“Ever heard of it?” Buzz said.
“No.”
“Me, neither. So I called another buddy who, for our purposes, shall remain nameless. He works across the river. I knew it had to have something to do with those dickweeds over there because they always give their ops those goofy, two-name handles — Project Blue Balls, Operation Eat Me. They love all that sexual double entendre crap.”
“Across the river” in Buzz’s vernacular meant CIA headquarters at Langley. His friend there, he said, had never heard of “Project Short Hair,” either.
“So, he tells me he’ll have to do some snooping, rummage around the basement where they keep all the dead aliens. He found it, though, the tenacious son of a bitch. I owe him a beer. Which means you owe me a beer.”
“Put it on my tab.”
“Somehow, I could’ve predicted that would be your response, Logan.”
What his friend across the river found, Buzz said, was a briefing paper stamped top secret that CIA officials in 1956 had delivered to then-President Dwight Eisenhower. It outlined the agency’s clandestine efforts to arm various nations friendly to American interests in and around South Asia with state-of-the-art weapons that could be used against the old Soviet Union in the event World War III broke out.
“Which countries?”
“We’re talking nearly sixty years ago, Logan. Whichever ones they were, I guarantee you the ones that wanted to take warm showers with us then hate our asses now. That’s just how the geopolitical worm turns.”
“Point taken.”
The fact that the Twin Beech had been stolen by the CIA made operational sense. The pilot likely would have been a private contractor who didn’t work directly for the agency — a “cutout” in the parlance of covert operations. That way, Langley could deny any direct involvement if the mission went south. Where the plane was coming from or flying to when it crashed, and who shot Chad Lovejoy to death, were the last questions on my mind. I was worried about Savannah. She was really all I could think about.
I felt as helpless as I’d ever been in my life.
“Why don’t you just spill it, Logan? You and the little lady are having problems. I can help. I’m a nationally known expert on male-female relations. Me and Dr. Phil.”
Buzz was joking around, trying to cheer me up. I knew that. But I was hardly in a cheerful mood.
Somebody just then rapped on the front window of the bungalow. I looked over.
“Twelve o’clock, Mr. Logan,” Johnny Kavitch shouted from the other side of the glass, tapping his wristwatch. “Please don’t make me call the authorities.”
“You’ve already helped enough,” I told Buzz over the phone. “I’ll catch you later.”
I stacked my duffel on top of Savannah’s rolling suitcase and made for the door.
Bundled up against the cold like Mr. and Mrs. Nanook of the North, the Kavitches stood aside as I walked out. Johnny was still holding the ski pole like a weapon.
“I’ll be in town as long as it takes to find Savannah,” I said. “I’d appreciate you having her call me on my cell, if and when she comes back.”
Gwen Kavitch assured me she or her husband would do so, then said she hoped we’d enjoyed our stay.
I said nothing.
I stowed the luggage in the back of the Yukon and started the engine, brushed the snow off as best I could, and scraped the icy windows with my ATM card — a more valid use for the plastic than at any ready-teller, given my paltry account balance. As I got in, my hands freezing, wishing I’d remembered to bring gloves, I caught sight of skinny, bizarre Preston Kavitch, leering at me from the second-floor bedroom window of his parents’ Victorian-style inn.
He grinned demonically, raised his right hand, and flipped me off.
What began as a snowstorm was now a full-blown blizzard. Flakes the size of quarters floated down from a lowering sky, the clouds obscuring the tops of the pines and cutting visibility to a hundred meters at most, draining the day of any color but a flat, opaque white.
For more than an hour I drove around South Lake Tahoe, stopping periodically to ask if anyone had seen Savannah. No one had. Everyone commented on how beautiful she looked in the photo.
The top of my skull throbbed excruciatingly, to the point I could barely focus. In my previous lives as a fighter pilot and covert operator, I would’ve simply willed the headache away. Maybe it was because I was getting older, or because of the profound anguish I was feeling over Savannah’s disappearance, but distancing myself from the pain was no longer a function of mind over matter. I needed to take something before my cranium blew off.
Cruising along Turquoise Bay Drive through a neighborhood of cheap cabins crammed too close together on narrow lots, I happened upon the Dutch Mart Gas and Grub convenience store. If you’re American, you know the place — a seedy, shake-shingle storefront with a grandiose gabled roofline meant to convey European refinement. Front windows plastered with posters for Camel cigarettes and twelve-packs of Budweiser. I parked, walked inside, and was immediately engaged visually by whom I assumed to be the store’s proprietor — none other than Reza Jalali, one of the two Iranians I’d encountered earlier that morning at the café with Deputy Streeter.
He was standing behind his cash register, ringing up a tin of chewing tobacco and a package of Huggies diapers for an acne-ravaged, dentally challenged meth head who was blathering on about how everything he needed to succeed in life he learned in juvenile detention. A half-opened door behind the counter led to a small office. Inside, I could hear another man laughing. It sounded like he was watching a rerun of Seinfeld.
“Aspirin?”
Eyeing me darkly, black hair slicked back, Jalali pointed with his chin toward the back of the store and a pegboard from which haphazardly hung various travel-size toiletries.
I grabbed a packet of two aspirin and, on impulse, a small package of turkey jerky from an adjacent display because it’s never smart to take pills on an empty stomach and because nothing says manly like smoked, nitrosamine-laden meat. When I walked back to the register, the meth head was gone and Jalali had been joined by his friend, the fireplug who’d raised my suspicions at the café. I put my purchases on the counter. Jalali rang me up. The fireplug’s eyes never left me.
“$8.97,” Jalali said.
“Nine bucks for two aspirin and three bites of jerky? That’s really promoting customer loyalty.”
“You don’t want it,” Jalali said with an obnoxious, indifferent shrug, “don’t buy it.”
My head felt like it was splitting apart at the seams. I pulled a ten-spot out of my wallet and slapped it on the counter. Jalali took the bill and made change, his eyes locked on mine.
“You were in the restaurant,” he said. “Why did you look at us that way?”
“I’m looking for a woman.”
“We are all looking for a woman, my friend,” the fireplug said.
I showed him Savannah’s picture. “Have you seen her around?”
The fireplug donned designer reading glasses from the pocket of his blue silk dress shirt, took the photo and peered at it intently, then handed it over to Jalali, who studied Savannah’s image with similar intensity. For several seconds, they talked back and forth in Urdu, their native language, before Jalali handed the picture back to me.
“No,” is all he said.
If I’d understood Urdu I might’ve been able to assess with greater accuracy whether he was telling the truth. Nothing, though, in his body language or microexpressions suggested he was lying. His friend, the fireplug, was a different story. The small muscles beneath his right eye were in spasm. He couldn’t stop glaring at me.