“Actually if you wanted to send me news reports or even just letters from this part of the country, I need a Lower Ohio Valley Correspondent.”
“You have no idea how long-winded I am.”
“You have no idea how short on copy, and reporters, I’m going to be, especially if I’m trying to cover the country. My guess is that if you wait a couple of weeks and then address it to Chris Manckiewicz, the Newspaper, Olympia, and give it to anyone going that way to be passed on to the next person going that way, it’ll find me. Sort of like Internet by hand.” He looked down at the copy of Weisbrod’s speech, and his eyes were pulled into the paper; before he knew it he’d read the whole thing. “Hey, this is a great speech, and yes, you get all the credit for transcribing it. Here’s your first assigned gig: write me an account of your impressions of the speech, how he said it, how people reacted, everything.”
“Really? You want me to write something like that for you?”
“No, just make something up and I’ll throw it in the wastebasket.”
She swatted him playfully, they grinned at each other, and Chris figured I’ve got no paper and it’s breaking my heart, but I’ve got a stringer, and that’s a start. Carol May said, “Pauline should be back any time; she was going to round up a few teenagers who don’t have enough to do to go out and help you all with getting the plane ready. You’re just lucky the harvest is in, and we all like Mr. Larsen, so we can spare him some time and effort to keep him flying. Especially since he was so good as to put us on the map and has been such a pleasant man to have around these past few days.”
“He thinks he’s not good with people,” Chris said, grinning. “Can’t be persuaded otherwise.”
“Pooh. All he needed to do was ask for help; I’m glad you came along to do it for him!” Carol May Kloster looked at the sky. “If you all hurry, he can take off sometime before the storm hits, and I’m sure that would be a good thing.”
FOUR DAYS LATER. SACRAMENTO. CALIFORNIA. 2:30 P.M. PS£T. THURSDAY. JANUARY 2.
Heather and Bambi were working the crowd in front of the platform, looking for anyone with a weapon, when Bambi whooped. Grinning like a maniac, Quattro Larsen stepped forward. They embraced, laughing just as though it had been years instead of weeks. Another thing we all have to get used to, Heather thought. Nowadays a thousand miles is a long way.
“I take it your giant mechanical bumblebee is working again?” Heather said.
“Giant—I’ll have you know, if there’s ever a National Museum again, that’s the one plane that for sure’ll be in it. At least after there’s another operating plane on the continent, besides my other one.”
“The Stearman’s flying?”
“That’s how Chris and I—Chris!”
Chris Manckiewicz turned from where he’d been taking notes on an intense conversation. “My entire history of the period,” he said, mournfully, “which is all future historians will ever know of our age, will be filled with the phrase, ‘But then Quattro shouted for me, and we had to go.’”
“We met at the Washington Advertiser-Gazette, a long time ago,” Heather said, sticking out her hand.
“I remember you, Ms. O’Grainne, and thanks for all your help on that day.”
“I had no idea at the time you were a pilot. And how did you get out here?”
If Manckiewicz could do anything, it was tell a story, and after a few minutes he’d made Heather laugh more than she had in weeks, describing the adventures of “a guy who thought the props must be the fake parts of the plane,” on his first trip as “assistant mechanic, copilot intern, master chef, and chief wailer-in-terror.” “But,” he added, “by the time we landed at Castle Larsen, I was approaching competence, though I am told I never attained the kind of copilothood that was first achieved by the one, the only, the Amelia Earhart of her generation—”
Bambi made a fart noise with her tongue.
“Which is one-third of the mission here,” Quattro said, smoothly. “I was kind of hoping your interrogation of Ysabel Roth is not complete, that Bambi Castro is still essential to it, and that you’d see the wisdom of leaving them both at Castle Larsen, actually.”
Heather grinned at him. “And you didn’t even mention securing the enduring loyalty of a critical Castle on the California coast.”
“Seemed rude and unnecessary.”
“Well, as for Roth, I don’t think we’ll get more cooperation out of her in another location, and we don’t have to guard her where she is. And we don’t have any way to hold employees against their will, nor—”
“Larry!” Bambi shouted and waved.
Heather turned around and found herself facing a guy who seemed to have been sent from Central Casting as “old sourdough”—baggy wool pants, rope suspenders, immense flannel shirt, floppy broad-brimmed hat, and bushy beard. All he needs is an arrow through that silly hat.
He grinned. “Do you have any idea how great life is when I don’t have to fit the FBI dress code?” He stuck out his hand.
Heather looked down at her current outfit—a heavily stained men’s safari shirt (you could never have too many pockets), black-powder carbine on a sling, combat knife in an arm holster, camo pants, and calf-high moccaboots she’d traded a case of pre-Daybreak Coors for in Limon, Colorado—and said, “Well, I have to admit, I could get through quite a few more years without ever putting on black pumps, jacket, skirt, and a blouse. Biz outfits used to make me look like a giant poodle.”
“Me too,” Mensche said. “I don’t care what Hoover thought, speaking as an FBI agent, the pumps always killed my back.”
“Did you find Debbie?” Bambi asked.
“No luck yet. But she was alive when that bunch of women left Coffee Creek, and she was among the leaders, and at least I’ve established that no one ran into them around the mouth of the Columbia or on the south shore of Puget Sound. It was while I was up there that I persuaded the governor to invite you all to move the Federal government there, and now he seems to think that it was his idea and I was his brilliant assistant, so he thinks he owes me some favors. I’m planning to cash in on them by having him put out sort of a permanent APB for Deb. Meanwhile, I’m thinking maybe Deb’s group out of Coffee Creek headed east for some reason, gonna try to pick up the trail that way.”
“So are you leaving the FBI for good?” Quattro asked.
“Soon as they open an office, I plan to transfer to the US Marshals. I’m not looking to be Eliot Ness anymore. I’m thinking more Wyatt Earp.”
“Or Gabby Hayes,” Bambi suggested.
TWO DAYS LATER. THE COW CREEK COUNTRY. NORTH OF GRANT’S PASS. OREGON. NOON PST. SATURDAY. JANUARY 4.
Word from farther up the line was that coal was getting hard to locate, so they were towing six coal cars in addition to Amtrak One and the supporting staff and troop cars, which made for a slow climb; they had crossed into southern Oregon a few hours ago, and stopped for the obligatory speech in Grant’s Pass, which seemed, like many smaller cities that had always been somewhat isolated, to be doing relatively well. The crowd had been enthusiastic, putting Graham in what Heather was beginning to think of as a too-good mood.