“I mean so what? Just because somebody high up says it’s okay don’t make it okay at all. Makes it more suspicious than ever. We gotta know.”
“Who has to know? What do you have to know?”
“Who’s behind the hijackings and what your purpose really is, of course.”
“Why?”
“Because we don’t know, why else?”
“I see. So you’re with some sort of a supersecret club inside the CIA, right?”
“No,” Penny shot back, her heart rate leaping.
“I’ll take that as a yes. So what do you think you know about all of this already?”
“Just what I told you. Ain’t that enough?”
“Liar. Did you know your nostrils flare when you lie? Even in the dark I can see it”
“They don’t flare!” Penny protested. “Not anymore! I trained ’em not to.”
“Hey, it’s just a little bit, hardly enough to be noticeable. Now, what do you know about all this?”
“I said, nothing.”
“Nostrils! Start talking or I get Walter Jacobson on the phone.”
Penny sulked. “After the network morning-show fiasco, we tracked the RV being hauled to a chop-shop in Tucumcari. They did a butcher job on it, then hauled it to a private garage out in the sticks, where it got smashed up like it was in a wreck. Damn thing changed hands three more times with the SUV it used to be attached to, then it ended up in a RV body shop in Flagstaff and both was restored to what they are now.”
“Keep talking.”
“The RV looks like a vintage Airstream again and the SUV looks like any other SUV,” she pointed out. “They’re not welded together like some oddball vee-hickle like you expect to see at a monster truck show.”
“Tell me the stuff I don’t know already.”
“Okay. All we knew was that somebody was working the system better than even we knew how to. Legal title on the RV and this here SUV was held by the military, the State of New Mexico and then Vintage RV s of Santa Fe, all in the course of two weeks. Even the U.S. Postal Service had legal possession of the thing for a few hours on Wednesday. Damn, it was beautiful how you people worked it. How’d you do it?”
“Beats me. I just do grunt work. You try to put some sort of electronic tracking doohickeys on it?”
“Didn’t dare,” Penny said. “We saw the thing being scanned for bugs every day and every night. You folks were sending orders to the FBI to do the scanning. One time it was the Flagstaff PD. Once it was BIA!”
“What’s BIA?”
“You don’t know?”
“Told you, I’m just the grunt.”
“Bureau of Indian Affairs. Anyway, you people had it zipped up tight. So we took the human approach. When they went to hire a driver to take it to Indy, I applied and managed to get the job instead of the regular relocation service.”
“How’d you get the job, exactly?” He could feel the interior heat up from Penny’s radiating face. “I see. A little puttin’ out.”
Penny was too embarrassed to even try denying it. “Well, hell, what am I supposed to do now?” he demanded.
“Tell me who you are,” Penny said.
“Aren’t you supposed to leave the questions to the professional interrogators?” Remo asked. “I assume they’re tracking us. I can hear your cell phone working its little chips. They must be listening to everything we say. That’s why you’re stalling and telling the whole long story.” He snatched the phone from the breast pocket of her denim shirt. The display was dark, but there was a lot of electricity zipping around inside. Remo squeezed it flat in one hand, which took more effort than smashing a typical mobile phone. He crumbled the remains like Roquefort cheese.
Penny felt the chunks placed on her lap. “That phone was armored with steel plate.”
“Felt like it.”
“It’s too late to get away. They’ll swarm this vehicle in minutes. They won’t let you slip the net.”
“Why not?”
Penny glared sightlessly in his directly. “Because. Whoever you are, you’re not under control.”
“Not under your control, you mean?” Remo asked, his hackles rising. “And who are you people exactly?”
Penny got stubborn. “Don’t ask me. I’m just a grunt.”
The truck stop was lit as bright as Las Vegas, but there were just two customers in the entire place—two truckers sipping coffee in a booth at the restaurant. They stopped sipping when they heard the sound of propellers.
“Sounds big,” said the trucker with the mustache.
“Yeah” said the trucker without a mustache.
They were identical twin brothers, separated at birth, raised on opposite sides of the country. They barely knew each other while growing up. They had both chosen to make a living as long-haul truckers and met up for a coffee every few months when their paths crossed. Despite their disconnected lives, they shared that amazing bond that all twins shared, in which each seemed to know what the other was thinking.
“Real big,” said the brother without the mustache, as the black shape swooped out of the dark sky and thundered to a touchdown on the empty interstate, roaring by the truck stop without slowing much.
The racket brought the waitress stumbling out of the ladies’ room with her skirt tucked in her underwear. “What is it?”
“Hercules,” said the brother with the mustache. “C-130. Heavy-lifter.”
“Worked on one in the Army,” added his brother. “Don’t say?”
“Great big sucker.”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, my God!” The waitress ran into the parking lot, waving her arms at the headlights that had appeared on the highway, closing fast on the taxiing aircraft.
“Herc pilot ought to put on some lights if he’s gonna land on the road,” said the man without a mustache.
“That goes without saying.”
“I apologize, then.”
There was no chance the shrieking waitress was going to reach the highway in time to warn the approaching vehicle, which wasn’t slowing. The gigantic aircraft had to have been visible, even with its lights off, but the approaching headlights didn’t reduce speed.
As it flashed by the truck stop, the brothers could see the perfect gleaming profile of a restored Airstream towed behind a big SUV.
A quarter mile later it was about to rear-end the Hercules, but the airplane lowered its ramp. The SUV accelerated, then drifted up the ramp and disappeared inside the aircraft. The Herc accelerated and lifted off.
The waitress watched it vanish, which didn’t take long in the dark of night, then she turned and stared at something far down the highway. It was a woman, running wearily to the truck stop.
“Are you hurt? Were you raped?” the waitress shouted as she followed the haggard jogger into the restaurant
“Would you shut up? I’m fine. I’m gonna use your phone.” The jogger barked some sort of code words into the telephone, then turned on the twins. In minutes, the sky filled with helicopters. Unmarked cars arrived next. The state police came last demanding explanations.
“Got away?” shrieked the woman who had jogged to the truck stop. She was getting some sort of update on a- walkie-talkie. “It’s a freaking flying football field! Half the state must have seen it!”
“Running dark,” pointed out the brother with the mustache.
“Above the cloud cover, and it’ll cushion the sound,” his brother explained.
“Shut up!”
The brothers were questioned. They told the same story as the waitress, and when they asked to see the Feds’ badges they were rebuffed. They helped themselves to more coffee. The woman jogger asked them one last time, “You sure you didn’t get the numbers off that aircraft?”
“’Course we didn’t. It was running dark.”