Off the Grid

by C. J. Box

  “Yes. Sorting it out is like trying to get a drink from a fire hose, but we believe this to be credible.”

  Tyrell stopped speaking while he opened another file on his laptop.

  Volk used the opening to cut in. “And it’s more than just the chatter. Other things have happened in this sector. A couple of tractor-trailers were stolen from truck stops along I-80 while the drivers were away from their vehicles. There have been at least three large-scale thefts of oil field equipment and copper tubing. Someone broke into the warehouse of a huge sporting goods company and hauled out survival gear and weapons, and they were very specific about what they took: tents, generators, high-powered rifles and ammunition, freeze-dried food, camouflage clothing.”

  “So?”

  “The crimes and what was taken cross-check with certain words and phrases our spooks picked up in the chatter stream at the same time. Bad guys in Europe and the Middle East were talking about semitrucks and electronic gear hours after they were stolen over here. We don’t have enough intel to connect the dots—but we know there are dots to connect. And that’s why we’re here, and here’s why you’re here.”

  Tyrell spun the laptop around to him again. On the screen was another photo taken from a satellite or drone of what was obviously a falconer flying a bird in the desert. Nate leaned forward as Tyrell clicked to zoom it in.

  The man in the photo was in the act of swinging a lure around his head. A lure was a piece of bird wing tied to a line that would draw the attention of a raptor in the air and entice it back in from the sky. At the top of the photo was a blurred image of a falcon in a stoop.

  The falconer looked a lot like Ibby.

  “This was taken two months ago, less than a hundred miles from here.”

  Nate had guessed this part. “So Ibby’s a falconer.”

  “He has been since he was a child,” Tyrell said, scrolling through photo after photo of a young Ibraaheem with a succession of falcons: kestrels, red tails, prairie falcons, peregrines, goshawks. “You know all about this, don’t you? The thing Middle Eastern royals have for falconry.”

  Nate nodded.

  “You have a unique opportunity to be able to check him out,” Volk said, “one falconer to another. Try to figure out what his deal is, what he’s been doing these past two years. And, of course, let us know if he appears to be a part of this impending threat.”

  Nate closed his eyes briefly, and when he opened them he was angry again. He said, “You people are out of your minds.”

  “What do you mean?” Tyrell asked. His neck was flushed red.

  “Falconers are loners,” Nate said. “That’s a big part of the appeal. If you’re a dedicated falconer, you devote your life to falconry. Everything you do is structured around your birds and hunting. We aren’t a bunch of sociable guys who hang out together. That goes against everything we believe in.”

  “Oh, come on,” Tyrell said with some heat. “We’ve got files upon files on falconry conclaves overseas. Sheiks and their royal family members fly their 737s to the desert, put up tents, and hunt together.”

  Nate nodded. “They do. And they’ll pay thousands for a raptor that they’ll use only once or twice a year. But other than falconry itself, there is no similarity between their brand of falconry and ours.

  “Over here, we’re outlaws and loners. We don’t get together like a social club. When we do get together on occasion, all we do is argue and fight. We’re like a bunch of farmers and ranchers and we don’t agree on much. We’re independent. We’re American,” he said.

  “Ibby is about as unlikely to want to talk to me as I would be to talk to him. He’s doing his thing with his birds in the desert and he doesn’t want to be encroached on by another falconer. He’d resent the hell out of me moving into his turf.

  “Why is it so incomprehensible to you two,” Nate asked, “that maybe Ibby had a bellyful of politics, religion, and war and he’s dropped out to fly his falcons for a while? Nature is a powerful narcotic, boys. Once you step into it and accept how beautiful and cruel it is, you want to stay there. How do you know Ibby doesn’t just want to be left alone to practice falconry?”

  Tyrell said, “We don’t. That’s why you’re here. You’re going to find out.”

  “Either that,” Volk said with a harsh grin, “or you can go on and on for years about ‘beautiful nature’ to federal correctional officers in prison, and you’ll likely never see Olivia Brannan again. Your choice.”

