Chapter 2

His name was Remo, but around these parts folks knew him as the Big Rig Bandit of 1-44.

“You’re him, ain’t you?” asked the terrified driver.

“Who?” Remo asked.

“The Big Rig Bandit of 1-44. You’re him.”

“Never heard of him. But I’m him.”

The driver was no longer driving. She had been a minute ago, barreling down the interstate and listening to the CB chatter about the bandit. There was a lot of chatter. People were scared.

“You been stealing rigs up and down this stretch of road,” the driver said. “Got yourself a peculiar reputation.”

“How’d my reputation get peculiar? I only started hijacking eight hours ago.”

“You ain’t gonna hurt me, are you?”

Remo frowned. He didn’t like having a reputation. “They say I hurt people out there?”

The driver cranked her head to look at Remo, but it did her no good, what with one of her own grease rags tied around her head to make a blindfold.

She had never heard him, never sensed him. All of a sudden, she felt a tiny pinch on the neck and felt her arms and legs stop working. In a flash she was scooted into the passenger seat and belted in, and only then did she realize she had been blindfolded. She had expected to feel her vehicle veer out of control and crash, but it drove on as if nothing had happened.

His first words to her had been, “Just consider me your relief driver.”

Now he said, “Well? Who says I hurt people?”

“Nobody,” she admitted.

“What do they say about me?”

“That you’re some sort of a weirdo. You hijack ’em, then strand ’em. You ain’t hurt a single soul. But what’re you doing with all those rigs, I wanna know?”

“If I told you, then maybe you’d be the first one I had to hurt.”

The driver tilted her head like a curious mutt. “Naw. I think you’re a nice guy.”

“No way. I’m bad.”

“You’re a pussycat.”

“Hey, no. I’m a killer. I killed lots of people. I could kill you, too, just like snapping my fingers.”

The driver laughed. “You’re a funny. I like you, kid. Name’s Penny.”

“Hi, Penny. I’m Darren ‘The Decapitator’ Dougally.”

Penny laughed. “Yeah, right.”

Remo had to admit Penny was a cool customer. She wasn’t just putting on a brave front, she truly wasn’t the least bit concerned about being hijacked and paralyzed. Maybe she was bonkers.

“So? Where you gonna leave me, Triple-D?” she asked.

“How about the access road back of the Neosho Truckers’ Campus?”

“That’ll be just fine,” Penny said. “Give you lots of time to get to wherever you got to go while I hike on in. You’re going to unfreeze me so I’ll be able to hike, right?”

“Sure,” Remo said easily, but now he had an itch in his head.

Penny was cool, but she couldn’t be that damn cool. He could sense her pulse, and it was suspiciously modulated. So was her breathing. She was cool in a practiced way, and why should she practice being cool unless she was some sort of an undercover agent who needed to be cool in extreme situations?

“You’re from Langley, huh?”

Her heart rate rocketed, even as she replied easily, “Nope, I’m a Texas girl from Angelina.”

“The Bureau?”

“Pardon?” she asked.

She was still tense, but her pulse didn’t spike again. Remo could tell such things. “You know, the Company’s not supposed to do intelligence-gathering inside the U.S.”

“What are you talking about?” Penny chuckled, but she did it like an expert Only Remo’s highly tuned hearing picked up the slight quavering of her nervousness.

“So. CIA it is. You people tracking the Big Rig Bandit of 1-44 or this vehicle specifically?”

“Triple-D, I got no clue—”

“Can it, Agent,” Remo said. “You’re with the CIA and you’re operating on U.S. soil. That’s the facts I know so far.”

“Boy, you’re crazy,” Penny replied, her heart now in her throat. “You’ve hijacked one too many rigs today, and the stress is making you a little, you know, paranoid, like.”

“Maybe,” Remo said. “Here’s an idea. I drive you on into Springfield and turn myself in to the news station and they broadcast live. You and me. And I tell them how I think you just might be a CIA agent. I’ll look totally crazy, right?”

