Page 9 of Gryphon

Ten minutes later, they and their luggage were out front. Miranda hadn’t said a word, but Meg was trotting along happily enough for Mike not to worry.

“Going with us?” Mike pulled Jeremy aside.

“Wouldn’t miss it!”

“Did you call Taz?”

Jeremy held up the phone clutched in his hand as if the blank screen was proof.

“Good boy.” Since when had he decided that tending a marriage was important enough to make sure Jeremy did so?

Mike had been a serial monogamist his whole life, but his relationships never extended more than a few months—before Holly. He’d been with her since two years before Taz returned from the dead. Now Taz and Jeremy were a year married and had a newborn. He and Holly were still dating, or sleeping together, or whatever they were calling it. Thank God they were both terminal bachelors. That’s all they were. Two single people fine with sleeping together every night. Marriage would never be—

Klara arrived at the same moment as an airport shuttle, the flow of her fine blonde hair arriving well behind her. She went through the expected apologies for pulling them from the conference and thanking them for coming to the SHK’s aid.

As they were loading up, she held out her card. “If there’s anything I can do to help, anything at all, please don’t hesitate to call.” Except she didn’t present it facing him. Instead, she presented the back, which had a handwritten phone number and a word that looked misspelled. Then he guessed that the Swedish word was only one letter different from the English one.

He made a show of tucking it carefully into his wallet before thanking her and joining the others in the van.

Beside the handwritten phone number was the word: Privat.

In the past, he’d have definitely made use of the card at the first opportunity. Where had the charge gone? He was glad to admire but felt none of the normal need to pursue.

He climbed into the front seat and glanced back at the others. Jeremy and Miranda discussing the latest session. And Holly, sitting in the back row of the van beside Tad Jobson’s shoulders, made his gut wrench. He faced forward.

Jealousy was ridiculous. It wasn’t like he’d ever wanted a committed relationship.

5

The flight from Reykjavik to Sweden was a crazy juxtaposition of variable speeds.

Miranda’s Citation M2 bizjet covered the thousand-plus miles in two and a half hours. Just that quickly they crossed from Iceland to Scandinavia.

But the trip felt as if it took forever.

Mike always flew copilot to Miranda. With Meg lying behind Miranda’s seat, that left Jeremy, Holly, and Tad in the main cabin’s four facing seats. Despite the headset tuned to cockpit-only, he heard the three of them yakking it up like old times—like when the team had first come together.

He missed the early days. Miranda’s planes often made it more efficient for the rest of the team to fly themselves to an incident site. Before acquiring the M2, Miranda always flew a step ahead, leading the way at the edge of Mach 1 in her Korean War-era single-seater Sabrejet. Then he, Jeremy, and Holly would follow along, rubbing shoulders in the close confines of the slower Mooney M20V. But, along with the easy camaraderie, the little plane was gone now, burned up along with Miranda’s home. Instead, the luxury bizjet whisked them all together to crash investigations with effortless ease.

Effortless.

He was not going to think about whatever the hell was going on back in the cabin. Instead he’d think about what lay ahead.

That constantly renewed determination didn’t last him a single tick past ten seconds.

After Tad and Miranda had left the lunch table, he’d texted Jill at NTSB headquarters. If ever there was anyone wired into everything happening there, it was her. Every launch to an incident crossed her desk first: air, sea, rail, pipeline, and highway.

She’d confirmed that Tad Jobson was for real and had been sent to their team. Only knowing that Jill could as easily hand them the mundane launches as the highly technical ones that were Miranda’s specialty had kept him from lambasting her for not giving them a heads-up. Not that she was the vindictive type at all, but certain risks weren’t worth taking.

Once they were up to cruise altitude, he hunted down a tiny airstrip less than twenty kilometers from the crash site. He’d never have attempted to put Miranda’s jet down on such a short runway, but she eased it in as if it was the most normal thing in the world. Of course, the runway on the island she used to live on had been two hundred meters shorter.

At least the little strip had runway lights. They’d flown out of day into night. The winter sun had set two hours earlier, the leisurely passage of a winter’s evening at three in the afternoon drastically accelerated by their eight-mile descent from the lofty and still evening-lit heights. Welcome to winter in central Sweden.

They still had five hundred miles of fuel in the tanks. It was a good thing because Ludvika Airport boasted no services, only three small hangars, and a house with a very startled owner standing on the porch. He’d probably never seen a jet land on his airstrip before. His eyebrows had only gone higher when a pair of white, blue, and yellow police cars had raced up his driveway to load them aboard.

A call to Klara’s number—with no greater purpose Mike could identify in himself—had arranged for special customs clearance and the police escort. The cops whisked them away, directly to the crash.

En route, Mike contemplated the thick woods cut neatly back to either side of the two-lane. They were in a channel sliced through a dense, sixty-foot-tall conifer forest, lined on both sides with three-meter deer fencing, lit in the blue stroboscopic flashes of the police cars’ emergency lights. The verge bore only a few inches of snow, blades of brown grass still poking through the white sheen. Occasionally, the road would curve around the shore of a frozen lake, revealed by the abrupt break in the forest. A glimpse of stars above a sky gone jet black.

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