Storm Front

Chapter 14

Virgil followed Ellen back into town, the sun sinking in his rearview mirror as they headed southeast through the bugs along the river, and the late-day heat waves coming off the tarmac. The evening would be spectacular, he thought, the air soft and cooling after the hot day, the moon coming up big and yellow; a good night for sitting on the back patio of a bar, talking with friends, the jukebox playing low, Guy Clark’s “Rita Ballou,” two-stepping with Georgina… or Ma.

The sun was down by the time they got to Jones’s house. Virgil got a flashlight and Ellen led the way into the backyard, and pointed at the tree and the edge of the neighbor’s garage, and by stepping back and forth and cocking their heads, they figured out where the shaft of sunlight would fall along the west fence.

The search took a few minutes: Jones had scraped fallen leaves and grass back over the hole he’d dug, and it was hard to see in the heavy shadows cast by the flashlight. Virgil eventually encountered a spot with an unnatural texture, and pushed into the earth with an index finger. After a half-inch of soft, loose soil, his finger hit stone.

He was shoulder to shoulder with Ellen — she smelled of woman work-sweat with a touch of something, maybe Obsession — both of them on their knees, and he said, “Here’s something.”

He scraped the dirt away, then more dirt, found the stone was dark, at least, in the light of the flash, and heavy. They both worked at it, clawing up the soil. Three or four minutes after Virgil located it, the stone came loose, and he lifted it out onto the lawn.

“Oh my God,” Ellen said. “It really is…”

“That’s it,” Virgil said, shining the flash on the side of it. He could feel the carvings, but not see them through the dirt.

“What should we do with it?”

“Take it back to my place, where we’ve got some good light,” Virgil suggested.

VIRGIL CALLED SHRAKE and told him to get Jenkins and go home. “I’ve got the stone. I don’t care what the Hezbollah guy does.”

“Good. I’ve been here so long I’ve been thinking about starting a family,” Shrake said.

Virgil called Yael. “Did you go shopping?”

“For a short time only, to survey the possibilities,” she said. “Has there been any progress in finding Jones?”

“No, but I’ve got the stone,” Virgil said.

“You have the stone? This is wonderful. May I see it?” she asked.

“Sure. I’ll come by and get you.”

Ellen said she wanted to take a shower, and so she’d wait at her father’s house until Virgil got back from picking up Yael. “But I’d like to be there when you guys look at it.”

“Fifteen minutes,” Virgil said.

Yael was waiting on the curb outside the motel. Virgil popped the passenger-side door for her, said, “Don’t step on the stone,” which he’d placed on the floor. Yael climbed in, then bent and lifted the stone into her lap. “Wonderful,” she said. “I will ask my department to issue you a commendation.”

“All part of the job,” Virgil said.

They went past Jones’s house again, waited a couple of minutes for Ellen to finish dressing, and then did a caravan over to Virgil’s house. Virgil lugged the stone inside and said, “If it stayed buried for three thousand years, and is still okay, I don’t think rinsing it off would hurt.”

“That would be fine,” Yael said.

They put it in the kitchen sink and sprayed it with warm water, until the dirt was gone and the water came clean. Virgil dried it with a dish towel, carried it into his study, put it on the desk, and pulled a reading light over.

The Solomon stone was pretty much as advertised — not quite a cube, a little longer than it was thick. The top was broken off nearly square, but the bottom had a fist-sized hole in it, as if there’d been some kind of inclusion there that had remained with the stone that this chunk had been broken from.

Under the raking light, they could clearly see the hieroglyphs, a lighter gray on a dark gray, densely covering two sides of the four-sided stele. The glyphs were small, about the height of a dime. The other two sides were covered with alphabetic forms. “Some of these could almost be modern — but some of them I don’t even know,” Yael said. “It’s Hebrew, though, and very, very old.”

She gently touched the Hebrew lettering, as if for good luck, or as a prayer.

“Can you read any of it?” Ellen asked.

“No, not really. I can read some of the letters… but the words elude me. This will take a lot of study. I think this”—she touched a group of letters—“could be the name of Solomon.”

