by Dana Haynes
She shook her head. “Calendar works exclusively for American intelligence, military assets, corporations. He considers himself the patriot. He is on no one’s personnel rosters. He is what they call … what is the phrase, in English … deniable…”
Ray said, “Plausible deniability.”
“Yes. Thank you. Just like me.”
Ray seethed. “Jesus Christ,” he whispered. “You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to be this! Come home. I have contacts in military intelligence. If it’s an adrenaline high you’re after, we can find a way to do that and to buy back your soul!”
Daria looked at him. He wanted to punch someone so bad. Anyone. Daria linked her arm around his, rested her forehead against his biceps.
After a moment, she looked up, eyes too bright, smile too wide. She slid off her stool and kissed Ray on the cheek.
“I will see you around, Ray.”
“Where do I find Calendar?”
“If his work is finished, you don’t. He is the ghost. If his work isn’t, you won’t have to look far. He’ll be there.” She drained her last shot glass. “Also, has a team.”
Swell, Ray thought. “Size?”
“Small, two to four at the outside. Experienced.”
“You know or your suspect?”
Daria took the longest time before answering. “He offered me the job.”
Despite the heat, Ray felt his body temperature drop. “And you turned it down because…?”
“Because I was otherwise occupied. Ray? Tread carefully. He is the sociopath but very good at his work.”
She kissed him again, ran a hand through his close-cropped hair.
“Goodbye.”
TWIN PINES
Tommy and Kiki treated themselves to a lunch of burgers and fries at an A&W that hadn’t been remodeled since the sixties. It was noon, Monday.
Tommy pounded an upside-down ketchup bottle over Kiki’s fries, so that she didn’t have to tax her broken rib. “You’re a very nice boyfriend.”
“You know, I really am.”
They scarfed down the food, well rid of hospital meals. No burgers had ever tasted better.
“So. That was a neat trick with the crashers’ voices and their histories. I thought poor Petey’s head was gonna explode.”
“Jerk.”
“Silver Hair: where’s he from?”
A french fry was halfway to Kiki’s lips when she froze. She stared over Tommy’s shoulder, into the middle distance.
“Hon?”
She ssshhhed him, still staring.
She finally turned her gaze to Tommy’s eyes. “You know I couldn’t tell you.”
“Well, a plane had just fallen on you. Plus, your hunky, gorgeous boyfriend was leaking blood like it was—”
“No. It’s not that. I can hear him. He asked me, ‘Hey, are you okay?’ and later, ‘What happened to the airplane?’ It’s just…” She stared into space again.
Tommy pointed to her burger. “You gonna finish that?”
“Yes. It’s like I can’t tell you where he was from because he wouldn’t tell me. There was no regional accent. No dropped sounds, no cultural signposts. There was no there there. Like what he presented was so tightly controlled. He gave away nothing.”
Tommy reached out, took her hand in his. “It don’t matter. Ray Calabrese’s all over this. We find out about the chain of possession on the black boxes, Ray’s people ID the … whatever, the pulse weapon. We’ll call Delevan Wildman, call Isaiah, get—”
He squeezed his lips together, grimacing at the mistake, averting his eyes.
Kiki gripped his hand tighter. “I do that all the time. When Peter was being a brat, I wanted to ask Isaiah how best to handle him.”
Tears glistened in Tommy’s brown eyes. He got out of his side of the booth, sat on hers, and hugged her softly.
“Silver Hair and his friends killed Isaiah. We are going to fuck them over like nobody’s been fucked over. Not never.”
She kissed him. “Promise?”
“Promise. Asshole’s killin’ days are behind him.”
* * *
Lakshmi Jain got a call from the coroner’s office in Helena. They had checked the bodies that were there waiting to be autopsied for electric devices.
They had found several, but none of them was functional.
* * *
Peter Kim met Police Chief Paul McKinney at the morgue. The assigned officer unlocked the door, let them in.
McKinney pulled back the sheets on five bodies. It was obvious that they’d been searched.
“Goddammit.” Peter was livid. “You assured us these bodies would be protected.”
“You saw my guy out there. I have another one posted at the remains of your airplane. I have four men on day-shift duty and you’ve got two of them. You think I have unlimited personnel?”
