I'm not laughing, but the light is rolling on the floor of my insides, laughing his ass off.
"Short story is that now, you are ours. No out of town trips on business without our permission, if you take my meaning. We'll occasionally be sending you an assignment or two, which we'll expect you to do for the good of your country, no questions asked. You give us any grief, and we'll burn your life down in front of your eyes, and then put you down."
He walks a couple feet to his left and picks up a manila envelope that's been sitting on top of a vent of some kind. He flips it toward me, landing it a few feet in front of my feet. We both watch it spin and slide until it comes to rest an inch from my right big toe. Nice shot.
"Your first six jobs are in there. Pick one, any one you want, and get it done next week. You won't see me again. Ms. Nortin will be on this roof every Thursday night we have a message, she'll be our courier. And unless you want your mom to see your dick on YouTube, you might want to wear pants in the future. The drone will be hanging around. You haven't managed to spot it in six months, you're not going to spot it now."
I laugh at him. "General," I respond, "the only thing a video of that would do is get me a whole lot of dates."
He gives me a stern look. "Don't fuck with us son, you have no idea what you're up against. We control the banks, we control the Internet, we can get you fired, we can make sure everyone you've ever met is living in a box in South Central. And you gotta believe that the Chinese and North Koreans have figured it out too now, and they'll be coming. We can protect those same people for you."
He takes out his phone, and says two words into it. It beeps back at him. Then he turns back to me and points at the envelope.
"Do the job and follow instructions and you're safe, and your family is safe. Ignore me at your risk, the consequences will be severe."
A helicopter is coming down toward the roof, a really nice Black Hawk, he must have called it. It hovers a few inches above the roof, the general steps on the skid, and is helped into the body. The door closes and it heads off into the night sky.
"I'm sorry, I didn't know. That's not the story he told me." It's Celeste, she's awake, but looking pretty groggy.
"You OK?"
"Fine. Better than fine. That's the most fun I have ever had, and by a wide margin. You want to do that again, any time, any place, I am all yours."
"If you're OK," I ask her without responding to her last comment, "I need to be gone." She smiles, and tries to hand me her card. I go get it, and grab the envelope too. It's only in my hands for seconds before I know there's something wrong. I fly away with it anyway.
Helicopters are relatively slow, I am not. I manage to take my clothes off between BofA and Bank of California, and dump them, the card, and the envelope on the roof of the second bank, my intention to follow and learn. Naked I am invisible on radar.
Then I feel it. Someone's watching me. All these months that I thought it was fucking Fog Dude, it was the frakking army. I punch the molecules and swing through a full circle around downtown. The feeling stays with me, the drone still invisible, but now I know to look for it. Then, like a bicycle across the moon, I see it black against the side of a high rise.
I hit the molecules and go vertical, six hundred miles per, straight up. The drone can't match it, no aircraft can. In two minutes I am 20 miles high, out of its range. The helo left BofA roughly flying northeast, and in the three or so minutes I've been farting around with the drone, it would have covered no more than six or seven miles. I fly that far out at my altitude, then plummet earthward at high speed.
I spot it, maybe 1,500 feet above the ground, plunking along toward the Inland Empire. I settle at 10,000 feet, a mile or so to the north of the flight path, parallel though slightly behind, straining every sense I have, human and fog, for drone sign. The helo eventually turns more northerly and starts to follow Interstate 15, climbs to six thousand feet. I keep formation. Two and a half hours later, it's landing at Nellis Air Force Base outside Las Vegas, and I am turning for home.
My clothes and the envelope are waiting for me on top of the bank, along with the card of a woman no longer in sight. For three hours I've been running the conversation and the past six months over and over in my head. The general is a good bluffer, that's my conclusion. He knows more about me than I'd like, but he has no idea who I really am, where I live, or anything else of substance. Otherwise, he'd have visited me there to prove it.
He also never mentioned Hawai'i, which I'm sure he'd have done if he realized I had been responsible for three million dollars of damage to the roads and beaches there. He's got his ace up his sleeve, not on the table. I sit down on the roof of the bank and look at the envelope. Standard manilla, big clasp on the back. Inside, a bunch of pages, grouped together with a heavy clip. Somewhere in here is a tracking device, I'm sure, or more than one, and it's not obvious to me.
For safety sake, these pages are not going anywhere I go. I put the pages and the card into the envelope and reseal it, carefully hiding it in one of the big square vents sticking through the roof, being as sure as I can be that it will still be there when I come back. I wouldn't mind it if something happened to the pages, but that business card is priceless.
I give my paranoia free reign. It's time for more suborbital practice, heating my body to several thousand degrees, burning my underwear to ash, just in case something might have been placed on me. If it is, I am already done, because they will know I followed them to Vegas.
I pop back to Anaheim, but sit naked on the dumpster behind the Chinese restaurant for 20 minutes making sure I wasn't followed. Then it's into Starbuck, but south on Harbor, then south on the 405 to Lake Forest, before doing a U turn and heading north. I exit two exits south of my normal 710 junction, and head to the surface streets, on the theory it will be easier to spot a tail there at five in the morning, in total driving 80 miles to go 30.
Home in time to shower twice before going in to LAX, I need Perez and I need her bad. Not that way, I have to figure out what to do.
Chapter 3
I turn Starbuck into the LAPD lot, Perez is there, holding me a spot next to her Mustang. She's looking cheerful, but apparently I am not. Whether it's my stupid look, or just my depressed look, she picks up on it.
"Not holding up well are you, Air Force." Only a friend can insult you before saying good morning.
