“Did Tab see anything?”
Buck looked nonplussed. “I don’t know. I guess if he was helping them put the rig together, he must have got inside and seen something, at least, before he went off and killed himself.” Buck’s voice trailed off uncertainly as he spoke this last sentence, and he suddenly got a woozy look about him.
“What happened yesterday?” Clyde asked. He had dropped the conversational front now and was interrogating Buck Chandler like a suspect.
“They pulled out,” Buck said. “I went by their house. But they’re gone. And then I went by the barn, too, and they’re not there either.”
“Barn?”
“Yeah.”
Clyde’s heart started to beat a little faster. He carefully sipped some ice water. “This place that you bought for them. The place where they built their pilot plant. For some reason I was picturing it in one of the old buildings on the grounds of the Matheson Works. That’s where I figured it would be. It’d be perfect—it’s empty, the whole thing is surrounded by a high wall. But you say it was a barn?”
“They also leased a space at the Matheson Works,” Buck admitted. “They stored some shipping containers there. But the facility itself was at a barn.”
“Buck,” Clyde said, “where is that barn?”
The silverware began to hum, then to buzz, then to rattle. A deep rumbling noise came down from the sky, up through the ground, in through the walls. The gadgets hanging from the doorknob began to play their tinny Christmas carols.
“It’s out by the airport,” Buck said. “It’s that old dairy farm that went out of business a couple of years back. Just a stone’s throw from the runway.”
Clyde slapped his napkin down on the table and ran out into the middle of River Street and looked up into the sky, which had gone solid gray. Half of the firmament was blotted out by an immense shape passing low overhead, in the direction of the Forks County Regional Airport. Rows and rows of massive wheels trundled out of giant bomb-bay openings in the underside of the Antonov freighter, so close, Clyde could see that the tires were bald and threadbare. Then it was gone, and a fine mist of kerosene descended on the street, and the rumbling gradually died away to be replaced by the sound of distant tornado sirens and car alarms that had been set off by the disturbance. Finally there was nothing left except a fine rain that was beginning to fall out of the clouds, coating Clyde and everything in the street with a thin lacquer of ice.
Chapter Fifty-Two
Clyde ran toward his unit, tried to stop too late, and found no traction. He skated the last few feet, slamming heavily into the side of the car. For a moment he thought that he was glad his career was over so that he wouldn’t have to go out and haul people out of ditches during what promised to be a day of nasty weather. Then he remembered that what he would actually be doing would probably be much worse than that.
He got in his car and drove the half mile to Knightly’s place, ignoring the radio calls coming in from the dispatcher: a car in the ditch here, a Mexican in need of a jump start there. He was tempted just to switch the radio off but left it running in case something of interest came in.
Fazoul had heard him pulling into the Knightlys’ side yard and was already on his way down the ladder, wearing his Twisters sweatsuit with its hooded sweatshirt pursed tightly around his face. “The airplane,” he said.
“I know where they did it,” Clyde said. “Right next to the airport.”
Fazoul rolled his eyes and shook his head. He led Clyde across the yard to the Knightlys’ back door, no longer caring whether the neighbors noticed, retrieved a hidden key, and opened up the house.
For the dozenth time in the last couple of days, Clyde fished a scrap of paper out of his pocket bearing ten or eleven different Hennessey-related phone numbers and started dialing them. At some length he got through to someone who was actually working on Christmas Day, and who forwarded his call to what sounded like a skyphone on an airplane somewhere. “Yello!” Hennessey barked over the engine noise.
“Merry Christmas,” Clyde said.
“Yes, Clyde. Merry Christmas! We just flew over you about half an hour ago.”
“Got to talk to you about those Iraqis.”
“Did they build a pipeline?”
Hennessey sounded ebullient, almost giddy. Clyde wondered if he himself had been so overconfident an hour ago when he’d walked into Metzger’s.
“Nope. They landed an Antonov.”