Chapter 8

CHAPTER 8

M y niece walks in, her mouth grimly set, and I can feel her intensity humming like a power line. Formidable in a black flight suit and baseball cap, she carries a pistol in a drop-leg holster, a black tactical backpack slung over her shoulder. Her eyes are masked by computer-assisted photovoltaic “smart” glasses, the lenses this moment tinted dark green from the sun.

“We’re just about ready,” she announces to Marino and me.

The woman at the desk returns Lucy’s government credit card and a receipt for fuel. She tucks them into her badge wallet.

“How was the drive over?” Lucy asks us.

“Peachy,” Marino says with heavy sarcasm.

“This way.” She indicates for us to follow her.

“Where are we going?” he puzzles, and she says nothing else for now.

Lithe and deceptively strong, her short mahogany hair touched by rose gold, Lucy isn’t recognizable as the pudgy know-it-all who spent vacations with me while she was growing up. In those days she was a redheaded tomboy in owlish round glasses, her face scattered with freckles. Marino would call her Peppermint Patty when he wasn’t teasing her about something else.

After Janet and their son, Desi, died at the beginning of COVID, Lucy moved into the guest cottage on Benton’s and my property. But that doesn’t mean we see her often. The last time was five days ago when she told me there were issues with the Secret Service’s stand-alone cloud computer. Her presence was required at the training center and cyber lab some forty miles from Old Town in a rural part of Maryland.

As it’s turned out, her being there was fortuitous. The helicopter she pilots is hangared on the grounds. When the Secret Service was alerted about Sal Giordano’s disappearance, she was able to mobilize immediately.

“We’ll step in here for a minute,” she says.

She shows us into an empty pilots’ lounge overlooking the ramp parked with private aircraft shining in the sun. Lucy shuts the door behind us, the lenses of her glasses changing to shades of gray in the low lighting.

“Now we can talk safely,” she explains. “In case you haven’t noticed, there are cameras everywhere.”

“Yeah, I noticed.” Marino stares out the windows at a red Jet Ranger helicopter taking off, the expression on his face transmitting how much he dreads our flight.

“There are surveillance devices that you won’t have noticed, and I’ve temporarily jammed the ones in here. I’m not happy about the confrontation you just had in the parking lot.” Lucy is telling us that she’s hacked Briley Flight Service’s cameras, and I think of the candy-coated peanuts in my briefcase.

“I’m surprised the Secret Service would use any joint belonging to Ryder Briley.” Marino has a way of making remarks to her that sound like a challenge.

“He owns a lot of private terminals in Virginia,” Lucy says. “The choices are limited.”

“And now we’re headed to a theme park that belongs to the same asshole. I don’t trust it.” Marino hands her the manila envelope from Ryder Briley.

“I’m accustomed to not trusting anyplace, and assume someone’s watching unless I make sure they can’t. And maybe we’re watching him as much as he’s watching us.” Lucy slides out the document. “Clearly, he’s on the offensive. Which means he’s feeling defensive. When did you notice someone was tailing you?”

“Once we hit the airport this silver Suburban suddenly appeared behind us,” Marino says. “Obviously, I couldn’t run the tag, but I’m betting it’s not registered to Norm Duffy.”

“The SUV belongs to Briley Enterprises, and Norm started working there within weeks of you firing him last November.” Lucy says this to me.

“Did you know that before now?” Marino asks her. “The jerkoff practically gets the doc killed, and here he is in our faces again?”

“I didn’t know,” Lucy says. “The woman with him is security officer Mira Tang, thirty-six years old. Convicted of fraud and tax evasion five years ago and spent eighteen months in the women’s prison near Richmond. Since getting out she’s worked security for Briley, her rap sheet making her all the easier to manipulate.”

“How can you know all that from a tag number?” Marino asks Lucy.

“Facial recognition technology.”

“Jesus, what else do your fancy computer glasses see that the rest of us don’t know about?”

“Live as if others are watching. Because they are,” Lucy replies. “Ryder Briley certainly is, and there’s no question that he was tipped off. Be careful what you say outside this room. If you need to hit the loo, do it now. The restrooms at the theme park haven’t been used in years. There’s no running water and plenty of rats as big as Munchkins, I’m told.”

