The Northeast Kingdom

Chapter 9

Menckley, the arsonist, entered the clean, circular command Center, the technological brain of ADX Gilchrist. “The head count went better than expected,” he reported. “More than twenty confirmed dead. The Marielitos went after a couple more — vengeance scores. Some others went over the mountains.”

Luther Trait eyed the penitentiary monitors as Spotty stood next to him, impassive and broad. Cons roamed the halls freely, still basking in their liberation, exhilarated from running hard through the cold night. Trait switched on the facility intercom.

“Brothers,” he said, and watched their eyes go to the ceilings. “This is Luther Trait. I have accomplished the impossible. I have delivered you from your cages. This morning you are free men.” He saw their mouths twisted by their war-whooping, but the thick walls of the Command Center were soundproof. “You have done well by bringing the residents here. The breakout was a surprise to all of you, and since then you have been operating largely on faith. I accept your compliance as repayment for your freedom. Consider us even. I know you have concerns regarding government retaliation, but rest assured that we have anticipated everything. My address to the world will be broadcast over this same intercom in a few short minutes, so please — stay tuned.”

He switched off the microphone and watched the animals cheering throughout the facility.

Menckley worried his hands like a psoriatic. “Looting was widespread outside the town center,” he said. “Weapons and booze mostly. They’re drunk now, and happy, but it won’t last.”

“No, it won’t,” said Trait, turning to one of the men collecting rifles and tasers and mace from the room, an ex-con known as Burly. “How certain are you that all the residents have been rounded up?”

Burly, a murderer and strongman from Detroit, closely resembled the buzz-cut bank robber in police shooting galleries. “This town’s a ghost town,” he said confidently.

“All loaded onto trucks?”

“All loaded.”

Trait turned to Menckley. “Start video recording. Set the system for exterior lockdown and then drop the package. Make sure you leave yourself enough time to get out.”

Menckley was nervous but excited. “Don’t worry,” he said.

Trait glanced around at the Command Center. He was leaving ADX Gilchrist now, for the last time. But before he could, the police radio on his belt squawked.

It was DeYoung, his radioman back at the police station. “The FBI won’t talk to you live on the air. They say they’ll only speak to you privately.”

Trait nodded. “Good. Then they can just listen like the rest of the country.”

Chapter 10

The first hours all ran together. The march to the golf course was an odyssey of whipping wind and gluelike snow, the coldest night Rebecca had ever known. Dawn brought neither sun nor heat, only milky light bleeding into the sky.

Kells kicked in a window in the pro shop to gain access to the country club. There was a stone hearth in the center of the main lounge, shaped like a wide, shallow well, and they gathered newspapers and dry wood for a fire. The flume smoke was a risk overshadowed by the need for heat. They sat around the growing fire, exhausted and smarting, feeling the heat on their cold-hardened faces and awaiting the sear of human thaw.

Rebecca’s jaw defrosted, and she soon regained movement in her fingers and thumbs. She looked around. The lounge was all manufactured rusticity, dark wood and mounted moose heads and Indian hangings. Mia was staring deeply into the fire, her face florid. Darla was struggling to toe off her boots.

As Rebecca’s head began to clear, the march began to fade into memory, supplanted by the outrageous reality of the present. Gilchrist had been overrun by criminals. There were three hundred sociopaths on the loose.

Kells shed his parka and went behind the front desk to the manager’s office. Then he started away down the dark stone-and-timber hallway.

“Who is he?” said Terry, as soon as Kells disappeared around the corner at the long end. “Anybody know? Anybody talk to him?”

Blank stares, exhausted head shakes.

“What he does, where he’s from?” Still no response from the rest. “He was out driving around town after the riot started. You realize — we’re following this person, and we don’t know who or what he is.”

“He carries a gun,” said Fern.

Everyone looked at her, Rebecca included. Fern spoke with regret, knowing she was betraying a trust. “I saw it in his bag when I was changing his towels.”

Terry stood with effort, moving into the managers office. The voices startled them at first, but they were television voices, comforting, authoritative, and one by one they roused themselves to follow Terry. Rebecca was last, behind Coe and Fern, shuffling into the small office.

The screen showed ADX Gilchrist. The camera was set up outside the great fence, the view steady and peaceful, snow falling down.

Rebecca doped it out after a moment. “That must be CNN’s equipment,” she said. This was unprecedented, so far as she knew: The bad guys had broadcasting capability.

A man moved into view wearing prison blues. It was Luther Trait. Rebecca just stared.

He looked more commanding on television. He faced the camera and spoke into it without hesitation.

“Today is a great day,” he began.

“A great day!” said Terry. Everybody shushed him.

“A day that has been a long time coming. A day you dreaded and yet never saw coming.”

Kells returned, filling the only remaining space in the office, standing close over Rebecca’s right shoulder. She tensed but did not turn.

“We have seized control of the Administrative Maximum Unit Penitentiary at Gilchrist. Overnight, we rounded up the citizens of this small town. I want you to know first that our invasion ends here. We have seized this town as fair trade for our mistreatment, and we have no plans to make any further acquisitions. We have no need. Our exile is self-imposed. We have no desire to rejoin your soft society. We ask nothing further from you, and provided that your government and law-enforcement representatives behave appropriately, we pose you no additional threat. As proof of this, we are releasing the captured residents to you at this hour.”

“Releasing?” Dr. Rosen gripped his head, pointed at the television. “He’s releasing the hostages!”

Rebecca could feel the force of Kells’s attention over her shoulder, as though he were focused on Trait’s every word.

“We hold no hostages, and we have no laundry list of demands. All we want is to be left alone. Gilchrist’s geography is fairly self-isolating. Of course, should your government choose to attack us, we would be no match for them. However, we believe such an attack will not occur.”

Terry said, “No?”

“Many of you are familiar with the concept of ‘casualty insurance,’ reimbursement in the event of a catastrophic loss. I have taken out a similar policy myself, in order to ensure our safety here. I call it ‘multiple casualty insurance.’ ”

She could feel Kells brace.

“Ricin is a natural protein poison extracted from the common castor bean. It is six thousand times more toxic than cyanide, and third overall behind plutonium and botulism. Inhalation of a single particle ignites a chain reaction beginning with flulike symptoms, progressing to exploding red blood cells, internal hemorrhaging, and finally death within a few days. The toxin is odorless and tasteless, and there is no antidote.

“My associates on the outside, fellow pledges of the Brotherhood of Rebellion, have devised a simple, effective mechanism to release the deadly ricin toxin in what is known as a ‘controlled multiple casualty attack.’ What we have done is install these devices in two randomly chosen communities within the United States of America.”

She heard Kells say “Oh, boy,” under his breath.

“This claim may strike some as fantastic. It is difficult to accept the fact that you or your families may be at risk at this very moment, your survival contingent upon the actions of your elected government officials. You may simply think that we are bluffing. I cite an occurrence in Montana a few months ago, the traffic stop of a dedicated associate of mine. I understand that a small bag of white powder was seized, and later opened by an unfortunate police officer who unknowingly released the ricin into the police station, to lethal effect.”

Rebecca’s mind was racing. She remembered the news story as something she had printed offline for her clip file. Surface-to-air missiles, and ten or so policemen bleeding out from an unnamed contaminant.

“But words are cheap. You need to be taken by the hand. Things must be demonstrated for you in order to be believed and understood. What you will watch now is a live feed from the prison monitoring system inside ADX Gilchrist.” The scene switched to surveillance images of prison corridors and offices occupied by cavorting ex-prisoners. “True warriors are rare in the modern world. Only the fittest are deserving of survival, and we will survive. But these weak men were weaned on the permissiveness of your society. They are criminals by occasion and opportunity, not will. They are learning their fate at the same time you are. The prison exits have been locked down. Less than thirty minutes ago we began introducing ricin into the facility’s ventilation system. As you can see, these men feel nothing yet. They smell nothing, they taste nothing. Yet you will see that in a few short hours the first of them will begin to fall ill.”

The inmates were stopping their partying. They were starting to look at one another and the vents in the walls.

Then back to Trait standing outside the penitentiary fence.

“Securing this broadcast facility was no accident. We will not be packaged and we will not be misrepresented. We will not be spun. Any provocation by your government will place your lives, perhaps those of your family and friends, directly at risk. Two targets give us one to waste if we are needlessly tested or provoked. I urge you to contact your elected officials and make your voice heard. Any transgression toward the convict township of Gilchrist, from tampering with our utilities to a full-blown military assault, will result in the genocide of an innocent American town.

