packing up the car,

As they were leaving, Dexter said. ‘You know what. I think we need a bigger car. Roxanne looked at the folded-down seats filled with clothing, and a few pictures. and said.“I think, you might be right.” 

They headed east to Wilmington Delaware and got onto Highway 1 Heading south. Then they switched over to 13 and rode it down to Norfolk and Virginia Beach.

Along the way, through the lush Delaware farmland, Dexter explained his talent to Roxanne. She tested him a few times and was astonished at how he was, quite literally, able to see her thoughts and play them back to her.

They talked a lot about what Dexter could do with this talent. Dexter seemed to be quite interested in what he could do to help people find missing friends or relatives. That was one idea, but Dexter wasn’t all that concerned. He knew it would take some time. But he had more than enough money stashed away that they could find a nice house to rent on the ocean and then figure out how to move forward. Roxanne liked the missing persons idea and thought she could create a suitably vague web site that could put them in the personal investigation business. There was certainly no shortage of missing people in America. They discussed it a bit more and Dexter told her that he had already looked into it. From what he had learned about it so far, anyone who disappeared usually did so at the hand of or through the help of a relative or close family friend of some sort.

Roxanne, who was travelling with about ten thousand dollars that she had saved up for the trip to New York was happy that she didn’t have to touch any of that money. Dexter insisted on paying for everything, And she had to admit that this was a genuine adventure they were on, and that appealed to her on a whole other level. Roxanne was three years older than Dexter, but it didn’t feel that way at all. Dexter was extremely intelligent and intuitive, but most of all, he exuded a great deal more self-confidence than any nineteen year old she had ever encountered.

It was early evening when they got to Virginia Beach. They checked in at the Hyatt Hotel along the strip and then drove off in search of some dinner. 

They got back around nine and Roxanne got out her computer, hooked into the hotel’s server and together she and Dexter began to search for beachfront houses to rent or lease. They found three likely choices, which Roxanne noted. They would call them in the morning. 

They both had showers and then laid in bed and watched a movie on the large flat screen TV. The movie was kind of boring and so they started fooling around. Pretty soon, they were doing a whole lot more than that, and about half an hour later they collapsed from the exhaustion of the lovemaking and the long day’s drive They slept in each other’s arms and it felt pretty good.

The next morning, during breakfast in the hotel’s dining room, Dexter started calling real estate agents. They saw the three houses they had found online, and eventually settled on the one with the best and easiest access to the beach. The houses were all unoccupied and nicely furnished and it was simply a matter of signing the lease and giving the agent a check for the first six months. The agent told them that it would take a day for the cheque to clear, so they stayed at the hotel for another night. 

The next morning they met the agent at the house on Ocean Front Avenue. There they were given the keys and a list of all the utility providers, whom she had already contacted, so they were good to go. 

They unpacked the car and hung up all their clothes. When they were done, they made a shopping list and, two hours later, had a house full of food, some beer and a couple bottles of nice wine. They heated up a supermarket pizza and then sat out on the spacious back deck and watched the ocean while they ate. 

“I’ve got to tell you, Dex,” Roxanne said. “This is light years from where I was headed when you picked me up at the border.”

“Yeah, well, sometimes life works out that way. As long as you’re happy with what we’re doing.”

“I think I will be once we actually start doing it. Right now it feels like we’re on a holiday.”

“Yeah, we need to do one last thing before we get started. We need to get a new car.”

The next day they drove over to a Chrysler Dealership in Norfolk and traded the Jetta for a new Chrysler Minivan.. Roxanne

 liked it because the seats were higher and she could see more of the road ahead. But she could also see that the gears were turning in Dexter’s head.

That evening they barbecued some steaks and ate them with a Caesar Salad. And they talked about what Dexter was thinking. “We would kinda be like an unlicensed detective agency.” he said. “We could think up a cool name for it and you can design us a web site and let people know we exist. After that, we can see what happens. I already have an idea for how we could write the site. Then we’ll put it out there and you can goose the SEO on it and we’ll see if we can generate some leads.

“What would we charge for this service?” Roxanne asked.

“I can make all the money we need playing poker. We don’t need to charge anything. Now if someone wants to gift us something, well that would be up to them.”

“Okay.” Roxanne said but she sounded kind of iffy to Dexter.

“You’re thinking that people won’t take us seriously if we don’t charge them.”

Roxanne just smiled. “Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.”

Dexter took a deep breath.“How about this? We play it by ear. If the people were are talking to are rich then we charge them. If they’re not so rich, we charge them less. And if they’re poor we just do it for nothing, maybe even help them out if they need it.”

“I can live with that.”

“Me too.”

~ 15 ~

Phillipe was now at the point where he had to create an actual case for Dexter to solve. He surfed the Internet and after a couple of hours he settled on a child kidnapping case. He found several examples of unsolved cases and he wrote out a bit of a narrative of how of how Dexter would go about solving the case.

That evening he talked it over with Madelaine and she agreed that they could get a lot of mileage out of a child kidnapping case, and maybe even tie it into something political. Madelaine loved political dramas. Phillipe wasn’t too sure how that would work unless the kid that was kidnapped was the son or daughter of a politician. Then there would be the question of getting access to both the victim’s parents and all the people they had to talk to. That was a pretty huge red flag, so they decided that they would have to start small and work their way up to the big leagues.

One morning, a few days later, Madelaine was playing around on the computer with names. She had always done well in her design classes which often involved creating names and the logos to go with them.

For reasons that are unknown to most creative people, she typed out the words; DR Lost & Found. She then started playing with turning it into a word-mark that could represent the operation. 

Phillipe had gone for a long run, which he did at least every other morning. He came back in, wiping his face with a small towel and holding a bottle of water. He sat down beside Madelaine and looked at the design she was working on. He smiled at her and kissed her on the cheek. 

“I had no idea you were such a creative thinker.” he said

“I have my moments of inspiration.”

“Well, this looks pretty damn good to me. It’s interesting because when you put the first initials of the characters names, it can be construed as Doctor. I think they call it a pun.”

“I never thought about that but you’re right.”

“Save the designs for when we talk to your producer friend.”

“Oh come on. They’re not all that good.” Madelaine said.

“You can hate them all you want. But the name works for me and that’s all we need right now.”

Phillipe kissed her again and headed up to take a shower. Later, after Madelaine had gone to have lunch with her mother he continued writing.

For a self-professed computer nerd. Roxanne turned out to also be quite a capable creative person. After only a few minutes of thinking she came up with a name for their enterprise: DR Lost & Found. Once she had that and all the content that Dexter had already written she was able to put together a web site using some stock shots she purchased online. When she had finished with the layout she went to a site called GoDaddy and bought the URL for DRLostandFound.com. 

After the site was set up, she then emailed a friend of hers from school who specialized in search engine optimization. He sent her back a quote and she got signed up using Dexter’s Visa card. He explained that he would send her weekly reports on the amount of traffic he would generate. 

Now all that was left to do was wait. 

It was early August and though the temperature was high, the ocean seemed to keep things a good five degrees cooler.

They spent pretty much a whole day driving around the Norfolk, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake areas, looking for cool restaurants and places where they could sit outside and have a glass of wine. In the evenings they would watch old movies together or just sit out on the back steps and watch the waves roll in.

“You know, at the rate the Polar ice caps are melting, we won’t be able to stay here for a long time. Some of the lowlands in Florida are already flooding.” Dexter said. “We have a bit of elevation here, so maybe ten years if we’re lucky.”

“I didn’t know you were paying attention.” Roxanne said.

“I grew up in Atlantic City, that’s sitting pretty low too. It’s just something you’re aware of when you live there.”

Roxanne grew up in a small city on the shore of Lake Ontario and she had to admit that never once did it cross her mind that the lake would overflow. She supposed that living on the ocean was a totally different thing. And as she looked out and could see literally forever, she shivered involuntarily.

“It’s gonna take a few days or maybe even a week before the SEO kicks in and we start to get any real interest.” 

“Yeah, well that’s what I figured. But, you know, there might be a better way to jumpstart this.”

Dexter opened up his computer and began to search Google for child disappearances. He was amazed at what he saw. He went to a site that gave the statistics for child abductions. It was pretty depressing. 

He and Roxanne spent a good hour looking at stories until they came across one that was close to home. It was an hour away by car in the city of Richmond. The story came with an email address attached to it that the mother had set up. Looking at the date they noticed that the post was more than a year old. This meant that the authorities had probably stopped looking. 

Dexter opened his email and pasted in the address. He titled the message. ‘We would like to try and find your son.’

He and Roxanne then composed a brief email, explaining what they were about. 

‘We are an independently wealthy couple and we both have highly developed intuitive skills. We would very much like to try and find your son, Andrew. We are not professionals, but have chosen this area because it matches many of our skills and is an opportunity for us to give back for the good fortune life has bestowed on us. Judging from your web site, the police seem to have given up on your case. 

If you are interested, please let us know. We would really like to try and help.’

Roxanne signed the note with her email address and phone number and they sent it off.

And again, all they could do was wait.

~ 16~

Madelaine smiled as she read the most recent instalment of Phillips’s story. “Well, now we’re getting somewhere.” she said. 

“Yeah, well the front end can be a lot shorter if it’s gonna be a TV thing.” Phillipe said, although he wasn’t really sure about that. He wasn’t actually sure just what he had, if anything at all, other than just another GTB. (good try, but…). But there was no mistaking that he was enjoying the writing and that he was also enjoying his life a hell of a lot more than he knew he would be if he had not left the States and his father’s vision of his future. He didn’t really know for sure what would happen from one day to the next and he found it genuinely exciting.

He was sitting in the backyard on one of the two chairs that were down near the water’s edge. He was watching the clouds move over the mountains and figuring out where he would take the story next. Truth be told, he was making this all up as he went along. But as he progressed, the story had started to more or less write itself. There was nothing like this in the world of numbers. It was all about balance, and the immutable logic of the sum total of things. The writing was almost the polar opposite. When he sat down to carry this story forward he didn’t really have any concrete idea of what he wanted to do. 

All it was, as it turned out, was the lonely writer following the trail of crumbs that he had laid out on a path. He had no idea what lay at the end. Nor did he have any idea where the next crumb would take him. But the one thing he was sure of was that the more of the story he wrote, the more his mind would force it to make sense, and the better he would get at it.

There was a great deal of comfort in that for a guy like Phillipe. He was learning how creative he could be, while still remaining logical. It was a cerebral juggling act and the more he juggled, the easier it got. And in the end, it all boiled down to desire; his desire to make something happen in a world that he knew very little about.

Undaunted by the strangeness of it all, Phillipe opened his computer and carried on.

Two days later Roxanne’s phone rang. 

“Hello, this is Roxanne.”

“Hello Roxanne, my name is Elaine Fletcher. I believe you sent me an email a couple of days ago.”

“Oh yes, Mrs Fletcher, we did.”

“You were right about one thing. The police have given up on searching for Andrew.”Her voice sounded sad and exhausted.

“I can only imagine what you are going through, Mrs Fletcher.”

“So I guess what I would like to know is how exactly are you going to be able to help me.”

‘My partner, his name is Dexter Fox, has, I’m not sure what you would call it. I call it a gift. He’s able to get a handle on what people are thinking even when they are saying something completely different.”

“That sounds pretty strange. You know we have had experience with spiritualists and the like. They all turned out to be con artists of one kind or another.”

“Dexter and I, as I said in the email, are independently wealthy. This is not about money, Mrs Fletcher.”

“Well that’s certainly a departure. As you can tell, I’m a bit cynical about calls out of the blue.”

“You may be cynical, and I can understand that, but you were curious enough to call.”

“I haven’t given up hope you know. It’s just the more time passes the more you start to believe you’ll never see him again.”

“I don’t know if we can help you. But we’re willing to try. And the skills that Dexter has are pretty formidable.”

“How is it you are independently wealthy, as you said?”

“Dexter is a professional gambler. He’s very good at it.”

“And what would happen if I said yes?”

“Well, he would want to talk to you and anyone involved, and hear what they tell him.”

Louise Fletcher said nothing for quite a while and then finally said.“You sound very sincere.”

“We are. We have no reason to be otherwise. This is something that Dexter has chosen to do. If we don’t do it for you, we will eventually do it for someone else. We have created a web site with very powerful search engine optimization. It’s just a matter of time before we start getting calls. But we chose you, because Dexter had a very strong feeling about your case.”

“There’s really just a small circle of people.” Mrs Fletcher said. 

“OK well, why don’t you get a list together and we’ll come over to Richmond and meet with you. We’re in Virginia Beach.”

“It will have to be on the weekend. I have a full time government job.

“The weekend is fine.”

They worked out a time and Mrs Fletcher promised to put together a list of people they could talk to.

Just as she hung up, Dexter came up to the house from his run on the beach.

“Guess who I just  got off the phone with?”

“Elaine Fletcher. And she wants to meet.” Dexter said.

“Guess Christmas and birthdays must have been a real drag for you.”

“As a matter of fact, they were. So when do we meet with her?” 

On Saturday. In Richmond. I’ve got all her info. And she’s gonna give us a list of names of everyone involved.

“Good. If we solve this we should be able to spin it into some very good PR.”

Roxanne laughed.“Would you please stop doing that?”

“Sorry, Rox. Force of habit. Let’s go out for dinner to celebrate.”

That afternoon, Madelaine had visited her TV producer friend, a man in his mid-fifties named Maurice Flaubert. He lived in the manor house of the small winery he owned just north of the city of Annecy. Maurice’s company, Images Flaubert, had good working relationships with a couple of European networks, as well as with Netflix, Amazon Prime and Britbox. He specialized in limited edition miniseries, and heavily favoured human dramas over what he called ultra-violent exploitation, which really comprised the bulk of what was being produced, especially by the North American-based streaming channels.

Maurice was a handsome and powerful man. He was good friends with Madelaine’s father who was his banker. He also tried to convince Madelaine to try acting, because she had both the look and the voice of someone who could command the screen. Madelaine, however, was very happy being who she was, and even happier to have finally found someone she could be real partners with in life. So, as usual, she told him she would think about it.

Maurice poured them another glass of wine and then went outside to sit on the back porch. 

“So what is on your mind, Chere?”

Madelaine hesitated for a few seconds and then said “I have a new friend, Phillipe Fornier. He came here from America about six weeks ago. He purchased a house on the lake outside of the centre of Geneva and hired me to take care of his finances. He comes from a very wealthy family, but wants to be a writer.”

“What kind of writer, Chere?” Maurice asked.  “There are many different kinds.”

“Right now he is writing a story about a young man who can, ummm, read minds. Not a, what’s the word, con artist. Someone with a genuine talent. But he wants to use his talent for good.”

“This character,” Maurice asked. “What is his job?”

“He doesn’t really have one. He is a gambler. He travels around to casinos and plays Blackjack and high-stakes poker and, of course, he wins a lot. He meets a girl in his travels and together they settle down in a place called Virginia Beach, which is somewhere along the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. From there, they begin to look for people to help. In the last part of the story I’ve read, he finds a woman in a nearby town whose son, a three-year-old had disappeared a year earlier,

This is where he has gotten to so far?”

“Oui.”

Maurice looked out over the vineyards. “Is he a good writer?”

“He’s actually quite good for someone who comes from a whole other discipline. He has degrees in mathematics and business administration.”

“Well, writers, you know, they come from just about everywhere. Do you like the story so far?”

“Yes. I find it interesting that his character can make as much money as he wants with his gift, but chooses to help people. Do you remember a TV series called The Mentalist?”

“Everybody remembers that, Madelaine. One of the most successful TV dramas of the past twenty years.”

“This character reminds me very much of the character who played the Mentalist. Of course, the story is quite different, but to me, it has the, je ne sais quoi, the same feeling.”

“Okay, chere. You have my interest. Tell your friend to finish the story, send it to me and then we will have a meeting.”

“Merci, Maurice.”

~ 17 ~

While Madelaine was having her chat with Maurice Flaubert, Phillipe, sat in his favourite place and continued with his story.

