“I’m sure.” Then Emily turned to Claudia as if that was all that was needed. “What do we know?”
Dilya always liked watching Emily work. She’d wanted to be like her when she was young. She still did. Except when it was necessary to blend in. Emily never did that; she commanded the attention of every room she walked into. She even overshadowed Mark, which was hard to imagine yet was true every time. It was disturbing to discover things she could do that Emily couldn’t.
Also to see that Emily didn’t have her act completely together. Dilya saw, in retrospect, how thinly she was stretched yesterday. Even Emily Beale had limits and that uncomfortable thought made her question her own state of mind. Racing across the country had seemed the most natural thing after the collapse of her relationship with Jimmy. And yet, who did that? Certainly none of her other high school friends. They were each as settled in their choice of place as Jimmy was in New Hampshire. She was the lone vagabond of their group.
Emily might work at all of the Night Stalker bases, and their training areas spread all over the country, but she was rooted here.
Adrift. Dilya had nowhere she belonged. She’d spent half her life in the White House and most of the rest in a variety of war zones. She?—
Claudia turned from her screen. “We know that due to a short runway, Choteau airport sees very few bizjets. The ones that do come in are known, mostly Hollywood and music folks coming up to their Montanan ranch-in-the-country. I reached the FBO, Choteau’s fixed base operator, during dinner last night. He lives close to the field and heard a Gulfstream G650 arrive that night. Spotted it departing in the morning after Miss Watson was taken, but he didn’t see the tail number.”
“The 650? How far…” Dilya didn’t know her nonmilitary aircraft very well. In fact, she’d rarely flown in a civilian plane.
“Far,” Claudia answered her. “Moscow, Beijing, Hong Kong. Twelve hours to max range without refueling. About the only places out of direct-flight range from here are southern India or Africa, Australia, and Antarctica. It’s a proper globe trotter. I’ve been able to backtrack enough satellite imagery to confirm there was a jet parked at Choteau during the night, but it left before full dawn, so I can’t determine much more than that. Based on their departure time, their range limit would have landed them around dinner time last night.”
Dilya slid down the wall until she was squatting in the corner. She was so tired. They’d all agreed to meet after six hours sleep. She’d managed three. She’d been right yesterday—they didn’t have time to sleep or eat. They were too late even before they’d lost the night. Wherever Miss Watson had been taken, she’d arrived while Dilya was riding her horse back through the evening light.
“ADS-B?” Emily asked.
“I confirmed that all G650 models are equipped with the ADS broadcast system, but I have no tracking for a plane in this area at that time. They had their safety location beacon shut off or illegally spoofed as another aircraft.”
Dilya was going to be sick.
“There is one odd thing.”
Emily made a Hmmm noise.
“I did have brief satellite coverage from a Chinese surveillance bird that they don’t know we’re in on. Poor resolution, but it did capture a small jet thirty kilometers northeast of Choteau at the right time. If they held that precise bearing, they passed directly over a grand total of three airports of any significant size before hitting their fuel limit. Palermo in Sicily, Paris, or RAF Station Brize Norton.”
Dilya looked up so quickly that she banged her head on the wall. She’d assumed it was the Russians out to grab Miss Watson. She’d been a deeply embedded spy in the Soviet Union. Though that had been forty years ago and the USSR hadn’t existed for over thirty—the former KGB were now the oligarkhiya. No one held a grudge that long. Don’t trust your assumptions. How many times had Miss Watson told her that?
But Italy, France, or Britain? That made even less sense.
24
Waking wasn’t supposed to be painful, though at her age it often was.
The mental haze was one she recognized. She first experienced it during her intake testing to work at the Central Intelligence Agency. Back then she’d been a naive twenty-one-year-old Yalie, months from completing a masters in Russian literature with an undergrad degree in Greek dramatic writing. At his inauguration, President Kennedy had asked what she could do for her country.
Ah, poor JFK. So much hope cut short by an assassin’s bullet.
And if he’d only created the Peace Corps sooner, how different her life might have been. But he didn’t do that until March and his call of January 1961 had perfectly aligned with a CIA campus recruiting drive.
Her wandering thoughts traveled back to part of the qualification testing of new agents. Could she stand up to the psychotropics without revealing what had been fed to her as critical information? The psychotropic drugs became part of agent training that was repeated and formalized over the years. The agency’s trainers held onto them much longer than the hippie counterculture.
She recalled a civilian blood donation she’d made in the seventies in which the nurse had asked her if she’d ever taken any drugs. Annoyed enough to answer, she listed them all: hash, heroin, acid, speed, and peyote. All the different forms as well: purple hearts, dexys, French blues, and black bombers for the uppers, acid on paper, in drops, as crystals…
None were on the woman’s interdiction list, so they’d taken her blood. When fuzzed out as she was now, she liked to picture which of her flashbacks some poor woman was experiencing after a surgery. Staying stoned for much of her years deep undercover in North Vietnam had been a welcome escape. Those were different days. By the time she was sleeping with a Soviet two-star general, their drug of choice was vodka. Now it was usually Murchie’s Earl Grey or their No. 10 black tea.
But this fog was a new one. She could happily return to sleep if the room wasn’t busy doing the spins. Squinting an eye open offered only a blur of dark shapes. Interesting. Benadryl Cocktail? No one had ever hit her with the common date-rape drink before, but there was a symptomatic match. A cautious shift of her hips… She wore clothes and they felt like hers. At eighty-five, perhaps she’d lost the allure that had so often aided her work in the past.
There’d been…gunfire. A dead person? Yes. She was relatively sure of that. Another injured? Yes, she’d shot two; too bad there’d been four.
Again the body check. No feeling of unusual tightness such as a bandage or a restraint. Just the spinning nausea and the sleepies.
Her last thought was to wonder who had found her after all these years. Who had been willing to expend the manpower and take on the political risk to attack her in Montana?
25
