Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [50]
About three hours to the south, Portland, Oregon, has an airport, too—and by sunrise I was nervously ensconced in a Marriott hotel immediately outside it. I closed all the curtains, plugged all the cracks, and turned off all the cell phones. I rigged the door with a cheap alarm that would give me time to … I don’t know, panic and cry, if anyone tried to bust in.
And shortly after sundown the next day, I had a plane ticket that would bring me to the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport. I also had the entire contents of my Thunderbird packed into the suitcase from the trunk, which I checked in order to keep my very sharp little tools and whatnot. I left the car in long-term parking. Maybe I’d be back for it, maybe I wouldn’t. For all I knew, it might sit there for weeks before anyone thought to tow it. There was always the chance this would blow over and I could just go back home, picking up where I’d left off.
Optimism! Okay, forced optimism. But it was all I had.
I checked the Internet to see if The Other Thief’s serial number turned up anything via Google magic, but no. Nothing.
And then I ran, not even sticking around to see if anyone was going to chase me down for running that search. Call me a coward if you like, but it didn’t really matter if they were following me or not.
I was headed to the airport.
I don’t typically enjoy flying. There are too many variables, and I’m on a narrow kind of time frame—I simply must be indoors in the dark when the sun rises, unless I want to wind up a steaming, wibbling pulp—so the red-eye is fine by me. But any delays or reroutes can be downright deadly.
I made my connection in Denver and skidded into Minnesota with an hour or two to spare before morning.
I won’t bore you with the particulars of what came next, except to say that I found another hotel (a Hyatt, this time), burrowed in for the day, and then went looking for some slightly more solid accommodations downtown. I wasn’t 100 percent certain of where Holtzer Point was located, and I’d need some time to lie low and do some research. This sort of research is hard to accomplish when you’re stuck in an airport hotel, and much easier (and less eyebrow-raising) to manage when you’re in a very posh establishment nearer to the center of everything.
Eventually I paid up for a full week at a four-star establishment on the other side of the river, hunkered down, and spent a couple of days scavenging for paperwork, rumors, and hints. It was mostly boring—which is to say, I didn’t learn anything new or exciting about Ian’s incarceration and nobody kicked down my door. But I did eventually locate the storage facility and learn a bit about its security protocols.
At a glance they were pretty pathetic, but that might be meaningless. Even the shittiest schematics can be made troublesome by enough manpower on guard duty.
I inferred from the diagrams that Uncle Sam simply didn’t believe there was any good reason that anyone, anywhere, would want inside … even if anyone could find it. (Conspiracy nuts on the Internet be damned.) And yet a token effort at security was undertaken as a matter of general principle.
It reminded me of a story I’d stumbled across years ago about a bank vault full of Susan B. Anthony and Sacagawea dollars that nobody wanted. Thousands and thousands of dollars, just sitting there—and the bank couldn’t give them away, not for trying. But out of a sense of duty or whatever, they kept the coins locked up in the basement behind a barred cage frame.
At the time, I wondered why anyone would bother.
But as I sat in my very posh hotel, wearing a fluffy white robe with the hotel logo on the right breast, staring down at a bedspread sprinkled with marginally informative files stamped CONFIDENTIAL, I concluded that guarding Holtzer Point was even sillier. The only people who wanted to get inside it were sitting at home eating Cheetos from their beanbags, filing Freedom of Information Act petitions and coding way-too-much Flash into their alarmist webpages. They were armchair wingnuts.