“It has to.”
He continued loading bundles into a dark blue backpack, and then in a gesture both impetuous and condescending, tossed a bundle of one hundred dollar bills at me, as if that should buy my cooperation. I caught it and laid it on the desk.
“I have to make this payment. It is an imperative. You must allow this.” He dropped the remaining bricks of money into the pack and pulled his phone. “I’ll call my lawyer.”
He didn’t reach the lawyer. He tried twice more as his face reddened and sweat glistened on his forehead and the sides of his nose.
“If it’s clean, we’ll return it in a few days,” I said.
“Please don’t do this. This payment is late. I couldn’t get to the money.”
“You could have asked us at any time. Where did you get so many one hundred dollar bills? What’s the payment about?”
“Please!”
“I’m sorry.”
He was shaking when he left the backpack on the desk and walked out the door.
24
July 7th, early evening
“You’re going to like this French pilot, man. She’s hot. The drone pilots are following me. They’re right behind me, and we’re not that far away,” Eddie said. “Hey, your shitstorm is spilling into my life. The FBI came to see me. They’re looking into my business because of you. That’s not good for you or me. You need to call your FBI friend and ask for a favor.”
“Doesn’t work like that, Eddie.”
“Everything works like that. You call him before I get there, okay? Don’t fuck with me on this. You figure out what to tell him.”
“Not going to happen.”
“Who else is going to get you work when the company you’re working for, Strata Data Mining, cuts you loose? Who’s going to hire you?”
“I’ll flip burgers, Eddie.”
“You’ll flip burgers? You flip burgers and I’ll come eat there. The fuck you’ll flip burgers.”
Beatty broke the connection and looked at the cleft in the mountain rock where the wind funneled from the west and swept over the airfield. No one thought enough about these bony-ass mountains when this land was leased for the training airfield. He watched the neon orange windsock trying to rip itself off the pole. Then his phone rang again. Had to be Eddie, but it wasn’t. Turned out to be a vice president from the Strata Data Mining Houston office named Anna Lee Peale.
“I hope you don’t mind me calling you directly. I didn’t tell Edward Bahn I would be calling you, but I think it’s right. Are you okay with talking directly to me?”
“Sure, I work for you.”
“Mr. Bahn has told us you want everything to go through him.”
“He didn’t get that from me.”
It did surprise him she was going to do this herself, but maybe it was Eddie’s idea of how to handle it.
“How do you like the airfield we built?”
“I like it.”
“We hope to use it year round. We’re converting to drones and we’ll train pilots from all over the world where you are. This will sound crazy, but I wish I was out there with you. You’re on the edge of the new world and I’m in an office in Houston.”
“Come on out.”
She laughed. It wasn’t a bad laugh, but neither was it real. Here it comes, he thought, and Eddie didn’t have the balls to say. Or he wanted the call made to Grale first. More likely that; what an asshole.
“You can appreciate it’s a difficult situation we’re all in,” she said, “and we believe you’ve taken appropriate steps to exonerate yourself. But we also have to pay attention to public perception. We’re pursuing mineral rights leases of US government land, and we don’t want a politician grandstanding and accusing us of anything that we can’t defend ourselves against. Polling data that we’re using says 44 percent of the public believes you had a role in the bombings, 17 percent says no role whatsoever, and the other 39 percent are undecided. It may be morally reprehensible, but we have to pay attention to this.”
“Forty-four percent think I had a role?”
“I’m sorry, but that’s the data I have. Of course, that can change fast. If the FBI clears you, I’m sure that number will be cut in half overnight.”
“If the FBI clears me? There’s nothing to clear me of.”
“We’re moving on a secondary strategy to speed up the training there. This will involve another instructor as well as you. That instructor is on the way. He’ll arrive within the next forty-eight hours.”
“You’re trying to get my replacement here as fast as you can.”
“That’s not how I would phrase it, and I want to propose higher pay for you in return for longer teaching hours in the near term. Would you be open to that idea?”
“Work harder so I can be fired sooner?”