Page 22 of The Lie Maker

I blinked. “Of course. Everyone’s heard of it. I mean, everyone who’s ever seen a movie or read a crime novel or watched the news.”

“It hasn’t been around forever,” she said. “It’s not like the post office or something. It was authorized in 1970 by the Organized Crime Control Act. Since then, nearly twenty thousand people have been protected through the program.”

“That’s a lot of witnesses.”

“The U.S. Marshals Service oversees the program. I don’t know if you knew that or not.”

“I do know that,” I said.

“So let’s say you have a witness to a serious crime, and it’s reasonable to assume that there will be serious retribution against this individual if they testify. We can give that person a new identity, relocate them, set them up with a new life so that they’re safe, so that anyone who might seek revenge or to silence them won’t be able to. A lot of the people we relocate are themselves facing serious legal consequences, and in exchange for their testimony, those charges will be dropped and we’ll set them up with a new life. Not just them, but their family, too, like a spouse, and children.”

“I’m aware,” I said. “Why are you telling me all this?”

“Getting to that,” Gwen Kaminsky said, and smiled. “Just like you, I have to let the story take its course, you know?”

She shot another stern look at the guy with the nervous knee, then turned her attention back to me.

“Here’s the thing. We’re pretty good at what we do. We get people set up in a new location, we keep tabs on them, we do everything we can to keep them safe. And we have a pretty damn good record in that regard. But I’m going to admit that there’s one area in which we fall a bit short.”

“What’s that?”

“We’re not very creative.”

“Creative?”

Gwen smiled. “We don’t just relocate these individuals, give them a new identity and a new job. We need to give them a backstory. Who they are, where they came from, what makes them tick. They need stories, new stories. If they settle into some community and start running off at the mouth about things that really did happen to them, then people might start putting things together. Realize they’re someone they read or heard about in the news, and maybe they’d tell a friend, and that friend tells someone else, and before you know it, these stories get to the wrong people, and not only do these relocated witnesses find their covers blown, they may be in very real danger of being found and killed.”

“Wouldn’t it be smarter for them to just keep their mouths shut?” I offered.

Gwen smiled. “Indeed. In a perfect world.”

“But if they’re telling stories of things that never happened to them,” I said, “someone’s going to catch them in a lie. Something won’t ring true.”

She pursed her lips, considering my point. “Maybe, but think about your own experience. Someone tells you where they went to school or about their first job or the time they got on an elevator with Robert Redford. Do you check out their story? Of course not. And even if you think they’re lying, what do you do? You think, what a bullshitter. And let it go at that. But that’s better than one of our people telling you legitimate details about themselves that could get them in trouble.”

There was some truth in that. I’d known plenty of people over the years who liked to tell stories to puff themselves up that I knew had to be complete fabrications. Someone I’d gone to school with liked to tell a story about how he once dated a famous supermodel. The truth was, he’d been in line behind her waiting to board a flight to Atlanta and said hello.

So yeah, maybe Gwen had a point. We rarely challenge people on their lies unless there’s something big at stake.

“We’ve got people who do their best at cobbling together fictitious anecdotes, work histories, imagined shenanigans from their school days. But they spend most of their time staring at their computer screens trying to come up with something. We were recently putting together a fictitious biography for a bookkeeper we were relocating. A somewhat nerdy kind of fellow who was keeping the accounts for an embezzler, and one of our so-called writers came up with the idea that at one time he was a rodeo clown.”

“You never know,” I said. “Someone has to be the rodeo clown.”

“It was ridiculous.”

I could finally see where this might be going.

Gwen said, “We would like to engage you to write those backstories.”

“I see,” I said.

“You don’t look very excited about the proposal.”

“I have questions.”

“Shoot.”

“First, how did you know I wrote books? They were published under a pseudonym.”

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