Search For Reason (State Of Reason Mystery, Book 2)

by Miles A. Maxwell

  The religious leader’s eyes angled upward onto the scarf-covered face. The mullah’s answer: a single nod.

  “If you can continue as you have done . . .” he smiled, “then very soon I think the infidels will require a Gold Dinár’s Club card to make their purchases in oil.”

  Raucous laughter followed.

  Those on the mullah’s either side helped the religious man to his feet. “Very well then!”

  The festive mood returned. Each man stood.

  “To the success of Allah!” the mullah shouted.

  Each man raised a cup. “ALLAH’S SUCCESS!” echoed the response.

  The Architect added his own toast: “Now is our turn!”

  As one they echoed these final words of ebullience and optimism: “OUR TURN!”

  A thousand feet above the sand, a nearly silent hummm came from the small dark craft that bore an infrared camera and a directional shotgun microphone. Its wide wings banked again.

  A guard on the ground dropped the heavy night vision binoculars to the lanyard around his neck. Shit!

  The man ran inside.

  “Sir! Sir!”

  The Architect’s eyes thinned. Men had been made to disappear for protocol infractions far less intrusive.

  “A plane circles! There are cameras!”

  Bedlam! Men pushed through the tent’s main door. Engines started. Headlights blasted away the darkness. Camels rose. Tires spun. Sand flew.

  Calmly but without wasting any time, the Architect grabbed up a box shaped like two side-by-side loaves of bread. He walked outside and faced the invader. He was not about to leave his kitchen or his chef behind.

  Leaving Everon

  Franklin followed his brother down the jet’s stairway door. They set everything on the ground. Franklin’s breath floated on the cold air.

  “I don’t feel good leaving you like this,” Everon said. “All this stuff. This cage. Sheesh! But this is the closest runway this monster can take off on. I could have flown you right to Erie, you know. How are you going to get back to your jeep?”

  Franklin smiled. “I’ll find a way.”

  Everon ran fingers through his hair. “I should have thought about this when I agreed to trade planes with Hunt.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Well, okay then.” A vertical frown line channeled Everon’s forehead. “Take care, Bro.”

  “You too.” Franklin said, giving him a hug. “One thing —”

  “Yeah?”

  “Where you’re going, we probably won’t have any way to communicate for a while . . .”

  “Probably not.”

  “Uh, I was listening to your crew — when you were trying to decide which part of things to tackle first? I wonder if you forgot an option.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The greatest long-term good.”

  Everon’s blue-green eyes stared at him, the line in his forehead becoming still more pronounced. His breathing becoming deeper. “I never did ask why you said that thing at Del’s. That crack you made about not going back at all.”

  “Because,” Franklin hesitated, “I don’t know if it’s really going to help.”

  “What, then, do nothing? It’s February, Bro. Gas furnaces don’t run without electricity. Do you know how many people would freeze to death? And if we don’t get power to the water companies —”

  Franklin thought about the things he’d overheard his brother talking about with his crew on the plane. Computer chips fried by EMP. Microwave ovens and refrigerators. Motors burned out. Old televisions actually exploding.

  “If you and your crew repair the electric grid,” he asked, “what’s going to happen?”

  “I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. A lot of people are going to be a helluva lot better off.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe?” Everon sputtered.

  “What I meant was, what if there’s a third bomb?” Franklin asked quietly. There, he thought, you’ve said it. What everybody’s thinking but afraid to say. “Can you just keep on repairing things?”

  Everon’s face was pink. It wasn’t just the cold air.

  “We still don’t know where it came from,” Franklin rushed on. “So far the government doesn’t have any idea how to stop the next one. Maybe people have to learn to rely on themselves a little more. If communities, and well, you know, churches . . .”

  His voice trailed off as he recognized the sarcastic look on his brother’s face. Everon had never cared much about anything too abstract. And Franklin didn’t know exactly what he was trying to say.

  “You better go.” Franklin gave his brother another hug and turned away.

  He heard the jet door close hard behind him. He shrugged the strap of one duffel onto his right shoulder, the big coil of climbing rope over the other. Cyn’s account statements, rolled up, protruded from the inside pocket of his black leather jacket — he couldn’t say why he was bringing them back with him. He lifted Harry’s cage with his left hand, the other duffel with his right, and began walking for the terminal building.

  The owl gave a single soft “Hoooo —”

  He hoped his vehicle was still where he’d left it. Behind him he heard the jet speed up the runway.

  The Lift

  Faces turned, puzzled in partial recognition. Eyes followed Franklin as he struggled through Rickenbacker Airport carrying Harry’s cage and all his other stuff.

  He made it out to the curb before anybody said anything. Then it started.

  “Hey!” said a red-headed man wearing a thick green parka. “You’re that bird guy! I thought it was you!”

  A little girl with blonde pigtails joined in. “You’re the guy on the news! That’s Harry, right? The owl! The one in your shirt!”

  A crowd began to gather.

  “You rescuing that baby! That was something!”

  “They say the Empire State Building’s been chopped in half. Did you . . .”

  People closed in around him, wanting to ask their questions about New York:

  “What was it like in there?”

  “Was everything on fire?”