Elaine Fletcher lived in a bungalow on the south side of Richmond. There was an older Ford in the driveway and a couple of other older cars parked close by on the street. Roxanne and Dexter got out of the van and walked to the door. Louise greeted them and invited them in. She was a good-looking woman, but there was a sadness that made her look pale and drawn.

The living room was small but neat. There was a box of toys in the corner and a small teddy bear on the couch. They walked through to the dining room. She offered them some coffee which they both accepted. Then they sat down at the dining room table.

Dexter started the conversation. “Mrs. Fletcher. First of all, I want to tell you how sorry we are for your situation. I’m not 100% sure we can help, but we’re willing to give it a try. I’ve done a good deal of research regarding missing children, in a great many of the cases the abductors were someone who was known to the child.”

“Yes, that’s what the police told me and they questioned everyone who had anything to do with my family.”

“I understand you are a single mom. Why is that?” Roxanne asked.

“Andrew’s father and I have been divorced for two years now.”

“Does he have a relationship with your son?” Dexter asked.

“No. He’s an alcoholic and a gambling addict. He manages it pretty well, enough to work and keep up his child support payments. But he’s not a good person. So I was actually pleased when he did not petition for visitation.”

“Would he have any reason to want to harm you or Andrew?” 

“I don’t think so. He’s not a very aggressive person.”

Dexter could sense something odd about her response. Like she did not believe what she was telling them. He didn’t want to press it. But he definitely got the feeling that there was more to the husband than she was willing to tell him. But her mind was too muddled for him to get any real clarity.

“Where does your husband live?” Dexter asked.

“Down in Chester, which is a suburban area south of here.”

“And what does he do for work?”

“He drives a truck for a concrete company down there that his two brothers own. He makes pretty good money, but he drinks and blows a lot of it on gambling. Mostly sports betting.” 

She reached for a piece of paper on the table and handed it to Dexter.
“This is a list of everyone I could think of who would have anything to do with Andrew. It’s the same list I made for the police.”

Dexter scanned down the list. There were a couple of pre-school teachers, a swimming instructor, two babysitters, a few friends, the husband and his two brothers, and the names of two of the police detectives who handled the case.

“What about your parents and your husband’s folks?” Dexter asked.

“All gone I’m afraid.”

Dexter put the list down.“Don’t take this the wrong way, but my feeling is you’re not telling me everything, specifically about your husband. I think you suspect he had something to do with this.”

Louise Fletcher buried her face in her hands for several seconds. Then she took a deep breath.“You’re right. I do. A few months before Andrew was taken, he called me and told me he had turned the corner and kicked both the drinking and the gambling. But I didn’t believe him. I was afraid to let him back into my life for fear he would start stealing from me to finance his addictions.”

Dexter knew she was telling the truth. But there was something else. Something strange and jumbled, possibly because of her mixed emotions. He couldn’t figure it out. But he knew two things, He had to talk to the husband. But first he needed to talk to the cops.

“Is any of this helping?” Louise asked. 

“Yes it is.” Dexter said. “If you would like us to carry on we will need a picture of Andrew. The most recent one you have.”

“This gift, or whatever talent you have, how does it work?” Louise asked.

“I honestly have no idea. It’s just a feeling I get when I talk to someone who is telling me one thing and thinking something else. I have had this facility since I was born, but really didn’t start to understand it until I was about nine or ten.”

“Your partner tells me you make a lot of money playing cards. I’m curious as to why you have chosen, you know, situations like mine.”

“I’m not sure either. Maybe it’s because I was raised by nannies. My parents never had time for me. Maybe I’m just trying to help the parents that do have time for their children.”

Louise got up and walked to a small hutch. She took a picture of young Andrew out of the frame it was in, and laid it down in front of Dexter. She put her hand on his shoulder.

“Please find him if you can.” she said and there was a genuine sadness in her voice.

“We’ll do our best, I promise you that.”

The detective who was in charge of  Andrew Fletcher’s abduction was a man named Farley Klein. He lived in the next neighbourhood east of Louise Fletcher’s. He had recently retired and was sitting on his front porch reading a book when Dexter and Roxanne walked up to the house. He looked to be in his early fifties, but tall and fit looking. His hair was just starting to show grey. He was wearing reading glasses.

“Mr Klein?” Dexter asked.

“Klein put down the book, took off his glasses and looked Dexter and Roxanne over. “Who wants to know?”

Dexter and Roxanne climbed up onto the large porch. “My name is Dexter Fox. This is my partner, Roxanne Doyle. We’re investigating the abduction of Andrew Fletcher for Mrs Fletcher”

“Well, you must have shot her a pretty good line, for her to have hired you. That lady is not dumb.”

“We haven’t been hired, Mr Klein. We’re doing this on our own dime.” Roxanne said.

“Huh. Well, that’s pretty fuckin’ strange.”

“We’re wondering what you could tell us about the case.” Dexter asked.

Klein gestured to a love seat. “Have a seat…. There’s not much to tell really. Kid was playing in his front yard. Mom was sitting on the steps watching him. She went inside to answer the phone. When she came back, kid was gone. We canvassed the entire neighbourhood. Nobody saw anything unusual. Nobody saw any strange cars. There was really nothing to go on. So we started interviewing anybody involved with the family in any way, Everything checked out. We got great press coverage, offered a reward, tapped all our sources, the whole nine yards. Nada.”

Dexter could feel that Klein was telling him the absolute truth.

“What about the husband?” Roxanne asked.

“Oh he’s a real piece of work, a genuine scumbag, gambler and functioning alcoholic.‘Course he was working for a company owned by his brothers, so they probably cut him a whole lot of slack. But he alibied out. He was at some company shindig at one of his brother’s houses. The Fletcher boys are working class rich.”

Dexter was starting to get a weird vibe from Klein “But you had your suspicions.” he said.

“Yeah. I did that job for a lot of years. Most of the time, it’s the husband or the wife. They get to hate each other and want to hurt each other. It’s never pretty.”

“Mrs Fletcher told us her husband did a lot of gambling.” Dexter said.

“Yeah, mostly sport betting. Lost way more than he won. Fortunately, his brothers were there to bail him out of it most of the time. But there’s a limit to everything.”

“Did you interview them?”

“Yeah. They’re both assholes. But they own the local gravel pit and even an asshole can get rich with one of those.”

“Sounds like there was very little to like about any of them.” Dexter said.

“They stay on the right side of the law. Unfortunately there’s no law against bein’ an asshole. But I’ll give you some advice right now. They are meaner than junk yard dogs. I’d stay away from them if I were you.”

“So you worked the case for a whole year and nothing.”

“That’s generally how it goes. Postponed my retirement by four months to stay on the case.” Doyle said.

“So what does your intuition tell you about this?” Dexter said.

“Hmmm. Well, you know as cops we tend to deal mostly with facts. But I can see a scenario where the husband, Rolland, had the kid taken and sold off to pay off some big gambling debt.”

“Wow. That’s pretty harsh.” Dexter said.

“Yeah well, you do this job long enough you’ll see just about every fucked up thing one person can do to another person. Trouble is, of course, you need evidence and we simply didn’t have any. Not a smidge.”

~ 18 ~

Madelaine got home late in the afternoon. She found Phillipe sitting with his legs dangling in the current pool, and drinking a glass of wine. She slipped off her sandals and sat down beside him. The day was very warm, and she felt like she could easily slide into the water just to cool down. 

“So how was your meeting with Monsieur Flaubert?” Phillipe asked.

“Very good,” Madelaine said. “He was intrigued by the idea. And he said he would be happy to read the story when it’s done.”

Phillipe smiled. “You’re a little miracle, aren’t you?” he said.

“Yes, I suppose I am. Have you been swimming?”

“No, I’m just thinking about it. Mostly I have been writing. I think I’ve found the rhythm for the story. So that’s a good thing

“I’d love to read it.” Madelaine said. 

“Tell me the truth, Madelaine. Do you really think it’s good enough to be showing my work to someone like Flaubert. I mean, he’s a real deal producer.”

“Why? Don’t you?”

“I honestly don’t know. Maybe I’m just too close to it.”

“I’ve heard that can happen.” Madelaine said. “And I understand it’s just your first piece. But, I don’t know. It feels to me like a good story. And remember, if Monsieur Flaubert likes it enough to want to do something with it, he will option it from you and then give it to a screenwriter. And they will turn the idea into a script. If its a good story, it will be a good script.”

“You seem to know a lot about this.”

“Well, Monsieur Flaubert knows I am a curious person. So over the course of our relationship, he explained a lot of things to me. But honestly, he will not be judging your story on its literary merit. He will be judging it strictly on the basis of what he thinks he can do with it, you know, as an idea.”

Phillipe thought about that for a while and then said. “Well then, I guess I’d better make it the best idea it can be.”

“Oui,” Madelaine said. Then she kissed him on the cheek and headed up to the house to read what Phillipe had written.

At dinner that evening. Madelaine said. “It looks like you’re setting this up for the father to be the guilty person. Selling his own child is pretty low.”

“That may be,” Phillipe replied, “But it’s not unbelievable, especially for anyone who is desperate enough, like a guy who is in debt up to his eyeballs and has no way to pay off the debt.”

“But that would also make him dangerous. And your characters are, as far as I can tell, not really equipped to handle that.”

“You’re right but I think I have figured out a way around that. Remember, Dexter doesn’t have to be confrontational to find out what he needs to know. All he has to be is in a conversation with the person.”

Madelaine thought about that for a bit and then said. “Oui. Okay. I get it.”

“I’d like to finish this up over the next few days, so perhaps next week we can go and see Monsieur Flaubert.” Dexter said.

Once that was decided and they finished their dinner, Phillipe took his Mac out onto the patio. Madelaine went to her office to finish up some work and plan her day. Afterward they would both go for a swim.

Later that evening, Phillipe sat at the computer, re-reading the passage he had written earlier in the day. He was feeling quite good about the story so far. But now he was coming to the hard part. How does a 19-year-old guy confront a 30-year-old man, who is probably not a good citizen, about the abduction of his child?

Dexter and Roxanne found a comfortable place in downtown Richmond and had a late lunch. The plan was to follow Rolland Fletcher from his job and see where he went. If he went to a bar, maybe Dexter could get close enough to him to start a conversation of some sort. If he could do that, he figured that he would be able to get into the guy’s head and find out something, anything to do with his son.

It was a long shot, and Dexter hoped it wouldn’t go south on him. But he was committed to try, because his intuition was telling him that Rolland Fletcher was the key to the whole thing.

Louise Fletcher had told him that Rolland usually got off work about five then went home to change and have a sandwich or something then head out to any of half a dozen different bars where he could make bets by phone on various games. It was July, so he would probably be betting on baseball.

They drove to the Fletcher Brothers stone quarry and waited on a side road facing the entrance. At five o’clock, a whistle sounded and a few minutes later several cars started to leave the lot and got onto the main road heading back into town. They spotted Rolland Fletcher’s pickup, which Mrs Fletcher had told them he drove, He was one of the last to leave. They gave him a few seconds and then started to follow him. About five minutes later, they saw him turn into the parking lot of a small apartment building. They pulled into the visitors’ parking area and waited. They had both brought their Kindles and spent the time reading.

About ninety minutes later, Rolland Fletcher came out of the building. He was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. He was a wiry looking guy, and not all that bad looking. He got into the pickup and headed further into town. He zig-zagged his way to a place called Pop’s Bar and Grill. Not a terrible-looking place. They pulled in and parked. Dexter got out of the car and entered the bar. He spotted Fletcher sitting at the bar, looking up at a flat-screen monitor. There was a baseball game just getting under way. Fletcher was on his phone. The bartender put a beer down in front of him. He took a slug. The restaurant was only about half full, mostly with diners sitting at tables. He went back out and got Roxanne. 

As they walked back to the bar Dexter said, “He’s sitting alone with his phone and a beer. Probably betting on baseball.”

Dexter and Roxanne sat themselves down at the bar, one seat away from Fletcher. The bartender came over and Dexter ordered a Bloody Mary for Roxanne and a beer for him. Dexter spoke loud enough for Fletcher to hear. He turned and stared at them for a while, mainly Roxanne, then he turned back to the game.

It was a Baltimore/Tampa Bay game. They sat quietly for a while sipping their drinks. Even from a distance of a few feet, Dexter could feel the tension in Fletcher’s head. “This guy is reasonably fucked up,” Dexter said in a low voice. “All kinds of weirdness going on in his head. A lot of it is pretty dark.”

“Is he dangerous?” Roxanne asked

“No. It’s not menace or anger. It’s something else.”

“Guilt?”

“Maybe.” Dexter said as he looked up at the screen. Then he said to Roxanne in a voice just slightly louder than he needed to.“That Tampa Bay is a hard to beat team. I don’t think the O’s have a snowball’s chance.”

That did the trick. It got Fletcher’s attention. He turned to Dexter and said “You’d be surprised by this O’s team.”

“Well, if you say so. But I’d definitely put my money on the Rays. They hit left-handed pitching better than any team in the AL East.”

Roxanne didn’t know baseball, so she didn’t know what the hell Dexter was talking about. Just then a roar came from the TV. Baltimore had just hit a three run homer. Fletcher swivelled in his seat “See what I mean?”

“I stand corrected” Dexter said and held out his fist which Fletcher met with his own. Dexter was in. “Dexter Fox,” Dexter said. “This is Roxanne Doyle.”

Roxanne just nodded to Fletcher. 

“Rolland Fletcher.” Fletcher said. “You folks from around here?

“Greensboro. On our way back from Atlantic City.” Dexter said.

“Did a little gamblin’?”

“Yeah. I play poker.”

“That’s all you do?”

“It’s more than enough.”

“You’re pretty good then.”

“We do alright.”

“What about the Missus?” Fletcher said gesturing to Roxanne.

“Let’s just say I make the money. She spends it.”

“Well. Hope you have a safe trip back.” Fletcher said and he turned his attention back to the game.”

They finished their drinks and left the bar. As they were walking to the van, Dexter said. “Guy was an open book. Even coughed up a name. John Romano, Charlotte North Carolina.

They found a hotel and stayed in Richmond. The next day they went back to visit Farley Klein. This time he was cutting the front lawn.

“Mr Klein.” 

“What brings you folks back?”

“A hunch.” Dexter said. You have any connections in Charlotte, North Carolina?”

“I might have. What’s this in aid of?”

“We’re hoping to get some help there.”

“What kind of help?”

“We’d like to check someone out. And we would prefer to have a police officer with us when we do.”

“Sounds like you have some information that nobody else does.”

“Just a hunch. But I have a pretty good batting average when it comes to hunches.”

“You think you’ve found the Fletcher kid?”

“I don’t know. That’s why we want to play the hunch.”

“Come on and sit on the porch. I’ll get my phone.”

Klein went into the house and a few minutes later he came out carrying his cell phone and a small notebook. He sat down in his rocker and dialled a number.

“Willis Peterson, please.” he said then waited. “Willis, hi, it’s Farley up in Richmond….Yeah things are fine. Willis, I take it you’re still working missing persons. Good. I’ve got a lead on the Fletcher case for you…Couple of young people who are working for Mrs Fletcher…Guy name of Dexter?” 

He looked at Dexter. “Fox.” Dexter said. 

“Dexter Fox.…” 

Klein looked at Dexter “Tomorrow around eleven….OK thanks Willis.”  Klein disconnected and turned to Dexter. “He’ll meet you at the central precinct in Charlotte tomorrow. You can make it easily by nightfall if you leave now.”

“Thanks for this Mr Klein.”

“I’m takin’ a flyer with you kids. I hope you’re right. Give me your phone.”

Dexter handed Klein his phone. He punched in Willis Peterson’s number and name. “Here you go. Call him in the morning, and make sure he’s not out on a case or anything.”

They shook Klein’s hand and got into the van, heading south.

~ 19 ~

“So it looks like you’re coming up on the end of the story.” Madelaine said. “They find the kid and he’s reunited with his mom?” 

