by G M Eppers
“Is that what all this tension is about?” He turned sideways in the seat to face me. “The Taco Bell thing was a joke. I saw the burned out Chembassy from the plane on the way in. I know that if the Chembassador had been killed it would have been in the International media, but there was nothing. So I assumed he’d changed to another venue. I’m not even sure Belgium has a Taco Bell.” He was laughing at me. He wasn’t actually laughing, but he was still laughing at me. “Just how paranoid have you gotten?”
I took a deep breath, trying to relax. It’s amazing how someone who seemed so apathetic could be so attuned to my emotional state. Did money buy empathy? “You have to admit, things are different between us.”
“That’s true.” He tilted his head, considering the idea. “Is it a good thing or a bad thing?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Do you still want me to take you? Feel free to change your mind. I’m not going to force you into anything.”
“Do you swear you won’t push me out of the plane without a parachute? Swear it on . . . on The Fountainhead.”
He put a hand on my shoulder, which used to be the equivalent of pushing my buttons but for some reason felt more like an off switch today. “I swear on Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead that I won’t push you out of the plane without a parachute.”
“Okay. Now swear that you won’t push me out of the plane with a parachute, either.” I grinned at him. He probably thought he was going to get away with a semantic technicality.
He swore on that, too, then signaled to the driver to open the door. With my bag slung over my shoulder, I allowed him to take me by the hand to help me out of the limo, but walked up the staircase ahead of him on my own and resumed my seat in the private cabin.
Chapter Four
Despite having the entire Airbus to ourselves, we stayed in the private cabin for the short flight across the North Sea. The challenge I had set for Butte was to finally get me a ride on the London Eye. I’d tried more than a dozen times and been thwarted each time. The last had been about a month earlier when my team and I, with Sir Haughty’s friend Sticky, had gotten to the ticket booth late in the day only to have the attendant roll down the shade in our faces. It would be approximately the same time of day by the time we got there. It was a perfect test of Butte’s influence, and how high he ranked in the organization. From there, I could get some sense of WHEY’s capabilities and whether or not they had the resources to pull off a string of bombings across Europe. I’d either bring Butte down a peg or have the ride of my life. It was a win-win.
Before Butte took his seat, he excused himself. “I’m going to talk to the pilot for a sec. I’ll be right back.”
I settled in next to the window and buckled my seatbelt. In a few minutes, he returned. “I asked him to change his flight plan,” he explained. “I want to show you what I saw. We were on the way to Prague and should have still been cruising over Belgium too high to see anything, but there was unusually high cloud cover so we had to travel lower. There was turbulence, but the pilot didn’t like the looks of those clouds, so he opted for a bumpy ride over a possible crash. This far north it could have resulted in ice crystals in the engines and he’s a better safe than sorry kind of pilot.” Most successful pilots are. “It might take a few minutes to file the change and get authorization, but we’ll be on our way shortly –“
“Which is the only way I do things, right?” I said. I hadn’t told him about losing a quarter of an inch. I didn’t think I would. He liked to kid me about my height, or rather lack of it, but it had always been endearing, actually. It was never done in a mean-spirited way and never when I was down.
“You said it. I didn’t,” he said. “But yes.” He grinned as he adjusted his seatbelt.
The plane taxied to the runway, then stopped for a few minutes. “Maybe he didn’t get permission for the new flight plan,” I suggested as we sat there for what seemed to be a long time.
“He’d call me. Be patient,” he said, though I did catch him discreetly checking his watch two or three times before we finally began accelerating. Shortly after lifting into the air, the plane banked to backtrack toward Brussels while it climbed to about 10,000 feet. This time I was prepared for the burst of sound and the air pressure, and again worked my jaw to clear my ears. “It’s dusk. It might be hard to see,” he said as he peered out the window.
