Storm Front

like a very large, old-fashioned cell phone and a wall charger. “Turn it on, keep it with you, and keep it charged. It’ll hold a charge for four days with normal use. It’ll work anywhere. If you need us, push one. If we need you, it’ll ring like a phone. Do not hesitate to call.”
    “I can do that,” Virgil said, and they all started packing their briefcases.
    —
    “I T ’ S HOT HERE ,” Moehl said conversationally, as they walked out of the FBO’s building. “I didn’t expect that.”
    “Gonna be a real scorcher tomorrow,” Virgil said, looking up at the sky. “Ninety-five degrees, ninety percent humidity, fifty percent chance of thunderstorms in the afternoon. Could get a tornado.”
    Hartley asked, “You play the guitar?”
    “Not so much,” Virgil said. “Why?”
    “’Cause Weezer was always, you know, so heavy into guitars. I thought maybe you were a picker.”
    “No, no, but I’m glad to know our spies are familiar with Weezer,” Virgil said. “Makes you seem more human, and less reptile-like.”
    “Saw them a couple of times in L.A., back in the nineties, before I joined the Corps,” Hartley said. He took out a pair of oversized Beverly Hills sunglasses as they walked out to the parking lot and put them on. “I liked them, okay, but they were always a little too . . . mainstream, I guess you’d say. Though I suppose if you’re a cop, you’d wear a mainstream band T-shirt.”
    Virgil, though insulted to the core of his being, covered up and said, “I know what you’re saying.”
    Lincoln asked, “So, you know Tag Bauer personally?”

19
    M a Nobles drove along the back road, not quite sure that she had it right, until she saw the “Sawyer Pottery” sign on the left side of the road, with a gravel driveway climbing up a low hill into an old, poorly maintained pine plantation.
    At the top of the hill, she found a red-cedar-and-glass house, wrapped with a walkway at the second level. Visible out back were a gray wooden shed, built of boards that she could sell in thirty seconds, if she could get them to western Massachusetts; a garage; and farther away, a low, wide structure that looked a little like a yurt. She wouldn’t have known what it was, except for a sign in a pathway that said, “To Wood Kiln.”
    She got out of the truck, and as she did, she heard a glass door sliding back, and then Jones came out on the balcony and said, “The door is open.”
    She went inside, and found Jones standing at the top of a short stairway. “Please come up,” he said. “I’m too weak to go up and down too much.”
    “Nice place,” Ma said, as she climbed the stairs and followed Jones to a sitting area. He dropped on a couch, and she took an easy chair.
    “Yes. It’s charming. Maybe a little too charming. But then, they’re charming people,” Jones said. “They would be somewhat unhappy if they knew I was here.”
    “Where are they?”
    “England. Supposedly studying pottery,” Jones said. “Maybe they are, and maybe they aren’t, but I’ll tell you what—they’ll write it off.”
    “I brought the food,” she said.
    “Do you know where Flowers is?”
    “He said he had to go to Rochester—I don’t know what for.”
    “You believe him?”
    “I asked him if he’d like to come over and go skinny-dipping, and he said he had to work. I know he likes to skinny-dip, so . . . I believe him. Hasn’t called me today.”
    “Hmm. If I were younger, and not a minister, and not married, and not dying . . . anyway . . .”
    “He would never find this place,” Ma said. “I could hardly find it myself, and I knew where it was.”
    “I know that—that’s not why I wondered,” Jones said. “The thing is, Florence, I need another favor from you, and having Flowers on his way to Rochester is perfect.”
    “What do you need?”
    “My wife is in a home in St. Peter. I need somebody to drive me up there.”
    Ma looked at him, then shook her head. “Sir, everybody in the state is looking for you, and your picture is everywhere.”
    “Yes, they know exactly what I look like. That’s why I need another favor.”
    “Another one?”
    “I need you to cut my hair. I can shave myself, but I can’t cut the hair.”
    —
    A FTER THE CONVERSATION with the spies, Virgil drove to the Rochester convention center, called Davenport on a hardwired phone, and filled him in. “I’m not sure I was supposed to tell you any of this, because I was sworn to absolute