Rise the Dark

45

The council fire had been planned for evening, but Eli’s accelerated timeline forced him to move it to dawn, and for once he saw a benefit. The sunrise was more powerful than the sunset in this location; from the ridgetop, the earth seemed to be lit from within for a few spectacular minutes, an ethereal glow that spoke of the ancient world. That would matter to the group he was assembling. Any extra touch that enhanced their mission commitment was valuable, if not imperative. Eli’s command was going to be tested during this ceremony, and he would need to call upon the natural world for power. While the gathering crowd had been pliable enough in initial talks, everything was different on the eve of action, and they would arrive with at least some level of doubt. The group en route was as close to battle-tested as any Eli could assemble, minus a few key parts. He thought of the women in the cabin, of the empty shackles that lined the walls, and the image was bittersweet. He had counted on five more alongside Sabrina Baldwin, and Lynn Deschaine had not been in that mix. But those people remained available to him for the future, and in the future, a world of fear would be easier to rule.

When darkness fell, chaos would reign, and the man who controlled the chaos? His ascent to leadership was natural order. Proof of this was in the history books of every civilization.

Eli read voraciously about biological warfare and understood both the potential and the challenge-you needed to determine how to infect the first wave of carriers with the virus. A careful study of human nature, however, told you that every human on earth already carried two viral qualities: fear and hope. Each was contagious and could spread rapidly under the right conditions, but at first glance they seemed to be natural enemies.

False.

Fear and hope were fundamentally joined, inseparable. Anyone whose fear drove him to make predictions, to offer dire warnings, nursed a secret hope that these things would actually come to fruition. If you devoted much of your energy to, for example, a political campaign against a candidate you feared deeply and then that individual rose to power, would you not wish him to fail? Perhaps with spectacular consequences?

Eli believed that most people would. And for those he had found on the radical fringes, the ones itching to be mobilized for a cause, it was simply a matter of joining their fear and their hope. This is what he had nursed so long among so many. First he coaxed forth a prediction born of fear-The Islamic terrorists are coming; The Christians will kill us; We’ll die when they take our guns; We’ll die because they won’t take our guns; the details of these fears were less interesting to Eli than what they could do, because all fears harbored potential for action. They harbored, he believed, a secret hope: The doubters will finally see that I was right. Any prophet wanted his prophecy fulfilled.

And so Eli coaxed them, encouraged them, nurtured them. Then he solicited the promise: When it happens, we will act.

When the western electrical grid went down, Eli was confident that at least seven groups of wildly different ideologies would be compelled to act, and he was hopeful about five more. Yesterday he began careful cloud-seeding of rumor, issuing predictions of a massive action from, depending on the message board or forum, ISIS, the U.S. government, the Tea Party, Greenpeace, the Ku Klux Klan, and Wall Street.

In return, he had his promises: If it happened, action would be taken, and-most critically-his varied cells promised that they would not be fooled by whatever narrative their opposition offered. Because of course they would offer an explanation, of course they would bury the truth in a lie. Eli had warned of this as well.

When a nation was attacked, the nation looked for an explanation, tried to understand what would incite anyone to take such action. It was an arrogant assumption that any strike against society implied an ideological cause, some bizarre attempt to correct society, rather than a clean and simple desire to watch it burn.

The group that would initiate the most significant terrorist strike ever made on North American infrastructure gathered on the ridge just before dawn. They shared only a few words of greeting, some no words at all. There was palpable tension. They had to be wondering how ready they really were. And, perhaps, wondering what they were doing there at all.

Eli shared none of their doubt. He’d been years in the planning of this operation, and in its study. If you could convince a band of people that the evil they were doing was not only justified but also the opposite of evil-a righteous act, a noble act-you could coax far more out of them than they would have ever dreamed. There was much to learn about humanity from watching a lynch mob.

The dozen he’d gathered here had been carefully culled from fringe environmental movements, castoffs drawn in by Violet’s ludicrous appropriation of American Indian spirituality. In her bizarre ways, she was perhaps the most brilliant recruiter he’d found. He knew the secret of her success was her sincerity. She believed with a depth of passion, a true intensity, that few could match. When she spoke of the way the strike on the grid would provide a needed wake-up call for the nation, she believed it, and her words carried that.

There was no messenger so effective as a true believer.

She also preached nonviolent resistance. Eli had explained this dilemma to Garland and the two other guards he’d recruited, men who responded well to whispered assurances that only a select few were being trusted with the task of pulling triggers. None of them were present now. Eli didn’t want any guns in sight.

As the sun made its first timid appearance on the horizon, a faint band of gray, Eli put his back to it and stood on the summit, looking down on the chosen twelve.

“We gather in darkness,” Eli said, his voice the deep, textured thunder that he had practiced so long to achieve, “because we do not fear darkness. We know its necessity. And we also know this-those who would keep us in darkness have reached their day of accountability.”

A few murmurs, a few nods. Eli held silence for several seconds, staring at them.

“Here is what we know,” he said, voice lower now, cool as the mountain wind. “We know without question that those in power, be they government actors or titans of wealth and greed, have manipulated the very planet itself for their own agendas, their own gains. The greatest gift we’re given, the source of our very existence, has not only been abused, it has been claimed. There are many who think that they have dominion over the planet.

“Make no mistake. They will attempt to identify us as evil. To label this band of people who believe they have certain rights, certain freedoms, as enemies of humanity. They will say this about people who believe that the very earth itself has certain rights and certain freedoms!”

He shouted the last words, expecting to hear support, excitement.

Instead, the group was quiet, and the energy in the air was weak. They were uncertain. Hesitant.

He studied them and thought about their hopes and their fears. He knew the language that would incite them-it was what had brought them here. And yet now they seemed strangely unmoved.

He looked toward Violet. He wanted this to be his own moment, and he deserved it to be, but he’d arrived in this place through a special understanding of manipulation. Each audience had its own trigger.

“Violet,” he said. “I would like you to speak for the land.”

For several seconds she was silent, and he was afraid he’d made a mistake. If she could not inspire, things might unravel swiftly. Just before he was about to speak again, she broke the silence.

She didn’t speak. She chanted. An unknown tongue, but a musical one, an ancient half wail that belonged to this place, to the peoples she’d studied for so long.

The murmurs of approval grew louder, the energy from the group changing. Eli saw one woman reach out and squeeze the hand of the man she’d come with. Another man closed his eyes and bobbed his head as if in agreement with the wordless song.

The sun was tinting the edges of the earth now, the gray giving way to a thin band of pink, and it was magical. It was perfect.

Violet stopped the strange chant.

“The land speaks,” she said softly. “The land speaks to those who care to hear. There are whispers from the high peaks, whispers within the deepest caves, the emptiest oceans. And for those who can hear, the tone has changed. The whispers are louder now, my friends; they are shouts. More than shouts, they are cries. The land is crying out, and do you know what it says?”

She paused, looked at every individual face, each of them beginning to take on a new clarity in the rising dawn light.

“It says that it will not be mocked.”

The woman who had been clutching her companion’s hand now dipped her head as if she were about to faint. Another man had made a fist so tight his knuckles bulged. He held it in front of him like a weapon, but his eyes were locked on Violet.

All of their eyes were.

For this, Eli thought, tolerating her was worth it.

The truth was, he couldn’t summon his usual contemptuousness of her. He’d become suddenly uneasy. There was a unique magic to her voice, the depth of the believer. He wanted to interrupt her, to reclaim control of the moment, but he knew better and willed the impulse down.

“Someday,” she said, “we will all be returned to the earth. This is the certainty of our existence, the only certainty. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust. Whether as ashes or dust, you will return to the earth. How do you wish to be greeted?”

No one spoke. Violet began to make a soft humming noise, rising and falling like a chant, and Eli knew that she had said all she intended to say. The baton was back in his hand.

“We will be challenged,” he said. “We will be pursued. We will be hated. All of this is understood and accepted, because the time has come. Not the day of reckoning, but the day of reminding. Perhaps we are not all as lost as it often seems. Perhaps there is more hope out there than we have often believed. But the reminder must be issued. The populace must be shaken. And then, I hope, I pray, that we will all find the essential things we lost along the way.”

He turned from them and faced the sunrise. The pink had deepened to crimson, and it lit him and cast his shadow large across the ground. He closed his eyes and breathed, deep inhalations and exhalations, seven of them, and then he spoke again without turning.

“The world awakens. She calls to us. Today is the day. If some of you choose to depart, you will not be stopped, nor will you be questioned or shamed. The task ahead is not for everyone. If anyone wishes to leave, now is the time, and go in silence.”

No one moved. He counted seven more breaths.

“So we begin. I will ask you to speak now. Not to me, but to the land. This is a sacred place, and it is filled with listeners, I assure you. Speak to them now. Share the day’s message.”

They spoke nearly in unison but just enough ahead or behind each other to make the group sound larger than it was; their fourteen voices turned to forty. They spoke loudly, eagerly, and they spoke without fear. Eli closed his eyes with pleasure. Finally, it was here. Finally, they announced it to an unknowing world at the break of the western dawn.

“Rise the dark, rise the dark, rise the dark.”

46

By the time Larry was ready to go, the sun was fully risen and the Soda Butte glittered like scattered diamonds in the white light. Larry surveyed the Tahoe and said, “Damn nice vehicle, and I’d like to take it, but how’s your back trail?”

It was a good question. By now the police probably had the make, model, and plate number.

“I don’t think anyone knows that I headed this way when I left Red Lodge, but the vehicle is a risk,” Mark admitted.

“Kind of figured that. We’ll take Blue, then.”

“Blue?” Mark had a bad feeling. “You don’t mean the Ford?”

“Hell yes, the Ford!”

“That truck was barely running twenty years ago, Uncle.”

“I’ve made some improvements.”

The improvements certainly weren’t visual. The 1971 Ford Sport Custom pickup was behind the cabin, and the wheels seemed to be attached to the axles. That was the best that could be said for the truck.

“Get your shit,” Larry said. Mark got his things out of the Tahoe and slipped his shoulder holster on. Larry watched without comment.

“Where are we headed?” Mark asked once he was in the truck, the passenger seat wheezing beneath him, and Larry cursing and pumping the gas as he tried to coax the engine to life. The exhaust let out a burst like a cannon shot and then settled down to a clatter that shook the dirt on the floorboards, but Larry smiled with pleasure, so evidently this was a good sign.

“Five Points Hot Springs.”

“You think Pate is holed up in a resort?” Five Points was an old-time inn built around a natural hot springs. It catered to people who wanted a taste of the rugged West but without leaving fine dining behind.

“No, I don’t. But I think Salvador Cantu will be. He’s blowing his cash at the bar down there and trying to blow his load with a waitress.”

“Who is Salvador Cantu?”

The truck went into motion, and it seemed that the lurch forward had been at least partially inspired by the engine.

“He runs meth out to the oil fields,” Larry said. “He’s been doing well lately. The Bakken’s been better to the drug business than it has to the oil business. He also helped with the whip on the day that I mentioned.”

His voice didn’t change when he said that, but Mark’s throat tightened.

They crossed the Soda Butte and turned onto 212 in Silver Gate. The Range Rider, an old boardinghouse and saloon, was just across the street. That had been Larry’s favorite hell-raising spot in the old days. Mark wasn’t looking at the town, though, but up at the once-wooded slopes of Republic Pass. The thick forest that faded out into the granite peaks was a grim gray burnout now, a testament to the pair of brothers who’d set it on fire three summers earlier. Blackwell, their names had been. Dangerous men.

Mark saw the giant buffalo that had been outside of Larry’s cabin reappear alongside the road. “Is that your personal guard bison?” he asked.

“That’s Jackson. He’s a surly bastard. Chased some tourists into an outhouse last year and kept them there until he got bored.” Larry smiled. “I’m partial to Jackson.”

Outside of Silver Gate, Larry got the truck up as high as fifty, at which point the suspension system announced that was the limit. Mark was really beginning to wish they’d taken their chances with the Tahoe.

He wondered where Lynn Deschaine was and whether she knew there’d been a sunrise.

It was midmorning when they arrived at Five Points, and the old resort was quiet. Or at least it was quiet until they arrived. The blue Ford took care of that.

“Couple things we need to be clear on,” Larry said when he killed the engine, leaving a backfire and a cloud of exhaust smoke as final warnings. He’d been quiet for most of the ride, and now his voice was low and contemplative. “You want to move in a hurry, as I understand it.”

“I have to, yes.”

Larry nodded. “Sal Cantu is not going to want to move in a hurry. Such conflicts are sometimes unavoidable.” He sighed and worked a cigarette into his mouth. “He won’t be staying in the main lodge. But they’ll know him at the bar.”

He was right on both counts. When they walked into the dimly lit bar, with the blue-water pools of the hot springs looking bright on the other side of glass doors, there were only employees inside, and maybe half a dozen people out in the water, young couples drinking brightly colored drinks in plastic cups. The bartender, a young guy, asked what he could do for them, and Larry said they were looking for Sal Cantu, and the bartender’s face went from friendly to wary.

“He’s not in the lodge, and he won’t be again.”

“Had some trouble with him?”

The kid picked up a dry glass and dried it again. “If you know him so well, then you’d know we had trouble with him.”