“I think someone broke in here and searched these bodies. I think that makes our jobs much, much harder. I also think the hotels of Helena are chock-full of bereaved loved ones, and I’m wondering what to tell them.”
McKinney looked around and shivered in the cold. “Um, any reason they have to know?”
“Chief … Jesus Christ.” Peter was close to unspooling. “Yes, they have to know. I have to assume items were stolen. I have to know how much the passengers took out of their ATMs before the flight. I have to ask about expensive jewelry, watches. I— Fuck it! I want that officer posted inside!”
“It’s forty degrees in here!”
“Get him a parka!”
They were toe-to-toe now.
“No. I tell you what. Here’s a better idea: get these goddamn bodies out of my town. Do it now.”
Peter stepped closer. “This is a federal investigation!”
“I don’t care if it’s being conducted by the Detroit Red Wings! The bodies! Out! Now!”
Peter saw red.
McKinney said, “Swing, and I will arrest you, Mr. Investigator in Charge. I kid you not.”
Peter turned and marched out.
Halfway back to the real estate office, he realized he really should have brought Beth Mancini along.
LOS ANGELES
For the second time that month, Ray Calabrese returned to Los Angeles from Mexico. Neither trip had been much fun. He took a cool shower in his own condo, traded worn clothes for new travel clothes. He wolfed down two scrambled eggs with an English muffin, washed his dishes.
He checked his e-mail. His office mates had looked up the address of Stanley Katz, the conspiracy theorist with the Pentagon or Pentagram? online magazine Henry had told him about. Ray threw his satchel into his trunk and drove out into the Valley.
TWIN PINES
Calendar drove carefully around the perimeter of the auto-parts-storage yard. A quarter acre surrounded by tall Cyclone fencing topped with barbed wire. Not impossible to break into but tough. He wondered if there were dogs. A lot of chop shops kept dogs to hold off meth addicts looking to steal metal.
The luggage in the fuselage was his last chance to secure Andrew Malatesta’s speech and sketch pad. Unfortunately, he saw too many people walking in and out of the shop in their NTSB windbreakers.
He’d have to wait to break in.
ORANGE COUNTY, CALIFORNIA
Ray found the address in a shabby neighborhood just off Interstate 5. The houses were one-story, two-bedroom clones of one another, with wire fences around dingy brown yards strewn with children’s toys. The cars were a decade old. The starter homes needed new aluminum siding, new roofs.
Still in his car, on his cell, Ray said, “Everything you can find, yeah.”
Henry Deits, director of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office, said, “His name’s Calendar?”
“No, that’s a DBA.”
“And he specializes in freelancing for U.S. intelligence agencies?”
“So my source says.”
“Good source?”
Henry had specifically warned Ray to steer clear of Daria and the
rogue ATF operation in Mexico. “It’s a source I trust.”
“Okay. So are we assuming command of the investigation?”
“Not yet, I think. I don’t have the conclusive evidence. Trust me on this: the current Investigator in Charge is going to want the Is dotted and Ts crossed. This isn’t like Oregon, where Tommy was IIC and was willing to bend the rules a little.”
Henry Deits didn’t seem mollified. “Cryin’ out loud, Ray. If there’s an assassin involved…”
“I don’t have any reason to believe he’s lurking around. Likely he did his job and moved on.” That wasn’t precisely what Daria had told him, but Ray thought it sounded reasonable.
“Okay. You got the boots on the ground. I trust your judgment.”
“Thanks, boss. I’m at this guy Katz’s place. Call when I’m done.”
* * *
Stanley Katz was a small-boned man, five-three, with a hunched back and spindly arms and legs. He used a walker to get around. From the name, Ray had anticipated a Jewish man. Stanley Katz was African American; Ray thinking, Well, they’re not mutually exclusive.
Stanley led the agent through the demonically cluttered one-story house, past the precarious stacks of newspapers and periodicals as high as Ray’s thighs. Ray noted that Scotch tape adhered wires to the windows, the wires linked to an oscilloscope.
Stanley saw Ray’s glance. “Noticed that? They beam lasers off my windows, try and catch audio, a couple times a year. Faggots. Who gave you my name?”