“Pretty cool,” Virgil said.

“More cool than you know,” Yael said. “Solomon, in the legend, was the last great king of the United Israel and Judah. Despite that, there is no contemporary mention of him. We have never found a stele, a coin, an inscription, anything, by anyone who lived around his time, who mentions him. Until now. This is the only thing, sitting here in Mankato, in the state of Minnesota.”

“Amazing,” Virgil said. “I’ll tell you what: I’ll keep it here overnight, then move it up to St. Paul tomorrow. We’ll let the big shots turn it over to you, all official and so on.”

“This would be very fine,” Yael said.

“I wonder where the first Yael is?” Ellen asked.

“This I am not curious about,” Yael said. “I hope she stays where she is, not in my sight.”

“I’d like to know,” Virgil said. “Maybe she went home, like the Turks.”

“If my father calls me again, I’m going to tell him that you’ve got the stone,” Ellen said. “Once everybody knows where the stone is, and that nobody’s going to make a profit from it, maybe they’ll all go home. And Dad can go back to the Mayo.”

Virgil said, “He’s got a legal problem.”

She nodded. “Of course. But his time is very short. We’ve been told that when the final decline sets in, he will progress from a lucid state to death in a matter of a few days. He’s already begun to lose bladder and bowel control, and that’s the end.”

“Then maybe he should just stay out,” Virgil said. “If everybody agrees that this is the stone, it’s not a decoy or something… I won’t look for him at your house. Or at the Mayo, for that matter.”

“Thank you,” she said. “My brother is coming next week, or sooner, if Dad goes. So… I appreciate that.”

“I am very sorry for your family,” Yael said. “It comes to everybody, but is nevertheless a sad thing.”

They talked for another five minutes, about the stone, and about where Jones might be, and then Ellen left, to go back to the Twin Cities and home. Virgil put the stone in the dishwasher, hidden behind a couple of plates, locked all the doors, then took Yael back to the Holiday Inn.

“I’ll come for you at eight o’clock,” he told her.

“I will stand here,” she said, pointing down at the curb.

Back home, Virgil took the stone out of the dishwasher, made several high-res photos with his Nikon, and e-mailed a couple to his father, with a brief explanation. Then called Davenport.

Davenport picked up and asked, “You got Jones?”

“No, but I’ve got the stone.”

“Good. If you’ve got the stone, you don’t need Jones,” Davenport said. “If everybody’s reading this right, he’ll be dead in a few days, and I suspect he’ll turn up then. What’re you doing with the stone?”

“I thought I’d bring it up there tomorrow morning, stick it in an evidence locker, and then let you guys talk to the embassy and authorize its return. Probably with the second Yael. Anyway, that’s all diplomatic, it’s not for a humble flatfoot like myself.”

“That sounds about right,” Davenport said. “Good job, Virgil. I’ve been watching all that bullshit on TV, and it was giving me an ice-cream headache. See you tomorrow.”

Virgil was in the process of rereading all the George MacDonald Fraser “Flashman” novels, and the spy novels of Alan Furst. He was halfway through Furst’s Red Gold, and picked up the book from the living room couch and carried it back to the bedroom.

Long day. Fistfights, a naked woman, an ancient relic… a relic that could reshape the way people thought about a couple of world religions.

He read Furst for a couple hours, realized he wouldn’t be able to finish it, and reluctantly put it aside. He spent a short time thinking about God and one of His creations, Ma Nobles. He was beginning to see her as a bit more than a redneck woman, although she played that role.

And maybe even was one. She certainly wasn’t uninteresting, though he recognized that he certainly wasn’t exactly a disinterested observer in making that judgment… given the evidence at hand that day.

Virgil had been married and divorced three times, and wasn’t eager to get back on the marriage market. But what he’d told Ma that day, about having a redneck kid running around the house, wasn’t exactly true. He’d like to have kids. Maybe one of each. And if he was going to do that, he had to get busy. Ma might be a little much, but…

Jesus, what are you thinking? he asked himself. Get a goddamn dog.

