The Voting Machine

Final Coordinates

Annabelle did her tell again, tugging at the ponytail she'd set in place.

"You mean your daughter?" she confirmed.

"You had Juan Ricardo take her as your insurance policy. You knew I might solve this, because people had underestimated me in the past and they paid the price. I killed Chet Castle with my bare hands because I thought he had my daughter. He would've told me anything I wanted to spare his life. But he didn't know where my daughter was."

"I never underestimated you, Temo. I know how you hide your intelligence to get an edge on people."

"And you were willing to kidnap my daughter to buy my silence."

"The greater good," she muttered weakly.

"Where is she?" I demanded.

She walked over to the whiteboard and grabbed the sharpie pen. Then she knelt beside me and scrawled a string of numbers on my arm.

"I'll be leaving this country," she said. "I'll be gone a long time. The foundation can become a global network now. We can expand beyond drug treatment and support dozens of causes: anti-poverty, disease prevention, women's rights, education. Shiro and its clients spent decades wrecking the world to maximize their profits. Now we'll use their money to undo the damage. I don't care about profits. I care about a better future."

"I am sure you have a lot of reasons to go abroad."

She winced. "You still doubt my intentions."

"Your intentions are the only thing I don't doubt."

She ran her finger along my arm. "The Sunflower Foundation will continue here. I've delegated control to a board of people whom I trust: Brenda, Fatima, the Senator and others."

"I don't care about any of that," I said, pushing her hand away and studying the numbers on my arm. "I get my daughter back today and you'll get your silence. After that, there's nothing left between us."

"I loved you once, Temo. You know that."

"I've seen what you do to the people you love. Whatever happened between the two of us is over now. I want to go forward without looking back. Only God can judge the paths we're on."

Annabelle left the room without making eye contact again. I stood up and walked out of the clinic, back into the sweaty, sunny stink of Skid Row. My first stop was the hotel on 7th street, where I paid the same clerk another hundred bucks to hand me back the sealed envelope I'd given him plus a pack of matches so I could burn it outside in the alley.

Once my letter to Stevens was nothing more than a swirl of scattered ashes, I held up my arm, checking the numbers once again and then I punched them into the map application on my phone. The GPS coordinates told me where I had to go. When I returned to the motel, I filled the tank of my loaner car and headed south. I wasn't sure whether Stevens would try to track me. There was a risk that he might come after me or forward my location to local authorities so they could stop me at the border. But I was willing to take that chance.

I filled the gas and headed right down the Grapevine, through South LA and the Orange Crush, past Camp Pendleton and San Diego. As I drove along the coast I thought about Annabelle, escaping with blood on her hands and billions in the bank, flying around the globe in pursuit of her grand dream to improve the human condition, comforting the afflicted, afflicting the comfortable, trying against the odds to undo the nightmare of history and prove that another world is possible. The reckoning of justice would come in some final form that I couldn't begin to imagine.

My mother told me that when nothing else is working out, at least you can be a good person. And now I realize that the being of it is the thing. It is is the simplest thing and the hardest thing. And to do the right thing in the right way does not mean you will prevail. It might mean you suffer a more agonizing defeat than anyone else, like Cuauhtemoc with his feet to the fire, sacrificing everything for a cause that would be doomed and buried in the sands of time.

I passed the border checkpoint into Tijuana. I continued along the coastal highway until I reached a beachfront house in Rosarito that matched the coordinates scrawled on my arm. It was a quiet estate, understated in its grace and elegance. Song birds perched on lemon trees in the front garden and the ocean purred beyond the sandbar in the distance.

I knocked gently on the front door and a middle-aged nanny answered the door.

"A quién va dirigido favor?"

"Soy Temo McCarthy. Fui enviado por la dueña de la casa."

"Sí señor. Por favor, pase . Hemos estado esperando."

She led me through the foyer, decorated with modern furniture in vibrant, pastel colors and lined with full-wall windows overlooking the waves lapping the beach outside. She took me into the nursery room in the back, where Reina was waiting in her crib, playing with a stuffed doll. I took her in my arms and kissed her on the top of her head. Her skin was soft and her hair smelled like baby shampoo. She was chubby and rosy-cheeked, a child who had been well fed and clothed and cared for in captivity.

"Thank you," I whispered

I took out my cell phone and asked the nurse to wake up Suzy. When Suzy answered the phone by her bed I asked her to switch to video so I could show her our daughter. It was the first time I'd seen Suzy smile in as long as I could remember and I knew right then that we would rebuild and recover. We would rise above the trauma and heartache and the lingering aftermath of betrayals and bad decisions. The forces of the universe had conspired to destroy our love and extinguish our hope and those forces had failed.

"You did it," Suzy told me, her face wet with tears of joy.

"We're coming home."