Brett Battles - No Return

But the driver of the sedan had made a mistake. He was hanging too far back.

Wes took a left, then sped to the end of the block, and turned left again before the sedan had even made the first turn. Two intersections on, he turned right and knew he’d lost his pursuer. Just to be sure, though, he made several more random turns.

The sedan made no reappearance.

A couple minutes later he spotted the old Carl’s Jr. where Lars had worked in high school. It was as good a choice as anywhere else, so he turned into the lot and parked. He grabbed the papers out of the storage compartment and headed inside.

After he got a soda, he took a seat in a booth near the back, set his drink out of the way, and placed the papers on the table.

The top page was some sort of personnel information sheet. In the upper right corner was a black-and-white photograph of Lieutenant Adair. It was the same photo the newspaper had run. To the left was the kind of information you would expect: name, birth date, height, weight, education. Oddly, the line for current address was blank. Under “Family” was written: “Wife-Stacey. Children-Darla, Rachel.” Each name had a corresponding birth date.

Below that was a list of military postings. Most were configurations of numbers and letters that Wes didn’t recognize. Fleets designations? Maybe squadrons?

There were several more sections. “Rank History.” “Commendations.” “Special Training.” Most contained few entries or none at all.

By the lack of information, Wes would have assumed Lieutenant Adair had been only an average officer at best. But there was no such thing as an average fighter pilot.

More confused now than he’d been when he’d started reading, he set the sheet to the side and looked at the second page. Printed on it was a description of a weapons system the F-18 had been equipped with during its ill-fated flight, called SCORCH. Wes didn’t understand most of the technical jargon, but what he did understand was that the SCORCH system had been integrated into the operating system of the plane itself.

The third page, as far as he could tell, had nothing to do with Adair at all. It concerned something known as Project Pastiche.

PROJECT PASTICHE

Project Pastiche is based at the Pentagon. All inquires concerning the project should be made through Admiral Nolan Barker in Naval Operations. All further information is classified

.

PP-214

The only other information was an initiation date of two years previous. Why Lars had thought it was important was lost on Wes.

He started to set the page down, then stopped and looked at it again.

PP-214 .

He picked up the personnel sheet, then looked at the list of Adair’s previous postings. There it was at the bottom. Adair’s very first posting: PP-214.

Did that mean Adair had been part of Project Pastiche?

He looked back at the project sheet, specifically at the initiation date, and frowned. The dates didn’t line up. Adair’s service in PP-214 was listed as occurring prior to when Project Pastiche had been in existence.

Maybe the designation was used for more than one thing? That didn’t sound very organized, and if the Navy was one thing, it was organized.

Not sure how the pieces fit together, he put the pages to the side and took a look at the last sheet. On it were two lists.

PP-214 Personnel

Barker, Nolan

Admiral

Lorang, Kyle

Commander

Operations

Butler, Thomas

Lieutenant

Computer Technician

Karner, Kenneth

Lieutenant

Computer Technician

West, Thomas

Lieutenant

Computer Technician

PP-214 Pool 7B

Lemon, Theodore

Lieutenant

Complete

Faith, Brian

assign

Available

Briley, Donnel

Lieutenant

Complete

Adair, Lawrence

Lieutenant

Complete

Bruce, Cameron

assign

Available

So Adair was tied to Project Pastiche. But what did “Pool 7B” mean? And how were those in it different from those listed under “Personnel”?

As Wes was trying to make sense of everything, his gaze strayed over to the papers he’d already examined. Something on the second sheet caught Wes’s attention. It was near the top. A short, almost invisible crease.

No, not quite a crease.

He flipped the page over. On the back was a word written in blue ink. With everything that had happened, Wes had forgotten Lars had taken the sheet back and written something on it. He had said it was “the key.”

The word was “Jamieson.” It meant nothing to Wes. Sure, it was a name. But was it a first or last? Or even the name of a place? Perhaps it was a project designation.

Whatever the case, it was just one more piece of the puzzle, and try as Wes might, there wasn’t enough in any of the papers for him to get a grasp of what it all meant.

He needed a computer, but not just any computer. It had to be one that wouldn’t bring Commander Forman straight to him while he was using it.

Unless …

He stared out the window, thinking for a moment, then nodded to himself.

Casey .

He started to grab his cellphone, then stopped. After Lars’s paranoia the night before had proven justified, Wes didn’t know if he could trust his phone to make the call. What he needed was a landline no one could tie him to.

It only took him a couple seconds to come up with a solution for that, too.

The man in the sedan was already exiting the Desert Rose parking lot when he saw Stewart race out ahead of him on his motorcycle. The watcher didn’t let that stop him, though. He had things to do, and Stewart wasn’t his concern for the moment. Still, he kept his pace slow so that he wasn’t accidentally spotted.

He was surprised when Stewart made the same turn off China Lake Boulevard he needed to make, but decided not to change his plans, so he made the turn, too.

It was when Stewart increased his speed and took a sudden turn to the left that the man realized that Stewart had indeed seen him. It was an annoyance more than a problem. The distance between them was too great for Stewart to have seen the man’s face.

Laughing as he passed the street Stewart had disappeared on, the man continued on his way west, beyond the city limits. When he reached the familiar dirt road, he turned left, automatically slowing to a near crawl to keep the washboard surface from rattling his car into a pile of useless scrap.

The lots in this area were each two and a half acres, though many had been joined together to create five-acre desert kingdoms. The driveway the man turned down led onto one of these larger parcels.

Near the rear of the property was a light gray one-story house. It hadn’t always been that color. When the man had painted it twenty-five years earlier, it had been light blue, but the desert sun had burned most of the tint out. He could have repainted it, but that would have been too much work for a place he seldom visited anymore.

He swung the sedan around, then backed it up so that the trailer hitch on the rear was only a few feet from the empty horse trailer parked underneath the attached carport. When the time came, it would only take him a couple minutes to hook them together.

Once inside, he headed straight for the kitchen, pulled a bottle of Gatorade out of the ancient refrigerator, then made his way to the bedroom that had once been his as a child.

On the floor was the duffel bag containing his clothes. He changed shirts, then glanced at the uncomfortable blow-up mattress in the corner. He was tired, sure, but not quite that tired yet. God, he couldn’t wait until he was back in his cozy bed at home, his wife beside him. But there was work still to be done, so that little pleasure would have to wait.