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special radio gear needed for medivacs and the increasingly complex ground-air networks.
    Whitemark got into the fighter business almost by accident. In the seventies, the company found itself without a dominant stockholder, and Whitemark execs liked it that way. Nobody interfered with them, but there was one large fly in the soup.
    The company was undervalued and cash-heavy, a sitting duck for a takeover. They looked for a way out and found a lowbrowed ne’er-do-well named Winton Woormly IV.
    Woormly had inherited a majority holding in a medium-sized aviation company. The company specialized in jet trainers and small ground-support aircraft, marketing them in third world countries that couldn’t afford the big stuff. Woormly was smart enough to understand that, if he tried to run the company himself, he’d screw up and lose it. Besides, he wasn’t interested. He was interested in single-malt Scotch, ocean racers, polo, trout fishing, and young boys, in that order.
    Whitemark offered him a deal; they’d give him a big lump of cash, a special issue of stock, and a place on the Whitemark board. In return, Woormly would turn over his controlling interest in the aviation company. Woormly jumped at the deal. He wound up with a title and more money than he could spend. Whitemark got a major stockholder who wasn’t interested in running the company and whose stock holdings would scare off pirates. They’d also stripped themselves of excess cash, which made them a less inviting target.
    The Woormly buyout was a success from the start. The two companies matched up well. There was always a demand for the ground-support planes. Then came the Hellwolf concept. Whitemark started lifting its eyes to the big leagues.
    There was much more in the report: details on the Hellwolf, speculation about flight trials and cost overruns, arguments in the military press over the advantages and disadvantages of the Hellwolf versus the Sunfire.
    I was still reading when the wheels came down. Out the window, the dark ribbon of the Mississippi curled through the lights of the cities, separating St. Paul from Minneapolis, the red-brick East from the chrome-and-glass West. I caught a cab into St. Paul, the Whistler on my lap.
    The cat was out roaming the rooftops when I got home. I found a hammer, nails, and hangers, and hung the Whistler on the big interior wall of the studio, surrounded by the work of friends and personal heroes. The other work ranged from simple sketches in India ink to slashing Expressionist stuff in electric acrylics. The Whistler, simple as it was, dominated them. Age and power. The shamans are right.
    I got a bottle of beer from the refrigerator and walked around and looked at it some more. I was still looking when Emily knocked at the door.
    “You’re back,” she said. Emily has steel-gray hair pulled into a bun at the nape of her neck, like a nineteenth-century English schoolteacher. She’s usually wrapped in a woolen shawl. If it weren’t for the flinty sparkles in her dark eyes, you might take her for Whistler’s aunt. “I thought you were gone until tomorrow. I heard the pounding and thought I should check.”
    “C’mere.” I crooked a finger at her. She followed me into the studio and spotted the new piece immediately. From where she stood she recognized it, and said, “Holy shit! Is it real?”
    “Yeah.”
    “What have you done?”
    “Nothing, yet.”
    “It must be pretty extreme, whatever it is,” she said. She grabbed my upper arm with a surprisingly strong hand. “I hope you don’t get hurt.”
    “I’ll be careful,” I said. “You want a beer?”
    “Sure.”
    When I came back from the kitchen with a longneck Leinenkugel, her nose was a quarter inch from the sketch. “Little Jimmy Whistler,” she said. “You know he learned to draw at West Point? Flunked out. Couldn’t pass chemistry. Years later he said, ‘If silicon was a gas, I’d be a general now.’ He was probably right. He was at West