Shock Wave

said.
     
     
    BY THE TIME HE FINISHED with Butz, it was five o’clock and people were going to dinner. He hadn’t gotten any closer to identifying the bomber, but he was getting the lay of the land, Virgil thought. He went back to the Holiday Inn, set his clock for six, and took a nap.
    At two minutes to six, he rolled out, turned the alarm off before it had a chance to start beeping at him, went in the bathroom and brushed his teeth. Then he sat on the bed and called Davenport, told him about the trip to Michigan, and also about the market research idea.
    Davenport approved of the trip and was interested in the market research concept. “Let me run it by a couple of computer people. I think it’s worth a try, if we’re confident that people would try to tell the truth. Probably every high school kid would nominate one of his teachers.”
    “It could get messy, but if you got enough people to participate . . . Lots of smart people around, and they all know each other.”
    “You know what would be even better?” Davenport asked. “If you charged ten dollars per person to make a suggestion, and then the winners divide up the pot. Give them some incentive to be right.”
    “Jeez, I dunno. Would that be legal?”
    “Why should I care? I’m not planning to do it,” Davenport said. “Anyway . . . I’d give it some more thought before you do anything. It’s interesting, but in a funky way. Maybe too funky.”
     
     
    VIRGIL SAID HE’D CALL if anything broke, rang off, put a couple of clean shirts, a fresh pair of jeans, and some socks in a duffel bag, along with his dopp kit, sunglasses, laptop, and pistol, threw it all in the truck, and drove out to the airport.
    A black SUV was arriving just as he did, and Marie Chapman got out, carrying nothing but an oversized purse.
    “An adventure,” she said.
    “Adventures are what you have when you screw up,” Virgil said.
    “Been there,” she said, “and done that.”

9
    P YE’S PILOT was a reassuringly square-chinned, gray-haired man wearing a military-style olive-drab nylon flight jacket over a blue canvas shirt, jeans, with brown leather boots and a long-billed blue hat that said “Pye” in white script. The copilot was a square-chinned man with salt-and-pepper hair, also reassuringly aviator-like, in the same flight jacket, canvas shirt, jeans, boots, and hat, which Virgil took as a uniform dreamed up by a designer with delusions of manhood.
    The plane itself was larger than Virgil expected, a blue Gulfstream 550 with the same white “Pye” script as the pilots’ hats. A cabin attendant, an Asian woman in a jade business dress, was putting together a meal in a forward galley when Virgil climbed aboard; she asked, “Something to drink after takeoff ?”
    “Diet Coke?” Virgil asked.
    Chapman said, “The usual.”

    CHAPMAN SAID THAT the interior of the plane had been customized for long-distance trips; that Pye was expanding in Latin America and Asia, and that they traveled twenty weeks of the year. “He’s pushing really hard, because he’s got nothing else to do. Willard’s wife died six years ago. He’s never gotten over it. He told me that he still talks to her at night, when he goes to bed.”
    “That’s tough,” Virgil said; though he really had no idea.
    Chapman showed him two private sleeper cabins in the back, with fold-down beds; the center of the plane was taken up with six seats that could be swiveled into a meeting formation, with a folding desk that could be swiveled in front of each. The plane had Wi-Fi and electrical plug-ins for laptops.
    Forward of the cabin door, but behind the pilot’s cockpit, was the galley, and a long folding chair for the cabin attendant.
     
     
    THE PILOT CALLED BACK to suggest that they take their seats, and Chapman said, “Come on, I want to show you something.” She led him back to the bedroom suites, leaving the door open behind her, then opened a smaller, shorter door that Virgil thought probably went back to the baggage compartment. Instead, he found himself on his knees in a four-foot-high, four-foot-long compartment.
    Chapman, kneeling beside him, said, “Pull on your side,” and Virgil helped peel back a thick plastic cover over two body-length windows set in the fuselage floor.
    “This is always a trip,” she said. “The idea is to lie down and look straight down while we take off. . . . It’s like flying.”
    And it was. Ten minutes later, they were off the ground, Virgil