“It’s a little more complex than that. I mean they have to go through a bit of convincing with the police in Charlotte, because the guy who has the kid is some sort of mover and shaker in the town. There’s going to have to be a little luck involved to pull this off.” Phillipe said.

“Hmmm.” Madelaine said. “I never thought about that.”

“Well thank God I’m here, covering off all the bases.” He said but in a voice that made her laugh.

Madelaine closed the computer and looked at Phillipe. “It’s a good story with good people who are trying to do something good. There’s so little of that out there in the world these days that it just may stand out for that reason. Have you thought about where you would take it from here? You know, as a series.”

“No, I’ve been a little busy just trying to figure out the ending. I assume that, if Monsieur Flaubert wants to develop it, we could talk about a lot of different things. But I am not a screenwriter. I’m just barely a story writer but I understand the characters and that can be helpful, especially over here writing about things going on in the US.”

“Once you finish the story, you should go back over it one more time and see if there’s anything you want to add.” Madeleine said “Maurice told me he’s looking enough character description to get a feel for who he could cast for the parts.”

“That’s a good suggestion. I’ll do that for sure.”

“You know. I never asked you this before, but I’m curious as to why you have chosen to do this particular story.” Madelaine asked.

Phillipe thought about it for a while. Then he said. “You know the scene in the story where Dexter is talking to Mrs Fletcher about why he is doing this?”

“Oui.” 

“Well I think that’s the reason. I grew up the same way he did. Left pretty much to my own devices from the time I was about seven years old. I guess I have a soft spot for parents who genuinely care about their children.”

“That’s a very good answer.” Madelaine said. “By the way, my parents, who care a lot about me, have invited us for dinner tomorrow.”

“Oh oh.”

“They won’t bite. I promise.”

The trip to Charlotte took a good six hours with a stop just outside of Greensboro for a late lunch.  They checked into a Holiday Inn in the suburbs of Charlotte, then had a swim, which was really more about goofing around than any kind of workout, found a cool restaurant called Cajun Queen, then headed back to the Holiday Inn where they watched a movie, fooled around a bit and then crashed. 

The next morning they went for breakfast at a Stuckey’s near the hotel and called the number Farley Klein had given them. 

Willis Peterson sounded like a pretty good guy. But he did tell them he was going to call Louise Fletcher so that he could confirm that they were for real. They agreed to meet at eleven at the Charlotte-Mecklinburg police headquarters building if everything was cool with Mrs Fletcher.

They didn’t check out of the hotel figuring they might have to hang around for another day to wait for Louise Fletcher, if indeed her son was with the Romanos. 

They had an hour and a half to kill so Roxanne got on the computer and searched for John Romano in Charlotte. She only came up with one and found the address. She checked it out on Google Maps and they got in the van and drove to it. 

The Romano home was more of a mansion than a residence. There was a massive two story house, an iron gate around the entire place and a four car garage. It was professionally landscaped and looked absolutely pristine. It was on a short street of similar houses. Looking at the house, it became obvious to them that this Romano guy was either an uber successful businessman or a high level crook. Since Roxanne found no other presence of him on any of the major social media sites, they concluded that he was probably a crook with political connections. This was going to make the work of verifying Andrew Fletcher’s identity a real pain in the ass.

They showed up for their meeting with Peterson right on time. He looked to be in his late thirties and in pretty good shape. He was dressed cooler than most cops tended to dress and his hair was a bit longer too. 

Once they were seated in one of the conference rooms, Peterson said. “Well, you check out with Miz Fletcher and Farley up in Richmond, so what’s on your mind?”

“We believe that Mrs. Fletcher’s son, Andrew, was kidnapped, about a year ago and sold or given to a fellow named John Romano. Are you familiar with him?”

“Every cop in the city knows him. Big time operator. Gambling mostly. Thing is nobody’s ever been able to pin anything on him. The second thing is that he grew up with the mayor, so he’s kinda protected. Helping the city get a casino licence. Lot of jobs. Lots of money. You know the drill.”

“So are you saying you can’t get to him, even you wanted to? Dexter asked. 

“No but I’m the only cop in this whole damn town who’d do it. That’s why Farley called me. As you probably know,  I worked the Fletcher case with him. When he retired I decided to move down here, where I could work on my own. I worked that case with him for nearly a year, and to tell you the truth, that’s one angle we never considered.”

“So you’d be willing to go after him.”

“Damn straight. But there’s one thing. I’m gonna need probable cause. You two just showing up based on Farley’s reco ain’t enough. I need to know how you found out about this in the first place.”

 Before Dexter had a chance to make up some bullshit story, Roxanne said.“I hacked Rolland Fletcher’s phone. We were in a bar with him. He got up and went to the can, so I opened up his phone and checked out the call log. Lot of calls to Romano dating back to a little over a year ago.”

“You some kind of professional hacker?”

“No.” Roxanne said. “But I know a lot about it. And I have a photographic memory.” Roxanne figured that story was a lot more credible than Dexter telling him he read the Fletcher’s mind.

“Okay. That’s still pretty circumstantial.”

“Not when you figure that Fletcher is a gambling addict who may have run up too big a bill with Romano’s organization.” Dexter said.

Peterson chuckled. ‘You got this private eye thing down pat, don’tcha?”

“Mrs Fletcher is more than willing to do whatever she has to do to get her kid back. She will sue Romano if she has to and get Romano to produce a birth certificate and have the child do a blood test.”

Peterson leaned back in his chair and absently pushed back his hair. “You know, I’ve only been here for less than a year. And I have to tell you, the  criminal element in this town has way more political clout than they have a right to.”

“So what’s the best way to go about this?” Dexter asked.

“Well. Miz Fletcher needs to swear out a complaint against Romano. Then we’ll see how much heat comes down on the case. She needs to get herself a good lawyer here and then put as much pressure as she can on the Romanos. It’s a little complex because it’s not just about the Romanos, it’s about the kidnapping too. This could cost her a lot of money.”

“Don’’t worry about money. Who’s the best lawyer she can get here?”

From my experience here so far I say a lady name Julianna Faraday. She got her own practice just down the street. Deals with a lot of custody issues, divorces, and marital assault. She’s pretty damn scrappy and she knows all the angles.”

“Sounds like you know her pretty well.”

“Sounds like I do, don’t it? You tell her you’ve been talkin’ to me and she’ll make time for you. Once that gets going, I can get involved if need be.”

“How do we know it will be you?”

Peterson just chuckled. “Nobody else in this building would want to cross swords with John Romano. He’s a total bad-ass and a bit of a psycho to boot.”

Peterson disappeared for a moment and then came back with Julianna Faraday’s business card. “Give her a call and mention my name.”

They both shook hands with Peterson and left the building. They spotted a coffee shop on the corner and walked over. 

Dexter called Louise Fletcher, who had he cell phone with her. 

“Hi Mrs Fletcher. It’s Dexter Fox. Yeah, we’re in Charlotte and just had a great meeting with a cop named Willis Peterson. He put us onto a lawyer who apparently is a real killer at this sort of case. We’ll talk to her this afternoon I hope and if she agrees to take the case, you’re gonna need to come down here and meet with her.” Dexter listened for a while. “I understand. Don’t worry about the cost. It’s all part of the service….You’re most welcome….I’ll be in touch.”

Dexter disconnected and then dialled the number that Peterson had given him. On the third ring, Julianna Faraday answered. “Mr Fox.”

“Julianna Faraday?”

“Yes. How can I help you?” Julianna said in a voice that sounded southern but not too much so. 

“I assume you have talked to Detective Peterson.”

“Yes I have. I have some time around four today if you’d like to meet. I understand he gave you my card so you know where I am.”

“Yes ma’am, I have the address right here.”

“Good. It’s a one-woman show, so just walk right in. See you at  four.”

“Okay” he said and disconnected. 

He turned to Roxanne. “Four o'clock.”

OK. So let find some place we can have a long lunch.”

Phillipe rubbed his forehead and his eyes, which was a sure sign that he was pooped. He closed the file and backed it up onto his portable hard drive, then got up to look for Madelaine. He found her out in the far end of the backyard doing something on her computer. He walked out and took a seat beside her. The air was a little cooler on this day. Madelaine was wearing a thin sweater, as she punched away, then sent off the email she was working on. She closed her laptop.

“Finished writing for today?” she asked Phillipe.

“Yeah. I’ve got some thinking to do. This thing could get unruly unless I’m smart about how I wrap it up.”

~ 20 ~

The next morning, Phillipe woke up early with the whole rest of the story figured out in his head. He left Madelaine sleeping and headed downstairs to make some coffee and get it done.

Julianna Faraday, in addition to being a beautiful red-haired woman, was one of the best connected lawyers in Charlotte. This was because for five years before opening her own practice, she worked in the public defender’s office and got to know and go up against almost every lawyer in the city, which was great because she dealt with them all the time, even got referrals from a few of them.

Her office was in one of the older buildings downtown, and was essentially a one-room affair, very tastefully decorated. Julianna did all her own paperwork, and there really wasn’t that much of it since a lot of her cases were settled out of court.

After Dexter laid out the story they had told Willis Peterson, she simply shook her head. “You don’t have a case.” she said, quite bluntly. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t get what you are looking for.”

“You’ll have to explain how that works.” Dexter said.

“OK, well everybody knows that John Romano is good buddies with the mayor. His name is Chris Bidwell. Bidwell and Romano are leading the crusade to have a casino built out on the south side of town, near the Interstate. Guess who will own the casino?”

“I’m assuming it will be Romano.”

“Yep. with a hefty regular kickback to his buddy the mayor. So what you’re looking at here is a massive scandal, if it’s true that Romano bought the child from a debtor and if that ever were to become public knowledge the city council would have no choice but to take the casino away from him. Now, you don’t know John Romano, but I do. And he is the greediest bastard God ever let live. And frankly, legit or not, if he was confronted with the possibility of this going public, he would do whatever he could to squash it.”

“That sounds interesting and maybe a little bit dangerous.”

“For you two maybe. But John Romano doesn’t scare me. The cops here all hate him and he knows it. If he ever tried anything hinky with me they would be all over him.  

So I’ll tell you what. I’ll take this case for ten thousand dollars, talk to Romano’s lawyer, who just happens to be my old boss in the DA’s office and see how tightly we can turn the screws.”

Dexter reached into his shoulder bag and pulled out his cheque book. “Who do I make the cheque out to?” he asked.

Dexter and Roxanne went back to their hotel and waited while Julianna Faraday did whatever she needed to do.

The first thing Julianna did was call her old boss Clyde Hutchings.

“Hi Clyde,” Julianna said when he answered the phone.

“Hello darlin’. Clyde said. “How you been keepin’ ?”

“I’ve been just fine Clyde. How about yourself?”

“Never better. What can I do for you today?”

“Well, I’m glad you asked, because there is something. I’d appreciate it if you could bring your client, John Romano, to my office for a meeting, or I can come to yours. Doesn’t matter to me.”

“And just what would this be in aid of?”

“Well let’s just say it would be in aid of preserving the status quo here in Charlotte.”

“Sounds intriguing. We’ll come to you. Say ten AM tomorrow?”

“Works for me.” Julianna said.

“You take care now. And we’ll see you tomorrow.”

The next morning at 10 AM sharp. Clyde Hutchings walked into Juliana’s office with a short stocky Italian looking man and two other men who looked like defensive tackles in expensive suits.

The two bigger men stood by the door, while Clyde and his client John Romano took seats facing Juliana who was at her desk. 

“So, here we are, darlin’, right on time. Now suppose you tell us what this is all in aid of.”

“Well, I have a client from out of town, who has some real concerns about your son.” Julianna said.

“My son?” Romano laughed. “He’s not even three years old. What concerns could there possibly be?”

“Well, of all, these folks are representing a mother up in Richmond whose child was kidnapped, right around the time that you all of a sudden had a young boy the same age.”

If looks could kill, Julianna would have been in a million pieces.

“So,” Julianna continued, “We’re going to go to court and petition any records you may have regarding how this child came to be a member of your family. This will be quite a public affair and if it turns out that you have acquired this child through any means other than a legal adoption, I’m afraid that this will create the kind of scandal that even you, Mr Romano, cannot buy your way out of.”

“Hold on a minute, Julianna.” Hutchings said. “What kind of proof do you have that there is any validity to this claim.”

“We have a recent picture of the child, taken by his mother, and we can petition for access to the phone records of  one Rolland Fletcher, who is the father of the missing child. 

That pretty much shut Hutchings up.

“And, of course, if this goes public, which I can see happening,” Julianna continued, “I would not want to have to sit in front of the State Gaming Commission and try and explain this.”

Romano sat fuming for the better part of a minute, going through all the permutations. Finally, he said, in as humble a voice as an arrogant bastard could muster. “So what does it take to make this all go away?”

  

The next day, Louise Fletcher arrived in Charlotte. She met with Dexter and Roxanne at a downtown restaurant. At around two o'clock Dexter’s phone rang. He mumbled something into the receiver and hung up. They finished their lunch and walked down the street to Julianna Faraday’s office. Her son, Andrew, was sitting at Julianna’s board table drawing something with pencil crayons. He looked up stared at his mother for a good fifteen seconds. His face was a picture of confusion. Then suddenly he dropped the crayons and ran to her.

A few minutes later, Louise thanked Julianna profusely and then hugged both Roxanne and Dexter. 

While Louise Fletcher was sitting with her son at the table, Dexter and Roxanne sat down opposite Julianna. On the desk beside her were two briefcases. On the desk in front of her were two sheets of paper.

“As you probably know, everything in life comes with a price” Julianna said. ”The price for this is yours and Mrs Fletcher’s silence. This casino deal is too important to for the economy of the city to be scuttled. So I’m afraid I have to ask you to sign these letters of agreement that you will not disclose any of the details of this entire incident. Since Mrs Fletcher is your client I will leave it to you to persuade her to do this.”

Roxanne signed the paper in front of her and passed it to Dexter. She then picked up the other paper and walked over to the table where Louise Fletcher was sitting with young Andrew. 

She sat down next to Louise and explained the non-disclosure agreement. Louise looked over at Dexter who sadly just nodded his head.. 

“The saddest part of all of this,” Louise said, “Is that nobody got to suffer but me, and now I can’t even have any justice. But I understand.”  Then Louise Fletcher then she signed the agreement and Roxanne walked it back to Julianna’s desk

“Justice.” Julianna said, “Always has a way of winning in the end, Mrs Fletcher. And with that, she got up and brought her a briefcase. “There’s one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in there. Call it a college fund for your son.” she said. 

Louise Fletcher didn’t say a word but took the case and said thank you to Dexter. On her way out she hugged them both again and she was gone.

Julianna then passed the second briefcase over to Dexter, who simply stared at it for a moment.

“There a hundred and fifty in there for you too. But you owe me something else.” Juliana said.

Dexter looked at her curiously. “What else?”

“I talked to Willis last night, after you guys left. He didn’t buy your story and neither did I. So what you owe me is the truth. How the hell did you figure this out?”

Dexter looked at Roxanne who simply shrugged, then he said. “You probably won’t believe this but all my life I have had the ability to hear what people are thinking. When we talked to Willis’ old partner back in Richmond, he had a strong feeling that it was the husband who took the kid and traded him to pay off a gambling debt. He never came right out and said it, but I heard him thinking it. So we followed Rolland Fletcher and got next to him at a bar he goes to, and I was able to, I don’t know how to explain it…I was able to feel what he was thinking. He felt very guilty about it, so it was always on his mind. After that, it was just a question of finding this John Romano. You did the rest.

“Julianna just looked at him trying to discern whether or not she was being bullshitted. 

“That’s a little hard to believe, you know.” Julianna said.

“You wanted the real story, you got it. Give me your hand. Then close your eyes and think about something other than this case.” Dexter said. 

Julianna held out her hand. Dexter took it lightly in his. He closed his eyes and after a few seconds he said. “Willis asked you to marry him…last night… you were having dinner at some Mexican restaurant. The tacos were too hot. He gave you a ring. You haven’t put it on yet, because you’re still thinking about it. But I think you want to marry him, because you’re thirty four and want to have a couple kids before you’re too much older.”

