But that didn’t mean he wasn’t working for them.
What did they do for Safer America?
“Strategic intelligence.” Were they advising Safer America what to focus on?
If ever there were a candidate for a cutout company run by the Boys, this would be it.
She set an alarm for 2 a.m. Woke up enough to book the flight on her iPad and send the email to Caitlin on her Safer America laptop.
She booked the flight out of Houston to San Francisco as Michelle, the flight to and from Arcata as Emily, using American for the Houston leg and then switching to United, the only carrier that flew in and out of Arcata. That way she’d be going through two different security lines at SFO-less chance that someone would notice the identity switch that way. And she used two different IP addresses on her VPN to book the two different flights.
It wasn’t foolproof, not even close. But it was the best she could do.
She couldn’t show up in Arcata as Michelle. The Arcata-Eureka Airport was small, and the odds of her running into someone who knew her as Emily, too great. She’d been to the one bar/restaurant at the airport enough times where the bartender acted like he recognized her, anyway.
And if federal investigators were in Arcata looking into “Jeff’s” life-she couldn’t risk traveling as Michelle.
She had to keep that identity safe.
Before she fell back asleep, she heard the chime signaling an incoming email on her Safer America laptop.
Caitlin. Did she always stay up this late, Michelle wondered?
Absolutely no problem. Take all the time you need. Anything I can do to help?
Thank you so much, Michelle wrote back. I’ll let you know. But I should be back Monday evening. If you need me for anything, don’t hesitate to call/email.
The first thing she did when she got to the Arcata house was throw open the windows and sliding glass doors to let the fresh air in. It was in the mid-sixties, a nice day, and after the soupy heat of Houston, just feeling the cool air on her skin seemed to dissolve the knots that had accumulated in her shoulders from the lack of sleep, the flight, her life in general.
The house was fine, at least. No break-ins. The property crime here wasn’t as bad as in Eureka, but it was worse than you’d think, for a relatively small city in the redwoods. People blamed it on the tweakers, and on transients who drifted through Humboldt in search of cheap weed. Another good reason to have a home security system.
After that, she made a pot of coffee. Sat on a stool at the wooden chopping block island and contemplated the knotty pine cupboards. They really didn’t look that bad, she thought.
She took in a couple deep breaths. Drink your coffee, she told herself. She had a couple hours before the meeting at Evergreen, which she’d set up when she’d landed in Arcata-Eureka.
Drink your coffee, and then go look for the book. Like it’s not a big deal.
She didn’t know if anyone was watching.
After she’d drunk about half her cup, she wandered out into the living room.
Some of Danny’s larger books were out on the coffee table, appropriately. One on the Antarctic. Another on tigers.
So, the bookcase.
You’re just looking for something to read, she told herself. Even if no one was watching, pretend like someone was. Live the part. Something to read before she went to sleep tonight, and for the long trip home tomorrow.
More coffee table books, many of them gifts they’d given each other. Nature and animals, countries he’d been to or wanted to visit. One on Paris that he’d given her, because she’d never been: “Don’t all women love Paris?” he’d said, half-joking. “We’ll go there someday. Promise.” Books on fighter jets with names like Viper and Eagle, and several on his beloved Cessna Caravan. Her photography books were out here as well, and the big cookbooks and wine books that were as much about pretty photos as they were recipes and varietals. “Food porn,” Danny liked to call them.
Amazing how many things they’d managed to accumulate together in two years.
There was another bookcase in the bedroom. That one had novels, mostly hers, plus the history and biographies he sometimes liked to read.
She found it on the second shelf, between a history of Timbuktu and a book about how societies collapse under environmental pressure. Funny, she hadn’t known he was interested in that kind of thing.
But she didn’t have time to think about that. Here was Taking Flight.
A thick trade paperback. The cover had what looked like a red electronic bull’s-eye over a surreal cloudscape. Michelle looked at the back cover copy. A novel. That alone was unusual-Danny didn’t read a lot of novels.
Air Force Captain Lex Telluride flies his missions and doesn’t think much about their purpose, until he sees something in the skies above Iraq that he can’t explain. He wants to forget what he saw, but the image comes to him in dreams: A golden disc, a fluttering of wings. Slowly but surely, his life falls apart… or is it coming together?
A modern-day Catch-22 that combines surrealist travelogue and Pynchonesque conspiracies into a howl of rage against the absurdities and outrages of war, while somehow remaining a celebration of flight as a metaphor for the elevation of the human spirit.
“Lex Telluride”?
Though given that Danny’s Air Force nickname was Jink, and he had buddies called Bagger and Punch, maybe the name wasn’t completely far-fetched.
Or maybe it was just Pynchonesque.
She sat down on the living room couch with the book and her coffee.
Flipping through, she didn’t find any notes, anything obvious to explain why Danny had wanted her to see this.
She started reading.
In fact, the worst day flying was not better than the best day working. Sometimes flying was just work. Sometimes, when the Lawn Dart you’re flying is a bag of balls and Bitching Betty chimes in to let you know things are well and truly FUBAR, flying’s not much fun at all.
“What a goat fuck,” Telluride said.
Michelle hoped she wouldn’t have to read this entire book.
When she got to page 4, she saw it-a faint pencil underline of the number 4. Okay, she thought. Maybe this wasn’t anything, but she grabbed a pad of paper sitting by the landline and wrote it down.
The next underline was on page 10. Just the zero. Then, two lines down, an underlined period that ended a sentence.
40.
She kept going. On page 48, the 8 was underlined. On page 57, the 7. Then 1, 8, 0, 5.
40.871805.
The next markings she found were of letters. The “min” in “minute.” Then the word “us.”
Minus?
More numbers. 124.0610.
Letters and words followed.
At the end, what she had was this:
40.871805 minus 124.0610 between north side bridge and big tree by tree. Dig 1 ft.
She was pretty sure she knew what the numbers were, from the times Danny had taken her flying in the Caravan: latitude and longitude.
Directions to something he wanted her to find.
How could she figure out where these coordinates were?
She thought about her iPhones, both of which were switched off and stored in signal-blocking bags. She didn’t have any illusions that Gary couldn’t find her some other way-he was probably tracking her credit card spending, for one-but she hoped this would at least slow him down.
There had to be apps for finding someplace with the latitude and longitude-could Google Maps do that? But she had to assume her phones were hacked. Entering these coordinates into either of them, even using a VPN, was too risky. She didn’t know enough about how that technology worked to know if a VPN was enough protection.