Down in Whisper

by Bonnie Elizabeth

  Rain

  Now that Meg was on her way up the mountain, I was left with RaeLynn to help me search out information. Or maybe she was left with me? We were working in our respective offices looking up stuff about the plane. Zari A supervised. Kyle was in his office working on his own project. Listening to the periodic swearing, I had to assume that was not going well.

  I took a few minutes to reschedule a meeting for Dillon. Ian had been notified and would be in the office later to do some paperwork and take over one other meeting that was late in the day.

  “I think you want to come here,” Zari purred in my mind. She was down in RaeLynn’s office on the perch we had set up for her.

  “Rain!” RaeLynn called at just about the same time. She wasn’t quite yelling. If she couldn’t get me that way, she’d use the intercom. I walked back towards their office, noticing Kyle was bent seriously over his computer typing furiously. He appeared so engrossed in his own work that he seemed to have missed RaeLynn’s call.

  “I think we found a link,” RaeLynn said when I walked into the office she was working.

  I raised an eyebrow.

  The receptionist was holding some printed out information. “There’s a paramilitary company called Langea over in Yakima. Taylor and Sons has done work for them.”

  I took the report and scanned over what she had printed out. Yakima wasn’t all that far, which meant that a plane flying from that area could easily get over the mountains. Or maybe that was just a coincidence.

  “I wonder what would have happened if we’d just reported the plane?” I said aloud.

  “I thought Peter didn’t want that,” Zari asked, as if that question clarified everything.

  “Peter didn’t want people trampling around on his mountain messing with that metal,” I reminded her. “That doesn’t mean the government isn’t interested. I saw some military trucks driving north when I was in driving to North Bend yesterday. It’s not like we had to involve Peter. A hiker could have found the plane and then this research would be their headache.”

  “Peter wouldn’t like them tramping around even without the metal there. I think he would have hated it even if it were a normal plane. This just makes things even more unusual.” Zari gave me a knowing cat look.

  “I’d have thought if the government were testing the plane, they’d have had a better focus on where the plane went down,” RaeLynn said.

  “They were in the Valley. Maybe there was a computer problem?”

  RaeLynn shrugged. “I have a few contracts between Langea and the government, but I’m not seeing anything that suggests they were building a plane for them.”

  “What exactly are you and Peter going to do with your metal anyway?” I asked Zari.

  “Peter and I will take care of it. It is not very large and is very finely done so he should be able to neutralize it. If not, one of the Gods will no doubt be willing to assist in making it go away. That’s what happened last time. I was able to neutralize it and give them something to…” the cat paused trying to decide how to phrase it and finally decided on, “grab on to, I guess.”

  I continued reading the printout that RaeLynn gave me. It included an invoice that Taylor and Sons had sent to Langea. It was for 120 “man hours”. It didn’t say what sort of man hours.

  “Do they often do that kind of invoicing?” I asked. “It seems really non-specific. They could be working for anyone, doing just about anything.”

  “Most of their stuff is that loose. It looks like they have a small shop that does a little of everything and jobs are typically listed by the company that they’re working for, with just the number of hours. I did find a few places there they actually have a specific job for a specific company but that seemed to be the case only with companies that they worked for a lot.”

  “Anything else on Taylor and Sons?”

  “Nothing else in Langea’s records, or any other contractor I’ve been looking at. Langea does have a few blanket sort of invoices, one of which seems to match a Taylor and Sons invoice. There are some records at Langea that are even worse than Taylor and Sons. Those records don’t name names or projects.”

  “It seems like they’re going to a lot of trouble to keep anyone from finding links between them. Do you suppose there’s more buried in the computers?”

  Zari snorted at me. “If it was there, I would have found it. I can’t help it if you don’t understand the information you have.”

  I made a face at the cat. RaeLynn did her best to hide a smile, looking away from me.

  “I think,” Zari continued, “That I am done here. I would like to search around for information on machine shops in general which does not require my special machine.”

  “I can probably get you started,” I said, turning to walk back to my own office.

  “I’ll keep hunting through these invoices and see if I can’t make a bigger connection,” RaeLynn said.

  I’d be helping Zari with the web search for a while. Last time, she’d gotten all excited about ice skating and I’d spent an entire day letting her read everything on every site she could find. She’d wanted to learn how to do it. Being a cat nixed that idea, which meant she wanted me to learn how. I already knew how to ice skate having grown up in Michigan, but I sure as heck wasn’t planning on doing that here. Besides, it was June when she went through that phase. Fortunately, Peter had offered to do some ice skating, as soon as it was cool enough to do so, leaving me off the hook. I hoped that she wouldn’t decide I needed to learn to rivet. I just wasn’t a Rosie the Riveter kind of girl.

  Meg

  Meg wandered back towards the plane in time to see the others taking apart something on the wing. She noticed how clean the plane looked, even in those areas that were dissembled.

  “It looks new,” Colleen said, as if reading her thoughts.

