The propjet flight from Newark was noisy and bumpy but on time. Enterprise had their rental—a black Taurus—ready and waiting, the only hitch being a brief argument over who would drive, which Donny lost. Hari didn’t like being a passenger, so she convinced Donny he’d be the better navigator. Once they got rolling they had a second argument when Donny wanted to play music from his phone through the car’s sound system. Thirty seconds’ worth was all she could stand.
“I would call that bad music,” she said, turning it off, “but that would classify it as music, which it most definitely is not.”
“You don’t like DMX? He’s from my high school days.”
“He makes the B-52s sound good.”
“Who are the B-52s?”
“You never heard of—I don’t believe it. ‘Rock Lobster?’ The worst rock song ever?”
A head shake. “Nope. Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Consider yourself lucky. Find a country station.”
He looked horrified. “Country? You like country?”
She didn’t, but she figured he’d like it less.
By noon they were cruising through an industrial park just outside Albany where Sirocco Trucking occupied a huge warehouse. Hari passed it once to get the lay of the land. It sat on a low rise with a big, tree-lined parking lot. Good thing she had the address because no one had bothered to put a sign out front, just a number.
She swung back and turned into a gently curving driveway. She found a space in the packed parking lot and spotted a uniformed guard walking a German shepherd. She didn’t like the way the dog tugged toward their car, so she called from her window.
“Excuse me! This is Sirocco Trucking, right?”
He approached with the dog and stopped a dozen feet away. His dark blue uniform housed a running back’s build that had yet to go to seed. His baseball cap with its Septimus Security logo, his big aviator sunglasses, and his thick mustache didn’t leave much of his face visible, but what Hari could see looked surprised.
“You’re looking for Sirocco? Well, I guess you found it.”
She guessed they didn’t get many drop-ins.
“Great. Where’s the office?”
“The office…the office is around the corner but no one’s there.”
“Out to lunch?”
“No one’s ever there. Can I help you?”
Damn. They’d been assuming they could at least get inside the building.
“We’d like to rent a truck.”
“They don’t rent trucks.”
During this scintillating repartee, another guard in identical garb with an identical dog rounded a corner and stopped to watch.
What is this? Hari thought. Do we somehow look threatening?
“I mean,” she said, “we’d like to arrange to ship some things.”
“All their trucks are spoken for.”
“All of them?”
“Every one.”
He sounded coached.
“Do you think we might have a look at them?”
“That’s not an option, ma’am.”
“Are you sure?” she said. “Is there someone I can speak—?”
“The office is empty and I’m afraid you can’t park here.”
Hari gave him a hard stare. He stared back through his shades.
And that was all she wrote. Hari could see she wasn’t going to win here, so she backed out of her space and headed down the drive.
“That went well,” Donny said. “What now?”
“Notice anything?” she said as they hit the industrial park’s common boulevard.
“Besides guys patrolling the grounds of a trucking company with dogs? I mean, seriously—German shepherds? Whoever heard of that? It tells me they’re majorly paranoid about someone glomming onto whatever it is they’re up to. And as for little boy blue back there, he wasn’t giving anything away. I mean, nada.”
“All good points. But I’m more interested in the parking lot.”
A pause, then, “Full. Lots of cars.” Another pause as he rubbed his stubble. “They could belong to drivers arriving to take a haul somewhere.”
“Exactly. The question is: Have they already left, or are they gathering to leave together?”
Donny grinned. “A convoy? Seems unlikely, but only one way to find out. I see a stake-out in our future. Let’s get some food first. We need to stock up on munchies. I saw a strip mall back by the highway with some fast-food joints.”
Hari knew where he meant and headed there.
“Speaking of fast food,” she said, “did you hear how McDonald’s bought the Wendy’s logo and won’t let them use it? So pretty soon, unless you already know where your Wendy’s is, you won’t be able to find one.”
“You’re kidding!”
“Yep.”
A long pause, then a sigh, then, “Y’know, one day that mouth of yours could get you killed.”
“I know. Can’t wait.”
At the mall Hari picked up two large coffees—both for her—at an espresso bar while Donny bought these box lunches from Taco Bell that contained enormous amounts of food. Then they found a parking spot in the lot of the FedEx depot across the boulevard with a view of the Sirocco driveway.
“Do you ever drink anything that doesn’t contain caffeine?” Donny said just before cramming a soft taco into his face.
“Only when forced by circumstance. You don’t want to know me when I run low.”
The wait turned out to be shorter than Hari had anticipated. In fact she’d expected to be watching trucks returning from a haul. But at 1:22 one tractor-trailer after another started pulling out and heading for the freeway. Half of the trailers were rectangular freight semis, while the rest were tankers.
