Leaving the phone, Rachel glanced down the row of parked cars. The panel truck was there, stopped directly behind her Toyota, trapping her car. Preventing her from driving.
Deliberately? Had to be. But why?
Maybe it was just coincidence.
Above the chain-link fence that lined the airfield, the sky was cloudless except for a black speck moving toward a strip of land shaved bare among the perpetual crop rows. A whirring sound rose as the speck became a plane that touched down gracefully and rolled to a stop some 20 yards away.
The pilot appeared. A woman, slender and agile, with hair like smoke. Alexandra Miller was making her way toward the building. She caught sight of Rachel and stopped. “What a nice surprise!”
Rachel fumbled for her manners. “Yes. Good to see you.”
“What are you doing here? You look upset.”
“It’s nothing, really. Well, maybe I’m a little jumpy. Someone is blocking my car.”
Alexandra’s eyes darkened as they skimmed Rachel’s flushed face. She patted her shoulder, then took a cell phone from her pocket, flipped it open and pushed a single key with her thumb, turned away and said something into it.
She took Rachel’s arm and began walking quickly. “I have an idea. Guaranteed to change your mood.”
“I’m okay, really.”
“You don’t look okay. You look miserable. I seem to be making a habit of finding you when things are going badly.”
Rachel managed a smile. “I guess I’m a little unstrung. And yes, you sure rescued me from those muggers.”
“Let’s have a quick cup of tea,” Alexandra said, opening the door to the small waiting room. An urn of hot water sat on a card table. She took two Styrofoam cups, filled them, tore open two teabags, dropped them into the water, and handed a cup to Rachel.
They moved to the window where several people were watching the airfield. “So, what has unstrung you?” Alexandra asked.
Rachel was wondering what Hank would do when he returned and found her gone. She took a sip of the tea and winced as it burned her tongue. “Nothing much.” She blew gently on the tea and took another sip. “Well, there are some problems. Someone I really trusted.…”
Where could she go now? What should she do?
Alexandra shot her a look. “Bad idea trusting anyone.”
“Too late now.”
“A man?”
Rachel nodded, thinking Alexandra couldn’t possibly imagine the degree of betrayal. “I need to find a place to stay for a while.”
“That’s easy. Come with me.”
“Oh, no,” Rachel said. “I couldn’t.”
Alexandra was gazing at the airfield. “Of course you can.” She turned to Rachel. “Look, do me a favor.”
“What?”
“Just let me rescue you again. I have a wonderful idea. I guarantee it will change your mood.”
Alexandra crossed the room to the door. Rachel followed her into the unpaved parking area. The van was still blocking her car. A pickup truck was pulling away, throwing dust.
“This will be perfect,” Alexandra said as she reached a black Jaguar.
Rachel was thinking that might be true. Alexandra’s place might be the perfect place to hide for a while.
They got into the car. “Not afraid of heights, are you?” Alexandra asked.
“A little.” Oh, no. She had forgotten that flying was Alexandra’s favorite way to unwind. The last thing she wanted was another plane ride. “I don’t think—”
Alexandra cut her off. “Trust me.”
Rachel wiped sweaty palms on her jeans. “Okay.”
Alexandra backed the car in a semicircle, then it sprang forward like the cat it was named for. A few miles later, she pulled off the road into an open field where two pickups were parked.
The field seemed nearly filled by an enormous pool of bright yellow.
Alexandra laughed at the expression on Rachel’s face. “That’s Delilah. My hot-air balloon. Ever been up in one?”
“No.” Rachel didn’t want to now, either. But Alexandra seemed so pleased at the prospect, and the woman had offered her a place to stay. The least she could do was humor her. It was probably perfectly safe. People went up in balloons every day. And maybe she could tell Alexandra the truth. Maybe the two of them could figure out what to do.
“I was planning to go up,” Alexandra was saying. “Pure luck that you caught me.”
