Then call in a crew and get it ready, Barbara." It sounded like a threat.
' Your priorities-!"
"Look, Barbara it might take me days, a whole week, to locate this guy." His attempt at mollification was amateurish, unpractised.
"I need to get up there by the quickest means. I don't think I should take too many more civilian flights. Do you?" His features and his voice had altered. Reflection had shown him his own danger, flagged the FBI wanted posters in front of his eyes.
"OK, OK," she grumblingly agreed, as if they were enacting yet another of their interminable domestic squabbles. She brushed her hair away from her face. I'll get to it. Take care of the airplane!"
She moved away from them towards a telephone. Blakey shrugged conspiratorially with Gant, who waggled his hand.
Then he rubbed at his worn eyes. It would take a week, maybe more, combing the Three Sisters area, all of it wilderness, sparsely populated, poor roads, mountainous… Even then, he might never find Strickland, especially if the guy was living there under another name
… "Aliases," he said. Barbara was speaking into the telephone, obsessively businesslike, demanding in her own way.
"Strickland had aliases, maybe four or five…" He held his temples in his hands, applying pressure.
"When I ran into him he was called…?"
Barbara watched him retreat into an intense abstraction, trying to remember. All too often during their brief marriage when he had employed the same posture it had seemed more like absenting himself from their situation, a protective, defensive stance.
"Yes, Bill," she said into the telephone.
"It is urgent yes, the men will be paid a bonus… Thanks, Bill. A half-hour? Good." She put down the telephone and turned again to watch Gant. His face was chalky with the effort of recollection.
"He had various Op Names like Preacherman, Mechanic — Fireball was another one—" He clicked his fingers impatiently, as at some invisible waiter.
"His code names…" He reached for a notepad, scrabbled for a pencil.
Scribbled furiously, shaking his head, roughly scrubbing out whatever he was writing.
Barbara wandered towards Blakey, as if choosing his more comfortable, bearlike appearance. She stared casually at the printout of the Oregon map, and at the hugely enlarged sky and the man's forehead and eyes beneath it. Strickland seemed as distant as any stranger in other people's snapshots.
Try this-!" Gant offered urgently.
"It's one of his names, I'm sure… then this one."
The pencil tapped on the pad like insistent morse.
"Christianson," Blakey murmured.
"Ford—" They're based around Preacherman and Mechanic."
"OK-let's see."
At the command of Blakey's blunt, quick fingers, the telephone directory for Central Oregon scrolled up the computer's screen, the Cs flicking past as casually as an eye might glance across the columns of names of some war memorial… The Christiansons, dozens of them. Blakey slowed the movement to the speed of movie credits.
"No initial, given name?" he asked.
Gant shook his head, as if to loosen the tension that Barbara was feeling as they pressed at Blakey's shoulders, staring at the screen.
"I don't recall—" Blakey glanced quickly, repeatedly between map and screen, checking unfamiliar names, ignoring the towns like Bend, Redmond Oakwood… Eventually, shaking his head, he set the screen in flickering motion once more.
Then slowed it as Ford appeared. The list moved as sluggishly as diesel in the Arctic. A. Ford… Arthur J. Ford… Bob Ford.
Eventually, the screen became still, frozen. Peter Ford, Sun Bear Lodge, Squaw Camp, Three Sisters… "Well?" Blakey asked very softly.
Barbara listened to Gant's breathing. It was like that of a tense, roused animal.
Blakey's face expressed the pain he must have been experiencing from the ferocity of Gant's grip on his shoulder as he stared at the screen.
Blakey had isolated the name and address, so that it sat enlarged in the dead centre of the otherwise empty screen.
Eventually, Gant nodded.
"It's him. Hello, Strickland hello."
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Flight and Rest He sat in the swivel chair that had been Vance's, his back to the large desk, watching the dawn begin to leak into the desert sky and dim the stars. The scratch ground crew that Barbara had gotten out of bed were almost finished now. He was just waiting for the ground engineer to call him down to the hangar. The ship was fuelled and had the range to reach Bend, Oregon, without landing. His flight plan had been filed in the name of the pilot who had taken over his job after he resigned; the guy who had flown Barbara back from Oslo after Alan died.
When the phone on the desk rang, he swivelled round in the chair and picked up the receiver.
"Mitchell? We're through down here. You want to take our baby for a drive? We can talk about the monthly repayment plan and the insurance
…?" The humour was tired but refreshing.
"OK, Bill just give me a minute." Barbara had been at the edge of eyesight when he picked up the phone. She was still there as he replaced the receiver. He shrugged at her in a way that he hoped would discourage talk.
"They're ready…"
She was poised like a rain cloud near the door of the executive suite.
Time to go," she replied. He felt her press against his temples like an ache.
She seemed reluctant to let him go, not out of anything that resembled affection, but as if she would be adrift once they parted.
Try to bring my airplane back in one piece, uh?"
He sensed a twisted well-wishing beneath the bluntness.
"OK. You need it to fly to DC next week." He grinned. She was subpoenaed to appear before the Senate Committee that was continuing its investigation of the affairs of Vance Aircraft, despite Alan's death and the company's collapse.
Whatever scams and frauds he had perpetrated weren't going to be allowed to die with him. There seemed a Federal vengefulness towards Vance much like that of Mclntyre towards himself. You stepped out of line, now you take the consequences, that kind of thing. Just one of the recurrent bouts of malarial righteousness they suffered on Capitol Hill. Screw them. It was all mostly irrelevant now, as far as Vance Aircraft was concerned just another shovelful of earth on the company's coffin.
He turned away to stare out of the windows. The dawn was purple along the horizon, the first crags and outcrops coming back to silhouetted life.
"Will you be able to find him? If you find him, can you—" Looking at the back of his head, his set shoulders, she remembered that he meant only to kill Strickland, not bring him back.
"For God's sake, Mitchell-!" she was impelled by desperation to shout at his back. His shoulders flinched.
"Help me! God, I need the sympathy vote his confession would give me!"
She could say no more. It hurt so much to have uttered the words at all.
Gant remained watching the slow seepage of the day, the first faint outlining of a small cloud with pink against a blue-black sky. He could begin to pick out the hanged-men silhouettes of cactuses beyond the perimeter fence. The taxiways and the main runway were the slightest difference of shading from the desert sand. He imagined a flicker of light for an instant, out beyond a clump of rocks. His chest felt tight, his shoulders cramped with too many muscles. Then he exhaled noisily.
"OK, Barbara OK. I promise I'll try and get him back alive." He sighed with what might have been disappointment, a sense of having been disinherited.
"I promise."
He sensed her about to say something else, then was aware, through his tense shoulders, that she had gone and the door had closed behind her.