  “I would have stated it with a little more diplomacy,” Tyrell said. “But he’s right.”

  Nate felt a black gloom settle over him.

  “One more thing,” Volk said, “and this is important. If you’re caught or exposed, we’ve never heard of you and you can’t expect us to use any influence to get you out of your predicament. If either of those things happen, you’re dead to us. No one will believe you were recruited by the Wolverines because no one knows the Wolverines exist. You can’t point to us”—he gestured to Tyrell and himself—“because the names we gave you don’t exist, either. We’re phantoms.

  “We need you, because if you’re caught or exposed, it won’t lead back to us or the administration. Things are so out of control around the world right now that we can’t risk the Kingdom thinking we’re targeting the son of their highest official. That would be a disaster, and we can’t afford disasters. Got that?”

  “Got it,” Nate said bitterly.

  • • •

  NATE SHINNIED DOWN the tree in the dark. He still had to feed his falcons in their mews.

  Could he believe or even trust Tyrell and Volk? He wasn’t sure.

  But they’d found him and they were tracking Liv. He didn’t see that he had a choice but to do what they wanted. Nate wished Joe Pickett was around to talk to. Joe often had wisdom that surprised them both.

  They’d given Nate an advanced compact satellite phone. He was to keep the phone hidden away and it was to be used only for communicating directly with Tyrell and Volk. Their two private numbers were already programmed into the display. The phone had encryption technology in it, Tyrell said, that not only prevented anyone from listening in but also instantly wiped out any record that a call was made and to whom.

  Nate assumed the device also had a GPS chip that would keep them informed as to his exact location even when the telephone was powered down.

  • • •

  HE NARROWED HIS EYES when he sensed something out of place near the cabin. It was too dark to see the grounds clearly, though, and the moon fused through the trees at an angle that cast everything in half-light. It was not yet dark enough that the stars could illuminate the ground. Nate drew his weapon and held it down at his side as he slipped from tree to tree.

  It was the white smudge on top of the roof of the mews that had caught his eye, he realized.

  When he got closer he saw the gyrfalcon. It was the one from his dream.

  The bird turned its head and their eyes locked.

  He realized that perhaps it had not been a bad dream that morning, but a premonition.

  —— PART TWO ——

  RUNAWAY BEAR

  The closer you get to Canada, the more things’ll eat your horse.

  —THOMAS MCGUANE, The Missouri Breaks

  6

  In the late afternoon of his forty-seventh birthday, Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett was headed off the eastern slope of the Bighorn Mountains toward home in his green departmental pickup when he got the call urging him to turn around and go back.

  He had just made a tight turn on the switchback road from the dark timber into the light when his phone lit up. He squinted against the setting sun and checked the screen on his phone. The call was from Jessica Nicol White, one of three large-carnivore biologists doing a study in the area.

  Joe eased his truck and horse trailer onto a pull-out barely big eno
ugh to accommodate both units. He could feel Rojo, his saddled sorrel gelding, shift his weight for balance in the trailer behind him. He’d probably been sleeping, Joe guessed, after a full day of trail riding in the mountains. Rojo was ready to go home and get turned out, and Joe was ready to get home as well. He’d been up since four-thirty a.m., because it was the first week of hunting season.

  It had been a long day that started with Joe saddling Rojo in the dark by the headlights of his truck. His fingers had been as stiff as the leather on the saddle from the cold, and his breath billowed around his head. He rode for a quarter mile and dismounted to walk so his joints would loosen up and he could warm up through exercise. Joe had to do more and more of that kind of thing as he got older, he’d found. He didn’t really feel comfortable until the sun rose and penetrated the dark lodgepole pine forest.

  At the first camp, he’d shared a bacon-and-egg breakfast over a campfire with a trio of elk hunters from West Virginia, and then rode in a huge loop through the trees for the rest of the day, checking licenses, conservation stamps, and making sure game laws had been obeyed.