“There are plenty of us left here. You need not know who or how many. Only that we are dedicated and united. Along with this land we have claimed, we are also seeking reparations from your government in the amount equal to the total annual expenditure necessary to support the facility formerly known as ADX Gilchrist. Reports put the prison budget at $68 million. That sum, plus five percent for inflation, will be paid to us each year, in perpetuity. Consider it a tribute. And from this point forward, consider this town a separate nation from the rest of your United States.

“I hope I have impressed upon you the sincerity of our mission. We have secured the town, and we have proven our resolve to you. All you have to do from here on in is what you’ve always done: Forget us. Put us out of your mind and leave us alone, and we will do the same.”

The image cut back to the prisoners roaming the Gilchrist halls, riled now, moving about in soundless confusion and anger.

Rebecca, like the others, stared dull-eyed at the screen, too shocked yet to speak. Having traveled so far that morning, they were due brighter news.

“They did it,” said Kells.

The others turned toward Rebecca, looking at him. Terry was nearest to the television. “What do you mean, ‘They did it’?”

“A bluff,” Bert said. “A fantasy. There’s no such...”

Darla shivered. “He was so calm.”

“They let the rest go,” Dr. Rosen said. “They let every-one else go, so they would be alone here. We’re the only ones left.”

“Trapped,” said Mia. She pressed against the others to get out of the small room, like a swimmer fighting toward surface air. Robert followed her out.

“What have we done?” Terry was becoming manic. “Why didn’t we stay at the inn like I said?” His hat-rumpled hair made him appear bewildered. “He led us here. He took us deeper into town, instead of out.”

They looked for Kells, but he had left the office. Darla pushed toward the doorway and the rest followed her.

Some returned to the fire, sinking deeply into chairs or just sitting on the floor, stunned. Kells remained apart from them, as always, standing on the top step of the lounge before the long hallway. A navy blue wool sweater with a seaman’s collar covered his broad chest. If he was aware of Terry’s insinuation, he did not show it. His mind was elsewhere, as though he were working through another problem entirely.

The others looked his way. Rebecca did too.

A muffled chirping noise broke the spell. Mia gasped in surprise. After a moment Rebecca looked for her cargo bag on the floor.

She unzipped the bag and dug through her clothes, finding her cell phone and feeling it vibrate in her hand. She hesitated before answering, but all eyes were on her now.

“Bee! Bee, do you believe this?” It was Jeb. He sounded far away. “Where are you now? Did you meet Trait?”

There was only one bar of reception showing on her display, and it was flashing. She nearly choked on her words, unwanted emotion rising. “I’m still here, Jeb. I’m still in Gilchrist.”

“No, Bee. Everybody got out. They let everyone go.”

Saying it was like confessing that she was in trouble, and she did not want to confess anything to him. “We didn’t make it,” she said.

“We? Who’s we?”

She faced the rest to include them in the conversation. “My literary agent,” she told them.

“The people I was staying with at the inn,” she said into the phone. “We’re at a golf course — a country club.”

“A country club? Don’t you know what’s happened?”

“We know, Jeb. There’s a TV here.”

“Okay. And you’re okay?”

“We walked all night.”

“Okay. How do we get you out of there?”

“I don’t know,” she said, emotion rising again.

“Okay. This isn’t good. Who have you talked to? Have you talked to anybody?”

“No one. No one knows we’re here. It needs to stay that way, Jeb.”

“Okay.” The negotiating side of him had kicked in. “The Unabomer book I did with what’s-his-name at the FBI, the special agent in charge of something. Ginnie!” He was calling his assistant. “What’s that noise, Bee?”

Her phone was beeping. “Shit. My battery.”

“Get me a land line number there. Is there a phone? I’ll have somebody from the FBI call you back in ten minutes.”

This was what Jeb did best: reassurance, hand-holding. Rebecca sent Coe to the reception desk for the phone number.

“Bee — I don’t know what to say. You’re okay there? These people you’re with?”

“Yes,” she said.

“And you did meet with Trait?”

“I met with him.”

“This is very big. Hugely big, if we can get you out of there.”

Coe had the number and Rebecca repeated it to Jeb. The line went dead before he could respond. She was left holding a dead telephone, yet something made her pretend he was still on the line for the sake of the others. “Okay. I’ll be waiting. Right. Okay.”

She collapsed the phone and dropped it into her bag. The others waited.

“Let’s keep that main line open,” she said. “The FBI will be calling in a couple of minutes.”

Smiles, a surge of relief and hope — exactly what she had wanted.

Coe said, with awe, “The FBI?”

“Oh, thank God!” Darla exhaled.

Kells came down off the hall step, moving slowly to the hearth. He had everyone’s attention. “They won’t be able to do anything,” he said.

Something popped in the fire. Fern’s anxiety was beginning to show. “Why would you say a thing like that?”

Terry said, “Yeah, what do you know?”

Kells said, “We’re on the wrong side of the fence here.”

His manner put everyone off. He was squandering their hope. Rebecca stepped up for the others. “Look, I’ve met many of these agents. I’ve seen them in action. You’d be amazed by what they can do.”

“They’ve already been outmaneuvered. Trait is a terrorist now, and even if the U.S. negotiated with terrorists — which it does not — there is no need for Trait to negotiate anything because he is in total control of this situation. He has taken the entire country hostage with one bold stroke.”

“He’s impressed!” said Terry.

The telephone rang on the reception desk. Rebecca answered it as the others — except for Kells, who remained at the fire — gathered near.

The voice said, “Is this Rebecca Loden?”

It was a male voice. Rebecca was cautious. “Who is this?”

“My name is Sam Raleigh, I’m with the FBI.”

Rebecca turned and nodded to the others. “Yes,” she said. “This is Rebecca Loden.”

“The author?”

“Yes.”

“Sony — I was just handed this phone number. Can you tell me where are you, Ms. Loden?”

“At the country club. The golf course in town.”

“In Gilchrist, Vermont.”

“That’s right. There are eleven of us, we walked here. We were all staying at the Gilchrist Country Inn. We were watching the riot on TV, and then they started to take over the town. We packed up and walked here.” Strange pride in recounting this now.

“To a golf course?”

“It’s new, it’s not on the map. We’re guessing the prisoners don’t know about it yet.”

“I see,” he said, obviously surprised. “That’s good.”

“Are you in charge?”

“I am a crisis negotiator, I am assigned to this case.”

She said, “So there are negotiations?”

“No. Not yet.”

The others saw the answer in her face. Terry pushed through to the desk. “Tell him we want out,” he said.

“What was that?” said Raleigh.

Rebecca turned away from Terry. “Can you help us?”

“Do you have a radio or television there?”

“Yes,” she said. “We just watched Trait. We heard what he said.”

“They’ve closed off all the roads. I don’t know if you know. We learned from some of the released hostages this morning, they were collecting all the weapons they could find in town.”

Rebecca repeated to the rest: “They’ve taken all the weapons.”

Quiet alarm. Even Kells turned his head at that one.

Raleigh said, “Do you have any weapons?”

“Yes — one.” She wasn’t sure about Kells’s gun yet.

“One. Okay. Any climbing gear perhaps?”

“Not really.”

“I was just wondering if you were thinking about trying to escape. The snow right now would make for a treacherous ascent. Are you reasonably comfortable where you are?”

“For now.”

“Because it sounds like you’re in a pretty secure situation there. Probably the best position you could be in, considering the circumstances. I want to advise you strongly against attempting any escape at this time. The thing you most want to avoid is antagonizing the prisoners in any way. I’m sure you understand why...”

“The ricin.”

“Yes. We are taking this threat very, very seriously. There are thousands of lives at stake, apart from your own. You’ve got a good-sized group there. How many men?”

He was taking notes, which for some reason comforted her. “Five men, five women. A seventeen-year-old boy.”

“Okay. Let me work out a few things here. My advice to you right now is to sit tight—”

“For how long?”

“Hard to say just now.”

“What about a rescue attempt?”

“Impossible, given the current weather conditions and the fact that any incursion on our part would be perceived as a hostile action.”

“You could do something. There’s only a fraction of the prisoners left. You can sneak in some sort of Delta Team squad to take them out.”

“It is much too early to decide anything, but even if we wanted to consider that, there is a constitutional problem here. Something called the Posse Comitatus Act forbids the use of armed force against U.S. citizens by federal troops, except by a special act of Congress.”

“These aren’t citizens,” said Rebecca. “They’re criminals. Terrorists.”

“Yes, but unfortunately it seems the town incorporated the prisoners into the population a few years ago, for tax reasons. They are legal residents of Gilchrist.”

She was exasperated. “So? What about the penitentiary? That’s federal property.”

“The president could issue a proclamation to disperse, but the only people occupying that facility now are basically dead men. Trait is right: There is no cure.” Raleigh took a breath. “I have to do a difficult thing here, Ms. Loden. I have to ask you and your friends to wait. I understand how you must feel. But let me marshal resources here on my end. It might take a little time, but know that you have the full resources of the FBI and the U.S. government on your side. We will find a way to get you out, if you folks can just bear with us. I will call you back as soon as I can.”