The balloon’s basket seemed oddly small against the sea of yellow. Alexandra strode toward it. Four men who had been sitting on the grass rose and followed.
The pool of yellow became a huge bubble.
Alexandra climbed easily over the side of the basket. Rachel followed clumsily. Her companion was studying the small array of valve handles and gauges on the console.
Pulling a glove onto her right hand, Alexandra called, “Never mind the safety chute. We’re in a hurry.”
Rachel turned, searching what she could see of the road. A cloud of dust was moving along it.
A whooshing sound rose. The bubble began to rise. The basket followed.
After a moment someone shouted, “She’s up.”
Another whoosh, like a furnace igniting, was followed by a series of short, hissing blasts, like air being pulsed into an enormous tire. The basket rocked, then slowly followed the balloon into the air.
Rachel stifled an impulse of panic as the ground quietly fell away. This was probably the safest place she’d been in weeks.
It’s perfect. No one can get to me here.
Then she saw that a white van had joined the two pickups.
Backing away from the edge of the basket, she asked, “Who is that?”
“Where?” Alexandra asked from behind her.
“There. The guy in the black jacket getting out of that van.”
Alexandra glanced at the ground. “He works for me.”
“He works for you?”
The words congealed, almost closing Rachel’s throat as she turned. The barrel was very short but it belonged to a gun and it was pointed at her face.
Alexandra’s glove was gone. The long fingers looked as elegant gripping the derringer as they would holding a teacup.
Chapter Fifty-five
“If you so much as move a finger,” Alexandra said conversationally, “you will die. There will be no warning. So do keep your hands still.”
Her words hung in the air like birds that had stopped flying but didn’t fall.
The hissing sound continued for what seemed a long time. Then there was silence but for a wheezing sound, like the breathing of an asthmatic, and a feeling of floating.
Rachel fought a wave of dizziness.
Above them was only sky, and ropes that led to a huge, open, yellow mouth.
“Lovely, isn’t it?” Alexandra asked, as if they were two chance passengers on an airliner.
Adrenaline surging now, Rachel’s senses hit red alert, nerves and muscles demanding action. But there was nowhere to flee. Struggling to slow her mind enough to think, she said nothing.
Alexandra moved toward her with the deadly grace of a panther. “My compliments. You have been very slippery.”
Rachel only stared—an animal caught in onrushing, lethal headlights. The wheeze came again and the huge yellow orb swayed above them like the head of a giant adder.
Gazing at the sky behind her prey, Alexandra said in a tone one hears at cocktail parties, “Pity you’ve never gone ballooning. Nothing compares. Hang gliding should, but somehow it doesn’t. Planes conquer nature. Balloons join us to nature.”
Rachel was thinking that she was shorter, but probably the stronger of the two.
“Of course the main advantage of the moment is that there’s no need to file a flight plan. No record of balloon flights at all. And the flying is quite simple. The air heats, the balloon ascends.” Alexandra said the words slowly, as though teaching a rather dull child. “Pull the rip line—that cord over there—the deflation panel
opens, the warm air escapes, and we descend. Direction, of course, is the problem. So much depends upon wind. And wind is so capricious.”
“How…how do you get back to the same place?”
“We don’t. The ground crew will follow us in the truck. Isn’t this a splendid view?”
“I can’t see much.”
“Of course you can’t. How thoughtless of me. Turn around. But do it very, very slowly.”
Rachel eyed the gun’s muzzle. The last thing she wanted to do was turn her back on it.
“Go ahead,” Alexandra was saying. “The basket is quite sturdy. Quaint, isn’t it, to use a basket. A throwback to the era of the bustle. There’s even champagne. If a farmer takes offense at your landing in his field, you can invite him to a party. Now, slowly, turn around.” The gun barrel moved ever so slightly, indicating that this time, it was a command.
The floor of the basket was surprisingly stable, but Rachel’s legs wouldn’t hold her. She staggered against the wicker wall.
Something rigid pressed into her ankle. For a moment, she couldn’t think what it was.