Then he went to sleep. But not for long.

The big problem with Bart Kohl, in Tal Zahavi’s estimation, wasn’t that he was a coward, it was that he was a whiner. She could handle the cowardice with blackmail; but the guy was a nudnik, pestering her with complaints and warnings, visualizing disaster at every turn, and worse, with all his visions of tragedy, his voice was like a band saw, high-pitched and nasal. Even worse than all of that… he was boring.

Like when Tal had called him and asked him to provide her with a pistol. “A pistol? Where am I supposed to get a pistol? I don’t even know how to do that. When people asked me to help out, they said they’d just want me to drive people around. They never said anything about weapons. I’m against weapons. I signed the anti-handgun pledge.”

So Tal, operating from Tel Aviv, had had to go online and find a gun show where he could buy a firearm. Even after he had the pistol, he bitched about having to drive it across state lines. “Now I’m committing a federal crime, delivering it across state lines without a permit.”

Blahblahblah…

When she told him that they were going to grab Ellen Case, and use her to extort the stone out of her father, he’d nearly laid an egg.

“Kidnapping? Are you kidding me? No way. I’m out of this.”

She had to remind him that he’d already committed a number of crimes, both state and federal, to get him to go along. “It’s this way, Bart. Your name could be called to the police, and then what would you do? I will be back in Tel Aviv, but you will still be in Des Moines.”

She’d had to plan the whole thing by herself, spotting and tagging Case, while Kohl sat next to her in the passenger seat of his van, twisting his hands and drilling into her head like a woodpecker.

Zahavi had Case’s address, which turned out to be a small house on the south side of Minneapolis, near a creek or small river. When they spotted it, the house was dark. Zahavi told Kohl to pull into the driveway, and she walked up to the front door and knocked… and saw the lights of a security system.

Not too large a problem, she thought — especially if Case never got to it.

“Now, we have to be very careful,” she told Kohl. “There may be cameras, there may be security patrols. We must keep moving.”

Kohl said, “This is the end. The end of everything I’ve worked for. The end of all my dreams. My father said, ‘You’re an American, you’re not an Israeli. Stop pretending.’ Did I listen to him? Oh, no. I had to go to Israel. I had to sign up with the Interest Group. Interest Group? I thought I’d be giving lectures in Omaha, on Masada and Yad Vashem. Maybe I’d meet some nice young girls with small noses and low morals. But no — I have to go around and buy guns.”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up…”

“And no, it’s not just an Interest Group, it’s a Mossad Interest Group. No young girls with small noses for you, Bart Kohl. No, it’s some meshugenah bitch with a nine-millimeter.”

Enough to drive her out of her goddamn mind, and she considered the possibility of standing him on the shoulder of a highway and unloading that 9mm into him.

Not really. She needed him.

They watched the house for six hours, almost until midnight. Zahavi was thinking of calling it off — the neighborhood was very quiet, but they’d seen a couple of police patrol cars, moving slowly, looking for trouble.

Then Case showed up; and they were right behind her.

“Pull over,” Zahavi said. She got a gunnysack out of the back, purchased that afternoon at a Home Depot.

“Oh, Jesus,” Kohl said, “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”

“And give me the tape.”

“Please God, help me.” But he handed her the role of duct tape, with the end pulled free and folded back on itself, to make a handy tab.

Case pulled up to the garage door, which was automatic. A light came on inside, and the door began to go up. Kohl pulled to the side of the road, at the front of the house, as they’d planned, and Zahavi got out in the dark, with the bag. Case pulled into the garage. Zahavi took another look around, and moved.

Case parked, and the garage door started down. Zahavi slipped into the garage with the bag, heard Case get out of the car, humming a little tune. Zahavi was at the Jeep’s fender when Case, still humming, thumbed through her keys for the door—

Zahavi stepped up behind her and threw the bag over her head and dragged her to the floor, straddled her. Case was trying to scream, but instead made choking sounds, just as Zahavi had seen in a training film, and before she could actually scream, Zahavi hit her twice, in the head, with an open palm, stunning blows, and then Zahavi pulled the tape loose and began looping it around Case’s head. Case began to fight, but it was too late, and too confusing, with the tape going on. Zahavi taped her up like a slow calf at the local rodeo, all the way down to her ankles.

