“Amazing, man. It sounds like a good gig.”
“It is,” Nate said. “Which is why we need to find Soledad fast and recover my Air Force. He stole five peregrines, two red-tailed hawks, three prairie falcons, a Harris hawk, and a gyrfalcon. Twelve out of fifteen birds. He killed three and left them.”
Geronimo whistled and called up Tristan’s calculator app on his phone. He punched in a series of numbers and mumbled while he did it.
“Peregrines are worth fifty K on the black market . . . red-tails go for twenty-five K each, prairies and the Harris hawk go for the same, and an Arab sheikh will pay up to forty-five for a gyr like mine . . . that’s fucking four hundred and forty-five thousand dollars!”
“Yes.”
“Jesus. I’m in the wrong business,” he wailed.
“It’s not just that, as you know,” Nate said. “It’s the capturing of fledglings in the nest and years of flying them to the lure. Building up fourteen birds to a state of perfect yarak—well, it would take years to do it again. This guy stole our company and our livelihood. I can’t let him get away with it.”
Geronimo agreed.
“Tell me something,” Nate said. “You’ve got that patch on your coat and you seem to know a lot about antifa. How involved are you?”
Geronimo hesitated while he formed his answer. “Don’t get me wrong,” he said, “I’m totally down with the movement. BLM—not antifa. Don’t get confused. BLM and antifa are in two different lanes and those lanes don’t merge, even though some ignorant folks think they do. Anyway, like I said, I’ve been pulled over for Driving While Black too many times. I get it and it pisses me off and I want to see progress made. But I’m not a follower. I’m a free man with a will of my own. I don’t go for the shit some of the BLM honchos go on about. But something bad is happening.”
“You asked Tristan about the choice of weapons that were put in the cache we found. What was that about?”
“Ah, you picked up on that.”
Nate nodded.
“That’s not the first street cache I ever found,” Geronimo said. “But this one was a little different.”
“Meaning what?”
“Well, it had the usual stuff: bats, rods, bricks, rocks, fireworks. That’s pretty standard.”
“Interesting,” Nate said. “Go on.”
“What this cache didn’t have were plastic shields for protection. There are usually shields there like the cops use. And in this case there were those axes. I’ve never seen axes before.
“Another thing,” Geronimo said. “That cache was untouched before we found it, even though there was street action going on downtown. Don’t you find that kind of odd?”
“What does it mean?” Nate asked. “You still haven’t told me why you’re helping me shut down Axel Soledad.”
“I’ll tell you when I’m ready,” Geronimo said. “I need more proof than I’ve got. I don’t want you to think I’m one of those conspiracy nuts.”
Geronimo leaned back in his seat with Tristan’s phone perched between his thighs. He tapped it and said, “There’s a lot of information we can use from this. It’s like our own little captured Enigma machine. We can follow message threads and weigh in as Tristan Richardson if we want to. We can really screw with those people when they’re planning street action or coordinating their movements.”
* * *
—
Six hundred and eighty-five miles later, north of Boise, Nate asked Geronimo, “Did ‘Baker City’ ring any bells for you?”
“No. Never heard of it.”
“Have you ever heard of an outfit called Wingville Enterprises?”
“No, man.”
“Have you ever heard of Ken Smisek or Bob Prentice?” Nate asked.
Geronimo shook his mass of dreads. Meaning no.
“They’re more my age,” Nate said. “Falconers gone bad, like Soledad.”
“What about them?”
“They live near Baker City.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Wingville
Baker City, Oregon, was a town of fewer than ten thousand people in the high desert between the Wallowa Mountains to the east and the Elkhorn Mountains to the west. Nate found it charming. The downtown was historic and well-preserved, with ambitious early nineteenth-century stone buildings. The structures had obviously been put up by residents who at one time had believed the place would boom into a major city. There were so many of those once-ambitious towns in the west, he thought. Showpiece architecture that shouted optimism for something that would never come. It was kind of depressing.