She realized with a chill that Kells was right. FBI negotiator Raleigh was playing her, talking the talk. He was stalling.

“Why don’t you give me the names and addresses of everyone there,” Raleigh continued.

The act of registering their identities with a higher power was supposed to comfort her, but it was just paperwork in place of real action. Rebecca turned to the hopeful faces watching her. Kells remained behind, arms folded, studying the fire.

“We can contact your families for you,” Raleigh went on, through the silence. “Let them know you’re all right.”

“We have telephones here,” said Rebecca. “We can call them ourselves.”

“Right. Of course.” He felt her cooling off. “But please impress upon the others the danger involved. The prisoners will be monitoring the media. You don’t want to tip them off that you are still inside the town.”

“No,” she agreed, her spirit sinking.

“Let me give you a special direct phone number.” Rebecca copied it down dutifully on a scorecard with a green-leaded golf pencil. “Just sit tight and stay low,” FBI Special Agent Raleigh concluded, “and I’ll get back to you shortly.”

“Right,” she said, numbly, hanging up the telephone.

Fern watched with a hand at her cheek. Rita was clutching Bert’s arm, and Mia’s eyes were wishing for the best while expecting the worst.

“They’re not going to help us,” Rebecca said.

Dr. Rosen’s defeated gaze drifted to the floor. Mia just stared.

“They won’t do anything to upset the prisoners,” Rebecca went on. “They want us to sit here and wait.”

“You weren’t forceful enough,” said Terry. “You’ve got to tell these people exactly what you want. You’ve got to be explicitly clear.”

His reaction shamed the others. Rebecca was furious. “You call him back,” she said. She threw the phone number at him and the scorecard hit his chest and fell to the floor. “Call him back yourself and be explicitly fucking clear.”

“Okay,” said Bert, stepping in. “Let’s not fall apart here.”

Rebecca went over to Kells, emboldened by her anger. “How did you know?” she asked.

Kells was infuriatingly even-tempered. “The FBI is out of it now,” he answered. “This is a national security situation now. Department of Defense.”

“Enough,” said Terry, still near the reception desk, shaking. “I’m a bonds analyst. He’s a doctor, she’s an innkeeper, we have a social worker, a thriller writer, the rest. Who the hell are you, and how do you know so much about this, and why do you carry a gun?”

“I’m a government employee,” said Kells. “I work for the Pentagon.”

Terry kept pushing. “And what do you do for them?”

“Special investigations for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.”

“The ‘Doomsday’ Agency,” said Rebecca.

Kells was mildly surprised. “That’s right. We deal with weapons of mass destruction and unconventional warfare. Primarily the development of NBC weapons outside the dissolved Soviet Union. That’s Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical.”

“You’re a physicist,” she said. It was all she could remember about the agency.

“Not me. Just a street agent. That incident in Montana, the ricin exposure? The ex-con bled out in quarantine with the rest, but the FBI traced his movements back to a ranch outside Mesa, Arizona. There was a small factory in a work shed there on the property. Inside they found a partially constructed delivery device and nearly four pounds of ricin stored in coffee cans, baby food jars, thermoses. That’s when I came onto the case. We don’t get many domestic investigations, but the ex-con was carrying thousands in cash, semiautomatic rifles and ammunition, even a surface-to-air missile launcher. His intended target was never identified. Every lead dead-ended. I was delving deep into the con’s background, which is how I wound up here. He had done some time in Marion with Trait and wore a Brotherhood of Rebellion tattoo on his arm.” Again, he looked at Rebecca. “But even a government official on a special investigation couldn’t get in to talk to Trait.”

Much of the antagonism had evaporated and the others paid Kells careful attention now. “So — this ricin,” said Bert.

“It’s real and deadly, everything Trait says it is and more. But most importantly for us, the government will treat it as such. Gilchrist is this country’s nightmare scenario. No one, certainly not the president, is going to put a couple of thousand of innocent lives on the line for us or for these cons. The prisoners are going to use the media to hold the entire country hostage in a high-tech, high-stakes blackmail, and it’s going to work.”

Rebecca said, “How can you be so certain?”

“Trait doesn’t need to take out a million people. Probably couldn’t. Variables such as wind, climate, transmission. But this is psychological warfare more than biological. There is no precedent for this. Doomsday always knew something like this might happen, we’ve discussed it, we’ve planned for it, but we’ve never had to deal with actual human lives. Trait’s gambit here is solid. The best the FBI can possibly do is to maybe exploit the information chain. People other than Trait have to know the names of the targeted communities, including at least a few people on the outside. The FBI will be kicking in the doors of every Brotherhood of Rebellion ex-con out there.”

“I don’t understand,” said Rebecca. “How can the prisoners be so organized? Trait’s been in isolation all this time. And he’s a killer, not a terrorist.”

“Obviously he had help on the outside. Anyone remember the name Errol Inkman?”

Rebecca did, vaguely.

Kells said, “Resigned from the CIA in the early nineties, two years before Aldrich Ames. Inkman had been passing information to Libyans and other terrorist nations. He was arrested and held for months but never prosecuted. He’s in his late-fifties now, thinner and worn, but still with a European mien. Graying hair. Bushy eyebrows.”

“You don’t mean,” said Fern, with a start, “Mr. Hodgkins?”

“I didn’t put it all together until last night,” said Kells. “I thought I recognized him at dinner — I did recognize him — but could not place the face. Unlike Ames, Ink man’s treachery hadn’t resulted in the loss of any lives, so rather than risk airing the agency’s dirty laundry in a public trial, the CIA quietly let him go.”

Rebecca remembered the worn, particular man at dinner that first night. “Why would he bother springing a killer like Trait?”

“Just because they didn’t prosecute doesn’t mean they let Inkman off scot-free. He betrayed the United States. I’m certain they pulled his life apart brick by brick. Bankrupted him with lawsuits, scared away potential employers, harassed his friends, searched his home. I know his wife left him, and he started drinking. I imagine now he’s a very bitter man with an intense anti-American grudge. As the former second-in-command of the CIA’s counter-terrorism station, he’s got a lot of specialized information lying fallow. Now he’s putting that expertise to work. He is one of those people who thinks he’s smarter than everyone else, whose latent genius went underappreciated and unacknowledged. A large ego in a marginalized man. I don’t know how he could have gotten involved with Trait and the Brotherhood of Revolution. I do know that, in order to pull off something of this magnitude, he needed absolute secrecy and unwavering dedication of the men involved — something perhaps only Luther Trait could deliver.”

“But if he was ruined — bankrupt — then how did they finance this thing?”

“Inkman could have bankrolled this with bottle returns. Biowarfare hasn’t changed much since the Romans used dead dogs to foul their enemy’s water supply. Only the methods of delivery have matured. The cost of a controlled multiple-casualty attack on a one square kilometer area using conventional weapons is about two thousand dollars. With nukes, you drop to around eight hundred dollars. Chemical weapons, about six hundred dollars. But biological weapons? About one hundred, one fifty.”

Dr. Rosen said, “Look — they seem reasonable. What if we throw ourselves on their mercy? They don’t want us here, and we don’t want to be here. They let the others go.”

Terry said, “These are psychos. We should wait, shouldn’t we? The FBI knows we’re here now. They’ll find a way to get us out. They have to.”

In the corner, Darla sank down the dark wall paneling to sit the floor, gripping her stomach.

“We could hide here,” said Rita, looking around.

Fern nodded. “There’s a kitchen. We have a fire.”

“Fire makes smoke,” said Rebecca. “We might as well dial nine one one. We can’t just hide here and wait this thing out. The prisoners could hold the FBI off for months like this — months. Do you realize?”

“She’s right,” said Kells. “We need to keep moving. Tonight.”

Rebecca nodded at having found an unlikely ally. “We have to escape. There is no other way.”

“Not escape,” contradicted Kells. “The snow is three feet deep in places and still falling. With the short days, there’s no way we could cross the mountains or walk through the trees in the dark. Even with skis for everyone. The cons have sealed off the town and sealed us in. We can’t go backward or forward.”

Rebecca was staring at him. “Then, what?”

“We make a stand here in town. We fight.”

Dr. Rosen said, “Fight?”

Terry dropped his arms and walked away.

Mia was crying silently, Robert was holding her hand.

Rebecca was shaking her head. “We can’t provoke them like that,” said Rebecca. “The FBI said—”

“The FBI said, Wait to be captured. They said, Better eleven dead than eleven thousand.”

The others were shocked. Hearing it put so bluntly chilled Rebecca.