“Anybody mention what a bad idea this is?” Marino replies as he opens the door. “Maybe you forgot to check the weather report.”

“I didn’t, and nothing to worry about unless we spend time here arguing about it.” Lucy isn’t going to let him get a rise out of her.

“I’m hitting the men’s room.” He stalks out of the pilots’ lounge.

“You okay?” She looks at me.

“Trying to keep my attention on what’s important,” I reply, and she can see it in my eyes.

“I’d been around Sal, but not like you had.” She’s aware that he and I were old friends, but I’ve never told her much more than that.

“You appear to be by yourself.” I change the subject. “Where’s Tron?”

“I left her at the scene to supervise,” she says of her investigative partner. “She’ll be with us on the return flight.”

“To what location?” I’ll see if Lucy divulges where I’m being taken for the autopsy.

“You’ve talked to Benton?”

“Yes.”

“Then you know I can’t tell you.” She’s not taking the bait. “But for now, it looks like you get to copilot.”

What that means is I sit in the left seat and help with the avionics as I’ve been doing since she started taking flying lessons while still in her teens. Beyond that, I’m not well trained, certainly not in the beast of a helicopter she pilots these days. Although I suppose with assistance I could get it safely to the ground in an emergency. But it wouldn’t be pretty.

Marino returns from the men’s room, picking up the two scene cases by their handles. The woman at the desk releases the lock to the door leading outside to the ramp, the sharp fumes of jet fuel making my eyes water. We walk through rows of private jets and prop planes, careful not to trip over tiedown rings and ropes.

An aircraft marshaller in a reflective orange vest directs a King Air taxiing in, the roar of turbine engines loud. Off by itself in a remote corner is the Secret Service’s twin-engine black helicopter known as the Doomsday Bird. AI-assisted, it has wide tactical platform skids and gun mounts. Under the fuselage are special imaging systems enclosed in a radome.

“I sure hope you know what you’re doing.” Marino has a habit of talking to Lucy as if she’s a kid. “I don’t care what the computers are telling you. I can see the storm moving in with my own two eyes. And I don’t need artificial intelligence to tell me that it’s genuinely stupid to be flying anywhere.”

“I wouldn’t put you or any of us in danger,” she says, the lenses of her computer-assisted glasses dark again.

The wind is picking up as we reach the Doomsday Bird, the flat black paint seeming to absorb sunlight, the four main rotor blades gracefully bending toward the ground. The skin is covered with strange geometric configurations that could be symbols from an ancient language. Lucy has explained that the sigil-like shapes are a type of invisibility cloaking. They defeat radar and other sensors by reflecting light in unusual patterns.

“You want us getting struck by lightning? Because that could happen, not to mention fog and wind shear in the mountains. And if it hails? Think of the damage.” Marino is going through his litany of objections as Lucy opens the baggage compartment.

“We’ll be fine.” She helps him slide in the Pelican cases.

“What? You’ve got some kind of special lightning protection system?”

“We won’t get hit.” She takes my bags and fits them in.

“Why?” He glowers at her. “Because you’re such a gifted pilot you can outmaneuver lightning?”

“I can.”

Griping and arguing, he climbs into the back cabin, the helicopter shifting under his solid mass. He settles into a Nomex-upholstered seat, one of two facing forward, the headliner and floor covered with the same silvery fire-retardant material. The seats across from him have been removed, leaving an open area of flooring large enough to fit a stretcher.

Lucy and I step up on the skids, settling into the hot stuffy cockpit, leaving our doors open, the breeze cool. We fasten our four-point harnesses, and she straps a kneeboard around her left thigh, jotting down the time, the amount of fuel and other details. Going through the preflight checklist, she pushes buttons and flips switches, multiple video screens blinking on.

An automated voice talks her through testing the autopilot, the hydraulics and other systems. She turns on the battery, and alarms begin to bong and blare as we put on our headsets, adjusting the voice-activated mic booms.