“Sure. But I was told he’d be here, and I was-”

“Fishing camp. We just rent the cabins, we don’t own them, and we don’t have the authority to evict. That’s up to the individual owners.” He put the glass down and looked from Larry to Mark. “You two probably know the owner I’m talking about.”

Mark surely didn’t, but Larry just nodded. “Right. Okay, boss. We’ll take two shots of Maker’s and then get out of your hair.”

It wasn’t noon yet. Mark drank the whiskey with his uncle, though, and it sat sour and burning in his empty stomach as they walked back to the parking lot.

“Who owns that cabin at the fishing camp?” Mark asked.

“No idea, but it wasn’t going to help me to say that. If Sal’s been booted from the main lodge but they can’t keep him out of one of the cabins, it belongs to somebody he supplies something to. Drugs or protection. Maybe both.”

“Protection?”

“Sal’s not a small boy. Or a nice one.” Larry turned and gave Mark a hard look. He seemed like a starkly different man from the one who’d opened the door bleary-eyed and in his underwear just a few hours ago. A lot more like the man Mark remembered. The transformation told Mark plenty about how things were likely to go with Sal Cantu.

The fishing camp was on a dirt road that ran through pasture and down to a trout stream where there was a handful of limited-access, privately owned sites with small cabins that were rented out during peak season. Larry pulled the truck off the road, reached in his duffel bag, and got out a revolver with worn bluing, which he stuck in his belt. Then he brought out a length of paracord, put that in his back pocket, and grabbed what looked like a short piece of a belt. Mark knew it at once: a homemade blackjack. Larry had always carried one. He would cut inserts into a thick leather harness strap and load in pieces of lead shot. He referred to it as a slapjack because of the extra flex. He put that in his back pocket and said, “I’m an old man trying a young man’s game today, Markus.”

He didn’t seem dismayed by that.

They walked up the road and came to the gated drive. The gate was locked and there was barbed-wire fencing on each side. Larry climbed the gate looking very much like the young man he’d said he wasn’t, and Mark followed.

They hadn’t even reached the cabins before a door to one of them opened and a Hispanic man as thick and solid as an oil drum stood before them.

“Private property,” he said. “No fishing, no access, don’t bother asking.”

He was a couple inches shorter than Mark but at least eighty pounds heavier, with an oversize jaw traced by a thin beard. His hair was cut short, and you could see white lines of old scars across his skull. He’d been looking primarily at Mark, but when he let his attention shift to Larry, there was a blink of recognition.

“Shit,” he said, “you really dumb enough to come back around looking for your sister, man? She’s where she wants to be. Stay out of it.”

Larry looked to the side. There was silence for a moment. Then he nodded. Cantu had followed his glance and he looked confused when Larry nodded at nothing. Mark wasn’t confused-it was the old gesture, the appeal for guidance from a voice that rarely counseled peaceful action. He wasn’t surprised when his uncle’s right hand flashed out like a cat’s paw and he cracked Salvador Cantu in the face with the slapjack.

He hit him flush on the cheekbone, and Cantu reeled back and fell into the cabin’s front wall but didn’t go down. Instead he pushed off it with a roar of pain and rage and came at Larry with one heavy fist balled up and raised as if to knock Larry’s head right off his shoulders. Mark caught his wrist before he could come out of the clumsy windup, wrenched his arm down, and slammed him back into the wall. Cantu threw a left hand that was more of an awkward slap than a punch but one that still landed on the side of Mark’s head, and his strength made even the clumsy punch a heavy one. Mark took a step back, just enough to clear space, and then brought his right fist up under Cantu’s jaw so hard that the man’s teeth cracked together. Cantu reached for him as he fell, trying to tackle him, but Mark slipped the grasp and Cantu fell to his knees, his big torso swaying. Mark drew his gun and put the muzzle of the.38 to the top of his head. Sal Cantu’s breath came in hot gasps, and he looked at Mark with hate, a red mouse already swelling high on his cheekbone. Behind them, Larry chuckled.

“How ’bout that,” he said. “You got some of your uncle Ronny in you after all, boy.”

Then he hit Cantu again with the slapjack, two rapid smacks, one above each knee, in the thick muscles of the quads, and Cantu grunted with pain and fell flat on the porch, writhing on his belly. Mark glanced at Larry, who was circling Cantu like a wolf around fallen prey. Mark wanted to tell his uncle that it was good enough, that they didn’t need to push it any further; Cantu was down and they had the guns and there was no need to hit him again. Mark hadn’t been the one tied to a trailer hitch and whipped, though. Larry would decide when it was done.

Larry took off his baseball cap and ran his fingers through his long white hair. When he put the cap back on he spent a little extra time bending the grimy bill, and Mark could see that the busy hands were designed to keep his emotions in check, bleed out a little of the tension that filled him.

“I need you to be able to talk, so be grateful for that,” Larry said. He kicked Cantu in the ass, hard. “Where’s Pate?”

Sal Cantu looked like a trout left on the rocks, bug-eyed and fighting for breath, mouth open wide, a string of spit between his lips. Despite the pain he had to be feeling, though, there was a smile in his eyes, and the smile had risen at Pate’s name.

“Speak,” Larry said.

Cantu lifted his head. It took some effort. “You actually think your sister matters, Larry?” he said. “You really think her tired old cooze means a damn thing?”

When Mark hit him, he did it so fast and so hard that even Larry said, “Shit!” Mark backhanded Cantu across the face with his.38, driving his head sideways, and then caught him again for a forehand, using the pistol like a tennis racket, two fluid swings that left Sal Cantu howling into his hands, curled up and bleeding on the porch. Mark saw Larry shift from side to side, but his uncle didn’t say anything, just watched. Mark didn’t look him in the eye.

“You’ve got a dangerous impression of things,” Mark told Cantu, who was writhing in pain, blood running between his fingers. “You think you know why we came here, and what we want, and what we left behind. You don’t know any of those things.”

Cantu still had his hands up to his face, his fingertips looking as if they’d been dipped in red ink, but over them, his dark eyes were focused. He was listening.

“Allow me to introduce myself,” Mark said, kneeling down, “so you don’t have to suffer the pain of your misconceptions any longer. I’m Markus Novak, and I’m not here because of anything that happened with my uncle or my mother or any of the people you consider relevant in this situation. That’s important for you to understand. I’m here for something very different, all right? And I don’t have time to waste.”

Cantu breathed through his mouth and stared at Mark and didn’t speak. Mark looked at him for a moment and said, “You’re going to test my seriousness here, aren’t you?” He shook his head. “That’s a poor play.”

Mark stood up and holstered the gun and extended his hand to his uncle without looking at him. He kept his eyes on Sal Cantu.

“Let me borrow that slapjack.”

Larry didn’t hesitate. The weighted leather socked into Mark’s palm. He grasped it, stepped back, and took a couple of short practice swings, testing the feel. It was perfect; heavy enough but balanced and flexible. A craftsman’s answer to brass knuckles. Mark ran his thumb along the worn leather and advanced toward the bleeding man on the porch floor.

Sal Cantu watched him come and said, “I’ll tell you where to go, but you’ll get more than what you’re ready for. With Pate, you’d better believe that.”

“Sure. Where is he?”

“There’s a warehouse in Byron, maybe a mile out of town north on Route 5, toward the oil field. A big prefab deal with an eight-foot fence around it. Looks empty.” He was speaking to Larry now.

“But it’s not empty,” Larry said. “He’s there? Pate himself?”

“He’s there.”

“It’s a long drive if he isn’t.”

“Guess you’ll have to trust me.”

“Guess so,” Larry said, and then he reached behind him and withdrew the length of paracord he’d stuck in his pocket. He tossed it to Mark. “Hands and feet.”

Mark caught the cord, tossed the slapjack back to his uncle, and knelt to tie Cantu’s hands.

“Hey,” Sal said. “The fuck you think you’re going to do? I just told you-”

“When we find Pate, someone will find you,” Larry said. “Until we do, you’ll join the missing. Consider that, and consider if you want to give different directions.”

“Nobody’s tying me. I gave you what you needed, damn it.” Cantu struggled upright.

“Glad to hear it,” Larry said, and then he stepped forward and swung the slapjack again, and this time he had more than his wrist behind it. The lead-laced leather cracked off the back of Sal Cantu’s skull, and the big man dropped to the porch floor. Mark stared as blood dripped down the unconscious man’s face. Larry put the slapjack back in his pocket and looked at Mark with challenging eyes.

“You forget how to work a knot?”

Mark bound Sal’s hands and feet while Larry opened the cabin door. Then they hauled him inside. Larry found a dishrag, shoved it into Cantu’s mouth, and said, “Tie that in there good too. If he wants to breathe, he’s got a nose.”

“You believe those directions he gave are worth a damn?” Mark asked.

“Oh, I’m sure they’re worth something,” Larry said. “That boy isn’t the sort to send you on a wild-goose chase. He’s the sort to send you into a hornet’s nest.”

47

The recruitment of Doug Oriel had been Janell’s primary assignment in Florida. His combination of military-grade demolition skills and full-blown conspiracy-theorist paranoia was enticing to Eli, but his network of like-minded souls was even more intriguing. The problem with Doug was that he had a deep-seated distrust of the Internet, which meant Eli’s standard recruiting tactics were ineffective. Thus the decision to approach him in person.

For nine months, Janell had devoted herself to the coddling of this oversize child. In the miles since they’d left Ardachu’s house, she realized that it had all been a waste.

He didn’t speak for nearly two hours, and when he did, it was to demand that she drop him off at a bus station.

“A bus station,” she said. “That’s your idea of where you should go now? Only a few hundred miles from being a part of this, you want to stop and get on a bus?”

“Yes. I don’t want any part of this. Not anymore. Not with you.”

She gripped the wheel tighter. “You are not going to a bus station. We are going to finish the journey.”

“You can do what you want. I won’t be along for the ride.”

In the hours of silence, he’d managed to locate some confidence to fill in the places where before shock and horror had existed. He was sitting taller, his shoulders back and his big chest filling. Trying to make himself larger, the thing they told you to do if you stumbled across a mountain lion in the woods.

She wanted to laugh.

“No bus station,” she said. “You want out, you can pick your place on our route, but I’m not changing course.”

But she knew she’d have to.

The group Eli was gathering all believed a narrative of nonviolence. That was the great irony of the first strike force-they were mostly peaceful by nature, shepherded together by their opposition to oil drilling, fracking, big business, and pollution, all the tedious minutiae of those who believed the earth was worth saving. Janell’s understanding was that, with the notable exception of bodyguards recruited from some meth runners, the tribes, as Eli called them, would recoil at the idea of murder.

Now she was driving Doug and his new story to their doorstep. That could not happen. It would be safer to take him to the bus station as he wished than to deliver him to anyone whose resolve could shatter.

She hated to lose him, though. Through Doug, they had reached dozens of potential players. To a man, they feared the government, believed in shadow conspiracies, and were firmly convinced that the U.S. military was looking for any excuse to claim first the guns and then the freedoms of Americans. Doug had facilitated contact with three different militia groups, an arm of the Ku Klux Klan, and a team of Texas preppers who were better armed than most third-world militaries.

All this energy expended preparing for a nonexistent war, and a single dead man had brought Doug to his knees.

“There are casualties in any worthy mission,” she said. “You’ve always known this.”

He shook his head. “This is exactly what the police want us to do. They won’t even have to lie about us now. You’ve made it the truth.”

She fought for patience, for the right words. There was no time to waste finding the right words, though. Recruiting days were done. They were in action now, and she had neither the time nor the energy to return to the wars of rhetoric.

“You understand that’s all a lie, don’t you?” she said.

“What is?”

“Every word we’ve ever said. Every…single…word.”

She looked away from the road, at his face, and he blinked at her, utterly oblivious, and her frustration swelled to something deeper and darker.

“We find people of value,” she said, speaking like a teacher addressing a young child, “and we determine what story they need to hear. It’s the story that they’re already telling themselves, don’t you see? It’s the nightmare they believe in. Once you understand that nightmare, you join them in it. Their fear becomes your fear. It’s all a shared experience then. And once you have that, once they feel that is the truth, all the way down to their core, then your coping strategy becomes theirs. It’s a natural progression. This is the power of the shared narrative. Of the echo chamber. Do you follow that? Can you comprehend what I’m saying?”

He stared at her, his broad face showing all the intellect of a steer who has reached the end of the slaughterhouse chute without realizing where he’s been led.

“Infrastructure,” he said stupidly. “That’s all that needs to be hit. A man like the one in that house, he might have believed exactly what we believe. You don’t know. You didn’t bother to ask, you just cut his throat.”

She took a deep, patient breath. Said, “Let’s try this once more. Everything you have heard me say is a lie. Take your time. I’ll give you a few seconds to figure it out.”

“I don’t know what in the hell has gotten into you,” he said. “You’re out of your mind. You’re right-I don’t believe a word you’ve said. Not anymore. Pull over. I’d rather walk to prison than ride another mile with you.”

