Overfall (26 page)

“What’s she gonna do?” T.J. said.

“I don’t know,” Sam said while he watched her.

“I hate to say it but she looks like a woman who has you by the gonads.”

Even with the distance between them Sam knew she was looking right at him, and he could feel each punch of the dialer as if it were drilling his chest.

“Damn that woman,” Sam said. She was coming back toward them and talking on the phone.

“We should leave now,” T.J. said.

Sam walked up to Anna. “What are you doing now?”

“Just a minute, Harold,” she said before covering the mouthpiece. “I’m on the phone with the
New York Times.
Harold Butler. I’m going to give him an interview. If you get in that plane without me you’re going to read about yourself in the
New York Times.
You’re going to read how you left me standing on the dock at the residence of a bunch of criminals. Not only that, you’re going to read your life’s history. I can afford to forfeit the bond. And you can sue me if you want to.”

“But if I take you ...”

She indicated the off button on the phone.

Sam was looking at a woman who was crazy with determination.

“This is what I get for saving your life?”

“No. This is what you get for trying to run it. Nowhere in our contract does it say you can make life and death choices for me. I am your equal. Get that through your head.”

“If you come you fight my way.”

“Since I don’t know any other way to fight, I suppose yours is as good as any.”

“You are something else.”

“I’ll grow on you. Let’s go,” she said. “Harold, I’ll call you back later.” They both ran back to the plane.

T.J. looked worried.

As Sam was walking to the plane a bad feeling almost paralyzed him. He tried to shake it off. He considered that the intruders were far ahead, trained and heavily armed, and probably impossible to catch. His small group wasn’t ready for this.

“Come here,” Sam said, pulling T.J. away from Anna.

“What about me?” Anna said.

“Just stand there,” Sam growled, about as mean as he ever sounded.

“I don’t think we should take Anna and I’m afraid this could end in disaster,” Sam said.

“You stay. The boys and I will go. If you sit here she’ll stay and there isn’t a hell of a lot she can do about it.”

“I don’t want you dead, T.J.”

“It’s the job. I wanna go, but I sure as hell don’t wanna take Anna Wade.”

“If you fly right over to the far side you could be flying into automatic weapons fire. If that happens you’ll be dead.”

“We won’t go straight. We’ll come in at the end of the island and go overland.”

“It’s your choice.”

“What are you saying?” Anna walked over to where they were standing.

“You and I are staying here to run the radio,” Sam said.

“No way.”

“Anna, I’m staying here and so are you. T.J. and the boys are going.”

The pilot was slow in reaching for the door. He cleared his throat and spoke. “What are all these guns, and this?” he said, speaking in a tight voice, his eyes hard with fear.

“Little problem,” Sam said. “These gentlemen need to go to the other side of the island, up at the other end, and look for someone.”

“With those?” the man said, still eying the armament.

“Lotta bears over there,” Sam said.

“Bullshit,” the pilot said.

“Twenty-five thousand dollars if you take them.”

“Am I gonna get shot at?”

“Probably.”

“Fifty thousand cash plus you buy the plane if it’s damaged. And I want it in writing now.”

Sam took out a pen and scrawled the deal.

“And the movie star here signs it.”

“Listen, asshole, we gotta go,” Jeff said.

“Take it easy,” Sam said. The man’s being reasonable. And now that we’re paying him fifty grand he’s officially agreed to fly through live fire.”

The pilot swallowed and looked at Sam as if he might rethink his position. The three men jumped into the plane. Sam shut the door, practically choking with frustration.

He and Anna stood in silence while the plane taxied and took off.

They watched as the seaplane flew down the island, made a turn, and disappeared in the distance. In ten minutes they got a radio call.

“Sam, they are long gone. No seaplane, no boats, no nothing. We watched as the Otter took off in the distance. There was a chopper nearby that could have come into the old orchard back here. We’re coming back.” Then there was a few seconds’ silence and T.J. came on again.

“We’ve been hit. We’ve been hit. Somebody stayed behind. We’re going to try to land.” Then more stridently. “Duke and Jeff have both been hit bad. Automatic weapons fire.”

Sam called seaplanes and a medical helicopter. The pilot got the Beaver on the water.

Twenty minutes later T.J. came on the radio.

“Damn it, Sam. Duke and Jeff are dead. Both gone.”

Sam and Anna sat in a Hawker 700 jet that had leveled off at 32,000 feet.

“We have to go after them. The longer they are gone, the harder they will be to find.”

“You know, you’re trying my ego. Supposedly I’m an expert at this. We have fifty people or more working their butts off nearly twenty-four hours a day looking for escape routes from Canada. We are monitoring phones, we’re nudging the Canadian government, we’re getting informal help from the FBI and Scotland Yard without yelling too loud because of the circumstances and because governments can screw things up. They left in a private plane, and we’ll find it.”

“I know. I just can’t stand it.”

“We lost two more men because we couldn’t wait.”

“I know. I know. We’ve gone over this.”

“Until we know where they went, you need to get your mind off it and give the appearance of Anna Wade going about her business as usual.”

