David Dun - Overfall

“When she returned, my father and grandparents told her I had died the day she left. Crib death, they said. Showed her an urn with my ashes. She totally believed it, and it really broke her down. She went back to the reservation, then on to the city and problems with drugs and alcohol, then back to the reservation and a dry-out facility. Then she spent time with her father and really changed. She went back to school, graduated. She is a psychologist and a spiritual leader in the tribe. When I found her and she saw me, she suspected who I was during my fumbling introduction. I mentioned my father and she started weeping.”

“She must have felt horribly betrayed.”

“It was hard for her to get over the hate.”

“I can imagine. Your dad raised you?”

“I lived mostly with his parents until I was ten; then he took me full-time.”

“And when you learned the truth you felt betrayed?”

“Horribly. But you deal with it.”

“Did you and your dad get along?”

“My dad taught me three things-self-reliance, self-control, and survival. He was special forces military.” Sam just smiled.

“Oh, I get it. It might give you away.”

“My dad did that until age thirty-seven, when he faked an accident so he could die so he wouldn’t have to retire and become an ambulance driver or something like that. He’d had knee troubles and his brand of special forces didn’t go much past forty anyway.”

“He killed himself?”

“Not what they called it, but that’s what he did.”

“I’m sorry.”

“When I was growing up, he put me through a tougher version of what he went through. We went on trips into the Alaskan wilderness, British Columbia, practically naked, and lived like animals. We climbed around on Mount Denali, scaled ice cliffs. He loved to tell me about all the schools he went to. There were at least nine. Combat diving, paratrooper, underwater egress, survival, special ops medicine. He knew I was more suited to academic school, using my mind. I think he was trying to sweat it out of me.”

“You never wanted to follow in his footsteps?”

“I never for a second considered the military.”

“You just don’t seem like a math nerd.”

“Well, Dad made sure I was big and strong and athletic. I got out a lot and-”

The drone of the seaplane provided a convenient escape from what was quickly becoming an embarrassing topic.

“Sam?”

“Yeah.”

“Did your father abuse you?”

“He didn’t hit me except with boxing gloves on. But he did things with a young kid that shouldn’t be done.”

“Like?”

“Like it’s time to go.”

“Sam…”

“I loved him. I respected him. But at the same time I pretty much lost him even before he died.”

“What do you mean?”

“In the winter I studied and played with my computer, primitive as it was in those days. I got totally enthralled with math and then computers and from about twelve on it was all I thought about. Any fun I had on the wilderness forays in the summer was blunted because it kept me from playing with computers. I was great with logic and math but not much else in school. I’m dyslexic and couldn’t read a book to save me. The math skills got me pretty far, though. The high schools didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to other subjects as far as I could tell. So I went off to the university young.”

“What university?”

“A good one. Doesn’t matter. Graduated at twenty and after that got some graduate degrees. Was out at twenty-four.”

“What graduate degrees?”

Sam smiled. “You’re narrowing it down.”

“Don’t be a jerk. You’ve told me this much. Now give.”

“Computer science. Tech stuff. Ph. D.”

“So you were at school a lot.”

“Yeah, from about twelve on I was the boy wonder. The real key was this professor I had. He took me under his wing. He’s the reason I did well in college. He figured out a way for me to read like a normal person, and after that I read fanatically.”

“And your son?”

Sam hesitated. “My son was killed. We were on a job. It was my fault.”

“What happened?”

“I’d rather not go into it now. Maybe another time.”

She waited a few seconds, looking for the plane. “Okay.”

In six hours Anna was out of Vancouver and on her way to New York.

After seeing her off in the studio’s Gulfstream IV, Sam climbed into a Hawker 700 for the trip to LA. The Hawker was an old workhorse business jet, worth maybe one-fifth as much as the plane that came for Anna. It was owned by Sam’s friend, who let him use it for a fee. Sam was a no-frills guy even when it came to his choice of jets.

At Sam’s request the pilots had been good enough to obtain some tobacco leaves and a humidor that originally came from a Cuban national who for years had supplied Sam.

Inside the jet things were posh and comfortable. The plane’s sidewalls were wood and, near the floor, carpet. On the ceiling and upper sidewalls it was two-tone, stitched leather. Sam settled into a seat with Atlas-sized armrests and watched the flight information display monitor for a couple of minutes before he cracked open his small tobacco box.

He could understand his friend’s wife not wanting their plane to smell like a cigar, even a good cigar, but there was no law against rolling one. Sam took a large unblemished tobacco leaf and rolled the smaller leaves and pieces inside it to make a loose facsimile of a real cigar. When he had it all carefully rolled, he stuffed it in a cigar tube and screwed on the lid. Sometime this week he would smoke it.

He picked up the sat phone built into the plane and called Paul.

“Hi,” Sam began.

“Well, well, well, you’re coming back to work. I heard you’ve got Jill back in the saddle. And Shohei called me.”

“It’s a particular assignment.”

“Hey, you know me. I’m in.”

Sam spent a solid forty minutes telling Paul the whole story.

“This could only happen to Sam the History Man,” Paul said when he was through asking questions. “Now let me get this straight. You’re telling me that Anna Wade doesn’t even know the rules?”

“No contract yet. I told her not to talk. She’s not fooling me. I figure she’ll go ask around about me. She’s a control freak.”

“From what you’ve told me she also has no sponsor.”

“We’ll fix that. Let’s see what she does.”

“From what you gleaned it sounds like she’s most likely to spill the beans to her ex or her boyfriend. We gonna need somebody in New York?”

“Oh, yeah. For protection, mainly, but also to keep the lid on any snooper stuff. Let’s impress her. We’ll find out a lot in the first few hours.”

They talked over the details of what they would need to do in the next twenty-four hours. It was a long list.

“Have Farris get the ESN number and the phone number on Anna’s cell. They’ve got the contacts, probably cost a few grand.”

“Use an oscillator?”

“Yeah. Record every word.”

“You’re gonna feel like a shit.”

“I know. Do you think I should call Typhony?” Sam asked, now satisfied that Paul understood.

“She’s one of the best researchers we ever had. She can make Big Brain sing songs and tell secrets. You already got one ex-lover back in the biz, why not two?”

“You think her boyfriend will be all right with it?” Sam said.

“Fiance, you mean. Yeah, I do. He’s a good guy.”

“There’s an undertone there.”

“No undertone. I just never figured out why you and she didn’t stay connected.”

“One of those mysteries.”

“Truth’s truth, Sam. Commitment bores you. That was Jill and that was Typhony. So you gonna call Typhony or am I?”