by Brandt Legg
“For what? Your karma?”
“I don’t know. For years I felt this discontentment, something missing, something really big. Like, why does everyone else seem happy, when there are all these holes in me?”
“And the Eysen has filled that?”
“Maybe not filled it yet, but it’s shown me the answers exist.” As the horses cautiously navigated the edge, Rip looked up at the night sky. The Navajo Nation was one of those rare spots on earth where the stars were so numerous that it appeared the sky might collapse from their weight. “If I had stayed with you, Mai, you would have been miserable; maybe having caught my tragic melancholy. I couldn’t stand to watch that glow of yours extinguished, and to be the cause of it . . . that would have killed me.”
“How do you know that you wouldn’t have absorbed some of my ‘glow,’ or what if we defeated your problems together?”
“I wish you understood. It’s my fault for not being able to explain. I swim in sadness and loss. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve felt pain, even when laughing,” Rip said, frustrated. “But you know I would have gone just as crazy on the reservation as you would have living off of it.”
“I know,” Mai said, so softly he could barely hear her above the horse’s hoofs. “We had our moment.”
“And it was wonderful.”
“Hold on,” she said. “Haaw!” The horses broke into a gallop. The trail had widened and turned away from the edge, sloping slightly downhill. Suddenly the horses were in the air! The landing came hard and Rain threw Rip.
A juniper that somehow had managed to take root on a ledge took most of the impact. Rip yelled.
Mai untangled him a few seconds later. “Anything broken?”
“Doesn’t seem like it,” Rip said, as she helped him to his feet. “Was that the worst?”
“Yes.”
“What did we jump over?”
“A drop . . . four hundred feet down.”
“Thank goodness it’s too dark to see,” Rip said.
“Do you need help getting back on Rain?” Mai asked.
Rip didn’t answer; instead he pulled Mai to him and kissed her. “I’m sorry I left you. I wish we could go back there . . . ”
“As Tahoma would say, ‘Too many sunsets have passed, and the light is all different now.’ But hold me for a minute. I miss your dangerous arms around me.”
“That warm breeze . . . ” Rip said, kissing her again.
She let their mouths linger, then pulled back. “Maybe it wasn’t our moment, maybe it was just the winds of change.” Mai climbed onto her horse. “We’d better go. There’s still some steep ground to cover.”
Rip got back on Rain. “It’s cold,” he said.
“Don’t worry, I brought blankets.” Mai said, and although he couldn’t see it, he heard the smile in her voice.
Chapter 50
Friday July 21st
Wrapped in one of Mai’s woven blankets, Rip paced to keep warm against the cold desert night. Finally, a faint whisper of light transformed the sky to indigo. “It’ll be light in an hour,” Mai said.
“Where are they?” Rip asked again. Waiting for Gale was suicide. At any minute choppers could break across the sky and flood the area with lights. Tension Rock had been a good choice, with its cascading boulders and numerous small caves. Even the horses were concealed, and yet the hideout afforded a decent view of the trail and beyond, over the rim.
“It’s a big canyon,” she repeated.
“How can he search in the dark?”
“Day or night the canyon is the same. Tahoma knows the sounds as well as the sights. A breeze sings a different song in each tree. Stillness whispers a unique hush at every spot. Nothing is ever the same. We don’t merely see with our eyes.”
He’d seen her use just those skills to navigate their way along the steep trail and finally to where they now hid. “I can’t wait much longer. She’d want me to protect the Eysen.”
Headlights suddenly split the blackness. Rip couldn’t tell where they were coming from.
“It’s Tahoma,” Mai said. “His truck sounds like no other.”
Rip could barely hear it and, even if he could, he would not have been able to tell the difference between it and any other pickup. But he trusted Mai and followed her to meet the vehicle.
Gale jumped out and ran into his arms. “I thought you’d be gone,” she cried, while clutching the back of his neck.
“Not without my partner in crime.” He said, surprised at his joy in holding her.
Gale kissed his neck and cheeks. “I’m glad you waited, even though you shouldn’t have.” She laughed, embarrassed by her display of emotion.
Her kisses sent his thoughts to Mai and made him self-conscious. “Now we have to go.”
Rip turned and found Tahoma handing him keys. “Take my truck.”
“I couldn’t,” Rip said.
“What? Are you going to make your escape on horseback? The horse is worth more than my truck. I only hope it gets you off the rez; it’s never been that far.”
Rip dug into his pack, trying to find Grinley’s envelope of cash. “Here.” He held out a thin stack of hundreds.
“Your money’s no good here.”
“Please take it.”
“You’ll need it more than I will.”
“I’ve got more. Please, I won’t take the truck without paying you something.”
“Take it, Tahoma, please, so we can go,” Gale said.
He took it and hugged Rip. “There’s a map in the glove box,” he said, then explained how to get to the main road.
Rip hugged Mai. “You’re right, timing doesn’t seem to be our thing,” he said.
“Or maybe it is. Things have a way of knowing how they’re supposed to work out. We don’t always know what’s best.”