“You all set back there?” Lucy asks Marino, and I imagine him overwhelmed by anxiety in the back cabin.

“As set as I’m going to be.” His glum voice is loud in my headset, and I turn down the volume.

“We’re switching the intercom to crew-only as I start up and deal with the radios,” Lucy tells him. “But I’ll have you on camera. If you have a problem just motion.”

“I’ll be sure to flip you a fucking bird.”

“And if that doesn’t work,” Lucy says in all seriousness, “press the red button on your mic controls. It will alert us that you need our attention. For now, you won’t be able to hear us, and we can’t hear you.”

“Don’t fucking worry, I won’t feel like talking—” he says as she flips the intercom switch, and he’s gone.

Lucy fires up the first engine, and the rotor blades start turning with a roar. Next, the second engine is going, the generator on. She asks me to enter the frequency for ATIS, the automated weather service. The robotic voice recites the details about heavy rains, high winds and poor visibility moving from west to east across the Commonwealth.

“Niner-Zulu is ready for departure with ATIS,” Lucy talks to the tower.

“Stand by.”

“It’s busy, a lot of traffic right now.” She says this to me, the rotor blades thud-thudding, the radios bristling with calls as pilots wait to land and take off. “But once we’re clear from here there won’t be much, not with the forecast we just heard.”

“I hope Marino’s going to be all right back there,” I reply, the sun hot through the windshield.

“Him and his phobias. The less control he feels he has, the worse they get.”

“Which is why they’re in high gear since your mother started worrying about her crazed fans harassing and stalking her.” I adjust my mic boom so that it’s touching my bottom lip. “I didn’t realize the extent of the problems she’s having.”

“The trolls Mom’s talking about are nasty. But I doubt one of them broke into her car at the nail salon last month to grab her gym bag as she claims. There’s no evidence she’s being stalked.”

“What about the white van she’s been noticing?” I ask. “Last week she felt that someone was tailing her as she was driving to Target. She worried someone might be following as she rode her bike on the Mount Vernon Trail.”

“The van had no front license plate, meaning she couldn’t see the tag number, and there are a lot of bikes on the Mount Vernon trail.” Lucy scans everything going on out the cockpit windows, barely looking at me as we talk. “That doesn’t mean I don’t take Mom seriously. But I’m suspicious some of what she’s claiming could be a subconscious need for attention.”

“There’s nothing subconscious about it and never has been, Lucy.” I watch a Piper Cub start up, the prop sputtering and spinning, reminding me of a toy plane powered by a rubber band.

“The more she gets, the more she needs.”

“That tends to be what happens with addictions.”

“She’s playing with fire when she engages with strangers.” Lucy’s getting impatient as we wait for the tower to call back, the rotor blades thudding. “Recently, she’s started commenting on what a dangerous world it is for visible people like her. All that does is give wack jobs ideas. As you can imagine, none of this is sitting well with Marino.”

“It doesn’t set well with me either now that I’m hearing the details.”

I don’t follow my sister on Facebook, TikTok, the former Twitter platform now called X or anything else. For the most part I have no idea what she posts.

“This is ridiculous.” Lucy stares at the air traffic control tower rising above the airport like an Olympic torch. “You know how much fuel we’re wasting sitting here going nowhere? Six minutes and counting. We’ve just burned through twelve gallons, about a hundred taxpayer dollars.”

“They know you’re law enforcement,” I reply. “Seems like they could be more accommodating.”

“Depends on who you get.” Lucy’s trigger finger squeezes the radio switch on the cyclic, what most refer to as the stick. “Helicopter Niner-Zulu is on the ramp standing by,” she reminds air traffic control.

“Niner-Zulu, what is your request?” After a long pause.

“I’d like to depart from our current position on a one-eighty heading.”

“Niner-Zulu. Squawk one-six-three.”

“Squawking one-six-three,” Lucy answers as I enter the numbers into the transponder, identifying us on radar.

“Ident.”

“Identing,” Lucy says, and I press the ident button for her.

“Permission granted to depart from current position on a niner-zero heading. Stay clear of the runways at all times.”