An updraft hit, and they bounced a dozen vertical feet. His stomach rolled. “You sure you know how to fly this thing?”
She smiled from the pilot’s seat in front of him. “I saw it on tri-d once. How hard can it be?”
The airfield was on the outskirts of Newton, four smooth runways crisscrossing like a pound sign. They’d left his car parked in a gravel lot, checked in at ground control, and gone to the assigned hangar. The glider was futuristic looking, with broad wings and a streamlined body. Made of carbon fiber, it weighed so little that they pushed it by hand onto the runway, where Shannon hitched it to a thick, twisted cable. Inside she put on a headset, spoke in a soft, fast voice to the tower, and a moment later the cable snapped taut and yanked them almost a mile in thirty seconds, the massive winches hauling with force sufficient to hurl them into the air. Cooper didn’t mind heights, had ridden in helicopters and jets and military aircraft, and had even jumped out of a few of them, but the glider he wasn’t loving.
“How long can this thing stay up?”
“You a nervous flyer?”
“No. I just like doing it in a machine with, you know, an engine.”
She laughed. “Old-world thinking, Cooper. Gliders have no emissions, the winches are solar-powered, and out here, if you ride the updrafts, you can stay aloft for hours. Easiest way to get from town to town in the NCH.”
“Uh-huh.” He looked out the window at the patchwork ground far below. The only sound was the wind rushing beneath the broad wings, whistling over the teardrop body. The hull of the thing was about the thickness of a napkin.
“Look,” she said. “No hands.” She released the stick and held them up above her head.
“Jesus, would you quit? I’m hungover here.”
She laughed again and banked in a slow angle that gave him a better view than he really wanted.
Tesla was in the heart of the state, and tacking from updraft to updraft, the trip took about two hours. Seeing it from the air was oddly familiar, similar to the satellite images he’d reviewed. Midsize by Holdfast standards, it was home to ten thousand people. The town was a grid centered around a complex of mirrored rectangles, energy-efficient buildings that rose four stories higher than anything else.
In one of them sat the richest man in the world.
The landing turned out to be gentle enough, not much different from coming down in any other small plane. Shannon had touched, bounced once, then smoothed the glider into a long slow run. Good flying.
There was another security check at the hanger, this one more intense. The man behind the bulletproof Plexi was affable enough, but he ran their passports with care and spent longer than Cooper liked clicking on his datapad. Tesla was well outside of the tourist sections and protected by several more layers of sieves. The whole town was private corporate land, inside a gated community, inside a high-security municipality, a series of legal classifications that basically amounted to “keep the hell out.” Cooper smiled blandly at the guard.
Half an hour later, they were pulling into Epstein Enterprises, the mirrored buildings, all sun and sky, too bright to look at. There was another security post, but Shannon had made a call this morning, and their fake names were on a list. They got in with little more than a passport check and a scan of the vehicle.