Terry said, “That’s not true.”

“You’re in finance, Terry,” said Kells. “You crunch the numbers.” He looked to the rest. Rebecca could feel Kells’s pull on the group’s orbit, like a finger nudging a gyroscope off course. “Right now Trait and his men think the town is evacuated. So, long as we keep moving, we’ve got the snow to shield and the long winter nights. Sitting here and waiting will only get us killed.”

“Killed?” said Dr. Rosen. “And going out and fighting them won’t?”

“Not if we do it right. Not if they don’t know we’re here.”

“You were wrong,” Dr. Rosen said. “You were wrong about running. If they had caught us at the inn, we would all be home now.”

Kells said, “I wasn’t wrong. You think the hostages were well-treated? These men escaped from cages. What about your girlfriend?”

Kells nodded at Darla sitting against the wall. She just stared at the floor, but public acknowledgment of the affair chastened Dr. Rosen.

Rebecca was tired and scared. “Just say the word. Rape. Just say it.”

“That would be just the beginning.”

“You think only women? Don’t pretend it couldn’t be any one of you.”

Terry said, “Jesus Christ!”

Kells said, “All the more reason to keep moving. Fighting these escaped convicts is the only way.”

Rebecca said, “Won’t they assume the attacks, or whatever you’re proposing, are coming from outside? They’ll drop the ricin on those towns.”

Kells was growing impatient. “Those towns are already lost. The mechanism has already been set in motion. No matter how it happens, Trait’s going to be forced to do those towns someday. Otherwise, if he’s allowed to profit from this threat, you’re going to see these situations popping up all over. No one can get in his way right now except us.”

“Are you kidding?” said Terry, laughing fearfully. “Do we look like fighters to you?”

“You look like people with a simple choice: Fight or die.”

Bert said, “How many killers are left out there? What do we think? Twenty-five? Thirty?”

“Assume more. But even forty, even forty-five, that’s still a four-to-one ratio. Favorable odds when surprise is on your side.”

“But these aren’t just men,” Rebecca reminded him. “These aren’t just convicts. These are the worst of the worst.”

“They are just men. But they are also the establishment now. They are the law in this town, and we are the criminals. It’s a lot easier to create chaos than it is to prevent it.”

“That sounds good in theory,” said Bert, looking interestedly at Kells. “But they have all the weapons. We have yours and Fern’s turn-of-the-century rifle. We’re outgunned. How do you propose to get more?”

Kells looked to Fern. “They couldn’t have collected all the guns. Not here in Vermont. You’ve got hunters, farmers, sportsmen. Let’s use their unfamiliarity with the town to our advantage. Give me someplace the cons wouldn’t have looked, or couldn’t have found.”

Fern tried to think but could not concentrate.

Coe looked up then, his face bright. “What about Marshall Polk?”

Fern looked to him, more shocked than chagrined. “Marshall Polk?” she said.

Kells said, “Who is Marshall Polk?”

“A crazy man,” said Coe. “Lives in the mountains.”

“A recluse,” said Fern, “an old kook. A former selectman and town postmaster until he started fighting the prison plans. He was always kind of wacky with his theories, but something went wrong in his mind. Maybe just age. It ended up with him seceding from town. He lives in a shack somewhere in the northeast mountains.”

“He declared war on Gilchrist,” Coe said. “He’s a one-man militia.”

“Barbershop talk,” scoffed Fern. “Marshall never actually did anything.”

Kells directed his question at Coe. “You know where he lives?”

“Cold Hollow, on the ridge somewhere over the old asbestos mine. I know it pretty good.”

“Think he’s still there?”

“Don’t know. But maybe he left behind some guns.”

Fern said, “That’s a day’s walk.”

Kells was still looking at the kid. Coe was thinking. “We could take the sleds,” he said.

“What sleds?”

“The snowmobiles. The greens crew here has some. A couple of them came out to chase us off the fairways a few weeks ago.”

“You know how to ride?”

Coe’s confidence was growing under Kells’s examination. “Me and my buds, we carve up the old asbestos mine all the time.”

“This is what we need,” said Kells, pointing Coe out to the others. “Someone resourceful, someone who knows the town, who notices things. How long?”

“To get there? Two hours, maybe? Depends on the sleds. And two hours back.”

Fern said to Kells, “Wait. He’s only seventeen.”

Kells asked if anyone else could operate a snowmobile. No one else volunteered.

“It’s settled,” said Kells, looking at Fern. “I wouldn’t take him if it didn’t mean our survival.” He turned to Coe. “You and I will go together?”

“Sure,” agreed Coe.

Terry said, “But what about the rest of us?”

“Keep a lookout, and be ready to leave after sundown. We’ll scout for a new hideout along the way.”

“Wait.” Darla got to her feet, still distressed. “What if something happens? What if you don’t come back?”

Kells had his bag open and his revolver in his hand for everyone to see. He said, “We’re coming back.”

Chapter 11

Trait stood listening to the inn. An astronaut returning to Earth after years in an orbiting capsule would also move about clumsily, grabbing walls. Trait was doing this mentally. He was a man coping with his freedom. The sensations overwhelmed: the cold air, bright rooms, doorknobs that opened under his hand. For five years he had done so much wandering with only his mind that now he doubted his physical presence in each new space.

The joy of freedom would come. Little gifts of will. Music. Sunlight. Women.

The pain in his head was like the flames that buffet a spacecraft’s return to Earth. It was a neurological reaction to an abrupt change in atmosphere, and it was to be expected. These were the birth pangs of a mind expanding to its new environment.

He continued past the hanging quilts in the upstairs hallway, turning into the next bedroom and feeling a pulse of familiar energy. A burgundy sweater was folded next on the dresser. He picked it up by its shoulders, letting it fall open before him. The fabric was smooth against his fingers, cooled of body heat but still redolent of her scent. Clean and fragrant, like soap right out of the package. He looked into the mirror.

For a moment he was standing inside his foster sister’s room, waiting for her, hearing her blue jeans swishing down the hall. He had gotten into trouble with that girl, and had been killing her ever since.

A man appeared in the doorway, and Trait was back inside the inn. Errol Inkman wore the same collared shirt and loose corduroy pants he had worn at their very first meeting, that morning. His belt buckle was small and bright gold. Trait found Inkman a strange little man, nothing at all as he had imagined him. “A quarter mile outside the center of town,” Inkman said, “just a few minutes down the road from the police station. We can store weapons in each place and work out of both. Plenty of space here, and a good-sized kitchen — the perfect location.”

Trait folded the sweater and laid it back on the counter. “Perfect.”

“I checked all the rooms. Most of the luggage is gone. Looks like everyone left in a hurry.”

Trait wondered if she had been among those he released that morning. “One thing I learned in Gilchrist was that there is no such thing as coincidence.”

“The writer?” surmised Inkman. “That she requested a meeting with you the day before the breakout?” He ventured a step over the threshold. “I wonder about things like that sometimes. Connections. Like my sitting next to Deacon on that bus trip to Baltimore. Him hearing my ramblings and, once I sobered up, drawing me out about bio-terror and revenge. Was it fate? Or just a random occurrence that, in light of our success here, in retrospect seems like destiny?”

For a moment Trait was inside his Marion cell with Deacon, a wizened man of seventy years, shuffling out on parole, promising to keep the faith. Trait owed his freedom to that old hard-timer, as well as his sanity: Deacon was a legitimate criminal psychiatrist in 1960s Baltimore before coercing patients into pulling jobs for him. In their cell at Marion, he had taught Trait how to survive in the life of the mind.

Trait said, “There are omens, good and bad.”

“She was no more notable than the rest,” said Inkman. “An unremarkable bunch. But gone now.”

Trait nodded, coming out of it. “Gone.”

“Except the warden.” Inkman had stopped near the brass bed and its lilac comforter. “I just came from the police station. Jailing him is a foolish indulgence. I was very specific about there being no hostages. Putting a human face on this siege will force an assault. If the Cold War had involved a handful of Americans in a gulag in the Ural Mountains, it would not have lasted six months. Better to hold an entire nation hostage than one of its pale citizens.”

Inkman’s knowledge of the world impressed Trait, but not enough to change his mind. “No one knows,” Trait said. “To the outside world, he is dead.”

“This is a battle for public opinion. Killing or imprisoning innocent people makes us madmen. But releasing civilians and downsizing the country’s unwanted prison population — that makes us revolutionaries.”

“The warden is an indulgence,” conceded Trait. “But he is my indulgence. And he will remain.”

“It’s bad form. To hold a man without ransom, without any potential benefit — it is dangerous.”

Trait started past Inkman, leaving the room for the stairs. “If you had been with us inside Gilchrist, you would understand.”

