by Ty Patterson
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 1
Five years back.
The three men took turns raping Elena Petrova.
One of them was bald and built like a retired boxer, another was of average build and had a pock marked face, the last one had long straggly hair tied back in a ponytail. The first one finished, the second, Pony Tail, took his place.
They cracked jokes while they were at it, commented on her body and went at her until she faded out. Pony Tail slapped her face and brought her back to consciousness. She looked at him with dull eyes, her body jerking with every thrust he made. Her feet were spread apart and tied. So were her hands. Her mouth was the only part of her body that was unrestrained.
She had screamed when they had grabbed her, shouted until she went hoarse.
They had laughed. There wasn’t anyone to hear her.
They were now in a small shack surrounded by miles of nothing. Flat land, sparse vegetation, the occasional coyote that didn’t care if Elena screamed her heart out.
It was Boxer’s turn then. He looked at Pony Tail and made a crude remark. They all laughed. He was vicious and brutal, drew blood. Elena didn’t feel it. She had lapsed into darkness again.
Boxer shook her awake, punctuating his motion with light slaps. She came to sluggishly and then jerked in shock when Pock Mark threw a bucket of cold water on her.
Boxer’s mean eyes narrowed at her as he squeezed her breast cruelly. ‘This is the first warning.’
‘This is the only warning you’ll get.’
They left her in the shack, still tied down, with nothing but the dark to keep her company. She heard them driving away and then the silence grew on her and mocked at her. Elena shouted in the dark, but no one came to her rescue.
Her head fell back.
I am going to die.
Her eyes couldn’t even squeeze out tears.
Present
Elena Petrova woke up screaming in the night. Her hand clawed out and knocked over a glass of water, and its shattering woke her fully.
It was a balmy night in Cheyenne; she was in her two-bedroom apartment, in a block not very far from the governor’s mansion. She listened keenly but heard nothing alarming. Nothing other than her own hoarse breathing.
She looked at the night clock, two a.m.
Such nights were common, especially since she had restarted her investigation. She got out of bed, gingerly stepped around the shards of glass, went to the bathroom and washed her face.
She rinsed her mouth, ignored the hollow eyes set in a pale face looking back at her in the mirror. She brewed tea, let its warmth fill her as she powered on her computer.
She read all that she had typed. Made some corrections and wrote some notes. She would start making calls the next day.
Today, she reminded herself. Next day was now.
Elena Petrova was an investigative journalist. Her hard hitting exposes on the misdeeds of politicians and government leaders had landed her accolades on the east coast. After working for more than three decades with the country’s biggest papers in New York and Washington D.C., she had retired eight years back to her family home in Wyoming from where she freelanced.
She was fifty, single, no immediate family, a few close friends, not weighed down by debt, a lifestyle envied by many.
Her articles were sought out by the big publishers on both coasts of the country. Now that she was not a hostage to deadlines, her exposes went deeper, hit harder, and at least two city governments had toppled because of her writing.
Six years back she had come across The Man in Wyoming. Everyone knew him, but no one really did. That was his knack; projecting an image but keeping his personal life very private.
He had enormous wealth. No one quite knew how he had amassed it. He had power.
He was power.
The few people Elena spoke to, told her to forget him and drop her investigation.
Elena scoffed. She had been to several White House dinners, had the country’s senior most politicians on her speed dial, and had hobnobbed with the richest entrepreneurs.
Some guy, however rich and famous, wasn’t going to scare her off.
One night a brick smashed through a window of her pickup truck. There was a note tied to it.
Back off.
She took the note to the sheriff. He shrugged, said he would look into it. Nothing much happened. Elena continued asking questions, interviewing people. It became a project that nagged at her.
Then she was raped, five years back.
That memory was like yesterday. She had managed to free herself the day after her rape. Her wrists were bruised from rubbing the rope against the sharp edges of the wooden posts in the shack.
Once free, she had washed herself, dressed in her clothes, which were scattered on the ground. She had walked five miles before she hit the black top. Another two hours of waiting in the sun before she thumbed a ride.
Going to the cops wasn’t even an option. Boxer, Pony Tail, and Pock Mark hadn’t bothered to cover their faces.
It was The Man’s message to her. He was power.
She went to a discreet clinic where she was tested and then thanked God – who she no longer believed in – when all the tests came back negative.
She dropped the story. Journalism was in her blood. However blood required a living heart to pump.
She sold her family home and moved to Cheyenne. Bought an apartment close to the heart of the city and felt safer.
The story didn’t leave her, though. It shamed her in the quiet times of the night. It popped up from nowhere when she was with friends, when the tendrils of steam from her tea enveloped her face. It occupied her mind when she went to the theatre. It made her stand still when she was performing routine chores.
It made her feel small.