The air had become noticeably cooler, and very quiet. Not even the sound of wind disturbed the silence. She pulled her jacket around her.
“There’s no wind because we’re traveling with the wind,” Alexandra said, as if she’d read Rachel’s mind.
Mountains purpled at the far side of the valley. Rocks showed between the tufts of trees that climbed the hillside. Stretched between the mountain ranges was a patchwork quilt—squares of brilliant greens, a few yellows, a few browns.
“It’s simply delicious to drift.” Alexandra’s voice was dreamily sensuous. “Look.”
Rachel cast a quick glance over her shoulder, wondering if this was a ploy to divert her attention before the kill. In the distance, three ponds glittered in the sun, roundish chunks of scattered mica amid row upon undulating row of naked farmland. The drainage ditch, betrayed as man-made by its precise straightness, aimed directly at the ponds.
Alexandra was gazing at them. “Bruno’s great hope for a truce with Mother Nature.”
“What does Bruno have to do with this?”
A small smile flirted with Alexandra’s mouth. “With this? Not a thing.” Her eyes had drifted lazily over the scene. Now they pierced Rachel’s. “Remember that drought a few years back? It was phony. Jason trumped it up with bogus statistics. He got in bed with agriculture. Jason and the Farm Bureau were going to set the environmental movement back thirty years.”
She gave a low, harsh laugh. “Fourteen million people saving the dishwater for the roses and paying four-ninety-five a pound for the tomatoes that could still be irrigated. People don’t forget that in a few short years. Jason and the farmers thought they had bought fourteen million votes for more dams, more canals, more destruction.
“But the final part of the plan was even worse—more evil than I could have imagined.” Her eyes riveted on Rachel’s. ”You know what they intended to do?”
Rachel could only stare as Alexandra’s mouth twisted with rage.
“They were going to privatize it. Put our water in the hands of a corporation. Our water. At the mercy of profits and profiteers.
“Even now it’s being whispered that water will become the oil of the coming century.”
Rachel's head swam. She gazed at the other woman thinking that despite the threat to herself, Alexandra was not entirely wrong. Her methods were appalling. But her reasons were sound.
“They thought they had me cornered.” The words floated on the clear, smooth oil of her now almost serene voice.
“Jason was putting together a mountain of twisted information to show how we,” Alexandra’s eyes hardened, “how we, the environmental community, had lied to the public. He wrote the proposition and had the signatures to put a peripheral canal on the ballot in November. It would have killed the delta. And privatizing it would kill much more than that. It would kill the environment. It would kill California. And maybe, eventually, America.”
“So you killed him,” Rachel said, voice raw in her throat.
“For a while, I hoped Charlotte would. I think she just couldn’t bring herself to arrange it. But then Jason found something in his own water quality laboratory. Not the drugs,” she said to Rachel’s look. “That was Harry’s own little game. Dear Harry was full of tricks. But the only one I cared about was that he obliged me by acquiring the sodium selenate.”
Rachel’s eyelids flicked closed, then opened slowly. “So you could poison your own ponds,” she said, more calmly than she could have imagined. She was thinking that at least it was not Hank who had betrayed her. “How did you do it—get the poison into the ponds? Just send a dump truck?”
“Good heavens. That would have been clumsy and crass, and far easier to discover.” A slow smile bloomed like a toxic flower across Alexandra’s lips. “I used a crop duster. It was so simple. And truly thrilling to have such ultimate power. Over plants, over insects, over bacteria. Over life itself.”
Rachel ran her tongue across dry lips. “They used a crop duster to smuggle the selenium and, I guess, other stuff Harry wanted, across the border.”
“Is that right? I can’t say I’ve ever done any smuggling, but the duster worked very well for my purposes.”
“Selenium isn’t illegal. Why did Harry have to get it for you? Couldn’t you just purchase it outright?”