“My point is,” said Inkman, following, continuing, “if you are going to bend any other rules of our agreement, I’d like to know first.”

Trait reached the bottom of the stairs where Spotty was eating a bowl of cereal as he stood guard at the inn doors. His hand and opposing wrist were wrapped with gauze, blood-dotted bite marks apparent on his forearm.

Trait said to him, “I warned you about those guard dogs.”

Spotty had insisted on saving the German shepherds from ADX Gilchrist before the ricin dropped.

“I can break them,” Spotty said.

“They were bred to attack cons.”

Spotty nodded awhile, swallowing. “I’m going to change my clothes.”

“It’s not the scrubs. It’s the smell or something. Something the hacks put in our food. I don’t know how they know, but they know. They know cons from guards and civilians. You get torn up bad, Spotty, there’s no doctor here. No one here to treat you. You realize that?” Now Trait could hear their barking, deep-throated in the distance. “Where are you keeping them?”

“The church. Good fence around the cemetery, room to run.”

“If they get out and hurt somebody, you’ll have to put them all down. All of them, understood?”

Spotty answered with quiet confidence. “I can break them.”

Menckley came in from outside then, hunched over and shivering, tears from his watery eyes were frozen high on his cheeks like bits of broken glass.

“What’s going on?” asked Trait.

“They’ve given up trying the pen doors,” Menckley reported. “Also the Command Center. Too stupid to know they can’t beat the lockdown that way. Panic seems to take them in waves. A few symptoms are starting. That stuff will start to wear them out.”

“How’s it playing on TV?”

“The government tried to censor our feed but the networks keep cutting to it now and then.”

“Good. Keep the live feed running.”

“How many cons do you have riding around town?”

“None. Everyone is either here in town or walking the barricades.”

Menckley’s facial expressions were limited to his thin, ointment-slick lips. Now they curled in suspicion. “I heard engines when I was out there.”

“What kind of engines?”

“Snowmobiles, had to be. On the wind from the east.”

Trait looked to Inkman. “A few stragglers, perhaps,” said Inkman. He appeared unconcerned. “Inmates who failed to return for the count, still riding around. They probably don’t even know what happened at the prison yet.”

Trait said, “Send somebody out there to sweep the area. Give it to the Marielitos. They seem anxious for something to do.”

Chapter 12

At a hard-packed road lined with bare, black trees, Coe opened up his sled and Kells throttled to keep pace, doing thirty miles per hour over the snow. Flickering through the trunks to his left was the asbestos mine, a skeleton of a tower with connecting feeder bridges atop a bald hill. Beyond it rose an outlying ring of mountains.

They turned off the road and kept to the safety of the trees, cutting wide around the outermost mine buildings before reaching the hills and starting to climb. They topped out on the first hill and Coe led the way onto a curling footpath up the next rise that only a kid would know about, just wide enough to admit their sleds.

The shack they came to was windowless and leaning, built tree-to-tree on a guarded plateau under the grizzled chin of a sloping stone cliff. The roof was off-kilter, like a bad hat worn roguishly, and the buckled front porch gave the shack a goofy grin. A thick clump of trees sheltered the plateau from the mine and the rest of the town.

They cut their engines and stood off the sleds, shedding their helmets in the sudden, ringing silence. Kells stayed near his sled, as did Coe.

“Chimney,” Kells said.

Smoke dawdled out of the roof pipe. Footpaths were shoveled from the warped porch, and recent footprints led from the door to the trees.

Kells was unzipping his parka when a tubby old man in a lumberjack coat stepped out of the trees with a gun in his hand. He wore boots with dirty fur halfway up the calves and moved as slowly as he spoke, seemingly made up of equal parts granite, grit, and wood.

“I thought someone’d come,” he said, pushing his plaid hunting cap off his forehead and pointing the gun in their direction.

Kells’s hands were empty and open. “Easy with that,” he said.

“Easy yourself.” The old man paid careful attention to where he planted each boot as he sized up Kells. “Got the ground wired for booby traps but the whole shebang’s buried under this snow. Funny way of sneaking up on a man. I heard your engines running a mile off.”

Kells glanced at Coe and the kid gave him a nervous nod.

“Marshall Polk?” asked Kells.

“Seventy-three years now.”

“We came from the inn. Do you know what’s happened in town?”

“I know a gunshot when I hear one. Know a gunfight when I hear more. I warned them. I did my part. But all they saw was tax breaks and more streetlights. Now I got a black man standing in my front yard.”

Kells had dealt with the Polks of the world before. “If you thought I was a prisoner you’d have fired that thing by now.”

“Don’t try and out-think me,” he said, cocking his head.

“My name is Kells. Do you recognize the boy?”

Polk came a few steps closer, scrutinized Coe. “Looks like the Provost fella, Matthew Provost.”

Coe seemed surprised. “That’s my dad.”

“Except for the hair. Your dad’s was longer, girly. Always got hippie magazines in the mail. How you mixed up in this?”

“We came here to... I brought Mr. Kells to see you.”

“The rest of the residents are gone,” said Kells. “Do you know what has happened?”

“I got two radios but no batteries. Same could be said for my ears. But I know enough.”

Kells noticed a second set of footprints, leading out of the trees. “Someone come to you an hour or two before we did?”

The old man called, “Come on out, Tom.”

A man in a long black overcoat opened the front door of the shack. His face was long and the shins and the tails of his coat were soaked through. He held a revolver in his hand as though he hadn’t held many.

“Mr. Duggan?” said Coe.

“Look here, Tom,” said Polk. “The Provost kid brought a friend around.”

It was anger, not nerves, making his weapon shake. Kells faced him. “There’s a group of us holed up at the golf course. Fern Iredale, the innkeeper, and some of her guests.”

“Fern?” said Tom Duggan.

Polk said, “Tom stumbled in like that two hours ago — frozen solid. No boots or gloves or hat. Could barely see the black of his coat under the snow. He told me what he could.”

Tom Duggan’s gun hand had fallen, and he was leaning against the skewed door frame, looking away.

Kells briefed them on the takeover and the ricin threat. At the end, Polk was squinting up into the falling snow.

“It’s funny,” Polk said, with satisfaction. “You can wait for a thing to happen, anticipate it, plan and prepare, but when it comes it still packs a punch.”

“We came up here looking for help,” Kells said.

“Seven years and no visitors. Now three in one day. They remember you when they need you. Let’s take this inside. My manners are rusty.”

The porch was a row of wooden pallets nailed together. Inside, the shack was warm, dim, airless. Like the old man, it was arranged around a potbelly, a sizzling black stove. The sagging army cot must have been hell on Polk’s back, and there were a desk table and two chairs lifted from the abandoned mine. Half of the table was a workshop, cluttered with rags and twine and radio parts. The other half was cleared for eating. Jars of preserved fruit and boxes of Quaker Oats and other dry foods were stacked on slanting shelves, no toilet or bathtub in sight.

Tom Duggan had taken a seat in a wooden folding chair near the stove, a puddle of melted water beneath him. The revolver rested in his hands in his lap.

Kells ducked to keep from butting one of the rafters and bringing down the roof. Coe’s face was screwed up at the smell.

Polk pulled the door shut and came around near the cot. “Never thought I’d see the ditchdigger visit me in my own house, at least not with me on two feet to greet him. Tom’s the town’s favorite son. That’d make me its poorest relation. He brought in the prison and the money. Now his mother’s dead.”

“Mrs. Duggan?” said Coe.

Tom Duggan’s head turned a bit at the mention of her name.

“It’s the riot that killed her,” Polk said. He had given up on his .38, no longer aiming it at Kells. “Terrible thing. It’s the government behind it all. They’ve wanted this town from the start.”

“I work for the government,” said Kells.

Polk’s gun came back up. “That’s two strikes against you.”

“The other being that I am black?”

“The other being that you’re a flatlander. Not from the Kingdom. Don’t be so race-sensitive. I hate everybody.”

Kells said, “We were hoping you might have some guns.”

“Guns. What do you want them for?”

“To fight.”

“Fight the prisoners?” Polk was constantly reevaluating Kells. “Say I did have some guns. If I gave them to you, how would I get by?”

“You could join us.”

“I’ve been fighting this fight for seven years. Way I see it, you’d be joining me. You got a plan?”

“Our plan is to find some weapons and fight.”

Polk nodded. “I must say I like your plan.”

The old man went to his cot and got down on one knee and pulled out an old army blanket. He carried the bundle to the cleared end of the table and unrolled it ceremoniously, like an ancient scroll.

Inside was one long rifle, a shotgun, a revolver, a pistol, and a greasy paper bag.

“All cleaned and oiled,” Polk pronounced.

Kells studied the bounty. “Where’s the rest?”

