Skillful Death (53 page)

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down a series of terrible roads until he finally pulls out onto decent pavement. The tires sing on the asphalt and the Jeep seems to have a top speed of forty-five miles per hour. I think it’s the studs in the tires. They’re great for traction in the woods, but get them on pavement and they’re a real liability. It’s such a pretty day though, you can almost forget that we’re being chased by an elite squad of masked men. At least now that the road is calmer, it’s easier to talk.

“It’s easy to prepare a getaway kit,” Bud says. “The hard part is maintenance.”

“How do you mean?”

“Documents expire, food is perishable, you’ve got to register vehicles and pay for insurance. You have to get the oil changed and make sure the gas doesn’t go bad in the tanks. All that stuff takes time to update. And you can’t have someone do it for you. The more people who know about your emergency stash, the less valuable it is.”

“That sounds terrible,” I say.

He smiles. “It can be the difference between getting caught and getting away. Like today—I haven’t driven that motorcycle in years, but I have to drag it out twice a year to make sure everything is working and the tires are inflated. And you can’t have just one stash. What if you’re being chased east? You need something in a couple different directions. In a way, having these guys come after me is a relief. When we ditch this Jeep, I won’t have to worry about paying the excise tax next year. One less thing to worry about.”

“With all your money, it seems like there must be a way to subcontract those chores.”

“Sure, I could, but look at what happened today. Somehow those guys got all the way inside the perimeter before a single alarm went off. That means they must have known the system: where the sensors are, where the mines are, everything. They must have somehow tapped into records from my subcontractors. The more people you hire, the more your risk. Think about everything they know from you.”

“From me?” I ask. “What are you talking about?”

“The psychic? All that stuff she said?”

“She told me a bunch of stuff about your past,” I say. “She didn’t get anything valuable from me.”

“But she told you lots of things that you’d never admitted to anyone, right?”

“True.”

“So, they must have extracted that information from you beforehand.”

“Perhaps, but to what end?”

Bud turns onto a smaller road that winds up a hill and then between beautiful meadows dotted with black and white cows.

“They had her establish her credibility by telling you information they’d previously extracted from you. Then, she told you a bunch of information they’d dug up about me. I think the point was to send you running to me so they could follow you.”

“Huh,” I say. I guess it makes sense, but I hadn’t put those things together. I thought they were just trying to scam me out of the prize money, but he’s probably right. “It didn’t work then. I interviewed the psychic last year. We’re only talking about it now.”

Bud nods.

We pass into another patch of woods and the boss slows down until he sees a narrow drive. About a hundred yards into the woods, he stops at a small garage. He hands me a ring with two keys on it.

“Pull the car out and I’ll put this one in there,” he says.

I unsnap my door and jump out of the Jeep. It’s so quiet here. Even with the Jeep idling behind me, the way the woods seem to absorb sound is unsettling to my city ears. One of the keys matches the padlock on the garage. I swing open the two doors to reveal an older tan Toyota with rust around the edges. I squeeze in through the door, since there’s not much extra room in the garage, and start it up. I notice from the sticker in the window that the car is due for inspection this month. That’s probably why Bud had maintenance on his mind.

I pull the Toyota out and Bud pulls the Jeep in. Leaving the car running, I get out to move to the passenger’s seat. Bud locks up the garage and waves me back.

“No, you drive for a while,” he says.

I get back in and wait for him. I flip on the radio. Instead of alternative hippie drum music, the de facto radio programming in this part of the world, I hear police chatter. He must have this stereo hooked up to a scanner. I hear orders conveyed to officers in the field. They’re looking for two white males, one in his sixties and one in his thirties. They give heights and weights that match me and Bud and cap it off with, “The older man is shaved bald. Suspects are armed and dangerous.” Bud gets in the passenger side and puts on his seatbelt.

“Are they talking about us?” I ask.

“I guess,” he says. He turns the radio down until it’s just a distant drone.

“So the people chasing us have enlisted the local police?”

“I guess,” he says. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d bought or bribed quite a few people.”

I pull out to the end of the long driveway and come to a stop.

“Which way to an airport?”

“Let’s try right,” he says.

I’m not exactly brimming with confidence at his directions. Each time we get to an intersection, it feels like he’s just picking our path at random. The roads go from nice, fast blacktop, to washboard dirt, and then back to highway.

“I’m picking these roads at random,” he says.

“That’s inspiring,” I say.

“Don’t worry. We’re headed in the right direction.”

Vermont is big on trees and hills and cows, but it doesn’t have a lot of open space. I’ve read that you can lower your blood pressure by staring off into the horizon for a period of time. Something about unfocusing your eyes and staring off towards a distant point is relaxing. I guess that’s why people like to vacation at a place with a view. It makes me wonder how people around here relax. You can never see more than a hundred yards. There’s always a hillside, or tree, or cow, blocking the view.

I turn left on the next road, as instructed. We climb a small hill and find ourselves driving next to a big open field. It’s amazingly pretty after all the time we’ve spend winding around on the sides of mountains.
 

“Pull in here,” Bud says.
 

Down a short grass drive, we pull in next to a couple of hangars. A pretty maple tree shades the side of the hangar. The grass in the field is trimmed like a putting green. The flat, open field looks like it stretches all the way to the mountains.
 

“Come on,” Bud says, pulling me away from the view. After being locked up in Bud’s house for days, recording his life story, I could stand and look at this view for an hour.

“You’ll get a better look at the mountains from up high,” he says.

I don’t travel much. Most of the people who want to apply for the prize end up coming to my office. Every now and then I’ll get a claim for a particular geographic location, but it’s really not more than once or twice a year. I’m okay on big jets. There’s a lot of machinery, investment, expertise, and infrastructure there. No company is going to invest that much money on something unless they expect it to stay in the sky for a really long time. Small planes scare the hell out of me. A car mechanic can’t tell you with any accuracy what the next thing to go wrong on your car will be. Why should I trust some small airplane mechanic to know that a tiny little one-engine plane is going to stay aloft?
 