“Yeah, well, you can just haul your cute butt down to my studio party.”

“I said I would ride in the limo.”

“But we aren’t going if it will in any way affect the hunt for Jason.”

“Absolutely.”

Anna began eyeing the small couch in the back of the jet’s cabin.

“Lie down if you like,” Sam said.

“Will you come back so we can talk before I fall asleep?”

“Sure,” Sam said. He took a mint-green blanket and white pillow from a forward baggage compartment, ushered her to the back of the plane, and sat in an upright seat across from the couch. Anna, already in her stocking feet, lay down.

“Why don’t you sit here?” she said.

Sam got the idea, moved over, and put the pillow in his lap.

“Tell me about the letters in the picture book,” she said.

“Maybe I should be the one on the couch.”

“Come on, Sam.”

“The thing with the sat phone and the
New York Times.
I didn’t like it.”

“It was just a bluff. You were being a butt head. Let’s not digress.” She put her hand on his arm and patted it.

“No.” He said it with a tentative tone to soften what was not soft.

“I know. I was wrong. Wrong. Wrong. I won’t do it again but I’m sure I’ll be tempted.”

“One of the letters was to my son. It was in English so you know what it said. Mom found it in his things.

The other was in the language of my tribe. It was from my grandfather to me.”

“And what did it say?”

“It was very similar to the letter I wrote to my son except for the last line. My grandfather didn’t mention the sunset or the beer.”

“And?”

“It said ‘Do not neglect the gift that I have seen.’ Loose translation.”

“What is that gift?”

“I have dreams. Sometimes hunches. They are just normal things. Most people have them.”

“Your Grandfather was a Spirit Walker?”

“Yes.”

“And he had these dreams and hunches?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Methinks you doth protest too much. In the cabin when you jumped up and said we had to get out. Was that one of those dreams?”

“Yeah.”

“When was the last time you had one?”

“Before getting in the seaplane at the lodge; on the roof of the Dyna Science building before getting in the helicopter. But you know that was logical. It had only one engine. I usually use one with two turbines.”

“When before that?”

“When I was sailing past the mouth of Devil’s Gate. I turned in.”

“It’s how you saw me.”

“Well, it made it easier.”

“Come on. Would you have seen me if you’d kept going?”

“Probably not. I had the same bad feeling about putting you in the seaplane.”

“So what is this?”

“It’s nothing.”

“What did your grandfather mean?”

“My Grandfather Stalking Bear decided that I inherited the Spirit Walker thing.”

“Fascinating.”

“It’s intuition pure and simple.”

“Did all Indians around these parts believe the same?”

“Well, there were some distinct differences. Only my tribe believed in Spirit Walkers, but all the tribes had the spiritual leaders known as Talth.”

“So tell me your tribe.”

“You can keep your trap shut?”

“Of course.”

“You threatened me with the
New York Times.”

“I said I was wrong. I concede.”

“I’m a Tilok.”

“What’s your name? Your real name.”

“Oh, no.” He shook his head. “Let’s go back to Indians. Even in things as basic as language there were differences. The Yuroks spoke a language related to the Woodland Algonquian tribes of the northeastern United States, while the Karuk spoke Hokan, the oldest language in northwestern California, and the Hupa spoke the Athapaskan, which was a language common in the Pacific Northwest and the Southwest. Pretty amazing to have such diversity in one small area of northern California.”

“What do the Tiloks speak?”

“A dialect of the Algonquian tribes, but Mom says it’s pretty different. Before English, none of these tribes could talk to each other without a multilingual translator. Their economies, social structure, and spiritual beliefs were similar but there were differences. My mother can tell you what was common and what was not. Tiloks were travelers, not so much lowland Indians except seasonally. In spring and summer Tiloks went to the high country. They were hunters, trackers, and traders.”

“Why does she say that your soul lacks harmony?”

“I told you that you need to leave me with a few secrets.”

“Okay, just a little more. Tell me about your dad.”

“He was the penultimate tough guy. Life was about holding out the proper facade no matter what. Laugh at adversity, joke when others cry, never have a really serious conversation, and never under any circumstances be vulnerable.”

“Must have made a heck of a one-man platoon.”

“He was a parajumper. The bad-ass rescue patrol. The president or a cabinet member goes down, needs rescuing, or a pilot behind enemy lines, or a hiker on Mount Denali ... the toughest rescues around are given to the parajumpers. That’s what you wanted to know.”

“I’m not spying on you, Sam. Relax.” She squeezed his arm. “I do, though, fully intend to find out everything there is to know about you.”

“Curious creature, aren’t you?”

“I am,” she said, and quickly drifted off to sleep.

He didn’t really doubt her. It seemed that he was seriously losing his grip with this woman.

He used the plane’s satellite phone to call the office.

Typhony answered.

“How’s it going?” Sam asked.

“Really good but I can’t talk now, so I’m giving you Paul.”

That’s weird,
Sam thought.

“Yo,” Paul said.

“Are we making progress?”

