“All that’s nice, but none of them knows the whereabouts of McCanliss,” Teagarden muttered to himself. “I’m here alone. Whoever Orpheus is, he can’t do me much good while Mr. Mental Case is still out there.”
He again trained the binoculars on the Key West tourist wharf. The big attraction of the moment was a crew of acrobats flipping from each other’s shoulders. He scanned the other boats at anchor, but saw little evidence of activity. One large boat had a group of cocktail drinkers, a family party on an old cabin cruiser was barbecuing dinner, and a small sloop had a sleepy-looking man with a beer in one hand and a rod-and-reel in the other, with a line that dangled over the side.
“Good luck with the fish,” Teagarden mumbled.
He panned the glasses to Wisteria Island. There was nothing except the twisted shadows of jagged wild shrubbery in the twilight.
“Eva’s right,” he said, still talking to himself. “I need more sleep.”
He returned to the The Tomcat’s sleeping compartment and dropped into blank unconsciousness.
Chapter Ninety-Two
Key West, FL
The X-47 lay in the hangar like a surgery patient, comatose under anesthesia.
The fuel line was transplanted, but the patient was not yet revived. The gray titanium underbelly remained open while engineers and technicians tested and retested their work.
The benefit of being in the civilian hangar was the team of twenty-four-hour security guards armed with M4 carbines. They were the reason Eva was present with her daughter in tow.
She hadn’t lied to her father. She said Marnie wouldn’t leave her sight, and she was keeping her word. As her dad said, the most dangerous member of the group—Harry McCanliss—was still out there, still on the job.
And she realized that Pangolin was right about the media. The fact that reporters and cameras were not camping on her driveway was, ironically, a liability. Who would have thought the media could provide a valuable service by relentlessly gangbanging a big story like this one? Not her. She contemplated contacting local and national media. But it was another afternoon phone conversation that convinced her otherwise.
“These men answer to no one,” Cynthia told her on the phone. “It’s being learned that they’re completely off the books. And I’m being told by House Speaker Alderman that there’s speculation at least one of them has gone solo—a complete renegade. His motives are unknown, but we can assume that what’s driving him has nothing to do with money, God, or country.”
“Great,” Eva complained. “They all went off the deep end long ago and now at least one has found a deeper end to dive into. Makes you wonder where the bottom is.”
“Well put,” Cynthia said. “A lot of people inside the beltway are wondering the same. The good news here in D.C. is that the higher-ups who managed this black ops team have been suspended and face congressional subpoena.”
“Will that help stop the one who’s gone solo?”
The pause at the other end of the line said it all.
“It’ll help eventually,” Cynthia said. “Meantime, I think you and your dad must continue to take every precaution until we can get you into federal protection.”
That conversation helped Eva make up her mind by the time Pangolin returned from securing her father on the boat. She would decamp to the civilian hangar that had been temporarily claimed by the U.S. Navy pending full repairs of the X-47. She’d stay there with Marnie until Washington figured out how to police the dark ops people. Meantime, the security detail surrounding her robo-plane would be good security for her and her child.
Besides, it was her job to supervise work on the bird. Her father and daughter were her family responsibility, but that airplane was her professional duty. Turns out, that rigged-up emergency landing at Key West Airport was working in her favor in more ways than one. Unfortunately, only Marnie could make the trip to the hangar with her. The guards would challenge her father, Pangolin and Pilar, but not the kid. They took turns playing with Chopper while she caught up on loose ends. Using the Dan Jones address, Eva e-mailed her dad. She received a call from a man named Willy Baaktau in Washington, who had the deepest most melodic Dixified Cajun accent she’d ever heard. He told her, “Just hang tight till Monday. That shooting down there in the Keys is just now starting to get play inside the Beltway. Things are beginning to go our way so just hang on.”
Easy for you to say, you’re in Washington.
She was trying to hang on. Her father was hiding on a sailboat, and she was hiding in an open-air hangar with her daughter, who was asleep on a blanket with her two favorite stuffed animals.
She walked around the thirty-eight-foot-long plane where it loomed over her in the semi-darkness. The wings were folded in to fit inside the hangar, which made the futuristic triangle look less like an airplane and more like a spaceship. Technical glitches had delayed approval for combat readiness of the 47-series. One of those glitches was a faulty fuel line, which she knew would help cover her butt in the current situation. Then the whole program was mothballed, probably because pilots were threatening to do what Pangolin had done, which was—quit. But mothballed doesn’t mean canceled. Meantime, she was still in charge. And when they’re eventually sent into war, each of these Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles (UCAVs) would heighten America’s invincibility around the world—without—risk to pilots. It meant there would never again be downed pilots held as POWs and paraded in front of cameras to America’s shame.
It was a subject Pangolin had mentioned before he dropped her and Marnie at the airport. They’d parked behind the main civilian terminal, where the nose of the X-47 could be seen poking from its cover. From there, they could read the name in neon white lettering on the nose: Little Bomber-Bot.
