Just when he’d started to settle down, Rufus felt his face getting warm at this development. What possible ideas could Saskia be coming up with relating to Rufus? Did she want him back for more? Or did she hate him?
But it was nothing of the sort. “You ever see eagles up there?”
“You mean, like F-15s?”
“No, Red. Fucking eagles. The large birds.”
“Plenty of buzzards.” Rufus was visualizing a particularly energetic group of them who had lately been subsisting on the corpse of the boar that had attacked Bildad.
“I know that,” T.R. said, somewhat exasperated. “It’s Texas. There’s gonna be buzzards. I’m not talking about those. I’m talking about eagles.”
“I guess I’ve seen a few. More down toward the river.”
“Well, a few years back, the Dutch had a program to train eagles to take out drones. They were worried about airspace security at Schiphol. Figured they could train eagles to pounce on any drones and take ’em down before they got sucked into a jet engine or whatever.”
“Did it work?”
“No. Well, sort of. The eagles attacked the drones. But they were hard to control. I mean, they’re eagles. Animal rights activists lost their minds, of course. But at the end of the day . . .”
“They just didn’t need those darn eagles.”
T.R. nodded. “There’s other ways to take a drone down, as you probably know.”
“Sure,” Rufus said, “if you know it’s there.”
“Right, and at Schiphol fucking Airport you’re gonna know, it’s gonna stand out like a murder hornet on a pool table.”
“Not so easy here,” Rufus pointed out.
“Exactly, Red. Anyway, Her Majesty, with her interest in aviation, had a soft spot for that program and stayed in touch with some of the falconers who got let go when it was shitcanned.”
“Falconers?”
“Folks who know how to wrangle these big birds. I guess ‘Eaglers’ would be a better term.”
“Are there a lot of out-of-work Dutch falconers?”
“There’s at least one,” T.R. said, “but she’s not out of work anymore, ’cause I just hired her.”
While Rufus was absorbing that, T.R. was fielding an interruption from someone off camera, an aide or something who was in the car with him. “Okay, I stand corrected,” he said. “She ain’t Dutch. She’s Icelandic.”
“There ain’t a lot of work for falconers in Iceland,” Rufus said, thinking out loud, “so she worked on this Dutch project for a spell and then got laid off. But Saskia still has her on speed dial.”
“Thordis, for that is her name, is in love with one Carmelita, a falconer in SoCal who has had her fill of hanging around garbage dumps.”
“Why does Carmelita hang around garbage dumps?”
“That’s where the work is. Crows go to dumps and pick over the discarded food, then drop chicken bones and whatnot on housing developments miles away. Carmelita gets paid, by homeowners associations and real estate developers, to use falcons to chase away the crows.”
“Well, I can see how that would get old.”
“I need you to go down to the airstrip tomorrow noon and pick up Thordis and Carmelita and Nimrod.”
“Nimrod?” To Rufus this was a Moby-Dick kind of name, right up there with Bildad.
“An eagle. Don’t worry, Nimrod travels in a box.”
Nothing was ever simple and so Rufus ended up burning the whole next day on this. Thordis showed up first but Carmelita and Nimrod were delayed—something to do with logistics pertaining to Nimrod’s box. Since the Flying S Ranch was nothing like a real airport, both of them were coming in on smaller planes that T.R.’s people had chartered. Rufus ended up cooling his heels in a prefab steel building next to the airstrip that had to all appearances been erected ten minutes ago. This looked like a warehouse from the outside but had all the amenities on the inside. There was a sort of lounge or waiting room with a view of the airstrip and the mountains beyond. Arranged around that were bathrooms, a couple of offices, and a conference room. When Rufus arrived, half a dozen men were seated around the table in there, having apparently just converged on the site in a couple of different planes that were now being refueled and fussed over outside. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, not that it was any of his business. At the head of the conference table was a big screen running a video call with two talking heads on it. One was an efficient-looking woman probably in her forties. The other was Michiel, the ex-soccer player from Venice. Even though he