“Jesus Christ.” Julianna said.

“Nope nothing about Jesus.”

“I’ve never heard of anything like this.”

“There are hardly any people on the planet who know about this. I would appreciate it if you would keep it to yourself. If you promise me that, I’ll owe you a favour. OK?”

“Deal.”Julianna said but she was still a bit stunned.

Dexter and Roxanne got to their feet. “Thanks Julianna. You’re an amazing lawyer. Marry Willis. He’s good people and you love each other.”

After they were in the car and heading out of the downtown area, Roxanne said.“I’m not sure you should have done that, you know.”

“Me too. But life’s a gamble and I had a good feeling about her. She’s not gonna need me. She gets too big a kick out of figuring things out for herself.”

“There’s always that.”

“Let’s have some Steely Dan.” Dexter said. Julianne reached down to the CD binder in the well between the seats and dug out the CD entitled Aja.

“Perfect.” Dexter said as he reached across and rubbed Roxanne’s thigh.

As they approached the city limits, a large Lincoln limo pulled in front of them and forced them to stop. The back door of the Lincoln opened up and a small man in a dark suit climbed out. He walked over to the driver’s side of the van. As he got closer Dexter could see that he had a very serious expression on his face. 

Dexter rolled down the window. 

“Mr Romano, I presume.”

“That’s right, kid.”

“What can I do for you, sir?” Dexter said, knowing exactly what was going on.

“I just wanted to let you know, that if it wasn’t for the casino deal, your life wouldn’t be, what do they say in the gangster movies, worth a plugged nickel.”

“I admire your restraint, sir. A lesser man would have, what do they say in the gangster movies, ‘punched my ticket.’

“I just want you to know that I know who you are and if you ever get up in my business again, it won’t end nicely for you or pretty little partner in crime over there.” he said gesturing to Roxanne.

“We’ll take that under advisement.”

“I don’t know how you found out about all of this. But if I were you, I would stay as far away from this city as you can.”

“Fair enough.” Dexter said. 

With that, Romano turned and walked back to his limo, which did a U-turn back into town.

“Well that was interesting.” Roxanne said.

 Dexter just chuckled and dropped the car into gear. 

They got home at close to midnight. Both of them were drained from all the driving, too much restaurant food and having the shit scared out of them by a gangster. So they just decided to go to bed. Before they did Roxanne opened her laptop, which she hadn’t brought with her, and noticed there were 14 messages from people she had never heard of. 

As she climbed into bed and snuggled up to Dexter she said, “There are fourteen messages on the site’s email.”

“I know.” He said and she gave him an elbow that almost knocked the wind out of him.

~ 21 ~

 Three days later, Phillipe had gone over the story several times adding little bits of detail, taking away little bits of superfluousness. The editing, he noted, was a lot harder than the actual writing. When he was writing, the only decisions he had to make was what moves the story forward. When he was editing there were dozens of ‘is this too muches or not enoughs’ to deal with. And he understood why most of the big time writers in the world all have editors who do all that stuff for them. 

He supposed he could have hired one, but he knew in his heart that he wasn’t there just yet. He just wanted to get some very basic initial feedback from someone who did this for a living. He wanted all the imperfections explained to him and he thanked his lucky stars for Madelaine and her connection to a person who could hopefully do just that.

Later that day Madelaine emailed the story to Monsieur Flaubert. It was now titled:

Finding Andrew Fletcher 

A Dexter & Roxanne Story

Three days later, they were sitting on the terrace of  Maurice Flaubert’s estate house. There was another man sitting with him. He was younger than Flaubert but older than Madelaine and Phillipe. His name was Daniel Snow and he was the head writer of Images Flaubert.

“Daniel and I both agree we find it very difficult to believe that this is the first story you’ve ever written.” Flaubert said. Then he looked at Daniel Snow, who was actually hired by Flaubert from a company in Los Angeles owned by Bruno Heller who had created, among other things, The Mentalist. Snow had worked on the last three seasons of the series.

“Phillipe, this is what we call serializable as hell.” Snow said. “The concept is solid and after I read it and showed it to my writers, they came back to me with a ton of other ideas about how this could roll out into a solid mini series.”

“So am I to assume you liked this?” Phillips asked.

“No, Phillipe, we loved it.” Flaubert said. “And we want to option the story and the concept. We would also like you to be one of the executive producers so you can get a chance to work with the writers, and help them get the characters right.”

Phillipe was floored.

Snow continued. “This is a solid idea, and best of all it’s fresh. And if we can pull it off, I believe we’ll have something very interesting. We’re in the process of scripting your story right now. But we’re gonna put a contract offer together for you. I understand you have just recently moved to Geneva.”

“Yes. About two months ago.” Phillipe said.

“I know this can be a lot to take in,” Snow said. “But this business runs on ideas and you showed up with a good one at the right time.”

Phillipe laughed. “So I guess I’m in the TV business.”

“From what I understand from Madelaine you are in the ‘whatever the hell you want to do’ business.” Snow said.

“Yeah, but that got old pretty quickly, which is why I started writing the story.”

“Well, you will learn a lot watching this production come together.” Snow said. “And we would be honoured to have first right of refusal on any new ideas you come up with. They don’t even have to be in story form. Even a one or two-page treatment will be fine. I have a really solid team. But they are Hollywood trained and used to developing ideas that come from other sources. Give us a good one and we’ll run like hell with it.”

Phillipe took a sip of his wine. “This is very surreal. You know when I’m sitting at my house writing this, it’s like…you don’t imagine anything actually happening with it. Especially not the first time you try. And here we are talking about all of this. Wow.”

“I’ll tell you something, Phillipe.” Snow said. “There was a time when I was sitting in rented house that I shared with two other people in Redondo Beach and I felt the very same way. Through some miracle and a ton of networking, I got a meeting with Mr Heller and it turned my whole life inside out. Now I don’t have the kind of ‘fuck you’ money that you do. But I do get where you’re coming from. My advice is to get on the pony and ride. It’s the best business in the world to be in. And I can tell from the story you wrote that you are a storyteller. We’ll do the best job we can to put it out there, but its success or failure will depend, like it always does, on the audience’s response. And we all think they’ll love it.”

Phillipe took a deep breath. “Okay.” 

“This will be an English language pilot movie.” Flaubert said. “We can shoot all the casino scenes in Atlantic City so that’s going to make it really cost effective. We’re looking at a 90 minute pilot and then we will set each of the individual one hour episodes in a separate city. We get a lot of cooperation from city councils in the US, especially with an idea like this. If the show is a hit in English, we will consider doing a British and a French version as well.”

They talked for another half hour or so, until Phillipe’s head was full and it was starting to drain his engines. Then he and Madelaine, got up and thanked both Flaubert and Snow.

On the way back home in the car, Phillipe said. “I feel like one of those big drag racing machines. One minute you’re on the starting line, revving your engine. The next minute you’re doing 200 miles an hour through a quarter mile.”

“I’m very happy this has all worked out for you.” Madelaine said. “I remember you telling me that how you wanted to figure out your own future. Well mon ami, you are doing just that.”

Phillipe reached out and took Madelaine’s hand. “Can you tell what I’m thinking right now?”

“Not exactly, but think it’s turning me on.”

Two nights later, after Madelaine was asleep. Phillipe wandered down to the kitchen and poured out a small glass of wine. He then took his laptop out onto the terrace and sat down. With only a sliver of the moon for light, he opened the computer. For reasons he would probably never understand, his brain was chugging along at an astounding rate. He had been thinking about this idea ever since they got home 

His name was Parker Nash. 

 He grew up in the wealthy Detroit suburb called Auburn Hills. He was the only child of Edie and Phillip Nash, and the heir to the Nash family estate which was rumoured to be somewhere in the neighbourhood of $110 million. Phillip Nash was a stock market player and a mathematical genius with a clear understanding of how the US economy worked and the role it played in the international economy.

In addition to being very astute, Phillip was also very shrewd and moved the better part of his fortune into a trust for young Parker who was their only child.

Parker grew up pretty much alone, left with nannies and very much to his own devices from a young age. But Parker was a peculiar boy. He didn’t seem to need anyone or anything. He was also a gifted boy, with an Eidetic memory, which was never really diagnosed until he was in his late teens. 

Perhaps it was because he lived almost totally in his own head, combined with the sense of abandonment that he felt from his remote genius father and his self-absorbed socialite mother, neither of whom paid all that much attention to him, Parker came to terms with his solitude very early on in life.

 From the age of six, he was shipped off to a succession of boarding schools, where he kept pretty much to himself having discovered that the other rich kids he was thrown together with were, for the most part, shallow and self-centred. They were not in school to learn, but simply to tread water until their trust fund money became available, and then, who knew what would happen to them.

Parker was neither weak nor strong physically. But his mind was quite agile and he realized at a very young age that if he was to make his way in the world with any success, he needed to educate himself. And being fortunate enough to be endowed with a strong sense of purpose, he set about that task with all the energy could muster. He taught himself computer skills all through high school, and created several database programs, which attracted the attention of Michigan State University.

By the age of twenty-one, Parker had arrived home in Auburn Hills, with a newly minted Master’s Degree in Computer Engineering and an open invitation to return to Michigan State to work towards his PhD.

But Parker was through with higher education and chomping at the bit to make a name for himself in the computer sciences.

Three days after his twenty-second birthday, Parker was sitting in his parents’ house, researching career opportunities and seriously contemplating his future. It was a Saturday and he had no idea where his parents were. They had left early the previous evening for some political event downtown. He wandered around the house, as he had been doing for the past week since he got home from school. He was about to get in his car and head out to get some dinner, when a Michigan State Police car pulled into the driveway.

An officer named Clinton Farrell got out of the car. 

“Parker Nash?” He asked.

“Yes. What can I do for you, officer?”

“Mr. Nash I’m afraid I have some bad news for you, sir.”

Parker stood beside his car as Officer Farrell explained that his parents had been killed in Detroit. They were at a fundraiser for Calvin Dodd, the incumbent Democratic State Senator.

Parker wasn’t sure whether it was delayed shock or simply no reaction at all, but he simply stood there. Then he asked. “How did they die?”

“I’m afraid they were caught in a rampage. An individual with a semi-automatic weapon opened fire on a group of people at the reception. Nine people were killed and about thirty were injured before the Secret Service protection detail finally got to him.” 

“Did they kill him?”

“Yes sir, they did.”

“The killer. Do you know anything about him?”

“No sir, those details have not been released.’ Farrell said. “I’m very sorry for your loss, son. He then handed Parker a piece of paper with an address, name and phone number on it. “This is the address for the county morgue. You will need to confirm the identities and arrange for your parents’ bodies to be released. I understand that you are the only blood relative.”

“Yes. My parents were both only children and all my grandparents are gone. There’s just me.”

“Please call the morgue, sir. And again, I’m terribly sorry for your loss.”

“Am I your first visit?” 

“Yes sir.”

“Guess this is the really shitty part of your job.”

“Yes, sir. That pretty much describes it.”

Officer Farrell got into his cruiser and left Parker leaning on the front fender of his car with a small sheet of paper in his hand. All he could think of was that he had been pretty much alone for his entire childhood. Now it looked like he was going to be alone some more.

As usual, Phillipe had only the vaguest idea of where what he had written would go from there, But it was something to think about and he had some time to do that while Daniel Snow and the two other writers got their rough scripts together.

For the next month he toyed around with his new idea, and even though he had planned to only write an outline, he found it much more fun to actually write the story out in full. He was working to master this part of the craft, and he knew that after he was done, he could always go back and summarize it for Monsieur Flaubert and Daniel Snow. So he just kept going. When he was finished, he had a twenty three thousand word story. It took about a week and a half to write the first draft and then another week to tighten it up.

He was surprised at just how much easier it was this time around. He wondered about that quite a bit. He did have a pretty agile mind. But he was still a bit blown away about how simple it was to change gears and how much more gratifying this new kind of work seemed to be.

He did not show his work to Madelaine, like he had done the first time around. He also refused to talk about it to her until it was done. She merely shrugged her shoulders and said ‘Okie Dokie’.

~ 22~

Almost at the same time as he completed the draft of this second story, he was back to commuting to Monsieur Flaubert’s estate, which was only about a half hour’s drive, and starting the equivalent of a Master’s program in just how a mini-series came together. 

The writers, Daniel Snow, along with Gary Ellis and Anastasia Rostov, who were a couple, built a series of stories, each of which was a separate search. All in all, there were eight stories including a beefed-up version Phillipe’s original. There were repeating characters and overlaps here and there that tied all eight episodes strongly together. The writers, all three of whom were seasoned professionals, used Phillipe extensively, more as an acid test for character consistency and development than anything. With experienced TV people, no coaching was necessary. Once they got the concept they were, quite literally off to the races. 

As Phillipe watched them work, he was both amazed and frightened. Amazed at how cohesive a unit they made and how productive they were, bouncing ideas off each other, never criticizing, always adding and always building. He was also frightened at the pace and the depth of thought that these people, maybe just a decade older than him, were able to generate without ever seeming to feel and frustration or exhaustion. He thought of them as Energizer Bunnies who just kept going and going. 

Overall, he was happy to be exactly what he was, which was basically a consultant. Because he knew that it would easily take a decade of nose-to-the-grindstone effort to learn to work at the pace that these three seemed to be quite comfortable with.

For budgeting reasons, they would set each episode in a different city, and shoot the required openings and closing scenes in Virginia Beach and Atlantic City scenes all in one batch. 

As they got into the actual scripting and scene setups, they brought in a location specialist named Gilles LaPierre. His job was to make sure that whatever locations required were both available and how much they would add to the overall budget. Gilles worked on each script as it materialized from its outline, and spent a lot of time on the phone and making notes on each script.  

Gilles told Phillipe that when they got to that point they would start shooting they would hire a continuity person to keep track of everything. This way Gary and Anastasia could work more closely with Daniel Snow who would be the director. 

At the end of the four months, with the eight episode series was written, Maurice Flaubert and Daniel Snow hit the road to pitch the series to Netflix, Prime, BritBox, The BBC and Apple TV. Maurice Flaubert being the executive producer and a multi-millionaire in his own right provided the first half of the up front 50%  financing required to make any deal viable.

So there was a break in the activity. Gilles, Gerry and Anastasia returned to Paris, and Phillipe simply drove home. Just another day at the office, only now he was extremely well equipped to move further along in his newfound profession. 

As the scripting moved along and he got to know the three writers a little better, he realized that he wouldn’t have to create entire stories, unless he wanted to. He thought back to what Daniel Snow had told him; that all they really needed was a one or two-page outline of the concept of the story, and they would blow it out from there. In a strange way, Phillipe started to feel like he had the easiest job of all in this whole enterprise. And that strengthened his desire to impress these people away with his ideas.

That, of course, didn’t mean creating the next big-budget Hollywood-style extravaganza. Because he now knew all three of the writers well enough to understand that they were in Europe so they could focus on character-driven stories. Daniel told him that everybody and their uncle in the US was busting their asses to come up with the next big thing. It was the nature of the Hollywood beast. Guys like Bruno Heller, whom they had all worked for in Los Angeles and several others, were the exception to that obsession. They focused on character, because while it was nice to have a little action here and there, when it came to TV, what got people tuning in week after week, season after season was their love for or interest in the characters.

When Phillipe started to write his story, characters were his main interest. Not because his years of experience had taught him that. But because that was the area to which he instinctively gravitated. As good fortune would have it, Madelaine happened to know someone who felt the same. After a while, he wasn't sure if that was good fortune or some sort of kismet, but he was happy about it all the same.

That night he and Madelaine went to out celebrate at a restaurant downtown at Restaurant Les Armures. They wisely took a taxi so they could polish off a couple bottles of very fine French wine along with their dinner.

“It’s funny,” Phillipe said. “It was just five months ago that I literally snuck into this country and started a new life. It all seems a bit unreal.”

Madelaine just smiled. “Well, I suppose it could be seen that way.” But it was also about your own effort to make something happen. You can’t underestimate that.”