I peered, too, but I still needed him to point it out before I saw it. A black hole in the middle of Brussels with city lights all around it. I could see the shadow of the remnants of a building in the black hole, but it was like looking through a hazy filter at a film negative. We circled it twice, and I was able to see it from every angle. One angle showed more jagged edges in the shadows than the others. Then we made the course correction to head to Heathrow. “It’s hard to see the full extent of the damage at this hour, unfortunately, but you can get the general idea,” Butte said. What, I thought, AirWHEY didn’t have a searchlight attachment? “What I want to know is why we didn’t hear anything about it on the news. Do you know anything about that?”
“Nope.” I was being evasive, and I knew it showed. I was hoping he wouldn’t press the issue. Silly hope.
“But you knew about it before, too. Before I mentioned it. Or you wouldn’t have asked.” The plane climbed higher. “I’ve been open with you all day. I sang for you. I cooked you breakfast. But you are hiding something from me.” I was surprised he hadn’t pushed me about it earlier. Maybe he was attributing it to my recent job situation or separation anxiety from being apart from my team, and Billings. This new Butte was hard to read. I was used to him being oblivious to me, but now he seemed all too interested. I had to get him off the subject, but I was curious. Was this the result of nearly a decade in WHEY? How could it be a bad thing? Perhaps he’d spent so much time and energy fighting for people’s rights he had finally learned to see another viewpoint. Not that he could accept it, but he could see it and tolerate it. With a little push now and then to join the Dark Side. Not so much Luke Skywalker’s father, but maybe his second cousin or a close uncle.
I didn’t feel like I was in danger anymore, but I wasn’t ready to tell him everything, either. The plan had been that he wasn’t even supposed to learn about my little private investigation. I was supposed to leave him after I felt satisfied with my conclusion and with him none the wiser for it. I wasn’t sure how he’d react to being manipulated, basically. Oh, I knew he wasn’t going to have me iced or anything like that. But I wasn’t interested in hurting his feelings, either. “Please, Butte. Don’t. Not yet.” I could feel his eyes studying me although I continued looking out the window, seeing the North Sea creep under us. The vast, dark expanse was not very interesting viewing, but I kept looking at it anyway.
“I think I can figure it out,” he said. I kept my gaze out the window, but he probably saw me stiffen. “You’re here shopping.” I turned my head back to him, waiting for him to expand on that. “You’re wondering if there’s a place for you in WHEY, even temporarily, to get you on your feet. That’s why you want to know what we do, what I do. You’re trying to figure out if your CURDS skill set will still be useful. Sorry, but we don’t investigate, we don’t arrest, and we don’t shoot anyone. We protest and demonstrate and that’s it. It’s not hard, though. You could do it. Nice change of pace, I guess. A lot safer. Your mother would be happy about that.” He leaned toward me, grabbing my eyes with his. “You know I’ve got your back. I know where your loyalties lie, but that doesn’t matter. If you need something, just ask.” Enter a little push. Hello Dark Side.
“What have you done with the real Butte Montana?” Meeting his gaze, I presented a confidence I didn’t entirely feel. “You never cared about my welfare before. You didn’t bat an eye when I kicked you out.”
“I respected your wishes. You wished me gone. So I left.” He scratched an itch on his cheek.
That wasn’t how it had felt at the time. But it had gotten him off the topic of how I kn
ew about the previous bombing, so I decided to pursue it. This was even more uncomfortable, though, in some ways. I guess it’s what you’d call taking one for the team. “You didn’t try to come back. You never called. I had to call you when the papers came through. I had to track you down to sign them.”
“Because I didn’t want to,” he said quickly. Then we were both silent. I was amazed. It’s true we hadn’t done much talking after Dad died, but then we’d been married for twelve years. We both thought we knew each other. I’m not sure why. It wasn’t like we ever finished each other’s sentences like other married couples, or ate off each other’s plates. But after twelve years it was easy to just assume that the not talking meant there was nothing to talk about.
The plane bobbed gently in light turbulence over the North Sea. We wouldn’t even reach normal cruising altitude. The flight was so short, we’d be preparing for landing before we got that high. We skidded along just under the clouds. It was a little choppy, like a kiddy roller coaster, but nothing scary. I’d been on planes enough to know that turbulence was commonplace. I barely noticed the slight changes in elevation. The pilot did an excellent job of compensating and the flight was relatively smooth. I was even getting used to the cabin pressure and the engine noise.
