Necessary Evil

Chapter 11

Kier probably could have stopped Jessie's stinging slap, but he didn't try.

"You son of a bitch. You ever lock me up again and I'll have you prosecuted for interfering with a federal officer."

"I thought you had decided to become a postman."

"It's no joke."

Kier looked into those eyes, thinking if it were another life, he'd kiss her. He gave her a little smile, waiting to see if she would smile back. She didn't.

Overcome with fatigue, he bent and put his hands on his knees. "My cabin's burned. Let's get some supplies before they send in the next wave."

She turned without another word and led him toward the burning cabin. He stopped briefly at the pump house to recover the remaining volume.

His body, covered in sweat and snow, was out of adrenaline, out of energy, and numbing quickly. Even with the heavy wool shirt, sweater, and the thin white topcoat, he would weaken and eventually suffer the effects of exposure unless he got more insulation or warmed himself. They went to the heat of the burning cabin. They would need to pull supplies from the root cellar as soon as the fire cooled enough. While they waited, they could strip some of the clothing from the bodies of the men who had come to kill them. Quickly his mind began cataloguing what they would need.

Then, like one more symptom of a deadly illness, he heard the sound of snowmobiles.

"Let's go."

We can't. We've got no supplies, no clothing. Nothing."

"We have all we need," he replied and grabbed her arm, pulling her into the forest.

A second wind is a strange thing. Athletes near the goal line, soldiers in the heat of battle, mountain climbers struggling against the elements, all accomplish far more than even they- the champions of the flesh-imagine might be possible. And they do this after their bodies tell them that exhaustion is complete.

Despite their fatigue, Jessie and Kier went at a bounding lope up the mountain through a tunnellike opening in the trees that marked the trail. They used only the small light that Kier had taken from the fallen mercenary. He slowed to a brisk trot a few hundred yards later to lead her along a rock face that had shed boulders now slick with snow. Crouching to scramble over chunks of granite, scraping her shins and banging her knees-it reminded Jessie of screaming FBI drill instructors, of competition, of gutting it out on pure desire.

Moving with an ease and grace that she could not duplicate, and that utterly astounded her, Kier occasionally slowed and turned, as if to measure her endurance and progress. At other times, he wordlessly reached back to pull her up a particularly troublesome spot, seeming to anticipate her difficulty.

After myriad tiptoed and hopping steps, they cleared the boulder field and began winding up the mountainside through heavy tree cover. Flickering off the boughs on either side of the trail, their dim, hand-held light gave only sufficient illumination for the next footfall.

An hour and a thousand vertical feet later, Kier stopped. He shone the light on a house-sized boulder projecting from the cliff. Its overhang sheltered them from the weather.

"Dig," he said, throwing snow away from the cliff's base to expose what looked like a small cavern beneath.

When Jessie began knocking the drift out of the way, she discovered dead leaves on the floor of a little cavern. Farther back, wind-driven whiteness gave way to a cave floor spongy with moss.

As they climbed under the overhanging rock and out of the wind, Kier removed his heavy sweater and cut the sleeves off his shirt. Stuffing the shirt sleeves full of moss and leaves, he made what looked like a sausage and tied it over her ears, then did the same over her nose and mouth. After putting his sweater back on, he began taking huge handfuls of the green moss and stuffing them between his sweater and his long Johns, even down his arms.

He nodded at Jessie. "You do the same."

Then, over the moss, he packed in leaves until he looked like a scarecrow in a white camouflage windbreaker. They finished packing Jessie's coat and stuffed their pants before tying off the trouser cuffs with ribbons of cloth cut from Kier's sleeves.

"Now if we keep moving we might live and avoid frostbite until we get to shelter."

"Can we build a fire?" Outside the little hollow she saw nothing but icy blackness. She hated the hint of weakness in her voice. ''I suppose they might find us more easily if we did that," she added, trying to redeem herself.

''Sometime I'll tell you what frightens me and you'll laugh."

"Who said anything about being frightened?" Her voice came to life.

"No offense intended. I know the mountains aren't your favorite place."

"Yeah, well, you put up with things in this world. We don't always get what we want." But her mind leaped ahead to her one phobia. "Are there any really steep drops where we're going?"

"In the mountains we call them cliffs."

Hanging her head and gripping Kier's belt, Jessie once again struggled to keep up in the thigh-deep snow. Labored breathing, screaming muscles, icy air like razor blades down the throat- all commanded her mind.

After climbing across the mountain's face for more than an hour, they came to the knife-edged spine of a ridge. When she saw the ground fall away sharply, she stopped and tugged on his coat.

"This is steep," she said.

"Not very," he replied, turning to continue on.

She forced herself ahead, most of the time unable to see the drop she knew must be there. At the crests where it became the sheerest, the snow tended to scatter on the dull gray rock, keeping it shallow. No matter, she would have rather walked through the snow.