“You’re right you know. I did make it happen, with a little help from a certain beautiful lady I know.”

They toasted each other and then did a bit of speculation about who would pick up their series. 

Phillipe had no clue how that end of the business worked. But he did know that he was looking forward to going back to the States for the casting. He insisted that Madelaine come with him, even if it was just for a few days. He wanted to introduce her to his parents, not just because she was the love of his life, but because he also knew his father wouldn’t freak out if he showed up with someone, especially a beautiful young lady like Madelaine.

After dinner, they walked around the downtown area of the city. They were both a little high, but this was Zurich and the downtown streets, while not exactly crowded, were well enough populated that they didn’t have to worry about anything untoward happening.

“So, you have been pretty secretive about your new story. Care to tell me what it’s about.”

Phillipe had written enough of the story that it was almost complete. But he didn’t worry about that. There were three great writers who would blow it up into something wonderful and, of that, he felt very confident.

“It’s a story about two young people, one a computer science graduate from Michigan State, named Parker Nash the other a literature graduate from Bryn Mawr…that’s a college in Florida, whose name was Tori Desmond. They are the children of very wealthy parents, who are politically active. One night at a fund raiser, a lunatic shows up and kills a dozen or so people including their parents. They eventually meet up and find they are attracted to each other, first through their shared grief and then they fall in love.

“After a while they begin to think about the political issue of guns in America. And they decide to do something about it. With the help of a hacker Parker knew at Michigan State, they are able to hack the systems of the top eleven weapons manufacturers in the US, and basically shut them down. They are very careful how they go about doing this. And very explicit in their demands for getting high powered weapons off the street. 

That’s more or less all I have at the moment, although I am planning to bring in an FBI officer whose job it is to track them down. That’s basically the pilot story in a nutshell. But I‘m thinking that’s just the starting point. Once they realize that they can do this, they will go after other issues that America is struggling with, like its wealth imbalance and the Republican party which has moved much, much farther to the right. I have to do some more research on issues, but there would be more than enough to populate a minis series.”

“Do they get caught?”

“Not really. There’s a lot of suspicion, but the FBI can’t really do anything because they have been very careful not to leave evidence of their crimes.”

“Is this something that could actually happen?” Madelaine asked.

“Oh yeah, easily. The guy who made my Swiss credentials could do this in his sleep. In fact, I’m amazed that nobody has done any of this for real.”

“Well, I think you have taken to this kind of writing very well. What do you call this story?”

“It’s called Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, which was the title of an old Beatle’s song, but it got their intent across very well.”

For some reason, Madelaine found this quite amusing. “I remember that chanson, song. That was something they created towards the end of their being a band together. The title is quite apropos.”

“Thank you Mademoiselle.”

They walked around for about half an hour and then grabbed another taxi home. They laid in bed under the big down comforter and talked for a while. The window was open but the air coming through it was cool enough for Phillipe to get up and close it. They conked out about ten minutes later.

The next day and for the next dozen or so days after that, Phillipe toiled away finishing off and tightening up Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, even expanding it to accommodate a couple of other ideas. The finished story was more than twenty-five thousand words, but he didn’t care. This was as much fun as he had ever had in his young life and he was blowing his brains out on it.

When he had gone as far as he thought he needed to, he emailed a copy of it to Madelaine to read, which she did. She thought about it for a long time after she finished reading it and then said to Phillipe. “This feels more like a movie than a series.”

“Yeah. It does. But one of the things I have learned about Daniel Snow and his crew is that they can turn anything into anything. Besides that, I won’t be showing them anything new until we figure out where the ‘Finding’ series goes. Hell, they may not even like it at all.” 

“You know it does have something in common with your first story. It seems very much to be about, je ne sais quoi…abandonment.”

“Hmmm. You know I never really thought about it that way, but you’re right.”

“Did you feel abandoned by your family?”

“You’re asking someone who went to the trouble of moving all the way here and changing his entire identity?” Phillipe chuckled a bit. “Yeah, I suppose I do feel that way.”

Madelaine leaned over and kissed Phillipe gently on the cheek. “Ma petit garçon perdu. My little lost boy.”

“No big deal. I’m happy. And hey, we’ll go back and they’ll see I’m happy and that will be that.”

Madelaine laughed. “You know, when it comes to family, there is no such thing as ‘that will be that.’”

“Maybe. But that’s the plan anyway.”

“It’s always good to have a plan.”

“So you didn’t tell me if you liked it or not.”

“Mon cherie, you have sold an idea to one of the best independent producers in all Europe. You are, as the Americans say, playing in the big leagues. Everything you do from now on will be considered at least good, if not great.”

Phillipe just sat there. He was smiling but deep down, he was wondering if that was really true.

~ 23 ~

After his conversation with Madelaine, he thought about a lot of stuff. Mainly how the subconscious can creep into your conscious mind and shape your thinking. He then thought that maybe the awareness of that would get him onto another thought track. So he started looking for stories that could be relevant in today’s world, not just America. In his reading, he started to notice that it seemed like every other day a new AI-based entity was formed. He headed downtown to an English-language bookstore and found a couple of books on the subject. As he read through both books, he noticed they painted a dreary picture of AI’s influence, present and future, on the world. 

This made him curious about the time, maybe even ten years ago, before AI was such a huge thing and people just used their cleverness and ingenuity to create digital products. He thought maybe if he told a story like that, it would serve as a reminder of the fact that the world was changing faster than people’s ability to keep up with the change. This thinking became the genesis for a story about protecting the world from the criminal downside of the fast moving AI train.

The title came to him before he had written anything. He just woke up one morning with it in his head. And he had the presence of mind to pick up his iPad sat up in bed and stared at it for quite some time, thinking about all the different things it could mean.

A little later that morning he sat down on his terrace with his coffee, his croissants and a sliced apple and his MacBook and opened a Pages file and named it The Human League.

1. EMBRYO

It all started simply enough as all movements do. 

Terry Moorehouse had just received his Master's degree in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His major was, as most majors were these days, in Artificial Intelligence.

Terry was not someone you would have pegged as a propellerhead. He was tall and handsome, with long dark hair and rimless glasses that made him look more like a shortsighted high fashion model. 

Terry did not talk like your average young geek either. His grandmother, Olivia Moorehouse, had raised him after his parents Stephen and Judith were killed in a freak storm while they were sailing in the Atlantic off Martha’s Vineyard, where the family’s summer home was located. She tutored him on the essentials of having a sophisticated vocabulary.

‘People are lazy, Terrance.’ she would tell him, ‘They use a hip shorthand language that seldom actually communicates coherently. They think they are being cool, but in fact, they are cretins and part of the demise of intelligence in America.’

Terry always paid a lot of attention to his grandmother. He instinctually understood that her degrees in history and philosophy had made her one of the more literate and intelligent people in his life. He was intellectually challenged by her regularly and took it as a matter of pride and devotion to always listen to what she was saying. Because although there was a generation between them, Terry knew how wise his grandmother was. But more importantly, he respected it and had, at an early age, resigned himself to learn as much as he could from her.

Olivia Moorehouse was the head of the Moorehouse empire which included several textile mills all through New England, a large printing operation that specialized in academic books, and a small digital marketing company that Olivia was steering into the twenty-first century. Terry was being groomed to take control of the digital wing of the Moorehouse business mansion. 

Olivia was quite young when she married David Moorehouse, who passed away at the age of fifty-four from a massive stroke, leaving her and young Terry, then only thirteen, to fend for themselves in the world and the entire Moorehouse business empire in her hands.

Terry and Olivia shared a large house in a gated community on the shoreside of Plymouth, about twenty miles south of Boston. Olivia had sold her Martha’s Vineyard house a few years back citing too many memories that made her sad. She also sold her townhouse in Boston the year she moved into the Plymouth house to take care of Terry. All through Terry’s high school, Olivia lived in the main house and Terry in the guest house. But they ate almost all their meals together. 

Olivia was an excellent business owner and trusted her management teams implicitly. She had never been any sort of a social butterfly, and because she was an introspective person at heart, this quiet life suited her just fine. Over the years she had become interested and then obsessed with gardening, and spent most of her time, in the good seasons, out tending to her plants and flowers.

She jogged a few miles along the shoreline every day, read a lot and spent at least an hour or two a day making sure that her businesses were running well.

~ 2 ~

One night in early August, at dinner, Olivia brought up the subject of what Terry would do with all his education. 

“You do have a whole small digital marketing company in place that you could take over and shape any way you choose.” Olivia said.

“I know, Gram. My problem is that I’m not really sure just yet what I would turn it into.”

“Well, you do know a lot about the AI world. I should think that would be a good direction to take it.”

“That’s true enough. But I keep thinking about what one of my professors told me while I was doing my Masters. He said ‘The key to success is learning how to zig when everybody else is zagging’. Right now everybody and their uncle is trying like crazy to be the next big thing in AI. What they are completely ignoring is the astounding amount of human displacement all this new tech is going to create. It feels like that’s the last place I’d want to be. Because sooner or later the government is going to have to start laying down rules, and a lot of that boom is going to bust.”

Olivia just stared at him. If nothing else she knew how bright and intuitive her grandson was. “So the question is how do you zig?” she said.
“Exactly.” Terry said. “And believe it or not, I have an idea about just how to do that. The only thing is that it’s not exactly…ethical.” 

They talked about Terry’s idea for another half hour or so and by the end of it Olivia was convinced that not only was his idea a sound one, but it was also completely necessary. And that she could help make it happen.

For the next few weeks, Terry did a lot of research on disruption and formulated a battle plan. During his research, he came across the name of a person he had been at MIT with. He didn’t know her very well, but well enough, he figured, to reach out and invite her for coffee. The video article he saw with her mentioned had to do with the future of AI. She was one of several MIT grads interviewed. As he listened to the interview, he became intrigued and thought about how they had first met.

~ 3 ~

Shawna Lennox was one of the minority of women at MIT engaged in computer science. But she was more than enough of a nerd to hold her own in any conversation or tutorial. With long auburn hair, fashion-model facial features and a body to match, she was good-looking enough to command the attention of any gathering of nerds you could name. 

Terry and Shawna had had a few brief conversations, mostly on walks through the campus, and Terry was always impressed with her well-reasoned skepticism about AI and its place in the lives of the human race.

They met on a bright Tuesday afternoon at the Tatti Bakery and Cafe on Summer Street in Boston. They both ordered large lattes, and then sat at a table by the window.

“So,” Shawna said, “Have you figured out what you want to do with your life yet?”

“As a matter of fact,” Terry said. “I have, well sort of. But first I’d like to know about you. What are you doing?”

“Mostly just waiting. Sent out a lot of queries. But you know the megacorps. They always take their sweet time. So I’m mostly just hangin’ around the house. Messing around with a few ideas.” She took a sip of her latte. “Your turn.”

Terry took a deep breath. “Well, I don't know if you know this about me, but my grandmother is the CEO of a small conglomerate called Moorehouse Industries. Big in textiles, book publishing and printing, and digital marketing. The digital marketing business is small right now, mostly just managing websites, but it was given to me to run.”

“So are you offering me a job?”

“No Shawna, actually I’m suggesting a partnership. Something you and I can work together to build, with the resources I already have in place and whatever else we need.”

Shawna’s guard went up immediately. Nobody takes a newly minted graduate out for coffee and offers them a partnership in a going concern. She found herself shaking her head. “Why me? I mean we knew each other in school, but not that well.”

“Call it a hunch. Call it intuition. But I think you and I want the same thing.”

“Oh yeah? And what’s that, pray tell?”

“We both see the insanity that’s going on right now. And we both want to do something to at least slow it down or get it under control. You’re on the record in several places echoing the same sentiment.”

That stopped Shawna in her tracks. This guy had East Coast aristocracy written all over him. He’s the last guy she would have ever pegged as a would-be AI anarchist. She stared at him for the better part of a minute.

“I suppose you have some sort of plan in mind.” she said.

“As a matter of fact, I do. I just need someone like you to help me refine and actualize it.”

“And where would this all take place? I mean you live down in Plymouth, right?”

“Yeah. But the business is there too.”

“So you’re asking me to move to Plymouth?”

“Or commute. The drive is not so bad. But I have a pretty massive house, you could live there.”

“So you’re not just offering me a job, you’re asking me to come live with you too.”

“No. I don’t live in the big house. I have a smaller house out back. My grandmother lives in the big house, and she would love to have the company.”

“How is it you have a big house with a smaller house in Plymouth?”

“When I was thirteen, I lost my parents in a boating accident. They left their entire estate to me. My Gram moved into the big house and stayed there. She runs her entire business out of there now. I live in the pool house out back.”

“I’m so sorry to hear about your folks.”

“Thanks.”

 Shawna said nothing for a while. 

“You know, Terry, I’m a little confused. You’re obviously a rich guy. Yet you sound like you’re really concerned about the world.” 

“When I was twenty-one, in my senior year at MIT, my trust fund became available to me.”

“How much, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Currently, a little over fifty-four million. With easy access to half of it.”

“Well, that explains the little house big house thing.”

“Look. I know this sounds weird. I’ve never tried to hire someone before. but my feeling, at the moment, is that you and I could really build something great.”

Shawna leaned back in her chair and thought about it. But not for too long. She wasn’t an impulsive person by nature. But there was something about this that intrigued her. She did a lot of math in her head and said. 

“So how much is this partnership worth?” 

“Three hundred thousand a year guaranteed and twenty-five percent of any net profit we turn. The other twenty-five percent is mine and the remaining fifty percent belongs to my Gram.

Shawna was floored, but worked really hard to keep a straight face. Three hundred thousand guaranteed was more than twice what she would earn working for any of the biggies. She stared at Terry, looking hard for some kind of chink in his emotional armour, but he was rock solid, as he sipped his latte and waited with the patience of Job.

“Okay, big boy. Drive me home. I’ll get packed and kiss my folks goodbye.”

And with that, they were off to try and give the cyber world a black eye.

By the time Phillipe had finished that, he had pretty much figured out the entire story. Not all the details.  But he saw the ebb and flow of it and it excited him. 

Madelaine had left before Phillipe had even woken up and his reverie was broken by her noises from the kitchen where she was making something to eat for herself.

He got up, walked into the kitchen and kissed her on the cheek.

“So you were up early.”

“Oui. I had three meetings one right after the other. And what about you?”

“Well, to tell you the truth, I started writing another story.”

Madelaine chuckled. “Why am I not surprised? You are a writing machine, mon ami.”

“Yeah, I suppose I am.”

~ 24 ~

Phillipe spent the next five days working on his Human League story. Then on the sixth day, he got an email from Daniel Snow. it read. 

“Greetings from London. Everybody loved the concept and the scripts, but the BBC loved it the most. They have assigned us a liaison person, Albert McBride, who will be coming back to France with us to do all the prep and finalize the budget. Albert is good people and so this should all go very smoothly. Nice work kiddo. Be ready to show up at Maurice’s on Monday morning. This is our first BBC production and we really want them to fall in love with us.

     Cheers, Daniel

Phillipe stared at the email for quite some time. Then he looked up at  Madelaine, who was sipping her coffee. 

“The BBC bought the series.” Phillipe said. “We start
pre-production on Monday.”

Madelaine just smiled. “Truth be told, I already knew. Maurice texted me last night to thank me for introducing you to him.”

“And you never told me.”

“He asked me not to. He wanted Daniel to do that.”

“Well, that doesn’t matter. This is a real thing now.”

“Mais oui. Just remember, you may be the genesis of the idea but you are by far the least experienced person in the whole group. Watch and learn, mon cher.”

The meeting was set for lunch on Monday. Maurice Flaubert had a caterer bring an assortment of food, and he provided the wine. Once everyone was seating with plates of food and glasses of wine. Maurice got up and raised his glass. 

“To a successful development.” he said. 

Everyone repeated his words.

Maurice sat back down. “I’d like to introduce the newest member of our little group, Monsieur Albert McBride of the BBC.

Albert was a handsome and casually dressed Brit. His hair was long and tied back. He wore frameless glasses and reminded Phillipe of the singer Paul McCartney. He even had the same sort of Liverpool accent. 