She remembered nine months ago, when they’d arrived in Cassadaga, how quickly she’d been able to convince him that he needed to stay away from television and computers. They were the most common tools of brainwashing, she’d explained, and then she’d given him a book about neurolinguistic programming. It had been, admittedly, a risky joke to play, because if he paid any attention to the book at all, he might have had some questions about her, but instead he’d swallowed the story whole. Why? Because it was what he had already suspected. Already feared.

Everyone wanted to believe he or she was the prophet of truth, and when that truth was rooted in fear, the desire was even stronger. Every human response was stronger when it came from a place of fear.

Now the source of Doug’s fear had shifted.

“Pull over,” he repeated.

They were driving through prairie country, flat and desolate and entirely empty. She slowed the Yukon and pulled off the road and bounced over the shoulder and onto the grass beyond. She was reaching for the gearshift when she saw the gun in his hand.

“On second thought,” he said, “you’ll do the walking.”

She looked at the gun, not his eyes, while she nodded. Then she moved the gearshift into park, let her foot off the brake, and said, “I’m taking the phones and radios. You clearly won’t have a need for them, and when you’re caught, I’m not letting you get caught with those.”

“You can have your phones. Just get out.”

“Such a waste of potential,” she said.

“Get out.”

She opened the door and stepped out onto the road. The sun put a haze over the asphalt, but the day wasn’t warm. Spring in the high plains, a climate of confusion.

As she walked toward the tailgate, Doug shifted awkwardly. He wanted to just slide from the passenger seat to the driver’s, but he was too big and clumsy for that. She had the tailgate up when he opened the passenger door and stepped out onto the crunching, brittle grass.

On top of the radio bags was the 12-gauge shotgun she’d stolen from Gregory Ardachu’s cabinet. It was loaded with double-aught shells. When she stepped back from the Yukon, he was blank-faced, the pistol at the side of his leg pointed to the ground.

She’d endured this for nine months. It ended in a tenth of a second.

The sound of the 12-gauge echoed across the plains, then faded into their vast spaces. Doug Oriel’s body fell in the dirt beside the Yukon, taking the bottom of his head down with it. The top had been separated from it, and now the remains settled in the grass in a red mist. A bad shot, too high.

But in the end, effective.

She walked to the body and looked down. Only one of his eyes remained, and it was staring into the dust, looking away from her. She sighed and shook her head. Eli had harbored high hopes for Doug and wanted to meet him in person. He’d be disappointed by this result, but he would understand. Doug had lost track of his narrative, and once that happened, he was not only of limited value but high risk.

As a dead man, though, he had renewed potential. She would see to it that he fulfilled his own prophecy.

It seemed he deserved at least that much for his service.

She put the shotgun back in the Yukon, closed first the tailgate and then the passenger door, and got behind the wheel, alone.

48

It took Mark and his uncle nearly an hour to reach Byron, and during the drive neither of them said much. Mark was thinking of the way Sal Cantu had smiled when he’d looked at Larry and said, You actually think your sister matters? It reminded him of the amusement Janell Cole had shown over the idea that Mark believed Lauren mattered. Yet Lauren had known the phrase rise the dark, which mattered to all of them, and certainly mattered to Lynn Deschaine and Homeland Security. How had Lauren heard of it? He was beginning to wish they’d gotten in a few more questions before Larry had knocked the man out.

“This would be the place,” Larry said, slowing. “The warehouse Cantu described. That’s it, right?”

Calling it a warehouse was lipstick on a pig-the place was just an oversize old prefabricated barn in a gravel parking lot surrounded by a high fence and a gate with a keypad. There were no vehicles in the lot, and the property looked beyond empty. Desolate.

Larry was pulling in when Mark felt the sensation that had come over him in Cassadaga-that soft, rubber-band sound, and suddenly he was tense, hand drifting toward his gun.

“Drive past.”

Larry obliged without comment, cruising down the lonely road for another mile, until the barn was out of sight and they were facing a sign for the Byron oil field, which loomed just to the north.

“Okay, chief,” Larry said, pulling onto the shoulder and turning off the car, “what’s the master plan?”

“We go back on foot. It’s so damned empty that they’re going to hear anybody in a truck, particularly this abomination of an exhaust system.”

Larry looked wounded. “I had Blue tuned up not five years ago!”

“There’s only so much a mortician can do to improve a situation, Uncle.”

“It was a mechanic.”

“Uh-huh. Regardless, I’d like to go in quietly. It’s not much of a walk.”

“It’s a damned empty one, though. A truck pulled up outside of that place looks like it belongs, maybe. Left here? It’s abandoned. It draws the eye. If anyone is in the place, they’ll see us coming ten minutes before we get there instead of thirty seconds. And if anything goes wrong, we’ve got a mile of empty highway to come back up, with nowhere to hide.”

He pointed at the surrounding countryside, bleak and barren, looking more like West Texas than Wyoming. There was no snow here; the earth was dry and fissured, like the palm of an old man’s hand. Until the Pryor Mountains rose up in the north, red-baked and uninspiring, there was no shelter. Fleeing on foot would mean covering a long stretch of open land dotted with scrub pines and brush. Larry was right-if it came to that, they’d wish the truck were a hell of a lot closer.

“All right,” Mark said. “Just make it fast. This wreck sounds like a steam locomotive.”

“Don’t you listen to him, Blue. Don’t you listen.” Larry started the engine. The exhaust fired like a cannon volley, and then they were in motion. Mark’s mouth was dry, and the strange, echoing pops were back in his skull. He was aware of a single bead of sweat trickling down his spine.

What’s the matter with you, Markus? It’s an empty pole barn, nothing more. What in the hell is the matter with you?

He’d felt this way before; that was the problem. His body had trapped the memory of the house in Cassadaga and was throwing it back at his mind.

But why? The house in Cassadaga was straight out of Edgar Allan Poe. This is an empty barn in wide-open country. There’s no similarity.

Still, the feeling was there.

Where’s that strange boy when I need him? Or, better yet, Walter, the dead man who apparently took a shine to me. I could use his advice right now. Tell me, Walt, what’s the issue up ahead?

Mark forced a smile as the fenced-in barn came back into sight, looking as if it had been abandoned for months. Beyond the fence was sun-and-wind-blasted soil with a few thatches of brush clinging to whatever groundwater there was to be found.

“I’ll drive right up to the gate and we’ll climb again,” Larry said. “Ain’t no point in jacking with that security box.”

The box he’d referenced was a curved metal pole with a keypad. High-tech for an isolated barn. A deep ditch ran between the road and the fence, ready to drain runoff and snowmelt out of the mountains, and you had to cross a massive cattle-guard grate to get across that and onto the last thirty feet of dusty drive. Larry was scanning the property, searching for watchers, and Mark knew he should be doing the same, but for some reason he was fixated on that cattle guard. It looked new, the stainless-steel gleaming in the sun, high angled pieces that rose on each side, allowing for heavy equipment to lower the grating into place easily. Cattle guards were common in this part of the world, so why this one held Mark’s eye made no sense, and yet he couldn’t look away from it, and the echoing, popping noise in his head was back and louder, closer to the surface.

You’ve seen it before.

Of course he had. He’d seen a million of them, old and rusted and dusty, while this one was new.

It shouldn’t be new, nothing else here is new-

There was nothing strange about it, nothing threatening; it was a straightforward device for livestock and drainage and-

You’ve seen it before!

The voice in Mark’s head didn’t seem to be his own, and the light reflecting off that polished, clean steel pierced his brain like an ice pick through the eye and he was just about to look away when a memory finally broke the surface like a drowning man fighting a riptide.

The basement in Cassadaga. The trap on the table. It was a model. It was a scale model and that means this one, at full size, is-

“Uncle, hang on,” Mark said, and Larry glanced at him but kept driving. As the front wheels bounced off the gravel road and onto the cattle guard, Mark grabbed his uncle by the back of his neck and jerked him down, away from the windshield and the window, pressing their faces together and slamming their heads against the gearshift. For one blissful instant, a tenth of a second, he thought, I was wrong, and I am going to look like a fool.

Then the truck rocked like it had taken a direct hit from a howitzer, and glass exploded all around them.

Just like the tiny one. That was a model for this. Turning a standard bit of equipment into a bear trap. That is what they were working on.

Larry was struggling against him, swearing and fumbling for his gun. Mark held him down for a few seconds, but there were no more impacts, so he released him and they both rose shakily to look at the damage.

The windshield was spiderwebbed with fractures, and all of the windows had blown out. Larry’s cheeks and arms were laced with small cuts, and Mark’s showed the same damage. As they looked at each other and then the truck, Larry whispered, “Mother of God, what is that?”

He was looking at the doors. Pieces of metal each as big as a man’s fist but filed down into shark’s teeth had punctured the doors, slamming shut on the truck with such incredible force that they’d bitten clean through. The doors themselves had buckled inward, and on a newer vehicle, a smaller one with less solid metal in the frame, the damage would have been even worse. A compact car would have been crushed. In another car, the airbags would have deployed, but Blue had come off the line long before airbags. Mark twisted in his seat and opened the latch on the bedcover window.

“We gotta get out.”

He wormed through the narrow opening and fell into the corrugated bed, landing hard, bits of glass biting into his hands, and again he thought of Cassadaga, of his crawl out of the basement while the house had burned around him.

He climbed across the truck bed, noticing for the first time that Larry had a trio of long guns-two rifles and a shotgun-hidden under a roll of old carpet, and he found the latch to the tailgate and opened that and pushed out, stumbling into the dusty road, shedding pebbled glass and drops of blood. He turned back and saw Larry following suit, swinging down to the road.

“You okay?” Mark asked.

“Fine. Thanks to you, that is. If you hadn’t pulled me in like that, that fucking thing would have taken my head off. Damn sure it would have broken my arms and ribs, probably my leg. How in the hell did you see that coming?”

“Walter,” Mark murmured.

“Who?”

“Nothing. I saw a version of it in Florida, and I nearly lost my hand to that one. It was so small I didn’t understand what it was a model of. I finally recognized the shape. Almost too late.”

“Just in time, that’s for sure.” Larry stepped away, looking at his beloved truck from the side. The hood and the cab were demolished, smashed and ravaged by those massive steel teeth that had been welded onto the angled side of the cattle guard. The design could not have been simpler-it was an old-school trap, springs responding to pressure, but Lord, they were powerful springs.

Why use springs, though? Mark wondered. An explosive and a pressure sensor could have incinerated the truck and killed them both in the time it took to blink. The technique employed here was far more labor-intensive, resulting in far less damage. It was a step backward in the art of war.

It fits Pate’s preaching, Mark realized. Pate needed to sell the idea of the dangerous world of modern technology. He would, therefore, go to war with old weapons, or at least old theories.

“Look what they did to Blue,” Larry said. The look on his face made any expression he had shown at Sal Cantu’s seem positively kind. “Do you have any idea how many miles I’ve covered behind the wheel of that-”

The gunfire that interrupted him was a sustained burst of shots, rapid and fired from a semiautomatic. The bullets lit up the truck, taking out what was left of the windshield and pocking the hood like hail. The shooter wasn’t armed with a large magazine, apparently, because he ran out of ammo almost as soon as Mark and Larry managed to react, and they were pressed against the back bumper, guns drawn, during the brief respite where one magazine was dropped and another inserted. Then a second burst fired. More glass and metal flew, but the bullets weren’t penetrating, and many of them were sparking off the steel cattle guard.

Mark dropped to the gravel and rolled sideways as Larry hissed, “Markus, don’t go out there!”

Mark had his gun raised but wasn’t about to return fire with the.38. That was like bringing sparklers to a fireworks show. He just wanted to see where the shooter was.

He wasn’t hard to locate-there was a pedestrian door on the east-facing side of the building, toward the front gate, and a man stood in front of it with a rifle, probably an AR-15, at his shoulder, spraying bullets at the truck.

Mark ducked down and said, “What kind of rifle do you have back there?”

“A thirty-aught-six and a three-hundred Win Mag.”

“Give me the three-hundred and I’ll own this guy.”

“I’ll do the shooting.” Larry rose high enough to fumble the folded carpet out, then dropped with a shout when another burst of gunfire rattled the truck.

“You hit?”

“No, but it was closer than I’d like.”

Mark pressed up against the rear passenger-side tire, holding the.38 and feeling impotent. He was a fine pistol shot, but the distance rendered that meaningless.

“I think he’s shot himself out of bullets,” Mark said. “Hurry!”

Larry grabbed for the rifle and instead caught the roll of carpet and dragged the whole mess out, flopping it into the gravel. The shooter took a few steps farther from the building, as if considering coming all the way out, then stopped, and Mark caught his breath.

Garland Webb.

“It’s him,” Mark said, though his uncle had no idea who he was talking about. “He’s here.” He swung around the truck, rose to his knees, and shot the cylinder on the.38 empty. None of the bullets came close, and Garland Webb turned and fled into the shadows of the building.

“Shit!” Mark looked at Larry, still fumbling through the rolled-up carpet for the right rifle case, and shouted, “Give me your pistol!”

“Pistol, hell! We’ve got to make up the distance!”

“Give me the pistol!”

Larry looked up at him in shock, saw Mark’s face, and handed over the gun. It was a Colt.45. Mark checked the load and took off at a sprint while his uncle screamed at him to stop. If Webb had more ammunition or another weapon, it was a suicide run, but Mark couldn’t think clearly enough to care. Webb was there, and Mark had a gun in hand.