“Well, there’s my thirty-eight. But I keep that on my person. And Tom has the other revolver.”

Kells nodded. “And?”

“That’s about it.”

Kells looked again at the mouse-chewed blanket and the four measly weapons. “And you call yourself a militia?”

“Guns cost money. I gave that up when they started putting them metal stripes in the bills. Microchips. Your government trying to control our purchases.”

“We’re big on that. What about hunting for food? A crossbow?”

“Broke a few months ago. That’s a jug of gasoline over there.”

Kells found it under a scrap of tarpaulin. It was a milk gallon carton and its contents sloshed around inside. It was not even half-full.

“Like little eyeballs in your pocket,” continued Polk. “Tracking our movements.”

Kells looked sternly at Coe. The kid looked embarrassed. He was blocking his nose by pretending to wipe it.

Kells picked up the long rifle. A sling was attached. He was incredulous. “This is a biathlon rifle.”

“I got most of them from friends. Some die, will ’em to me.”

Kells tried the bolt action. “A biathlon rifle?”

“Straight pull. Damn accurate. Pretty good stopping power, and light.”

Kells picked up the pistol, a Beretta 9mm. “You have friends who deal drugs?”

“That’s a police-only model, loads fifteen plus one. Good old Eddie Bakerfield, God rest. But it’s foreign-made — I never trusted it.”

“What’s in the paper bag?”

“Some extra rounds. Most of them fit.”

Kells nodded, reconciling himself to the situation. “Fine. How soon can you pack?”

Polk plucked an old Pan Am flight bag from behind his bed. He said, “I’ve been packed for seven years.”

“You ride with Coe.” Kells wrapped up the blanket of oily weapons and looked to Tom Duggan. “The undertaker and I will take the guns.”

Tom Duggan looked up, then rose to face Kells. He looked slightly crazed, but mainly just lost. Demons were running roughshod over his thoughts much like the marauders raiding the town. Despair over his mother’s death and fantasies of vengeance crowded his mind.

“I thought you were one of them,” he said.

Kells shook his head dismissively. “Don’t worry about it.”

Tom Duggan wore the look of the dispossessed. It was a look Kells knew well.

Chapter 13

Rebecca stood alone in the shadowy function room at the end of the wide hallway, chairs up on the round tables, the bar empty of glass. For two high-school summers, she had waitressed every weekend at a country club outside Hartford, called Pleasant Valley. All she could remember of it now was the downtime after cleanup when the lights were dim, and the kids were all flirting with each other as they waited for their rides: The valets raced golf carts out on the fairways, the busboys stole swigs from behind the bar, and she and the other waitresses chatted with their legs swinging off the bar stools. There had been something very grown-up and reassuringly innocent about it at the same time, a free zone between adolescence and maturity — a safe place of limbo, as opposed to where she was now.

You have something for me, Luther Trait had said.

She pulled the gold cord on the glowing red curtain and opened the wall of windows on the last green. A flag had been left planted in the snow, a red number eighteen fluttering before a vista of sculpted white fairways and high, tamed trees. She could feel the cold pushing through the glass as she scanned the grounds for sociopaths. Hearing gunshots in the distance had been one thing. Running for her life was quite another.

She returned to the service kitchen as the coil beneath the glass kettle began to glow orange. Rebecca was boiling water for tea, though all she really wanted was something to keep her hands warm. You can’t fight criminals with cold hands. She was trying hard to stave off despair.

One of the swinging doors pushed open and Darla stepped inside, looking childlike in her matching lilac ski parka and pants. “Hi,” she said, hesitantly. Her bright blond hair stood out in stark relief to her dark eyebrows, forced and desperate like the rest of her.

Rebecca had heard Dr. Rosen on the telephone in the manager’s office earlier. I’m all right, dear. No, just some others who are also stranded.

“Plenty of water,” offered Rebecca.

Darla moved to the long prep table in the middle of the kitchen. “I just wanted to move around,” she said. “It’s like... it’s not really real, you know?”

Rebecca nodded. She did know.

“Ever been to one of those murder mystery dinners, where they kill someone between courses, and it’s kind of shocking but you just play along? I feel like I’m just playing along.”

“Yes, I know.”

“I never had a brother. I’ve never been in a fight before in my life. I don’t know why I’m not crying right now.”

Darla’s expression tightened and Rebecca had to look away. She was angry that Darla needed consoling. They all needed consoling.

“I don’t think I can fight,” Darla said. “I know you can, from reading your book. But I’d be afraid to hold a gun.”

Rebecca was about to set Darla straight on her weapons experience when she heard the motor in the distance. The engine ran faint, then loud, then faint again, like a motorcycle riding toward them up and down hills.

“Do you hear that?” said Rebecca, stepping past Darla and through the swinging doors to the function room, looking out over the course. The sound was louder there.

“The snowmobiles,” said Darla, following. “Thank God.”

Rebecca saw the sleds now, skimming over the creamy golf course, riders weaving in and out of formation.

She counted three sleds and pointed this out to Darla.

Darla said, “Maybe they found a third and brought it back.”

Rebecca studied the distant riders, their jackets and helmets. She was backing away from the window.

Darla was still rationalizing. “They might have changed their clothes...”

Rebecca turned and started through the function room to the hallway, running to the end, her boots clumping into the lounge. The others were rising and moving to the windows.

“Get back!” she yelled fearfully. “It’s not them. It’s prisoners.”

They all stared. Rebecca moved to the edge of the front-facing window as the noise of the engines grew to its loudest, revving like angry dirt bikes. Then they quieted to an idle.

The others shrank away, dropping to the floor. Rebecca knelt and peered over the sill.

One of the prisoners already had his helmet off. He was a compactly built, dark-skinned man standing astride his sled, smoky breath curling out of his mouth. He looked to be in his forties. All of them wore heavy jackets and boots. Their idling snowmobiles looked like sleek black insects.

The standing prisoner stepped off his sled and sized up the building, disappearing to the right.

Terry’s scared voice asked, “What is it? What’s happening?”

Rebecca slid down and turned her back flat to the wall, pressing her hands against the solid planking of the wood floor. “They’re looking around on foot,” she whispered.

Rebecca saw Fern lying on her side against the bottom of the sofa. Her rifle, their only weapon, was hugged to her chest.

Rebecca heard boot steps crunching in the snow. A vague shadow darkened the gloomy window light above her and she closed her eyes, waiting for it to pass. She opened her eyes and the room seemed to float before her.

The shadow was gone. It took all she had to turn and peer outside again.

The other two prisoners remained on their sleds. The one on foot was missing.

Rebecca ducked back, slanted against the wall. It was as though the lounge were hurtling through space. “They’re going to see the smoke,” she said.

“We’ve got to run,” said Bert, huddled low against the far wall with Rita.

Rebecca heard sniffling. Mia was with Robert somewhere behind the hearth.

“Maybe they’ll just go,” said Darla, a small voice. She sat near the hall steps, hands clenched to her chest.

“No,” said Rebecca, her own words making her feel sick. “They’re going to come inside.”

“We’re getting the hell out,” said Bert. It sounded like he was moving.

“Where?” Rebecca whispered.

Another noise now. Faint, distant as the engines had been. A high-pitched squeal getting louder. It was a whistle, growing...

“Ohmigod.”

Rebecca scrambled to her feet. She took off running down the weaving hall to the function room, rounding the tables and breaking through the swinging doors to the kitchen where the kettle was screaming with steam. She slid the glass pot off the burner and burned her hand holding the spout open to silence the noise. The kitchen doors swung behind her, slowing until only the whistle echoed in her head.

She put the kettle down on a cold burner. It hissed at her and she turned without breathing. She was separated from the others now. She had backed herself into a blind corner.

Footsteps, hard and quick through the function room. Fern entered with her rifle, barrel-first.

“Maybe they didn’t hear it,” said Rebecca, fooling herself now.

Fern said, “They heard it.”

Rebecca held on to the stove as more footsteps approached and the rest of them pushed through the black doors behind Fern. Everyone except Bert and Rita.

“Weapons,” Rebecca said. It was all she could think of. “We need weapons.”

She pulled open counter drawers, looking for knives. A noise outside made her pause: a single snowmobile engine running past the delivery door.

Rebecca could feel the hysteria rising in herself and in the room. She found a drawer full of cutlery and was pulling out knives when the panic started behind her.

“I need a gun,” said Terry, grabbing at Fern. “I need a gun!”

Terry began to wrestle with her for the rifle. Fern twisted away in amazement. “Who do you—?”

“Give me the gun!” Others tried to intervene, and Terry began to fight them too. “Get away from me!”

