Book of Souls

Chapter 30

Dane Bentley piloted a twenty-year-old Beechcraft Baron 58, a sporty twin-engine with a top speed of two hundred knots and a range of almost fifteen hundred miles. There was hardly anywhere in the continental US where he hadn’t touched down, and there was nothing he liked better than having an excuse to do some serious flying.

When his old friend Henry Spence called invoking the 2027 Club and told him he’d foot the gas bill, Dane was quickly behind the wheel of his ’65 Mustang motoring to the hangar at Beverly Muni Airport on the rugged Massachusetts coast. On the way, he left a voice mail for his live-in lady friend informing her he was going to be away for a few days and a second voice mail to the younger woman he was seeing on the side. Dane was a young sixty.

In the distance, about fifteen nautical miles to the north, the late-afternoon sun was glinting over long, skinny Lake Winnipesaukee, a large deepwater body dotted with two hundred pine-bristling islands. Dane suppressed his tour-guide instinct to point it out. His three passengers were behind him, sound asleep in facing red-leather seats. Instead, he started chatting with the tower at Laconia Airport, and several minutes later, he was swooping over the lake and approaching the runway.

Jim Zeckendorf had left one of his cars for Will at the airport, its keys in an envelope at the general aviation desk. Will bundled his family into the SUV and took off for the house, leaving Dane behind to check the weather, file a flight plan, and catch a quick nap in the pilots’ lounge.

It was a straight ten-mile shot east on Route 11 to Alton Bay, one of the small towns that ringed Winnipesaukee. Will had visited once a few years earlier for a weekend of fishing and drinking. He recalled he had a girlfriend in tow but for the life of him he couldn’t remember which one. It had been a time when women were flying in and out of his life at speed, a bimbo blur. All Will could remember for sure was that Zeckendorf, who was wifeless that weekend, was more interested in his girlfriend than he was.

Zeckendorf’s second house was befitting a big-time Boston law partner. It was a six-thousand-square-foot Adirondack, perched on a rocky ridge high over the choppy waters of Alton Bay. Nancy was too tired and numb to appreciate the rustic, airy, vaulted living room which flowed into an open-plan granite-topped kitchen. On a happier day, she would have been flitting from room to room like a honeybee in a field of clover, but she was impervious to the magnificence of the place.

It was dusk, and through a wall of lake-facing windows, stands of birch and pines were swaying in the wind and the gray-black waters were doing an imitation of the sea, methodically crashing against the stone breakwater. Nancy went straight for the master bedroom to change Philly and get out of her mourning dress.

Will zoomed around the house, checking things out. Zeck’s wife had made a trip up from Boston and stocked the fridge and the pantry with provisions and baby food and boxes of diapers. There were fresh towels everywhere. The thermostats were adjusted. There was a car in the garage with keys. There was even a brand-new travel crib in the bedroom and a high chair, with a price tag still affixed, in the kitchen. The Zeckendorfs were unbelievable.

He unpacked Nancy’s service weapon from its case, checked its clip and safety, then left it conspicuously on her bedside table next to a prepaid phone.

The baby was fresh and powdered, and Nancy was in comfortable jeans and a sweatshirt. Will tightly held Phillip to his chest and peered out the window while she rummaged in the kitchen. They exchanged banal domestic talk, a pretense the last two days hadn’t happened, but it seemed all right to give each other a break. He waited until she was ready to start the baby’s feeding, then placed Phillip, wiggling, into his chair.

Then he hugged her for a long time and only broke the clench to wipe away two streaks of tears on her red face, one with each thumb.

“I will call you every step of the way,” he said.

“You’d better. I’m your partner, remember?”

“I remember. Just like the old days, back on a case.”

“We’ve got a good plan. It should work,” she said emphatically.

“Are you going to be okay?” he asked.

“Yes, and no.” Then her confidence broke. “I’m scared.”

“They won’t find you here.”

“Not for me, for you.”

“I can take care of myself.”

She gave him a squeeze. “You used to. You’re an old retired guy now.”

He shrugged. “Experience versus youth. You choose.”

She kissed him full on the lips, then gently pushed him away. “I choose you.”

It was semidark when Dane took off. He banked over the lake, then made a graceful turn westward. When his course was set and the plane was leveled off at a cruising altitude of eighteen thousand feet, he turned to Will, who was shoehorned into the copilot seat, and he began to talk. It had taxed him to keep quiet for so long. They didn’t come more talkative or gregarious than Dane Bentley, and for the next eighteen hours, he had a captive audience.

Their first leg was going to take them to Cleveland, a distance of some 650 miles. By the time they landed about four and a half hours later to gas up, stretch their legs, get a bite from vending machines, and use the facilities, Will knew a great deal about his pilot.