He’d waited two agonizing years for this moment.

He ran down the ditch and scrambled up the other side and then hit the fence and climbed. There was barbed wire along the top, and he felt it shred his stomach as he flipped over and then landed in the gravel on the other side, but he didn’t pause, just stumbled forward and then ran hard once he had his balance, praying that Webb would show himself again, step out of the darkness and into the daylight. Into shooting range. For too long, he’d been hidden just like this-behind high fences and thick walls, locked inside dark, inaccessible rooms.

Now, though, he was right there.

Mark was halfway to the building when he heard an engine start. He pulled up short. Then he realized that the engine was coming from behind the building, and he began to run for the closest corner of the barn. He was halfway there when a truck came into view from the opposite side, a white Silverado with mud spattered along the side. Instead of driving toward the gate, it angled across the empty parking lot and toward the fence, gathering speed. Mark took two shots at a run-foolish, wasting bullets-and then forced himself to stop and take careful aim, going for the tires. He squeezed off the rest of the rounds in the gun, hitting the tailgate but never the tires. Meanwhile the truck was still accelerating, heading right for the fence. On the other side of the chain link, the land was rough but flat enough for driving, and the road was only a hundred yards away.

“Damn it, Larry, shoot! Shoot him!”

But no gunfire came from his uncle, and the Silverado hit the fence at fifty miles per hour at least. It tore through the chain link as if it were so much twine; the engine howled and the truck fishtailed and bounced over a short clump of brush, down into the ditch, and then up onto the road. The tires burned rubber, smoke rose from the pavement, and the truck was gone.

Mark dropped to his knees in the parking lot. His chest was heaving, and he could not take his eyes off the spot where the truck had just been.

Where Garland Webb had just been.

Had him. He was here, and so was I, with a gun in my hand. Finally.

He felt so tired, so beaten, that it took two tries for him to rise to his feet. By then, Larry had reached him and was in midsentence as well as midstride.

“…stupidest stunt I’ve ever seen! If he’d had another clip you’d be splattered over this parking lot like roadkill! Running into the wide-damn-open with nothing but a pistol, and you-”

“Why didn’t you shoot?” Mark screamed. “You had a three-hundred Mag and you couldn’t get off a single shot!”

“I don’t drive around with that thing loaded up and ready to fire from the hip, Markus! If you hadn’t run up there like a damned kamikaze pilot, I’d have been ready to pick him off no matter how he came out.”

They stood there and stared at each other, both of them glaring and breathing hard, and then Mark turned away and said, “Stupid son of a bitch!” He was talking to himself, not his uncle. Larry was right; if Mark hadn’t forced the issue, there would have been enough time to load and scope in, and then no matter how Webb chose to leave, it would have ended with a squeeze of the trigger.

It would have ended.

Mark reached into his pocket and closed his hand over Lauren’s old dive permit. There was blood on his hand from either the glass or the fence, and he could feel it oozing between his fingers.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“You should be, acting that damn foolish,” Larry said, unaware that Mark hadn’t been apologizing to him.

“That was him,” he said. “Uncle, that was the man.”

“I got that impression, son. Tell you something else-I know whose truck he was driving.”

Mark turned to him. “What?”

Larry’s face, speckled with fresh cuts leaking blood, was taut with anger. This time, though, it didn’t seem to be directed at Mark.

“That Silverado belongs to Scotty Shields.”

“The hunting guide? I thought you said he was in Alaska?”

“He did say it. But he wouldn’t leave that truck behind. Not by choice.”

For a moment Mark was silent. Then he said, “Let’s see what he left in there.”

They crossed the parking lot and approached the open side door from which Webb had emerged. Even though it seemed unlikely there was anyone still inside, Mark lifted a finger, asking Larry to wait. Mark had made enough foolish mistakes in this place. He motioned to the doorway and then back to himself, indicating that he was going through first, and Larry nodded and stepped to the side, ready to provide covering fire. Mark went in low so Larry could shoot over him if needed.

Nothing but silence and darkness greeted him. The inside of the barn smelled of rust and something with an acidic tang that Mark couldn’t place. He turned sideways and checked both sides of the door and found the light switches.

“I don’t want to turn these on,” he whispered.

“Hell, son, ain’t nobody here but us and the rats. Light the place up.”

Mark glanced into the expansive dark, clenched his teeth, and hit the lights.

The fluorescents had that little hitch, the half-second pause before full glow, and by the time the barn was illuminated Mark had placed the smell-there were pallets of fertilizer stacked around the room. A fine explosive material. Along the far wall were more grates for the cattle guards, loose pieces of steel, and a pair of commercial-grade welders. Quite the workshop.

What was most troubling about the place, though, was how empty it was. Mark didn’t think it was a case of slow stockpiling. It looked more like they’d been taking supplies out. Fresh tire tracks lined the floor, and a Bobcat with a front loader was parked near the huge barn doors on the opposite side, where the Silverado had evidently been. It looked like they’d been loading.

“They’re getting ready,” he said softly.

He walked to the big double doors and pushed them open in a shriek of rusted metal. More tire tracks here, and they were wider than the pickup Garland Webb had been driving. A flatbed, probably.

Larry followed him outside. Neither of them spoke for a moment. The wind blew gravel dust into the air, and it stuck to the blood on Mark’s face.

“You know where to find Scott Shields if he really is still around here?”

“Yes.”

Mark looked up the road where Garland Webb had vanished. Everything was completely silent again, as if the crush of steel and exchange of gunfire had never happened at all. No car had passed. The countryside spread out vast and empty, the sun high.

“How far is Shields’s place from here?” Mark asked.

“Not very, but it’ll take a long time walking.”

“I guess we’ll need a car, then.”

“I haven’t forgotten how to acquire one when necessary.”

They walked back to the truck. Larry handed Mark the two rifles without comment, and then he took the shotgun and his duffel bag. He gave his truck one last sorrowful look but didn’t say a word.

They set off together down the dusty road.

49

Eli drove to Red Lodge after the morning council. The tribes were in motion, Jay Baldwin was behaving, and Garland Webb was in position to deal with Markus Novak if he actually appeared on the trail. Eli thought that unlikely, but it was good to have safeguards. For Garland’s sake, he hoped Novak actually made it through.

His only concern-that news of her son’s arrival might unsettle Violet and throw off the morning’s rituals-had not developed. Overall, there was nothing in the warm, sun-splashed morning that suggested harm, and there were only a few remaining tasks. He wished that Janell had arrived, but he was not worried by her absence. If there was anyone among them who could be trusted to handle a crisis, it was Janell.

He stopped at a café in Red Lodge that offered Wi-Fi, ordered a coffee, and set up in a back booth where prying eyes didn’t reach. He had a backpack with four tablets and five smartphones, and he had nine messages to send. The first, a text message to Jay Baldwin:

You are sick today. Call in early, Jay-it’s the courteous thing to do. And prepare your barehanding gear. Don’t forget the hot stick! Talk soon.

That done, he turned off the phone that had sent the message, withdrew a tablet, and set to work composing a longer, more emotional note. This one was his pet project, the most difficult of all the recruitment efforts, because he’d had to pose as the neophyte in need of convincing rather than the messenger. If the plan was effective, though, the rewards would be enormous.

Using an application called an Android emulator to mask his location and make it look as if he were posting from Seattle, he logged on to a locked social network. There his name was Fasiel, and he was a twenty-seven-year-old Web developer who had converted to Islam twenty months earlier. He had posted references to the vulnerability of Seattle’s electrical grid time and again, urging his brothers to take action. The level of trust in Fasiel seemed minimal, although he was subject to recruiting efforts-Eli’s post office box in Seattle, which was checked by one of the heavily armed men who had arrived this morning to provide security support at Wardenclyffe, had received everything from gift certificates to Islamic bookstores to a box of chocolates.

Now on to the most important messages, which Eli would write essentially in nine different languages. Each extremist group had a unique jargon with a shared constant-they all appropriated certain words, terms, or ideas that made them feel authentic. In the echo chambers of this online world, where people parroted one another and an original idea was not only discouraged but feared, it did not take long to learn how to join in the chorus.

My brothers, Fasiel wrote,

By dawn tomorrow you will be aware of a great action, praise be to Allah, the most merciful and most beneficent. The American crusaders will be struck by the Sword of Allah deep in their hearts, and it will cast terror across the Western lands, and from nation to nation his power will be known. I caution you that the truth will not be told, and I suspect you will hear nothing but lies from the infidels, who will not wish to admit they could be so humbled by soldiers of the Caliphate. The crusaders will deny that they have been struck within their own fortresses and across the oceans, struck deep within their own homeland. When the news reaches you, the Americans will surely say that this strike at their hearts was made by a group of their own kuffar, their own clueless kind, and not by those who, Allah willing, will soon join you in Dabiq. Do not let the lies hide the truth, brothers. You will know of what I speak when you see the news, you will know immediately, and you must claim the work as that of the Caliphate, for I may perish in the fight and for the cause, dying without fear, dying with the promise of the Prophet, blessings and peace be upon him. Please do not delay in this: let the infidels know that it was the Caliphate’s sword that found their heart. This is just the beginning, as we know, and a warning for those who wish to take heed.

He posted the message, refreshed the page to be certain it was visible, and then he turned off the tablet, took it into the restroom, cracked the screen against the toilet tank, and let it soak in the sink until any hope of saving the device was gone. He left it in the trash and returned to his booth.

“More coffee?” The waitress was a redhead with blue eyes. Eli smiled at her.

“Absolutely. It’s a beautiful day, don’t you think?”

“A gorgeous day. Hope you’ll get outside to enjoy it.”

“Oh, yes. Trust me, I intend to enjoy the day.”

When she was gone, he withdrew another tablet, powered it up, and went to a site called Sons of Freedom. There, under the identity of a forty-four-year-old gun expert and motorcycle mechanic named Joe Walden, he issued his next warning.

You all know I’ve got a connection who is BIG-TIME with military intel. I know I’ve got haters and doubters about that, but you’re about to see the proof, and it’s fucking scary if it’s true. Those army boys are scrambling today to shut down some sort of MAJOR towel-head action. I got the warning. If all of you who call me a liar and say I’m full of shit are right, then nothing will happen, and I’ll come back on here and admit it myself. But, boys? It’s going down tonight. Don’t know what, where, or when, but I got a feeling it’s going to be big-league shit, and I don’t mind telling you I’m fucking scared. I am sharing this so you all are prepared and because I love all you who are ready to fight for what is right. This shit is Islamic Jihad, ISIS or al-Qaeda or something just like them, and here’s what I’ve been told, by a guy who’d be in Leavenworth in ten minutes if anyone knew he’d whispered a word to me: When it goes down, our fucking joke of a president is going to say that it wasn’t anybody from the Middle East. He’ll say it was AMERICAN BOYS. That’s the truth. Or at least what I was told. Like I said, I’d rather be wrong than right, because if I’m right? Americans will be blamed for MUSLIM TERRORISTS. We are at fucking WAR then, you understand? So if something goes down tonight, and you hear it was anybody but the towel-heads, it’s time to wake up and DO SOMETHING. War is coming. It’s here. And I for one am not going down listening to a bunch of lies from pussy politicians who get backdoor deals from terrorist oil money. God bless you all.

Eli finished the note, read it again, and couldn’t keep the smile off his face. The language was just right. He’d seeded the clouds of fear on each side, and when the news broke, the clouds would burst.

“You are enjoying the day!”

The waitress was back, wearing a big dumb grin. “I can see your smile from all the way across the room, mister. Nice to see a happy face.”

“What’s not to be happy about?” Eli said as he pushed Send. “It’s a special day.”

50

Janell used the satellite radio, their desperate-measures-only means of communication, from where she was parked behind an abandoned barn nine miles north of Doug Oriel’s body. Eli answered quickly but his voice was soft and she wondered if Violet Novak was nearby. The thought of that trite, ignorant woman enraged her. She understood Eli’s double life intellectually, but not emotionally. She hoped that her existence with Doug had troubled him in the same way.

“I’m en route but delayed,” she said, and then she explained the situation in the simplest terms possible: Doug had threatened the cause; died for the cause. The rest was irrelevant.

He listened without interrupting. For a man of such power and command, he was always a patient listener. Today, though, the silence scared her. Not because she was afraid of him-theirs was a relationship that transcended fear, mocked fear-but because she knew the disappointment he was feeling.

“I was relying on his skill and his devices,” he said at last. “Counting on them.”

She winced. “I know. Do you think I don’t understand that? I’ve been apart from you for nine months to ensure that we would have him. If there had been another option, any other, I would have taken it. There wasn’t.”

The silence went on even longer this time, and then he said, “I’ve never liked my contingency. It’s been tried before, and without much success.”

“But you have it. We’ve got to try it now. We must.”

“Yes.” He sighed. “Much pressure rides on the shoulders of my man Jay.”

“Will he perform?”

“He’s a motivated man.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Because there’s no certainty. But Jay is no different than any other recruit. When faced with his worst fears, he will discover he is capable of more than he realized.”

