Myrmidon

CHAPTER FOUR

Chapel set down in Pueblo, Colorado, first thing in the morning, but when the door of his plane—Hollingshead’s private jet—popped open, it was already as if he’d opened the door of an oven. It had to be ninety degrees outside, but it was a dry heat that made the skin of his face shrivel. He’d been expecting mountain weather—Pueblo was nestled in the foothills of the Rockies, a mile above sea level—but the first thing he did was shed the fleece he’d brought.

In his ear, Angel was there with an explanation, as if she’d read his mind. “Pueblo’s in what is called a banana belt, sugar. But don’t expect to find any palm trees. That just means that because of a fluke of geography, it’s warmer than the surrounding region. Drier, too—the mountains over there scrape off all the clouds, so moisture from the Pacific never makes it this far.”

Chapel could believe the mountains could scrape the sky clean. As he stepped off the plane, he felt like he could reach out and touch them—a wall of rock and trees that stuck up almost straight out of the ground. It was an optical illusion but one hard to dismiss. They towered over him until he could see almost nothing else. Yet if he turned around and looked east, the world seemed as flat as a pancake.

Overhead, the sky was a pure and unbroken blue, and it looked about twice as big as the sky he’d left behind in Virginia. The ground was a sandy brown, dominated by scrub grass and stands of wildflowers and, off in the distance, a single tree. It wasn’t exactly high desert, but it was close. “Cowboy country,” Chapel said. “This all looks like the set for a Western.”

“The locals are supposed to be friendly.”

“And well armed, I’m sure.”

Angel cooed in his ear. One of the few perks of Chapel’s job was that he got to listen to that sexy voice all day. “You’d be surprised. About thirty-five percent of people in Colorado own guns, but that’s exactly the same percentage as people in Pennsylvania.”

Chapel checked his own weapon, nestled in his left armpit. He still wasn’t sure if he should bring it or not. Given the plan he’d chosen, by the time he needed it, he would already be dead. Still, walking into Terry Belcher’s domain without a weapon felt like the dumbest thing he could do.

He still wasn’t sure that his plan wasn’t the second dumbest, but he was determined to give it a shot. At the airport terminal, he rented a car and headed south, through the city. Pueblo lay astride an actual river, the Arkansas, and as he got close to the water, he saw a lot more trees, but the second he passed beyond the city limits, the desert rose to meet him again—that water only went so far. He headed down Route 302, through a corridor of washes and open prairie, and soon found himself in the midst of utter desolation. It looked like the country here wasn’t even used for farms.

South of town, he passed by a three-hundred-foot-high wind turbine that loomed impossibly high over the desert floor, its long vanes turning slowly in the sunlight. It didn’t look real, it was so big. Instead, it looked like some mammoth toddler’s pinwheel, dropped and left behind on the ground after the giant child moved on.

Between the turbine and the mountains that filled half the western sky, the Colorado desert felt like a place not built to human scale. The land rolled away in every direction as far as he could see, desert unrelenting, unending, visible for miles in the clear air. Chapel felt tiny and insignificant as he drove south, like an ant crawling across an airport runway.

Belcher’s compound lay only twenty miles south of town, but it wasn’t easy to get to. He had to leave the paved roads behind and take private trails out into the prairie, roads that would have washed away years ago if there had been any real rain out here. Without Angel whispering directions in his ear, he would never have been able to find his way.

“You’re getting close, sugar,” she told him after he’d turned off onto yet another track through the scrub grass. He’d rented a four-wheel-drive SUV, but it still bounced and complained as he rocked along at twenty miles an hour. “Last chance,” she said.

“Last chance for what?” he asked.

“To turn back.”

“So I guess you think I’m crazy, too?” he said. Hollingshead had felt this plan was pure folly and had been of a mind to forbid it—he said he didn’t want to throw away his best operative on a harebrained scheme. Chapel had eventually talked him into allowing it simply by pointing out that there weren’t a lot of alternatives.

“Every time you go into a dangerous situation alone, I worry,” she told him.

“The fewer people who know what I’m doing here, the better,” he said. “We have to keep this thing secret. Besides, I’m hardly going to be alone. I never am when I have you looking out for me.”

“There’s not much I can do if things go wrong,” she pointed out. “If I call in the local police, it’ll still take them the better part of an hour to respond. If we need any kind of military support, it’ll take even longer since nobody knows you’re here. Let’s abort this now and plan it again for a week from now, what do you say? I can have a whole battalion of troops waiting out here to back you up. I can have tanks and planes running support.”

“Sure,” Chapel said, “and Belcher will see them coming. On land this flat, you can’t exactly hide an infantry platoon. He wants that, Angel. If we hit him with massed troops, that’s proof of every bit of propaganda he’s been spouting about the government for the last fifteen years. Where do I turn?”

“Up ahead on the right. This is it.”

Soon after he’d made the turn, Chapel saw the compound. A low rise in the earth had hid it before, but now it lay exposed in all its glory. It didn’t look like a survivalist enclave. Instead, it looked like Small Town USA, circa 1895. Single-story frame houses stuck up from the sandy ground, all of them painted white with gingerbread decoration on their porches, all of their roofs covered in the same weathered shingles the color of the ground. In their midst stood a pair of stone buildings that might have served as a town hall and local fire department. The warehouses and workshops were on the far side of the town, shimmering in the distance.

The only thing that immediately said compound was the chain-link fence that wrapped all the way around the town, enclosing a couple hundred acres of wasteland. Low trees clung to that fence as if for support. A single gate broke its run, a chain-link gate with reinforced supports straddling the road. A sign across the gate read Posted No Trespassing, which wasn’t exactly welcoming, but it didn’t say violators would be shot on sight. No sentries stood guard there, nor did anyone come running out as Chapel pulled up to the gate and stopped his car.

He jumped out and walked over toward the gate, keeping his hands visible. He was certain someone would be watching him. He studied the ground just in front of the gate until he found what he was looking for.

A thin strand of steel cable, maybe as thick as a pencil, had been stretched across the dirt, held at tension so it hovered an inch or so above the ground. Both of its ends disappeared into scrub grass on either side of the gate.

“I really hope,” he told Angel, “that this doesn’t set off a bunch of land mines.” He kicked the cable as hard as he could, then moved back ten feet.

Off in the distance, from the direction of the white houses, he heard a bell start to ring. It shut off as abruptly as it had started.

“Now what?” Angel asked.

“Now we wait,” Chapel told her. He had a feeling it wouldn’t take long.