The drive took place largely in silence, aside from the slipstream of wind seeping into the car. The Miata was not built for road trips. It was loud and cramped. And goose chase didn’t begin to capture the quixotic basis for the trip. Each, though, had motivations. Jerry, who fashioned himself as a man of action, wasn’t about to sit around and let this infuriating moment pass without doing something. Plus, this Lyle guy irked the shit out of him, the more so because Jerry saw some connection between Lyle and Eleanor. I’ve got your back, he thought to himself as he watched Eleanor, and you’ll be grateful for it when the time comes.
Eleanor had made a simple calculation that it made more sense to go than not. But it wasn’t satisfying in the least because the margin of her decision was razor thin, like 51 percent to 49 percent. Or maybe her decision was more of a plurality: 50 percent go on a goose chase; 49 percent don’t go; 1 percent have no freaking clue, or what’s the alternative?
Two things pushed her over the top. One was that someone had died on her airplane, an old man, and she knew—absolutely knew—that she’d done nothing wrong to cause that. The second thing was that, on some basic level, she trusted this Dr. Martin. Such an odd combination of guileless and cunning. Not evil cunning, or wily, but brilliant cunning. She’d looked him up on the Internet before their first meeting. She knew what he’d been once. She was left to wonder what had caused him to come undone. It bore watching. She sat in silence in the passenger seat, trying to take in as much information as she might, watching the side of the increasingly dark road disappear in the rearview mirror.
For his part, Lyle had moved beyond thinking and into instinct. The frontal lobe of his brain, the part involved in decision making and higher-level analysis, would be surprisingly free of activity at times like these. What prevailed was free association, the appearance in his mind’s eye of ideas that might be loosely described as taking the shape of puzzle pieces. He tried to link them and, sometimes, frustrated, he would emit a sound of disgust. In a couple of these moments, Eleanor would glance at Jerry, which would send her first officer into a pleasure spiral because the two of them were seeing eye-to-eye. Jerry felt the shape of his gun in his back holster and he smiled.
They pulled off at an exit just before nine o’clock looking for gas and food.
At the Chevron, Jerry fueled up and they all stared at the video monitor located on the pump. It was a split screen, one side featuring an ad with an adorable-looking cartoon car smiling because it was being filled up with Chevron gas; the other side showed marchers descending on the Washington Mall. One held a placard with an automatic weapon drawn on it. He was being confronted by a young person poking a finger in his chest.
Jerry looked at Lyle.
“What is it with you and this woman?” Jerry asked.
“I don’t know. Other than . . .” Lyle’s back ached from the small backseat confines. “How much do you guys know about the immune system?”
“Fights disease,” Jerry said.
“Exactly. The way it does so is kind of incredible. First, it has to recognize a threat. There are trillions of possible alien threats and some of them can look a lot like normal cells. So that’s no small feat. Then it has to—”
“Please tell me he’s going somewhere with this,” Jerry whined condescendingly to Eleanor.
“I think so.”
Jerry pulled out of the gas station and into the parking lot of an In-N-Out Burger and took a spot while Lyle explained how the immune system has to look for subtle signs of a dangerous, often deadly, invader, then look for ways to attach to those cells and figure out how to produce proteins capable of attacking the offender. It is an extremely delicate task, arguably the most sophisticated cat-and-mouse game in the world.
“I think she wants to see if I can discover her and then . . .” He paused. “She’s putting out these clues. She’s trying to get seen, or discovered.”
“Pretty damn narcissistic if you ask me,” Jerry added.
Lyle pushed air out of his lips, realizing he wasn’t making a lot of sense. It was the risk of putting theories out before they were fully baked. He knew there was more to this idea in his head. Something fuller was forming. He couldn’t get at it.
It was totally dark now, raindrops pelting the windshield.
Lyle perked up. “What did the attendant say when you called the hotel?” he asked Eleanor. It took her a moment to orient to the question. Then she answered: “She just said she was connecting me to room 106.”
“Isn’t that an odd answer?” Lyle said.
“Why?”
“Because they don’t give out room numbers,” Jerry advanced.
“Exactly,” Lyle said.
They let this tiny clue sink in.
