“We’d rather work with you than against you,” Amish said. “We’re all on the same side here.”
“I’ll take that to mean you don’t want me calling the vice president about it,” Walt said.
“I’m aware of your relationship with Vice President Shaler. I’m aware of your service record. You’re something of a hero, Sheriff. I get that. Doesn’t make my job any easier.”
“You’re retired military,” Walt said. “That’s a burn wound on your neck-chemical, maybe. Desert Storm, I’m guessing. There were compounds used in that war that few of us ever heard about, weren’t there? You don’t strike me as military intelligence, Mr. Amish. You have field experience, I’m pretty sure. Marines, maybe.” There was a flicker in the man’s eyes that was his telclass="underline" an ever-so-slight lifting of the eyelids that Walt guessed he’d worked hard to control. “Your boss worked under George the First when he headed up Langley. Your boss’s boss I’m talking about: Roger Hillabrand. He was a Marine, wasn’t he? A big player in Desert Storm. Hired his men to work for him, once he entered the private sector, and formed the Semper Group. So you’re long on loyalty, short on questions. We can spend three or four hours in here and all I’m going to do is lose my chance at Ms. Kenshaw. These are tricky waters because your boss’s boss has a personal relationship with Ms. Kenshaw-and if he had anything to do with our grounding, if any phone calls were exchanged, this is going to look personal. Mixing business with pleasure. Using his power… to derail any attempt at a date. I thought I could take off the uniform, fly her up over Craters, and make a good impression. Maybe score a few points. But maybe Hillabrand thought different. This could be embarrassing. You called in the Air National Guard, Mr. Amish. Over a woman. Why don’t you release us and let me try to salvage what I can of an evening gone horribly wrong and we’ll both forget all about this?”
“Your glider will be impounded until further notice. Our people will take it apart-piece by piece, if we have to-in order to determine there were no cameras hidden in it. I can only assume you think you’re doing good, Sheriff. But we both know that do-gooders typically do more harm than good.”
“I was out on a date. I was trying for some romance. You want to arrest me for that? Guilty as charged.”
Amish’s eyelids flared again. His jaw clenched, as he fought to keep his mouth shut. But Walt egged him on with a shit-eating grin intended to make the man feel as small as possible. Interrogations could go both directions.
“This facility is under constant surveillance,” Amish said proudly. “We are watched”-he pointed to the two cameras in the room-
“recorded, scrutinized, and investigated. We are held accountable to six different federal departments. We report to the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I know it’s easy to see a place like the INL as a conspiracy in progress, given the materials we work with and the secretive nature of the research conducted here. On-site protests and demonstrations remind us of this on a regular basis. We offer up a fine target for the Greens. But this lab lit the first city in the world with atomic-powered light. The nuclear submarine engine was developed and tested at this facility. Critical situations like Three Mile Island were successfully resolved because we had a working facility in which to simulate repairs. This place matters. And if you work here, you can’t pick your nose without a Senate subcommittee hearing about it. We are not a rogue facility. No matter what people like Sheriff Walt Fleming think. There is nothing here that’s going to help you with this murder investigation of yours.” He answered Walt’s expression: “Read the pages, Sheriff.”
Walt wanted to take a swing at the guy, more out of frustration than anger, but it wasn’t going to happen. Amish’s confidence was disconcerting. There was a knock on the door followed by the arrival of a man who leaned into Amish’s ear.
Amish said, “You’ll go home tonight, but we’re not done here. We’ll report this violation to some of those six departments, and I’m sure you’ll be hearing from more than one of them. This was a stupid stunt to pull, Sheriff. You’ve fooled no one.”
If he was being sent home tonight, then they hadn’t found the photographs.
He waited another hour to be released and around nine P.M. was led outside to a vehicle that drove him and Fiona back to the Arco airport, where the towplane waited.
They didn’t speak while in the car and under escort. After having been dropped off, the shuttle vehicle then leaving the airstrip, Walt turned to her.
“So?”
Her lips pursed. She tugged the strap of her camera bag higher onto her shoulder. “I made the call. You know?”
“E-mailing the photos, you mean? Yeah. That was incredibly fast think-”
“The other call,” she said. “How do you think we got off so easily?”
“Hillabrand?”
She nodded spitefully.
“But… they didn’t have us on anything,” Walt protested. “Why drag Hillabrand into this if they were going to release us, anyway?”
“Let me get this right: you’re mad at me for getting us out of there?”
“I’m not mad at you. But they had no evidence.”
“They had us locked up in interrogation rooms. They had my phone. My phone, not yours. All the photographs were on my phone. Besides, don’t give me that: it’s why you brought me along, right? We established that earlier.”
“It’s not why,” Walt countered. “I hadn’t even thought about Hillabrand until you brought him up.”
“That’s not true,” she said.
“It is! I asked you along because I needed photographs shot. If we hadn’t been forced down, I’d have gone in there on foot tonight. To that construction work. But, listen, I never once considered using your… relationship… with Hillabrand to my advantage-our advantage. Your mention of it actually amused me, Fiona. You don’t know me very well if you’d think I’d do such a thing.”
“There is no relationship with Roger. Just FYI. I’d say that pretty much just came to an end tonight. I felt like a teenager calling Daddy. Who knows what he thought. Ten minutes later, we were released. You can thank me later.”
She hurried off toward the towplane, where the pilot was standing by. Walt packed in with her behind the pilot, and they sat pressed shoulder to shoulder for the short thirty-minute flight. She never said a word to him. He tried twice to break the silence but failed. At the FBO in Sun Valley, she marched to her parked Subaru, climbed in, and drove off without looking back.
Walt arrived home, depressed, and wondering if the INL would take legal action. Hillabrand being dragged into it complicated matters.
He parked the Cherokee out front as he almost always did, despite a garage around back. He liked the police cruiser being seen sitting in front of the house. He hurried up to the front porch, concerned-but not overly so-by the front porch light being off and the rest of the house being so dark. He always encouraged Lisa to keep several lights on.
He managed to key open the door in the dark and flip on the lights.
“Lisa?” he hissed softly.
The couch was empty. He usually found her dozing there at this hour. She’d probably fallen asleep next to one of the twins while reading a bedtime story.
“Lisa?” he repeated more loudly.
His chest tightened.
He hurried through the house, carefully opening Emily’s bedroom door first. Empty. Then Nikki’s. Empty. He checked the face of his cell phone: eleven messages. He had assumed them all to be work related; consumed with the events of the evening, he’d planned to answer them once he got home.