By the time he finished with Butz, it was five o’clock and people were going to dinner. He hadn’t gotten any closer to identifying the bomber, but he was getting the lay of the land, Virgil thought. He went back to the Holiday Inn, set his clock for six, and took a nap.
At two minutes to six, he rolled out, turned the alarm off before it had a chance to start beeping at him, went in the bathroom and brushed his teeth. Then he sat on the bed and called Davenport, told him about the trip to Michigan, and also about the market research idea.
Davenport approved of the trip and was interested in the market research concept. “Let me run it by a couple of computer people. I think it’s worth a try, if we’re confident that people would try to tell the truth. Probably every high school kid would nominate one of his teachers.”
“It could get messy, but if you got enough people to participate. .. Lots of smart people around, and they all know each other.”
“You know what would be even better?” Davenport asked. “If you charged ten dollars per person to make a suggestion, and then the winners divide up the pot. Give them some incentive to be right.”
“Jeez, I dunno. Would that be legal?”
“Why should I care? I’m not planning to do it,” Davenport said. “Anyway… I’d give it some more thought before you do anything. It’s interesting, but in a funky way. Maybe too funky.”
Virgil said he’d call if anything broke, rang off, put a couple of clean shirts, a fresh pair of jeans, and some socks in a duffel bag, along with his dopp kit, sunglasses, laptop, and pistol, threw it all in the truck, and drove out to the airport.
A black SUV was arriving just as he did, and Marie Chapman got out, carrying nothing but an oversized purse.
“An adventure,” she said.
“Adventures are what you have when you screw up,” Virgil said.
“Been there,” she said, “and done that.”
9
Pye’s pilot was a reassuringly square-chinned, gray-haired man wearing a military-style olive-drab nylon flight jacket over a blue canvas shirt, jeans, with brown leather boots and a long-billed blue hat that said “Pye” in white script. The copilot was a square-chinned man with salt-and-pepper hair, also reassuringly aviator-like, in the same flight jacket, canvas shirt, jeans, boots, and hat, which Virgil took as a uniform dreamed up by a designer with delusions of manhood.
The plane itself was larger than Virgil expected, a blue Gulfstream 550 with the same white “Pye” script as the pilots’ hats. A cabin attendant, an Asian woman in a jade business dress, was putting together a meal in a forward galley when Virgil climbed aboard; she asked, “Something to drink after takeoff?”
“Diet Coke?” Virgil asked.
Chapman said, “The usual.”
Chapman said that the interior of the plane had been customized for long-distance trips; that Pye was expanding in Latin America and Asia, and that they traveled twenty weeks of the year. “He’s pushing really hard, because he’s got nothing else to do. Willard’s wife died six years ago. He’s never gotten over it. He told me that he still talks to her at night, when he goes to bed.”
“That’s tough,” Virgil said; though he really had no idea.
Chapman showed him two private sleeper cabins in the back, with fold-down beds; the center of the plane was taken up with six seats that could be swiveled into a meeting formation, with a folding desk that could be swiveled in front of each. The plane had Wi-Fi and electrical plug-ins for laptops.
Forward of the cabin door, but behind the pilot’s cockpit, was the galley, and a long folding chair for the cabin attendant.
The pilot called back to suggest that they take their seats, and Chapman said, “Come on, I want to show you something.” She led him back to the bedroom suites, leaving the door open behind her, then opened a smaller, shorter door that Virgil thought probably went back to the baggage compartment. Instead, he found himself on his knees in a four-foot-high, four-foot-long compartment.
Chapman, kneeling beside him, said, “Pull on your side,” and Virgil helped peel back a thick plastic cover over two body-length windows set in the fuselage floor.
“This is always a trip,” she said. “The idea is to lie down and look straight down while we take off… It’s like flying.”
And it was. Ten minutes later, they were off the ground, Virgil and Chapman lying side by side with their noses right on the window glass, and Chapman started laughing in delight as the plane banked in a tight turn to the east. They climbed quickly over the summer-green landscape, the trees below throwing long shadows like dark hands over the farm fields, the lakes as dark and hard as granite tiles set in a glowing green carpet.
When they’d finished climbing out, Chapman said, “That’s the show,” and Virgil said, “You were right-it was like flying.” They went back to their seats, and the cabin attendant brought Virgil his Diet Coke, a martini with three olives for Chapman, and a paper menu.
Virgil ordered a cheeseburger with fries and a chopped salad, and Chapman a salmon steak.
“Hell, this is better than what we’d get in Butternut,” Virgil said, when the food came. “We ought to eat here every night.”
As they ate, they chatted about the bombings, and Chapman got out a sketchbook and drew cartoon-like pictures of the Pye Pinnacle, to illustrate the problems a bomber would have getting in. “I’m not an expert on security, but we’ve had all kinds of experts there in the past two weeks. They all talked to Willard, and I took notes,” she said. “It’s almost like a locked-room mystery, but the problem is, how did the guy get in?”
“I was an MP captain in the army, and a lot of MPs wind up guarding prisons,” Virgil told her. “I never did, but I took the course work, and we looked at a lot of prison escapes. The ways people get out of prison are amazing- and they mostly depend on sleight of hand, just like with magicians.”
“Like what?”
“Like guys disguising themselves as guards and walking out. Make the guard uniforms right in their cells. Another guy… See, when trucks come and go, the guards roll mirrors under them to make sure nobody has tied themselves onto the bottom. One guy made a folding papier-mache box and spray-painted it brown and gray that looked like the underside of a Sysco truck. He tied himself on, with the box facing down. The guards looked at it, not expecting to see anything, and they didn’t, and waved the truck through. What the guy hadn’t figured out, though, was that the truck was traveling a long way, and by the time he got to where he was going, he was almost dead from carbon monoxide poisoning. They found him lying on the ground under the truck. He’d managed to cut himself down before he passed out. But, he got out.”
“But they’ve got all these cameras at the Pinnacle.”
“The point is, they see what happened, but they don’t understand it,” Virgil said.
“The guys who were looking seemed smart,” Chapman said. “I think they would have made allowance for that.”
“Maybe,” Virgil said. “But everybody knows magicians do tricks, and they still don’t see it. If you’re good enough… but who knows? Maybe it was an insider, who was cooperating with somebody from Butternut Falls. Did anybody look at the insiders and ask about relatives from Minnesota?”
“That’s something I don’t know,” she said. “You’d have to ask Barlow.”
They spent the rest of the flight talking about how they’d gotten where they were-she’d worked as a reporter for a while, hadn’t liked the money, wrote for a couple of magazines as a freelancer, then caught on doing research for a Washington, D.C., public relations company, and worked for a Michigan congressman for a while. After a couple years with the congressman, she ghostwrote, for the congressman, a moderately successful book about Washington lobbying. The congressman introduced her to Pye, after Pye mentioned to him that he was looking for an unusual kind of assistant.
She said, “When I was researching you, I found a lot of stuff about shoot-outs you’d been in, and then I found out you were a writer. You’ve even written for the New York Times Magazine.”
