No way i'd be a snitch for the cops, man.
The words of Yolanda Rodriguez echoed in his head.
Troy knew, as he had told the CIA operatives, that he had made his bed. Lying in it was more difficult than he had imagined when he dropped those coins into that Las Vegas pay phone.
For nearly a month, Troy had led a double life.
His day job was enough to gratify the extreme desires of any pilot. As one of the designated test pilots for the Shakuru Program, he had flown the aircraft to an unofficial world altitude record and had made seven flights above a hundred thousand feet. His long-duration flights with Aron Arnold had exceeded twenty-four hours and had spanned the continent.
His alter ego as a snitch made him feel dirty.
Had he succeeded as a snitch, that would be one thing, but he had failed so far to find anything useful for his CIA handlers.
Aside from a report on Raymond Harris's increasingly vitriolic rants about the need to relieve the United States of its present government, he had come up with virtually nothing. He had finally seen the Raven, but only from a distance, and from the side. The dark-gray aircraft was dart-shaped, with its two vertical tail surfaces canted inward, suggesting that the aircraft was capable of speeds in excess of Mach 3.
He had met only once with the CIA since Las Vegas.
They had agreed to rendezvous at the lone bar in Paiute Wells, a dusty little Nevada town where people from Cactus Flat occasionally hung out to break the boredom of life on the base. The bar was a seedy relic from the 1950s, with a row of glass bricks in the front and Naugahyde-padded swinging doors that had small windows in the shape of spades from a deck of cards.
When Troy related the meager details that he had learned about the mysterious Raven, the CIA men had conveyed their disappointment.
'Is that all? We need more… and we need it soon.'
When Troy asked them why they were so impatient, they implied that other information, developed from other snitches, suggested that whatever Harris and his confederates were planning, they were planning to do it sooner rather than later.
'More… More… More.'
The words spoken to the snitch echoed in his head as he made his way to the small office that Harris used when he was at Cactus Flat. Troy knew that Harris would not be in his office today. He had just boarded his Gulf- stream and had headed out for parts unknown. Over the past couple of weeks, Harris had been away more often than he was at the Flat, a fact that tended to support the CIA supposition that something big was demanding his attention elsewhere.
The door to the office was locked, of course.
Troy had been to Harris's office a dozen times, but only when Harris was there. What he was about to do gave him the creeps. His alter ego as a snitch made him feel dirty.
Long ago, when Troy was still in high school, and still in that stage of life where pranks are part of life, he had learned the art of lock picking. Objects placed in lockers, especially gooey, messy, explosive objects, were great fun. So too was the feeling of accomplishment that came with being able to pick the heaviest padlock in order to place such ridiculous objects to ruin the day of an unsuspecting fellow student.
The office was the same as it always was — except, of course, for the absence of its usual inhabitant. As such, it was uncharacteristically quiet.
What was he looking for?
Troy really didn't know. It was one of those cases where he knew that he would know it only when he found it. Where should he look?
That was an even bigger question. The desk was piled high with papers, folders, and memo pads. So too were most other surfaces in the room, and that didn't count the four-drawer file cabinet.
Troy realized that it would take a week to methodically search everything.
The clock on Harris's desk read 10:14.
How much time dare he spend doing this?
Even if Harris was away, someone else might have a key and come in for some reason.
Got to be out of here by 10:30, Troy decided.
How should he go about this?
He decided that he would try to imagine what Harris would do, so he lowered himself into the former general's desk chair and looked around the room.
Troy tried to imagine where, if he had something important to conceal, would he hide it in this room?
Keep it close. This would rule out anything beyond arm's length. If it's an active operation, then keep it where it can be easily accessed — but keep it out of sight.
With this in mind, Troy searched the bottom half of each stack of papers on the desk, then turned to the drawers.
The clock on the desk read 10:22.
The bottom drawers of the big, old-fashioned metal desk were crammed with folders and tablets. Pausing to read what was written on each of them was time-consuming.
The clock on the desk read 10:35.
He had already blown his schedule, and there was nothing to show for it.
Was it a wild-goose chase?
Troy sorted through the tops of the piles on the desk. The clock on the desk read 10:48.
He had been at this for more than half an hour.
One more pass through the drawers, and then I'm done, he thought.
He started by pulling out the bottom left drawer. What's this?
He didn't remember the blue folder with pieces of duct tape on it. He was sure it hadn't been there before. The tape!
The first time that Troy had looked in the drawer, the blue folder had been attached to the underside of the drawer above it. Somehow, he had jiggled it loose.
This, he quickly discovered, was what he had been looking for.
Correction, this was what the CIA men had been looking for.
The first page gave a short overview of an innocuous-sounding process that was referred to as 'The Transition.'
If the United States reaches a point where it cannot be properly governed, read the opening paragraph, it is the responsibility of the private sector, in the form of PMCs, to intervene…
There was page after page of dry details about how an independent entity would be formed to manage and operate the government during The Transition. Most chilling was the description of how PMC military units would be activated to neutralize the U. S. armed forces. The attached tables of statistics showed how the effectiveness of the traditional armed services had declined in direct proportion to the increase in PMC capabilities.
They actually believed that they could pull this off?
The clock on Harris's desk read 11:17.
Troy had been at the desk for more than an hour. He had to get out of here before his luck ran out.
Having memorized as much as he could about the details of The Transition, Troy carefully retaped the blue folder to the bottom of the middle drawer.
Chapter 40
'You're having all the fun up there in Shakuru, Loensch,' Raymond Harris said with a grin, approaching Troy at the coffee urn.
The sun was just coming up, painting the sandstone bluffs west of Cactus Flat in the vivid colors that
