She had not asked him how this particular area could reasonably be construed as on the way to Tulsa from Angola.
She had not asked him what expertise he was lending.
During the ten minutes she had spent trying to talk the pilot into waiting for her contact the flatbed trucks had been driven away.
She was going to need to rethink this step by step.
She was going to need to reconnoiter, reassess.
The L-100 and the zone of safety it represented were about to vanish into the cloud cover.
Fly it down, fly it back, the pilot had said. That’s my contract. I get paid to drive the bus. I get paid to drive the bus when the engines are overheating. I get paid to drive the bus when the loran goes down. I don’t get paid to take care of the passengers.
Her partner, her backup, her protection.
Her single link to the day before.
He had flown it down and now he was flying it back.
Per his contract.
She did not think it possible that her father would find himself in exactly this situation, yet she had done exactly what he said he had to do. She had done exactly what her father said he had to do and she had done exactly what Barry Sedlow said to do.
Just do it my way for a change.
This would very soon be all right.
She would very soon know what to do.
She felt alert, a little light-headed. She did not yet know where she was, and the clearing in which the strip had been laid down had suddenly cleared of people, but she was ready, open to information.
This should be Costa Rica.
If this was Costa Rica the first thing she needed to do was get to San José.
She did not know what she would do if she did get to San José but there would be a hotel, offices of American banks, an airport with scheduled carriers.
Through the open door of the concrete structure off the apron she could see, intermittently, someone moving, someone walking around, a man, a man with a ponytail, a man with a ponytail wearing fatigues. She kept her eyes on this door and tried to recall lessons learned in other venues, other vocations. One thing she had learned during her four-year sojourn at the Herald Examiner was how easy it was to get into places where no one was supposed to be. The trick was to attach oneself to service personnel, people who had no particular investment in who got in and who stayed out. She had on one occasion followed a telephone crew into a locked hangar in which an experimental stealth bomber was being readied for its first rollout. She had on more than one occasion gotten inside a house where someone did not want to talk to her by striking up conversation with the pool man, the gardener, the dog groomer who had run a cord inside the kitchen door to plug in a dryer.
In fact she had mentioned this during the course of her Westlake Career Day workshop.
Melissa Simon had again raised her hand. She had a point she wanted to make. The point she wanted to make was that “nobody from the media could have ever gotten into those houses if the families had normal security and their public relations people were doing their job.”
Which had prompted Elena to raise the Westlake Career Day stakes exponentially by suggesting, in words that either did or did not include the phrase “try living in the real world for a change,” that very few families in the world outside three or four well-defined neighborhoods on the West Side of Los Angeles County had either public relations people or what one very fortunate eighth grader might call “normal security.”
Which had caused Wynn Janklow, after this was reported to him the next day by three different people (Mort Simon’s partner, Mort Simon’s lawyer, and the young woman who was described as Mort Simon’s “issues person”), to leave half his lunch at Hillcrest uneaten in order to call Elena.
“I hear you’ve been telling our friends’ kids their parents live in a dream world.”
In the first place, she said, this was not an exact quotation.
He said something else but the connection was bad.
In the second place, she said, Mort Simon was not her friend. She didn’t even know Mort Simon.
Wynn was calling from his Mercedes, driving east on Pico, and had turned up Robertson before his voice faded back in.
“You want everybody in town saying you talk like a shiksa,” he had said, “you’re getting the job done.”
“I am a shiksa,” she had said.
“That’s your problem, not mine,” he had said.
In fact she did know Mort Simon.
Of course she knew Mort Simon.
The house in Beverly Hills where she sat on the sidewalk waiting for the pool report on the celebrity fund-raiser was as it happened Mort Simon’s house. She had even seen him briefly, lifting a transparent flap of the Regal Rents tent to survey the barricade behind which the press was waiting. He had looked directly at her but such was his generalized view of the world outside his tent that he had not recognized her and she had not spoken.
“Send out some refreshments,” she had heard him say to a waiter before he dropped the flap, although no refreshments ever materialized. “Like, you know, diet Pepsi, water, I’m not paying so they can tank up.”
The wife and daughter no longer lived in the house. The wife and daughter had moved to a town house just inside the Beverly Hills line from Century City and the daughter had transferred from Westlake to Beverly Hills High School. Catherine had told her that.
Living in the real world.
We had a real life and now we don’t.
She put that out of her mind.
Other lessons.
More recent venues.
Not long after moving to Washington she had interviewed an expert on nuclear security who had explained how easy it would be to score plutonium. The security for nuclear facilities, he said, was always contracted out. The contractors in turn hired locally and supplied their hires with minimum rounds of ammunition. Meaning, he had said, “you got multimillion-dollar state-of-the-art security systems being operated by downsized sheriff’s deputies with maybe enough ammo to take down a coyote.”
She remembered exactly what he said because the interview had ended up in the Sunday magazine and this had been the pull quote.
If she could think of the man with the ponytail as a downsized sheriff’s deputy, a downsized sheriff’s deputy lacking even a multimillion-dollar state-of-the-art security system, this would be all right.
All it would take was nerve.
All it would take was a show of belonging wherever it was she wanted to be.
She got up, brushed the grass off her legs and walked to the open door of the concrete structure off the apron. The man with the ponytail was seated at a wooden crate on which there was an electric fan, a bottle of beer and a worn deck of Bicycle cards. He drained the beer, lobbed the bottle into a metal drum, and, with two fingers held stiff, turned over a card.
“Shit,” the man said, then looked up.
“You’re supposed to see that I get to San José,” she said. “They were supposed to have told you that.”
The man turned over another card. “Who was supposed to tell me that.”
This was going to require more work than the average telephone crew, pool man, dog groomer.
“If I don’t get to San José they’re going to be wondering why.”