“Tell me something,” he said, looking at the tip of the spaceship. “How can a nation be invincible and have leukemia at the same time?”
“I don’t follow you.”
“This morning at your house, your dad gave me that decoded diary. Eva, I read the whole thing.”
“Okay.”
“You read it, right?”
“Yeah, in your plane, on the way back from Virginia Beach.”
“Well, don’t you call that cancer?”
She knew she didn’t have an answer that would be good enough for him. Kasey Landrew, aka Pangolin, was the most honest man she knew, aside from her father. And it was his honesty that made him tough. Straight shooters are always tough. Unfortunately, it also made him inflexible. Instead of trying to say the right thing, she just said what came natural, what popped straight from the heart.
“Pang, both my dad—and—that airplane are what makes this country great.”
The answer was apparently good enough for him. He leaned over in the cab of her old pickup to kiss her goodnight. After the kiss, she put her hand on the side of his face and continued to speak her mind.
“By the way, I still love you even if you are twenty years older than me and hate the X-47 program. I’m sorry I dumped you for a commercial airline pilot. I’m sorry my name is Eva Ghent instead of Eva Landrew. It was a dark mistake on my part to think it wouldn’t work because of the age difference. Please forgive me. Oh, and one more thing—Marnie is your daughter.”
Chapter Ninety-Three
Her words erased the pain of the last three years.
Knowing Eva’s feelings left Pangolin buoyant with happiness. For the first time since becoming a U.S. Navy fighter pilot, he felt appreciation for just being alive.
So…that sweet baby girl was really his. He had adored her at first sight. Now he knew why.
Early on, he’d wondered if Eva’s pregnancy might actually be his child. There had been a couple of occasions that made it possible. “Mistakes,” she later called those encounters. Two months after her wedding, when she learned of her husband’s girlfriend and was as unhappy as he’d ever seen her, they had one final tryst. Her new husband was making the Miami-to-
London run with nearly three hundred passengers in the back of his 747. Afterward, she told Pangolin that she would not see him again—ever. The decision had been firm, final, the stuff of no return. In the Navy it was called “stand down.” Cease and desist. Return to carrier deck.
And she was right. It was better that way. Sneaking into the bed of another man’s wife, even though he loved her, was nothing he’d ever done before or since. He still missed her, but was glad the affair was finished.
What followed was a total change of lifestyle. He took refuge in his newly adopted persona. Instead of Kasey, or Captain Landrew, U.S. Navy, Retired—he became Pangolin. It had been his pilot’s nickname. Many years earlier, after getting his noggin shaved during the first stage of flight training at Pensacola, a curving patch of birthmark and brown freckles was revealed on his naked skull. It swept along the back of his head from ear to ear. After being variously described as a demonic sleeping animal, undulating road kill, and multiple creative descriptions of excrement, it was eventually named as a Pangolin, which stuck. He had to look it up: exotic insect-eater, armored scales, burrowing, nocturnal. It was found only in certain tropical corners of the world, places like Borneo and Pago Pago. After Pensacola, the affectation found its way onto his helmet and the fuselage of his F-14 Tomcat. He became Pangolin, U.S. Navy pilot.
Now he was Pangolin, the hippie pilot of a classic DC-3. During the past three years, he’d let his hair grow long enough to tie into a ponytail. He made a living giving tourists thrills by buzzing Cuban airspace, and he lived a marginal hermit’s existence on a small sailboat anchored off Wisteria Island. But there was more. Since retiring from the U.S. Navy and assuming his Key West nickname, he’d gotten to know other local mavericks. Like him, they were fiercely independent old Conchs who went mostly by nicknames. Like him, for whatever reason, they didn’t care to discuss their past.
One of those loners he’d come to know was an eccentric Conch named Chispa, the Key West Queen of Haul. She was physically big and brawny with an outsized personality to match. He wasn’t certain whether it was her old heap of a taxicab captured in their surveillance photos after the shootout. It could have been. He was certain of one thing, however: that was not her behind the wheel, navigating the perimeter of the cemetery after the shooting. That was none other than McCanliss, the same man who said his father died in Vietnam and his son in Iraq.
He decided to investigate Chispa’s houseboat by himself. That way there’d be no further risk to Teagarden, Eva, or Marnie—the child he now knew to be his own daughter.
He parked Eva’s pickup at the edge of the swampy inlet. Behind him lay twin lines of airport approach lights. In the far distance he could see the outline of his DC-3 safely parked at the end of the runway. In the near distance, just beyond the polluted inlet, was the open hangar. From that angle, he could see the rear end of the X-47 and the single Pratt and Whitney engine that powered it, the same turbofan that powered the F-15 and F-16. At least those two aircraft still required pilots—for now.
Chispa’s taxicab was there, parked on raised landfill next to her decrepit dump truck. Her ancient wooden pleasure boat was moored to the side of a narrow, rotting pier that had once been a causeway for bird-watchers in the swamp. For better anchoring, she’d illegally tied her boat to a telephone pole on the opposite side of the road. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, though it was difficult to be certain because he’d never been there before. They knew each other only as periodic denizens of the airport terminal, where they hustled the tourist dollar along with others handing out flyers for snorkeling, fishing, jet-skiing, paragliding, and sunset watching.
