by Joshua Corin
“Who’s Steve McQueen?”
“You’re kidding, right?” Xana blinked. “You’re a cop and you’ve never seen Bullitt?”
“I’m not a—”
“And I’m beginning to believe you, Steve. Now lay down your weapon. Don’t make me ask again, Steve. Your friend’s brain is not getting any less bashed in. Let’s go. Lead the way.”
“Or what?”
“Or this,” she muttered, and she shot his hands. His 9mm fired in return, but it could have been from reflex more than anything, especially with how wild his aim turned out to be. His gun tumbled to the dirt and his hands were a mess of wet, mangled flesh.
He reached for his fallen weapon, but he couldn’t get the muscles and nerves in his hands to clench. All the while he dripped blood all over the 9mm, and Xana took her time approaching him. She cleared her throat, gestured with her hand cannon. The injured man, having no alternative, backed off.
“Thank you,” she said, and slipped his sidearm into the waistband of her slacks. “Now let’s go.”
Steve sighed, turned around, and led the way up the paved trail.
They still had a few minutes of walking before the top of the mountain would be in view, so Xana filled the time with:
“You hate Muslims, Steve?”
And then:
“Why do you hate Muslims, Steve?”
And then:
“When did this hatred for Muslims start, Steve?”
But Steve wasn’t much of a conversationalist.
“You know, Steve, I got to tell you, I’ve dealt with my share of goobers and this plan of yours really is something. You attack a few mosques and get labeled a terrorist and then you get caught because you chose a national landmark as a base of operations. You do know what the American government does to terrorists, don’t you? You’re going to be spending the rest of your days locked up with the radical Muslims you hate so much! I mean, nobody ever said that criminals were smart, but you bunch are the dopiest lot I’ve stumbled upon in a long—”
They had reached the end of the trail. The top of the mountain. Their destination.
And there was no drone to be seen, none whatsoever.
Chapter 21
“Well,” said Xana.
The mountaintop wasn’t completely deserted. Two more men had been waiting for them, one arrayed in red plaid and carpenter jeans and the other choosing the more sensible attire of khaki shorts and a polo on this hot, hot day. Both men were in their thirties. Both wore nondescript ball caps. And both carried a semiautomatic pistol on target with one of Xana’s vital organs.
Steve approached her, bloody hand out. She returned his 9mm. And then the Magnum. Next she had to relinquish her wallet and phone.
“Xanadu Marx. Why does that name sound familiar?”
Xana sighed. Here we go again.
“I’ve been in the news.”
“How so?”
“I was drunk…I drove my car into a house…”
“That’s right! You’re that FBI agent!”
His buddies immediately lowered their weapons.
“No, no, it’s okay,” added Steve. “She was fired.”
His buddies immediately raised their weapons.
“What’s she doing here?” the gentleman in plaid inquired.
To which the other fellow amended, “Is she with them?”
“Aren’t you forgetting someone?” she replied.
“Oh yeah…where’s Nate?”
“Shit!” answered Steve. “He’s back down by her car. She brained him with his own gun.”
“I’ll go check on him,” the polo-and-khaki chap said, and he disappeared down the trail.
Once he was gone, the two remaining men stepped a few yards away and whispered between themselves. What, oh what, were they going to do with their intruder?
Xana, meanwhile, had questions of her own, and she had never been much of a whisperer.
“Where’s the drone?”
They both looked at her as if she’d spoken God’s True Name.
“What do you know about that?” asked Steve.
“What do you know about it?” asked Xana.
Then she noticed the grooves in the dirt. Parallel grooves running along the plateau, commencing a few yards from where she stood and concluding…well, concluding somewhere in the distance, somewhere, she suspected, just short of the edge.
She might not have found her drone, but she found its tracks.
She also spotted a circular indentation off to the side, just about the right size for an oil barrel.
“Let me rephrase,” she said, more calmly now. “Where is the drone now?”
Steve sighed. “We don’t know.”
The gentleman in plaid harrumphed at this reveal and walked off his attitude.
“Who’s we, Steve?”
“My name isn’t Steve. It’s Ralph. The pissed-off fella over there is Lymon. You already know Nate. And the other guy who went to check on Nate…his name is actually Steve.”
“That doesn’t quite answer my question.”
“We’re just a group of concerned citizens.”
“So that’s who you are? A cop and three of his drinking buddies?”
“Okay, seriously—how did you peg me so quickly for being on the force? I’m off-duty.”
Xana shrugged. “Are you ever, really?”
“We got the drone a few years ago. I never saw it, but I heard all about it. We’d joke about, you know, when we’d have to use it. Like, some idiot teenager is driving drunk after a party and we send the drone to pull them over, or some idiot couple is cooking meth in their trailer and we send the drone to knock on their door.”
“And then this morning happened.”
“And then this morning happened. At first, I was convinced it couldn’t be our drone. There was no way. Al-Qaeda or whatever must’ve snuck across the border or parked a boat along the coastline they launched it from or, I don’t know, anything but the possibility that we were responsible. That someone had stolen our drone and committed this crime. But the more I thought about it…”
“So why did you come here?”
