by Brandt Legg
DIRT, the Director’s secret team, had approved field agents on the case who met and briefed Barbeau at the airport.
“We seem to be watching Vatican agents, watching Gaines’s father at his residence, and at the radio station,” the DIRT agent said. “We did get a listening device onto the Vatican agents’ car at the residence.”
“Excellent.” Barbeau said, looking at Hall. It had been Hall’s idea, and DIRT had facilitated the equipment and monitoring. They’d put a bug on Nanski and Leary’s vehicle while they were briefly held at Chimayó. Those tactics and the results they had yielded so far had been kept from the Attorney General. The Director had authorized rounding up all known Vatican agents if necessary, but full DIRT surveillance had proven to be even more effective.
DIRT had made incredible progress in the case. The Eysen report and an ongoing investigation into Dover, the President, and Booker had impressed Barbeau so much that he’d told Hall that if the Director held onto his post after this case, Barbeau was planning on requesting a transfer to the elite unit.
Hall didn’t tell Barbeau, but he fully expected that before the case was resolved that the Director, Barbeau, and he would all be dead.
Chapter 46
Gale and Rip ran for ten minutes, but there was no sign of Tahoma or Sean.
“We can’t keep running; they could be anywhere,” Gale said, stopping to catch her breath.
“Tahoma is our only chance to escape before the damn helicopters come!”
“Maybe we should start yelling for him.”
“And what if the FBI or the Vatican agents hear us?”
“If they’re that close, we’re dead anyway.”
“Right.” Rip cupped both hands around his mouth and yelled, “Tahoma, Tahoma.”
“The canyon walls just swallow the sound,” Gale said. “Why don’t we split up? I’ll go up here and you go that way.”
“Okay,” Rip said, walking away. Then, realizing there was the possibility they might never see each other again, he stopped. “Good luck . . . you know, in case something happens.”
“You, too.” She turned before he could see her tears. Gale was touched that he said goodbye, especially after Sean turned out to be a traitor. She felt awful for championing him. Her intuition had missed on this one, clouded by the guilt she felt because of Josh’s death. Rip’s instincts had been right, but he’d ignored them for her. “How has it come to this?” Gale asked, turning to Rip, but he was gone. She was alone.
Rip continued calling for Tahoma, and a few minutes after leaving Gale, his friend responded. “Rip, over here.”
“Where?”
“Here.” Tahoma stood up and Rip saw him off to his left about forty feet ahead. He reached him seconds later and found Tahoma crouching over Sean. “He’s dead.”
Sadness filled Rip and it took several moments to manage some words. “What happened?”
“He was climbing the canyon wall there,” Tahoma motioned. “I yelled for him to stop. When he heard me, he turned and shouted something, then lost his footing and fell.”
“Oh, God. How high up?”
“Maybe twenty feet. He was trying to call someone.” Tahoma handed Rip Sean’s NSA phone.
“Did he complete the call?”
“He could have. I’m not sure.”
Rip tried to check, but the phone had been badly damaged.
“Two brothers dead. One day, I’ll have to see their parents and try to explain all of this.” Rip shook his head. “How am I going to do that?”
“We need to go or you’ll never get that chance. If he got that call off, then we’re already too late.”
Rip shook his head, taking one last look at Sean. “Will you come back for his body?”
“Of course.” Tahoma looked around marking the location in his mind. “Where’s Gale?”
“We split up, hoping to find you faster.”
“Never a good idea to split up,” Tahoma said.
That’s when they heard the helicopter.
“Follow me!” Tahoma grabbed Rip, practically dragging him along an ancient trail, hidden amongst the boulders near the cliff.
“What about Gale?”
“We can’t risk it now. She could be anywhere.”
Rip knew he had to protect the sphere, but the thought of Gale’s getting caught sickened him.
An hour later, they found Mai at a small stable where horses were kept for guided rides with tourists. “There hasn’t been another flyover. I’ll go back and find Gale. Mai will get you out on horseback.”
“Horseback?”
“Do you want to chance the road?”
“No,” Rip said.
“There’s only about an hour of daylight left,” Mai said. “We’ll be doing the steeps in the dark.” She looked at Tahoma.
“It’s a clear night and there’ll be a moon. He can do it.” He looked at Rip.
“I’ll just follow Mai.”
“The horse knows the way,” she said.
“If I find Gale in time, we’ll meet at Tension Rock,” Tahoma said, as he started back the way they’d come.
“If he finds Gale?” Rip said to Mai.
“Don’t worry, Rip, it’s a big canyon, but Tahoma knows it well.”
He looked at the horse and then up the steep canyon, wondering where there was a trail that a horse could navigate . . . in the dark. Then a bigger fear entered his mind. Maybe they hadn’t heard another helicopter because they’d already gotten Gale. “She would have told them I was somewhere else,” he thought. “She sacrificed herself to save me and the Eysen, and I’ve abandoned her.”