The overhead light went out, and she started, listening, but couldn’t hear anything but the muffled groans from Case.

She checked the tape, as best she could in the dark, then opened the garage’s access door and waved Kohl into the driveway. He pulled in, and together they wrestled the struggling woman into the back of their van. She looked, Kohl thought, like a giant joint in a stoner film.

“You didn’t have to hurt her?” Kohl asked, a pleading note in his voice.

“I might have had to slap her a couple of times,” Zahavi said, with evident satisfaction.

“Another felony,” Kohl said. He began to weep. “Oh, Jesus…”

“Pick another God,” Zahavi said. “And slow down. Slow down. We do not hurry.”

Case struggled and cried and begged, and was echoed by Kohl, but they made it out of town and south on I-35. They’d rented a hotel room, but it was two hours away, and they needed to drive circumspectly. A police stop would really have been the end. An hour south, they got off the interstate and turned east, cruising comfortably across the countryside in the dark. Case had gone quiet.

They arrived at the hotel, on the outskirts of the City of Rochester, after two o’clock. They had the two end units, and smuggled Case into the room at the far end.

“I’m going home,” Kohl announced.

“Oh, no. No, no, no, no…”

“Please don’t hurt me,” Case begged, from inside the bag.

“No going home now,” Zahavi said to Kohl. “Too late for that.”

She sounded pleased with herself.

Virgil was asleep before midnight. With the unconscious sleep-time clock that ran in the back of his head, he knew he’d been down for quite a while when he started dreaming that he was feeding automobile scrap into a hammer mill, and that garbage cans were falling down a stairway, that a Caribbean steel drum band was playing in his backyard….

Then his eyes cracked open and he heard all of that, plus somebody screaming, “Virgil! Virgil! Get up, Virgil.”

Virgil rolled out of bed, grabbed his jeans, started pulling them on as he stumbled to the front door. Somebody was pounding on the aluminum screen door, and they were panic-stricken. He got to the door, flicked on the porch light, and saw the bald head of his across-the-street neighbor, Robbie. He pulled his jeans up the last two inches and popped the door.

Robbie shouted at him, “Your garage is on fire.”

“What?” He didn’t comprehend that for a split second, and Robbie screamed again and pointed to his left, and Virgil saw the flickering light in the side yard.

He thought, The boat!

Virgil turned and bolted back through the house, into the kitchen, yanked open the cabinet under the kitchen sink, pulled out his fire extinguisher, ran through the mudroom, out the back door — barefoot — and around to the side of the garage.

An oval of flame was licking up the clapboard siding, and Robbie came running around from the front and shouted, “I called the fire department, they’re coming. Where’s your hose?”

Virgil shouted back, “On the other side of the back steps, it’s already connected,” and Robbie ran toward the steps. Virgil pulled the pin on the fire extinguisher and squeezed the handle, and foam began blowing out into the flames.

He could knock down the flames for a few seconds, but when he moved on to another section, the fire returned to the first, but he continued hosing it down, making some progress, and kept thinking about the boat: the boat was inside, his pride and joy, a like-new Ranger Angler, with a couple of years yet to go on the financing.

Robbie came running back, and Virgil realized the other man was still in his pajamas, and he was dragging the hose and turned the nozzle and fired it into the flames. The fire extinguisher ran out of foam and Virgil grabbed the hose and moved in close and Robbie shouted, “Watch your feet,” and, “Here’s the fire department.”

The firemen came at a run, pulling hose, and hammered the fire with a flood of foam that the fire couldn’t compete with: in less than a minute, it was gone, but Virgil shouted, “We gotta look inside.”

He got the garage door up, but there was no fire inside. He started to step inside and a fireman caught his arm, held him back. “Don’t do that, there might have been some structural weakening.”

