Chapter 3

The shuttle's passenger load changed at the medical building, where four airmen in PT gear climbed aboard and immediately started arguing about a football game. Brennan tucked herself deeper into her seat and watched Vernon drive. She had ridden this loop for eleven months, five mornings a week, and she had never once seen him speed up, slow down, or take a turn harder than the painted lines required. The shuttle moved like he was being graded on smoothness.

At the second stop, the PT airmen got off, and three more got on—a female captain with a coffee cup and a phone, and two technical sergeants carrying a cardboard box between them. Nobody asked about the drill. Nobody looked at the memo taped to the visor. The captain swiped her badge, sat down, and resumed her phone conversation; the sergeants found a row and started murmuring about inventory.

Brennan watched Vernon's hands on the wheel. They were old hands, brown and lined, with a scar across the left thumb that she had never asked about. He drove with a relaxed grip, two fingers loose on the wheel at all times, and every so often he would glance at the rearview mirror to check his passengers and then back at the road, a rhythm he had been running for decades.

The radio crackled on the dash. "Shuttle Seven, Loop Control. We have a drop request at the wing headquarters building. One passenger, returning passenger, needs a ride to the motor pool. Can you take them?"

Vernon keyed the handset. "Loop Control, Shuttle Seven. I'm four minutes out from headquarters. Pick up at the same stop?"

"Same stop. Passenger is waiting."

Vernon set the handset down and glanced at Brennan in the mirror. "You know who they're sending back?"

Brennan thought about it. The wing headquarters building on a drill morning. The colonel still standing on the pad, the aide gone pale, the lieutenant colonel with the red pen suddenly very interested in the state of the concrete.

"No idea," she said.

Vernon said nothing. He just turned the wheel slightly and began the wide, slow loop that would bring him back to the headquarters stop in under five minutes.

The stop was empty when they arrived. The shuttle glided to a halt beside the concrete pad, and Vernon put it in park but did not open the door. He waited.

For ninety seconds, nothing happened. The headquarters building sat in the heat, its glass front reflecting the sky, and Brennan started to think the call had been a mistake, a mix-up, a passenger who had already found another ride.

Then the door swung open, and Staff Sergeant Marcus Odell stepped out.

He did not look like a man who had been summoned for a ride to the motor pool. He looked like a man who had spent the last several minutes in a room with a colonel who was not happy, and the expression had not left his face yet. The clipboard was in his left hand, but he held it lower than before, more like a shield and less like a work tool.