Chapter 47
“Find out who the hell is flying that bird,” Busman barked to a subordinate. The NSA had forty agents blending in with summer tourists around the area. “That son of a bitch may have just blown our cover.” It seemed inconceivable to him that a helicopter would come out of nowhere and buzz the canyon. No great military leader he’d ever read about would make such an idiotic miscalculation. There must be a civilian there to help Gaines.
It had been Booker’s pilot who had made a mistake by flying over the canyon. Behind schedule and ferrying additional AX agents, he did not understand the sensitivity of the mission.
Harmer had been searching the canyon with binoculars, while Kruse had been scanning through his sniper’s scope. They were shocked when the chopper appeared. Kruse immediately called Booker to complain. “This is no small error. Rip is going to assume the chopper belongs to the feds. He’ll run before we can get to him.”
“I know, damn it. And the NSA is going to launch into a full scramble over this. They may just scoop him up; knowing someone else is this close. You’ve got to find him.”
“We’ve been trying.”
“Not hard enough,” Booker said. “The FBI and the Vatican boys are already in Flagstaff. Even the NSA won’t be able to protect Gaines if he drives into that trap.”
“All we can do is work the rim with the extra manpower that’s arrived, and hope we catch him coming out of the canyon,” Kruse said, waving off Harmer’s cigarette smoke.
“And if he stays put?” Harmer asked, listening to Kruse’s side of the conversation.
“She’s right,” Booker said. “Get a couple guys into the canyon.”
“It’s more than one hundred thirty square miles in rugged unfamiliar terrain. We couldn’t adequately cover that with one hundred men. The rim alone is nearly forty miles around and, need I remind you, the entire area is within, and subject to the laws of the Navajo Nation. We should stay on the rim for a few hours in case we get lucky, and then work the routes to Flagstaff.”
Booker respected and sought employees who were not afraid to speak their minds. Kruse was right and he believed that Gaines was too smart to stay in the canyon; even if the helicopter hadn’t shown up. The FBI would eventually cross check all his past digs in the southwest, and overlay it with all the roads leading out of Española, if they hadn’t already. From t
here, a list of known associates would eventually lead them to Tahoma. Booker, a step ahead, already had somebody on the way to talk to Tahoma. If not for the helicopter screw-up, they would have had Gaines in the next few hours.
“Okay, get AX all over the rim, near any possible exit points. And remember, they could be on foot, horseback, motorcycles, who knows,” Booker said.
“He’s friendly with the local Navajo. This area is filled with caves and concealed passages that he could slip through undetected or use as a hiding place.”
“I’ll see what I can find out. The person Rip trusts most inside the Navajo Nation owes me a favor.”
Chapter 48
The stable had six horses. Mai saddled the two best. “Have you ridden since the last time we were together?” she asked.
“No, I’m sorry to say. Good memories,” Rip said, feeling awkward.
She steadied the horse while he mounted. “She’s gentle and will carry you, don’t worry,” Mai said. He loved animals, was even a decent rider, but the horse did not seem gentle. She felt angry and powerful under Rip. The trail would be treacherous.
“Yours is called Rain,” Mai said, swinging into her saddle. “She is determined; don’t confuse that with anger.”
“Okay, Rain,” Rip said quietly to his horse. “I need your help.”
Rain galloped away, following Mai’s horse. Rip hung on. Occasionally they heard engines, but the echoes between canyon walls made distances and sound directions impossible to gauge. Rip wondered how long it would take for the helicopters to return.
“Now I know how Clastier felt when I was chasing him two hundred years ago,” he thought. Clastier had written about being trapped in a canyon, pursued by a posse, which would have included Conway. Rip realized that, after talking to the old shaman the day before, he might have been Conway. He was too afraid to admit it to Gale, or even to himself. The Eysen had taught him that anything was possible and everything could be something else. He wished he knew what had happened to Clastier.
“Choices always have messages,” Mai said, breaking the trance of hooves on rocky ground and the labored breathing of horses.
“Why are we stopping?” He had hardly been aware of their slowing down.
“There are two ways up from here. One is longer and will take most of the night, but it is much easier.”
“And the other?”
“Horribly steep, but shorter.”
“There’ll be more helicopters soon. We have to get out,” Rip said. “And the longer it takes, the more time they have to fill the canyon with agents who might find Gale.”
“This way then,” she said. He followed as the nearly invisible trail immediately started to climb. “Gale is a beautiful woman.”
Her comment caught Rip by surprise. He grunted some sound that could be construed as agreement and hoped the conversation would go no further.
“Do you love her?”
“Who?”
Mai laughed. “So the answer is yes.”
“Look, Mai, my nerves are frazzled and any minute I could be shot out of this saddle. Do you mind if we don’t talk about such trivial matters?”
“Ha! Since when is love a trivial matter?”
“I walked into that one, didn’t I?” Rip asked, as the horse negotiated a tight switchback and he was surprised that he was already peering down a thirty-foot drop.
“You have only known her a short time; as I recall, that’s when you fall the hardest.”
“Mai, we were different. I could not stay and you could not leave.”
“Would not stay, would not leave.”
“Semantics,” Rip said tentatively, as his horse rounded another turn and he teetered in the saddle.