Hari counted ten rigs in all. When it looked like no more were joining the parade, she pulled out and followed.
“Odd time for a convoy, don’t you think?” Donny said. “I mean, if you’re not keen on drawing attention, an afternoon truck convoy is not the way to go.”
“Makes even less sense when you consider the level of security they have around the building. I’d give anything for a look inside one of those trailers. Just a peek. Then we can head back.”
Maybe they’d all pull into a rest stop and she could sneak up on one.
“What about those tankers? They could be filled with anything—gasoline, water, chemicals, slime, anything.”
“‘Slime’?”
“Yeah. Green goop. I’m guessing you never watched Nick.”
“Who’s he?”
“It’s a cable channel. Nickelodeon.”
As Donny launched into an explanation she only half heard, Hari followed the convoy to 787 North where it rolled to Troy, then crossed the Hudson onto Route 2 East.
“Where the hell are we going?” she said.
The car came equipped with its own wi-fi hotspot and Donny had his tablet fired up and running.
“If we stay on Two here, it’ll bring us into the Taconic Mountains.”
“How long’s that going to take?”
“Not bad—forty-five minutes or so to the Massachusetts border.”
“And then what?”
“Lots of mountains.”
Great. Hari hadn’t planned on any of this. She’d expected a few hours’ worth of nosing around to yield what they wanted—the nature of the cargo. That, in turn, would lead them to the reason for the Septimus stock sell off.
Route 2 soon started calling itself Taconic Trail, and seemed to be running perpetually uphill. Which meant slow going in the lower gears for the big rigs. They passed the Massachusetts line and kept on trucking.
“How much longer?” Hari groaned.
“Well, since I don’t know the destination, I can’t very well—”
“Rhetorical! Rhetorical!”
A couple of miles into Massachusetts the trucks took a left off Route 2 onto a narrow side road. A sign with an arrow read Norum Hill.
“I think we just learned their destination,” Donny said. “Norum Hill.”
Hari turned and followed them up the mountain road. “How do you know they’re not going to keep on rolling?”
“Because according to the map, this road goes to the summit where there’s some kind of memorial to an Indian chief whose—”
“It’s ‘Native American,’” Hari said. “I’m Indian.”
“Right. Sorry. Anyway, I can’t pronounce his name, but the road ends there. When you want to come down you have to use this road.”
The road could barely fit two cars.
“Not with those trucks on it you’re not. How do they—?”
A cop car with Berkshire County Sheriff emblazoned on the door was parked on the shoulder ahead. An armed deputy in a tan uniform, Stetson hat, and Sam Brown belt, who had been lounging against the front grille, stepped into the road and held up his hand.
Donny stuck his head out the passenger window. “What’s the problem, officer?”
“Rock fall ahead. You need to turn around and go back.”
“What about all those trucks we’ve been stuck behind like forever?”
“They’re gonna be a problem.” He didn’t budge from the middle of the road. “We have to get them turned around somehow. In the meantime, you’ve got to go back down to the highway and stay off this road.”
“But—”
His voice hardened. “We’re both speaking English, aren’t we? Turn around, go back down to the highway, and stay off this road.”
Hari waved at the deputy and began backing up.
“Hey, Hari,” Donny said, “what are you doing? We need to—”
She lowered her voice and said, “What we need is to not draw attention to ourselves. Look at Deputy Dog’s face. He’s not going to let us by.”
“But he’s lying.”
“Of course he is. He might not even be with the sheriff’s department. But you said it yourself: This road ends at the summit. What goes up, must come down. We simply have to wait.”
They parked farther east on Route 2 where they had a discrete and only partially obstructed view of the turnoff. Hari lowered the windows, turned off the engine, and they settled in to wait.
It turned out to be a short wait—half an hour, tops—before the convoy started rolling back onto the Taconic Trail and heading downhill toward Albany. But only the tractors were rolling. All the semi-trailers had been left behind.
“And there goes Deputy Dog,” Hari said as the sheriff’s car brought up the rear.
“Why do you keep calling him that?”
“The cartoon. You don’t remember Deputy Dog?”
“Nope.”
“Not important.”
Hey, Nineteen started playing in her head.
Hari waited until the sheriff’s unit drove out of sight and they had the road to themselves, then headed back up Norum Hill.
“They left their loads up there,” Donny said, staring at his tablet.
“Yes, Captain Obvious.”
“But where? There’s one road to the top with no turnoffs.”
He was getting on her nerves.
“Maybe they’ve created a turnoff that’s not on the map. Maybe they left the trailers at the summit.”
“Ten semis and tankers?”
“Exactly. You can’t hide all those, so can we stop speculating? We’re on our way up the mountain. We will see wherever they left them.”