Dr. Rosen and Robert tried to lock Terry’s arms behind him, but he shook them off with nailing elbows and then ran to the delivery door. He was working the handle, trying to get outside. He got it unlocked before Rebecca and the rest seized him, pulling him back and forcing him up against the walk-in freezer door. His face was red and grunting. A full-blown panic. They handled him roughly, fighting Terry instead of the prisoners.

Only the sled engine stopped them. It passed the door again, this time followed by footsteps.

And Terry had unlocked the delivery door.

The steps stopped outside as the sled engine thrummed in the distance.

Then glass broke at the far end of the building.

They could not lock the outside door. They would be heard. They all stood frozen in the kitchen as though darkness hid them. Dr. Rosen was holding Terry by his collar and Mia’s raw nose was buried in her tight, mittened fists.

Fern stepped away from the rest with her rifle. She trained it on the swinging doors leading to the function room.

More glass shattering. The prisoners were inside the country club.

Terry moved again, and this time no one stopped him. He left Dr. Rosen holding a torn scrap of collar as he raced away through the swinging doors into the function room.

All reason fled with him. Darla inexplicably ran out too. Dr. Rosen stood immobile for a few seconds, watching the doors swing, then went after her. The black doors swung and swung.

The first gunshot sounded far away. A man yelling, perhaps Terry. Rebecca shrank into the corner. Hiding helplessly was the worst feeling she had ever known.

Two quick screams in the hallway, and gunshots to match. In her mind’s eye Rebecca saw Darla twist and fall.

Another yell and then footsteps charging through the function room. Fern steadied her rifle and the swinging doors burst open and a man ran inside. Fern shot him in the face. It was Terry.

Terry’s hand went to the hole in his cheek. He fell forward against the center prep table.

Mia was screaming, Rebecca was screaming. Fern was stunned and shrouded in smoke.

Terry continued on his knees to the outside door, a man possessed. He fumbled at the handle, finally pulling it open.

A prisoner with a deeply grooved face was waiting for him. Terry fell back with two gunshots in his chest.

Everyone was moving in the room except Rebecca. Fern doggedly worked the bolt on her rifle for another shot as the prisoner rushed inside, yelling in Spanish, firing at the first person he saw. Robert crumpled to the floor. Mia screamed through her hands.

Fern raised and fired again. The shot jolted the prisoner. A bit of insulating fluff flew out his right sleeve.

Then he kept coining. She was working the bolt again when he shot her in the stomach. Fern sagged a bit and raised the rifle but the mechanism had jammed. The prisoner walked up to her with her barrel trained on his crotch and shot Fern in the chest. She fell back and the rifle clattered to the floor as the prisoner stood over her.

Rebecca reached blindly into the open drawer. She was standing there holding a two-pronged serving fork. The prisoner laughed and came at her as the swinging doors opened behind him.

It was Kells. The gun in his hand went off and the prisoner’s shoulders flew back. Kells advanced with the gun held in front of him and fired twice more before the prisoner could turn. Kells kept coming and firing until the prisoner was lying dead.

The revolver did not explode in Kells’s hand. It made only a dull loud cracking noise. There was no explosion of flesh, only coin-sized holes that gurgled blood. And he did not grin. He appeared deadly purposeful and short of breath.

Silence then, the strangest, loudest silence, a smoky moment in the room. Kells heard words spoken in the hallway and walked back out through the swinging doors. The doors rocked back and forth.

For some reason Rebecca followed him. Kells strode around the tables with his gun ahead of him like a flashlight. The second prisoner, dark like the first, turned the corner into the function room and Kells fired first and fast, hitting him in the stomach, the face, and a leg. The prisoner stumbled to the empty bar, slipping to the brass foot rail and falling still. He was alive and concentrating hard on his breathing. Kells kicked the man’s gun away.

“How many more?”

Kells was talking to her.

“One,” she answered, shocked that she was even visible.

Kells proceeded into the hall. Rebecca went only as far as the edge of the carpet.

Halfway to the main doors, lying twisted and still in a lilac ski suit, was Darla.

An older man inside the front doors wore a long black overcoat and wielded a long rifle. Kells stopped near him and called down the hall in Spanish. He yelled again, then started along the opposite wall toward the reception desk.

A prisoner rushed out of the manager’s office firing a rifle. Kells cut him down. The prisoner collapsed in the hallway, and Kells advanced, sticking his revolver back into his shoulder holster. The prisoner was dragging himself toward his dropped rifle.

The man in the overcoat stepped next to Kells. He raised his long rifle over the prisoner but could not shoot.

Kells reached down for the prisoner’s rifle and finished him with a single shot to the back of the neck.

There were no flourishes. He killed without style and without hesitance. Dutifully, he killed.

The man in the overcoat just stood there. Kells started back past Darla to the function room, right around Rebecca to the prisoner lying at the bar. He searched the inside of the man’s unzipped North Face jacket as the prisoner watched, for some reason unable to move. He flexed his hands but his legs were still and loose. He was saying something over and over in Spanish, with what sounded like a Cuban accent. Kells responded in Spanish, finding a small, thin canister inside the prisoner’s jacket.

It was a can of mace. Kells stood and sprayed the prisoner in the face, and the prisoner coughed and seethed.

Kells moved on to the kitchen doors as the man in the hangman’s coat approached. Rebecca recognized him now. Tom Duggan, the undertaker from the town ceremony the day before.

Rebecca heard weeping behind the bar. She circled it, wide around the agonized prisoner.

Dr. Rosen was sitting there with his head in his hands.

Tom Duggan had followed Kells into the kitchen and Rebecca went too. Kells was kneeling next to Fern. She was dead and Terry was dead and Robert was dead. Shy, goofy Robert looked bewildered as Mia screamed over him.

The doors opened behind her and Coe appeared with a short, round-bellied old man wearing furry boots. The mountain man, Polk. He limped forward a step or two, then stopped.

Kells was on his feet again. “Get the kid out of here,” he told her. “Take the girl.”

Rebecca reached for Coe’s shoulder, but he shrugged her off. “Fern,” he said. It was Kells who stepped up and pushed Coe out the swinging doors. Rebecca needed help with Mia too, tearing her away from Robert’s body. The undertaker just stood in the middle of it all and watched.

Rebecca led them down the long hallway to the lounge, past Darla and the dead prisoner. Rebecca left them there to go back for Dr. Rosen, helping him to his feet. The maced prisoner sputtered something in Spanish as they left.

She had to walk Dr. Rosen past Darla. His gaze stayed on her fallen body as they passed.

There was glass on the floor of the lounge and wind and snow blowing through the broken window. Rebecca sat with Mia on the couch, Coe across from them crying into his fists. Rebecca laid one hand on Mia’s shivering shoulder, the other on her thigh. The old man wandered in and took a chair in the corner without saying anything.

Rebecca’s despair was too general for tears. For a while her mind went black, a deep, lightless place. She tried to will herself back by focusing on the physical, staring at the hearth fire that had cooled. She noticed a bloodstain on one wall, perhaps where Darla had been shot, the spatter like an augury portending a terrible future.

Luggage lay about the lounge like bodies. Terry’s designer suitcase. Darla’s thick American Tourister. Robert’s hockey duffel. Fern’s carpetbag.

Bert-and-Rita’s backpacks were there but their skis and poles were gone.

At one point the undertaker appeared in the hallway to drag the third prisoner back to the function room, then to carry Darla.

The old man had fallen asleep. Mia’s heaving slowed, her eyes settled into a deep stare. Coe emerged from the stones of his fists every now and then to look around the four corners of the room, searching for something, like a way out.

Finally Rebecca had to leave Mia and walk about. She was leaping with nervous energy and it took all her concentration to move slowly and not alarm the others. She went to the cracked window, feeling the cold. The light was fading. The short, terrible day was ending, the snow turning luminescent, and the flakes draping them in silence.

Staring into the snowfall made her light-headed. Before turning away, she thought she saw a form disengage from one of a cluster of tree trunks to stand on two legs. Bert-and-Rita again came to mind and Rebecca blinked and squinted into the darkness but saw nothing.

She waited awhile longer for it to return, until she doubted her own vision. A thread in the bullet-cracked glass had tampered with the fading light, she decided, deceiving her. She turned from the window and her nerves compelled her to the hallway.

She could hear whimpering coming from the function room. It was doglike, a kind of dry crying. Maybe she was hearing things too. What was taking them so long? Still light-headed, she reached out for the glazed stones of the wall, making her way past the bloodstains toward the end.