This was, of course, Eli’s entire worldview-and their earliest bond, dating back to their first conversation in Rotterdam, when they’d shared a dark amusement over a world that promised progress born from hope but acted, again and again, out of fear. It was not an untested theory, and the years had validated it repeatedly. Still, she was uneasy. She knew nothing of Jay Baldwin.

“I’m sorry it’s come to this.”

“Sorrow rarely advances a cause,” he said. “Proper action, however, always will. So let’s look at the energy of this situation and determine how to mobilize it. There’s a way to capitalize. There always is.”

He explained the potential he saw, and as she listened to his instructions, she couldn’t keep herself from smiling. It was brilliant, so perfect that it felt as if it had to have been planned, and to know that he had made this adjustment so swiftly, turning crisis into opportunity, was the ultimate illustration of what separated him from the common man.

“What the morning calls for,” he said, “are as many Paul Revere riders as possible. They’ll be ignored today, but by tonight? By tomorrow? They’ll be forever remembered.”

“I understand. I’ll make sure the message goes out.”

“Good. Doug will serve his purpose, as you say.”

“Serve it better dead than alive. What about Markus Novak?”

“If he appears, he’ll be killed by Garland.”

Good news, but still she felt cheated. Novak belonged to her. Both Novaks, in fact.

“Everything is accelerated now,” he said. “I can’t delay. You know I would if that was possible, but at this point…we’d risk too much.”

“I understand,” she said, but a part of her died with the acceptance. All of their time apart had been predicated on this day together. “I wanted to be there for the morning. I tried everything to be there.”

His voice was tender when he spoke again, because he understood what it meant to her. “Dawn was trivial; dusk is critical. Join me then. We’ll watch the world go dark together, and then we’ll leave together.”

Together. The word made her flush with anticipation.

“Give me the location,” she said. “I won’t be delayed again.”

He told her which phone to power up and promised that GPS coordinates would be sent to it. From her current position, he estimated it would be most of a day’s drive.

“Can you be there by sundown without taking risks?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Approach from the south. You’ll see me. We’ll watch the train go through, and then we’ll leave.”

“Together,” she said.

“Together,” he echoed.

She shut her eyes. It had been years since she’d wept, but at that moment, she was close.

51

As Jay read the text message, the dread that had lived in the pit of his stomach since the day he’d come home to find Eli Pate sitting at his kitchen table bloomed into a cold wellspring that spread through his veins and filled his body.

This is the shutdown, he realized. The time has come.

He called his dispatcher and informed her that he was going to be out for the day, that he was feeling ill.

“You sure don’t sound good, Jay.”

He hadn’t been trying to fake any symptoms, but his voice couldn’t sound like that of a well man.

“No,” he said. “No, I’m not doing too good at all.”

“Stay home and get healthy, then.”

“I’m working on it.”

He hung up. The sun had risen bright and brilliant and he watched it and thought that the storm that had blown in the day before he met Eli Pate, when he and Sabrina had counted the blinking lights, waiting to see if Jay would be called out, seemed a thousand years ago. A different man had left the house on the day of the storm, and that man would never be seen again.

Jay already understood that.

He walked into the garage and to the cabinet that held his barehanding equipment, relics of a lost life. He couldn’t climb anymore. That was what Pate didn’t understand. He’d picked the wrong guy. He’d picked a fraud. Jay hadn’t worked in the flash zone since Tim’s funeral.

The hot suit, or Faraday suit, allowed the lineman to contact the equipment directly, instead of having to use a properly charged pole or some other technique. The current would pass through the suit and continue down the lines with none of the deadly disruptions in voltage. When you came into contact, you’d carry a half a million volts all around your body. It was an experience unlike any other in the world, and Jay had always felt strangely spiritual during those times, the way others might in a temple.

That was before he’d climbed up to retrieve his brother-in-law’s corpse.

The suit-socks, trousers, jacket with hood, gloves-was made of a blend of flame-resistant Nomex and a microscopic stainless-steel fiber. In the 1830s, when Michael Faraday began the research that led to this suit, in a world that hadn’t yet seen a lightbulb, he determined that he could coat a room with metal foil and stand within it, unharmed, as the electricity flowed. Linemen who did barehanding work referred to putting on the suit as “becoming metal.” When Jay was encased in the suit, the voltage would pass through the steel mesh, meaning that Jay would energize to the same level as the lines.

He packed the suit in the backseat of the truck, then returned to the cabinet for his hot stick and the accessory bag, which was loaded with fuse pullers and wrench heads and shepherd’s hooks, all the things that had once been the tools of his trade. He packed the cutting stick too. Jay assumed that Pate intended him to go up there and cut a live line. It was a terrible plan. The system monitors would know the instant it happened, and a crew would be sent to fix it. That crew would work fast. Power wouldn’t be lost for long.

He took the hot stick, which was a long fiberglass pole filled with a special foam that allowed the lineman to reach out and contact the current. Distance was critical-the telescoping rod could elongate to ten feet, and Jay would want every bit of that. If you weren’t working from a bucket truck or a helicopter, something allowing a lineman to be safely energized without having a contact to the ground, you’d vaporize if you entered the flash zone.

The flash zone was actually an insulation zone. High-voltage lines were exposed, cooled by the air and wind, which meant that the air and wind also carried some current, always affected by humidity. The higher the voltage, the larger the flash zone could become. With lines at five hundred thousand volts, Jay would never get close before the current discovered him and decided to use his body as a convenient means of doing the only thing it cared about-returning to the earth. With lines at lower voltage, the Faraday suit would protect him, but at half a million?

They’d have to identify him by his boots.

He put the hot stick and tool bag in the truck and then paused to handle the Nomex and steel-mesh suit, thinking of all the times he’d worked in it while the current crawled over him like a swarm of insects. Dangerous, yes, but he’d worked with poise and confidence. Until the day he saw Tim’s face, or what had remained of it.

Jay dropped the suit, stumbled to the garage-floor drain, and vomited.

Eli Pate arrived two hours later, walking casually up the street from downtown Red Lodge. If he was concerned about watchers or a trap, he didn’t show it. He looked every bit as calm as he had when Jay found him at the kitchen table.

“How are you feeling, Jay?” he said when the door was open. “Calm, cool, and collected? I hope so. It’s a big day.”

“Do I get to see her?”

Eli Pate smiled warmly as he shook his head. “Not just yet. Now, we’ve got plenty of catching up to do, I know, but let’s stay in motion while we do it. You’ll drive, per the norm. I’m more of the shotgun type of guy, you know?”

Jay said, “What do you actually want? What in the hell do you think this is going to accomplish? You might take the power out. They’ll put it back on. And for what?”

Pate’s smile didn’t waver. “I’m the ultimate theorist, Jay. In a nation where people love to say that all they have to fear is fear itself, they have created quite fertile ground for terror. I’ll take the power out and they’ll put it back on, you say, simple as that. I’m not so sure I agree. When people are faced with events they can’t understand, they rush for a narrative that explains it. Rush right past the truth. When the lights go out? I’m interested in seeing what stories come out of the darkness, my friend.”

52

The engine sounds had come and gone again, but they hadn’t returned, and it did not take long before Lynn Deschaine began to muse on the possibility of escape.

“How is the fence electrified? There’s no way they have power lines out here. I don’t hear generators running.”

“A windmill. Violet is very proud of it.”

“You’re serious?”

Sabrina nodded. Her swollen nose prevented her from breathing except through her mouth, which left her throat dry and cracked, so even talking hurt.

“So if we stopped it from turning, we would cut off the power?”

Sabrina shook her head. “I doubt that. The windmill would feed batteries, I think. That way the current can be stored and controlled. Actually, that’s not right. The current is always alive. The only thing that can be stored is power.”

Lynn said, “Okay, I’ll confess-I’m stone-stupid when it comes to electricity. I bought another charger for my phone once before I realized I’d accidentally turned off the power strip the original was plugged into. If a fuse blows, I’m calling an electrician. Who would probably tell me it isn’t actually a fuse. This is the bad side of apartment living, I guess. I’ve always had the maintenance guys, right? I’ve never had to pause to learn. But there has to be another way to shut off the power to that fence without going right to the batteries or the circuit breaker or whatever.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Sure there is. Did your husband ever talk about his work?”

“Of course.”

“Okay. He’s the guy who turns the power back on. So…why does it go off?”

“Jay does high-voltage repair. I don’t think it’s the same thing as this.”

“Here they’ve got a power source, and they’ve got current traveling through wires. Isn’t it basically a microcosm of what he does?”

Sabrina nodded slowly. It should be. Whether the power came from a nuclear plant or a windmill or a battery, the idea was the same-generation, transmission, distribution. Lynn’s question was a good one: Why does it go off?

“Weather, usually,” Sabrina said to herself.

“What?”

“I’m thinking of the causes of the outages. Weather. Limbs fall on lines, or trees knock them down completely, or there are what Jay calls the squirrel suicide bombers.”

“Pardon?”

“Rodents making contact with a live wire. They’ll get fried, and if the shock doesn’t blow them clear and they get stuck in the equipment, it creates a fault.”

“Why?”

“Because the system is set up to protect itself. Just like a fuse or a circuit breaker. If it encounters something that could create a larger problem, it shuts down. A breaker trips, a fuse blows, whatever. You ever notice how your lights blink sometimes before they go out completely?”

“Yes.”

“That’s the system trying to clear the fault. It will try two times. If you get two hard blinks, the next one won’t be a blink. The next one is a shutdown, and it will be out for a while, because now they’ve got to send a crew out to fix it.”

She was remembering their first home together, a crappy rental in Billings, Jay explaining this as they lay in bed. That was the first time he’d talked about the squirrel suicide bombers, tickling her neck, making a stupid squirrel sound that had made her laugh.

Lynn said, “See? You do understand it.”

She supposed she did. At least the basics, at least a little more than most.

“So how do we create a fault that actually lasts?” Lynn asked. “One that doesn’t immediately come back on or that can be fixed by flipping a breaker?”

Sabrina took a deep breath, tried to put herself back in that house in Billings. What caused outages beyond equipment failure? Animals, storms, limbs.

“Maybe we could throw a limb up on the fence?”

“Did you see any limbs out there?”

“No.” Sabrina also wasn’t sure that the system wouldn’t just blow the limb clear, achieving nothing. The fault had to be one that lasted. What was bad, beyond equipment failure? Or, maybe a better question, what caused equipment failure?

She closed her eyes, remembering that warm, wonderful night in their first home together, Jay’s fingertip tracing over her skin as he talked.

If two energized lines touch, say good night for a while. The system does not like that.

Okay. Line-to-line contact. But how did you make one of those copper wires touch another without getting shocked yourself? She hadn’t seen any insulated electrician’s gloves lying around. Again, the idea of throwing something onto the wires was possible, but whatever you threw would have to bridge the lines and be conductive, able to transmit electricity between the two. Water or a piece of metal or…

Sabrina lifted her left hand, her shackles jingling.

“How long is this chain?”

“What?”

“Three feet, maybe?”

“At least. Could be four. Long enough to let us stretch out and lie down. At least three.”

Sabrina nodded. She mimed a tossing motion with her right hand, like pitching horseshoes.

She said, “I think I could do it.”

“Do what?”

“Use our shackles to kill that fence. The live wires are bare, not insulated. They aren’t spaced that far apart either. If I could toss these up there and get them to hook, we’d have line-to-line contact. That’ll make things go dark in a hurry.”

Lynn was watching her with fascination. “You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

“And you think you could make that toss? Because I doubt we’d have much time, and if it goes wrong, I don’t want you electrocuting yourself.”

“I don’t want that either.” She mimed the toss once more, then nodded. “I could do it. Tailgating experience.”

“Pardon?”

“Horseshoes, beanbag toss, even darts. I always won those. I’m a tailgating champ.” She had started to laugh, and not in a healthy way.

“This won’t be a game,” Lynn said, staring at Sabrina as if her sanity were slipping away. That was probably what it looked like, Sabrina realized, yet she couldn’t stop laughing. Tailgating. That had been her life once, and not that long ago. Montana Grizzlies home games, loud music, beer in red Solo cups-that had been real? It couldn’t have been real. She’d been born in shackles, hadn’t she?

Lynn said, “You need to-” but Sabrina cut her off.

“It won’t be a game,” she said. The tears that had come to her eyes with the laughter were leaking down her cheeks now, and the laugh was gone. “I’ll make it. If I get a chance, then I will make it. I can only control the second part.”

“It would be best to do it in the dark, I think. When they’d have more trouble finding us.”

“Yes.”

“But we might not get to call that shot. They’ve got big plans for the day.”

“It seems that way.”

“So…are we agreed? Next time out, we try this?”

Sabrina’s throat tightened and her stomach growled around cold acid. She couldn’t conjure so much as a smile, let alone the wild laughter she’d just displayed. Her tears cooled and dried on her cheeks.

“Next time out,” she said. It was supposed to be firm; it came out in a whisper.

“All right. We’ll have to deal with Violet in here, though. She’s taking us to the bathroom one at a time and locking doors behind her. Any attempt to come back will slow us down too much. When this happens, it has to happen fast.”

“Right.” Sabrina worked her tongue around her mouth, which had gone very dry.