“But you see, I needed a quite a lot. The quantities might have seemed curious, especially since Friends of the Earth doesn’t have a lab. Regardless, it would have left a paper trail. So Harry got it for me. Far as I knew, he got it from a chemical supply company.”
“I suppose he didn’t want a paper trail either,” Rachel said. “So he had it smuggled, maybe a little at a time because the dollar value wouldn’t have been worth enough for an entire load. And some of it probably was delivered to him by helicopter—through me. Lonnie must have carried one of those packages to the lab, thought it was something else, and snitched some.”
“Lonnie?”
“Guy who worked for me. Poisoned himself with sodium selenate. Or did you kill him, too?”
“Never heard of him,” Alexandra said. “But Harry did mention receiving a damaged package. He thought some of the stuff was missing. He was quite squeamish about it—went frantic when the pilot of that plane that went down with his shipment in the desert said he saw a woman take a box from the wreckage. Of course, at that point, we didn’t know the woman was you.”
“When did Jason find out?”
“He knew something, I’m not sure how much.” Alexandra glanced up at the yellow mouth, then her eyes shot back to Rachel’s. “Harry was crazed about Jason maybe discovering his sweet little multi-million-dollar scheme. Charlotte was suspicious when Jason was killed, but I think she was relieved. She felt almost as strongly as I did that Jason should not be allowed to ram through this ballot proposition.”
“Why didn’t she call in the cops?”
Alexandra’s laugh tinkled in the still air. “I would guess it’s because she discovered that the car that assisted Jason into the hereafter was checked out to her that day.”
“But Charlotte wasn’t driving it.”
“Of course not. That wouldn’t have been her style.”
“So what did happen?” Rachel’s voice sounded cold compared to Alexandra’s conversational tone.
“There was this mundane little press tour of one of InterUrban’s facilities. I drove out with Harry—I sometimes went along so that if Jason made some outrageous statement, I could contradict it before it got on the air. Charlotte had some minor car trouble, and she was worried about getting back. Harry decided to brown-nose. He offered to drive her car and gave her his. Harry is—or was—a rotten driver, so I insisted on driving.” Alexandra recited it as if giving a report.
“And there was Jason by the side of the road.” She couldn’t control a smile.
“It was just too perfect. I couldn’t resis
t.”
Chapter Fifty-six
Numbed by Alexandra’s ability to smile, Rachel gawked at her. “Harry knew? He was in the car?”
“Of course. But there was no way he’d say anything. I knew too much about him. I confess I didn’t think you’d ever enter into it, much less add any of it up. But then there was that ridiculous tie tack.” Alexandra’s mouth pinched at one corner and she shrugged.
“Tie tack?” Rachel asked. “What do you know about a tie tack?”
“That afternoon you and I went flying. Your purse spilled. Remember? And there it was,” Alexandra said, again smiling. “A tie tack, an odd design with a tortoise. I knew a Mojave jeweler who used that design, but it wasn’t common. And I had seen Jason wearing it. That was troubling.”
“And all the time, you were poisoning the environment you were supposed to protect.”
A pained look flitted across Alexandra’s face. “In some ways it was easier to kill Jason than it was to do that.”
“Then, why?”
“Sometimes a few have to be sacrificed to save many. In mere months, the most devastating proposition this state has ever seen would have been passed by the voters. I needed a hammer. The rest was a simple bit of barter.”
“Barter,” Rachel repeated the word. Her mind flashed to Alexandra’s tale of her grandmother. Barter, negotiation, and the Mojave who lived in harmony. Does she believe that’s what she’s doing?
A pair of nearly black eyes fastened on Rachel’s. “The delta will be returned to nature.…”
“It will never happen,” Rachel said. “There are tens of thousands of acres of farms in the delta that need it for irrigation.”
“But not that many farmers.”
“Meaning what?”
“The voters are in the cities. They care nothing about farming. They can be made to understand that everything in the delta is a losing proposition. Many of those farms are below sea level. For their very existence, they depend on eroding levees that cost the state a fortune to maintain,’’ Alexandra said.
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