The Buzzard Table

CHAPTER

17


Turkey vultures are masters of soaring flight—which is by far the most energetically efficient form of travel. In fact, flying turkey vultures use only slightly more energy than they do when standing on the ground doing nothing.

—The Turkey Vulture Society




Thursday afternoon

Both of Jeremy Harper’s grandparents and his mother worked, so the modest three-bedroom house on the edge of Dobbs was empty when he parked out front that afternoon and went straight to his bedroom.

As he waited for his PC to wake up, he shucked off his jacket, turned his cap backwards so that it would keep the frizzy silver curls out of his eyes, and unwrapped the striped scarf from his long thin neck, fuming with impatience.

It sucked that his computer was so slow. He knew he was supposed to be grateful that his mother had scored this one when her company updated all their hardware, but jeez! Snails ran faster than this antique hunk of junk he was stuck with. He thought longingly of the Mac Pro that a friend had gotten for Christmas. All Sam did with that state-of-the-art laptop was play games and cruise the net for porn sites that hadn’t been locked out by his parents. If he had that machine and a decent photo editing program—!

Fat chance of that happening anytime soon, he thought gloomily. His Burger King job barely paid for gas and car insurance. No way was he ever going to save $3,500 for a Mac and the expensive software program that would let him work magic with the pictures he took.

At last the screen stopped blinking and he clicked on the photo app. Another wait for it to load, then he slipped his jump drive into the USB port and opened the file he’d copied from Martin Crawford’s computer. As he scrolled through the pictures, his curiosity deepened.

Not buzzards and definitely not Peru.

Each picture was time-stamped, beginning with Wednesday morning a week ago and ending with Monday; and most were aerial views of the Colleton County countryside. Not just anywhere in the country either, but out at the county airport. There was that little block building that acted as office and terminal and there were the hangars. And damn! Look at the clear shot of that little Gulfstream!

Each scene seemed to have been shot in bursts of three. He adjusted the focus until he could read the fuselage numbers. He jotted them down and switched over to his search engine. As part of his Patriots Against Torture activism, he kept the FAA bookmarked, and soon he was searching their database for the owner of this plane. When the name popped up and he Googled it, he was disappointed to realize it belonged to a local insurance agency and not to some shell company that might be fronting for the CIA.

The wings of a Learjet could be seen off to the side, but even at extreme magnification, he could not make out any details.

As one three-picture set after another of the airstrip and the surrounding area scrolled past, he puzzled over how Martin Crawford had taken them. Had he rented a plane and flown back and forth over the strip at a low altitude? A hot air balloon?

He flicked back to the beginning and saw three aerial views of the shack where the ornithologist was staying. The details were amazing. There was Possum Creek and Grayson Village and there was Crawford’s truck parked next to something square down near the creek. Another click or two and he was looking down on a flying buzzard, the back of its ugly red head and ruff of feathers clearly visible, and there on the ground so directly beneath that only the face of the foreshortened figure was clear—Crawford himself. He seemed to be holding up some sort of small device that was pointed straight toward the camera. Cell phone?

“Holy shit!” the boy whispered to himself as the problem of viewpoint crystallized into certainty. “He’s put a miniature camera on one of those damn birds!”

Why?

Jeremy leaned back in his chair to consider the implications. Clearly the device Crawford held was a remote that could trigger the shutter of the camera.

And all those pictures of the airstrip. Was the man a spy? If so, who for? What was an Englishman who used an Arabic keyboard doing here in Colleton County? Was he planning to rescue someone from one of those rendition flights or to blow up the place or what?

As one wild scenario after another filled the boy’s head, one thing was becoming clearer. Here was a story a hell of a lot more interesting and potentially more profitable than interviewing wounded veterans. Only how to go about it without letting Anne Harald or Martin Crawford realize what he was up to?

Once again he went slowly through the pictures, bringing each up to its maximum magnification so that he could see every detail. And that’s when he spotted them—three pictures that would surely be worth $3,500.

Thirty-five hundred? Hell, make it 5,000, he thought as he printed out the pictures.

The only real question was whether to make the call today or wait till morning. He ejected the jump drive, hid it where he was sure no one would ever find it, then went looking for the Colleton County phone book.



Taking a handful of the cheap throwaway cell phones from the satchel in his bedroom, Martin Crawford checked that all were still completely switched off before he put them in his jacket pocket. He had paid cash for the phones at different electronics chain stores in Raleigh, and his name was not connected with any of them. Nor had they been turned on since he drove out of Raleigh.

Before leaving the shack, he made sure that his own personal mobile was switched on and under the pillow on his bed. Modern technology was a wonderful thing, but it could also trip you up if you weren’t extra careful. Cell towers could and would track a phone that was switched on even if not in use.

It wasn’t much of an alibi, but better than nothing if he needed to claim that he had never left the place that evening. Not that he expected it to come to that.

Twenty minutes later, as the sun slid toward the horizon, he was seated in his nondescript black truck at a strip mall on the eastern edge of Cotton Grove, where he called a local motel that he could see from where he sat. As with so many motels around the South, this one was owned by a low-level consortium of Pakistanis.

When a clerk answered, he adopted an Egyptian accent and asked if an Alex Franklin had checked in yet.

“I’m sorry, sir. We do not have reservations for Mr. Franklin.”

Crawford thanked her, broke the connection, and checked his mental list of passport aliases the man commonly used. This time he pinched his nose and used a high-pitched French accent. “Do you have a Frank Alexander staying there?”

“Yes, sir. Will I connect you?”

“No, I’ll just come over when I get in. What room is he staying in?”

“So sorry, sir. I cannot be telling you that.”

“Never mind. I’ll call back once I fly in tonight. We’re giving him a surprise party. Do you know if any of our other friends have arrived yet?”

From the clerk’s voice, Crawford gathered that she was young and not too long in this country. “I am not knowing, sir. No one is saying this to me. Will you be needing a room, too, sir?”

“No, I usually stay with friends.”

He ended the connection, pocketed the SIM cards from both phones, wiped his fingerprints, then crushed the two phones he had used under his foot and deposited them in trash barrels at opposite ends of the small town.

He waited a full 35 minutes before calling the motel again, and this time he used his stepmother’s accent. Within minutes both were speaking Punjabi. He lent a sympathetic ear when the girl admitted that she was more homesick than she had expected to be, and a mild joke made her giggle. Two minutes later, he had extracted the room number and assured her that yes, there was indeed a surprise party of old friends in the works. She promised not to tip Mr. Alexander off.

Again he crushed the phone and tossed it in the weeds, then drove to another quiet spot where he used a wire cutter to reduce all of the three SIM cards to shreds of plastic and copper before strewing them along his route.

And then he waited.