He listened to her silence which reminded him of a machine making noiseless but tangible and important calculations. Then he added:
"Listen to me, Ms Vance. I only have to instruct my agents who are with you, and I can have you arrested for harbouring a fugitive right now. But you realise that, I guess?"
The silence continued. Then, with a sigh of admission, the woman answered him.
"OK, you can make trouble for me, Agent Mclntyre. And I don't need any more problems right now. Mitchell is flying to Oregon, to the airfield at Redmond—"
He covered the mouthpiece of the receiver and gestured violently at the maps that lay unfolded on Chris' empty seat. Fraser moved, collected them and smoothed them out on his seat's folding table, which he jutted out into the aisle. Mclntyre tugged on his half-glasses.
"Why Oregon?" he asked.
For a moment, Fraser appeared both disappointed and on the point of asking him a question of his own.
"I–I'm not sure," Barbara replied.
"He didn't confide in me just borrowed the executive jet."
"How long will it take him to fly up there?"
"Most of the morning."
Mclntyre clicked his fingers impatiently at Fraser, who opened a map of the northwestern states and awkwardly tried to adjoin it to the one already spread out.
Mclntyre studied the distances voraciously, as if discovering a quarry's spoor.
"Why did you agree to loan him your jet, Barbara? You knew the situation—"
"Like you said, Mclntyre — I used to be married to the guy.
He deserved a break."
The last one he's going to get, Barbara." He grinned at Fraser.
"Put my man Kennedy back on the line. You showed good sense—" He realised that she had already gone, heard the murmur of her voice as she summoned Kennedy.
"Fraser call Chris and the pilot in here." Then: "Kennedy, you hear that? What's the confirmation on the flight plan?"
"We're still checking—"
"Five minutes is all you've got. Move ass—" He looked up from the map as a shadow fell across it. The pilot's shirt was already damp beneath his arms from the morning heat.
"Can we fly all the way up to Oregon from here without another refuelling?"
"Where in Oregon, sir?"
"Redmond."
"Sure."
"So, he won't have to refuel, either." His thick fingers made leaping, attacking movements on the map.
"How much longer before we can take off?"
"You want a change of flight plan maybe thirty minutes."
"Cut that time in half."
"Is he headed for Oregon?" Chris asked with due deference.
"Kennedy will confirm that in a couple of minutes. If he is, then that's where we need to be."
"Why Oregon?" Fraser asked.
"How should I know the guy's running scared."
"I don't think so, Mac. And neither do you."
Mclntyre shrugged. Looking up at the pilot, he said: "Get that new flight plan logged. I'll confirm when I hear from Phoenix." He grinned. The schmuck is running and we're right behind him. He's an hour ahead can we make that up?"
"We won't drop behind him. Depends what he's flying," the pilot answered from the doorway of the flight deck.
"Vance's personal jet."
"A Vance Executive is slower than this baby. We can maybe cut thirty minutes off his lead—"
"OK, let's get out of here as fast as we can."
As Chris moved away, Fraser whispered urgently:
Think, Mac for God's sake, think. Why is Gant so interested in Oregon?
Is Strickland in Oregon?"
"I don't know, Fraser but Gant's on his way there, and that's who I want!"
"Sure," Gant murmured into the receiver.
"No, you did right to protect yourself. It's OK, I understand." I counted on it, he added to himself.
Two hours into the flight, she had called via SELCAL. Like picking up the phone.
Vance's personal jet had had that facility installed. Satellite phone links to the entire planet. He had wondered whether she would call and now felt a tinge of guilt that he had doubted her. She would have had to inform the FBI, and he had known they would check his flight plan it couldn't have been kept secret.
Thanks," she murmured, as intimately as if she had been seated in the co-pilot's chair.
"What will you do?" There was an urgent, demanding interest in her voice.
"You don't need to know, Barbara."
"I have to go it's difficult."
"OK."
"Good luck."
"Yes."
He closed the channel, recognising as he did so the strange intimacy of their conversation.
Thirty thousand feet below the aircraft, northern California was beginning to lurch mountainously upwards. The peaks of the Sierra Nevada were to starboard, the Pacific too distant to port to recognise other than as an emptiness as large as the sky.
What will you do?
The question had plagued him for more than an hour after the draining tension of the violent take-off from Vance Aircraft. For a long time he hadn't been able to concentrate, had been incapable of making any decisions. He had turned, whole minutes after he should, on to his northern heading, passing west of Phoenix… crossing the Grand Canyon, lifting over the Sierra Nevada before the solution had come to him.
He couldn't land at Redmond, unless he wanted the FBI to arrest him moments after touchdown. If he declared a fake Mayday and diverted, he would reveal his eventual destination as surely as if he phoned Mclntyre to tell him. He needed somewhere to land and hide the airplane… somewhere secret.
Somewhere within driving distance of Three Sisters and Strickland.
Mclntyre was at Albuquerque had probably taken off by now, and was maybe only an hour or so behind him. Mclntyre could land at Redmond, just fifty road minutes from Squaw Camp and Strickland… The certainty that they would be there ahead of him narrowed the perspective of choice until it was a tunnel with no light at the end of it.
Los Angeles had been a sprawl to starboard, then the Sierra Nevada and the Coastal Range had formed the high perimeters of his flight path.
Somewhere amid the northern straggle of LA had been Burbank, masked in a morning haze. It had been ten minutes of flying time before the hazy recollection of the Skunk Works and the secret planes he had helped test for Lockheed reminded him. The flight path he was following he had flown before, tagging on behind commercial flights or flying above and below the commercial airways in ugly black Stealth airplanes, testing their radar invisibility. North from Los Angeles towards San Francisco and Oakland, then across northern California and southern Oregon to… Warner Lakes AFB. Long closed and abandoned. One of the airforce's secret facilities, linked to test flights of machines manufactured in the Skunk Works.
He hadn't needed the map. The topography and the distances had unrolled in his head like something on a Stealth fighter's navigational screens. It was tucked into the south-east corner of the state, amid salt lakes. It was nowhere. He had grinned, phrasing it like that.
Some comic based there had once erected a crude road sign beside the one that declared the identity of the airforce base Fort Nowhere.
It would take him hours by road from Warner Lakes after he had found a vehicle to hire or steal. But the Exec would be hidden and he would be lost. It was the only option even though it meant he wouldn't reach Strickland until late afternoon, and Mclntyre would be waiting for him.
It was too late now. He had already initiated the deception. On leaving LA Centre's control boundary and before he contacted Oakland Centre, he had faked poor radio transmission. When he tried to contact Oakland, the problem appeared to have worsened.