“I know I’ve changed,” he admitted. “Back then, I did whatever I thought you wanted. I never bothered to ask to make sure I was reading you right, and maybe I wasn’t. You’re so damned—“ he couldn’t find the word for it at first, struggled with a few choices, then settled on “—complex. I stayed away because I was tired of guessing. I needed a break. But the last few months, now, have been a whirlwind of activity. It used to be a big deal just to go to Tennessee or Massachusetts to demonstrate, and now I’m jetting all over Europe. I’ve seen a lot of people, and they almost all want cheese. I want to help them get it. It’s been enough time. Everyone knows about Uber and how to identify it and how to avoid it. We need to lighten up on the reins a bit. And for the first time, I think WHEY can really make a difference. That’s what I was trying to tell Billings. This is exciting. The start of a new world.” He leaned forward and took my hand. “One more step back toward the old one, back before OOPS ever happened. We can make cheese just be cheese again. Wouldn’t you like that?”
“And put my entire company out of business?”
“So you want to keep Uber around so you have something to do?” He shot back at me. Touché. It was hard to argue with that. Yes, my job is a contradiction. I fight to eliminate Uber, but if I succeed I will need to find another job. That doesn’t mean I’m willing to give Uber a leg up, or that I don’t want to succeed. I suppose police officers deal with this kind of thing every day, too. If no one broke the law, we wouldn’t need them. People like to say the only sure things are death and taxes, but another one is that someone somewhere is going to try to do something just because society says they shouldn’t. It may not be in everyone’s nature, but it’s in enough people that the human race has a built-in criminal element that will never disappear. There will always be members of any society who ride the edges of legality like a surfer hanging ten on a monster curl, risking life, limb, and a watery grave for the thrill and privilege of bragging rights. And you simply couldn’t decriminalize it all. There had to be rules.
“Okay, I admit it. Fighting Uber is a contradiction. But it’s a contradiction on your side, too. You want the old world back, but you can’t get there by allowing Uber free rein. I don’t know if fully eradicating it is possible anymore, but you’re not going to solve a problem by ignoring it.” I guess I was pushing, too. But he started it. “I want to make the world a safer place, and fighting Uber is one way to do that.”
“Quid pro quo. I’ll admit you helped keep it safe, back when there was a real danger.”
“The danger is still real, Butte.”
“You’re a mom,” he continued, ignoring my comment. “That’s what moms do. You see the world through a mother’s eyes. I get that. You want to protect and nurture. But I’m a father.”
“Fathers nurture, too.” He was getting preachy and it was making me uncomfortable. In his eyes, I might have been the first to get preachy. I’d lost track. But I didn’t dare try to avoid the debate. If I couldn’t stand up for what I believed, I didn’t deserve to work for CURDS.
“Not in the same way, Helena. Fathers instill self-confidence, self-reliance, independence. We throw the kid in the pool to teach him to swim. We kick the bird out of the nest. We make sure a child is ready for the world. We don’t try to make the world ready for the child. We know we can’t control the world.”
I laughed. “You can’t control the child, either, Butte. Not in the long run. You have to face the inherent risk in life. Sometimes the kid drowns, or the bird hits pavement. You have to do BOTH, prepare the child and change the world. Throw him in the pool, but put on water wings, make sure the bird is going to have a soft landing and not get the life knocked out of him.” I was already tired of these metaphors. Arguing with Butte wasn’t my idea of a good time. I still felt like I was in the right, but I could see his side of things, too. He wasn’t wrong about the importance of freedom. He just didn’t apply it correctly. “Look, here we are arguing again. We’re both wrong, and we’re both right. Let’s just leave it at that.” I pulled my hand out of his and leaned back in the seat. “Thank you for the job offer, though. I’ll consider it,” I lied. He had to know I was lying about that. Or had we both changed so much that neither one of us knew the other anymore? Had we ever really known each other? I could still see the man I fell in love with, but when he got on the subject of cheese it was like this Hyde creature came out. “I hate this argument. It never ends.” We were both too stubborn to give an inch. And neither one of us felt unjustified in being stubborn.
