“I need to talk to him.”

“He’s not here.”

“Where is he?”

“Took off. Says he’s afraid whoever messed with your plane might come after him. He also thinks it’ll make his kids madder at him than they already are, give ’em one more reason to put him in the home.”

“I understand, Dutch, believe me, but Al’s a pilot. You harm one pilot, you harm all of us. You damage one plane, you damage them all. I can’t believe he’d sit by and let that happen, do you?”

The old man was silent for a few seconds. “Well, when you put it that way…”

I asked Holland if he had any idea where Al might have gone.

“The Eastern Sierra, probably. He’s got a little cabin up in the Owens Valley. Got his own dirt strip. Hasn’t flown in there for years, though. Not since he lost his medical.”

I asked for driving directions.

“I couldn’t begin to tell you how to drive there ’cuz I never did,” Holland said. “We always flew. It’s south and west of Bishop somewhere. I could probably find it from the air if I had to.”

“We could take your airplane.”

“My airplane?”

“Assuming it’s still airworthy. I’ll even pay for fuel.”

“I can’t fly,” Holland said. “My medical’s not current.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’m a flight instructor. You’ll be flying with me.”

Holland mulled my proposal. “It’s a deal,” he said with a rising excitement, “but I’m flying left seat.”

“It’s your airplane, Cap’n.”

There was a doughnut shop just north of Montgomery Airport. I stopped off for a quick breakfast — two plain cake bad boys and one large coffee. Inside were six molded plastic tables and seats, orange-colored, scrawled with gang graffiti. I dunked my doughnuts and savored each soggy morsel. If loving deep-fried dough is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

I was polishing off doughnut number two when I glanced out the window and spotted a young, thin Asian man with dyed red hair standing across busy Balboa Avenue, about thirty meters away. He was aiming a digital camera at me. Or, if not at me, at the doughnut shop in which I was breakfasting.

Under normal circumstances, I would’ve disregarded him. It’s a free country, pal, snap all the pictures you want. But these weren’t normal circumstances. Chinese intelligence was supposedly spying on Castle Robotics. Janet Bollinger, who’d worked at Castle Robotics, was dead. And someone had intentionally trashed my airplane. Was the Chinese government behind it all? I flashed on the two Asians in the Lexus I’d seen taking photos outside Castle’s headquarters two days earlier. And now this guy with his camera across the street.

Call it coincidence — like when you read a word for the first time, and all of a sudden, you hear that word everywhere — but I was up and moving toward the door before I knew it.

By the time I burst outside, the guy with the camera was gone.

Dutch Holland’s Piper Cherokee hadn’t flown in more than two years, which coincided with how long it had been since the FAA yanked Holland’s medical certificate, effectively grounding him. That, however, hadn’t stopped him from putting the airplane through FAA-mandated annual inspections and running its engine at least once a week, if only to keep everything properly greased for its next owner.

By the time I got to Montgomery Field, he’d already penciled in a flight plan to the Owens Valley on a couple of aeronautical charts and telephoned Lockheed flight service for a weather briefing. Forecasts called for light winds out of the west along our proposed route, with clear skies and visibility unlimited — CAVU in pilot lingo.

“Good day to fly,” Holland said.

“Is there any other kind?” I said.

“I like your style, Logan.”

He took out a tow bar from the Cherokee’s aft luggage compartment and hooked it to the nose wheel strut. I offered to pull the airplane from the hangar and he let me. The last thing either of us needed was Dutch Holland having The Big One.

His preflight inspection was textbook meticulous. It was also glacial. Rockets have reached high orbit in less time than it took Holland to walk around his airplane, checking control surfaces, draining gas to make sure the fuel tanks had no water in them, fiddling with this and that.

“Any chance we can get going sometime before the end of the year, Dutch?”

“I’m surprised you’ve lived as long as you have with that kind of get-there-itis,” Holland said, peering at the oil dipstick through the lenses of his aviator frames. “You know what they say. There are old pilots, and bold pilots…”

“But no old, bold pilots.”

It was a truism in aviation, and I deserved the reprimand. Nothing will kill a pilot faster than impatience. I’d drilled the very same lesson into every one of my students — but not before convincing them that flying a small plane, if done correctly, is inherently safe. The last thing you want is to terrify somebody before they’ve paid you.

I sat down with my back against the wall of his hangar, and waited for Holland to finish his walk-around inspection. What, I wondered, had I gotten myself into? Trusting a moth-eaten, half-blind pilot to fly me into the meteorologically unpredictable Sierra Nevada Mountains, hoping to find a remote dirt strip and another moth-eaten airman who might or might not shed light on who sabotaged my Cessna? Finding a roulette wheel in Vegas and betting my entire life savings, all three figures of it, would’ve made about as much sense.

“OK, all set,” Holland hollered over to me.

Too late to back out now.

The old man grabbed the handhold bolted to the upper fuselage behind the Cherokee’s right rear window and, with no small effort, willed himself up onto the back of the wing. He unlatched the airplane’s only door, got down on all fours and crawled inside. The contortions it took for him just to reach a sitting position, then to slide over from the right seat into the left, were monumental. But any fear I may have had as to his piloting skills evaporated the moment I glimpsed the joy in his eyes. Holland was in his element.

I climbed in after him and latched the door. Even though he knew it by heart, Holland asked me to help him run through the engine start checklist. After we’d gone through the procedures, he asked if anyone was standing near the airplane. I double-checked and told him no. He reached down, toggled the electrical master switch to “on,” rotated the ignition key to the left-magneto setting, planted his soft-sole old guy shoes on the toe brakes atop the rudder pedals, then cracked open a small hinged window on the pilot’s side, and yelled, “Clear!”

A push of the starter button, a few pumps of the throttle, and the forty-five-year-old engine fired up as if it were factory new. Holland turned the ignition key to both magnetos, pulled the mixture control out an inch to avoid fouling the spark plugs, and retarded the throttle to idle. We donned headsets.

“Need to get the ATIS,” he said, his gnarled, palsied fingers fumbling with a communications stack that was even older than mine.

“How about I work the radios for you, Dutch?”

“Good deal.”

I dialed in the correct frequency for Montgomery’s Automated Terminal Information Service, the regularly updated recording that provides pilots with the current weather, altimeter setting and other pertinent information on airport conditions. I listened, then switched over to ground control, glancing as I did at the two inch-long placards affixed to the instrument panel in front of Holland that showed the airplane’s tail number, and pushed the mic button on the copilot’s yoke.

“Montgomery ground, Cherokee 5-4-8-7 Whiskey. Ready to taxi, east end hangars with ATIS Foxtrot. We’re a PA-28 slant Uniform. Requesting a right downwind departure.”

“Piper 5-4-8-7 Whiskey, taxi runway 28 right via taxiways Hotel, Alpha. Advise run-up complete.”