“I echo Monsieur Flaubert’s sentiments.’ McBride said, “And more than that, I have a very good crew on their way to America as we speak. The story captured our interest mainly because there is a great deal more American-influenced programming finding an audience in Great Britain and Europe. There very much seems to be a plethora of Hollywood refugees washing up on our shores, and we would be foolish not to take advantage of that kind of talent. The BBC has, over the past few years, modified its mandate, and is intent on producing and broadcasting programming that’s more international in scope. That’s the primary reason you just happened to be in the right place at the right time. I look forward to working with you all.”

Then everyone started to eat and carry on conversations with each other. 

After the lunch was finished, Daniel Snow got to his feet. “OK. Everybody knows everybody else. Right now we have to start planning out this production. 

“Maurice, myself, Albert and Gilles will be working on budgets. Gary, Anastasia and Phillipe will be going over the scripts to make sure they are tight and put some casting parameters together. Once all of that is done we’ll head to the States to scout locations and set up a production office. I want to make this a series that the BBC will be proud to broadcast and there’s no reason on God’s green earth why that can’t happen.” 

Phillipe invited Gary and Anastasia back to his house where they could do everything that needed to be done. So they caravanned back to Switzerland .

The next week literally flew by. Madelaine scrambled around, getting things done for her clients so she could take a few days off to fly over to the US with Phillipe. Phillipe Anastasia and Gary worked through the scripts making small changes here and there. Phillipe mostly just watched these two pros at work, but had a lot to contribute when it came to creating casting profiles, although he had to admit that Ana and Gary knew the stories better than he did. But they agreed on way more than they disagreed on and when the disagreements did occur they were settled logically.

“I understand that Daniel is going to direct these episodes.” Phillipe said. “He seems to trust you implicitly.”

“Well,” Gary said. “The three of us go way back right to the beginning of our careers. The people he told you he lived with in Redondo Beach…that was us. We have always been a team. After a while you start thinking like your teammates. That’s how things go so quickly. We decide on a direction and any of us can take the scripts there. It’s just more fun and quicker doing it together.”

“One of these days,” Ana said. “If you stick with the business, you will find your own team or be asked to join one. Right now, you‘re sort of a stringer. Your insights are valuable to us. And you have some very good basic storytelling skills. But let’s face it. This is your first gig. Your skill set is a little thin.”

Philippe laughed. “Funny, I was just thinking the same thing.”

“That’s  OK,” Ana said. “You own a piece of this and it was your basic idea that’s giving it the horsepower. We respect the hell out of that.”

They figured they had four days, so they agreed to work on two scripts a day. Gary was the better organized of the duo so he was in charge of the final version.

Each night they would email the two scripts they had done that day to Daniel and the next day they would go over them for budgeting and logistics. It was a process that these three had been doing for about ten years, and they had it down to a fine art. It was hard work, and fast-paced work. But it was also work that paid very well, especially since they all had a piece of the downmarket distribution, because though they were partnered with the BCC, it was Maurice Flaubert who owned the rights to the series. So after a six-month run on BBC, he was free to sell it anywhere in the world, and that’s where the profitability got really substantial. Because there were more than two dozen markets where this series would be viable. Maurice and the Daniel Snow team currently had four of these mini-series in syndication. Gary explained that their individual shares for each series would amount to at least two and a half million a year. 

Phillipe was fascinated with the entire machinery of the industry. As a math guy, he had always wondered how these entities made money. So in addition to a tutorial on putting scripts together, he was also learning a lot about the business side. Somewhere in the back of his mind he could see a time where he could do the same sort of thing. He certainly had more than enough startup capital. The real question was, did he really want to start a business or would he be happier just writing stories and selling them off to other people who were good at turning them into something.

He brought up the issue at dinner on the last night of their four-day scripting/casting session. Gary’s answer was short and sweet.

“The creative part is where all the joy is. Phillipe. The rest is nothing but hard, but well paid, rowing on a slave ship.” 

That was all Phillipe needed to know. Because he had already escaped one slave ship. He’d be damned if he would just jump onto another one.

~25 ~

They flew over on a private jet that Maurice Flaubert had chartered and landed at the Suffolk Executive Airport Virginia. They were then driven by limo to a large estate house on the north side of Richmond which would be the staging area for their production. There they met a lady named Kelly Prentiss who was their American logistics person. She was Daniel Snow’s significant other and a beautiful redhead who was pure New York City. She had several cars and a couple of box vans at their disposal. All the leased equipment was stored in the large four-car garage.

Once everyone was settled in, they all met on the terrace of the estate. Daniel Snow was very much in charge and Kelly was his assistant director. She introduced the relatively small crew and the first preproduction meeting started. It lasted only a couple of hours, after which scripts were handed out, and emailed to everyone’s computer or iPad and everyone dispersed to do their various jobs. Phillipe was introduced to everyone and got a good feeling for what was going to happen and when. The first thing that needed to happen was casting. So the next day, a Friday,  they drove to New York. Daniel, Kelly, Ana, Gary, Phillipe and Madelaine were in one of the limos. 

Daniel said it would take about three days to cast the entire series, which would start on the following Monday and that he and Madelaine were free to do whatever they for the next couple of days. In the meantime, Daniel was going to talk to his cinematographer, Jake Cooley, and hire a shooter to get the street shots they needed in the various locations dictated by the scripts. The company they chose was called East Coast Visuals, which was a married couple named Jake and Heather Freeman. 

They all checked into the Park Hyatt, just two blocks south of Central Park. Kelly contacted the casting coordinator a lady named Joannie Michaels, who gave them the address for the casting, which was a small studio in lower Harlem, just north of Central Park. She had already received the scripts and had a number of people lined up, starting with the two pivotal lead roles. The second day they would do the secondary role casting, and then Joannie would travel to Atlantic City to organize casting the poker and black jack scenes. For the Canadian scenes, Daniel had contacted a Canadian stock footage company with a list of exterior locations they would need.

With that all underway, they all disbursed for the weekend to visit friends and relatives in the New York City area.

Once they were settled in the hotel,  Phillipe called his mother. 

“Hi mom. It’s me.”

“Jason. Where are you? From the number you are calling from, it looks like you’re here in the city.”

“I am. And I’d like to have dinner with you and dad. My treat.”  

“There was a bit of a pause, but Phillipe could hear his mother talking.”

“Why don’t we have dinner here? Say about seven. I’ll order something from Santinos.”

“That would be great. You should know I’ll be bringing someone.”

“Oh, OK. Dinner for four then.”

“We’ll see you then.”

“Are you alright, Jason?”

“Yes mother. Everything is peachy keen.”

Phillipe hung up the phone and then looked over at Madelaine who was looking at a magazine. 

“My parents just live up on the far side of the Park. They moved down from New Rochelle, which is a suburb up in the north part of the city, when I was off to MIT. So we can walk there. You’ll love Central Park.”

“We can leave in an hour so. The only thing I would ask you is not to refer to me as Phillipe. I don’t want them to know I have changed my name. It could also open up a can of legal worms and it won’t be pleasant.”

“I can do that, Jason.”

“Thank you.”

“They fooled around for a while then took a long shower together then set out for his family home on foot. On the way they talked a lot about New York City. Madelaine found it crowded and noisy, but fascinating all the same. It was a cool day so the park wasn’t all that busy 

“My parents are really good people. My dad is a little overbearing, because he’s an A Plus type personality. I would really prefer it if you didn’t mention where we live. I will tell them all about it but I just have to pick the right time.” Phillipe said.

“No worries. I understand totally.”

“I knew you would.” Phillipe replied, and then he asked, “What do you think of the park?”

“Well, it’s very large. I imagine all the people who live in these big boxes really appreciate it.”

Phillipe chuckled. “Big boxes. I like that.”

They left the park at the Seventy Second Street entrance and walked a couple of blocks up Central Park West, where they entered one of the apartment buildings there. 

They walked over to the reception desk. There was a middle aged man sitting behind it, casually but nicely dressed. 

“Hello Jerome.” Jason said.

“Jason. Good to see you. It’s been a while. Come to see the folks?”

“Yep.”

“Well, you’re right on time. Dinner showed up about ten minutes ago.”

Phillipe didn’t bother introducing Madelaine. She merely smiled as they walked past the desk to the elevator.

Phillipe used his key to enter the apartment, which was large and luxurious. It was tastefully modern without being overdone. Phillipe’s mother, Elaine walked out of the kitchen and greeted them. She was blonde and dressed in a simple designer dress that showed off her figure. 

Phillipe gave her a hug, then turned to Madelaine. “Mom, this is my girlfriend, Madelaine DuChamps.” 

“Enchante Madame Whiteside. So pleased to meet you.” Madelaine said.

Elaine Whiteside took her hand. “Same here. And please it’s just Elaine. My God, you are a very beautiful young lady.”

“Merci…thank you.”

“Where’s dad?” Phillipe asked.

“He’s just on the phone…he’ll be out in a minute. Please come in, I’m just warming everything up.”

They walked into the large living room.

“Mom doesn’t cook very much. But she and expert warmer upper.”

“The dining room table was all set, and there were two bottles of wine on the sideboard. 

“Would you like a glass of wine, Madelaine?” Elaine asked.

“Yes that would be very nice, thank you.”

Elaine walked over to the sideboard and poured out four glasses of wine. As she was doing that Phillipe’s father walked into the room, He was a little taller than Phillipe, and ruggedly handsome. He was dressed in suit pants with suspenders and an open collared shirt. Madelaine could immediately see the family resemblance.

“The prodigal son returns. Nice to see you, Jace.”

“Good to see you too, dad.” He then gestured to Madelaine. “This is my girlfriend, Madelaine DuChamps. Madelaine this is my dad, Damon.”

Damon Whiteside looked at Madelaine and then took a deep breath. “Pleased to meet you, my dear.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you as well. Jason has told me a lot about you both.”

Just then a little bell dinged in the kitchen.

“That’s the dinner bell.” Elaine said. “It’s going to be a bit of a buffet, so I will put everything out on the kitchen counter. 

The next few minutes were spent filling plates and getting seated. 

“So you’ve decided to live in Europe, is that right?” Damon asked. 

“Yes sir. I have. I bought a house on a nice lake near a good-sized city.”

“And what are you planning to do in this house on a lake in the middle of Europe?”

“Well, thanks to Madelaine that’s all taken care of. I’m writing stories.”

“What does that mean exactly? Like literary stories?” Damon asked.

“No. They’re screen stories. Madelaine has a family friend who is a very big TV series producer. She got me a meeting with him and he optioned a story I had written. He then brought in a team of screenwriters who work with him and they turned the story into a limited series and sold it to the BBC in England. The reason we’re here is that we are starting production on it. The casting starts on Monday at a studio up in Harlem and after that, they will be shooting all up and down the east coast for the next eight weeks then they will take everything back to England where it will be edited and scored.”

Phillipe’s parents were dumbfounded.

“And all this happened because you wrote a story?” Damon asked.

“Yes sir, it did. I’m working two more stories and this production company wants the first right of refusal?”

“Well, that certainly solves the mystery of why we haven’t heard from you.” Damon said. “You’ve obviously been working your tail off.”

“No, dad, the real reason is that I simply didn’t know how to explain why I didn’t want to take over the business. I was genuinely afraid you would freak out.”

“Well, you have certainly taken the wind out of that sail.” Damon said. “Do you enjoy doing this, this storytelling?”

“Yeah, I do. Very much. I also think I’m pretty good at it because of my education in mathematics. I have a logical brain. And writing these stories is not unlike attacking a mathematical problem. You’re constantly trying to make things add up.”

“Well, I for one, am just very happy for you.” Elaine said. “You seem to have created a real life for yourself over there and you certainly have a beautiful young lady to share it with.”

Phillipe smiled.

“Well I can’t say I’m not disappointed that you have chosen not to come into the business.” Damon said. “But at the same time, we raised you to think for yourself, and I can’t argue with the fact that you’ve gone and done just that.”

Phillipe relaxed quite a bit after that. The hard part was over. The rest of the evening was quite pleasant. Philippe revealed everything but his new name because technically, doing what he did to get into Switzerland was a serious crime. Better to let sleeping dogs lie, he thought.

Three hours later and a little bit drunk, they were riding back to their hotel. Phillipe said. “I think you made a very good impression on them.”

“And I think you did a lot of needless worrying about what your father would say to you.”

“There’s no telling what might have happened if I had just showed up by myself.” Phillipe said. “Anyway, that’s all in the past and we have two days to do whatever we want here in the big city.”

The next two days breezed by as Phillipe showed Madelaine the sights of his home town. Madelaine had spent as good deal of time in Paris so she wasn’t intimidated by the size of the city. But she did remark on more than one occasion that it felt very claustrophobic down in the canyons of concrete and glass, as she called them. But they had some amazing meals and made love every night. And almost just like that, Phillipe was putting her into a cab for Kennedy airport and headed off to Harlem and the casting session for the series.

Truth be told, Phillipe’s main interest was in the starring roles of Dexter and Roxanne. He had developed an incredible amount of trust in the judgement of all three of his collaborators and their people. Not to mention the detailed character profiles and parameters they had outlined in their work session at Phillipe’s house.

So his plan was to hang in for the main casting and then head back home to continue writing his new story, which was really where his heart was. He would also have a meeting with Monsieur Flaubert, who was flying home after the casting and pre-production meetings were done, and come to terms on his contract for the series. 

Before the casting started and everyone was getting their coffees, he mentioned his plans to Daniel Snow, who completely agreed with him. Daniel’s idea was that Phillipe and monsieur Flaubert would be what he called the foils, which meant that the next time they would see anything it would be at the rough cut stage, after the shooting was done and the episodes were roughly edited. In any production there are always at least a couple of these people. Usually they are executives with direct production experience. Daniel Snow was counting on Phillipe to provide him with as much constructive criticism as he could muster. Phillipe was very happy to be relieved of several weeks of what would have amounted to just hanging around. Since he had no aspirations to direct or produce, being able to continue writing at home would be the best use of his time anyway.

The casting call consisted of twelve young men and twelve slightly older women as per the script. The started off in pairs for the first round and then half of them were cut as not quite right. The second round mixed up the pairings based on what Ana, Gary, Daniel and Phillipe thought might work the best. And it was there that they struck gold. The simpatico between a young man named Richard Balfour and a slightly older woman named Theresa Diedrickson literally blew everyone away. 

They used the car scene where Dexter first picks up Roxanne hitchhiking to New York City. It was really quite an emotional moment, especially for Phillipe who could not believe he was seeing almost exactly what he wrote come to life.

He turned to Daniel who, was smiling, and watching Phillipe’s reaction very closely.

“Is it always this easy, Daniel?” Phillipe asked. “I mean these people are fucking perfect.”

“No, Phillipe. The cinema gods are smiling on us.”

They made a second choice to have on standby in case either of the leads became unavailable. Everyone else was dismissed with thanks. Richard and Terry were taken aside and introduced to Phillipe by Daniel Snow.

“This is Phillipe Fornier. This series is based on his story.” Daniel said.

They shook hands with Phillipe and Daniel continued. “Phillipe is heading back to Switzerland where he lives, but I’d like you to sit down with him for a while and just chat. Ask him whatever questions you have. He invented the characters and knows them better then anyone.”

“Let’s go get a coffee.” Phillipe said. “There’s a Starbucks just down the street. 

A few minutes later, they were sitting in Starbucks. The two actors filled Phillipe in on their backgrounds. Both were aspiring stage actors and both were slightly older than they looked. But that didn’t matter to Phillipe.

“First of all,” Philippe said, “We were all absolutely blown away with what you did together. I majored in math at MIT and was supposed to go into my father’s business here in New York. But for some reason that I could not put my finger on, I couldn’t do that. So I ran away to Switzerland and one day, again for no reason than I can think of, I started to write this story. They took the story, about ten thousand words and turned it into everything you are going to be doing. Hopefully for some time to come. To me, none of this was real until I saw the scene that you both did, and then all of a sudden, I realized why I did this. So thank you for clarifying that for me.”