Due to the turbulence and the short flight, the pilot never turned off the seatbelt sign. He announced we would be landing in ten minutes, the plane gave another lurch as punctuation, and Butte said, “I’m sorry about that. I got carried away. I’ve been getting carried away a lot lately. Like I said, it’s exciting. The new studies--”
“—are a crock,” I finished for him. “John S. Hopkins is not Johns Hopkins. He has no credibility.”
He was taken aback, probably feeling like a fool for making that mistake with the name. “Galileo didn’t have credibility in the beginning, either.”
“Galileo wasn’t lying to everyone,” I said.
“Oh, I see,” Butte replied. “You only lie to individuals, like when you told that dairy farmer Grundy that Billings worked for eBay.”
“How did you know about that?” That mission was a couple of months ago, and as far as I knew Butte was nowhere near the Wisconsin farm. We had used a simple fiction to gain access to a stockpile of cheese Grundy was holding in his silo, suspecting that it was Uber. It had turned out to be a common processed cheese-like product called Chmelty, but the conversation Butte referred to had taken place at the silo, with very few others present.
“I have my sources,” he said mysteriously, with a playful expression on his face. He even wiggled his eyebrows.
A light bulb went off in my head. “The reporter!” We had borrowed a suit jacket from a reporter on a news crew to make Billings look like a businessman, and he no doubt had heard us explaining the plan to Billings.
“A friend of a friend of a friend,” Butte said. He seemed to count off something on his fingers, then added, “Of a friend.”
I gave him a gentle smile and a sigh. Talking with him, from time to time, made me feel as if we could possibly get back together, but my brain kept telling me it would be a huge mistake. It would never work. A couple could only avoid a certain topic so long, and then it was like Mount Vesuvius. I couldn’t stay. I was getting no sense that Butte and WHEY were anything more than they appeared to be. He was right about one thing. I was the one hiding things, not him. There were no armed guards, no one had threatened me in any way. I’d been watching the people he interac
ted with, and not one had done anything suspicious, like talk into their watch or tug an earlobe. No one had ducked behind a corner, even at the dock where there’d been dozens of nooks and crannies to duck into. I’d seen the limo driver discreetly scratch his package, but that was it. Any time I’d felt in danger it had been my own imagination at fault, imagination fueled by suspicion and fear instilled by someone else. I would enjoy the evening with him, avoiding the subject of cheese and Uber, and then part company and head back to Kutna Hora and my team. I felt perfectly confident in telling Miss Chiff that WHEY had no part in any of the bombings on any level.
Of course, that left the question of who was. I hoped my team had made some progress on that front. WHEY was made up of hired protesters, not detectives, and nothing more. They would be as useless in tracking down the culprit or culprits as they were blocking Uber. I’m not sure why the Krochedy Brothers were willing to spend so much money on simple, peaceful protests, but to paraphrase what Gertrude Stein said about Oakland, there was no here here. I was almost disappointed. A little intrigue would have been interesting. Scary, to be sure, but also interesting. I’m strange that way.
The plane landed at Heathrow and rolled to an available gate. Both the CURDS1 and AirWHEY could use a gate, but because the flight schedules were independent of the commercial airlines there wasn’t always a gate available. That’s when we used the tarmac or apron. This time, a gate was available for disembarking, but while AirWHEY waited for our return flight it would be pulling over to an out of the way spot on the apron. Butte and I walked down the concourse together. Neither of us made an attempt to hold hands. We were just two friends hanging out now. There were no more spinning beds in my future. Butte was fulfilling a promise, not trying to run the proverbial bases. I kept my head down. I could find my way out of Heathrow Airport blindfolded if I had to. I stopped suddenly and stared at a scuff I noticed on the floor. I looked left and right, walked to the left and turned around. “This is it.” I grinned.