Penny said nothing, but her heart was racing like a marathon runner.

“So, think about all the publicity when they do a little checking and find out you are a CIA agent. Operating illegally inside the United States.”

“You’ll go to prison,” Penny protested.

“Naw. I have legal title to this particular vehicle,” Remo said. “I didn’t leave any physical evidence at any of the other hijacks. Fact is, you—meaning the CIA—stole my RV.”

“Ain’t your RV,” Penny snapped. “I was hired to take it to its rightful owner in Indianapolis.”

“I’m the rightful owner, and I have the papers to prove it. But never mind that. We’ll let Fox News sort it out. In fact, we’ll make it in time for them to get us on their 5:00 a.m. program.”

Penny stewed. Remo drove. The mile markers decreased by fifteen.

“Okay. Fine. I’m with the Company,” she admitted. “What’s your purpose?”

“Figure out about this vehicle.”

“What about it?”

“What do you mean, what about it? If this is really your recreational vehicle then you were the guy who was driving it on national TV, right? You got half the military in the Southwest U.S.A. mobilized around it, and then you just disappeared. Nothing left but questions about who gave the orders to the military and where y’ all vanished to.”

Remo hmmed. “There should have been a note that made it all okay.”

“Huh?”

“You know, like from somebody high up in the government?”

“Yeah. There was all kinds of authorization. So?”

“What do you mean, so?”

“I mean so what? Just because somebody high up says it’s okay don’t make it okay at all. Makes it more suspicious than ever. We gotta know.”

“Who has to know? What do you have to know?”

“Who’s behind the hijackings and what your purpose really is, of course.”

“Why?”

“Because we don’t know, why else?”

“I see. So you’re with some sort of a supersecret club inside the CIA, right?”

“No,” Penny shot back, her heart rate leaping.

“I’ll take that as a yes. So what do you think you know about all of this already?”

“Just what I told you. Ain’t that enough?”

“Liar. Did you know your nostrils flare when you lie? Even in the dark I can see it”

“They don’t flare!” Penny protested. “Not anymore! I trained ’em not to.”

“Hey, it’s just a little bit, hardly enough to be noticeable. Now, what do you know about all this?”

“I said, nothing.”

“Nostrils! Start talking or I get Walter Jacobson on the phone.”

Penny sulked. “After the network morning-show fiasco, we tracked the RV being hauled to a chop-shop in Tucumcari. They did a butcher job on it, then hauled it to a private garage out in the sticks, where it got smashed up like it was in a wreck. Damn thing changed hands three more times with the SUV it used to be attached to, then it ended up in a RV body shop in Flagstaff and both was restored to what they are now.”

“Keep talking.”

“The RV looks like a vintage Airstream again and the SUV looks like any other SUV,” she pointed out. “They’re not welded together like some oddball vee-hickle like you expect to see at a monster truck show.”

“Tell me the stuff I don’t know already.”

“Okay. All we knew was that somebody was working the system better than even we knew how to. Legal title on the RV and this here SUV was held by the military, the State of New Mexico and then Vintage RV s of Santa Fe, all in the course of two weeks. Even the U.S. Postal Service had legal possession of the thing for a few hours on Wednesday. Damn, it was beautiful how you people worked it. How’d you do it?”

“Beats me. I just do grunt work. You try to put some sort of electronic tracking doohickeys on it?”

“Didn’t dare,” Penny said. “We saw the thing being scanned for bugs every day and every night. You folks were sending orders to the FBI to do the scanning. One time it was the Flagstaff PD. Once it was BIA!”

“What’s BIA?”

“You don’t know?”

“Told you, I’m just the grunt.”

“Bureau of Indian Affairs. Anyway, you people had it zipped up tight. So we took the human approach. When they went to hire a driver to take it to Indy, I applied and managed to get the job instead of the regular relocation service.”

“How’d you get the job, exactly?” He could feel the interior heat up from Penny’s radiating face. “I see. A little puttin’ out.”

Penny was too embarrassed to even try denying it. “Well, hell, what am I supposed to do now?” he demanded.

