“Hey, hey, hey, what’s going on?” said Al “Greasy Hands” Parsons, stepping in between them.
Johnson ignored Greasy Hands, pointing at Turk. “You remember you’re in the Air Force, mister,” he told him. “I don’t care who your boss is. At the end of the day, your butt is mine.”
Johnson stalked away.
“I swear to God, if you weren’t here, I woulda hit him,” said Turk.
“Then you’re lucky I was here,” said Greasy Hands. He laughed.
“Blaming me for that? What a bunch of bullshit.” Turk was still mad. His ears felt hot because of the blood rushing to them. “He almost killed me. He’s supposed to override manually immediately if there’s a problem. Not wait for me to call knock it off. Not then. Shit. I get hit on landing, that’s it.”
Greasy Hands was silent.
“Damn,” said Turk. He shook his head. It was typical Johnson: bluster and blame on everyone except for himself.
“Come on,” said Greasy Hands. “I’ll buy you a beer at Hole 19.”
Hole 19 was a club at Dreamland.
“I gotta finish the postflight brief,” said Turk.
“I’ll finish it with you.”
Turk smiled. Greasy Hands was old-school, a former chief master sergeant now working for the Office of Technology. He’d served at Dreamland for years. Now he was Breanna Stockard’s assistant, a kind of chief cook and bottle washer who solved high-priority problems. He was a grease monkey at heart, a tinkerer’s tinkerer who could probably have built the Tigershark in his garage if he wanted.
“I’m OK, Chief,” said Turk.
“I’d like to tag along.”
“All right, come on. Boring stuff, though.”
“Boring’s good in this business,” said Greasy Hands, patting him on the back.
18
The obvious next step was to disinter the bodies in the small cemetery and see if the records were wrong and one of them was Stoner’s.
Danny had no stomach for the job and was more than a little relieved when Reid said he would arrange for a CIA team to do it. He thanked the police chief and his son for their hospitality, buying them a late-morning breakfast at the town restaurant. Then he drove back to Balti, where he returned the Renault in exchange for a ride to the airport. The rickety old helicopter took him to Chisinau in forty nail-biting but uneventful minutes.
Nuri and Flash were waiting for him when he returned. They’d just come from the Russian bank, where they opened accounts with electronic access. They also scattered a dozen bugs around the place, all with video capacity. The bugs transmitted data to a receiving unit stashed in a garbage bin behind the building, and from there to the satellite network MY-PID used.
“Hey, boss,” said Flash. “Cool helo.”
“Don’t let the paint job fool you,” said Danny. “It rides like a washing machine with a switchblade for a rotor.”
“We have some leads,” said Nuri, leading them toward the car he’d rented. “Some better than others.”
The best involved a doctor who specialized in sports medicine, and was quoted in the Le Monde story. MY-PID had tracked him to a small clinic in the capital. There was only one problem: the clinic had closed ten years before. At that point the doctor had ceased to exist.
At least officially. But MY-PID had tracked bank accounts he’d used, connecting them to a mortgage on a house just outside the city limits. The mortgage had been taken out six months after the clinic closed — and paid off eighteen months later. The name on the mortgage was different, but the person was also a doctor: Dr. Andrei Ivanski.
MY-PID turned up little information on Ivanski. He was Moldovan, of Russian descent, according to certification papers. He had no active practice in the country.
Were they the same person?
Nuri thought they probably were. And, interestingly, the doctor also had an account at the Russian bank, though the records showed it hadn’t been used for nearly four years.
“He has a pretty nice house,” said Nuri. He showed Danny satellite pictures of it as they drove into town. “I want it under surveillance, get some more information, see if we can figure out what the doc is up to.”
“Maybe we should make an appointment and ask him,” suggested Danny. “Does he have a practice?”
“In town. But first we need background,” said Nuri. “We need to know what kind of questions to ask.”
“Ask him about steroids.”
“That’s the last question we ask,” said Nuri. “We don’t ask that until we’re reeling him in.”
“I don’t know if I’m buying this whole human engineering thing,” Danny told Nuri. “For one thing, I’m not convinced Stoner survived the crash. For another, I don’t see a connection with the sports place. It’s all pretty far-fetched.”
“Enhancement, not engineering,” said Nuri. “You don’t like the idea that Stoner was involved? Is that it?”
“I don’t have feelings one way or another.”
It was a lie, but Nuri didn’t call him on it.
“Look, Stoner was Agency,” Nuri told Danny. “I know he was your friend, but in some ways he’s like a brother I didn’t know. And I agree the whole thing is pretty far-fetched. But if they have a genetic test—”
“It’s not foolproof,” said Danny. “He may be in that cemetery.”
“We’ll know about the cemetery in a few days,” said Nuri. “In the meantime, these are our best leads. Until Kiev.”
19
The argument with his wife still felt a little raw as Zen wheeled himself into the congressional dining room, where he was planning to lobby a pair of congressmen on the companion bill to his scholarship measure. Both were from the opposing party, but he didn’t figure either would be a hard sell — they had large military installations in their districts, and one had a brother who was still on active duty with the Marines.
The ease of the assignment let his mind drift a bit, and he thought of the NATO meeting even as he came up to the table where the congressmen had already been seated.
“Senator, good to see you,” said Kevin Sullivan, an upstate New Yorker in his third term. He practically jumped out of his chair as he grabbed Zen’s hand.
His companion, Brian Daly, was more reserved. But it was Daly who began the conversation by mentioning that he’d talked about the bill with his brother in the Marines. His brother, a lieutenant colonel, had heartily endorsed it.
That was good enough for Daly.
“I think it’s a good idea, too,” said Sullivan. “I’m on board.”
“Great,” said Zen. “Let’s eat.”
“My brother remembers you from your Dreamland days,” said Daly as they waited for their lunches. “He was on a deployment in Iran when you were active.”
“Hell of a time,” said Zen.
“He said you guys were something else. You took out a laser site in broad daylight? Ballsy.”
“Your brother was probably in a lot more danger than I ever was,” said Zen. “The guys on the ground always had it worse. Hell, if I was in trouble, I could just fly away.”
That was more than a slight exaggeration — piloting the Flighthawks from the belly of a Megafortress, he couldn’t “just fly away” at all. He was completely at the mercy of whoever was piloting the big plane — or firing at it.
During the war between Pakistan and India, it had almost cost him his life. At one point, the plane in flames, he parachuted out with Breanna. They’d spent several days shipwrecked on an island.
Air-wrecked. Whatever.
Their lives had changed so much since then. It wasn’t just because they weren’t in the same line of work anymore either. They had different outlooks on things, different attitudes toward Teri and how to raise her. Different priorities with their jobs and lives.