“Same reason you did. It’s a likely launch site. Plus, when we arrived, we saw the mountain was closed off for repairs, and there were no repairs on the schedule.”
“So you’re not the ones who put up the sign.”
“Us? No. Where would we even get those signs made? Kinko’s? That’s official city signage. I should know. Whoever stole the drone must have also stolen some signs.”
“Except you don’t actually believe that,” said Xana. “You think it’s an inside job. That’s why you’re here with your boys instead of your brothers in blue. So you bypassed the signs and climbed the mountain and found the tire tracks and knew you were right.”
“They’re not tire tracks,” grumbled Lymon. He was shuffling back toward them. “Or if they are, they aren’t from any liftoff.”
He walked Xana along the path of one of the tracks. It looked real to her. Deep grooves on the grass and dirt in a straight line. She was no expert, but…
“They’re not level,” Lymon explained.
Frowning, Xana knelt down and looked closer. Not level? What was he seeing that she wasn’t?
Lymon handed her a tape measure. Suddenly his plaid attire made more sense. She unspooled several feet of yellow plastic and set it beside one of the tracks. Again, everything looked kosher. What was she missing? Deep grooves on the grass and dirt in a straight—
Wait a second.
She bent down even closer.
The tracks weren’t straight.
They were almost straight. In fact, until she’d set the actual straight edge of the measuring tape alongside the track, it had appeared to her naked eye to
be straight. But she had been wrong.
“Maybe one of the wheels is wobbly?” she mused.
“Or maybe someone faked these tracks to keep curious fools like us distracted while they went about their real business.”
Xana stood back up, handed the tape measure to Lymon. “That’s a lot of assumptions.”
“You notice where they set the oil barrel?” he replied. “That means they must’ve fueled her here, right? Well, they must be the best in the business because they didn’t spill a drop of high octane, not anywhere.”
“So what you’re saying is that there’s some kind of outlandish conspiracy—”
“Yes!”
To which Xana replied with a nod. And a sigh. And then with her hands on her hips.
It was time to educate these gentlemen about the ways of the world.
“Let me tell you a little something about vast conspiracies: they don’t exist. End of story. I mean, sure, small conspiracies exist. People collude. But for a vast conspiracy to be effective, it requires secrecy and coordination on a macro scale, and that’s simply impossible. It runs counter to human nature. Are there greedy sons of bitches in the world? Absolutely. Do they all meet in secret once a year to decide the fate of the world? No. How do I know? Because one greedy son of a bitch will only trust another greedy son of a bitch for so long before they go back to being competitors and then rivals and then enemies. People want to believe that there is some kind of shadow history because it explains the irrational, but one man can kill a president. A handful of men can kill three thousand. Vast conspiracies are the mythology of the paranoid and the weak.
“Don’t get me wrong, folks. I empathize. The last year I’ve had? I wish I believed in fairy tales. But fairy tales are a funny thing. There’s the hero and the dragon and we always see ourselves as the hero and we always see whatever our obstacle is as the dragon, be it our insensitive boss or the douchebag who cut us off in traffic or what-have-you, and fuck them because we’re the good guys…but what if we’re the dragon?
“All I’m saying is this: we do not live in a rational universe and any effort to try to make sense of it will end in tragedy. I have a friend who…who really is a hero…like, disgustingly so. She’s brilliant but not arrogant and she’s patient beyond all reason and she’s young; she has her whole life ahead of her, except right now she’s in a hospital bed and very soon she’s going to be dead and it’s all because the cells in her body simply decided to misbehave. Is there a rational explanation for her suffering? Is there some kind of vast conspiracy against her landing her dream job and falling in love and all that? Is that what cancer is? A conspiracy? It certainly is coordinated and it certainly is effective.
“I’m sorry. I’m rambling. Like I said, it’s been a rough year. And in my solipsism, I haven’t even mentioned the fact that several hundred people were murdered this morning, and it was a coordinated and effective effort, let’s give them credit for that, but they didn’t fake the moon landing, too. They stole the drone out of storage and they launched it from here and we all were hoping they’d return to the scene of the crime, but we were wrong. There is no setup.”
Then Xana noticed the helicopter hovering several hundred feet above them.
Then Xana wondered what was taking Steve and Nate so long.
Then an armada of federal agents swarmed onto the mountaintop from eight different directions, and they all had guns and half a dozen of the federal agents were thundering at Xana and Lymon and Ralph to lie facedown on the ground right now or they would be shot.
Chapter 22
“I warned you, Xana. I warned you and look what you did. Look where you are.”
“Did you come down here to help me, Jonesy, or to lecture me?”
“I am a college professor,” the bright-toothed academic replied. “My lectures are helpful.”
“Whatever helps you sleep at night, old man.”
Jonesy recoiled. “Oh, please. I’m only twelve years older than you are. And if it makes you happy, I’ll have you know that nothing helps me sleep at night.”