  “Probably is. It looks like a test plane,” John agreed, standing near a rounded part that must have come from inside something on the plane. He held some sort of tool in his hand.

  When Meg got closer, she could see Colleen turning over some small fittings.

  “Those look sloppily done,” John said, looking over at what Colleen was holding. “In fact the whole system, while functional, looks sloppy to me.”

  “This looks like that questionable metal doesn’t it?” Dillon asked, standing up from where he’d been crouched. He was just in front of a big rounded piece on the wing and had probably been crawling around under it, looking for a clue.

  “The metal all seems to be concentrated on the area you were just working with,” Peter said, appearing behind Dillon. He could have been behind the plane, but Meg knew better.

  “This looks like shielding,” John said. “Do you suppose this is more about shielding the weapons rather than the plane?”

  “I don’t know much about flight or planes,” Peter admitted, looking at John.

  “This metal, whatever you called it, does seem to be mostly in what appears to be a weapons system, although it looks like one put together rather inexpertly. I can’t tell if they were in a hurry or just sloppy. Although, sloppy or not, they look like they’d work,” John said, taking his cue. He continued to look around at the pieces they had disassembled.

  The clearing was quiet, with only their group. Peter was good at hiding things but Meg hadn’t even heard that someone was searching for a plane. “I’m surprised we haven’t had more activity around here with people trying to find the plane. I know it’s pretty hidden but still…” she trailed off not wanting to say more in front of John.

  “There could be people looking that we don’t know about,” Dillon said.

  Meg thought perhaps she should call Amy. Peter might be able to hide the plane from prying eyes but perhaps Marcus could see if anyone in particular was trying to pry. That might give them a lead.

  John crouched down to do more measuring. “I’d love to know how functional all the systems were at the crash. The weapons look in working order and I didn
’t see anything to suggest they weren’t hooked up. Nothing else seems to be standing out as not working, although the set-up of the plane is odd. Without a timeline of the crash itself, I’m inclined to consider pilot error. It’d be easy to do in a plane made with these specs. It probably doesn’t handle the way you’d expect.”

  “I haven’t found anything in the area that seems to be a computer of any sort,” Peter said. “Meg?”

  “Nothing here. Just the flight log,” Meg said.

  “Too bad the pilot walked away to die,” Dillon said. “Although I expect he wasn’t your average test pilot if he was willing to head away from civilization.”

  “He could have been disoriented,” John said. “We don’t know how injured he was, just that there’s no blood around here.”

  “There’s a little blood back here,” Dillon pointed to one of the seats.

  “Could have happened after the crash, too,” John maintained his stance that the pilot was uninjured. He didn’t seem attached to the idea, but simply wanted Dillon to work out his hypothesis.

  Dillon started nodding. “How did he get injured after?”

  “Fallen down while climbing out? The plane is damaged,” John said, pointing to where it had broken apart. “There’s a big step that might not have visible in the dark.”

  “Wouldn’t he have been going carefully though?” Meg tossed in.

  “Disoriented? Stunned?” John tossed out.

  “They’d want someone trained for a plane like this,” Colleen added. “Whoever they are. You don’t put someone who’s easily disoriented into something this different. That means training. Except he didn’t act like we think he should have.”

  “If he were attacked, maybe he did,” Dillon said. “Or if he wasn’t the pilot but was held prisoner? Someone with special training maybe?”

  “But why?” John asked, still playing devil’s advocate. “And what happened to the fight crew if he wasn’t the pilot?”

  Meg glanced up at Peter who shook his head. If the pilot had been attacked, Peter wasn’t aware of anyone in the area.

  “There’s no trace of anyone else in the plane or here,” Meg said. “I didn’t see any traces of people in the area beyond the clearing.”

  “Sort of like a locked room mystery,” John added. “Of course we can’t be sure the room was actually locked because we’re out here in the forest. The other question are those seats. You have enough for a co-pilot and probably two flight engineers, or maybe one of them is focused on the weapons, but we only have one person. We’re just far enough that if you had a test flight crossing the airspace here, you’d probably use all your test crew and clearly they didn’t.”

  Meg wondered about those other missing people. Would it be possible for Peter to miss someone? What if they were wearing something with that metal in it? Could he not see it? She could sense a sort of curiosity about the question which meant he would no doubt be pursing the idea. Meg could feel the thoughts turning in the back of her head, a white noise, like a conversation in another room. She was used to it. Sometimes strong emotions made it sound like a shout or an exclamation and sometimes the voices talked faster. This was one of the latter times.

  “We ought to get back to where the pilot died,” Meg said. “We can see if we can pick anything up on his trail.”

  Dillon and Colleen moved over to where they had set their stuff. Meg followed a little more slowly, thoughtful. She glanced back at the plane to see Peter standing with John, studying the plane, both men perplexed. Meg could only hope that John would find something in the clearing while the rest of them headed towards where Dillon had left the pilot.