She started again a year back, cautiously, using all the guile she could command. She created several false identities, using those to email questions. She used disposable phones to call people. She traveled under other false identities and used a wig and dark glasses as a disguise. She thought she was getting somewhere, getting the full picture on The Man.
What she knew scared her. What she would find out, would terrify her. She was sure of that.
She never got the chance to find out.
A week from the nightmare, Elena Petrova returned to her apartment after her weekly grocery shopping. She dumped food in her refrigerator, stuck the electric kettle on and turned to head to the bathroom.
A scream burst through her, her bag fell and scattered its contents on the polished floor.
Boxer was lounging against a wall. Pony Tail was sprawled on her couch. Pock Mark was chewing on a toothpick as he fiddled with her TV remote.
Elena Petrova hyperventilated. Gun? No guns in her house. She didn’t believe in them.
Knife? She was too far from the kitchen counter. Nevertheless, she whirled and darted to the knife rack.
A rough hand grabbed her hand and jerked her back. She screamed again.
‘Shout all you want. No one out there.’ Boxer said carelessly and backhanded her.
She fell, her lips burst and bled. He hauled her up and slapped her again. Slowly, methodically, the way he would build a rhythm with a speed bag, her head rockin
g with each blow.
She struggled, clawed at him and kneed him. There was no effect on him. She was against a rock.
When he finished, she lay bruised, bleeding and semi-conscious.
Pock Mark flicked his eyes at her.
‘She ain’t done yet. She ain’t told anything.’
‘I know.’
Boxer pulled out a knife and turned Elena on her back. She opened her eyes and saw the blade.
One last scream escaped her before he went to work.
They bundled her body in a carpet and drove through the night. When dawn came, they were in the foothills of the Wind River Range, in an area so remote that Google Maps didn’t know of its existence.
Boxer knew the area well. He had buried many a body there. They dug a grave, made sure there wasn’t any trace left by them and departed.
They should have burned her body, but the Man had a peculiarity. He thought the dead had to be buried.
Who was going to argue with him?
‘You sure it won’t be discovered?’ Pony Tail looked back at the receding grave.
Boxer rolled down his window and spat a stream of tobacco juice.
‘Betcha my life on it. Never seen another human there. Dumb folks go to all those hiking trails. No one comes here.’
Pony Tail was satisfied. Boxer was the best at getting rid of bodies. They drove back, consuming miles of tarmac, discussing where they would stop for lunch.
Boxer was right. People didn’t go to that burial spot. It wasn’t on any map and didn’t have any trail or a view. It lacked water, vegetation and even wildlife gave it a wide berth.
Boxer hadn’t reckoned on the one man who went camping in just those spots. One man who was restarting a vacation he had abandoned a while back.
Zeb Carter discovered the grave a week later.
Zeb looked around. No grave marker. After scanning the ground, reading what he could into it, he dug up the grave. He widened the grave further and drew a breath when he saw the woman.
The body was still recognizable; full decomposition hadn’t set in and scavengers hadn’t reached it yet.
He dug carefully and paused when he saw the slashes. He sat back on his haunches, studied the body, stepped back and looked for tracks.
There weren’t any, other than his own. Wind, rain, and the elements had erased whatever trail there had been. He sighed and looked around. This was going to derail his vacation. He was the only person in the visible universe, the only one who could be questioned.
He pulled out his satellite phone, made a call and set off a chain of events that Boxer had never anticipated.
Chapter 2
The Wind River Range, a part of the Rocky Mountains located in western Wyoming, was over two million acres of rugged beauty and wilderness and divided three watersheds, the Columbia River, the Colorado River, and the Missouri River.
Zeb had camped in the Bridger Wilderness area for a week, enjoying the solitude and the vastness of the land. He had broken away from the usual trails and hadn’t seen any other human being – which suited him just fine. He had seen a black bear and her cubs, coyotes, bald eagles and elks.
Most hikers didn’t see bears and when Zeb spotted her, he followed her at a distance and watched as she played with her cubs. Coyotes had come out at night, smelled the human curiously and on detecting no threat, had gone their way.
After two weeks, Zeb had skirted to the eastern slope and it was there, in the shelter of a rocky outcrop that he had found the grave. He wouldn’t have spotted it, but a mid-day thunderstorm had made him seek shelter in the outcrop. He had noticed the loose layer; contrasting sharply with the hard surrounding ground. He examined the layer curiously, scanned the surrounding area and found no other such soil.
He knelt down and tried to read the ground for tracks, but it was too hard and weather had erased any footprints. He drew a foot long knife from his pack and when the blade sank in relatively easily, he knew this was a man made hole that had been covered up.
He dug carefully and slowed down even further when he saw the pale flesh. He used his bare hands to remove the soil, ignoring the chips from stones and the cuts on his hands.
He sat back on his haunches when he had uncovered the upper body and studied it.
