How could he not?
Washington, D. C., was in a heck of a pickle this morning. There were tanks on the streets and an arrest warrant out for the president. Ralph didn't care too much for Albert Bacon Fachearon. He had not voted for the man, but it sure seemed that an arrest warrant was a bit over the top.
He hadn't thought too much about the PMCs taking over the federal government. It did not directly affect him. He figured it would be a long, long time before anybody decided to let them take over the West Virginia Highway Patrol.
Hampshire County and Morgan County, which were Ralph's beat, had been real quiet, quieter than normal, today. Of course, it was a Saturday, and he figured most folks were home watching the fireworks in Washington on television.
Ralph Overgeist was a few miles north of Slanesville when he rounded a bend and saw a woman walking alongside the road. She had long, unkempt blond hair and ill-fitting clothes. The boots she was wearing looked a few sizes too big. Of course, mountain people didn't dress all fancy like folks in the cities, like over in Martinsburg.
It seemed a bit out of the ordinary to see her just walking down Highway 29 out here in the middle of nowhere. A lot of people walked everywhere they went in this part of West Virginia, but still, something didn't seem right.
"Good morning, ma'am," he said, pulling over and rolling down his window. "Is everything all right?"
"Thank y'all for stopping." She smiled. "Everything's just fine… but since you're asking, I was wondering if I could get a lift?"
"Where you going?" Ralph asked. He couldn't quite place her drawl, but she definitely wasn't a city girl.
"Somewhere that I could catch a Greyhound… I'm trying to get back to D. C."
"What are you doing way out here without a vehicle?"
"It's a long story… I guess you could say that I was chasin' after a fella."
"He left you out here?"
"No… actually, he didn't even know I was following him. I'm over him now though. He's long gone."
There was little to do for two hours at the Greyhound depot in Martinsburg other than to watch people or watch the television set that was mounted to the wall. Since most of the people were doing little other than watching television, Jenna wound up watching it as well.
She sat there in the uncomfortable Day-Glo pink fiberglass seat, wearing the clothes that she had stolen from a clothesline as she was hiking out of the woods where her parachute had brought her down.
She sat there watching history unfold on the television — or at least today's crossroads chapter of American history. It was a blizzard of alerts, updates, and breaking news. Reports of Raymond Harris's death were confirmed. He had died in the crash of a highly advanced aircraft that Firehawk was testing. Many people had seen other aircraft in the area, and some had reported missiles being fired. There was speculation that rogue elements within the U. S. Air Force had killed Harris.
What kind of a world was it, Jenna wondered, where those who had killed the man who had helped engineer a coup were considered rogue?
There was no mention of a nuclear device, nor would there be. The viewers would never get to know about this, but apparently Albert Bacon Fachearon had heard.
If not, he had at least gotten the message. One of the breaking news items confirmed that he had tendered his resignation and was negotiating his return to his home state in exchange for a pledge of no public statements.
She thought of Troy Loensch and how preposterous his tale of The Transition had once seemed: his tale of PMCs overthrowing the government.
She also thought about how her relationship with him had evolved. For the first couple of years she had known him, she had found his asshole behavior nauseating, but revulsion had turned to tolerance, and tolerance had turned to her deciding that he was not so bad after all. This realization had opened the door to lust, and the realization that — whatever his faults, and there were many — he was very not-so-bad in bed. As she had told him to his face, Troy might not always be a nice man, but he was good.
She had been wondering all day whether he had gotten down in one piece, but she assumed that he had. She had been wondering all day whether she would see him again, and she hoped that she would. She wasn't ready to allow herself to fall in love with this man whom once she had hated, but she was ready to make love again.
Jenna bought a bag of chips from the vending machine and stepped outside. The rain that had been falling earlier had stopped, and the sun was fighting to break through the clouds. She had never been in Martinsburg before, but it looked as though people were coming and going more or less as people in any small American city might do. There were SUVs with kids in car seats, and a plumber's pickup with copper pipes gleaming in his overhead rack. The U. S. government had been taken over by forces whom Jenna knew to be forces of darkness, but somebody was still spending a Saturday remodeling a bathroom.
She wondered how many of these people passing by the Greyhound depot had voted for Fachearon. What did they think of what had happened? Not much, apparently. Like Jenna, like most people, they had other things on their minds today.
Back inside, fewer people were watching the television. One group had boarded their bus, bound for Harrisburg. Others, like Jenna, had gone to visit the bank of vending machines. A few had simply dozed off.
Jenna's bus finally arrived, so she missed Layton Kynelty's address to the nation from the White House. She could imagine what he might have said. He probably paid tribute to Raymond Harris, who had been his coconspirator in this bizarre fantasy that the world seemed to accept as a matter of course. He probably said a great deal about national unity.
She was glad that she had missed it.
An hour out of Martinsburg, Jenna Munrough was fast asleep.
Chapter 59
"They were using Firehawk ID cards," Jenna's colleague told her. "But nobody recalls any of the names. It was chaos over there at the airport on Saturday. It was chaos everywhere. There were at least five of them. One of them was a woman, but she drove away with the others in a van when the two guys took the F-16s."
"They just let them get away with it?" Jenna asked, silently noting how wrong the rumors of her own encounter at Reagan National Airport had become. As much as she deplored the inherent sexism in the rumor's distortion of fact, she was glad to discover that the imaginary woman had not been one of the pilots.
"Somehow they got their hands on Firehawk ID, and on Saturday, nobody was questioning Firehawk ID… anywhere."
Even after this exchange on Sunday, Jenna's decision to go in to the Firehawk offices on Monday morning was made with great trepidation. It need not have been. The media had consulted with itself and had decided to stick with the theory of rogue Air Force pilots — male rogues — and once decided, the theory took on an unshakable life of its own.
The Justice Department, the NTSB, and even the U. S. Air Force itself launched investigations — but they sought only people who fit the profile decided upon in this theory with a life of its own.
It was strange to walk through the lobby, with its stylized aluminum rendition of the company logo, a bird's head surrounded by flames, and to hear the buzz of conversation about the death of Raymond Harris.
"Ms. Munrough."
Jenna spun around at the sound of the receptionist calling her name. She was still a bit on edge, still expecting to be busted at any moment.