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“How?”
“I don’t know—you’re a smart man. Figure it out.”
“But how could I do that? I’ve been dealing with the quarterly reports… I’ve been up to my eyeballs in work.” Already, I feel my training kicking in. It’s like a bicycle. Once you learn, you can’t forget.
As I expected, his tone grew more agitated during our second phone call. “I told you to handle it or I’d handle her.”
I want to ask why he’s doing this. Why now, when I was so close to getting away from here. But that’s not the question to ask. “How am I supposed to do that?” I demand with a loud exhale. Never ask questions that start with “why.” “Why” is always an accusation, in any language.
“Like I said. You’re a smart guy. I trust that you’ll figure it out.” Mark excels at speaking vaguely. Best not to incriminate himself. But the manipulation, the incessant persuasion, the indirect bullying it’s all there just underneath the surface waiting to be unearthed, begging to be misunderstood.
“You had choices,” he cautions. Nails on a chalkboard to my ears. When people issue threats, directly or indirectly, they create ambiguities they fully intend to exploit. In this case, it’s me. A loss, even a perceived one, is far worse than a gain. He knows this. It could be conscious. It could be subconscious. But he knows. This is why he has my wife.
“I’m sure we’ll figure something out.”
“Do you want to make this right, Tom? That’s what I need to know.”
“Yes, but how?” Yes is nothing without how. I listen to Mark breathe into the receiver. I let the silence between us linger. The less one says in any negotiation, the better. Listening is one of the most powerful tools a person can have in their arsenal—one which few people utilize for all it’s worth.
“You tell me.”
The secret to gaining the upper hand in negotiation is giving the other side the illusion of control.
“How about this…how about I come to you and we come up with a plan? You know better than anyone that acting in haste is senseless.”
“Okay,” he says, as though this was what he’d wanted all along. “That sounds good. We’re at the lake house.”
“The lake house.” It’s not meant to be a question. I turn the car around and I drive in the direction of my wife’s captors. I’ve already lost enough. I won’t let them make me a coward, too.
“Oh, and Tom…”
“Yes?”
“Don’t fuck this up.”
I veer left in the direction I’ve been instructed to take. Not to my house. For this to go as planned, I knew I had to negotiate away from there. I had to come at Mark with a surprise. I call him back.
“This is good,” I say. “About the lake house.”
He doesn’t say anything.
“She can’t swim.”
“Beth is here.”
“Mark,” I remind him. “We have to do what we have to do.” He doesn’t know that I know why he wants those men killed. They’re not just men my wife slept with. They’re competition. Competition that will be as quick to put the move on his devotees as he would be on theirs. Austin isn’t big enough yet for multiple gurus. Mark wants to be the only one. I take a deep breath in. “We can’t have people thinking deception among us is okay. No one respects weakness.”
“No one,” he agrees.
“That’s why we have to be smart about this. We must send a message without outing ourselves. We have to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
“Maybe I should just kill her now.” He’s testing me. Melanie is Mark’s leverage. Without her, there’s only me. If he’d wanted to start there, he would have. Mark does not do busy work.
“Whatever you want,” I tell him. “I just want what’s best for the church. We need strong leadership. We need someone in control. You’re always saying that…”
“Excellence, yes.” He doesn’t think I’m the guy for the job. He wants to—but he’s not sure.
Now that I’d anchored his emotions in a minefield of low expectations, I play on his loss aversion. “She’s my wife. Wait and let me handle this like I said I would.”