  “Were there a lot of bodies?”

  “Need a ride somewhere?” the red-headed man yelled in his ear.

  “I’d gladly pay your gas for a ride over to the airstrip at Bayne.”

  “Bayne? Forget your money. I’m going right by there.”

  The guy grabbed one of Franklin’s duffels and pushed a hole through the crowd. Franklin followed with Harry.

  The red-headed man’s name was Brad. It was great to get out of the mob, but ten minutes on the road and Franklin began to wonder if the price Brad was charging was more than he could afford.

  “Which buildings are still standing? Were there bodies just everywhere in the streets? How could you and your brother get those people out of the subway? Dragging that truck with the helicopter to open the upper deck of the G.W. Bridge! Now that was brilliant!”

  For twenty minutes Brad made him relive hours of New York’s burning hell. Just when Franklin felt like asking Brad to please, please, shut up, when the pain of reliving Cynthia’s death began to overwhelm him again, Brad asked how Harry led to the rescue of his niece.

  And then Brad finally did shut up and listen.

  Franklin let go a deep sigh and told how he’d found Harry alongside the four-drawer file cabinet on Cyn’s roof. The file cabinet Melissa was locked inside.

  “It’s wonderful,” Brad gushed, “what you and your brother did!”

  Brad let him off. The old jeep was still where Franklin had left it hidden in the trees at the end of Bayne’s tiny airstrip. Franklin felt nothing but relief. Until he watched Brad’s taillights shrink away into the darkness.

  Frost on the windshield. Cold out tonight. He stuffed the key in the ignition. His lights came on. An image appeared in the tiny traces of ice.

  Cyn’s face.

  And the loneliness crept back in.

&
nbsp; Dean’s Shock

  On the south side of Pittsburgh, inside an apartment above a world-famous bird aviary, Dean Adlan flipped through television channels by himself.

  His wife Sally abhorred violence. She’d watched the news with him until the continuous scenes of destruction and horror left her unable to take any more. Not that there was anything else to watch if Dean wanted to. Every single station showed some horrifying picture of New York or Virginia Beach.

  Dean stopped. Shocked to see the screen filled with a huge speckled brown head. The yellow eyes of a —

  “Zeylonensis,” he breathed aloud.

  Dean pushed his wire-rim glasses up with a middle finger and peered more closely at the screen. The long fingers of his left hand nested in his short strawberry-blond hair. Without turning away he yelled, “Honey! Sally! Come here, will you?”

  Blonde and typically bubbly, Sally ran over carrying the skilletful of quail eggs she was cooking. He never yells, she thought. Dean was the quietest man on the planet. “What’s wrong?”

  “You’ve got to see this,” he said more softly.

  Sally stood next to where he sat on the couch. The shot showed a man exiting a helicopter, carrying an infant in his arms. “That’s odd,” Sally agreed.

  An owl’s head poked from between the buttons of the man’s white button-down shirt.

  “It certainly is,” Dean replied. “That’s a Ketupa zeylonensis! I doubt there’s another one in all of North America!”

  On Deck

  Four hours from his entry into trance, Pang Zhou crawled the cold steel deck to his heavily muscled knees, feeling a hatred like he had never known. Shaking, drained, his mission unclear. Ting’s disappearance. The man on the television. Both produced unbearable pain and indecision. The blended psychoactive tea had allowed the Pali Kongju to give Zhou temporary passage.

  One time only. There would be no other.

  Yet Zhou felt in possession of no true knowledge. No certainty, no idea what he must do. How to regain his beautiful guide. Find the man who possessed Ting and kill him? How?

  He dressed and went up on deck.

  Through dense white blizzard on a gently rolling sea, Norse Wind steamed on. Pang Zhou’s wide, ageless eyes, his broad nose, pushed against a freezing eighteen-knot wind. He felt as if his flesh would crawl from its bones, waiting endlessly to arrive at port so he could find some way to get to the dark-haired man. Surely this would bring his spirit guide back again. But how? Always the sea?

  It seemed impossible. Six hundred miles more! Then to enter a land with security tighter than any he had ever known?

  Dark waves flowed past Norse Wind’s hull. The ship itself was barely visible in the murky blackness. His grip tightened on the rail. The vision he’d had was not to be without cost! Now the Kongju exacted her true price.

  Zhou was blind!

  Yet . . . other images flooded his optic nerves. Sounds overwhelmed his aural cortex. Pang Zhou no longer stood on Norse Wind’s deck. His feet stood on wooden boards. He was not himself — but his ancestor!

  By the primitive masts of sailing ships he could see out the window, it was a century ago . . . port city Yeosu . . . southeast Korean coast . . .

  His name was Tai Zhou.

  Tai listened to the long bell. Through the fifteen-kilometer-wide islet, along the amoeba-shaped island of Dolsan Do, the night fog was rolling in. Another sundown . . . Always the sea.

  The bales of tea and silk waiting to be loaded out of the warehouse downstairs worried Tai. The numbers of men hoping to go to America, massing along the fences, growing each day, worried him too. Pushing to be picked to make the long voyage — the American railroads needing all they could get. Always the Americans . . .