“So what?” Jerry asked. He wasn’t being an ass, just asking the legitimate follow-up question.
“Is she setting a trap? She wants us to go there,” Eleanor said. Then she laughed. “Listen to me. This is nuts.”
Lyle thought this over.
“Lyle,” Eleanor said after a minute, “you still with us?”
“I’ll get the food,” Lyle said. “Least I can do.” He took their orders and went inside while Jerry and Eleanor waited in the car. Inside, Lyle placed his order and thought about this clue about the room number. It was the first time he thought he might have a handle on what this disease called Jackie might be doing, and a plan took shape.
When he got back, Eleanor was stretching her legs. With Jerry out of earshot, she put a gentle hand on Lyle’s arm.
“Thank you.”
“I whipped you up a gourmet dinner,” he said, handing her fast food.
“Hey, you two, get a goddamned room,” Jerry said.
They pulled on the highway again. Trucks hummed and rattled by with decreasing frequency on the nearby highway. Lyle, chewing an In-N-Out burger, Eleanor sipping her soda, Jerry spooning handfuls of fries.
“Look,” Eleanor said. She gestured outside the front of the car. A shooting star finished its descent and disappeared. “Remind you of anything?” she asked Jerry.
He laughed. “Atlanta.”
“Jesus, if they had known . . .”
Lyle heard the friendship between them and wondered why he ever had doubted it was there. After another quiet minute, Jerry asked Eleanor: “Are you thinking of Frank?”
She shook her head. “Not really.”
She turned around and glanced at Lyle. “You want to hear a funny story?”
“Absolutely.”
She told Lyle about the time that she and Jerry had been at a continuing education training at Delta headquarters in Atlanta. They’d been teamed up for years and just hated this nonsense. When they were live-training new landing gear, they’d been asked to pause in a holding pattern when Jerry had seen a shooting star. He pulled out this new time-lapse feature on his iPhone and they’d started playing around with it. They hadn’t realized that they’d just missed altogether the second turn in the holding pattern. They looked up when the radio squawked asking what the hell they were doing flying directly at the radio tower.
In the front seat of the Miata, Jerry was laughing. “The best part was that I’d gotten the camera turned around so instead of snapping the shooting star—”
“He took a picture of me with an oh-shit-radio-tower look on my face,” Eleanor completed his thought. “Or maybe the best part was when you told the guy in the radio tower that we aimed for the radio tower to punish him for putting veterans into a holding pattern.” She turned to Lyle. “Gives you all the confidence in the world in your flight officers, does it not, Dr. Martin?”
Lyle smiled. His mind was half in the conversation and half in the comment Jerry had made earlier about someone named Frank. Lyle wondered if that was Eleanor’s boyfriend or husband, or ex. In any case, it was someone who she’d be reminded of by a shooting star.
“Less than two hours,” Jerry said.
“I’m beat,” Eleanor said. She put her head on the window.
No one spoke for nearly an hour. Lyle even dozed. Jerry tuned the radio to the only station he could find in the rural track, a talk show called “The Fringe,” where a guy who declared he was broadcasting from an “undisclosed basement location” speculated that the Million Gun March on Capitol Hill was easily understandable as the work of extraterrestrials. Aliens, the talk-show host said, had impregnated us with Civil War instincts so we’d wipe each other out and they’d harvest our organs.
Lyle dipped in and out of sleep. He woke up and rubbed his eyes. He listened to the radio, the voice coming in and out, static sometimes. It was telling him something. Radio, static, frequencies, epilepsy, channelopathy.
They saw the first sign of Hawthorne. It was just the other side of midnight. “Heading due east,” Jerry said. “Not much of a tailwind.” He sounded nervous. Eleanor was still asleep. The horizon lurked deep dark. If there was a town up ahead, it wasn’t much of one. A distant, ambient light clung low to the ground, far away. Maybe some hotels or restaurants a few miles off. Then, a few miles later, something odd happened. The distant light flickered just at the moment the radio turned to static. Jerry instinctively reached for the dial and spun it, trying to regain the station, and got more static. All across the dial.
“Was that . . .” Lyle started. “That was odd, right?”
“Do you remember when we were landing?” Jerry said to Eleanor. “Hmm,” she said, groggily.
