David Koepp - Cold Storage

Because he could not help himself, he spoke.

“Wait, what?”

She smiled. “Thank you. That was bizarre and cool.”

Without another word she turned away and started climbing back up the ladder toward the top.

Teacake grinned. Some things you just couldn’t call.

“So are you, lady.”

He shoved the flashlight back in his pocket and followed her. He smiled all the way up, and he did not look at her ass, not even one time.

The moment he pulled onto the base, Roberto knew that Abigail hadn’t called Gordon Gray after all. If she had, they wouldn’t have stopped him at the back gate on Andrews and sent him around to the main entrance on Pope. He wouldn’t have had to wait ten minutes for the two base security lunkheads to put him in a jeep and drive him to the runway, and STRATCOM certainly would not have put him in the care of the 416th Fighter Squadron, with a priority clearance and a passenger manifest that showed up on every screen in Omaha.

Gordon would have moved with speed and with stealth. Roberto would have taken off fifteen minutes ago on an already scheduled flight of the 916th Air Refueling Wing, just another retired officer hitching a free ride west to see the kids. He would have been the kind of old duffer the pilots barely even notice and certainly don’t chart. Instead, he was alone in the back of a C-40A, as obvious and traceable as the air force could possibly make him.

Darn it. It was such a good speech to Abigail too; he’d really thought he’d put the fear of God into her. Six or seven minutes after takeoff, the phone rang in the burnished walnut cabinet next to his absurdly comfortable leather chair, and he picked it up.

“Hello.”

“Designator, please?”

“I had such high hopes for you, Abigail.”

“Could you please tell me your designator?”

“I guess I might have done the same thing at your age. All right, we can recover. Makes everything a little harder, but we’ll fix it.”

She hung up.

Of course, he’d known she’d hang up. She had to. He was just having a little fun with her. He had to admit, even though he was tired and even though the fate of everybody he could possibly think of was hanging in the balance, it was nice to feel useful again. Retirement had been a little disorienting so far. He’d looked forward to it for years, but he hadn’t really prepared. He knew deep down that all the work on the house had been something of a dodge. And now even that was done. You can’t just go from forty years of movement and activity and forced but enjoyable camaraderie with an unbelievably varied cast of characters from all over the world to—well, sitting in a chair. Not overnight, and not without motion-induced nerve damage from the sudden stop. No matter how nice the chair is. He adored his wife, any day spent in conversation with her was a good day by him, but a person’s got his habits, and Roberto Diaz was used to being in motion.

The phone rang again. He was still holding it, so he tapped the button with his thumb and answered midway through the first ring. He spared her the fucking around this time.

“Zero-four-seven-four blue indigo.”

“Thank you.”

“ Qué pasó, Abigail? I was very specific.”

“Is there a problem with the transport? My screen has you over Fayetteville already.”

“You didn’t call Gordon Gray,” he said.

“He was unavailable.”

“Of course he’s unavailable, it’s two A.M., everybody’s unavailable, until they aren’t. You found me, I’m sure you could have—”

“Mr. Gray passed away in January.”

His brain processed that statement in three distinct steps. The first two were achingly familiar, because they’d happened so often over the past ten years. Step one was the absorption of the information. Gordon Gray was dead. The man who had once refused to cross a casino picket line out of moral principle was gone. “Gordon,” Roberto had said at the time, “you’re drunk as a skunk, you’re gambling with your rent money, you just broke a guy’s nose because he stepped on your foot, and you’re in Las Vegas. Why exactly are you making a stand here?”

Gordon had just smiled at him and shrugged. “I’m full of contradictions.”

There were a thousand other memories, most of them far less benign, but that was how he always chose to remember Gordon, as a pretty amusing bundle of nonmatching character traits. Now that particular molecular combination of soul and folly no longer existed. Once Roberto forgot about that endearing moment in Las Vegas, it would be gone into the ether. It would never have occurred. That was step one, the sudden and vertiginous emptiness of death.

Step two came close on the heels of that feeling, and it was compassion. He was sad about the hole that Gordon’s death must have left behind with his family, his friends, his brothers and sisters in arms. Roberto now had some people to belatedly console, a few phone calls to make.

And that was what brought on step three, which was an entirely new thought, one he hadn’t had with any friend’s death till this moment. Roberto had the grim feeling that he’d just moved into a new phase of proximity to death. Because no one had called him to say, “Gordon’s dead.” When you’re young, the reaction is “Holy shit, so-and-so is dead, can you believe it?” Then you get older and start glancing at the obituaries to see if there’s anybody you know in there, but that stage doesn’t come as a surprise, because every middle-aged person you’ve ever met tells you they do that. Then, when you’re older still, starts the sad litany of phone calls coming in as nature’s sniper starts picking off your friends and family one by one. You buy a funeral suit and then a couple of different ties for it so you don’t have to wear the same thing every time. You get used to all that.

But this thing, this was brand new—at sixty-eight, Roberto had reached the age where somebody died and nobody called, not because they didn’t care, but because it’s Too Fucking Depressing.

That was a new one.

He didn’t say any of this to Abigail. To her he said, “I see.”

“In January,” she repeated.

“Who did you call instead?”

A man’s voice answered for her. “Thank you, Belvoir, you can clear the line.”

Roberto kicked himself for imagining they’d been alone on the line. Only a few years out and his edges had been dulled already. There was a faint click as Abigail disconnected, and Roberto could hear the colonel breathing on the other end.

“Hello, Roberto.”

“Hey, Jerabek, how’s that rash?”

“Your wife said put some cream on it, it’s fine now.”

Why did men talk like this to each other? Why not just agree to meet up and punch each other in the face until they felt better about things?

Jerabek went on, enjoying the role reversal. When Roberto had retired, the colonel had moved up, and that was the spot from which he looked down at this time. “I thought you put this one to bed thirty years ago.”

“Apparently it woke up,” Roberto said.

“Sounds like a broken thermistor to me.”

“That would be nice to think.”

“I’ll be frank with you, Roberto. You’re on that airplane as a gesture of respect to Gordon Gray. No other reason.”

Again, why the fuck had no one called to tell him Gordon was dead? People sucked.

“Threat assessment and sober report. That’s what I want, and that’s all I want. Clear?”

“Gotcha,” Roberto said. “Hey, you got a cell number for Loeffler?”

“See, you’re saying that to irritate me, Roberto, and I understand. I would do the same thing. That is the sort of jocular back-and-forth I so enjoy with you. But I’m not kidding around. This is going to go quietly and quickly. Assess and report. No off-the-books stuff.”