Shock Wave

and Chapman lying side by side with their noses right on the window glass, and Chapman started laughing in delight as the plane banked in a tight turn to the east. They climbed quickly over the summer-green landscape, the trees below throwing long shadows like dark hands over the farm fields, the lakes as dark and hard as granite tiles set in a glowing green carpet.
    When they’d finished climbing out, Chapman said, “That’s the show,” and Virgil said, “You were right—it was like flying.” They went back to their seats, and the cabin attendant brought Virgil his Diet Coke, a martini with three olives for Chapman, and a paper menu.
    Virgil ordered a cheeseburger with fries and a chopped salad, and Chapman a salmon steak.
    “Hell, this is better than what we’d get in Butternut,” Virgil said, when the food came. “We ought to eat here every night.”
     
     
    AS THEY ATE, they chatted about the bombings, and Chapman got out a sketchbook and drew cartoon-like pictures of the Pye Pinnacle, to illustrate the problems a bomber would have getting in. “I’m not an expert on security, but we’ve had all kinds of experts there in the past two weeks. They all talked to Willard, and I took notes,” she said. “It’s almost like a locked-room mystery, but the problem is, how did the guy get in?”
    “I was an MP captain in the army, and a lot of MPs wind up guarding prisons,” Virgil told her. “I never did, but I took the course work, and we looked at a lot of prison escapes. The ways people get out of prison are amazing—and they mostly depend on sleight of hand, just like with magicians.”
    “Like what?”
    “Like guys disguising themselves as guards and walking out. Make the guard uniforms right in their cells. Another guy . . . See, when trucks come and go, the guards roll mirrors under them to make sure nobody has tied themselves onto the bottom. One guy made a folding papier-mâché box and spray-painted it brown and gray that looked like the underside of a Sysco truck. He tied himself on, with the box facing down. The guards looked at it, not expecting to see anything, and they didn’t, and waved the truck through. What the guy hadn’t figured out, though, was that the truck was traveling a long way, and by the time he got to where he was going, he was almost dead from carbon monoxide poisoning. They found him lying on the ground under the truck. He’d managed to cut himself down before he passed out. But, he got out.”
    “But they’ve got all these cameras at the Pinnacle.”
    “The point is, they see what happened, but they don’t understand it,” Virgil said.
    “The guys who were looking seemed smart,” Chapman said. “I think they would have made allowance for that.”
    “Maybe,” Virgil said. “But everybody knows magicians do tricks, and they still don’t see it. If you’re good enough . . . but who knows? Maybe it was an insider, who was cooperating with somebody from Butternut Falls. Did anybody look at the insiders and ask about relatives from Minnesota?”
    “That’s something I don’t know,” she said. “You’d have to ask Barlow.”
     
     
    THEY SPENT THE REST of the flight talking about how they’d gotten where they were—she’d worked as a reporter for a while, hadn’t liked the money, wrote for a couple of magazines as a freelancer, then caught on doing research for a Washington, D.C., public relations company, and worked for a Michigan congressman for a while. After a couple years with the congressman, she ghostwrote, for the congressman, a moderately successful book about Washington lobbying. The congressman introduced her to Pye, after Pye mentioned to him that he was looking for an unusual kind of assistant.
    She said, “When I was researching you , I found a lot of stuff about shoot-outs you’d been in, and then I found out you were a writer. You’ve even written for the New York Times Magazine .”
    “I have,” Virgil admitted. “I don’t like to talk about it, for fear of offending my straight friends.”
    “I read the articles,” she said. “You’re really good. Why would you continue to do . . . this?”
    “Because I like it. It’s extremely interesting,” Virgil said. “I like writing, too, but in small doses. Sitting in a room, alone, for six hours a day, like a full-time pro writer . . . that’s no way to go through life.”
    She was attractive, articulate, and liked to talk about writing: she made Virgil nervous. His