The icy wind punished her-aching the bones, freezing the flesh, pounding the inner ear with dull, thick pain. Thinking ahead was debilitating, grist for despondency. Misery was better contemplated one moment at a time, she thought to herself, remembering grueling hikes through bug-infested swamps at Quantico.

Other people's troubles had kept her going then. Her mother's waitressing work, followed by a quick marriage and grandkids. Dad's tunnel vision of Jessie as the supplicant daughter, obedient, grateful, bound to marry a good boy with a not-too-threatening job. When she announced she wanted to go to college, and had a partial scholarship, and a research assistant's position at the university, her parents had been dumbfounded.

They were good people, lovable in their way, and even adaptable to change. Once she graduated from college, her younger brother followed, and then her older brother began night school. Claudie never went. What really blew the Mayfields away was Mom's decision to go to college. After all, she said, the kids were grown, and it was the way of the world. That had been a blockbuster. Jessie smiled, remembering how close she had finally felt to her mother when she enrolled in junior college.

Such thoughts helped keep her mind from the bleak present, where each step was labored, where she sometimes foundered on rubberized muscle. Then she began wondering if the next step would come. But it always did, and they kept climbing for what seemed several hours. In the dark her watch was useless.

Abruptly, she noticed that they were out of the snow. Only rock and leaves lay underfoot. Kier stopped.

"We're here," he said. "It's called Bear's Cave."

As Kier shone the light around, she was able to make out rock walls and ceiling. There was a fire pit, dry wood, a brown backpack hanging from a pole spanning the cavern, along with three pairs of snowshoes.

"Was there ever a bear?"

"None that ate people."

She thought he was smiling.

''I wasn't sure the bag would be here,'' he said. ''Inside that pack there are blankets, twine, a hatchet, things that aren't necessary but very nice. We don't let the boys get in it. They make do with what the mountain provides, and so do we. We bring the young boys here in the summer. The older ones come in winter."

Kier quickly climbed the almost vertical face of the cave, which had only the most meager handholds; then, twenty feet off the cave floor, he went hand over hand along the pole, which bowed under his weight. Loosening the leather thong that held the pack to the pole, he dropped it at Jessie's feet. Then he dropped two pairs of the semi-oval snowshoes.

For a moment, Jessie's weary frustration gave way to exhilaration. She marveled that she could have such feelings over a few blankets. Pulling open the pack, she took out two, wrapped them around her shoulders, and promptly began shaking.

"We can have a fire, but only in the night, or during the day in very heavy snow. Otherwise they will see the smoke." Kier had climbed down and joined her. "Even without the smoke they'll find this place quickly."

Once the fire was burning, Kier went out into the darkness without a word.

"What are you doing now?" she muttered out loud, and was not surprised when he didn't answer.

Kier returned to Bear's Cave, dragging long pine bows. He stripped the smaller branches off. Then he went out to retrieve two more twelve-foot branches, each roughly three inches in diameter. By cutting one into three equal pieces, he created a four-foot-tall tripod, binding the three poles together at the top with a short piece of line. Next, resting one end of the last branch on top of the short tripod and letting the other lie on the ground, he had fashioned the sloping ridgepole of a tent or lean-to.

"But why in a cave?" Jessie asked.

"There will be no fire tomorrow. We will want to be warm enough that we can sleep by day."

''How can I help with whatever it is we're doing?'' She rose with a groan.

"Lean the shorter sticks against the low end of the log," he said, even as he began placing the longer branches at the high end of the ridgepole near the tripod.

Each leaning piece of wood lay close to the next, just inches apart. Kier corrected Jessie a couple of times, then nodded his approval, and disappeared-only to return a few minutes later, dragging two small trees. Once again stripping the trunks, he cut them into short segments and lashed them and each of the smaller vertical pieces to the ridgepole. They had what looked like the upside-down keel and ribs of a crude boat. Kier finally wove some sticks horizontally through the vertical ribs.

When at last the skeleton seemed sturdy and complete, a giant pile of needled boughs remained. From this Kier made two beds, side by side. He put one blanket on each.

"Try it out," he said.

She did, and he followed. Rolling toward her on his elbow, he studied her face in the firelight. He found himself thinking about one large bed. Without a doubt she wanted to tell him all over again how dumb it was to run into the wilderness, but instead she just shook her head.

"We might as well get used to each other." He broke the silence. "Say what's on your mind."

"I think it's this overwhelming sense I get that you don't respect me."

He allowed himself a puzzled frown, as his way of asking for more information.

"Well," she began, as if he had actually spoken, "there's the 'one man against the evil empire' mind-set that seems to be operating here. You know what I mean?"

"You want to go to the city, the government."

''I want to work with people who can do something-people whose job it is to do something."

Kier remained impassive.

"So what's wrong with that? If my horse were sick, I'd call you. If someone were breaking the law, I'd call the police."

"This is different. First, we can't get to the city any time soon. Second, this is no normal crime. This is huge. You know that."

"All the more reason-"

"The government could be involved," he interrupted.

"Just what is it with you and the government?"

Kier rubbed his jaw and decided to tell her.