"Good morning to you too, Officer Perez, and no, I have issues."
"That is the understatement of the year. It's OK to be depressed about Jen, but you'll get over it."
I look at her. In the past two weeks she's been shot at, beaten, and kidnaped, yet she looks just as strong and ready to get to work as ever. I, on the other hand, am a mess.
"There's more now, we need to talk."
"This have anything to do with a certain blonde television reporter?"
"Fuck me. I thought she'd wait a few days at least."
"The biggest interview of her career, maybe eventually one of the biggest in forever if you keep your act together, and you thought she'd wait? How did you get all those high scores on those tests?"
We walk together into the building, not talking about what we want to talk about. The only thing I say during the transit is to express my surprise that she still wants to work Terminal 7, and she explains that she's gotten used to having lunch on the flight deck of airplanes, the one benefit of working with a pilot. We stop in the office to check in, and replace the overnight crew. The morning
Times
is sitting there, nothing about me on the front.
"OK," I say to her when we're finally alone, walking south down the concourse, "spill."
"I watched SportsCenter this morning, and your friend Celeste was on. She said she had received a tip that you would be on the roof of a downtown Los Angeles building after midnight, though she didn't say which one. She said she met you there, and that she interviewed you for 20 minutes, and you flew her around. She told a story which sounds like you would have made up, just enough truth to keep it real. She said you were responsible for the flashes of light last month, and that you didn't know what you were doing, you just wanted to help. She kept calling you MFM, the Mysterious Flying Man."
"What else did she say?" I must have sounded worried.
Perez looks at me, her eyes narrowing to slits. "Did she ride the salami, Air Force?" I don't know what my face looked like, but Perez now looks very disappointed in me, and there's something else on her face I can't quite put my finger on. There was just a touch of anger in her voice too.
"What else did she say?," I repeat myself.
"There's something else beyond that?" Perez is shaking her head and walking even faster than her normal 200 miles per hour.
"Like the Army was there?" Perez stops walking and pushes me over against the wall between one of the gates and the food court.
"Now you spill." Her serious, super intelligent look is back, her voice her best professional cop voice.
I tell her that I sensed someone was on top of the BofA building, and sure enough, it was Celeste. I tell her about the interview, I tell her about flying, emphasis on that it was only 50 feet and really slow, I tell her about the sex and about Celeste's reactions, I tell her about the Army, the envelope, and the ultimatum.
Perez leads me back out into the concourse, walking at normal human speed. She obviously is thinking since she's walking 50 miles per hour slower than normal, and wanted some time before saying anything. I'm fine with that, I never need to talk to be with someone.
"You sure you lost your tail before you came home?" There is worry for me in her voice now, something I always like and don't at the same time.
"Yes. I lost it before I left downtown, and I tried to be extra cautious coming back."
"What was on the pages?"
"I don't know, I put them back in the envelope without reading them." She looks at me funny for the tenth time this morning.
"I repeat my question: how did you get 100 percent in Criminal Investigations class?" I laugh a nervous laugh. "You have to go back tonight and get them. Take your camera, photograph everything. We have a few hours to figure out where to drop the originals. You going to Denver tomorrow?"
"No," I respond, "I have a simulator day. Every few months, I have to spend eight hours in a flight simulator, practicing in flight emergencies like engine fires or hydraulic failures. Tomorrow's my day." I pause, "And, I have no plans for the weekend, either." I am suddenly sad again.
Perez changes the subject. "You talked to your parents yet?"
"Yes, though not face to face. I'll see them Sunday. You still coming over?"
She nods. "I'm not talking to them for you, and we still have to put out a BOLO for your cojones." Then she gets back on topic. "This doesn't change our basic plan, at least until we know more. You just have to be extra careful about not being seen in the wrong places."
I like ‘our' in plan, partly because it's a good plan, and partly because it has the word ‘our' in it. We decided on a simple strategy. Read the paper, try to help. When hungry eat, when tired sleep. Nothing complicated, dig out a couple earthquake victims, or put out a forest fire, if I can figure out how.
"You think I'm right," I ask her, "that the general was bluffing about how much he knows?"
"Absolutely," she's back to walking at hyperspeed, "You are right that if he knew who you were or where you lived or who your mom was, he'd have met you there, not had some bimbo meet you on top of a bank."
"She's not a bimbo. She was a math major or something in college."
"She was a cheerleader who now interviews jocks with 70 IQ's about why they can't throw a ball straight."
"If it makes you feel any better, the sex was rotten, at least for me. The kissing was cool, but otherwise she just laid there like a throw rug. I have no intention of doing it again."
"I'm not upset about her or the sex," she says that in a way that makes me wonder if she didn't have a crush on Celeste too, "it's the potential consequences. What if you had ripped her apart? What if you got her pregnant? What if she scooped your DNA out, and they track you down somehow?"
"Perez, you already knew I was a dumbass, that's why I need your help."
She hits me on the arm. "So true, Air Force, so true."
We stay too busy the rest of the day to talk about it anymore, and don't even have the chance to dine in the office of one of our jets. Perez takes me out after work for margaritas and dinner at a hole in the wall restaurant run by friends of her family. She introduces me as her partner to the woman who takes our order. We run through everything I'm going to do tonight, step by step, three times. It's good for me, makes me feel like I have a superhero checklist. "Super Dumbass 1 cleared for takeoff, runway 2-4 left." She was thinking while we were working, I was too, but only one of us made progress and it wasn't me. She sees a hole in my planning.