“I’ll take Violet, and I’ll trust you with the fence. Sound right?” Lynn asked.

Sabrina just nodded. The thought of the attempt had stolen her voice. She was thinking of the chicken with the ruptured eye.

There are only two relevant parties now, Eli Pate had told her. People and power. Who has power, and who deserves it.

53

They stole an F-150 from the parking lot of a bar on the outskirts of Byron. The windows were open a crack, leaving it easy to get into, but it had been near the side of the building, not thirty feet from the door, and Mark was reluctant to try it.

“Somebody in there hears something, we’re going to end up with a shitstorm on our hands, Uncle. And this is Wyoming-ten-to-one odds that everybody inside that place is packing.”

“You’re probably right,” Larry said. “So I’d suggest we hurry with it.”

It took Larry less than three minutes, and he didn’t make much of a sound until the engine turned over.

“Do I want to ask why you’re in such good practice?” Mark said.

“Just get in the damn truck. Remember, I was asleep in my own bed when you showed up this morning.”

This morning. It seemed impossible that this was still the same day.

Mark climbed in the passenger seat, and they drove away from the bar and toward town.

“Pretty nice ride,” Larry said. He had the window down and his arm resting on the door, relaxed as could be, no indication that he’d just stolen the truck.

“Isn’t it neat how these modern ones can shift gears all by themselves?” Mark said. “I’ve heard the brakes even work without a rosary.”

“You were more respectful when you were a kid.”

They drove west, out of town. Mark was thinking of Lauren and Sabrina Baldwin, of Jay asking him what he’d have done for a second chance, when Larry threw the truck into a hard left turn.

“Whoa, here we go,” Larry called. They’d been traveling at a good speed, and the truck fishtailed briefly but Larry straightened it out and they bounced along a gravel road that led away from the highway and toward the Shoshone River. A few miles later, the road curled out of the gulch and toward the river and Mark saw an RV parked beside a copse of scrub pines. It was a large, expensive model, at least forty feet long, black and gold, though the paint was covered by a thick layer of dust.

“Is that Scott Shields’s?” Mark asked.

“Yes.”

“Doesn’t seem like he made it to Alaska.”

“Nope.” Larry cut the engine, and Mark saw that his gun was already in his hand. “And that gives me more than a few questions for him.”

They got out of the truck. The sun was high in a cloudless sky and between that and the lingering dust from the truck’s rattling ride, the place felt desertlike despite the pines. There were still patches of snow in all directions and yet the day had been sunburn-bright and plenty warm. Springtime in the Rockies.

Everything was still as a portrait. Mark could hear Larry’s breathing. He stood stock-still, like a dog smelling the air, hackles up.

“There’s a bad feel here,” Larry said, and then he walked up to the door and knocked. “Scotty? Scotty?”

No answer. Also no vehicle beside the motor home, although hard-packed ruts made it clear that there was usually a truck there. Mark was just about to ask where Shields might be found in town when he saw the blood.

“Uncle.”

Larry turned to him, and Mark pointed. Neither of them said a word as they followed the blood trail. It led from the tire tracks all the way to the front door.

Larry took his ball cap off, pushed his long hair back over his ears, put the cap back on, and bent the bill. He was bowstring-tense.

“Give me cover just in case,” he said.

“No. I’ll go in first,” Mark said, but Larry ignored him and walked to the RV with a brisk stride. Mark was expecting him to at least try the door. Instead, he simply raised his boot and kicked it. The door held for the first kick and snapped open on the second, and Larry reeled back like he’d taken gunfire. Mark was just behind him in a shooter’s stance, but he couldn’t see anything.

“What’s wrong?” he said a second before the answer arrived to Mark on the windless air.

The smell of death wafted out, pungent and nauseating. Larry gagged and spit into the dirt.

“Hang on,” Larry said. He went to the truck and found two rags and splashed a small amount of motor oil on them. He brought the rags back along with two pairs of weathered canvas work gloves. His eyes were grim. “Let’s have a look,” he said, and then he put the gloves on and held the oil-soaked rag to his nose.

Mark followed. Mark took the gloves and the rag, and they walked through the dust and up the steps of the RV. Even against the oil, the smell was strong.

The steps led into a small living-room area with a built-in sofa, empty. To the right of that was a booth and a table, also empty, and then the driver’s cab. The inside of the RV had the feel of the Mary Celeste, an abandoned ghost ship.

Except for that smell, and the streaks of blood along the floor.

Mark followed the streaks to an accordion door like those in airplane bathrooms. The door folded inward, and now the smell’s source had shape. There was a dead man sprawled on the bed.

Mark couldn’t see evidence of a killing wound until he took one step closer to the body, his stomach roiling, and saw a neat hole where each of the dead man’s eyes belonged. Mark could look straight down through tunnels of black blood that carved through the brain and out of the skull and into the mattress below. Twin shots in the eyes. A.22, probably, held right up against the eye sockets.

“This is him?” Mark said. “Scott Shields?”

“That’s him. Let’s get out of here.”

Larry stumbled away from the bedroom and out of the RV and there were retching sounds from outside. Mark lingered inside, looking down into those empty eyes. Then he backed out of the bedroom, closed the door on the corpse of Scott Shields, and left the RV. The main door would no longer latch. Tonight, if the body wasn’t moved, the animals that had been kept at bay would finally have a chance to feast.

Larry was all the way back by the truck, braced against the hood, spitting into the dirt. Mark walked up beside him and looked down the empty road. This time of year, caught between snowmobiling season and fishing season, there wouldn’t have been many people passing by the RV.

“Who told you he was in Alaska?” Mark said.

“He did. He said he was headed out.”

“So was he stopped from leaving, or was he lying to you?”

Larry frowned. “Scotty was a straight shooter with me.”

“Did he know what happened when you tried to get Mom away from Pate?”

“Yeah, he knew.”

“All right. Would he have lied to you to keep you out of the fire?”

“You’re thinking that he wasn’t through with Pate?”

“I’m asking.”

Mark glanced back at the RV. “Strange place to leave him. That body could have been scattered all over these mountains by coyotes and bears by now.”

“Pate left him there for a reason.”

“What do you think that is?”

Larry turned and looked Mark squarely in the face. “So we could see the bones of those who came before us,” he said.

For a moment neither of them spoke. A haze of dust rose in the distance, back toward the main road, but then it passed as the vehicle vanished in another direction. Mark checked his cell phone. He had a faint signal. They were standing at a murder scene and he had a cell signal. You called it in, that’s what you did. That was the right thing, the only thing.

He pocketed the phone.

“We could go back to Cantu and try again,” Mark said. “Let him know that we were unimpressed.”

“You’re unimpressed?” Larry said, wide-eyed.

“That we were not helped, at least. We’re no closer to Pate.”

“Cantu isn’t going to talk much more than he already has.”

“Not even with encouragement?”

“If you’re prepared to go back there and take a hammer to the man’s fingers and toes, pliers to his teeth, a drill bit to his kneecaps, he might talk. Might. Otherwise, he’s said all he intends to say. My gut tells me that whatever fear we put into Sal won’t be greater than the fear that already lives in him courtesy of Eli Pate.”

Mark looked away, back at the RV. He was silent for a few seconds, then said, “What’s this guy’s role? Shields. He got crossways with Pate and he got killed, that’s clear enough. But what was Pate’s problem with him?”

“Your mother.”

“What does Mom have that Pate could benefit from-and I don’t need to hear any remarks about the obvious. Cantu himself said that didn’t matter to Pate.”

“Son, your mother doesn’t have anything. Never did. You know that. She doesn’t have a dime to her name.”

Mark pointed at the RV where the dead man lay. “But he did.”

“Scott had some money, sure, but not that much. Not killing money.”

“Uncle, you know better than me that to the wrong man at the wrong time, ten damn dollars can turn into killing money.”

“Not to Pate. He’s just not that sort, not impulsive. If Eli killed Scotty, it wasn’t a cash grab-and by the time this happened, Scotty wouldn’t have had any cash left to grab, anyhow. What he did have he’d put into the hunting camp. And even that was risky. I knew that from the start. All he had was the land-no lodge, no equipment; hell, no good way to get there, even.”

“The property is that hard to access?”

“Bet your ass it’s hard to access. ATV or a horse. Maybe a tricked-out Jeep. Scotty was going to run horses for the hunting trips, the way he had up in Alaska.”

“And Pate knew this place.”

“Yeah.”

“And now your friend Shields is dead, but it’s a surprise to you.”

“Only a surprise because-”

“You weren’t looking for him,” Mark finished. “He saw to that. We could consider that a coincidence, I suppose.”

“But you don’t believe it.”

“I think it’s a stretch.”

Larry shook his head but didn’t say anything. He was unconvinced, but he was also wondering now.

“When you talked to Shields and Pate,” Mark said, “did they ever mention the word Wardenclyffe to you?”

Larry frowned. “No. What’s that mean?”

“I think it’s a place. I know people were looking for it.”

“Never heard of it.”

Mark looked again from Larry over to the RV, then up at saw-toothed mountaintops. The sun was angling down, unfiltered by cloud, burning the snowcap off the peaks.

“How far away is the hunting camp?”

“The drive isn’t all that bad, but it’s hiking once you get there, and there’s nothing up there but woods and rocks and wind.”

“When was the last time you saw the place?”

“Maybe seven months back.”

“Okay. So who knows what’s out at this rough property now? Pate has to be somewhere, Uncle. And he’s not alone anymore. He’s off the grid, and he needs to be hidden. The land sounds pretty good for hiding.”

“It’s surely that,” Larry admitted.

“I want to take a look,” Mark said. “If Pate’s not impulsive, as you say, then he killed Shields with a purpose. Maybe the purpose was to keep him away from his own land.”

Larry gestured at the RV. “What about this?”

“He’s sat this long. He can sit longer. Same goes for Sal, in my opinion.”

A ghost of a smile crossed Larry’s face. “Yes.”

They got into the truck and Larry fired up the engine. The smile was gone and his eyes were sorrowful as he studied the RV before putting the truck in gear.

“He was a good man,” Larry said, “and he was a hard man. That’s what worries me, Markus. Scott Shields was nobody’s pushover. When you see a hard man left like that…”

He didn’t finish, and he didn’t need to. He’d already said it before, when he’d finished vomiting out the smell of his dead friend into the dust.

The bones of those who came before us.

54

She sent the e-mails from the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant at an interstate stop in southern Wyoming. She hated not to be in motion, but Doug Oriel had some heavy lifting left to do.

Wording was key, and it took her a while to get it just right. She read it five times through, tweaking here and there, before she finally sent the message. Then she copied the text, pasted it into a fresh message, and sent it again. There were nine groups in all, ranging in size from five members to twenty-seven, reaching a total of more than two hundred heavily armed and deeply paranoid white men scattered across four states. Most were in Florida and Georgia, but there was a Texas contingent as well.

The note needed to convey the proper emotion, so she kept it terse, as close to panicked as possible.

Have any of you heard from Doug? I received a short phone call from him late in the afternoon. Police raided his house in Florida two days ago. All of his guns are gone. Confiscated. The house itself was burned. This was in Cassadaga. He told me the police will claim he murdered a woman there. He said he would not be surprised if he is implicated in another crime for every day that he stays free. He’s afraid they have all of his contacts under surveillance. That is why I am warning you. I’m destroying this computer as soon as I send this message. You should do the same. Doug believes there is something big coming. I don’t know what. He was scared, and not making much sense. Has anyone heard anything? Rumors, threats? I am afraid to be online, afraid that they will track me, if they aren’t already. There is no news about him yet, but the house fire is real. Just search for Cassadaga and fire. You’ll see it. There is also NO MENTION OF ANY GUNS BEING CONFISCATED. So they are already lying. I don’t know what to do, but I won’t use a computer or a phone. Not after what he told me. I don’t know if he is still free or if they have him. I don’t know what the “something big” means. I don’t know ANYTHING except that the police have decided to move against Doug and when this ends he will be in prison for a crime he didn’t commit and we all may be next. Everyone do what you feel is best…but be prepared for the worst. Doug thought he was, and look what happened to him.

I will contact you all when I feel it is safe. I have no idea when that will be. If you don’t hear from me again, you can guess what happened.

PREPARE FOR THE WORST!!!

She hated exclamation marks but thought they served a critical purpose here. The message had a certain tripping rhythm, a stumbling hysteria, and she knew it would be effective. She’d met most of the men in these groups over her nine months with Doug, and they were almost always wild-eyed with burgeoning panic and twisting theories, even on a calm day. After this message, there would certainly be a blood-pressure spike. And then the grid would go down in the West, and they would remember the message, the vague warning of something big coming, and of government lies. From there…

Time would tell.

And she was running out of it if she wanted to join Eli by dusk.

55

Twenty-nine miles outside of Chill River, Eli Pate told Jay to turn off the highway.

They were in a basin, with mountains in the rearview mirror and empty big-sky country ahead. Foothills snaked up to the east, Jay saw out his window. Power lines traced the low points, carefully laid in the places of easiest access, even if that was a bit of a joke-there was no easy access to the lines in Montana in the wrong kind of weather, and when you needed to get to them, it was usually the wrong kind of weather.

