“The bastard.”
Cale grinned. “He rushed me, and we fought. The copilot kept yelling to the pilot for help. Fortunately, my mother’s people had a bitch of a storm going, and the pilot was afraid to leave the cockpit. He must have altered his heading though, because the plane crashed too far inland for the route they had planned.”
“Mm hm,” I mumbled around another bite, and Cale continued. “The copilot put up a hell of a struggle, but humans can only move so fast. I grabbed a wrench from the nearest toolbox and knocked him out cold. The pilot was still shouting, sounding pretty damned panicked. I knew I had to toss the box before he turned on the autopilot and came after me.
“I finished un-strapping the crate, then checked to make sure we were still over water—and wewere. So I rolled the box down that wheeled track in the floor and shoved it down the open ramp. I was about to jump out after it when the ramp started closing, right in front of me. I turned around, and there’s the pilot standing in the cockpit doorway, a gun in one hand and the ramp control lever in the other. He fired, and I ducked.” Cale shrugged, regret softening his features. “I had to shoot him. It was either him or me.”
“I know,” I said, because he looked conflicted about his decision. In my experience, listening to your conscience in life and death situations is tantamount to swallowing your own gun. Fortunately, he’d listened to his survival instinct instead. “What happened then?”
“The pilot went down, and I threw the ramp lever on my end of the plane. Then I jumped out. I hit the water, but the box never did.”
Frowning, I wadded the empty cellophane wrapper into a tight ball. “How can you possibly know that? Even a ten second delay between the time the box went overboard and the time you did could result in a half-mile mile difference between the two landing points. And your delay was probably several times that. Chances are the boxdidhit the water somewhere.”
Cale shook his head, completely devoid of doubt. “Nope. It never hit. The Nereids know everything that happens in their section of the ocean, and there were several dozen of them there that night. That crate never landed in the sound. It hit solid land somewhere.”
I shrugged. “If that’s true, there’s no point in looking for it. The impact would have shattered it into a million tiny shards of wood and stone, and there’s no possible way to put Humpty back together again after that kind of damage.”
He grinned, evidently amused by my naiveté. I hadn’t gottenthatlook in several decades, at least. “I’m sure that’s exactly what happened to the crate. But wherever the box is, it’s whole and still functioning. If it were broken and the djinni loose, we’d know it. Trust me. Xaphan likes to announce his presence.”
“Wonderful.”
“Exactly. Ihaveto find the box before Devich does.”
“Fortunately, I think I can help with that,” I announced, pushing my chair back. And again, I noticed that my arm hurt less and less with each passing hour. It was healing extraordinarily quickly, even for me. The nap must have helped after all. Or maybe it was the food.
Cale’s gaze tracked my progress as I crossed the room toward my backpack, where I’d dropped it next to the bed. “Is this the part where I’m ill-equipped and under-trained, and you’re not?”
“Yup.”
He grinned, leaning back in his chair. “All right, work your magic.”
“It isn’t magic, unfortunately.” I plopped down on the bed and bent to unzip my bag. “Just lots of practice, good connections, and all the right toys.” Reaching into an inside zipper pocket, I pulled out the disk Devich had given me, holding it up for Cale’s inspection.
“What’s that?”
“Information from the plane’s flight data recorder.”
“The black box?” He sat up straighter, brows furrowing.
“Yeah. But it’s not actually black. They’re day-glow orange, to make them easy to find among the wreckage.” I set the disk on the bed and pulled my rugged travel laptop from the bag. The extra three pounds had seemed like a real pain in the ass during my hike through the Main woodlands, but now I was glad I’d brought it.
I carted the computer and disk over to the table, where I turned the former on and inserted the latter. By the time Cale dragged his chair over to my side of the table, the information had loaded. “You seem like you know what you’re doing,” he said, leaning forward for a good look at the screen.
“I’ve actually only done this once before.”
“Tracked down a crashed plane looking for a stolen artifact? How very Lara Croft of you.”
I laughed. “Not exactly. I was hired to find a man who crashed a private jet in Africa. His wife was convinced he’d faked his own death. She was right. He did it to get away from her.”
“Damn.” Cale pulled the plastic sack from the middle of the table and dug around inside. Apparently the bottomless grocery bag still wasn’t empty.
“Yeah. When I found him, he offered me twice what she was paying me to pretend I’d never found him.”
“Did you take it?”
“Hell yeah, and I kept the non-refundable portion of what she’d paid me,” I said, accepting the can of Coke he handed me. It was still cold. “Okay, here we go.” The screen in front of me was divided horizontally into two sections. The top two-thirds showed a photorealistic still-shot of an airplane in flight over the ocean. The bottom third displayed a series of airplane instrument gauges and readouts.
“What is this?”