“Landing?” asked Lyle.
“In Steamboat.”
“Was there an electrical issue—when we landed?” Lyle asked.
“I think so,” Jerry said. “I feel like . . .”
“Turn off the radio,” Lyle suddenly commanded.
“Hold on, slow down there, Dr. Cowboy,” Jerry said. He was back to that officious tone. But he turned off the radio. He sensed they’d been through something like this before. “Wake up, Captain,” he said. “We’re almost there.” He shook her leg. She was way out of it. “I don’t like this place. No more chickenshit stuff.”
For a second, Jerry let go of the wheel and the car swerved. He twisted in the driver’s seat and, with impressive flexibility, removed the nine millimeter from the holster behind him. He set the weapon in his lap. Lyle tried not to laugh. Who or what was he going to shoot? The radio?
It all struck Lyle as familiar, one of those Steamboat flashes. Jerry with a gun and this was going to end badly.
Desolation defined the weigh station at the Nevada border. As they approached, two eighteen-wheelers parked on the right side of the road looked all but abandoned. A toll-like plaza hung over the highway and funneled drivers into booths. All booth lanes were closed but the one on the far right where Jerry pulled the Miata. A dark figure loomed, which Lyle thought odd. Why monitor a border when there was no toll, and in the middle of the night?
“Jerry, put away the . . .” Lyle said.
It was too late. Jerry had pulled into the lane and slowed to the booth. He’d forgotten to holster or hide the semiautomatic and now it lay there in the middle compartment. The worst thing he could do now would be to draw attention to it. Wasn’t this an open-carry state? In the booth, a woman wearing a hoodie, frizzy hair pouring out the sides, looked blankly at them, all bureaucrat.
“Evening,” Jerry said.
Lyle noticed a small TV in front of her. “Are you watching static?” he blurted.
She looked at her TV and before she could look back, Lyle tossed a blanket over the gun.
“Somethin’ weird with the signal all of a sudden,” the woman said. She looked over the car again, seemed to have noticed that there was a change but couldn’t place it or wasn’t letting on.
“What brings you to Nevada?” she asked.
“I’m sorry,” Jerry said. “Is this typical? I’ve never been stopped at a state border before. We’re Delta pilots heading to a training.”
The woman’s eyes settled on Lyle’s jacket covering the gun and quickly moved off them. The butt stuck out.
“Just a precaution. With all the stuff taking place in Washington and we’ve got a military base here, as you probably know if you’re pilots,” the woman said. “Where did you say you were training?”
Jerry reached for his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. He extracted a card and held it up to her. “If there’s nothing else, we’ll be on our way . . .” He looked at her name tag. “Marsha.”
“Okay,” she said. But she looked skeptical. Lyle suspected she was told to be on the lookout for anything remotely suspicious, particularly if there was a military base located here. Even setting aside whatever the hell Jackie was up to, this world seemed to be boiling with tension.
Jerry hit the accelerator. Lyle looked over his shoulder and it sure looked to him like she picked up the phone.
“What the hell were you doing?” Jerry barked at Lyle. “I have a permit. You made it look like we’re doing something wrong.” He didn’t add the words you idiot, but his tone captured the sentiment. “Wake up, Captain.” He shook her leg again. She was really out. Was there something wrong with her?
From the weigh station, a car pulled out, now about a hundred yards behind them. Jerry stepped on it. So did the vehicle in the rearview mirror. In the dark, it was hard to tell if it was a cop car, though it stood to reason.
“I’ve never heard of a weigh station used for that purpose.”
“Maybe it’s Jackie Badger’s doing,” Lyle mused aloud.
“These are not ordinary times,” Jerry said dismissively. “Assholes with guns and now the government using that as an excuse to take away our rights. Freaking liberals couldn’t wait to institute martial law. Over my goddamned dead body.”
“You ever notice how often you contradict yourself on this subject, Jerry.”
“What’s wrong with Eleanor?” Jerry spat back at Lyle. “Captain, wake up.”
Behind them, red lights started spinning on the top of the cop car that was now a little more than fifty yards behind.
Ahead, in the dead of night, Hawthorne loomed. Jerry punched the accelerator.