“We wait here?” Jay said. It was a desolate spot but they were far from the lines and he could see no purpose for this location other than its isolation.

“No, no. I want you to watch something.”

Pate reached into the backpack that rested between his feet and brought out a pair of binoculars. Zeiss, high-end. He lifted them to his eyes with one hand, the other still on the gun, finger still on the trigger. Jay followed the angle of the binoculars. There was a road far to the northeast, nearly out of sight to the naked eye. Beyond that, the countryside was empty. There was nothing to see, and yet Pate said, “Tremendous,” and lowered the binoculars and passed them to Jay. “All yours, my friend. The show belongs to you.”

“What am I looking at?”

“I’d recommend you watch the access road directly in front of you.”

Jay lifted the binoculars and adjusted the focus. He finally found a single fir, neatly cut, leaning on the power lines at a forty-five-degree angle. It was just as they’d had in the Beartooths on the day all this had started, only down here there was no blizzard to contend with.

Jay thought, It will take the boys all of ten minutes to clear that shit.

“Cute work,” he said.

“Keep watching,” Pate said.

Jay kept watching. Nothing happened. His hands and eyes tired from the effort and he was about to ask just what in the hell he was supposed to see when dust appeared to the west. An oncoming vehicle. A few seconds later, it was close enough for him to identify: a bucket truck.

He’ll lose his good humor when he sees them at work, Jay thought. They’ll have it fixed in less time than it took him to cut the tree down.

The truck lumbered on down the road, the cloud of dust gathering in its wake like a storm. There was a dip where the road met a small runoff stream, but the water was low and there was a grate to make vehicle crossings easier. The truck would be able to get close to the tree, and the crew would make fast work of it.

He was about to say as much when the truck’s front wheels made contact with the grate, and then it exploded.

Jay didn’t immediately understand what had transpired. One instant the truck had been rumbling along and the next it was a mangled mess of broken metal and glass, and the cattle guard itself seemed to be inside out.

“What did you do!” Jay shouted, and Eli Pate laughed, low and soft and extremely pleased.

“I should have kept the glasses. You got all the fun. A good show, it seems?”

Jay had actually moved the binoculars away, but now he lifted them again and, in horror, panned the landscape until he located the truck.

“You planted a bomb for them,” he said. His voice was hollow. All of him was.

“Not at all. Take a closer look, Jay. That is simple technology at its finest. Trapped energy. That is all we did. We coiled the energy that the world is filled with, and we let it speak for itself.”

Through the lens, Jay could see what was left of the truck-the front and back ends were intact but it was crushed in the middle as if pinched between a giant’s thumb and index finger. One man struggled to crawl out of the passenger window. His blood ran down the remnants of the door panel and joined a pool of steaming fluids dripping out of the engine. He was fighting past something that at first appeared to be a part of the wreckage, but then Jay saw that it wasn’t a piece of the truck but rather the steep, angled sides of the grate. They had snapped shut on the truck like a wolf’s jaws.

“Why?” Jay said. “For the love of God, what is the point of this?”

“Not the love of God, Jay. The absence of one. Absence of both love and God, actually. I hate to shatter any illusions you might have previously held, but the world you occupy is a cold one, and no one listens. No one cares.”

He sounded restful, an old man on a porch chair, close to dozing off.

“You had questioned the thoroughness of my approach. You don’t need to tell me that; I’ve seen it on your face from the start. So let’s discuss it now. I’d appreciate your review. Your beloved bride will certainly appreciate your review. Understand?”

Jay held the binoculars half raised, staring at the carnage in the distance. Without the zoom, it looked like nothing more than a dust cloud.

“Within the next few hours,” Eli Pate said, “a number of utility trucks are going to meet with problems in very desolate locations. I expect that will create a strain on manpower, not to mention equipment. But your kind is used to crisis. They will respond. While they deal with these problems, my own crews will reassemble elsewhere. They’re equipped with grid maps and a fine understanding of the most remote areas on the system. They could continue to cut trees and create faults, of course, but that is so frivolous, child’s play. What they will do instead is wait for you. Because when you take down the transmission lines from Chill River, what will happen?”

“A massive outage,” Jay said. His voice sounded disembodied.

“Exactly. And think about all the lines out there that will suddenly be dead, harmless. Now imagine what fast work one could make with chain saws on the actual utility poles themselves. Without any risk from the current, I think they can bring down many lines in a hurry. And my understanding is that your sophisticated computer monitors won’t know where this is happening, because the system monitors depend on the current to identify the problems. But there will be no current, and therefore they will be blind. Am I correct so far?”

He was correct. He was also brilliant. Taking the transmission lines out would cause a massive problem, but it would be temporary. If he had teams working with chain saws in the mountains, though, taking down line after line, and then transmission was reenergized with no idea of all the faults that awaited…Jay could picture the grid map on his office wall, and he thought, Good night, Seattle. Good night, Portland.

“I’m no fool,” Eli Pate said. “I know that they’ll send for help and that they’ll get those transmission lines back up. But with all those unknown faults scattered about the mountains, what will happen when they reenergize the transmission lines, Jay?”

“The system will try to shift loads. Frantically. And by doing that, it will create more problems. Cascading outages. You’ll lose cities. You’ll lose states, maybe.”

He sounded like a man beneath an interrogation lamp, admitting what he didn’t want to admit.

“That,” Eli Pate said, “was always my idea. And I’m going to share a little secret, Jay. This is only the start. But I’ll be true to my word. If you take out those transmission lines, you will live to see your wife again. That doesn’t bother me in the least. In fact, I rather look forward to the media broadcasts of your account of your time with me. It will be fun to watch. Except…” He snapped his fingers. “Damn. It will be awfully hard to find a functioning television in this part of the country. Alas, the price of success.”

Jay lifted the binoculars to his eyes again and saw the man who’d climbed free was looking back inside the truck, trying to help the others. Another survivor reached for help from inside the ruins of the truck, reached for the man who’d already escaped.

The bloody arm he extended no longer had a hand.

56

The route Larry took away from the corpse of Scott Shields led them back through and toward the Bighorn Mountains.

“Fastest way would be up and over,” he said, “but the pass is still closed with snow at the top. We gotta head south, go through Greybull. The property is private land that abuts the national forest. It’s basically cut off from everywhere in the winter and not much easier to access in the summer. You could develop it, I suppose, but it’s expensive to build out there. I can’t even imagine a figure on utilities. Just to run electric would be plenty of work, and plenty of dollars. But it was good empty land. You know I’ve always liked good empty land.”

He was too chatty, considering what they’d come from and where they were bound, but Mark understood it, remembered it. Larry had always talked more when he didn’t want to dwell on reality.

“I’m sorry,” Mark said.

“What?” Larry looked genuinely confused.

“I’m sorry that I showed up on your doorstep this morning. Why are you even doing this? You’ve committed enough crimes today to put yourself in lockup for a long while, Uncle. Why?”

Larry frowned, glanced at him. “You said they murdered your wife, Markus.”

“You didn’t even know her.”

“You’re still family.”

“Not the kind who has been any help to you.”

Larry’s eyes were back on the road. “That’s not how I look at it, son. You were brought up wrong. I had a part in that, I know.”

“You had the good part. You tried to balance Mom.”

“Hell, I didn’t provide any balance. We were just different kinds of messes, my sister and me. Our brother too. Ronny and Violet and me, well, we stuck together better than most, I suppose, but I don’t think we would have if it hadn’t been for you. What you needed, none of us knew how to give. But we got something from trying. You’ll never understand that.” He gave a bitter bark of a laugh. “You know I look back on when you were nothing but a baby, back before you could so much as stand without help, and I think that’s why I got clean. Because you needed me. Needed us. But my definition of clean would be most men’s filthy. All the same…I think I got closer than I would have been because of you, Markus. Maybe even stayed alive because of you. I was in a bad way when your mother had you, and when Isaac skipped, what I wanted to do was kill the son of a bitch, but that wasn’t an option. Why? Because you needed your ass wiped. And so I stayed and tried to help. And trying to help was good for me.”

Mark said, “Isaac?”

“Shit. It’s been so damn long, I guess I slipped,” Larry said. He was casual, as if giving a name to an unknown father were a small thing. “He might not even have been the boy. I hate to put it that blunt for you, but that’s the way it was. He was the most likely candidate, I guess you’d say. He was leading the polls.”

“You knew him.”

“Mostly what I knew was that he’d skipped out when he knew your mother was…well, in her condition.”

“Pregnant,” Mark said. “That was her condition. He knew it when he left?”

Larry’s face twisted. “Shit, son, I don’t rightly recall how it went or how it didn’t. I’m not saying you didn’t get shortchanged by not having a father around, but you didn’t lose anything by missing out on that guy. He was the type who attracted your mother, full of bullshit tales that she wanted to believe.”

“What kind of tales?”

“He was a psychic,” Larry said with mock seriousness. He looked at Mark for camaraderie in the ridicule, but Mark was thinking of the boy from Cassadaga telling him he belonged in the camp, and the best he could manage was a wry smile.

“For a psychic,” Larry said, “he sure was surprised by that pregnancy test.”

Mark exhaled and turned toward the open window so the wind blew harder into his face, making him squint.

Larry glanced at him and said, “I don’t mean to go on about that. None of it matters. Not him, not even your mother. You got out from under it, from under all of us, and you did damn well for yourself. I’m proud to know it.”

Mark thought of his condo the way it had once looked, bright and shining, thought of Lauren and her new Infiniti and her law-school degree, and he thought of his own job. He had done well for himself. That was not a lie. And yet, by the end of today, he might be handcuffed beside a stolen truck and headed to a remote jail in the Rockies.

“You said it right earlier, Uncle.”

“Pardon?”

“Every man has a different definition of clean,” Mark said. “And I’ve found it’s tough to hold your anchor on that one. Even when you think you’ve got it…there’s something you haven’t counted on blowing toward you in the wind. Always. And when it gets there? Well, you might find your position sliding then. You might find it sliding fast.”

Larry didn’t answer. For several miles neither of them spoke. They passed through Greybull and headed east, chasing those mountains, which grew larger and taller and starker with each passing mile.

“I’m sorry that wind blew you back here,” Larry said finally. “But we’ll find the son of a bitch you need, and we’ll get him to answer for your wife’s murder.”

“Sure we will.”

“She was something special, wasn’t she?” Larry said. “I can feel it. Hell, I just know that. From the way you…I just know it, that’s all.”

“Yes,” Mark said, rubbing the old dive permit between his thumb and index finger. “She was something special.”

The engine’s throaty growl labored, rising to a whine as the road steepened on its climb into the mountains, and Mark found that it was hard for him to hold Lauren’s face in his mind. She seemed very far away.

57

The place Pate led him to was down a dirt lane through rugged prairie land, fifteen miles away from the nearest town and twenty from the Chill River power plant.

It was, unfortunately, the perfect choice. The transmission lines were equipped with motion-activated cameras in the ranges close to the power plant and the substations, but this stretch in the middle distance was a floater-the kind of stretch that was far too common in the country. Critical infrastructure, absolutely, but monitored? Not exactly.

“Before we get out of the truck,” Pate said, “let’s take a bird’s-eye view of the area, shall we? What do you see, Jay?”

What Jay saw was simple-a cut between mountains that provided access for all things human, all things that the natural countryside rejected. Cars, trains, electricity.

“Speak,” Pate said.

“I see transmission lines. And mountains.” The mountains were so massive that they threw off distance assessment. They seemed much closer than they were.

“Come on, Jay. You’ve got to see more than that.”

“Prairie. Trees. Train tracks.”

“Have you heard of Jason Woodring?” Pate asked.

Jay shook his head.

“He’s in prison now. A lone wolf, and an unsuccessful one. But what he did was quite fascinating. He looked at the intrusions on the land and decided to use one to help destroy the other.”

Jay saw it then and was surprised he hadn’t recognized it earlier-the human path west had been hard earned, ripped from rugged lands, and the various stages of progress followed the same path. First the rock had been removed for train tracks, then roads had been paved. Then power lines erected. Then cell towers. In inhospitable country, everyone tried to make use of the same access points.

“You want to use a train,” he said.

Pate laughed. “Very good! But I don’t want to use just any train. I want to use a coal train. The very one that feeds the plant that feeds those lines. I doubt anyone will appreciate the wit in that, but, nevertheless, I try.”

He leaned forward, holding the gun in his left hand while he pointed with his right.

“There are four reels of aircraft cable hidden in those trees. Stainless-steel cable that will hold at least ten thousand pounds, and there’s several hundred feet of it. Anchor rings are bored into the trunks. The cables need to run from those anchor points up to the towers. They can’t make contact with the tracks themselves; that will trigger an alarm. You will secure them to the towers. Do you follow?”

Jay did. He also knew it wouldn’t work. Pate had underestimated the strength of the towers. They would not come down. The cables would snap long before the towers moved.

Pate said, “Now I’m going to make a confession, Jay. These cables were a contingency, not the prime option. Your original task was to climb up there and install plastic explosives on the insulators. The towers never needed to come down. It was, if I do say so myself, a far superior vision, more sophisticated. But not all things today have gone according to plan. You know how that feels, don’t you? The way you can open the door and find unanticipated trouble? That’s where I am. So we come to the contingency, and to a critical juncture for your bride. This approach with the cables is not one in which I have a high degree of confidence, but for Sabrina to see tomorrow’s sunrise, it will need to work.”