“I love you, Mai,” he whispered in her ear.
“Then do something for me,” she said. “Stay alive. I’d like to see you again, when there is time to see the sunrise.”
“There will always be sunrises and I’m sure we’ll find one . . . in this or another lifetime,” Rip said, glad it made her smile.
“Go,” Tahoma said.
For thirty-five minutes, they bounced along the rutted dirt roads trying to follow Tahoma’s directions. Rip wished the old truck knew the way as the horses had. Finally, they found pavement, and headed southwest toward Flagstaff. Avoiding the interstate meant adding more than an hour to their trip, but it was their best shot.
In between navigating, Gale had avoided asking about Sean; intentionally keeping the conversation on their adventures in the night, but as the road stretched ahead of them and the sun rose, she summoned her courage.
“He’s dead.”
“I was afraid of that,” she said in a shaky voice.
“He fell trying to climb a rock wall high enough to get a signal on his phone.”
“Poor Sean.”
“He was trying to get us captured.”
“Because they tricked him and he didn’t know us well enough to trust that we hadn’t killed Josh.”
“I know.”
“His parents will be devastated. Two innocent sons, dead.”
“The cost of the Eysen is astonishing.”
“Let’s not discuss that again.”
“I sometimes wonder if I did the right thing. Maybe if I’d listened to Larsen and handled the find like any other, the Eysen would be being studied right now by a team of top scientists from around the world.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“No. But Larsen, Josh, Topper, Grinley, and Sean would still be alive.”
“I doubt that. The only difference is that you’d be dead too.”
Chapter 51
Agents reported to Busman what he already knew. Gaines was gone. Sean’s death also wasn’t a surprise. When the phone stopped emitting its signal, they knew something went wrong and operatives were sent to investigate. The signs had been there: Sean was too emotional
, immature, and not bright enough to pull off his mission. They considered him a lottery ticket; great if it paid off, if not, no big deal, just tear it up and buy another. Busman wasn’t worried; he had lots of tickets.
He checked the monitor on his laptop and saw a satellite image of the pickup truck traveling toward Tuba City on 264. Although he currently couldn’t see the occupants, he had no doubt that Gale and Rip were in the vehicle. One of Sean’s first assignments had been to place tracking devices in their packs, and that part he’d done well. And even though there was a slim chance that Gale would win her argument for Colorado, Busman had already bet heavily on Flagstaff. Busman did one hundred push-ups; then contacted his lead field operative. Everything needed to go perfectly.
The NSA had been well represented in Flagstaff for several days. Operatives were ready to thwart the Vatican and FBI attempts at apprehending Gaines. Those two groups were sophisticated and certainly required attention, but neither the FBI Director, nor the Cardinal running the Church’s operation had any idea what they faced. The NSA had become unimaginably powerful by dominating the collection and dissection of the most important commodity in history – information.
Perhaps only Booker knew how dangerous the NSA could be. He’d been obsessed with knowledge and information since childhood. And he’d played with the NSA plenty over the years. They traded information and had grown powerful together. But their aims had ended up being quite different.
At one time, the NSA took action in order to provide the intelligence community with the tools needed to make decisions; namely, intelligence. As the years passed, the NSA had access to so much information that managing it required judgments as the data was collected, rather than when disseminated. Soon, they began deciding every manner of national security question, such as which American citizens could be trusted and which were likely to cause problems. And the definition of “problems” became broader and broader. Their reach was everywhere, even into the White House.
Booker called it his deal with the devil. “It was like swimming with a shark,” he told those closest to him. “I’ve got to keep going toward shore, while trying not to get eaten alive.” He, like so many others, had once been an asset, and now was a threat. The Vatican felt the same way about him, and the NSA was unable to decide which party was the devil in that deal. But now there was a clash among titans. And in order to win, each needed to use the very thing they were fighting over. “It’s a Catch-22 from hell,” Booker said.
“It shouldn’t be this hard,” Booker told Kruse. “Gaines is gone again. The NSA let him slip away. He should have come straight to me after the find, but somehow Gale Asher convinced him not to trust me.”
“Flagstaff?”
“Yeah, we’ve already got people on the ground, but I want you guys there also. The extraction team is going to try to catch up with him along the way. And I’ve got a nice little surprise in store for Rip, but it may backfire. Either way, Flagstaff is likely our last shot. Get there!”
A DIRT agent expressed the Director’s regrets to Barbeau and Hall in Flagstaff. “There won’t be any way to see Grinley. He’s concerned about the NSA getting their hands on him.”
“I need to know what Grinley knows!” Barbeau was incensed.
“Do you trust the Director?” the DIRT agent asked.
“The Director himself told me to trust no one!”
Chapter 52
“My dad has a place in Mexico that no one knows about,” Rip said, as they rolled along the quiet highway. “He doesn’t own it, but it’s his. Some weird arrangement with the locals.”
“A tax dodge?”
“No. My father does not do anything unless it’s legal.”
“But he’ll help us?”