She turned the corner and onto the royal blue rug of the function room. The prisoner was still alive. He was seated in a chair set against the great wall of windows overlooking the dark eighteenth hole. He was a broken man, shirtless and bloody, with tears and all manner of mucus and saliva running down his pulpy face, the small hole in his stomach clogged with blood. He would have collapsed to the floor were he not bound to the chair with the gold cord from the curtain. He had been tortured, and he had talked. She could tell this just by looking at him. The corpses of the two dead prisoners were arranged against the window, sitting, heads to the side, empty hands in their laps. Their faces and palms had been mutilated. Arched over their heads were two words painted onto the glass, the drippy green letters reading like a comic book scream:

The scene was arranged for maximum impact, like a macabre piece of performance art.

Kells walked out of the kitchen then. He was wearing a police radio copped from one of the prisoners. His hands glistened clean though there were specks of blood on the lap of his pants.

He walked past the chair and picked up the prisoner’s black North Face jacket, lighter and warmer than his own. He examined it for bullet holes before putting it on.

Tom Duggan pushed through the kitchen doors in his slender, stiff way; and Rebecca could see behind him that the others’ bodies were gone.

The prisoner groaned and the room reeked of chemical mace and Rebecca’s head continued to swim.

Kells gathered the prisoners’ rifles and revolvers and mace and started past her without a word. She did not attempt to question him. She had seen too much that day. The prisoner groaned as she followed Tom Duggan back down the hall to the lounge.

Kells scavenged the others’ bags, emptying Robert’s hockey duffel of his clothes and toiletries and filling it with the prisoners’ weapons, including a guard’s taser. Mia watched him with a hard, blank stare.

“Where’s the older couple?” asked Kells.

“Bert and Rita?” said Rebecca. “They’re gone. Their skis are gone.”

“Then we have enough sleds to transport everyone in one trip. Coe and I passed a farmhouse a few miles out, backed up into trees off the road, good approach views.”

They were leaving. That was something everyone wanted. “What about the others?” asked Rebecca.

Tom Duggan spoke. “The freezer. It will preserve them.”

Rebecca picked up her cargo bag and laptop case and found her gloves among the others lining the hearth. As she pulled them on, she noticed Kells saying something to a downcast Coe, standing near Fern’s old paisley carpetbag. Coe nodded reluctantly and went to find his knapsack.

Kells turned to the reception desk telephone. He pushed only three buttons.

Rebecca turned to Dr. Rosen. He had stopped in the middle of putting on his long coat, one arm halfway in the sleeve, watching Kells.

“I have a message for Enrol Inkman,” Kells said into the phone. “Tell him his friends from the inn were looking for him. You have the address.”

Kells replaced the receiver and picked up his own bag and the weapon-filled duffel.

“What did you just do?” said Dr. Rosen, pointing. “You called nine one one?”

“It’ll take them hours to get here in the dark.” Kells was moving to the hallway. “The snow will have swallowed our sled tracks by then.”

“What happened to the element of surprise?” Dr. Rosen cried.

“Things are moving more quickly than I expected.”

“Than you expected?”

“The next wave will be prepared. Better to take the upper hand now. Intimidation can be just as effective as surprise.”

“Intimidation? You’re baiting them? A challenge?”

But he was talking to the hall. Kells had gone out the front doors. They could see him through the front window now, carrying his bags to the prisoners’ sleds.

Dr. Rosen looked at Rebecca and the others. “He’s crazy. We’re following a killer.”

Rebecca nodded in agreement. Then she and the rest of them took their bags and made their way to the door.

Chapter 14

Luther Trait stood before the marielito sagging in the chair. The bullet hole in the Cuban’s gut cried out like a little mouth of pain. “A miracle you are still breathing, Octavio.”

Octavio blinked up at Trait, slumping off the chair like a forgotten attic doll. “Cut me down,” he whispered, huskily.

“You were left alive to scare us.”

“I told you everything.”

“You told them everything.”

Inkman entered just in time to watch Trait pull a revolver out of his waistband and execute Octavio with a bullet to the forehead. The Marielito’s neck flopped back and Trait knocked over his chair with a kick to the dead man’s chest.

Inkman took in the carnage as the smoky report rang in the room. It was the bleeding green words, dark against the night glass, that grabbed his attention.

Inkman’s face washed white. He felt for the back of a chair and lowered himself into it.

Trait stepped away from the smell of the cordite and seared flesh, returning the gun to his belt. He saw Inkman sitting there. “Your friends from the inn,” Trait said. “You called them, ‘an unremarkable bunch.’ ”

Inkman’s eyes were unbelieving. He was holding on to the seat of his chair as though the room were in danger of being overturned.

“At least two were killed,” Trait went on. “Between five and ten of them got away on snowmobiles.”

“They asked for me by name?” said Inkman.

“By your real name. Explain ‘Tick Tock.’ ”

“It is ‘Clock,’ ” said Inkman. He was deeply affected by the scene, and Trait was patient. “A code name.”

“Whose code name? Yours?”

“Not mine. I never met him. Not that I know of. Might have dealt with him indirectly. I did a year in Belize in the mid-eighties—”

“Are we still talking about the guests from the inn?”

“He was a legend. I didn’t know anybody in the CIA who knew who he was. Only rumors.”

“CIA, code names, Guatemala. I’m asking you how this person could have been at the inn.”

Inkman looked stricken. “I–I can’t explain it.”

Jazzed by the violence, Trait’s mind worked quickly and reasonably. “Someone is playing you. Somebody got into the town somehow—”

“Nobody got into town.”

“Then your inn friends are getting help by phone. Someone at the CIA came up with this.”

Inkman shook his head stridently. “It’s bad juju even to invoke his name. The Company itself was afraid of him. Look what he did to their faces. You think some retired florist from Hartford did that?”

“So this man was staying at the inn somehow, and you did not know it.”

“It was said he could turn it on and off. That you could stand next to him in a hotel elevator and never look twice — that was his greatest talent. He was faceless. The coldest of the Cold Warriors.”

“To the central question: How did he get here? And what does he want with you?”

But Inkman was still making sense of the past. “He was a devil to the Guatemalans — a demon, a spirit. His was the highest bounty ever offered by the leftists. He vanished in the early nineties just as the human-rights crimes were coming to light. It was said that he had been captured and tortured, then thrown into an active volcano or chopped up and fed to jackals. They never found his body.”

“Octavio said a black man did the killing and the cutting.”

Inkman remembered the inn guests. “It could be,” he said, chilled. “I don’t know. It could be he’s been following me the whole time, but... no. They dropped my surveillance when I went to Mexico. I’m sure of it.” But his gaze had fallen. “Why won’t they ever leave me alone?”

“The writer was here also. She remained in town.”

Inkman was suddenly disgusted, aroused. “Who cares about the writer? Listen to me. Clock’s brief was counterinsurgency warfare. He ran proxy wars. Toppling unfriendly governments in Central America and propping them back up with the CIA’s own. Drafting, organizing, and training indigenous fighters, that was the game. It was said he could melt plowshares into swords with just one glance. Subverting the economic and social fabric of a small country is textbook stuff — but every culture has character, a national psychology, and Clock knew how to exploit its weaknesses. He knew how to give an entire society a nervous breakdown in the name of America.”

“Octavio saw an old man, a teenaged boy, the writer. You are too easily impressed. This is a scare tactic. He is trying to rattle you, and he is succeeding.”

“He left this for us. He wanted us here.” Inkman jumped to his feet. “He could be outside right now.”

Trait pushed him back into the chair. “He’s not. We were too careful.”

“If he’s here in town, then he’s not just coming after me. Do you understand that? He’s coming after all of it — the town, you, everything.” Inkman looked again at the bodies and the writing. “He wants you to go after him. I’m telling you: Don’t.”

“I won’t. Not tonight, not in the dark. But tomorrow. We will put an end to this tomorrow.”

Trait signaled to Spotty to admit the remaining Marielitos. The burn hole in Octavio’s forehead had stopped smoking, and the snowmobiles idling outside had masked the revolver’s report.

Trait met the four at the edge of the carpet. Four middle-aged Cubans coming off twenty years of U.S. incarceration, their eyes were bright as they tried to see around him into the room, skin tanned, builds tight and compact. Trait nodded solemnly and allowed them inside.

The Marielitos shouted words of anguish and one man gripped the shoulder of another as they viewed their fallen comrades. Their eyes glared with rage.

“Your brothers-in-arms were ambushed,” Trait told them. “We have a handful of citizens who foolishly decided to hide in town. Your brothers killed at least two.”

The one who spoke English turned to Trait, his top lip curled in fury. “Faces,” he said.

Trait glanced at Inkman. “There might be one among them who knows torture and revolt.”

The man translated this to others, furiously, before turning back to Trait. “Where they go?”

“The snow will keep them slow tonight. They can’t go anywhere except deeper into town. You will have your day. I promise you an opportunity for vengeance.”

“No,” said the spokesman, the smallest and angriest of the four Marielitos. “We promise you.”