“No,” Jay said. “No, that’s not fair, because it won’t work. I can’t fix that.”

“Not fair? Come on. You’re past issues of fairness. It’s time to think of solutions. Why won’t it work?”

“The towers are too strong. They’re not going to come down.”

“I’ll let you in on a secret. Do you know how that steel is held together?”

“By bolts.”

“Exactly! I was delighted with that discovery. They reminded me of an Erector set I stole when I was a boy. Such clean and classic work. I learned from models, Jay. I still do. But back to the point-these are strong towers because the steel is joined by the bolts. However, when you get closer, you’re going to notice something. Many of those bolts are missing. My goodness, they do not come out easily! But it can be done. And it already has been done.”

Jay’s throat constricted. All of his confidence that the cables would snap and the train would carry on was gone now. Yes, they would snap, but first, they would tug. And if the structures were already primed to tumble…

It might work.

“I don’t travel without a backup plan,” Pate said cheerfully. “So my thought is, if you get high enough, Jay, it’s a different scenario, don’t you think?”

It certainly was.

“You’re going to need to get very high,” Pate said. “Otherwise the leverage won’t be enough, and those towers will stand firm when the train goes by. That was Jason Woodring’s problem. He ran just one cable, and it was too weak, and he only went about twenty-five feet up the tower. Now he sits in prison, and the tower never came down. But if he’d gotten higher and worked with better equipment and more cables? Different story. As I say, it’s worked with my models. Many tests. Simple yet effective.”

Jay saw his brother-in-law’s face again. Tim had been a jovial guy, usually smiling, his eyes always seeming to laugh at a joke that hadn’t been told yet. At the end, though, he’d had no eyes at all.

“If I climb too high, I’ll carry those cables into the flash zone,” he said. “That’s the problem. If I get too high, I’ll die because the air itself is electrified up there.”

“I understand. It’s a dangerous world up there. Why do you think we stopped with the bolts below? It requires a high level of education and skill to maneuver around a half a million volts. That’s where you come in. Others have tried to take these towers down, and they’re all in prison cells. Why? Because they thought like men with boots on the ground. They needed to think like birds. Birds can sit on a live wire and survive. You know who else can do that?” Pate smiled and pointed at him. “You can.”

“I don’t climb anymore,” Jay said. He could remember that smoke rising from Tim’s open mouth, as if a cigarette were burning somewhere inside him. His insides were gone, boiled away by his own blood. That had been on a sixty-nine kV line. A fraction of the power Jay was staring at now.

“That’s going to cause some trouble for Sabrina.”

The highest Jay had made it up a tower after Tim was killed was seventy feet. He’d frozen there, then finally climbed back down while his crew found other places to look, either down at their boots or off into the horizon. Later, there was no ridicule, no taunting. Just soft-spoken, kind remarks, pats on the shoulder, nobody making eye contact. It was only three weeks after Tim’s funeral, and everyone said it was natural, bound to happen, he just needed a little more time. But they all knew he was done, knew it probably before he’d admitted it to himself. Certainly before he’d told Sabrina that he was looking at the foreman’s job in Red Lodge because he didn’t want to put her through the stress of worrying about him.

You coward.

Of all the sins he’d committed in his life, that was the worst. Claiming her as the reason, unable to admit his own weakness, his own terror. She would have let him continue the work for as long as he’d wished. She was stronger than him.

“The options at this point are very few, I’m afraid,” Eli Pate said.

Jay said, “It’s not possible.”

“It’s that sort of thinking that ails the world. I’m not interested in notions of impossibility. You climb or Sabrina dies. Now, as you are well aware, you could climb and die. But she’s not involved then. It’s your choice, Jay. Do you put her life at risk today or not?”

Jay said, “I can do it.” He wasn’t speaking to Pate. He was speaking to himself. And he knew he was lying.

58

It was well into the afternoon before anyone returned to the cabin, and when someone did, it was Violet, and she was alone. She carried the small solar lantern, which cast a dim glow. Sabrina waited for her to begin preparing food or ask if they needed to use the outhouse. Instead, she brought the lantern directly to Lynn and stopped a few feet away from her, staring down.

“You should not lie,” she said.

“I haven’t.”

“Yes, you have. My son is not with you. That’s not possible. That is a lie designed to distract me from my purpose.”

“You know that he’s here,” Lynn said. “It wasn’t a coincidence that he walked out of a motel room at three in the morning. He’s his mother’s son. Tell me this-did he help kill his own wife? Did she try to stop you; did she know too much?”

Violet gave a small shake of her head, but it didn’t appear to be a denial of the statement so much as a desire to push it aside.

“I can’t hear stories like this,” she said. “Not today. Of all days, not today.”

Lynn looked confused. “What’s the point of the game?” she said. “Why are you pretending? We both know the truth. I came here with him, and he set me up. I know it, and you know it.”

Sabrina didn’t think Lynn sounded entirely confident about that. The words said one thing, her tone another.

“If this is real,” Violet said, “tell me something about him. Something that all your data theft and eavesdropping wouldn’t provide. You aren’t able to do that, are you?”

Lynn glanced at Sabrina. Lynn’s face was still perplexed, but she also seemed to want to rise to the challenge.

“He’s your son,” she said. “I don’t know anything about him that you don’t.”

“Exactly.” Violet stepped back, pleased. She ran her palms over her jeans like she was dusting herself off, then turned and stepped toward the door, but she wavered like a drunk trying to walk a straight line. She was halfway across the room when Lynn spoke.

“He still listens to the chant music.”

Sabrina had no idea what she was talking about, but Violet looked like she’d touched that electrified fence.

“I think he hates that he loves it,” Lynn said, “because it reminds him of you. Of a place called Medicine Wheel? Does that mean something to you?”

A tremor worked through Violet’s face. She didn’t speak. Lynn let the silence build, and Sabrina felt an excruciating need to break it, to shout at both of them. Very slowly, the older woman turned to Lynn.

“What does he think happened to his wife?” she asked.

Lynn hesitated. “What he tells people is that Garland Webb killed her.”

Violet returned, the lantern bobbing in her hand, tossing light. She moved in a rush, dropping to her knees at Lynn’s side.

“Garland is only a suspect, a product of lies. They moved her body, your people did, all a lie, all to stop us. You know that, all of your people trade in lies, imprison innocents over lies, go to war over lies, build empires over lies! She was never in Cassadaga!”

Lynn’s voice was a half whisper when she said, “I’ve seen the photos, Violet. She died in a ditch in Cassadaga. Her blood was fresh and her car engine was warm. Nobody moved her there.”

“That is exactly what Eli told me you would say!”

“That’s because Eli is shithouse crazy.”

“Don’t you say that!” Violet leaned closer, her eyes wild and glittering in the light, her finger extended, pointing in Lynn’s face. “What he hears from the earth is the truth, and I will not be told-”

Lynn Deschaine moved in a blur of speed so fast Sabrina didn’t even see her first strike, only the result-Violet’s head snapping upward, whiplashed by a blow under the chin. The second strike was a kick that caught her on the side of the head and knocked her into the wall.

She was unconscious when she fell.

“Got a little too close, bitch,” Lynn Deschaine said. Then she reached for Violet with her free hand, only to be brought up short by her chain. She turned to Sabrina.

“Help!”

Sabrina was staring at her in shock. When they had discussed their plan of escape, Lynn had made no mention of what was now obvious-she was trained in some kind of martial arts.

And she was very fast.

“Keys!” Lynn hissed. “Get her damn keys!”

Sabrina finally went into motion, stretching out to grab Violet’s arm. She tugged her forward and Violet moaned softly but didn’t move. Lynn saw the keys in her hip pocket, pulled them free, fumbled at the cuff around her wrist, and promptly dropped the keys. Before Sabrina could reach for them, they were in Lynn’s hand, and Lynn had her cuff off, and then, in another blur of speed, she rolled Violet over and fastened it to her wrist and clamped the cuff shut.

That fast, the captor had become the captive.

“Hold still,” Lynn said, and then she unlocked Sabrina’s cuff and removed first the end in the bolt in the wall, then the one around her wrist.

They were free.

“My God,” Sabrina said. “How did you do that?”

“I just needed to get her close, but I wasn’t sure how. I guess Mark works well for that.” She paused. “I don’t know what to believe about him. Not anymore.” Then she shook her head, got to her feet, and helped Sabrina to hers. When they were standing, she didn’t loosen her grip on Sabrina’s arm, but tightened it to a nearly painful level. Her eyes seared into Sabrina’s.

“Are you ready?”

Sabrina could only nod.

Lynn handed her the cuffs. “Then let’s get out of here.”

As Violet moaned behind them, they went to the door. Lynn found the right key without difficulty, ratcheted the dead bolts back. She hesitated then, the first and only hesitation she’d shown in the astounding sequence; she’d been so competent, so confident. Now she looked unsure, and Sabrina understood why-everything beyond the door was unknown.

“Straight to the fence,” Lynn said. “Run straight and run fast. Then when it comes to the fence…”

She looked over her shoulder, and Sabrina nodded. The cuff that had become so familiar around her wrist felt strange in her palm.

“I’ll take care of the fence,” she said. Her voice was confident. Her heart wasn’t.

Lynn’s chest rose and fell with a deep breath. “Okay. Once we’re over the fence, just run like hell. We’ll try to stay together, but…if there’s shooting, then we’ll separate.”

If there’s shooting. Sabrina felt bile rise in her throat and swallowed it down.

“Okay,” she said.

Lynn squeezed her arm again, then pulled the door open.

Sabrina was ready for anything-guards, gunfire, Eli Pate looming in the doorway. Instead, there was only a wide-open expanse leading down to the fence. No one was in sight.

“Run,” Lynn whispered.

Sabrina ran. The stiff and wooden muscles didn’t slow her. Pure terror overpowered the aches, driving her forward. If anything, she felt too fast, as if her speed would send her tumbling down the hill. She reached the fence several strides ahead of Lynn and pulled up short-just short, almost colliding with it.

The electrified hum was louder here. She stared at those exposed copper wires, remembering the explosive impact of her first attempt. Beside her, Lynn was breathing heavily but didn’t speak.

The copper strands were held in place by brackets that protruded maybe two inches away from the fence, providing a small gap that would allow the cuffs to hook and hold. It was not much space. But it could be enough, if her toss was accurate.

Two live wires, Sabrina. Bridge them with a conductor and you will cause a fault. It will work, it will work, it will work.

And make that toss count.

Sabrina adjusted the handcuffs so she was holding them spread as wide as the chain would allow. It was long enough. If she hit it right, it was long enough to bridge the two lines. Just a matter of-

Lynn said, “He sees us. He’s coming.”

Sabrina looked back and saw Garland Webb behind the cabin, in the direction of the pole yard. He started running.

“Hurry!” Lynn said.

Sabrina turned back, and though hurrying certainly sounded good, she knew she would get only one chance and couldn’t rush it. She mimed the toss, like a practice swing, gauging the weight of the cuffs and envisioning how they would fall.

Please God, please God, please God…

She repeated the exact same motion, but this time, at the top of her extension, she released the cuffs. They flew up, arced down, and the top cuff collided with the top copper wire and whipped around it in a flare of sparks.

Not enough. It wrapped too tight and now it will not be long enough to-

When the bottom cuff swung back and made contact with the lower wire, sparks weren’t all that came-there was a loud, clear boom somewhere behind them, and then the hum was gone.

It worked. Holy shit, it worked.

Lynn said, “Is it safe?”

Sabrina reached out with a shaking hand and touched the copper.

Nothing. Just cool, harmless metal.

“It’s safe.”

“Then let’s go!”

Lynn began to climb to Sabrina’s left-she was so fast, scrambling to the top in a blink, while Sabrina’s right foot slipped as she struggled to get past the dangling handcuff. There were three strands of barbed wire at the top of the fence, but Lynn swung her leg over them without hesitation. Sabrina could see that the wire had raked her badly, but Lynn didn’t show any reaction. She paused at the top. She was looking behind Sabrina and could see what Sabrina could not.

She screamed, “Hurry!”

Sabrina was hurrying, but when she reached the top of the fence she couldn’t immediately ascertain how Lynn had swung over the barbed wire so easily. It was angled in, and just to get a grip seemed impossible, as if it would require holding the actual barbs for support. Then she saw that there was a post just a few feet to her left. Lynn must have used that.

Sabrina struggled sideways, reached with her left hand, and had just wrapped it around the post when Lynn screamed again, no words this time, just a scream, and then a hand closed around Sabrina’s ankle.

She thought, I just need to hold on to the fence, but in the instant that she tried to tug her captured foot free, she was jerked down in a single motion, whipped backward with tremendous power. She not only felt her ribs break when she hit the ground but heard them, and then Garland Webb was looming above her, his face furious, his fist balled. The fence rattled and Sabrina saw that Lynn was actually trying to climb back down.

“No!” Sabrina rasped. “Ruuun!”

She saw Lynn hesitate, and then Garland Webb’s massive fist hammered down and she saw nothing at all.