“A big fan.”
“Nah-nah nah-nah, man. Keep your secrets. FBI man comes to my door, keeping secrets, means he’s not lying to me. That’s a start, Agent Calabrese. If that is your real name.”
“You got ice water or something? It’s, like, eight hundred degrees out there.”
Stanley Katz, in a wife-beater and frayed chinos, looked all sinew and bone. Ray put his age anywhere from thirty-five to sixty-five. He wore an Afro and a jazz patch. He said, “I got home-brewed iced tea.”
“That’d work.”
Stanley filled two tumblers with ice up to the brim, then poured from a pitcher in the fridge. One glass was adorned with Boris Badenov, the other with Snidely Whiplash. Ray eyed the yellowed Commodore computer on the kitchen table, the stacks of Omni magazine back issues.
Stanley saw him looking. “Nobody hacks a Commodore. Nobody writes virus for that, for sure. Here.”
Ray sipped. It was delicious. “What’s this I’m tasting? Vanilla?”
“Yeah, yeah. Vanilla bean from a farmers market in Encino. What am I doing you for, Mr. FBI?”
“That airline crash on Thursday in Montana?”
“An airliner?”
“You heard about this, right?”
“The news is mostly faked, Mr. FBI.”
Ray’s hopes for the interview tumbled. “Okay, well, a midsized airliner crashed in Montana last week. I’ve got witnesses saying all the electricity stopped. Engines, hand-held gadgets, watches. Boom: gone.”
“Nobody cooked off a nuke in Big Sky Country, right? I mean, you woulda led with that.”
“Right.”
“Bruges protocols say: no pulse weps.”
“I’m told.”
“An’ you’re wondering, how’s that? Huh?”
Ray waited, sipped tea. He tried to keep a poker face but, damn, this was good tea.
Stanley Katz waved his fingers in the air to make a circle, filled by a diagonal slash through it: the international symbol for no. “No pulse weapons, man. It’s not just good sense, it’s the motherfuckin’ law.”
“So nobody has a weapon that could do that?”
“I di’nt say that, did I? Did you hear me say that?” Stanley, grinning now.
“I did not.” Ray, playing along.
“They’s this cat, he got mad weapons. Designs only. Vaporware. They say this guy’s got a design for an EMP weapon. Fired from a shoulder-mounted launch tube. Laser-guided. It’s clay, two containers of chemicals inside. Hit a target, a tank, a helo, what you got, it sticks to it. The binary chemicals blend together: wham. Electro-goddamn-magnetic pulse. And the lights go off all over the fucking world.”
Stanley winked, grinning.
“Is this weapon for real?”
The hunched man shrugged. “Nah. Paper only. In the man’s brainpan. But what I hear? This cat’s the da Vinci of new weapons. Gonna revolutionize war. He’s Bill and Melinda Gates from the mirror universe. Spock with a Vandyke, yeah? He’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang but with less chitty, more bang.”
Stanley laughing now, cutting up.
“This guy got a name?”
“Malatesta. Andrew Malatesta. And you make of this what you want, Mr. FBI, but in Eye-talian, that translates to bad head.”
Ray wrote down the name. “Mr. Katz, this is the best goddamn iced tea I have ever had.”
Stanley nodded. “You like that, you should try my house-brewed gin.”
Ray checked his watch. “Hit me.”
TWIN PINES
Jack Goodspeed sat on a food service cart, drinking from a bottle of seltzer that hadn’t broken in the crash. It was, strictly speaking, evidence, so drinking it was breaking protocol. Jack didn’t particularly care. It was hot.
He said, “You are one tenacious dude.”
Hector Villareal flashed him a shy smile. Only three suitcases were left and Hector was determined to check every one of them. “Got to be sure.”
“Hector, we’re sure. It’s going on one o’clock! We’ve been here for four hours! We’ve tried, what? Forty electronic devices? Fifty? Not one, man. Not. One. I’ve got an engineering degree. You’ve got an engineering degree. What are the odds that every contraption with a circuit board for a heart would go belly-up on this flight? Hm? The plane landed on its side. The cargo bay was largely undamaged. Some of these suitcases don’t even look scuffed up. And nothing works? C’mon.”