They talked for about half an hour and peppered Phillipe with questions about the characters they would play. He tried his best to answer them honestly and he came away believing that, for better or worse, they had a good handle on their character’s motivation. 

“My best advice to you.” Phillipe said. “Is to remember what you did today. Because in my opinion and, everybody else’s, I’m sure, it was right on the money. Jus t let the characters grow a bit more confident and a bit more in love through the episodes So have fun and break a leg.”

They walked back to the casting studio where everyone was waiting for them and it was back to business as usual. Phillipe hugged everyone and wished them all good luck as he headed out the door and south to Central Park. He stopped into see his mom, because he knew his dad would still be at work. He talked to her for about fifteen minutes, packed up some more of his favourite clothes and a few mementos, then grabbed a taxi back to his hotel. On the way back to his hotel he called Pan Am and reserved a first class seat to Zurich for noon the next day.

When he got to the hotel, he took a quick shower then called his pal, Toby. 

“Hey Tobe. It’s me. Phillipe.” 

“Phillipe, mon ami.” Then he paused. “You in the city?”

“Yes sir I am, and I want to take you out for dinner.”

They agreed on their favourite restaurant, which was Nathan’s Famous Food truck. 

“OK. It’s five now. Let’s meet in an hour.”  Toby said.

“Works for me.”

At a little past six, they were sitting at a picnic table in Central Park with dogs, fries, onion rings and cokes.”

“I can’t fuckin’ believe you’re in the TV business.” Toby said. “That’s like as far as you can get from math and still be in the known universe.”

“ I know. It’s really strange. But then again, you know, maybe that was my destiny after all.”

“And they’re over here shooting a whole fuckin’ mini-series based on a story you wrote?” Toby laughed at the extreme irony of the whole thing.

“And you are cohabiting with a gorgeous French girl on top of it all.”

“Livin’ the dream my friend.”

Toby took a big bite out of his dog. After a moment  he asked. “So you’ve told your folks about where you live.”

“Yeah, but nothing about who I am now. I figured that’s just a bag of snakes.”

“For sure.”

Toby told him that he was able to get the robot project off the ground and MIT was going to sell it to a major manufacturer, as a ‘pick and place’ prototype.

“So you basically invented a worker bee.”

“Yeah, but he works really fuckin’ fast.”

“You know you’re putting three or four people out of work.”

Toby chewed on an onion ring. “Dude, it’s coming whether we like it or not. It’s up to the business world and the government to sort that shit out.”

“Yeah, I suppose.”

“So tell me about Switzerland.” Toby said.

They spent the next couple of hours just shooting the shit like they used to.

They parted company with a man hug. Toby agreed to come and visit the following summer, if he could get the time off.

Back at the hotel, Phillipe watched an old Humphrey Bogart movie on Cinemax. He then crawled into bed and slept right through the night. He got to JFK the next morning with half an hour to spare.

~ 26 ~

The next morning he woke in his own bed. Madelaine was getting herself dressed. He laid in the bed and watched her move around the room, putting on her business gear. 

“I have a couple of year ends to deal with today, so I will be out all day.” she said, as she leaned over to kiss him goodbye.

“That’s cool. I’m going to see Monsieur Flaubert, to talk about money.” Phillipe said.

“Well have fun.” she said as she dashed out of the bedroom.

Phillipe got dressed about half an hour later and wandered around the house. There was no rain or snow in the forecast, but there was a definite chill in the air.

He dawdled over two cups of coffee and reviewed what he had done so far on his current story. ‘Tomorrow’, he told himself, ‘We’ll get going on this one.’ He drank up his coffee and ate up his breakfast croissant, then threw on a jacket and headed out to his car.

Monsieur Flaubert was sitting in his study when his secretary showed Philippe in. He offered Phillipe some coffee and motioned to a carafe on a tray along with cream and sugar. Phillipe got his coffee together while Monsieur Flaubert worked away on his laptop. He closed it once Phillipe sat down.

“The rest of the casting went very smoothly.” Flaubert said.

“That’s good. But the lead characters are just perfect. They will do a great job.”

“I’m sure they will. I have a great deal of faith in Daniel. We have been working together for about seven years now. And we have had much success.”

“Daniel is pretty amazing for sure, so are Gary and Ana.”

“Yes, they seem to read each other’s minds very accurately. But today I want  to talk about you.” Flaubert said.

“Okay.”

“You seem to have materialized fully formed out of nowhere. I’m pretty certain your name is not Phillipe. I’m also certain that your are are not doing this out of any sort of necessity. Madelaine mentioned that you were independently wealthy.”

“I come from a very rich family. And you’re right. I came to Europe to avoid going into the family business.”

“Which is?”

Phillipe chuckled. “You name it, my dad’s into it. Manufacturing, retail, construction, real estate, the market.”

“And so when you came to Switzerland, you did not have any specific goal in mind.”

“No. Well, yeah. The goal was to disappear. And figure out what I want to do as opposed to what my father expected me to do.”

Flaubert chuckled. “Families. They are sometimes like an albatross around your neck.”

“Sometimes. But Madelaine and I went to visit them in New York and a lot of things were straightened out.”

“That’s good. Because, I think you are beginning to become someone who will be quite valuable to us going forward. Have you been thinking about other stories?”

“In fact I have written one more. And I’m about halfway though a second one.”

“C’est bien.”

“They are both set in the US. I don’t know Europe well enough yet to set things here.”

“American stories are perfect. I look forward to reading them both. But now I will explain your payment.” With that he reached into a file on his desk and pulled out some paper. There were three sheets held together with a paper clip. He pulled the paper clip out and handed Phillipe a cheque made out to him for $200,000 Euros. 

“This is one part of your payment.” he said and then slid another sheet of paper across the desk. It was written in French. “This is the second part, which is 5% of all net profits on the project for five years, after which it will drop to 3%.

“That’s fine with me.”

“Tres bien. Now this arrangement will vary from project to project depending on what we see as the marketing opportunity. But it will never be any less. I think your share will be quite profitable over the long term. Because I can see your idea is marketable in a number of places and languages. We can discuss that as the situations arise.”

 Phillipe wasn’t quite sure how to react. “I’m very grateful to you, sir, for giving me this opportunity. I honestly had no idea what I wanted to do when I came here. But that’s all changed.”

“If your next idea is even half as good as this one, we will be making wonderful programming and, what’s the American expression, big bucks.”

“I will send you the new stories as soon as I have tightened them up a bit more.”

“No rush. I like to work on one project at a time, mainly because finding people of the same quality as Daniel and his team, this is very hard to do.”

“I can well imagine.”

“In the meantime, do a little traveling. This is a beautiful part of the world.”

“That’s good advice, sir. And thank you for the opportunity. This means more to me than you can imagine.”

‘Tres bien.” Flaubert said, and Phillipe knew the meeting was over. He got to his feet and shook hands with Flaubert. A few minutes later he was driving home and thinking what a strange thing life is.

He was back at home half an hour later. He poured himself a glass of wine and opened his computer to the last story he had been working on. He read over the first sections then sat back and took a sip of the wine he had poured, then he started to write again.

Olivia wasn’t at the house when they arrived. So Terry showed her around. Eventually, they ended up on the second floor, where Shawna was given her choice of bedrooms.

Then they hauled her bags up and Terry left her to unpack and have a shower.

“My Gram has gone to a shareholder meeting in Boston. She’ll be back sometime tomorrow. Come down to the pool-house when you‘re hungry and I’ll take you to dinner.”

When she came down Terry was sitting at a table beside the pool reading something on his Kindle.

She sat down beside him and looked out at the ocean. An hour later, they were sitting at a table in a restaurant called Martini’s, in downtown Plymouth. Terry was drinking a beer and Shawna was sipping a Long Island Iced Tea. 

“Your house is pretty amazing. Have you lived in it all your life?”

“Yeah. When I lost my parents, Gram sold her townhouse in Boston and came to live with me until I left for MIT. She commuted for a while, but then we had a chat and I set up and networked her computer to her businesses. It wasn't long before she got to love working remotely. Gave her a chance to spend more time in the garden, which is really where her heart is.”

“She did everything I saw? I mean. It’s a showpiece.”

“Yep. She had a landscaper named Mel Thorpe, who helped her design the whole garden, but she takes care of it pretty much by herself. Gram is a very high achiever,” Terry said. “But what about you, Shawna?”

“Pretty ordinary by comparison. My mom is a public school teacher and my dad works on the docks. He’s some kind of foreman. Spends his days unloading ships. I have one brother, Shane, also a nerd. He fell in love with girl from Canada and moved to Quebec City. I got interested in computers watching him. He’s a wizard. World-class hacker, but doesn’t really take advantage of it. Just wanted to learn how to do it because he was curious. Guess I’m a lot like him in that regard.”

“So you’ve done some hacking.”

“Little bit. Just peeking though. No stealing. No sabotage.”

“How do you feel about hacking?”

“Well, it would depend on the reason.”

“How about saving the world?”

Shawna just laughed. Not too loud. But she definitely thought it was funny.

“Well, you’re gonna have to quantify that somehow, because that’s a pretty big statement.”

Terry leaned back in his chair. He took a deep breath. “Look, what we have starting in the AI world is kind of like a Wild West show. It’s a free-for-all. Everybody’s trying to carve out the biggest slice of the pie possible. And they’re doing it with absolutely no regard for the consequences.”

“I don't disagree. The number of people who are going to be displaced as a result of a lot of this stuff is staggering.”

“Right. And the reason this is going to happen is because governments all over the world are just sitting back and letting it happen because nobody has lit a fire underneath their butts.”

Shawna stared at Terry for several seconds. “So are you talking about hacking the government, you know, to send them a message about how vulnerable they are? And using AI to do it?”

“Not quite. When my grandfather established this trust for me. I was only about fourteen at the time, he told me that when I got older, I should use this money to do something good. Well, I’ve got fifty-four million and what I want to do is wake the government up. And if the US government wakes up the rest of them will surely follow suit…at least that’s the theory.”  

“And you think we can do this, you and me?” 

“Yeah, I do with a little help from some friends.”

Just then the waiter came with their dinners. 

“Just think about it, Shawna. That’s all I’m asking.” Terry said. 

Later that night they sat at the table beside the pool. The air was cool and salty. They started to talk. And they talked until about three in the morning. 

The next afternoon, they went to the Rockland Trust Bank on Court Street and met with a lady named Gloria Rose, who was the personal banker for the Moorehouse family. She added Shawna to the payroll of Moorehouse Digital and arranged for a direct deposit to Shawna’s BankAmerica account in Boston.

They then walked down the street past all kinds of shops and restaurants. The street was bustling because it was summer and the town was filled with tourists and residents just enjoying the warm weather. As they walked Shawna noticed that Court Street had changed to Main Street. They stopped at a large, beautiful white frame house on the corner of Brewster and Main.

They climbed onto the massive front porch and Terry used a thumb-print to open the front door. Inside was a small reception area, a wide staircase and, behind the partial wall of the reception area, a large open space, held up by pillars. There were eight multi-screen workstations, all manned by people Shawna and Terry’s age. 

“This is the bullpen where most of the day-to-day stuff gets done.’ Terry said. “These people are dealing with the three hundred-odd websites we maintain. There’s a green screen studio in the basement for shooting stills or making video.” 

They then climbed the stairs to the second floor, which was also an open lounge area with comfortable furniture and coffee tables. There was a line of glass-walled offices along two of the outside walls. At the far end was a large counter with a couple of coffee makers, two fridges, a stove, a microwave and cupboards. A couple of people were sitting at the counter, drinking coffee and looking at something on an iPad. 

A older lady, dressed in a stylish business suit walked out of the corner office. She and Terry hugged affectionately. Then Terry turned to Shawna and said. “Shawna Lennox, this is Jamie Goldman, she runs the joint.”

Shawna and Jamie shook hands.

“Welcome, Shawna.”

“Thank you. This is quite the going concern you have here. How many people in all?”

“Well, there’s the eight sloggers downstairs, who deal with website creation and maintenance.” Jamie said. “There’s me, up here coordinating, I have two site designers and two app designers, but they work mostly at home. And we have three salespeople, who are on the road most of the time. Hence all the empty offices up here.”

“That’s quite an operation.” Shawna said.

“ Yeah, we try and have as much fun as we can. And keep the days contained to eight hours.”

“OK, so you and I,” Terry said to Shawna. “Will be working separately from the rest of Moorehouse Digital. Jamie has even given us our own separate server, which we can cloak.”

“So Jamie knows what you’re planning.”

“Yeah, Jamie’s part of the family. She was Gram’s executive assistant in Boston and Gram gave her this company to run after she decided to be more hands-off. Jamie’s president. Gram is the CEO.”

“So what are you? I mean what are we?”

“You can call yourself anything you want. Tell Jamie and she’ll put it on your business card. Mine just says, Head of Digital Innovation. That would be a good title for you too.”

Terry showed Shawna into one of the offices. There was a large desktop monitor and keyboard on a beautiful oak desk. Terry asked Shawna to sit at the desk. He reached over and activated the monitor. A small logo came up on the screen. Displaying the words ‘The Human League’.

“This is us.” Terry said.

Shawna smiled. Terry clicked on the logo and a page of text came up. 

“The Human League is dedicated to helping bring sanity to the digital future. Our mission is to create awareness, in governments around the world, of the threat that unbridled and unregulated AI development poses to humanity. We will do this with skill, cunning and in complete anonymity. The Human League will lobby the government to enact sensible and sane laws governing the use of AI.” 

Shawna looked up at Terry. “So this is more than just some idea you’re noodling.”

“A little bit. Yeah.”

Just then a man entered the office. His name was Jackson Freeburgh. He looked to be cut from the same cloth as Terry, but maybe five years older. He was dressed in a beautifully tailored linen suit with a black T-shirt underneath. His hair was long and dark. His sunglasses were perched on his forehead. 

“Hey Cisco.” Jackson said.

“Hey Pancho.” Terry replied. 

The two men embraced. Then Terry turned to Shawna. “Shawna Lennox, this is Jackson Freeburgh. Jack is the third wheel in our little tricycle.”

Jackson shook hands with Shawna. “Wow, if you’re as smart as you are beautiful, we’ll be in great shape.”

Shawna looked completely puzzled.

“Jack is a lawyer. Harvard Law. He started his own intellectual property practice two years ago. Very well-versed in the AI community. Once we get the attention of the people we need to reach, Jack will do the talking. He knows his way around DC ‘cause his dad’s a Senator and he grew up there. Lots of solid connections. He won't just be our lawyer though. He will also be our writer and frontman with the government.”

They moved to a small meeting room in the other corner of the house. Jamie Goldman joined them.”

“Terry has briefed me fully and I’m totally on board.” Jackson said. He put his briefcase on the table, pulled out four sets of documents and distributed them. “These are non-disclosure agreements. They’ll keep us all safe from each other.”

They spent the next few minutes signing documents, which Jack then gathered up and put back in his briefcase. For the next few hours they talked about the approach they would take. Jackson used the whiteboard on the wall to write it all out.

In a surprisingly short span of time, they had a plan of action, and everybody knew what to do. This was accomplished so easily because all four people in the room only had one agenda and were all motivated by the same passion.

 After the meeting adjourned, Jackson took off, and Jamie headed downstairs to deal with some Moorehouse issues, leaving Terry and Shawna in the meeting room. 

“So now you’re in it, Shawna. Right up to your neck. How do you feel?”

“So far so good. Ask me again when the heat gets turned up.”

Olivia arrived home just in time for dinner, which Terry had ordered from Bark Barbecue. 

Half an hour later they were sitting in the dining room with a plate filled with ribs and baked potatoes and bowls of Caesar salad that Terry claimed was his only culinary capability.

“So we met with everybody today and figured out an action plan. You can look it over when you get a chance.” Terry said to Olivia.

“Are you happy with it?” Olivia asked.

Both Terry and Shawna nodded. 

“Well, then I guess we’re good to go. I will confirm it with the Senator and get you a time and place to meet.” 