“Because you’re an old man.”
“You sure have a lot of lip for a terrorist.”
“It’s my main form of attack.”
An hour had passed since Xana and the crew from the mountain had been detained by a combined task force of the FBI, Homeland Security, the ACTF, plus state and local law enforcement. The location for their detainment had been the nearest accommodating facility, which meant that Xana had returned from whence she had been recently banished, namely the Stone Mountain Police Department. If memory served, they had only one official interview room, and this was where she had been deposited. Ralph and Lymon and Steve and Nate were probably set in offices throughout the municipal center, undoubtedly inconveniencing the daily conduct of government in these here parts. Or maybe Nate was on his way to the ER. Head wounds needed to be taken seriously.
And yet she had left him there on the trail.
Oh, Xana. What a colossal fuckup you manufactured this time.
“I warned you,” Jonesy repeated.
He took a whiff of the half-filled coffee cup he had walked in with, winced, and then offered it to Xana.
She was thirsty, but she wasn’t that thirsty.
“I shouldn’t even be here,” he continued. “When you called, I should have hung up.”
“I needed a lawyer. You’re a lawyer.”
“You need a lot more than a lawyer! But now that I’m here, at least tell me you’ve been cooperative with the nice G-men.”
“Sort of,” replied Xana. “As you can imagine, they had a lot of questions. They asked me questions on the way over here. They asked me questions as they were escorting me to this room. They asked me questions as they cuffed me to this desk.”
“And what did you tell them?”
Xana smiled. “I told them I want a lawyer.”
Jonesy wagged his finger at her. “You’re a lunatic. You know that? Yes, of course you know that. And I know it, too. You’re a lunatic and I’m a lunatic and that’s fine, but this is not what I signed up for!”
“And yet you’re here.”
“And yet I’m here. Because I’m a lunatic. So. Tell me everything you didn’t tell the nice G-men, would you, please?”
Xana commenced her recollection, and Jonesy shut his eyes. She frowned. Stopped talking.
“Are you taking a nap?” she asked him.
“No, no,” he said. “This is how I concentrate.”
“You shut your eyes?”
“When I require full use of my brain, I shut out all distractions.”
“You’ve never done that before around me.”
He smiled slightly. “I’ve never needed to, Groucho.”
After a long sigh, Xana plunged back into her recollection. Jonesy, eyes shut, nodded now and then but otherwise remained silent. She summed up Detective Konquist’s request to investigate the drone, her down-spiral visit with the chief, her impulsive investigation of Stone Mountain, the whole adventure.
Jonesy opened one eye. “Are you finished?”
“You tell me,” Xana replied.
“Ha.” He opened his other eye. “That fellow you assaulted, Nate, he could still press charges. And you are on probation for your DUI so a felony assault charge would bring along a prison sentence. However, that has nothing to do with your current situation.”
“That’s good news.”
“Stone Mountain isn’t a national park, correct?”
“Correct.”
“So they can’t get you for trespassing. The question becomes what they can prove. And you are certain that the first time you met these other gentlemen was today? There are no phone records or emails that can show you may have carried on a conspiracy with them?”
“I have seven contacts in my
phone. None of them live in Stone Mountain.”
“Let’s keep your elitism between the two of us, eh?”
“I was merely stating a fact.”
“Let’s keep your facts between the two of us, too. Now unfortunately, given that this is a case involving terrorism, the authorities have broad latitude with which to hold you.”
“Oh, really?” said Xana. “I was only an FBI agent for twenty-nine years.”
“They might be willing to cooperate if you had something you could give them.”
“If I had something I could give them, I’d have given it to them. I’m as confused about all this as they are. There are way too many inconsistencies. For example, did the Stone Mountain Police Department ever have a drone? The rumors say yes, but Chief Scheer says no and the records say no. Unless the records were doctored by the sheriff. But I don’t think he did that unless he’s a very different man than he was back in 1998. Then again, we all were different back in 1998. Back before 9/11.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve a feeling you were the same antiauthoritarian pain in the ass you are now.”
“And you, Jonesy, were probably the same smug know-it-all with look-at-me eccentricities that people made fun of behind your back.”
“Nonsense. Some of them made fun of me to my face.”
Xana smirked at the law professor. They were really a pair. Two alcoholic castoffs here in this stone box in the burg of Stone Mountain.
So did the Stone Mountain police ever have a drone? If Scheer was telling the truth—and Xana suspected he was—then the answer was no. This meant that somebody had originated the rumor. But who? And why?
In all likelihood, it meant nothing. In all likelihood, this was somebody’s idea of a prank and today’s appearance of an actual drone was tragic happenstance. That made the most sense.
Because the alternative suggested a conspiracy, and Xana had already shared her strong opinions on those. The alternative suggested that somebody had originated the rumor for the reasons of obfuscation, knowing that today’s horror show was in the cards. Somebody wanted the connection to be made with people on top of that mountain today so that when the authorities showed up, the frame-up would be complete.