But they didn’t.
Hari drove all the way to the summit without seeing anything but trees. The top had been flattened somewhat and layered with gravel for parking. A short memorial obelisk stood near a tall cell tower at the northern edge, but otherwise…nothing. The view might have been impressive had Hari’s interest in mountain vistas exceeded nil.
Donny got out and inspected the ground.
“No sign of anything with major tonnage up here recently. The gravel would be chewed up.”
“Which means we missed it. We’ll take it real slow going back down.”
But before leaving the summit she did a slow circuit of the perimeter of the groomed area. The Norum Hill road stayed mostly on the eastern and northern faces of the mountain and she saw why. The western face was much steeper.
“See anything that looks like a bunch of trucks down there?” she said.
Donny craned his neck to look but neither of them saw any sign of the trailers.
“Nothing. How is this possible? I’ve got a topographical map of this place on my tablet and, according to that, the summit here is the only even vaguely flat spot on the whole hill. There’s no place that’ll accommodate ten semis but here.”
“Obviously you’re wrong,” she said.
“I’m not. I’m…” He ran out of words.
“Think about it: We saw them pull trailers up, we saw them come down without them, so that means the trailers are still up here. We simply have to find them.”
Hari took her time on the way back down, and somewhere near the halfway point they spotted a break in the trees that hadn’t been apparent on the way up.
“Gotta be it,” Donny said.
The road didn’t branch here, but two well-worn ruts angled off through the underbrush between trees. Hari hesitated to turn in, unsure about backing out. She pulled onto the shoulder—extra wide here—and parked.
“Let’s reconnoiter on foot,” she said.
Donny pointed to the pavement as they crossed the road. “Lots of heavy traffic turning here. Gotta be the place.”
Hari wasn’t so sure. With the cliff face looming above them, she didn’t see any place to go. She did see fairly fresh tree stumps that had been sawed off a ground level. Someone had cut a path through here not too long ago.
But to her amazement, the trail ended abruptly at a sheer rock wall.
“This is impossible,” Donny cried, slapping his palms against the granite or whatever the hell these mountains were made of. “Look at the tire ruts! They run right up to the rock—right up to it! It’s as if it was lowered over the trail like a curtain.”
A perfect description. The tire ruts didn’t stop a foot before the rock face, they didn’t stop an inch before it: They stopped against it—as if the rigs had driven straight through solid rock, unhitched their trailers inside the mountain, then driven out again.
The perfect impossibility of that gave her a deep, uneasy feeling. Because it looked like that was exactly what had happened. Which made no sense.
She did a slow turn, looking for an answer. Her world was numbers, and numbers made sense. They didn’t lie. People might try to make them lie, but in the end they always told the truth.
As she completed the turn she noticed with a start that Donny had disappeared. Just like the trailers.
“Donny? Don—?”
“Coming,” he said as he trotted up the trail toward her, waving a tire iron.
“What’s that for?”
“It’s got to be a trick.”
He stopped before the stony expanse and hammered at it with the iron. It made just the kind of clank one would expect from steel striking solid stone. Moving back and forth he kept striking the stone until finally hurling the tire iron back down the trail with a frustrated howl.
“There’s got to be an answer!”
“Of course there is,” Hari said. “We just don’t know it. Yet. We get back in the car and inspect the road with a fine-tooth comb.”
“But the tracks clearly show heavy traffic turning in here.”
Hari started back toward the car. “We keep looking.”
And look they did, up and down the mountain road, but found nothing. Being on the east side of the hill, they lost the light early and were forced to call it quits.
As they headed back toward Albany, Donny said, “Didn’t Sherlock Holmes say something about eliminating the impossibles or the like?”
She knew that one. “You mean, ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth’? That one?”
“That’s the one. I feel we’ve eliminated the possible, so that leaves us with impossible.”
“‘Impossible,’ by definition cannot be, so what we’re really left with is the improbable.”
“Sounds like word games, but I’ll play. What’s the next step?”
“We find a hotel, eat, sleep, and get back to the industrial park first thing in the morning.”
“How do we know there’ll be another convoy?”
“Did you see the size of that warehouse? I’m guessing they’ve got a lot of whatever to move and I don’t see them wasting any time.”
He grinned. “Hotel, huh? How many rooms we renting?”
She had to laugh. “You’re kidding, right?”
A wider grin. “Well, one room would save Art some money.”
She pointed to the radio. “See if you can find a classic rock station. Maybe they’re playing Aerosmith.”
“Aero…?” His brow furrowed, then he laughed. “Oh, I get it. Dream On, right?”
“Riiiiight.”
At least he knew that one. But then, everybody knew Aerosmith.