The boss leads me into the dark hangar, which is filled with little two- and four-seat deathtraps.

“I’m over here,” he says.

My brain is going a million miles an hour right now. I’m thinking about everything Bud said about how difficult it is to keep an emergency vehicle up to date. I know he flies quite a bit, but this can’t be his regular plane. Whatever plane he normally flies would be at a bigger airport and would probably be staked out by a dozen guys looking for us. This must be a second or third choice plane. Are we really going to trust it to keep us in the sky?

“Who keeps this airplane registered?” I ask.

“I just lease this plane,” he says with a smile. “Someone else flies it on a regular basis. Don’t worry, it’s safe.”

I can’t believe he said, “Don’t worry.” Have these words ever caused someone to stop worrying?

“No problem,” I say. “Maybe we should just drive to a bigger airport?”

“I’m sure they have roadblocks set up by now. We won’t get out of the state. I’ll fly us to a place I know where we can catch a ride to a Canadian airport. Much safer.”

“Maybe I should just tell you my plan and you can go to Eastern Europe. I’ll stay here.”

“Come on, you’ve got a scientific mind. What are the odds something is going to happen to us in the sky? How often do you hear about a small airplane crashing?”

Bud is rolling open the big hangar doors.
 

He climbs up onto the wing of a powder-blue plane and opens the door. He comes back down to the ground with a clipboard.

“See,” he says, “there’s a checklist. How could anything go wrong?” He has a big smile on his face, and I can tell he’s enjoying my discomfort.

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Despite all my fears, it’s not a bad flight. There’s something deeply unsettling about the way the plane dips and bounces on the pockets of air, like we’re not firmly connected to reality. But as long as I can look out the window and see the place where the hazy mountains meet the sky, my stomach stays peaceful. The boss doesn’t seem to look out the windows much at all. He’s always looking down at his maps, or the instruments, or he’s fussing around with some log book.

This may be a leased plane, but I think it has some special voodoo going on under the hood. My knowledge of private flying is limited, but I’m pretty sure we didn’t register a flight plan, talk to any towers, or respect international borders. I thought there was supposed to be some kind of transponder in planes to prevent this kind of thing. Must be more than that, or every drug-runner would have an easy way to get over borders. None of those rules seem to apply to Bud.

He finally gets on the radio when there’s an airstrip in sight.

After a bunch of pilot jargon, he lines us up and we’re making our approach. They have so much junk in your face, you can barely see the runway at all. The windshield on those planes is tiny. I’m craning my neck just to get a glimpse of where we’re going to land.

“Are will still in the U.S.?” I ask. I see a lot of Canadian flags around.

“Nope.”

I don’t know what kind of arrangement the boss has here, but we don’t even see anyone who looks remotely official. We’re out of the plane, through a side door, and into a nice new car before the engine of the little plane has cooled. The boss is driving, and he’s not sticking to backroads anymore. We’re on a big highway, heading west.

“Do you want to stop and get something to eat, or can we press on?”

“I could use a pit stop,” I say. “The side of the road is fine though.”

I’m half kidding, but he takes me at my word. Traffic’s blowing by at one-hundred-twenty kilometers per hour as I pee on some purple flower at the side of the road. My thoughts wander. If they were using me to try to find the boss, and then they descended on him just a few days after I went to him, did they follow me? Is there any life left for me back in the city, or will they hound me there until they get their hands on him?

When I get back in the car, I try to find out.

“Do you think they followed me to your place?” I ask.

“Yes, and no,” he says. He pulls away and merges back onto the highway. “They must have known about my cabin for a while, because they had good intelligence. They knew how to defeat my security, and knew how to negotiate the mines. They didn’t seem to know about the other Jeeps or some of my other emergency plans, but I think it’s safe to think that they’d been planning for a while. You were only at my cabin a few days. They wouldn’t have planned a whole assault in that time.”

I’m waiting for the “yes” part of the answer, but he stopped talking.

I’m about to ask again when he finally resumes.

“But they may have waited for you to arrive so they could find me distracted. Before you came, I was on the porch, just waiting. So while they didn’t follow you to know where I was, they were waiting for something like you to distract me.”

“So why didn’t you stay on alert? Why was it so important to tell me your whole life story?”

“A couple of reasons. One, I thought that if I told the story to someone else, I might gain some insight into how to solve the basic problems. Two, I wanted to get it all down before I forgot it again. I don’t know how long the green candy is going to last.”

“Green candy?”

“You remember that candy the monk gave me? He gave me a special piece of green candy for when I wanted to remember the rest of my life story?”

“Barely. You mean in the mountains of Tibet?”

“Yes.”

“You held onto it for all those years?”

“Yes. I had it encased in a piece of jewelry. A couple days before you showed up, I finally ate it. It worked.”

“So you didn’t remember any of that stuff before?”

“I remembered my time as Dom, and some of my time as Constantine, but the candy really did help. I should have saved a tiny bit. I probably could have sold it to Pfizer for a fortune. I even remembered things from Seattle that I had all but forgotten.”

“It’s a good thing we wrote it all down,” I say. I still have the backpack with the laptop after all of Bud’s vehicle changes.

“Perhaps. I can’t say I gained much insight. It just made me more paranoid.”

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We approach Montreal as the sun is setting. What a pretty city. It’s nice to see the regular columns of lights again. A city at night looks organized and efficient to me. It’s inviting.

Bud takes us to the airport right in the middle of everything. He parks in the long-term lot and opens the trunk.