  Joe preferred riding from camp to camp on horseback rather than using his pickup or four-wheel ATV. There were few good roads in the forest, and on Rojo he could cut through stands of trees and enter the camps fairly silent. There was no reason to make a splashy entrance and possibly alert poachers or spook elk being stalked. The department wanted hunters in the area to have a big harvest, because the elk population was getting out of control.

  The risk of riding, though, was the possibility of a hunter mistaking Joe’s horse for an elk or a moose in the trees and firing away. That, and getting thrown if Rojo acted up. More hunters were injured by horse accidents, Joe knew, than any other reason.

  The day had gone smoothly with no drama. The hunters he met were serious sportsmen and he’d found no violations and had issued no citations. Of the twenty-three hunters he’d checked, seven had already killed their elk. The big animals had been field-dressed and hung from game poles.

  Throughout the day, the hunters swapped stories and asked Joe where the elk were, what the weather would be like, and if there had been bears or wolves spotted recently in the area. The reintroduction of wolves and the growing population of grizzly bears had thrown a new curve into the elk-hunting experience. Decades before, the biggest fear that hunters had had was being mistaken for a game animal by another hunter or getting injured while on the hunt. Now they worried about being attacked and eaten by grizzly bears, or harassed by wolves—as improbable as the latter might be.

  • • •

  FROM JOE’S VANTAGE POINT at the pull-out, the Twelve Sleep River Valley sprawled out below him, the town of Saddlestring a smattering of buildings and streets in the far distance. Eight miles beyond Saddlestring was the dark blue hump of Wolf Mountain and his home, where his wife, Marybeth, and two of his daughters were waiting for him. He hoped they hadn’t baked a cake, and for once—after years of pleading his case—were placing dozens of candles on a peach or apple “birthday pie” instead.

  His yellow Labrador, Daisy, was curled up on the passenger seat beside him and she lifted her head and yawned. She was tired, too.

  “Joe Pickett,” he answered.

  “Joe, this is Jessica White. We’ve got a situation with GB-53.”

  GB-53 (which stood for “Grizzly Bear Number Fifty-three”) was a 550-pound male grizzly bear that had wandered into the Bighorns from Grand Teton National Park the summer before. The GPS collar had tracked its meandering route through the Bridger-Teton Forest, over the Absaroka Range, across the Powder River Basin, and over the top of the Bighorns near Burgess Junction. It seemed to have found a home on the game-rich eastern slope of the mountains and had been there for the last three months.

  “What kind of situation?”

  “There may have been an interaction with a hunter.”

  “An interaction? Speak English, not bureaucrat.”

  There was panic in her voice. She said, “A hunter we met this morning agreed to carry a transmitter with him. We’ve been watching his movements all day and the movements of GB-53. About fifteen minutes ago, their locations merged into one.”

  “Did you hear any shots?” Joe asked.

  “No, no shots.”

  “Can you see anything?”

  “Not from where we are. We’re about two miles away from . . . the interaction. We need your help. We don’t want this to be what we think it is.”

  Joe didn’t, either. He said, “I’ll get turned around. You’re still at the meadow where I saw you last?”

  “Yes, Joe.”

  “Hang tight. I’ll be there in thirty minutes. In the meantime, call dispatch and Sheriff Reed in Saddlestring. Ask him to get the search-and-rescue team assembled. Tell them to arm up, since we may have a killer bear on the loose.”

  “Oh my God,” she said. “This is what we didn’t want to happen.”

  “Don’t panic,” Joe said. “Keep your eyes on your screen so we know where the bear goes. Do you have a way to contact the hunter?”

  “We’ve tried,” she said. He could hear a sob catch in her throat. “We’ve tried his cell number a dozen times, but service is terrible up here.”

  “You didn’t give him a handheld?” Joe asked. “So you could communicate with him directly?”

  “We meant to . . .” she said, her voice trailing off.