The Senator in question was Virgil Roman, who was chairman of the communications committee and far and away best target they could have picked. Olivia believed every bit as strongly as her grandson that a fire needed to be lit in Washington. So why not light it under the biggest tree? 

Shawna got to repeat her life story another time for Olivia, who marvelled at her determination. “You know it’s never been easy for a woman in this country.” Olivia said. “You have to fight tooth and nail for everything you get, and then you have to fight even harder to hold onto it.”

“I’ve always been pretty scrappy. So that doesn’t scare me. But I’d be lying if I told you I was a bit frightened of getting caught.”

“Well, if you are as talented as Terry says you are, I don't think you need to worry about much. Besides, I don’t believe there’s a jury anywhere that would convict us of anything.”

“Well, let’s hope you’re right.” 

What Shawna then found out was that Olivia had already been to Washington and taken her old friend Virgil out to dinner. She knew that Virgil was not going to run for the Senate again and really liked the idea of going out with a bang. And this project suited him to a T on both the political and personal levels.

“The other thing that should allay your fears is that Jackson has already done some research on possible outcomes.” Terry said. “He figures that as long as we stay anonymous, nobody will come after us. Because the real target would be the Senator and what happens to him”

Shawna was floored. “You people have that much power?”

Olivia just smiled. “To quote the great Garth Brooks, ‘I’ve got friends in low places.’”

After hearing that, Shawna noticed that the little nagging voice in her head had gone silent. And for the first time since this whole thing started, she felt relaxed.

Three days later, Shawna and Terry drove to the Charles River Country Club, in West Boston, where Senator Roman had agreed to be videoed for the AI construct that they would produce. Before they entered the building, they both activated small digital cameras that hung on thin chains around their necks. This would allow them to video the entire setup process, which is something the Senator insisted on.

Senator Roman was a fit sixty-four years old. He reminded Terry of the golfer Jack Nicklaus, especially with his Lacoste shirt and dark slacks.

Senator Roman had reserved a private meeting room. He instructed his security people to stay outside while he did the interview. Terry and Shawna and their gear were thoroughly searched and then allowed to enter the room. Introductions were made and hands were shaken.

 As per the plan, the Senator changed into a suit jacket, white shirt and tie. Shawna set up a small set of lights and had the Senator sit in a chair at the table. On the wall behind him, Terry hung a green screen.

“Thank you for doing this, Senator.” Terry said. “If this works out it will make your job of getting AI legislation passed that much easier.”

“I hear you, son. You know I knew your folks. Met them at a fundraiser that Olivia threw for me back when I was goin’ for my third term.”

“Oh yeah? I miss them a lot, sir.”

“They were good people, so you should be proud of them. You should also know that when my term is over next year, I’ll be settlin’ down in Plymouth. Found a nice house right in your neighbourhood. So I might show up for dinner some nights.”

Terry just smiled because he knew that the Senator and Olivia were much more than just old friends.

Once Shawna had the camera locked in place. She dug into her bag and pulled out three sheets of paper.

“Senator, I’d like you to read each short paragraph. Then speak it back to me looking at the camera. There are about three dozen short paragraphs. We’ll do a couple of different takes of each section. Just make them a little different each time.”

Gotcha.” The senator was no stranger to speaking from a script. He knew exactly what to do and exactly how to do it. “And that’s all you want me to do?” he asked.

“Yes sir. The paragraphs give us all the various lip movements, and the sound recording will allow us to emulate your voice.”

“Goddamn, that’s pretty scary.”

“Yes, sir, it is.” Terry said. “That’s why we're doing this. When we’re finished you won’t be able to tell it wasn’t you.”

“And you’re stickin’ to the script Jack and I worked out, right?”

“Yes sir. We’re just thrilled that you agreed to be part of this.”

“Well, something’s gotta happen. Maybe this will break the goddamn log jam.”  

“We hope so too, sir.”

They spent the better part of the next hour doing the lines, in both passive and aggressive voices. The Senator amazed them with his ability to look at the lines and play them back with ease, uncanny accuracy, and a good range of inflection.

Within an hour the Senator was shaking their hands and wishing them God’s speed. 

As they were packing up their gear, Shawna said. “Your family must have a lot of power. Getting a Senator to participate in something like this is no small feat.”

“I think he did this partially because he likes Gram. But also, if we pull this off, it’s gonna be the biggest crown jewel in his legacy and he knows that too. Hell, we might even get a whole chapter in his book.”

As they packed up, Shawna, who had been a loner pretty much all her life, finally felt as if she was part of something. It was a strange new feeling. But it wasn’t even remotely unpleasant.

As he was reading over what he had just written, Madelaine came through the front door. She stomped the light snow off her boots and shook out her coat then hung it up on one of the pegs in the closet. 

She took off her boots and walked to the kitchen in her stocking feet. She came up behind him and nuzzled him. 

“It’s winter out there.” she said.

“Well, it is October, after all.” He replied.

She leaned over his shoulder and looked at the screen. “Shawna? Who is Shawna?” 

“She’s Terry’s partner. And soon to be significant other.”

“I like the name. It sounds Irish.”

“Well, there are a lot of Irish people in New England.”

“So how did your meeting with Monsieur Flaubert go?”

“Well, he gave me a check for two hundred thousand Euros. And a document that guarantees me 5% of the net profits for the next five years.”

“Wow.” she exclaimed.

“Yeah. I had no idea what that story was worth. I was blown away.”

“Mais oui! I am blown away too.”

“Guess I’ll have to pay some taxes on this.”

“I’ll call my father. He will recommend a good entertainment accountant.”

“You don’t do this?”

“No. That’s what you Americans would call a whole other ball game.”

“OK.”

Madelaine walked into the kitchen and started looking around for something to eat. Phillipe came over and stood by the refrigerator. “Are you free for the next couple of days?” he asked.

She went to her bag and got out her iPad. ‘Oui. I was planning to hang around and read your story.”

“I’ve got a better idea.” He took her up in his arms. “Let’s go to Paris and I will buy you anything you like. It’s the least I can do for your introduction to Monsieur Flaubert. You can read the story on the way.”

Madelaine wrapped he arms around his next. “You may be sorry you said that.”

“Somehow I doubt that.”

She kissed him. He kissed her back and suddenly dinner could wait.

Three days later and about $50,000 Euros lighter, they returned from Paris with several stunning additions to Madelaine’s wardrobe. While they were there they talked a lot about the current story he was working on. So for the next five days he sat at the dining room table with his coffee and he wrote the whole rest of the story.

The next two weeks were a blur, as they worked to assemble the AI rendition of the Senator’s pronouncement. Shawna worked on digitizing and synching the Senator's voice to the narrative that he and Jackson had written. Terry drove to the Senator’s home in North Reading and photographed his study, which is where they would set the piece. Finally after thirteen days and almost as many nights they had what Shawna declared to be a fine cut.

They transferred it to an M-Peg file and sat down to watch the fruits of their labour.

The Senator’s AI-generated image was sitting at his desk in his North Boston home.

When it was over, Shawna and Terry looked at each other, and realized they were now swimming in the deep end of the pool. When they were finished, they drove up to Boston to show it to the Senator.

“My God, you kids are really something.” If I didn’t know better, I’d swear it was the real thing.”

“Yes sir.”, Terry said. We’re quite happy with it. But, in truth, it was mostly Shawna’s effort that made it happen.”

“Well, this ought to really shake things up.”

“Yes sir. That's the whole idea. And by the way, we are putting together the short piece on the making of this video. I’ll bring that to you once it’s finished.”

On the drive back down to Plymouth, they talked a lot about what they would do next. Terry’s thinking had changed somewhat. He was willing was to let this play out and see who would get interested in working with them. He was convinced that America was a true ‘Everybody loves a winner’ country and he felt that there would be more than enough opportunity coming their way once people found out what they had done. 

But Shawna stuck to her guns. She was convinced that their identities needed to be kept totally secret. She was also convinced that with the political state America was in today, nothing good could come of anyone knowing that they were participating in a hoax of this magnitude.

Terry thought about it for quite a while. He played through every negative scenario he could envision. And at the end of that little intellectual exercise, he came to realize that Shawna was right. 

So over the next couple of days, they finished the ‘How it was made’ video, disguising their voices and blurring their faces. They drove it on up to Boston and dropped it off with the Senator, who looked at it three or four times, then just smiled and thanked them for doing it.

“Just so you know, sir.” Terry said, “We have disguised our identities on the video for a reason. Shawna was concerned, and I agree, that while there wouldn’t be any legal issues, there might be any number of people who would be angered by our participation in it.”

“I can understand that, son. The worst it could possibly get in that regard is for you to have to testify before whatever committee is appointed to investigate this. I’m confident it won't come to that. But these are crazy times and the people who control Congress right now are the craziest of them all.” 

As Phillipe laboured through the story, he was working along two streams. One was the political stream and how it would be resolved with the US government finally deciding to create some laws to get AI fakery under control, and the development of the relationship between Terry and Shawna.

After four days Phillipe had a draft that was a little over twenty thousand words. But he knew that in the hands of pros like Daniel, Gary and Ana, this could easily become a very timely mini-series.

After he had cleaned up as much as he could, he gave the piece to Madelaine to read. She went up to the bedroom, closed the door and laid down on the big bed to read it, while Phillipe went into town to do some food shopping, which is something he very much enjoyed.  He believed that a lot of very wealthy people, who had servants to do all that stuff for them, were missing out on the real experience of day-to-day life, and that perhaps that was part of the problem. That disconnect in lifestyles was part of the wall between the wealthy and the rest of humanity. He thought about that while he was driving into town and thought that there might be a story in there somewhere. He made a mental note and filed it away for future reference.

When he returned two hours later, Madelaine was sitting at the kitchen table with her laptop and a cup of coffee. She smiled at his as he quickly unpacked all the groceries and poured himself a cup.

Sitting down opposite her, he said. “So, what do you think.”

Madelaine didn’t say anything for several seconds. Then she said. “I think you have, umm, tuned into a situation the entire world can relate to. This story is happening everywhere, especially the extortion, and I believe that is only going to become more of an issue as time goes by.”

Phillipe had incorporated a sub-plot where the daughter of a friend of the Senator was being blackmailed by a couple of Virginia Tech hackers, who have created a porno video and carefully edited in the daughter’s face.

“But yes, you are trois par trois, three for three, in the story department. This is more than enough to keep Monsieur Flaubert’s crew busy for the next year, perhaps more.”

“Thank you for your honesty.” Phillipe said. “I will send them off to Monsieur Flaubert right after I have reviewed them one more time.”

“Good idea.” Madelaine said. “But use my copy, I have found a number of typos in both stories.”

Madelaine them emailed her corrections to Phillipe. “Are you busy today?” 

“No, not really.”

“Let’s go for a drive.” I’ve been here for several months ands haven’t really seem much of the country.”

“Tres bien.” Madelaine said, as she closed her computer. Phillipe downloaded the corrected versions of the two new stories and closed his as well. And off they went.

 

~ Epilogue ~   

Over the next two years, Video Flaubert produced all three of Phillipe’s concepts, and created licensing agreements with production companies in more than 20 countries. This created a net income for Flaubert of more than 60 million Euros a year. With that success, Flaubert upped Phillipe’s percentage to 10%. 

The writing crew kept very busy and were also 10% profit partners, as well as production advisors and script editors in several of the English-speaking countries, that had optioned the concepts.

At the end of the second year, Madelaine sold her practice, because she found herself pregnant and preferred to be a real mom as opposed to a surrogate mom to a bunch of millionaires. Nine months later, she gave birth twins, a boy and a girl.

Phillipe wrote three more stories which he simply gave to Monsieur Flaubert, to do with as he pleased. He trusted Flaubert and there was alway a cheque in the mail.

After that, he started to write another piece, titled Lilli’s Lost & Found, which was a love story set primarily in New York, Long Island and Washington. As there was no pressure on him to produce anything new for at least another year or more, he grew the story into a 90,000 plus word novella. After it was completed he told Monsieur Flaubert and he, in turn, referred Phillipe to an editor named Edwin Pierce whom he knew in London. Phillipe flew to London to meet with Mr Pierce who told him, after reading the story, that his publishing house, McNally’s, would be honoured to publish his novel. The fact that Philippe now had a reputation in the TV industry gave him a certain cachet with the editor’s publishing company. After one fairly minor set of revisions, the book was published in English and released world wide. It was a huge bestseller in the US and, of all places, Australia.

Philippe politely declined offers to travel and promote the book, but was happy to have his friend Daniel Snow record an interview with him at his home in Zurich. The video was given to his British publisher and released through all the major outlets.

About a year later, Phillipe flew to New York and with the help of an immigration lawyer who was a good friend of Toby’s, was able to legally change his name. He then returned home none the worse for wear, legally, and simply carried on, writing about anything that interested him. He did not participate in the literary community and his publisher was fine with that. They compared him to the elusive American author JD Salinger, who preferred to remain as far from the prying eyes of the media as possible. This merely added to his mystique. The publisher only pressured Phillipe for another book for a short time. He replied to them by email, which simply read. “When it’s cooked, I will serve it to you.” They left him alone after that.

Phillipe and Madelaine had a great life together. He got to be a work-at-home dad, and she got to be a stay-at-home mom. They had a small circle of friends and their children were raised in a stable and loving home. 

Eventually, after writing one more novella entitled Juliet’s Gift, which was the story of a young girl from the midwest with the mental ability to open all kinds of different locks, Phillipe stopped writing stories altogether. 

Instead began to write poetry, which as he progressed into it and got better at it, became much more lyrical. Not being a singer himself, he went looking for a small band that were doing cover songs in English. He and Madelaine found one on a weekend excursion to northern Italy, of all places. The band was called Firefly and did mostly Bob Seger, Jackson Browne, Eagles and even some Dylan. The lead singer, whose name was Delbert Jones, had a great voice, not unlike that of Lou Gramm, who was the lead singer for the very successful band, Foreigner.

Phillipe invited them to come to Zurich, all expenses paid and talk about writing some songs with his lyrics. He left them a small book of lyrics, and one week later they showed up in two minivans with all their equipment. Madelaine’s mother, Louise Strindberg found them a quiet farmhouse to live in while they worked out a show using Phillipe’s lyrics. Phillipe then got them into a studio where they demoed pretty much the entire repertoire of original, songs they had created. Phillipe was genuinely astonished at the musicianship in the band. Each of the five band members was a composer. Phillipe could not help but wonder why, with all the talent they possessed, they were just a cover band. Delbert simply replied, “None of us can write lyrics that are worth a shit.”

Through a former client of Madelaine’s, they were able to find a well-connected music agent in Paris who sold them through to Apple Music in London, where they went to record their first album. Phillipe paid for everything, and he and Madelaine were able to join them for their album release at a large club in London. After that, Apple Music took over setting up club dates and getting radio play and video exposure all over England, Scotland and Ireland. Apple also handled the music publishing which then gave Phillipe another revenue stream, albeit a small one, relatively speaking.

Phillipe had invested close to a million and a half Euros to support the band while they wrote the songs and recorded the material. He continued to write lyrics and send them off to Delbert and they would add them to their repertoire. About a year later, Apple Music approached Phillipe about writing lyrics for other bands on their roster. He politely declined. He had found what he was looking for with Delbert and Firefly.

Phillipe didn’t care how much it cost. His estate had grown to well over a hundred million Euros. And for the most part, he got to work at home doing exactly what he wanted to do. He was seriously investigating ways to give about half of his money away. He couldn’t rationalize having that much money while others had next to nothing. Phillipe got up every morning and faced a brand new day with new possibilities. New things to try. New things to teach his children who were now seven years old.

One time, in college, when he was looking around on his Facebook page he saw a great quote that was attributed to Bob Dylan. He didn’t believe much that he saw on social media, but this one sounded kind of genuine.

“A man is a success if he gets up 

in the morning and goes to bed at night, 

and in between he does what he wants to do.”

That always stuck with Phillipe and even though he was only thirty-three, he believed he had stayed true to that for at least the last decade. What the next decade would hold was anybody’s guess.

FIN