One of the flight attendants brought Tristan another glass of mimosa to replace the one they’d finished inside and asked Colleen what she wanted, smiling a doll-like smile.
“Just coffee, if you have some?”
When the stewardess had walked away, Colleen turned back to Tristan. “Okay, I’m here on the plane with you. I’m evidently going wherever we're going. Tell me the truth. Why were people shooting at you?”
He sighed and spread his hands. “I honestly don’t know, and I don’t know that they were shooting at me. I work on computer software. Unlike some of the other people in that terminal, I’m not a drug dealer or a Russian mafia boss or breaking US treaties with other countries.”
“So, if you’re just ‘in computer software,’ what is it that you do?”
“I’m a coder. I write code,” he said and sipped his champagne as if that would end their conversation.
Colleen pressed on. “What kind of code do you write, Tristan King, and why doesn’t Google know anything at all about you?”
And with that question, a sly smile lifted Tristan’s lips but didn’t reach his blue eyes.
The plane turned onto the runway and lifted off into the sky.
7
Farmer Boy
Tristan
The airplane roared around them, flying toward LA.
Tristan King regarded the sylph of a girl sitting across the table from him. Colleen was perceptive, perhaps too perceptive, for him to be around for long.
He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. “Look, you’re not trapped. We’re only going to Los Angeles. The plane is going to land in about twenty minutes. When we get there, if you want to go home, I’ll buy you a first-class plane ticket on the next commercial flight heading back to Phoenix. However, I don’t think those gunshots were meant for me.” He glanced out the window at the white clouds and the crumpled barren landscape below the plane. “It’s unlikely anybody will be shooting at us whilst we’re in the air. I don’t see any MiGs out there.”
Colleen regarded him closely, scrutinizing his expression or his hair or something. “MiGs? Why MiGs? You didn’t say fighter planes. You didn’t say F-15s. Why MiGs?”
Yes, she was perceptive. “I just picked one.”
“MiGs are Russian fighter jets, or they were. Mikoyan was combined into the larger company, United Aircraft Corporation, a while back. But why would MiGs, specifically, want to shoot you out of the sky?”
“Well, if those men were shooting at me, and I still don’t think they were, it might make sense that people shooting at me might have connections to Russia or Russian oligarchs.”
She squinted at him, narrowing her warm brown eyes. “What, are you a spy or something? You said you were a coder. Do you work for the NSA?”
“No. I don’t work for any government. I don’t even live in the United States.”
She was still examining him very closely, and Tristan relaxed his arms and jaw to appear unconcerned. She said, “You sound like an American.”
Tristan dredged up his wide grin and slapped his dress shirt over his pectoral muscle, which was a little sore after a quick five a.m. workout at the hotel gym that morning. “One hundred percent corn-fed Iowa beef. Born and raised.”
Colleen tilted her head to the side, tendrils of her dark hair brushing her shoulder where they were coming loose from the bun on the back of her head. “Iowa?”
“Yep, I’m a farm boy. I was born in Iowa and raised there. When I was thirteen, I won a scholarship to a boarding school in Switzerland, where I went to high school.”
“I was wondering how you got stuck in a blizzard in New York City all by yourself as a teenager if you were from Iowa.”
He nodded and signaled to the stewardess for another drink. “I was flying home for Christmas break, but New York closed the airports due to a blizzard during my layover. I mean, they closed the whole airport. I had to leave the building. I suppose now that I could have told someone I was fifteen, but I didn’t know to do that, back then. I was already over six feet tall, so I guess they must not have known I was a junior in high school. I got on a train going into the City because that’s what everyone else was doing. When I tried to call my parents to ask them to use their credit card to get me a hotel room or something because I didn’t have any money, that was when I figured out their phone line didn’t work anymore.”
Colleen’s eyes were beginning to widen in sympathy, and her soft chin wasn’t as clenched. “Uh-oh.”
This was the part that he had to gloss over, the part where he spent the night in a Manhattan townhouse, talking to one of his friends’ black sheep of a grandfather. “When I finally made it to our farm west of Iowa City just a few days later, the house was empty. No people. No furniture. Abandoned.”
Tristan hadn’t meant to use that word, even when he was describing the house.