A woman’s sightless eyes stared back at him, her mouth twisted in a rictus of horror. Decomposition had started, but her features were still recognizable, the knife wounds on her body were obvious.
His eyes were drawn back to her face and he wondered if she had been tied down when attacked. There were some marks on her face that suggested she had struggled, but he wasn’t certain.
Somewhere out there would be family and friends who would be waiting for her. They would wait, then fear would set in and the first call to the police would be made and the system would swing into action. If they were lucky, the cops would get back to them and there would be some kind of closure. If they weren’t, the wait would go on and one day would turn into another and when time had killed hope, days and nights would blur together and resigned acceptance would set in.
In the here and now, she lay still and motionless, with just him and the elements for company.
He drew out his phone and took pictures of her body. He took close-ups of the wounds that had led to her death. He was certain she had died slowly and in great pain, and when he rose, the paleness of her body contrasted sharply with the beauty of the range.
Her sightless eyes brought up another pair in his mind. Blue eyes that hadn’t stopped smiling until the very end. Cold air filled his lungs, but it couldn’t keep away the darkness that flooded him, and with it came the beast. It surged through his blood, bayed silently and demanded action.
Zeb forced himself to move away from the grave and unclenched his fists. This is for the cops. I cannot avenge every dead woman. The beast howled in rage. I can’t get involved every time someone is killed.
He battled with the beast and slowly the darkness began to recede, the beast dissolved into his blood. He made his call when his breathing was back to normal; his pulse was back to its low, steady beat.
He settled back after he made the call. It would be a long wait.
Pinedale, to the southwest of where he was, was the closest town and was the county seat of Sublette County. The town had a sheriff, but since the body had been found in a Park Ranger district, Zeb suspected there would be some inter agency discussions and handing over.
No motor vehicles were allowed in the wilderness and given the terrain, Zeb suspected a chopper would be deployed to get the body or a Ranger vehicle would approach as close as it could get.
He drank from his canteen, fastened it to his waist and settled down against another rock. His phone buzzed.
How’s your vacation going?
There was a smiley after the message. He ignored it. The sender persisted.
You need backup? Broker said you were going soft and might need help.
He sighed and thumbed back a terse, no.
Zeb was ex-Special Forces and on leaving the military had worked for a few years as a private military contractor. His career as a PMC had come to an end quickly when he had received a call from an ice cool, grey-eyed woman in Washington D.C.
Clare was the first female director of the Agency, an organization that did not officially exist, which undertook missions no one heard of.
The Agency went after terrorists, despots, international criminal rings, all kinds of threats to the nation that couldn’t be dealt with by conventional means. It recovered stolen weapons of mass destruction, wiped out drug and human trafficking mafias and dealt with the shadowy powers that funded terrorists.
It wasn’t a policing organization. It delivered permanent solutions and took on the most extreme missions that other deep black agencies couldn’t or wouldn’t touch. Zeb called their missions, exothermic – so hot that only the Agency could execute them.
Clare reported only to one person, the President of the United
States.
On assuming the role, Clare wanted to overhaul the Agency so that it had the smallest possible administrative footprint and be completely deniable. She was discussing these challenges one evening in Washington D.C., with Cassandra, her close friend and confidante.
Cassandra and she had studied together at Bryn Mawr and had then pursued careers in the political jungle of the capital. Cassandra had joined the State Department while Clare started at the Agency as an analyst.
During dinner, she noticed a man outside their restaurant, a man who blended in and yet something about him made her watch him. Traffic moved around him the way water flowed over rock. He was furniture on the street and yet there was a liquid ease around him that reminded her of a cheetah. Cassandra noticed her distraction, followed her glance and laughed. ‘That’s my super-hero brother, waiting to walk me back.’
‘He was in the Special Forces, worked on stuff he never talks about.’ She replied when Clare crooked an eyebrow. She smiled and continued. ‘I asked him once about his missions and he said if he told me he wouldn’t have to kill me. I would kill myself.’
‘What does he do now?’ Clare swirled a stirrer in her drink absently.
‘He works as a Private Military Contractor.’
‘More money,’ Clare nodded knowingly, at which Cassandra’s laugh bubbled. ‘Money? Money has never motivated Zeb. He lives frugally and has done well with his investments. As far as I know, he doesn’t need to work. It’s not wealth that drives him. That man out there is the most principled human I have come across. He’s also the most lethal man I know.’
Intrigued, Clare had pulled Zeb’s file, the non-redacted one, and had blown her breath out softly when she read it. She called Zeb the next day and made him an offer.
To her surprise, he turned her down.
She was even more surprised when he made her a counter-offer. After she had considered it, she looked at him with new respect. Zeb’s proposal was to staff the Agency with Private Military Contractors like himself, whose primary allegiance would be to the Agency but would be free to pursue other assignments during down time. ‘You get total deniability, the best people, and no administrative hassle.’
