“Did you pursue identifying him?”
“I wanted to, but about that time we lost an agent to a firefight with a bank robber, and I was promoted into his position. I wrote a one-page memo for my files before starting the new job, saying what I just told you. No one was appointed to fill my slot, so I suppose my memo went the way of all paper. It’s probably in a file box in a salt mine somewhere out West.”
“Describe him thoroughly, please.”
Epstein closed his eyes and furrowed his brow. “Six feet, one-seventy, dark hair, fashionably cut, a permanent five-o’clock shadow, excellent teeth, skin on the pale side. If he’s your boy, then he probably had a European parent.” Epstein took another chomp of his Quarter Pounder. “Now tell me what you know.”
“I know what you just told me,” Millie replied. “That’s all.”
Epstein sighed. “All right, then this is what I want from you: if you’re able to put what I told you with information from somewhere else and you start a hunt for this guy, I want dibs on the search. Got it?”
“I’ll pass that on to Holly Barker,” Millie said. She wiped the fry grease off her fingers with a couple of paper napkins and offered him a hand. “Neither you nor Quentin is to speak about this with anyone anywhere. Thank you so much for a marvelous lunch. I’ll tell all my friends about this place.”
He shook her hand, she leaned over and whispered to Quentin, “Call me. I owe you dinner.”
Then she left the two of them to their sumptuous lunch.
25
Stone taxied onto runway 01 at Teterboro and smoothly shoved the throttles of the Citation M2 forward. The airplane accelerated as Pat Frank called the speeds: “Airspeed is alive... seventy knots... V1 and rotate.”
Stone pulled back on the yoke and concentrated on keeping two angled bars nestled together, which gave him the proper climb rate.
“Positive rate,” Pat said. “Gear and flaps coming up.” She dealt with both levers.
Stone changed frequencies. “New York departure, Citation 123TF, off Teterboro.”
“November One Two Three Tango Foxtrot, climb and maintain six thousand, direct BREZY,” Air Traffic Control replied.
Stone dialed in six thousand feet and selected the intersection BREZY on the flight plan, and the button Direct. “Citation 123TF, out of twelve hundred for six thousand.” They were off on the first leg, to Goose Bay, Labrador, in eastern Canada, the most popular airport en route to Greenland and Reykjavik.
ATC handed him off to Boston Center, which gave him an immediate climb to forty-one thousand feet, or flight level 410. Twenty minutes later he leveled off at that altitude.
“Free at last,” Pat said. “Thank God Almighty.”
“Have you been feeling unfree?” Stone asked, pressing buttons on the iPad-like controller and tuning in satellite radio and some jazz.
“Not until Kevin Keyes murdered two of my tenants,” she said. “Ever since then, though. I’m so happy to be back in the air at the start of a long flight.”
The satellite phone rang, and Stone pressed the appropriate icons to connect. “Hello?”
“Stone? It’s Bob Miller.”
“Hi, Bob, what’s up?”
“Just an update: we’ve checked the FAA computer for flight plans with Kevin Keyes’s name on them and came up with zilch.”
“He’ll turn up sometime, somewhere,” Stone said.
“Right, he will. What was the number I dialed?”
“The satphone on my airplane. I’m getting Pat Frank out of town.”
“Good idea. I was going to mention that.”
“You can reach me at this number or on my cell while we’re gone.”
“I’ll keep you updated. Bye.”
“Bye.” Stone broke the connection. “Did you get that?” he asked Pat.
“Most of it. I was fiddling with my headset. No luck with the FAA, huh?”
“Suppose he was flying as copilot?”
“Then his name wouldn’t be on the flight plan.”
“Oh, well.”
They flew for nearly three hours with a light tailwind and landed at Goose Bay, a large airport without a lot of traffic at the end of a fjord. They taxied to the Fixed Base Operator, Irving Aviation, and found a cozy operation with coffee and cookies on offer. Stone ordered fuel while Pat checked the weather and filed their next flight plan, to one of two Greenland airports. She returned shortly. “It’s Narsarsuaq,” she said.
Stone groaned inwardly. He had heard a lot about the former U.S. air base, dating to World War II, from other pilots. The field was up a Greenland fjord, rimmed with mountains, and no one wanted to go in there except in excellent weather. “Not Sondrestrom?” he asked. This was also an ex — U.S. air base, now operated by the Danish Air Force, but it had a very long runway and a localizer approach, easier than the non-directional-beacon approach at Narsarsuaq, and it often had better weather.
“It’s Narsarsuaq. The forecast is for six thousand overcast and light winds. That’s good for us.”
Stone shrugged. It would be a learning experience. They got back into the airplane, started the engines, worked through the checklist, and got a clearance from the tower. Their assigned altitude was 290 and their Mach speed, 67. “What the hell?” Stone said, outraged. “We filed for 410 and.70. Why are they giving us lower and slower?”
“The Canadians seem to think that the skies between here and Greenland are thick with airplanes, and since there’s no radar en route, they space them out to avoid conflicts.” She argued with the tower and got an increase in altitude to 310. “That’s the best we’re going to do,” she said.
Shortly, they were over the North Atlantic Ocean at 310, and Stone throttled back to Mach.67. The multi-function display in the center of the instrument panel displayed two rings around their current position, the first a dotted one that showed their range with a forty-five-minute fuel reserve, and a solid one that indicated where they would have dry tanks. “We’ve got fuel for Narsarsuaq,” he said, “even at the lower-than-best altitude.”
“It’s only a two-hour flight,” she said. She pointed at a mark on the Greenland shore, labeled SI. “That’s the first of two NDB beacons,” she said. “We’ll cross that at five thousand feet, then proceed to the next NDB, NA, which is on the field. If the forecast holds, we’ll be able to see the airport and make a visual approach. If it gets lower, we’ll have to fly the NDB approach.”
Stone had not flown an NDB approach since he was a student; they were hardly ever used in the States, and his airplane was not even equipped with the relevant radio. He knew he could fly it using GPS, though.
They were out of radio contact with ATC for an hour or so, then at the assigned point, they contacted Narsarsuaq Radio and told the operator their plan.
“That’s fine,” he said, “as long as you can see the mountains. We have no radar here, so we can’t advise you.”
Stone set up the vertical navigation feature to cross SI at five thousand feet, and at the appropriate point, the autopilot started them down. They were in solid instrument meteorological conditions, or IMC, until they passed six thousand feet, when the landscape below them emerged. Stone took a deep breath. All he could see was a snow-covered landscape with mountains. The fjord was filled with ice floes. “I’d hate to ditch here with all that ice in the water,” he said to Pat. “It would destroy the airplane. We’d never get into the raft.”
“That’s why we have two engines,” Pat said.
At SI, the autopilot switched to the next NDB, NA.
“We can see to descend now,” Pat said. “Let’s get down to three thousand.”