Virgil walked back out, calmer now, and asked, “What the hell happened?”

“Did you have gasoline out here or something? I can smell gas,” a fireman said.

“There was no gas out here,” Virgil said. “There’s a can in the garage… still there, right by the lawn mower.”

“Hate to say it,” said another fireman. “It looks like a Molotov cocktail. Like somebody threw one at the side of the garage.” He pointed to the top of the oval. “It broke there. Splattered, ran down the wall.”

“He’s a cop,” Robbie said.

The second fireman said, “That could explain—”

Virgil said, “Yeah but…” And the thought struck him. “Ah, shit,” he said, and he turned and ran back into the house, to the study.

The stone was gone.

Virgil felt like screaming, but he didn’t. The first thing he did was look around, to make sure he hadn’t simply moved it, and had forgotten about it, but he hadn’t, and he knew that when he looked. Then he went to the tracker pad: no sign of Ellen’s car.

But it had to be Ellen, one way or the other. Nobody else, other than Davenport and Yael, knew that the stone was in his house. He tried to call her, but after five rings, her phone sent him to the answering service. He left a simple message: “Call me when you get this, and I may not go for a warrant for your arrest on charges of arson, burglary, grand theft, and aggravated assault.”

He took no satisfaction from the message: he’d warned everyone, several times, that they were playing with fire, and virtually every one of them had ignored him.

Back outside, the firemen were cleaning up, and the man in charge told him that the damage had been minimal, and confined to the garage siding. There were no structural problems, and the boat was untouched. “Not to say that it wasn’t serious. If your neighbor hadn’t seen it go up, and you guys hadn’t gotten out there, the roof would have caught and then it’d have been Katie-bar-the-door.”

When the firemen and the rubbernecking neighbors had drifted away, and Virgil had thanked and re-thanked Robbie, the guy who’d seen the fire, called 911, and come to help — he’d send him a couple cases of Leinie’s Summer Shandy at the first chance — he went back inside the house and kicked an unfortunate wastebasket. He was a knot of frustration, four o’clock in the morning and nobody he could really call, or anything he could effectively do.

But sleep was impossible. Eventually, figuring that if he was up, everybody else should be, too, he cleaned up, and at four-thirty in the morning, drove to the Holiday Inn and woke up Sewickey. Sewickey came to the door looking stunned, and Virgil sensed that it wasn’t an act. “We’re having a meeting at eight o’clock in in the back room at Custard’s. Be there.”

Sewickey, confused, looked around at the parking lot, and then up in the sky, and finally asked, “What the heck time is it?”

He got a similar reaction from Bauer, who was at the Downtown Inn. Yael, however, was awake and staring at the television, still jet-lagged.

“The stone is gone?”

“Meeting at eight o’clock,” he said.

“But why would I take the stone? I had the stone.”

“Eight o’clock,” Virgil said.

The Turks were gone, but he drove to Awad’s apartment and pounded on the door until Awad opened it. He was wearing what appeared to be black velvet pajamas and yet another stunned expression.

Virgil said, “Invite me in?”

Awad looked over his shoulder and said, in a loud voice, “Of course, you are the police.”

Virgil stepped inside, and saw a sheet and blanket crumpled on the floor next to the couch. He nodded at the bedroom door and raised an eyebrow, and Awad nodded.

Virgil stepped over to the bedroom door and knocked: “This is the state police. Please come out. Now.”

A voice from inside: “Why?”

“We’re having a conversation about the Solomon stone, and you need to be in it.”

The door opened and an elderly gray-bearded man edged out. He was wearing Jockey briefs that were way too long in the crotch, and a white V-necked T-shirt. “What have I done?”

“I don’t know,” Virgil said. “Now: the two of you. You’ve been under surveillance. I know you’re trying to buy the stone. You should know that I had the stone until earlier this evening, when my garage was firebombed and the stone was stolen while I was fighting the fire. So. We are having a meeting at eight o’clock at Custard’s Last Stand.”

And so on.

