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He was alone in the helicopter, too. The pilot, sequestered in the cockpit, never spoke to him after letting him into the craft, other than to say, “Buckle in.” The fact that they sent him a rescue craft so quickly, and that they’ve placed him in such a richly appointed room of their inner sanctum, tells Starkey that he’s respected and valued. And yet, there’s unease in him as diffuse and ill-defined as the light coming through the frosted windows.
• • •
No one comes.
After an hour, he tries, without luck, to jimmy the door lock using a paper clip he found on the floor. Despite his skill with locks, he can’t pick this one.
“Hey!” he yells. “I’m still here in case you forgot! Someone get your ass over here and let me out!”
He begins pounding on the door, trying to create enough of a commotion that someone will come to shut him up. Nothing. It’s as if the entire floor is deserted. Or maybe soundproof. Furious, he begins knocking over chairs, making a racket, but if, indeed, no one’s there to hear him, all the sound and fury will signify nothing. Finally, not wanting to be found the author of this particular chaos, he sets the chairs back where he found them and, exhausted, sits down and cradles his head in his arms on the table. He falls asleep in moments.
He dreams of Bam. She’s laughing at him. She’s goading the others to laugh at him as well, and although he fires a machine gun at her, nothing comes out but flower petals and jelly beans and popcorn, and that just makes everyone laugh even more. Then Hayden grabs the machine gun away from him and shoves the muzzle so far up his nose he can feel it in his brain. “That’ll clear your sinuses,” Hayden says, and the laughter all around feels like it can fill a stadium.
He’s gently shaken awake by a hand on his shoulder and pulled mercifully out of the dream.
“Mr. Starkey?”
He looks up bleary eyed to see a well-groomed man with a tightly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard. Dandrich.
“About time,” Starkey croaks.
“I gave orders that you be taken somewhere to rest until I arrived,” he says kindly. “Orders, however, are often left to interpretation.”
“Someone should be fired.”
Dandrich considers it. “Or at least reprimanded. Be that as it may, I hope you got some rest. You must be exhausted from your triumphant efforts.”
Starkey rolls the kink out of his neck while the man pours him a glass of water from a crystal pitcher that wasn’t there before. “What is this place?”
Dandrich hands him the glass. “It’s what is commonly called ‘an undisclosed location’.”
“It seems pretty disclosed to me if it’s right in the middle of a city.”
“It’s not only AWOLs who can disappear in an urban environment, my friend,” he says, sitting down casually beside Starkey. “To city dwellers, most buildings, no matter how large, are merely obstacles between home and office. In a city, convenience and anonymity go hand in hand. But we’re not here to talk about our headquarters, are we?”
“There’s a team of traitors.” Starkey says, getting to the point. “We need to take them out if we’re going to save the Stork Brigade.”
Dandrich does not seem troubled. “A coup is always an unfortunate thing. Unless, of course, you are the one staging it.”
Starkey thinks of the coup he staged at the Graveyard. What goes around comes around, but the timing couldn’t have been worse
“It’s not a surprise that after the festivities at Horse Creek Harvest Camp, a number of storks would become disenchanted,” his benefactor says.
“They invented an incriminating recording, but with your help I can convince everyone it’s a fake. Send me back there with more firepower. I’ll get control again, and rally them to the cause.”
“No need.” Dandrich says. “Your last few attacks have been so successful, we’ve decided that no further action on your part is needed.”
“But what about Mousetail?”
“Unnecessary. It would be anticlimactic after what you did at Horse Creek. You were brilliant there,” he says with a smile. Then his smile drifts neutral. “You were brilliant, but now you’re done.”
Starkey shakes his head. “There are still ninety-two harvest camps out there. You need me to take them down.”
“Mason, you forget that it’s not our purpose to take down every harvest camp.”
Starkey stands up. “Well, it’s my purpose!”
Now Dandrich’s expression becomes icy. “We are not in the business of indulging adolescent power fantasies.”
