“Hell, I need a drink. Is there anything to drink?” Stick said.

Gannon got up and looked in the pantry where he’d found the pancake mix.

“You’re in luck. There’s beer,” Gannon said, kneeling down. “No, no. Wait. Sorry. False alarm. It’s just that O’Doul’s nonalcoholic stuff.”

“Screw it. Bring it out,” Stick said, making a gimme gesture with his big hand. “I’ll take even a pretend beer at this point.”

They watched him crack the bottle open and drink while he continued to pace.

“Okay, so there’s obviously something there about the plane,” Stick said. “Something about the director and the people there with him that is so unholy, there isn’t anything they’re not going to do to cover it up. So what the hell could it be?”

“Before he was shot, Wheldon was speculating it had something to do with the uncut diamonds,” Gannon said. “He said maybe they were illegal blood diamonds from some war-torn African country and that the exposure of the FBI director on the plane with the diamonds would expose some kind of Iran Contra–type deal with African warlords.”

“Maybe that’s true,” Ruby said. “The range on a G550 is transcontinental. They easily could have traveled from Africa to the East Coast of the US.”

“Or maybe the dead guy in the hoodie was some kind of African terrorist or something?” Stick said. “And they were doing some kind of off-the-books deal with him? Sneaking him into another country or something?”

“Awful lot of maybes and somethings to go on there,” said Gannon.

“You’re right,” Ruby said, letting out a breath. “We can’t really say what it is.”

“So what do we do?” Stick said.

“I think we need to do what Wheldon said before they shot him,” Gannon said.

“Which is what?” Stick said.

“Get the tape out there,” Gannon said. “We need to go back to my place and get the video. Get it out to the world. It’s the one thing they don’t want.”

“That actually makes a lot of sense,” Ruby said. “They’re willing to kill us to cover it up, right? But if the truth gets out, it’s out. The reason to kill us suddenly disappears.”

“Plus, at the very least, we’re going to need money and plenty of it to keep staying under the radar with these jacks hunting us,” Gannon said.

“Just one little detail,” Stick said. “How do you plan on getting us from here to the Bahamas with the FBI and probably every cop in the United States out looking for us?”

Gannon smiled as he thought of something.

“We’ll take the back roads,” he said.

68

They were just over the border of Kentucky the next morning when they saw the gas station.

They were on a two-lane strip of desolate Tennessee hill country road heading downward into a valley, and Gannon saw it ahead on his left off by itself in the middle of nowhere.

It was a blue-and-white Marathon station with a little mart attached to get doughnuts and Gatorade and lottery cards. Behind it was a tree-filled hill edged with a small cliff of striated brownish-gray rock.