“No one denies my father,” Rocky whispered. “What’s wrong with you?”
Nate stood up slowly so that Khalid would have no reason to react.
“Thank you for the coffee,” Nate said. “I want my birds back now.”
“I don’t understand,” Al-Nura said softly. “We’ve done business before. We were friends, professionals. We belong to a very small group of master falconers.”
“I’m beyond that,” Nate said.
“Why won’t you assist me?”
Nate considered the question for a moment, said, “Because I don’t like you anymore.”
Al-Nura said, “Khalid.”
His movement was lightning swift, too fast for Nate to ward off. Khalid was suddenly behind him, a hand on the top of his head jerking his face skyward, the bite of a razor-sharp blade like a wasp sting a quarter of an inch above his Adam’s apple. Khalid pressed in with the knife. It was so sharp Nate couldn’t feel the cut itself, only the thin hot stream of blood that crawled down his neck into his collar.
“Give him half of this,” Al-Nura said, breaking the brick of cash and handing $60,000 to Rocky, who stuffed it into Nate’s pants beneath his belt.
“You get the other half when you bring me the wild peregrines.”
The next morning, an hour after dawn, Nate launched himself down the cliff face. The northern wind had picked up and was starting to buffet the tops of the cottonwood trees two hundred feet below on the banks of the stream, making a liquid sound. He was protected from the wind by the rock wall, but he could hear it howling above him as well.
He rappelled down, feeding rope through the carabiners of his harness, bouncing away from the sheer rock with the balls of his feet. Tightly coiled netting hung from his belt.
Fifty feet down was the nest. It was a huge cross-hatching of branches and twigs and dried brush, cemented together by mud, sun, and years. It was well hidden and virtually inaccessible from below, but he’d located it the year before by the whitewash of excrement that extended down the granite from the nest, looking like the results of an overturned paint bucket.
As he approached it from above, he noted the layers of building material, from the white and brittle branches on the bottom to the still-green fronds on the top. The nest had been built over generations, and had hosted falcons for forty years. Nate couldn’t determine if all the inhabitants had been peregrines, but he doubted it. The original nest, he thought, had been built by eagles.
The nest came into view and Nate prepared for anything. Once, he had surprised a female raptor in the act of tearing a rabbit apart for her fledglings and the bird launched herself into his face, shredding his cheeks with her talons. But there were no mature adults in the nest. Only four downy and awkward fledglings. When they saw him, they screeched and opened their mouths wide, expecting him to give them food.
He guessed by their size that they were two months old, and would be considered eyas, too young to fly. If taken now, they would need to be immediately hooded and hand-fed until their feathers fully developed, and kept sightless in the dark so they didn’t know from whom their food came. If the birds saw their owner, the falconer would be imprinted for life as the food provider and the bird would never hunt properly or maintain its wild edge. Nate didn’t like taking birds this young, not only because of the work involved, but because of the moral question. He no longer wanted to own his birds, preferring instead to partner with them.
But here they were. So where was the mom? He almost wished she would show up and drive him away.
He spun himself around and the landscape opened up as far as he could see. The sun was emerging from a bank of clouds on the eastern horizon and lighting the trees and brush with burnt orange while darkening the S curves of the river. There were no birds in the sky.
Without extracting the net from his web belt, Nate sighed, kicked himself free of the cliff face, and descended to the creek bottom.
That night, Nate sat at the back booth of the Stockman’s Bar, illuminated in shadows cast by the light over the vacant pool table. The Stockman’s was a long dark wooden tube of a place decorated with ancient deer and elk heads and knotty pine. There were six men at the bar sitting on stools. Shorty sat on stool number four. Shorty refused to look at Nate, who nursed a beer and waited for his friend, Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett.
At eight, the game warden entered and squinted against the gloom. Nate nodded, and Joe walked back to join him, sliding into the seat across from Nate.
“Long day,” Joe said, putting his hat crown-down on the table. Joe wore his red uniform shirt with the pronghorn antelope patch on the sleeve.
“Thanks for meeting me,” Nate said, signaling the barmaid for two beers.
“I can’t stay long,” Joe said. “I haven’t been home yet. I was in the timber all day checking elk hunters.”
“Find any?”
“Plenty. But you don’t care about that.”
“No,” Nate said.
“You said something about a permit.”
Nate nodded. “I need to capture a few birds.”
Joe thanked the barmaid for the beer, sipped it, and studied Nate’s face. “When did you decide to follow the regulations?”
“I always have.”
“Like hell, Nate.”
They sipped their beers.
“I stopped by your place on the way here,” Joe said. “I noticed your birds were gone. I thought that was unusual.”
Nate nodded.
“I don’t suppose they flew off?”
“Nope.”
“Does this have to do with that big jet at the airport?” Joe asked.
“Possibly.”
“I always wondered what you did to make money,” Joe said. “Since there’s never been any visible means of support.”
Nate shrugged.
Joe rolled the bottle of beer between his palms, thinking. “I don’t know if I can issue a permit when I think the purpose of capturing the falcons is to sell them.”
Nate said, “That’s what I thought you would say.”
“Who is the potential buyer?”
“His son just entered the bar,” Nate said, stealing a look over the top of the booth. Rocky and Khalid were with two of the blond women. Every eye in the place was on the women, who wore black skintight bodysuits. No women in Saddlestring had ever entered the Stockman’s Bar in a bodysuit.
“Might as well look,” Nate said. “Everyone else is.”
Joe turned and looked, maybe a few beats longer than necessary. When he faced Nate, he said, “They don’t exactly go incognito, do they?”
“They don’t think they need to.”
“Is that your buyer?”
“His son, Rocky. And his bodyguard.”
“Who are the women?”
“Rocky’s toys.”
Joe paused for a while before looking up at Nate and asking, “What’s really going on here?”
Nate said, “I met him years ago. He was a friend of ours in Special Forces. Not because he liked us or we liked him, but we had common interests. I never talked politics with him once. Instead, we talked falconry. He’s paid me before to get him birds.”
Joe said, “Hmmm.”
“Al-Nura is Wahhabi. He’s got billions from the royal family, and he’s one of the biggest funding sources for foundations and mosques all over the world. If you’re looking for one of the main guys establishing a violent religion that exists to wipe us out, you’re looking at Al-Nura. Yet here he is, flying all around our country, doing as he pleases. No one even challenges him.”
Nate sighed. “A guy like that can have anything in the world. If he wants peregrines, he can get them from any number of good breeding programs. Hell, he could buy the breeding program.”