  Always the sea.

  A maxim, a proverb. The Zhou family’s means of survival. Tai scanned the horizon. Still no sign of the ship upon which their fortunes depended. Far out on the endless blue, the sun dropped below a wide red cloud.

  The ship is eight days overdue!

  Tai stepped back from the window to his rickety desk and checked the accounts. Success of this transport was critical. The goods would not wait forever. They must reach America intact, and their trade must be returned.

  The sun disappeared. Only that single red cloud growing far out on the horizon.

  By next morning the cloud was deep and dark. But still no ship. Where are the Americans?

  The flag across the road waved, then snapped, standing from the pole. A storm, he realized. The men left rapidly.

  The typhoon’s full force reached the Zhou docks at midnight.

  The next three days were some of the worst ever lived on the Korean coast. One-hundred-fifty-mile winds. Thirty-foot waves.

  Somehow Tai Zhou and his family survived.

  The building, the tea, the silk did not.

  Warehouse shattered, family fortune scattered with the dock’s last timber. Taken by the calming wind.

  Into the sea, the endless sea.

  Always the sea.

  Tough Navigation

  “There goes the VOR I was tracking,” Nan said.

  She twisted a knob, rotating the dial back and forth. A message appeared on one of the jet’s color displays. “And there goes the damn GPS again too!”

  “Depends on which satellites are overhead,” Everon said. “Any satellite over New York or Virginia Beach when the bombs went off is toast.”

  The crew quietly discussing problems they expected — in the jet’s cabin area behind him; Everon had his own problems. Below in the moon and star light, he saw only a blanket of gray cloud. A winter storm. With no GPS satellite signal, their highways-in-the-sky were no longer mapped electronically.

  At least the Gulfstream’s powerful radar located other planes. It wouldn’t do much good to go smashing into someone else as blind as they were at thirty-seven thousand feet. Since crossing the Appalachians they’d come within range of two. One military transport, and another private jet with the call sign MORMON1 that went north, crossing their course at ninety degrees, a couple thousand feet below them.

  Nan called Cleveland Center. A female controller answered and began to give their position — until her voice disappeared mid sentence.

  “Cleveland Center?” Nan called, “Come in Cleveland?”

  There was no answer.

  “This is ridiculous!” Everon said. “We’re like blind people, hands out in front of our faces, searching the sky at four hundred miles an hour.”

  “I have this, E!” Nan said. She twisted a knob on the instrument panel and darkened the displays way down. In the wraparound windshield the stars came out, glowed into brilliance, sparked across dark sky.

  “The Big Dipper’s behind us,” she pointed, “to the west. Cassiopeia — there!”

  Following Nan’s finger, Everon found the five-star lazy-W out the left side.

  “Compass is good,” she said.

  Ten minutes later the eastern edge of the storm slipped beneath them. Highways were visible again.

  “That’s gotta be I-95. Look at all the traffic!” Nan said.

  “Most of it’s going east now,” Everon agreed. “Two days after the bombs, looks like they’re already going home. Maybe they’ve got nowhere else to go.”

  Nan pulled a roadmap into the dim light above her lap. Leaning forward, she pointed down through the windshield. “Philadelphia up I-95, that way. Trenton northwest of Philly. About zero-five-zero.” She adjusted the autopilot. The big jet banked left. And Everon felt the old attraction.

  She was easily as good a pilot as he was. An even better navigator. As long as he’d known her they’d had something personal — yet never giving in to the pull, never allowing their relationship to become intimate. They were co-workers. They were friends. She once told him she decided to become a pilot when she realized she wasn’t going to grow any taller. She hated looking up at everybody. Flying was the ultimate way to look down.

  E
veron put his face to one of the cockpit’s side windows. On a typical evening there should have been patterns of glowing white light dotting the countryside. Out away from the highways it was all black. Shouldn’t things be getting better by now? Hunt should have teams in the field.

  He recognized something familiar. The stream of headlights where I-95 intersected I-76 made a definite pattern. Everon knew this area. His childhood had been spent only an hour north of here.

  “Trenton Airport is that way,” he pointed. “Inside that loop of highway.”

  Nan compared the roadmap to a flight sectional. “I agree.”

  They banked over.

  He keyed the radio, “Gulfstream Five-Five-Six-Six-Sierra-Whiskey to Trenton Tower, do you read?”

  There was no answer.

  “Gulfstream to Trenton, come in.”

  Silence.

  “Still no GPS!” Nan said. “And no tower beacon. How do we find the airport? Somewhere in that dark area up there! We’ll be on final in five minutes!”

  As if in answer, directly ahead a double row of lights shot out. “There!” Everon pointed. Then more. They were car headlights. A dozen pair illuminating either side of the runway — which looked mostly clear of snow. “Those must be Hunt’s trucks.”

  “I get there’s no power,” Nan said. “That’s why we’re here. But no airport generator?”

  And as they descended, in a neighborhood off to the airport’s south were what looked like that thing the brothers had left in New York.

  The flames of a raging fire.

  Amish

  An hour of the silence Franklin usually enjoyed on smaller roads, and the drive up from southern Ohio began to feel like the longest of his life.