He cut the noisy engine of the old Ford pickup.
Maybe it would be best to call the police. If his instincts were right and Chispa was in trouble, it could end with more ugliness. That was the last thing he wanted, especially now that his life was set to change yet again, this time for the better.
He stepped from the truck and called out: “Hey, Chispa? You home? It’s Pangolin.”
When there was no answer he stepped aboard the boat.
“Chispa, it’s Pangolin, the DC-3 pilot. Request permission to come aboard.”
He knocked at the pilot’s cabin, entered and stepped down to the lower level living compartment.
“Hello, anybody—”
The sudden stench was foul, yet held a touch of saccharine sweetness at the same time, like cheap perfume. He’d smelled that odor before, in Iraq and Afghanistan. And in Bosnia before that. After it registered in his brain, he sensed something else. He sensed he was not alone.
He lifted one foot to back away, to ease quietly from the small room. Before he could shift his weight and complete a step toward full retreat, there came a swooshing noise that concluded with a hard thud to the neck, hard enough to send him walking in space.
When he fell, he fell hard.
Chapter Ninety-Four
Sunday, July 28, 2019
The Tomcat, Wisteria Island, FL
He finally felt rested.
While waiting for sunrise, Teagarden sat in the open stern of the sailboat nursing his second mug of coffee. He’d slept through the night with blissful calm. Thankfully, that longer second bout of rest passed without more unsettling dreams. There had been no more haunting images of Kendra or Billy Carney. After waking, he found a frozen food package containing two ham-and-cheese biscuits, which he microwaved and devoured, along with a glass of milk and a fresh pot of coffee.
Now, in the very early hours, Cynthia was e-mailing him from her hospital bed through the webmail of poor Dan Jones.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
good progress here, the spkr’s asst. e-mailed during night…emgcy committee meeting set for sunday p.m….
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
u’r up early…okay, but what’s it mean?…and, more importantly, how’s your leg?
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
wow, u’r up early too…it means posibl amnesty & full legal standdown—as soon as TODAY!…plus i am told handwriting been confirmed as that of Clyde Anderson Tolson (CAT)…document is legit…as if we didn’t know…and, leg fine, out of hosp. tomorrow, wear cast for a month…then phys thpy…looking fwd to seeing you…
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
wonderful news…thank you…and…i think i forgot to tell you something impt. in that panic at watergate…
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
okay?…
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
i love you too…
She did not respond. But then, she didn’t have to.
Sipping the coffee, he wanted to phone Eva on Pangolin’s phone and wake her up, but he didn’t. Her last communication of the night had not been to him. It wasn’t an e-mail, but a particularly long text message sent to Pangolin’s cell: pang, hope i did not startle you…am desperately afraid f/dad…bullsht in cemetery was TOO close…anyway, marnie really is your baby…I’m yours too if u like…sorry it took so long f/me to wise up…
Eva did not know that Pangolin gave his cellphone to her father on The Tomcat. Except for Dan Jones, he was not in the habit of reading communications not meant for him. This one, however, was impossible to miss.
So, the father of my granddaughter is not who I thought.
It took a moment to process the information, though he wasn’t surprised. Nor was he upset. In fact, he was pleased. Teagarden had pegged John Ghent as a calculating opportunist and skirt chaser on first sight. The quick conclusion of his daughter’s marriage confirmed it. Plus, the man had been a total no-show as a father. He didn’t want the pregnancy, and after Marnie was born, he didn’t want the daugh
ter.
Captain Kasey Landrew, aka Pangolin, on the other hand, would be a wonderful dad.
Darkness on the eastern horizon emitted a thin layer of light that would soon explode into searing radiance. He watched the show in the sky slowly unfold, confident that he was safe for the first time in the last eight days and that his ordeal was nearing an end. Thanks to Danford Shackton’s commitment before he was assassinated, Cynthia’s work in D.C., and now his daughter and future son-in-law’s protection on Key West, he felt a solution was near. When it was finally over, attending Sunday services to give personal thanks would be in his future.
He had seen to it that his wife’s funeral was secular, as she wanted. Personally, he did believe in a supreme being, but hadn’t participated in organized religion in many years.
His faith had always centered on the unknowable mystery of the universe. For him, God could be found in numbers and in science. For all he knew, instead of a being, God might actually be a mathematical formula. But losing his wife, and now the experience of the past week, had expanded his way of thinking. It had been so emotionally wrenching that a personal expression of gratitude to God for his safe deliverance felt like the right thing to do.
And who knows? If church-going expression of faith turns out to be rewarding, maybe I’ll stick with it.
He wondered if Cynthia had a religious faith and whether she attended services with any regularity. They hadn’t gotten far enough in their short, tumultuous relationship for that sort of conversation.
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