  Joe closed his eyes and reopened them. The interagency grizzly bear team had been asking hunters to be volunteers in its study. Most of the hunters asked had agreed to participate. In addition to the GPS transmitter, hunters were supposed to be given a two-way radio as part of the protocol. That way, the study team could alert the volunteer if a grizzly was nearby. Apparently, the study team had forgotten to give the man a radio.

  “GB-53 is still there,” she said. “He’s not moving at all.”

  “Has the hunter moved?”

  A long beat. “No.”

  Joe thought of, but didn’t say, the maxim he’d heard countless times over the years: A fed bear is a dead bear.

  • • •

  AS JOE TURNED his rig around from the pull-out, he speed-dialed Marybeth.

  She answered on the second ring.

  “Yes, Joe?” she asked. Her voice was flat. She knew what it meant when he called her close to dusk and he was expected home.

  “I’m going to be late,” he said.

  “Of course you are.”

  Marybeth ran the Twelve Sleep County Library. She’d been working long days because the library board was pushing a one-cent sales tax to expand the old Carnegie building and modernize the facility. The local election was two weeks away. She’d obviously left work early to get home to prepare for Joe’s birthday party. Even though he really didn’t care about his birthday anymore, he always looked forward to seeing his family together.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “We may have an injured elk hunter. A grizzly bear may have gotten him.”

  “Is it anyone we know?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Joe said. “I’ll call as soon as I can.”

  “Any idea when you might get home?”

  He looked in his rearview mirror. Rojo was peering through the slider of the horse trailer and seemed to be asking him the same question. So was Daisy from the passenger seat.

  “Not sure,” he said.

  “We have birthday pie,” she said.

  “Finally!”

  “I hope it isn’t all gone by the time you get home.”

  Joe chuckled at that.

  “Be safe,” she said. “Don’t get eaten by a bear.”

  “Not to worry. I’m stringy.”

  • • •

  THERE WERE FIFTY GAME WARDENS in the state of Wyoming and their badge numbers reflected their seniority. Joe was now badge number twenty bec
ause Bill Haley, badge number one, had retired that summer. As usual, Joe was wearing Wrangler jeans, lace-up outfitter boots, a sweat-stained Stetson, and a red uniform shirt with the pronghorn antelope shoulder patch. His pickup was his business office, and it was crammed with maps, notebooks, gear, and weapons.

  He had a special designation no other game warden shared, that of “Special Liaison to the Executive Branch,” which meant that he sometimes was called upon by Governor Spencer Rulon to take on assignments outside his normal duties. Rulon liked to call Joe his “range rider,” much to the chagrin of the agency’s director, Lisa Greene-Dempsey, who didn’t like sharing her employees with anyone. Rulon didn’t really care about that.

  Governor Rulon was in the final months of his second and last term and Joe hadn’t heard from him recently. Joe wondered what Rulon, a charismatic but at times erratic go-getter, would do with his free time. He also wondered if the next governor would maintain the special designation with Joe, who, frankly, wasn’t sure he wanted to work for anyone other than Rulon.

  The governor-to-be was Colter Allen, a Big Piney–area lawyer and rancher. Since Allen had won a hard-fought Republican primary in August against three other candidates, there was no doubt he’d be the next governor. His campaign slogan was “Stick it to the feds,” which was pretty much the theme of all the Republican candidates in the race.

  Joe didn’t even know the name of the Democratic candidate, whom Independent Democrat Rulon had not endorsed or campaigned for. All Joe knew was that the candidate was a college professor. He didn’t have a chance. In the strange tableau of Wyoming politics that was unique to the state, Rulon seemed to favor Allen and had publicly offered to assist with the transition before the general election even took place.

  As far as Joe was concerned, the jury was still out on Colter Allen. The game warden in Big Piney had had several run-ins with Allen and he didn’t have many good things to say about him. The game warden suspected that Allen was anti–Game and Fish Department and anti–state employee. Joe wasn’t so sure that Wyoming voters didn’t just seem to like Allen’s very Wyoming-sounding name, as well as the fact that he’d been a U.S. Marine and a high school rodeo champion.