“You bet. I called Hal Godwynn. Apologized for the middle-of-the-night wake-up. Said you’d be talking to him, that you really needed his help. He’s cranking up as we speak. He knows it’s big and says there’ll be a lot of mouths to feed. Fifty thousand dollars to try, with a fifty-thousand success fee and fifty thousand more as a home-run bonus. Success is that he finds a plane leaving Canada with Jason on it and tells us where it landed. Another fifty-thousand home run if we actually find him and we get him back.”

“Okay.” Sam heard something in Paul’s voice.

“We’re thinking Jason was smart enough to circumvent file-folder security but never cracked the code to open the document. So he gave us a folder that he locked with a document inside that was encrypted by Grace Technologies. We’re working on breaking it. Grogg is going to run about two hundred big computers in series for about an hour and see what he can do.”

“We need to break it open. Jason had to have a reason for thinking it would be interesting.”

“So when you gonna be here?”

“Soon. Tell me what’s wrong, Paul.”

“Oh, it’s nothing critical; it can wait until you get here. Some people want to talk with you.”

“Which people?”

“Trust me on this one, Sam. It’s one of those things you should get into when you get here and it will definitely keep.”

“It’s why Typhony wanted off the line.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Okay. I’ll be right there. I can hardly wait.”

Someone had screwed up. Sam knew that. And the miscreant wanted to tell his or her story.

“What’s wrong?” Anna asked.

“You faker.”

“Tell me what’s wrong.”

“If you could hear, you know they wouldn’t tell me.”

“What do you think?”

“Don’t know.”

“Who’s Hal?”

“A retired FAA administrator. He has a knack for tracing aircraft flying in controlled airspace.”

“I hope he figures it out.”

“I do too.”

“Sam, I want to go to the office with you.”

“That’s out of the question.”

“If you let me come, I’ll ... well ... I’ll pay closer attention to what you say.”

“Oh, that’s a real concession.”

“You’re looking for my brother. That’s where everything is happening. You’ve got what ... bunches of people in there all working phones and computers and God knows how many people out in the field feeding you information.”

“You can’t come.”

“What if I promise to follow orders? How about that?”

“For the entire job you promise to do what I say?”

“Nearly.”

“What kind of lie is ‘nearly’?” Sam laughed. “At least be convincing. You get the anemic lie award.”

They drove through the streets of LA, she watching his face in the flickering of the night-lights, Sam talking easier now. She sensed he had decided to take a chance. He pulled through the gate, past the guard shack, and into what was obviously a very private parking area. She saw a lot of cars for what she considered the late hour.

“Looks like your crew is hard at it,” she said.

“That’s one I don’t understand, though.” He indicated a sporty-looking Porsche. “Four hundred and twenty horsepower, 413 foot-pounds of torque, zero to sixty in ten-point-oh seconds, and all-wheel-drive. It belongs to Jill, and she’s supposed to be in the mountains with Grady.” Then he leaned forward and peered down to the end of the row. “What the hell?” he said. “That’s my mother’s car down there.”

Sam had a look on his face that she hadn’t seen—a cross between anger and worry.

Inside they were met by Typhony and Paul. Jill stood just behind the pair. Everybody in the office was looking out of their cubicles, most standing.

Sam saw his mother in the doorway to the lounge. Beside her was Grady with a yellow pad. There was a hush about the place, none of the soft clicking from the keyboards. Everybody was watching as though he were a cop breaking down the door of a bookie salon. For a second nobody spoke or even moved.

“What’s happening with Grady?”

“I brought her here and put her to work,” Jill said.

“Paul?”

Paul looked at Jill.

“Paul said no way. Said we would have to follow procedure and that she wouldn’t work here for months, if then. I argued and he said take it up with you. But I brought her in anyway, when he wasn’t looking.”

“You broke a company policy?”

“I’ll be happy to fire her ass,” Paul said.

“She was just trying to help ...” Grady called out.

“Go back to your desk, Grady,” Jill said. “This is my business.”

“I’m speechless but I’m sure it won’t last,” Sam said. He craved a cigarette.

“I want to explain,” Jill said.

“In there.” Sam nodded at the conference room. He felt like the King of Siam when the Englishwoman challenged him about Tup Tim. Security had to mean something.

“I’d like to speak with you privately,” Spring said.

It gave him the excuse that he wanted not to react immediately.

“Okay,” Sam said.

They went into the conference room first and closed the door. “Jill only told me after we arrived and were inside that you would not approve. Shortly before you arrived here she explained the significance of what she had done—that it was a major breach of your security rules.”

“It certainly was that. And she ignored Paul.”

“And so you need to fire her.”

“That’s right.”

“And yet you know she would bust her butt for you in a tight spot.”

“I know that.”

“So you don’t want to fire her. So maybe there is a better way.”

“I’m listening.”

“Let her come up with a means of making recompense that satisfies everyone she put at risk. If it satisfies you and everyone else, then she can stay.”

“But she’s not a child, and this is a job. We don’t do detention.”

“Sam, I’ve watched these people. It’s a little community.”