With some sense of righteous revenge — everybody was now awake and either frightened or worried — he headed back toward his house, but then thought, Ma.

Ellen and Ma had some kind of friendly relationship. Was it possible that Ma had stolen the stone? He continued past his house and out into the countryside, to Ma’s house, pulled into the driveway and pounded on the door until lights went on.

Ma came to the door, peeked past a curtain, then opened the door. She was holding a Remington autoloading shotgun. “Virgil?”

“At eight o’clock…”

By the time he’d finished the rounds, it was almost six. He called Ellen again, and again got switched to the answering service — but the phone was ringing a half-dozen times before he was switched, so it wasn’t turned off. She was either not hearing the ring, or was ignoring it. He called her every half hour until he got to Custard’s at five minutes after eight, and never got an answer. Was she on the run?

Custard’s back room was usually reserved for cardplayers, but they never started until ten, so it was clear at eight. The meeting got held up because Sewickey, who arrived early, had ordered pancakes and bacon, and then Awad showed up with his Hezbollah associate, whose name was Adabi al-Lubnani, who ordered pancakes but got French toast by mistake, but was impressed by the name, and so accepted it; and by the time Virgil got there, everybody was fussing over food, and who had the ketchup and was there more syrup, except Ma, who was hunched over Tag Bauer, big-eyed about his television show. And not only big-eyed, Virgil thought sourly, as he tracked Bauer’s eyes down to her cleavage.

He called the meeting to order by rapping on a water glass, and said, “This is gonna be short. I know you all want this stone, but as I keep telling everybody, if you buy it, you’ll be violating a large number of laws. Do all of you understand this? That you could go to prison? I’d like a show of hands by those who understand this.”

They all raised their hands.

Virgil said, “Further. For those with the money — I’m looking at you, Bauer, and you, Mr. al-Lubnani — there are some extremely suspicious circumstances involving the discovery of the stone, and its removal from Israel. If you wanted to bet me, I’d take either side of a fifty-fifty bet that the stone is a fake. Do you really want to spend, what, hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars for something that turns out to be a fake? I don’t think so.”

They all nodded into their pancakes, and al-Lubnani muttered something to Awad, who also nodded.

Virgil said, “You all know now that somebody firebombed my garage last night and stole the stone. I am beyond being pissed off. So I’m telling you: this is now personal, and you do not want to get in the way. Go home. I’m telling you: Go home. Everybody who understands that, raise your hand.”

They all raised their hands, and Sewickey yawned.

Virgil: “You’re yawning, Sewickey. You think I’m joking?”

“No, I don’t,” Sewickey said. “I’ll talk to you about it in private. About the yawn.”

Virgil looked at him for a moment, then said, “Right.” And to everybody else, “Go home. All of you. Go home.”

Then he turned and headed for the door, tipping his head, and said, “Sewickey.”

Sewickey followed him out into the main dining room and Virgil said, “The yawn?”

Sewickey pointed at an empty booth, and they sat facing each other, and Sewickey interlaced his fingers on the tabletop and said, “Virgil, you’re a likable guy, and I don’t want to see you or anybody else get hurt, but you don’t understand what’s going on here.”

“What don’t I understand? There’s this precious artifact—”

“You don’t understand that the stone isn’t especially important. It’s the idea of the stone, and what everybody can squeeze out of it. Blood, already,” Sewickey said. “But the authenticity, the preciousness, the power? Nobody here really cares about that. Well, maybe this Israel archaeologist does, but the rest of us don’t.”

“I’ve read these, uh, books about the power these kinds of things can accumulate,” Virgil ventured.

“Virgil, Virgil. It’s all crap. It’s a fuckin’ rock. Some lunatic killer three thousand years ago wrote a note on it, and then he died and nobody gave a shit what he said. The stone was probably part of a fence or a foundation or something. Maybe a chopping block, and used when they cut the heads off pigeons.”

“Then, what—”

“It’s all about us. About me and Bauer and the Hezbollah and the Israelis. We aren’t going home. We can’t. We need this thing.”

