Bones of the Earth

Young Jimmy got up and erased everything Griffin had drawn on the board. Then he picked up a piece of chalk and drew a complex series of interlinking up-and-down lines. “The Subway of the Gods,” he said with a sharkish grin. “Local stops. As per your memo, I brought along a list of weak links.”

“Weak links?” Salley asked.

“When we set up security,” Griffin said, “we made sure to stir in a few guards who were less than optimally bright. Just in case. None of them are on duty very long. You’d have to have hired them to know where they were.”

“Now here,” Jimmy tapped a node, “in 2103 is a perfect opportunity. Security officer Mankalita Harrison. Officious, ambitious, bottom of her class. Filling in for Sue Browder for a period of two days. Never met the Old Man. Best of all, we’ve kept those days almost perfectly undocumented. We can insert anything into that silence we want. But you’ll need All Access clearance to pull it off. Is there any way you can get hold of the Old Man’s ID?”

The Old Man was a creature of habit, and had been since he was a teenager. Sharpened pencils always to one side of the top drawer, a ream of cream-colored bond in the middle. Griffin knew where he would keep his authorization papers. He knew what the passcodes would be. “I can do it.”

Old Jimmy cleared his throat. “I notice you assume the Old Man won’t play along?”

“Trust me. He’ll never cooperate on this one.”

“Well, if you can get the ID, I can do the rest. We’ll need documentation from—”

Old Jimmy threw Griffin a look. Griffin, in response, turned to young Jimmy, and said, “Okay. We’ve game-pla

“The crate?” Salley asked.

Griffin ignored her. “Oh, and we’ll need another person on the security team. Any recommendations?”

“I’ve heard good things about Molly Gerhard.”

“Get her. She leaves us at age forty-something to start her own business. Requisition her as close to the end as you can. The older the better.”

“Done.” The young man got up and left.

Griffin turned to the remaining Jimmy. “All right,” he said. “What is it?”

“I’m not sure I should…” He cocked an eyebrow toward Salley.

“I have no secrets from her. Speak openly.”

Jimmy sighed and shook his head. “When you get to be my age, you lose your taste for his kind of games.” He nodded toward the door on his. “Harry, I’m about to retire. I bought a bar on Long Island. Tomorrow is my last day.”

“Then give me your last day. Find the Old Man’s intercept point and keep him away from me until after the travel roster’s been filed. Take him out for drinks. Get him talking about the old days.”

Jimmy looked pained. “I understand how you feel. But there’s no way you can convince me to take sides here.”

Griffin studied Jimmy carefully, making him the focus of all his attention, to the perfect exclusion of everything else. He waited until Jimmy filled the universe, then said, “Do you remember that time in the Texas roadhouse, outside of San Antonio?”

Jimmy chuckled. He remembered, of course. It was a beat-up old redneck hangout with dollar bills stapled to the ceiling for decoration. They were in town for a rock and gem show where a generation-one geologist had pla

They’d stopped in the roadhouse for a few beers and a game of pool (each played badly and fancied the other played worse), when a drunk came over and tried to pick a fight. “Hey!” he’d said. “Y’all ain’t faggots, are you?” He was an unshaven, sloppy-fat yahoo, who wore a plaid shirt open over a stained tee. But he had the look of someone who worked for a living. Griffin judged there was real muscle under that paunch. “ ‘Cause you sure look like a pair a god-damned faggots!”

“Have a beer,” Griffin suggested. “My treat.”

The drunk stared at him in pop-eyed astonishment. He wove a little from side to side. “Y’all saying that I take drinks from faggots? You must think that I’m a faggot too.”

Jimmy was bent over the pool table, lining up a shot. Without looking up, he said, “I don’t have time for you. But that’s my bottle over there on the bumper. You can cram it up your arse.”

The drunk blinked. Then, with a roar, he ran at Jimmy, fist raised.

Jimmy stood and broke the cue stick over the man’s head.

He fell like an ox.

Griffin looked down at the man. He lay very still. There was a trickle of blood coming out of one ear. He didn’t seem to be breathing. “Maybe we should get out of here.”

Jimmy took out his wallet and laid several twenties down on the felt. He put his beer bottle atop them. “This should pay for the stick,” he said. There weren’t a lot of people in the bar, but every one of them was watching him.

Nobody said a word as they left the place.

Out on the road, they drove in silence for a while. Then Jimmy said, “You’re not going to like this.”

“What?”

“I left my driver’s license back in the bar. I had to leave it with the man to get the pool table.”

“Think there’s time to go back and get it?”

A police car, lights flashing, passed them, heading in the direction of the roadhouse.

“I don’t suppose there is.”

So they drove out to the airport and found a Cessna pilot who for two thousand dollars was willing to fly them back to D.C., no questions asked. There they ran out to the Pentagon, and looped back a day, so Jimmy could call the DMV to report his license had been stolen. After which, he and Griffin went out to a bar in Georgetown, where Jimmy broke a few things. They both spent the night in the drunk tank.

“That wasn’t part of the plan,” Griffin told Salley. “But when the police came, this fellow here got behind me and lifted me by the belt and shoved me right into them. We all fell over in a pile.” They were both laughing by then.

“I just thought that as long I was going to be in jail, I might as well have company.” Jimmy wiped the tears from his eyes. “In any event, it did give us a darling of an alibi.”

“The Old Man had us on the carpet for that one. He chewed us both out good.”

“Well, he had to, now didn’t he?”

“Yes, but here’s the thing.” He paused until the laughter had died down. “On the way out, I turned and winked at him. He didn’t wink back.” He let the silence sit for a moment. “You get older, you get more conservative. You know how that is. Well, the Old Man’s forgotten what it felt like to be young and wild. But not us. Not you, and not me. Yet.”

For a long moment, Jimmy said nothing. Then he nodded. “All right. One last run.”

He got up slowly, and left without so much as a word or a glance to Salley. As if she weren’t present.

When he was gone, Salley said, “Did he die?”

“Did who die?”

“The man in the bar. The drunk.”

He could see by her expression that she hadn’t thought the story was very fu

A minute later, young Jimmy was back, wearing a different set of clothes. He dollied in a large wooden packing crate, and showed them how it opened up. “This is how you’ll be traveling,” he told Salley. “Nothing fancy. We went for simplicity here. Padded on the inside. This little shelf acts as a seat. Hand grips here and here. And this clip holds a flashlight, in case you want to bring a book.”