That night at the hospital I stayed late, sitting in a chair in Julia’s room. At 3:30 a.m., the first of several calls from Beatty that I didn’t take came. I’d also had a string of texts from him that were confusing and hard to follow. I answered an e-mail from a bomb tech in DC before dozing and dreaming of Melissa and me as kids, hiking through the woods behind our house. At dawn, I called the ASAC. Thorpe was an early riser. From years of watching him arrive at the office, I knew we had that in common. I also knew he arrived most mornings with a full agenda and wouldn’t want to be sandbagged with an issue that should fall to my supervisor to solve.
“I’m getting calls from Beatty,” I said. “He thinks I should take a look at the drone pilots he’s teaching and the whole setup at the airfield. He’s talking like something is wrong about it all, and I don’t know how to evaluate that without taking a look. The three drone pilots he’s training are all foreign nationals, which he thinks is odd, though the company says it’s exactly what they’re building, an international multilingual team of drone pilots.”
“Is he saying these things to deflect our interest in him?”
“Not to me.”
“You’re talking about an out and back for a look around?”
“Well, to get a look at the pilots and a feel for where Beatty’s at.”
“How’s your niece?”
“Devastated. All she knows right now is what she lost.”
“And you?”
I didn’t want to talk about myself this morning. “I’m working.”
“Does nursing Beatty’s psychological problems or seeing the pilots-in-training get us closer to the bomb maker?”
“No.”
“But he’s reaching out to you, and you think it’s a worthwhile trip?”
“I do.”
“Make the trip and I’ll talk to Dan, but make it a quick trip. By the way, I did look into Beatty’s military record. You were right. He was top drawer at Creech before he went out. I also looked at what the DOD has and agree there’s not much there.”
I was 2.2 miles past the Mercury exit when across the highway I spotted the sun-bleached 6 × 6 post marking the unpaved road to the airfield. It cut straight as a knife into the desert. I made a U-turn and picked it up. After 1.7 miles, the road crossed a rocky wash, then skirted low barren hills. It was a place of implacable, relentless heat. If I saw one of NASA’s Mars rovers climbing a rocky slope out here, it wouldn’t surprise me. Another mile in at a narrow valley, there was a fence. I used the combination Beatty gave me to open the gate and rose over a rocky crest of dry hills and saw the black strip of airfield in the hot, flat valley below. A wide graded road ran down to it. It did look like they were thinking long term here.
Ten minutes later I parked on gravel and climbed steel stairs and knocked on the door of what had to be the flight trailer. A young guy who couldn’t be more than twenty, but must have been one of the pilots in training, opened it. He was broad shouldered and tall, olive skinned and green eyed, wearing a thin leather jacket and black pants, as if the heat outside meant nothing. He waited for me to explain myself, before Beatty waved from a table and stood up. He got the pilots working on something, pulled the door shut, and we walked out onto the airfield.
“What were you trying to communicate about the drone pilots last night?” I asked. “What I got was that you were worried about how legit they are. Today you seem okay with them.”
“They’re real. They can fly these things. They’re not going to need much instruction. They’re experienced.”
“Is that bad?”
“No, it’s good.”
“Then what is it?”
“Maybe they don’t fit with what I’m used to, but I’m pretty spun out right now. Did you see where the manager at Wunderland is giving tours of my trailer?”
“I saw that. What else about these drone pilots?”
“They’re all from different places and supposedly they don’t know each other that well, but I’d say they’re tight. They stick together.”
“How can you know that already? You just met them.”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong, but they look at each other and seem to communicate.” He looked at me and shook his head. “Who knows? Maybe it’s me. They’ve heard all the stories and know I’m getting fired, so they don’t want to get too close.”
“They cut you loose?”
“Yeah, my replacement is on the way.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“It pretty much had to happen, didn’t it? Just a matter of when, right?”
“What are you going to do next?”
“What am I going to do? Good question. I’ve got some strange ideas running through my head.”
“Like what?”
“Like you don’t want to hear about them.”