“Regardless, it was a timing issue. You may have the same thing with this one.”
“Seriously, can we talk about something else?”
“We’re two former lovers fleeing a sacred canyon on horseback in the dark of night. I can think of nothing better to talk about unless you’d prefer to talk about Conway.” Mai laughed.
“I never said I loved Gale,” Rip said. “Anyway, I never got over you.”
“How could you have? You knew me only in sunsets, flower blossoms, and starlight on the river.”
“Ah yes, I remember it well.”
“And we played at all this while working among the origin-artifacts of my people . . . which you discovered . . . and then the drama of the battle to save them.”
“I tried to do the right thing.”
“You did, Rip. You did the right thing returning the Navajo artifacts; you traded your passion for Cosega for our passion. I know what that took. And your gesture almost drew me into your world, but you know this place holds too much mystery and magic to surrender to the pretend-world, where the majority of white people live.”
“You and Gale have that in common – the dream that there is something more, as if we could just lift a veil.”
“The veil flutters open all the time, and most people look the other way. But you do something worse.”
“What’s that?”
“You close your eyes.”
“Oh, really.”
“If you didn’t, you would have stayed in Canyon de Chelly with me. You wouldn’t have been able to ignore those feelings.”
“Me, without my work; isn’t me at all.”
“You could have worked from here. Where do you live now, all alone in West Virginia somewhere? I would have waited.”
“Let’s talk about Conway, instead.”
“Okay.”
“No. I’m really just trying to change the subject.”
“I know you are. But don’t worry; we’ve got hours ahead and I intend to cover it all.”
Chapter 49
They rode in silence until their horses trotted to a stop.
“Why are we stopping?” Rip asked.
Mai pointed ahead. In the final light of dusk, nothing resembling a path for people, let alone a horse, was visible.
“Where’s the trail?” Rip asked, confused.
“Right there.” Mai nodded toward what to Rip looked like a wall above them.
“I guess we leave the horses here.”
Mai dismounted. With barely enough room to maneuver, she reached into a saddle bag and pulled out a handful of dried herbs, held them out to Rain, and then put her face against the horse’s and whispered some Navajo words. She carefully placed blinders on Rain and then repeated the same procedure with her horse. “They will go,” she said, swinging herself back up into the saddle.
Rip, astonished, looked up into the darkness above. All he could make out was the shadowy outlines of steep craggy rocks and outcrops. “Have they ever done this before?”
“Not in this lifetime,” Mai said, kicking her horse. “Haaw!”
Her horse lurched forward and Rain followed. He held on tight and for a few harrowing minutes forgot about helicopters and Vatican agents. They rode fast; he slipped but caught himself before going off Rain’s back. The night made it hard to tell just how much ground they covered before the horses found a twenty-inch wide trail on the edge of a cliff. Too dark to see the bottom, which he knew to be hundreds of feet straight down, Rip kept his eyes on Mai’s back, her long black hair, swinging softly from side to side. He missed the feel and the smell of it.
“Is the worst behind us now?” he asked.
“We have a couple of more rough spots ahead, but not much worse.”
“Splendid.”
Mai laughed. “We’ll be all right.” Then she was quiet. “I confess, I was wrong.”
Rip wasn’t sure he heard her. “What?”
“I should have convinced you to stay. You would have, I knew it then. There was that moment during our last night together when the monsoon finally let up and we walked outside to feel the humid air, to smell the moisture on the desert.”
“I remember.”
“Of course, you recall the night, but do you remember the moment?”<
br />
“I do. We were wrapped in nothing but those beautiful blankets your grandmother made and you convinced me to put them down on the wet muddy ground. Stars poked through the retreating clouds, and . . . that warm breeze and our endless embrace.”
“That’s it. That’s when I should have asked you to stay. You would have, wouldn’t you?”
“In that moment, I would have done anything for you, Mai.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me then?”
“Fear.”
“What were you afraid of?”
“You.”
“Me? I loved you.”
“I know. That’s what scared me.” Rip appreciated the darkness between them; discussing his feelings had never been easy. Somehow, with his life threatened, and riding a horse on the edge of a cliff made it easier, but being invisible in the blackness of the night helped most of all. “I love you, Mai. But I’m not as good as you. You have some pure streak of love that I’ve never experienced before. I feel as if I’m dreaming you. Like when we’re together, we don’t need anything. We could just melt into that warm breeze on that muddy ground and forget the world.”
“We could.”
“I know we could, but I can’t accept that kind of happiness. I’m chasing something.”
“You could have chased it from here; you could have done it with me.”
“No. I don’t have a pure streak of love inside me. I’ve got a burning, painful sadness.”
“Why?” Mai’s voice was strained.
“I don’t know.”
“Let me help.”
“All I can tell you is, it’s always been there, and the first time I ever felt the pain diminish was when I pulled the Eysen from that limestone in Virginia. That’s when I realized that it wasn’t something people could fix for me, but at the same time, I wasn’t permanently defective. Cosega hadn’t made me that way; Cosega was the cure!”