Hector retrieved an MP3 player. He tried it. Zip.
Jack had found the oddest thing: an old, scratched saddlebag stuffed into a bin that usually held pretzels. He pulled it out. Inside was a portfolio. He eyed it, bored now, then started scanning the printed document with the pencil scribbles in the margins. “Tenacious. That’s what we’re going to start calling you from now on. Tenacious H. That’s…”
Hector looked up. “Jack?”
“Hey. I know who this guy is.”
Hector found a penlight. He clicked it. Nope. “What guy?”
“I found a speech by a guy named Andrew Malatesta. I heard him speak at a Chautauqua at Harvard last year. World-class brainiac. Some really out-of-the-box stuff. He’s got the patent on some amazing, holographic heads-up-display avionics.”
Jack turned back to the speech. “I think this guy was going to Northwest Tech. He was going to denounce Halcyon/Detweiler. Which, I’m just saying, I got stock in. Says here—”
Beeeeep.
At the sound, Jack glanced up from the portfolio and aged saddlebag. A few feet away knelt a suddenly grinning Hector Villareal, holding a woman’s clutch purse in one hand, a cell phone in the other.
And the LED face on the phone was lit up. It showed three bars of reception.
Jack jumped off the cart. “No way!”
Hector nodded.
Jack immediately lost interest in the speech from the saddlebag. He stuffed his findings back into the pretzel bin, for lack of anywhere better to put them. He adjusted his ear jack and hit buttons on his belt-mounted comm unit.
“This is Kim.”
* * *
Police Chief Paul McKinney and Mac Pritchert, the state-assigned fire-crew chief, stepped out onto the roof of the Pure-Pride Tool and Dye Building. Both carried binoculars and Pritchert had a walkie-talkie.
He toggled the Send switch. “Jillian, what do you got? Over.”
McKinney jogged to the eastern end of the tarmac roof and raised the lenses to his eyes.
The radio squealed. The voice on the other end shouted over the d
in of helicopter rotors and an engine, “Mac? The fire has reached the crash site. It’s definitely moving faster today. Over.”
Pritchert hit the switch again. “Copy that. Jonah, it’s Mac. Is the firebreak gonna hold? Over.”
A different voice this time. “Ah, that’s a negative, base. Winds really picking up and the fire is crown-jumping.” It wasn’t just surviving on ground cover anymore, but had climbed into the trees. “On the western face of the fire, we do not—repeat, do not—have containment. Over.”
Chief McKinney lowered his glasses. “It’s your call, but I think we encourage an evacuation. For now. Wait an hour, see if it needs to be mandatory.”
Pritchert looked into his binoculars. “Yeah. Make the call.”
TWIN PINES
Peter Kim was ebullient. “A meeting, today. All team leaders.”
Beth Mancini perched on the edge of desk in the former real estate office and started to jot notes. “Agenda?”
“Putting Tomzak in his place. Invite him, Duvall, Agent Calabrese. We’re going to put an end to this insanity once and for all.”
“When and where?”
“Four. Here.”
She reeled back. “They’re evacuating the town! We’ve got to get—”
“It’s a voluntary evacuation. We’re not leaving the fuselage or the remaining bodies. But get going on the meeting, please. Top priority.”
Beth set down her pen and pad. “About the bodies. The police chief called and told me you’d been in a shouting match. I talked him out of kicking us out of our morgue, but it wasn’t easy. Peter, you’ve got to let me do my job and run interference for you. It’s—”
“You’re right.”
Beth hadn’t seen that coming.
“No, absolutely. I blew that badly. Thank you for calming the chief down.”
“I … You’re welcome,” she said, thinking, What have you done to the real Peter Kim?
“Sure. Now, please set up the meeting. Slapping Tomzak down is priority number one.”
* * *
Kiki and Tommy went down to the hotel dining room for coffee. It was going on 2:00 P.M.
“Ray’s flying back today,” Tommy said, fiddling with a miniature white porcelain pitcher of half-and-half. “Here’s hoping he brings good news.”
Kiki’s comm unit buzzed. Beth had left her one in their hotel room, without informing Peter. She activated it. “Hello?… Hi.”