“Tell me who you are,” Penny said.

“Aren’t you supposed to leave the questions to the professional interrogators?” Remo asked. “I assume they’re tracking us. I can hear your cell phone working its little chips. They must be listening to everything we say. That’s why you’re stalling and telling the whole long story.” He snatched the phone from the breast pocket of her denim shirt. The display was dark, but there was a lot of electricity zipping around inside. Remo squeezed it flat in one hand, which took more effort than smashing a typical mobile phone. He crumbled the remains like Roquefort cheese.

Penny felt the chunks placed on her lap. “That phone was armored with steel plate.”

“Felt like it.”

“It’s too late to get away. They’ll swarm this vehicle in minutes. They won’t let you slip the net.”

“Why not?”

Penny glared sightlessly in his directly. “Because. Whoever you are, you’re not under control.”

“Not under your control, you mean?” Remo asked, his hackles rising. “And who are you people exactly?”

Penny got stubborn. “Don’t ask me. I’m just a grunt.”

The truck stop was lit as bright as Las Vegas, but there were just two customers in the entire place—two truckers sipping coffee in a booth at the restaurant. They stopped sipping when they heard the sound of propellers.

“Sounds big,” said the trucker with the mustache.

“Yeah” said the trucker without a mustache.

They were identical twin brothers, separated at birth, raised on opposite sides of the country. They barely knew each other while growing up. They had both chosen to make a living as long-haul truckers and met up for a coffee every few months when their paths crossed. Despite their disconnected lives, they shared that amazing bond that all twins shared, in which each seemed to know what the other was thinking.

“Real big,” said the brother without the mustache, as the black shape swooped out of the dark sky and thundered to a touchdown on the empty interstate, roaring by the truck stop without slowing much.

The racket brought the waitress stumbling out of the ladies’ room with her skirt tucked in her underwear. “What is it?”

“Hercules,” said the brother with the mustache. “C-130. Heavy-lifter.”

“Worked on one in the Army,” added his brother. “Don’t say?”

“Great big sucker.”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, my God!” The waitress ran into the parking lot, waving her arms at the headlights that had appeared on the highway, closing fast on the taxiing aircraft.

“Herc pilot ought to put on some lights if he’s gonna land on the road,” said the man without a mustache.

“That goes without saying.”

“I apologize, then.”

There was no chance the shrieking waitress was going to reach the highway in time to warn the approaching vehicle, which wasn’t slowing. The gigantic aircraft had to have been visible, even with its lights off, but the approaching headlights didn’t reduce speed.

As it flashed by the truck stop, the brothers could see the perfect gleaming profile of a restored Airstream towed behind a big SUV.

A quarter mile later it was about to rear-end the Hercules, but the airplane lowered its ramp. The SUV accelerated, then drifted up the ramp and disappeared inside the aircraft. The Herc accelerated and lifted off.

The waitress watched it vanish, which didn’t take long in the dark of night, then she turned and stared at something far down the highway. It was a woman, running wearily to the truck stop.

“Are you hurt? Were you raped?” the waitress shouted as she followed the haggard jogger into the restaurant

“Would you shut up? I’m fine. I’m gonna use your phone.” The jogger barked some sort of code words into the telephone, then turned on the twins. In minutes, the sky filled with helicopters. Unmarked cars arrived next. The state police came last demanding explanations.

“Got away?” shrieked the woman who had jogged to the truck stop. She was getting some sort of update on a- walkie-talkie. “It’s a freaking flying football field! Half the state must have seen it!”

“Running dark,” pointed out the brother with the mustache.

“Above the cloud cover, and it’ll cushion the sound,” his brother explained.

“Shut up!”

The brothers were questioned. They told the same story as the waitress, and when they asked to see the Feds’ badges they were rebuffed. They helped themselves to more coffee. The woman jogger asked them one last time, “You sure you didn’t get the numbers off that aircraft?”

“’Course we didn’t. It was running dark.”

“Goes without saying.”