A Maidens Grave

and whispered, “What’s hold?”
    Tobe took the phone from her and tapped it with a fingernail, then handed it to LeBow. Potter winked at her.
    Again LeBow inhaled and said, “Creswell here.”
    “Hey, Don. You don’t know me.”
    A brief pause. “This is that fellow the FBI called me about? Louis Handy?”
    “Yeah, this’s that fellow. Tell me, is this bullshit he’s feeding me? It is, isn’t it?”
    Pudgy, benign Henry LeBow snapped, “Well, sir, I’ll tell you, it’s more bullshit for me. ’Cause frankly it’s making my life pure hell. I got sixty planes an hour coming into our airspace and this’s going to mean rerouting close to three-quarters of them. And that’s just the commercial flights. I told the agent no way at first but he’s a grade-A pain in the ass, and a FBI pain in the ass to boot. He told me he’d fuck up my life royal if I don’t do exactly what you want. So, yeah, it’s bullshit but, yeah, I’m going to give him what he asked for.”
    “What the fuck is that, exactly?”
    “Didn’t he tell you? An M-4 priority airspace clearance straight into western Ontario.”
    Good job, Henry, Potter thought, his eyes on Melanie’s silhouette.
    “A what?”
    “It’s the highest priority there is. It’s reserved for Air Force One and visiting heads of state. We call it ‘papal clearance’ because it’s what the Pope gets. Now listen, you might want to write this down. What you have to do is make sure the helicopter pilot shuts off the transponder. He’ll point it out to you and you can shut it off or smash it or whatever, and we won’t be able to track you on radar.”
    “No radar?”
    “That’s part of the M-4. We do that so radar-seeking missiles can’t lock onto a dignitary’s jet.”
    “The transponder. I think I heard about them. How long do we have?”
    LeBow looked at Potter, who held up eight fingers.
    “We can keep the airspace open for eight hours. After that there’s too much commercial traffic and we’d have to rewrite the airspace requirements.”
    “Okay. Do it.”
    “It’s being done. It’ll be effective in, let me see . . .”
    Potter held up two fingers.
    “About two hours.”
    “Fuck that. One hour tops, or I kill this pretty little thing next to me.”
    “Oh, my God. Are you seri—? Well, sure. One hour. But I need a full hour. Only please, mister, don’t hurt anybody.”
    Handy’s cold chuckle came through the speaker. “Hey, Don, lemme ask you a question.”
    “Sure.”
    “You in Topeka right now?”
    Silence in the room.
    Potter’s head turned away from the window, stared at LeBow.
    “Sure am.”
    Potter snapped his fingers and pointed to LeBow’s computer. The intelligence officer’s eyes went wide and he nodded. He punched silent buttons. The message came on: “Loading Encyclopedia.” The words blinked repeatedly.
    “Topeka, huh?” Handy said. “Nice place?”
    Loading  . . . loading  . . .
    Come on, Potter thought desperately. Come on!
    “I like it.”
    The screen went blank; at last a colorful logo appeared. LeBow typed madly.
    “How long you been there?”
    How calm Handy sounds, Potter reflected. Holding a gun to a girl’s eye and he’s still working all the angles, cool as can be.
    “About a year,” LeBow ad-libbed. “You work for Uncle Sam, they move you around a lot.” He typed rapidly. His fingers stopped. An error message appeared. “Invalid Search Request.”
    The more urgent the task  . . .
    He started again. Finally a map and text appeared and in the corner of the screen a color photo of a skyline.
    “Imagine they do. Like that FBI agent who called you. Andy Palmer. He must move a bunch too.”
    LeBow took a breath to answer but Potter scrawled on a sheet of paper, “Don’t respond to name.”
    “Hell, I’d guess so.”
    “That is his name, right? Andy?”
    “I think so. I don’t remember. He just told me the code that let me know it was a real call.”
    “You got codes? That you use like spies?”
    “You know, sir, I really oughta get on this project for you.”
    “What’s that river there?”
    “In Topeka, you mean?”
    “Yeah.”
    LeBow leaned forward and read the blurb about the city. “The Kaw, you mean. The Kansas River. The one cuts the town in half?”
    “Yeah. That’s it. Used to go fishing there. Had a uncle lived in that old neighborhood. It was all la-di-da, fancy old houses. Cobblestoned roads, you know.”
    Henry LeBow was sitting so far forward he was in