David Baldacci: First Family

Fred cherished telling the story of how the Koasati had gotten their name. "It means lost tribe. Our people left here in two groups long ago. The first group left signs for the second group to follow. But along the Mississippi River, all signs from the first group disappeared. The second group continued on and met up with folks who didn't speak our language. Our people told them that they were lost. And in our language Koasai means 'we are lost.' So the folks wrote it down as my people being Koasatis, meaning the lost people."

Quarry, who'd heard this story about a dozen times, spoke up. "Well, Fred, to tell the truth, in some ways, we're all lost."

About an hour later, as the sun blazed down on them, filling the flimsy awning with furnace-like heat, Quarry rose, dusted off his pants, and tipped his hat at them, promising to come back soon. And he would bring a bottle of the good stuff and some corn on the cob and a bucket of apples. And smokes. They could not afford but liked the store-bought cigs over the rolled ones.

Fred looked up at him, his face even more leathery and wrinkled than Quarry's. He took the homemade cigarette out of his mouth, went through a protracted coughing spell, and then said, "Bring the unfiltered ones next time. They taste better."

"Will do, Fred."

Quarry drove on for a long way over dirt trails that were so rutted they knocked his old truck from side to side; the man barely took note. This was just how he lived.

The road ended.

There was the little house.

Actually, it was not really a house. No one lived there, at least not yet, but even if they did, it would never really be a place where anyone could live for an extended time. It was really just a room with a roof and a door.

Quarry turned and looked in each direction of the compass and saw nothing but dirt and trees. And the slice of Alabama blue sky of course that was prettier than any other sky Quarry had ever seen. Certainly nicer than the one in Southeast Asia, but then that horizon had always been filled with anti-aircraft fire aimed squarely at him and his U.S. Air Force-issued F-4 Phantom II.

He walked toward the structure and stepped up on the porch. He'd built the place himself. It wasn't on the Atlee property. It was several miles from there on a plot of land his granddaddy had bought seventy years ago and never done anything with, and for good reason. It was in the middle of nowhere, which fit Quarry's purposes just fine. His granddaddy must've been drunk when he bought this patch of dirt, but then the man had often been drunk.

The building was a mere two hundred and twenty-five square feet but it was large enough for his purposes. The only door was a standard three feet wide with no raised paneling and set on ordinary brass hinges. He used a key to unlock the door but did not go inside right away.

He'd built all four walls two and a quarter inches wider than was normal, though one would have to possess a keen eye to discern that construction anomaly. Encased behind the exterior walls were thick sheets of metal welded together, giving this little house incredible strength. He'd done the welding himself with his own acetylene Oxy-fuel welding flame torch. Each seam was a work of art. It would probably take a tornado landing right on top of the place to knock it over, and even that hammer of God still might not do it.

He let fresh air fill the place before he stepped inside. He'd made that mistake before and had almost passed out going from full oxygen on the outside to barely any on the inside. There were no windows. The floor was two-inch-thick wooden planks. He'd sanded the boards down fine; there wasn't a splinter anywhere. What there was, though, was an eighth-of-an-inch gap between each floorboard; again barely discernible to the naked eye.

The subfloor was also special. Quarry could say with great confidence that probably no other floor of any home in America had an underbelly such as the one he'd built here. The interior walls were covered in hand-applied plaster over chicken wire. The roof was tied down to the walls as tight as anything on an oceangoing tanker. He'd used incredibly strong bolts and fasteners to ensure strength and to prevent any settling or movement. The foundation was poured cement, but there was also a sixteen-inch-high wrapped-in-cement crawlspace that ran underneath the structure. That lifted the house up by the same amount, of course, but because of the porch it was hardly noticeable.

The furnishings were simple: a bed, a ladder-back chair, a battery-powered generator, and some other equipment, including an oxygen tank that sat against one of the walls. He stepped off the porch and turned to face his creation. Every mitered cut on the walls was perfect. He had often worked under the generator lights as he lined up the studs and joists on his sawhorses, his gaze a laser on the cut-line. It was hot, tiring work, but his limbs and mind had been driven with a determination wrought from the two strongest human emotions of all:

Hatred.

And love.

He nodded in appreciation. He had done good work. It was solid, as perfect as he was ever going to make it. It looked unexceptional, but it really was an extraordinary bit of engineering. Not bad for a boy from the Deep South who'd never even gone to college.

He looked to the west where in a tree shielded from both the burn of the sun and prying eyes was a surveillance camera. He had designed and built this too, because nothing he could afford was good or reliable enough. With a bit of careful pruning of leaves and branches the camera had a good sightline of all that needed to be seen here.

He'd notched out a hole and a long trench in the bark on the rear of the tree and run the cable feed from the camera down it, and then glued the bark strips back over it, concealing the line completely. On the ground he'd buried the cable and run it several hundred feet away from the tree, to a natural berm that also featured one man-made attribute.

There was another underground cable running from this same spot up to and under the little house inside a PVC pipe that Quarry had laid in before he'd poured the foundation. That cable line had a dual end splitter with more cable running in two routes off it. All of it was concealed behind lead sheathing he'd overlaid on the metal sheets in the wall.

He locked the door to the house and climbed back in his old Dodge. Now he had somewhere else to go. And it wasn't by pickup truck.

He looked up at that perfect Alabama sky. Nice day for a plane ride.

AN HOUR LATER the decades-old four-seat Cessna raced down the short runway and lifted into the air. Quarry looked out the side window and down as the end of his land raced by. Two hundred acres sounded like a lot but the fact was it wasn't much.

He flew low, keeping an eye out for birds, other planes, and the occasional chopper. He never filed a flight plan so a good lookout was essential.

An hour later he dipped down, landed softly on the tarmac of a private airstrip, and refueled the plane himself. There were no fancy corporate jets here. Just sheet-metal hangars with open fronts, a narrow strip of asphalt for a runway, a windsock, and aircraft like his, old, patched together, but looked after lovingly and with respect. And as cheap as the plane had been when he'd bought it thirdhand years ago, he couldn't have afforded to buy it today.

He'd been flying ever since he'd joined the Air Force and raced his sturdy F-4 Phantom over the paddy fields and dense waterlogged jungles of Vietnam. And then later over Laos and Cambodia dropping bombs and killing folks because he'd been ordered to in a phase of the war that he only found out later hadn't been officially authorized. Yet it wouldn't have mattered to him. Soldiers simply did what they were told. He wasn't second-guessing anything riding that high up while people were shooting at him.