  Rain

  The day passed all too quickly, although our investigations ended up with many false starts. We had no luck finding out how Langea had heard about Taylor and Sons. In fact, other than the one invoice, nothing seemed to connect the two companies. The public information didn’t seem relevant. RaeLynn decided to check with Google images to see the company’s location. The address we had for them showed a large warehouse type structure. There was plenty of land around it, so it wouldn’t be impossible that there was also a runway there.

  “There’s just nothing,” RaeLynn said, shaking her head. “I mean it could be legit but it might be just a front.”

  “I’m leaning towards a front,” I said. “I mean why else would there be so little on them?”

  “I really want to know about Zari’s metal,” Kyle asked. “Where’d they get it?” He’d gotten into the discussion after having finished his work for Evans, Priory and DeCaire. He’d sent it off and would get back to them if they had more questions. If there was one thing he’d learned was that attorneys always had more questions. The issue was whether they could be answered.

  “It had to come from Blayn G. And it had to have gotten to this company before we were there. Peter and I destroyed all of it onsite with the help of Kuan Yin and Pele,” Zari said in her usual confident fashion.

  “But how did it get out at all? Did Blayn G really let people walk out of there with stuff he needed?” Kyle asked, looking at the cat.

  “I remember that the guard we interrogated knew of no one who quit,” I said. We had captured one of Blayn’s guards and taken him back here. Pele herself had done the interrogation. It had been quite impressive. In the end, the guard had worked with us.

  “And he knew of no one who disappeared,” Zari said. “It is not impossible to keep a secret from one like him. I can’t imagine that Blayn G did not make a few people disappear.”

  “Peter would have known if they took the metal off the mountain,” Kyle said, aware from his lifelong exposure to the Whisper Mountain earth spirit that he knew pretty much everything in his domain. For that short time, he was acting as if the Rainier area was his domain too.

  “And Pele would have known as well,” Zari said. “Her reach is even farther than Peter’s. She was not happy about what happened at all.”

  “If they took some and then came back to work, would Blayn have known about it? I mean he couldn’t just read minds, he had to work at it, right? So they could have hidden that information from him?” I asked, thinking about how Peter managed to keep a few secrets from Meg. It was too bad the plane went down now, making her want to get on the mountain. I knew that was making her far more suspicious of Peter’s secret than anything else. And he was so close to being able to share.

  “It depends upon when it happened. I’m sure that Blayn G was telepathic enough to search out all information he could, however he wouldn’t do that very regularly. And in the last days we certainly kept him busy. I expect there was a window of time in the last few weeks that it could have been done and not noticed.” Zari licked her paw, watching me to see what I thought.

  I watched Kyle make notes on his computer. RaeLynn was making her notes of things to look up on the system she worked on with Zari, although she no longer needed the cat for most things.

  “Do you have the names we got from the guard?” Kyle asked her.

  RaeLynn frowned at him, her eyes sparkling as if to say ‘duh’.

  I used my computer to start my own research on the Langea Company, even as everyone else was still asking questions and talking about the men with Blayn G. A search like that was easy enough for me to do as it didn’t require any special skills. It just required the patience to read through any public propaganda and press releases.

  It was annoying that the company wasn’t publically traded. I had no investor information to search through. While it was clearly a paramilitary company, it was small as such companies went. They had a presence in Iraq, like most, but none in Afghanistan or anywhere else. Their presence in Iraq quite small, so it made me wonder how they made any money.

  Langea listed that their work was for those with very specialized needs. There didn’t appear to be a lot of full time employees. I wondered if they hired full time assassins for something. What was a ‘very specialized need’?

  “When I lo
ok up Langea, I keep getting that they cater to companies with very specialized needs. They’re clearly paramilitary. Does that mean assassins?”

  “It could be,” Kyle said slowly, not looking up from his computer. “But we don’t really have any information to back that up. They could just want to sound sexier than offering guns for hire. Or spying. They could offer spies. And that’s not the kind of thing you advertise either.”

  RaeLynn smiled, looking up from her notes. “Yeah, that would blow someone’s cover if they said they worked at Langea and it was obviously hiring out spies.”

  “Would anyone say they worked there?” I asked.

  No one answered my question, although Kyle looked up with his own information. “There’s a guy that had background in biochemistry who was working with Blayn G. He was a lab tech in Utah. Apparently he recently disappeared.”

  “Interesting,” I said. RaeLynn quickly typed some notes.

  “Anyone else turn up missing?” she asked.

  “There’s a biologist who works in Seattle and he’s currently there as far as I can tell. There’s another biochemist who works on the east coast. So far as I can tell, he’s also where he’s supposed to be. However, he doesn’t appear to have any family so it’s probably harder to verify that.”

  “Why don’t we do a full search on your lab tech,” I told Kyle. RaeLynn set about getting the information to run it through the main computer. Who knew what we’d find? It was as close as we had to a lead.

  Meg

  Meg, Dillon and Colleen hiked away from the plane, following a path that Dillon vaguely remembered. Peter stepped in now and then when Dillon started to get off track. Dillon had moved around in circles when he had trailed the pilot. Peter was able to lead them in a more direct path.