Mystified and infuriated, Troy walked across the bridge toward Georgetown and turned up Thirty-first Street. He walked anonymously, with the confident anonymity of a man who could move unnoticed in a world where he was already dead. The presence of Troy Loensch in this world and on this street would raise questions, but so far, nobody knew that Troy Loensch still existed. In a moment, he would cut a razor-thin slit in this veil of anonymity.
He recognized the cobalt-blue Porsche as it made the final turn, and he recognized the woman as she stepped out to get the mail before sliding into the underground parking garage beneath her building.
"Hey, Falcon Two," he shouted as he crossed the street, wondering whether using the nickname was too cute.
Jenna spun at the sound of the voice, startled by the sound of that voice and of its choice of nickname.
Her expression was one of disbelief.
Who?
How?
"What are you…?" Jenna gasped.
"You mean why am I not dead?" Troy asked as he approached close enough to see the confused expression in her eyes in the growing darkness. She looked good, Troy thought, even with her hair a little unkempt and her makeup a little bit faded, as a woman's makeup usually is at the end of a long workday. She also looked very bewildered—"seen a ghost" bewildered.
"Who are you? Are you… are you Troy Loensch?" "What?" Troy smiled. "You obviously recognize me." "Who are you? Really," she stammered.
"I took a chance that you'd be coming back to your apartment on time," Troy explained, ignoring her question. "I figured that you wouldn't be working late, since Harris is otherwise occupied up on the Hill."
"You look different, Loensch," she said, studying his face and the deep tan that he had picked up in Nicaragua. "You look like you've been on a beach for a month."
"Actually I've been in the mountains for several months… seems like a helluva lot longer… so much has happened since…"
"You can't be…"
"Is this the part where you tell me I'm supposed to be dead?"
"I was at the memorial…"
"Didn't see you in the pictures."
"Then you didn't see very many pictures," Jenna replied, regaining her composure. "This is the part where I ask you what the hell happened."
"And this is the part where I ask you whether you're gonna stand here with your Porsche burning through unleaded, or are you going to invite me in?"
Chapter 45
"Want a drink?" Jenna asked as she tossed her laptop and keys on the small table in her dining nook. "As I recall, an Ozark girl like yourself usually has a little Wild Turkey in the cupboard."
She poured two and nodded for him to take a seat as she flopped onto her couch and put her feet on a footstool.
"Obviously y'all weren't lost at sea like we thought," she began. "They searched a million square miles for a week. Never found a thing… where were you?"
"Storm blew in, blew the Shakuru back over land… I went down on a mountaintop. Just like Noah's ark. It was a couple of weeks before I figured out that I wasn't on an island somewhere."
"Where were you?"
"Nicaragua… but I didn't know that until about two weeks ago."
"How could…?"
"I broke my leg pretty bad… couldn't get around… it still hurts."
"Couldn't you make contact with us?" Jenna asked, almost angry that he hadn't tried to phone.
"There are still places in the world without Wi-Fi access." Troy smiled. "Still places with no cell service… besides, I didn't have a cell phone."
"How long have you been back?"
"Got to town this morning."
"Have you been to Firehawk yet?"
"Nope."
"I need to call them and let them know that you're—" Jenna said, reaching for her purse to get her phone.
"Please don't," Troy said, his voice so stern that it surprised Jenna.
"Why?"
"Because your boss, your CEO, Raymond Harris… tried to kill me."
"Kill you? When? Where?"
Jenna's astonishment was almost equal to what it had been when she first confronted Troy as a "ghost."
"In Shakuru, somewhere over California."
"How… I thought… I thought he managed to escape only after Shakuru was going down and you couldn't get out."
"He sabotaged everything," Troy said. "My parachute… the autopilot override… radio. He disconnected the lithium sulfur batteries."
"Are you sure?"
"What the hell do you mean, 'am I sure?' Of course I'm sure. I was there," Troy said angrily. "I screamed myself crazy trying to get out a distress signal… I watched the damned engines shut down when the solar panels were starved of sunlight… I felt myself start to freeze in the damned space suit as it shut down."
"But Harris?"
"And I heard him calmly tell me how I was going to die, just before he popped the canopy — and just after he told me why."
"Why?" Jenna asked. "Why did Harris want you dead?"
"The Transition," Troy said. "Because I found the documents… y'know, about The Transition."
"What's that?"
"It's what's been playing out in the news back here since I've been out of touch with reality," Troy said. "He's trying to overthrow the government — him and Kynelty and their crowd."
"But this has been in the news for weeks," Jenna said. "Firehawk and Cernavoda are only two of several PMCs that have submitted proposals to Congress—"
"But Harris is trying to overthrow the government!" Troy insisted. "Can't you see that?"
"Are y'all sure you're the real Troy Loensch?" Jenna laughed. "The Troy Loensch that I knew wasn't this interested in politics."
"Geez, Munrough, can't you see what's going on? Why am I the only one who sees this shit? Maybe I was in the jungle too long."
"Thought you said you were in the mountains."
"It was in Central America…. the mountains have jungles… but that's not the point. The point is that I go away for a few months and come back and it's like mass hypnosis back here. Everybody is going along with this. Nobody seems to see what lie's doing."
"You're just being paranoid," Jenna said with a dismissive toss of her hand. "It's all politics. What the hell do y'all care about politics?"
"Maybe it's just a matter of that oath we took when we joined the U. S. Air Force…. something about upholding the Constitution….. Was that all just a big pile of crap? I came here to see you, rather than going to see anybody else, because I thought you of all people would be able to see through this, see what Harris and Kynelty are doing for what it is."
"Look, Loensch, the politicians are fighting this out in rooms up there on Capitol Hill… it ain't guns in the streets."
"Is that what it's gonna take for you to see? Guns in the streets? Look at me… you're lookin' at the dude who was damned near the first casualty of this fuckin' revolution that Harris has up his slimy little sleeve."
"What exactly was in these 'documents' you found that you say he tried to kill you over?"
"That I say?" Troy asked angrily. "This was very, very damned unambiguous. He tried to kill me."
"Okay… I believe you," Jenna said, backing her tone off a few notches from the accusatory. She could feel the Wild Turkey starting to flutter its wings in her head and imagined that the same was true with Troy. "Just start from the beginning… tell me what you found… actually start with telling me how y'all found these documents."
"I found them in his office — his office at Cactus Flat." "What were you doing in his office?"
"I broke in to look for—"
"You broke into Harris's office?"
"Yeah," Troy said in a tone that implied, Of course.
"Shit, Loensch, if you'd broke into my office, I'd be pretty pissed, too. Why the hell did you do a thing like that?"