Once Dane had decided in high school he was going military, it was a foregone conclusion he’d enlist in the navy. He grew up on the water in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where his family ran a charter fishing company, and his father and grandfather were ex-navy. Unlike most of his classmates, the Vietnam draft wasn’t hanging over his head because he was a gung ho volunteer, itching to use his pent-up energy to steam up the Gulf of Tonkin and fire off some big ordnance.

On his second tour in ’Nam, he volunteered for naval intelligence, got trained up in covert ops and communications, and spent that tour and one more motoring up and down the Mekong, tagging along with Swift-boat crews to scope out Viet Cong positions. When the war ended, he was persuaded to stay in with a plum assignment to the Office of Naval Intelligence in Maryland where he was made petty officer at the Maritime Operations Center.

He was a good-looking ladies’ man, ill suited to a suburban military community that catered to married guys and their families. He toyed with throwing himself into a commissioning program to make the officer corps or chucking it in and going back to the family business. What he didn’t know was that the Maritime Operations Center was ground zero for Area 51 recruiting. Over half the watchers at Groom Lake passed through Maryland at one point in their careers.

Like everyone who got corralled into Area 51, Dane was seduced by the mystery of an ultrasecret naval base land-locked in the Nevada desert. When he passed through final security clearance and the base mission was revealed, he thought it was about the coolest thing he’d ever heard. Still, he was an action, reaction guy. He’d never had a deep thought in his head, and he wasn’t about to start contemplating his navel or the mysteries of the universe. The lush fringe benefits and a Vegas lifestyle were all he needed to convince himself he’d made the right choice.

Will was taken aback that the man who was helping him thwart the watchers had been one. He was initially suspicious, but he had to trust his own ability to read people, and Dane’s earnestness and lack of guile satisfied him he was not a threat. What was he going to do anyway? Jump out without a parachute?

Dane provided an insight into the mind-set of the watchers. He’d done just about every job within their ranks during his three-decade career, from manning the metal detectors for the daily strip and scans to conducting field operations against employees who were suspected of obtaining unauthorized DODs for relatives or friends or otherwise compromising the integrity of the operation. They were a buttoned-down cadre, encouraged to be detached and humorless, interacting with staff in much the same menacing way that corrections officers deal with prisoners.

But Dane was too affable at the core to make management rank, and in his annual reviews, he was consistently advised to remain more aloof and warned not to fraternize. He and Henry Spence first met outside work when a chance Saturday encounter at a filling station led to a drink at the Sands Casino.

Dane knew all about Spence. The watchers were told he was a real hotshot, ex-CIA with a brain the size of a watermelon. The two men were polar opposites, brain versus brawn, but there was chemistry based on that kind of magnetism. Spence was a Princeton-educated country-clubber with a socialite wife. Dane was a beer-drinking Massachusetts townie who liked banging heads and dating showgirls.

But both shared a passion for flying. Spence owned a top-of-the-line Cessna while Dane rented shit-boxes by the hour. Once their friendship got going, Spence gave Dane liberal use of his plane, and, for that, the watcher was forever in his debt.

Dane told Will he had only retired a year earlier, just shy of the mandatory age cutoff of sixty. He kept his condo in Vegas for the winters and planned to use his inherited Massachusetts bungalow for summers on the water. He’d gotten a sweet deal on the Beechcraft. After a year, the plan was working, and he was a happy guy. Spence hadn’t waited long to give Dane the distinction of being the only ex-watcher ever to be invited to join the 2027 Club, this to the consternation of other members, who had trouble getting comfortable with the idea.

In the distance Will could see the twinkling lights of Cleveland filling half the windshield and the blackness of Lake Erie filling the other half.

“You know Malcolm Frazier, right?” Will asked.

“Oh sure, he was my boss! From the second he got off the elevator on his first day, everyone thought he was going to become the top dog. Ruthless SOB. He’d give up his own mother. All the guys were scared of him. We’d be doing our jobs, and it was like, he’d be watching us. He’d rat out guys for stealing a paper clip. Anything to get ahead. You know, he made his bones on a hit. Some analyst who worked on the US desk smuggled out a little rolled-up note with DODs wrapped up in a piece of a baggie. Put it in between his cheek and his gum, like a wad of snuff. We’re not sure what he was going to do with them, but they were all Las Vegas residents with dates coming up. The guy got drunk and blabbed to another guy at the lab. That’s how we found out! Frazier took him out through a sniperscope at a thousand yards while the SOB was getting a drive-thru at Burger King. Maybe the guy was the Mark Shackleton of his day.”

“What do you know about Shackleton?”

“Pretty much everything.”

“What do you know about me?”

“Pretty much everything. Except for your recent antics. I want to hear about that after our next refueling stop.”

Will gave Nancy a quick call from the airport lounge. She was okay, he was okay. Philly was asleep. He told her to get some rest. There wasn’t more to say.

When they were ready to resume their trip, Dane did a visual inspection of the plane with a cup of black coffee in one hand and a flashlight in the other. On wheels-up, he declared brightly, “Next stop Omaha!”

Will wanted to sleep.