“He’s my dad.” Rip smiled, thinking about how few subjects he and his father agreed on. In spite of that, he was the one person on whom Rip could always rely. “We need gas soon. I think our next chance is Tuba City. I’ll call him from there.”
There were three payphones mounted to a wall on the side of the old service station; two were missing the handsets, and luckily, the third worked.
“I thought I might hear from you,” his father said. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, but I need a favor.”
“And you want to ask it over the phone?”
“I don’t really have a choice.”
“Okay. How about we talk about that time we went fishing?”
“Which time?” Rip asked.
His father remained silent.
“Oh, that time,” Rip felt foolish for not knowing what his father meant.
“And the guy at that place?” his father asked.
“Yeah.”
“Okay. And that time in Los Angeles with the couple from New York.”
“New Jersey?”
“You’re right, New Jersey. But, you know when I mean?”
“Yeah, as long as we’re talking about Jersey.”
“We are. Now, let’s see. Okay. Take the amount of your first allowance. Add to that the number of kittens in Chloe’s first litter. And then the number of Lola’s cars.”
“Got it.”
“That would take care of what you want, right?”
“Yes, Dad, thanks. And you don’t mind doing this?”
“Well, I’d rather be doing just about anything else, but you know . . . ”
“Rise to the occasion,” Rip finished his father’s words.
“Yeah, we gotta do what needs doing.”
“At the place, where we were that time?”
“I’ll be there.”
“And Dad, make sure neither of you are followed.”
“Likewise.”
Rip hung up and was about to head back to the truck, when he heard a familiar voice call his name.
He turned and let out a gasp as if he’d been punched, unable to believe the man standing in front of him was really there. “Are you, you?” Rip stuttered.
“The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” Larsen Fretwell said.
“How?” Rip’s voice was strained.
“It wasn’t me on the catwalk in Atlanta.”
“How is that possible? It was all over the news.”
“Can’t always believe what you see on TV,” Larsen smiled, but then his expression turned serious. “Booker did lose two men in the accident. Two men who died, trying to save me.”
“What happened?”
“Booker’s guys pulled me out of my beach house, before the FBI could arrest me or the Vatican agents, who were waiting there, could kill me. It was hot pursuit after that and Booker sent in a decoy crew. He had a big tall fellow like me fly to Atlanta with another guy. I think initially the feds thought it had been me, but they surely would have figured it out by the next day. I’m not sure why they withheld the truth from the media.”
Rip shook his head. “But how did you get away?”
“Harmer, one of Booker’s hired guns, and I got offshore in a speedboat. We eventually wound up in Cuba.”
“Cuba?”
“Booker has a place there.”
“And, all this time?”
“I’ve been waiting for you. But Booker says you’ve decided not to trust him anymore and thought I might be able to convince you that he’s on our side.”
“Well, that’s a great idea, except I’m not sure I trust you either.”
“Are you joking?”
“You’re my best friend, I’m thrilled you’re alive; shocked, but truly ecstatic. It’s just that another person I trusted just tried to get me killed, and then there’s the little matter of you bringing Gale to the dig site in the first place, and lying to me about your relationship with her.”
“She told you, huh?”
Rip nodded.
“Man, I’m sorry about that. If I’d known what was going to happen, I would have told you. At the time, I just didn’t want you to be mad at me. It didn’t seem important to get into a scene in front of everyone.
”
“You could have told me before I left with her,” he said, still stunned to be speaking to his “dead” best friend.
“She and I had a big fight about that. I didn’t want her to go. Everything happened so fast. We had no idea it was going to turn into this crazy nightmare.”
“You wouldn’t believe it if I told you,” Rip said. “Either way, Larsen, I’m glad you’re alive.”
“Me too.” Larsen tossed a phone to Rip. “Just talk to Booker, please. He’s on speed-dial one, and the phone is scrambled.”
Rip caught it and stared at the phone a second. “Okay. But first tell me, how did you find us?”
“I found Tahoma. He still trusts me and gave me the plate number to his truck.” He pointed over his shoulder with his thumb. “Mind if I go say hello to Gale? I can’t wait to see the look on her face.”
Rip did kind of mind. And he still had a million questions for Larsen, but time was short. He remembered Clastier’s words about trust. He wanted to trust Larsen, and he needed to trust Booker. They already knew his location, so there wasn’t much to lose. “Sure, go ahead,” he said, pushing the button on the phone.
Chapter 53
Larsen disappeared around the corner to find Gale, as Booker answered the phone.
“You wanted to talk to me,” Rip said.
“Rip, god damn it,” Booker said. “Who in the hell convinced you I was your enemy?”
“Well . . . ”
“Well, don’t you know I’m the best friend you have in the world?”
“West Memphis?”
“What about it?”
“You were the only one who knew where we were.”
“You’ve got to be kidding. They traced the rental, Rip. They did some sort of grid sort on every car rented within a certain radius and tracked them all. The Vatican guys got lucky and made it there first. The fact that you’re still alive and free might say different, but the FBI does actually know what they’re doing, and they’re sharing info with the Vatican. But you’ve got much bigger problems than them.”