“So you don’t even care about—”

“Virgil, listen. It’s all crazier than a bucket of drunk rattlesnakes, but we’ve all got our needs and they need to be tended to,” Sewickey said. “Bauer calls himself an investigative archaeologist, but you know what he majored in, in college?”

Virgil thought for a few seconds, then guessed, “Television?”

“Drama. He wants to be a movie star. But he needs this stone. All that bullshit about the planks from Noah’s Ark almost killed him off. Nobody believed him. That thing about getting the gopher wood at a Glendale gas station? That’s the truth of the matter.”

“The Hezbollah guy—”

“Al-Lubnani? You don’t really want to go back to the Hezbollah leadership and say, ‘Sorry, boys, that one kinda slipped off my plate,’” Sewickey said. “I mean, Virgil Flowers might put him in jail. The Hezbollah, on the other hand, will cut off his head with a chain saw. How hard will he think about that choice?”

Virgil regarded him for a moment, then said, “The Search for Hitler’s Heart? The True Cross?”

Sewickey winced, then said, “Look. I’ve got a small department. It’s me, an assistant professor, and two graduate students, funded by three rich oil and gas guys from Midland. You know what rich oil and gas guys want?”

“More oil and gas?”

“Well, yeah. But what they want from me is results. I pull down a hundred and fifty K from UT, get expense-paid trips to Istanbul and South America and Russia and a lot of other places, eat in some very good restaurants, get quoted on TV, especially in Midland, and occasionally get laid by undiscriminating museum ladies. If those rich guys go away, it’s back to Mr. Sewickey’s eighth-grade English in Bumfuck, Oklahoma. So: I won’t risk my neck for the stone — you can send it into space, for all I care — but I need those photos I lost, because I need to be the American authority on the stone. If I could get those pictures back, I’d sit in the hotel looking at the porn channel and eating fried pork rinds and wait out the… the… climax of all this, and then go on TV at the end of it and become the authority. Make those guys in Midland happy.”

“So…”

“So nobody’s going home.”

“That all sounds pretty cynical,” Virgil observed.

“Virgil, have you even bothered to look at the economy? Another seven years and I’ll have nailed down a substantial pension,” Sewickey said. “If I’m kicked out of UT before then, it’s thirty years of microwave dinners, thinning hair, and fattening waistline. I’ll have spent fifteen years wearing a fuckin’ string tie and these goddamned cowboy boots, for nothing.”

Virgil thought about that, then said, “Tell you what. You hole up in your room. I took a bunch of high-res photos of the stone last night, and I’m a pretty goddamned good photographer. You hole up, stay out of this, and I’ll get you a set.”

Sewickey brightened: “Deal. You got yourself a deal, Virgil.”

As he said that, Bauer emerged from the back room, trailed by Ma. Bauer asked, “What kind of a deal are we talking about?”

“Mr. Sewickey has agreed to withdraw from pursuit of the stone,” Virgil said.

Bauer: “Really? Hard to believe. Once he gets his teeth into a project, he’s a regular Chihuahua.”

Sewickey half stood: “You want me to rattle a few of your fake pearly whites, wristwatch boy?”

Virgil: “Stop that.”

They stopped it, and Ma said to Virgil, “You’re getting pretty authoritarian, you know that?” and Virgil said, “Shut up, Ma,” and she said, “Oh, no, I kinda like it. Gives me little shivers,” and one way or another, thirty seconds later they all rolled together out the front door of the restaurant, and somebody yelled, “There they are!”

Somebody else screamed, “Virgil Flowers: Is it true somebody firebombed your house and stole the stone?”

Fifteen television people stampeded toward them, five of them with cameras on their shoulders.

Sewickey and Bauer surged past him, but the reporters ignored them and closed on Virgil. Virgil gave them one minute of noncommittal answers, and then said, “That’s all I got.”

As he stepped back, the cameras still on him, his phone rang. He took it out of his pocket and looked at the screen.

Davenport.

Virgil said, “Ah, shit,” and to the TV people, “You can quote me on that.”