Force of Nature

by C. J. Box

  “It’s worse than I could have guessed,” Nate said.

  Kennedy simply nodded as he kept his eyes on Nate.

  “She’s right,” Kennedy said, referring to what Haley had exclaimed. “We’ve been virtual prisoners here. Honestly, I’m not afraid to go out, but I understand the odds. So we haven’t left this place since Nunez vanished. I haven’t been able to go to the church to preach.”

  He chinned toward the window above the sink. “We haven’t opened the curtains until just this morning. We’re locked down and I’d like to say we’re ready for anything, but it depends what they throw at us. As you know, this is a tough place to get into if you don’t know the keypad code. I can’t see them trying an all-out assault. Instead, they’ve been patient and they picked us off one by one.”

  Nate said, “Why do you think they’re gone now?”

  Kennedy shrugged. “Because we’re still alive, and God has a plan for me. He wants me to continue to do what I’m doing here.”

  AFTER A FEW MOMENTS, the Reverend Oscar Kennedy said, “You came here for help and information, Nate. I’m not sure I can provide information, and the men who could help you have been taken from us.”

  “I understand,” Nate said. “I’m sorry.”

  “It is what it is.”

  “Do you know how many men Nemecek has on his team?” Nate asked. “Has there been any chatter about changes in tactics?”

  “A little,” Kennedy said. “Obscure references. Some serious complaints. But I can’t recall seeing a number, and certainly not a list of operatives.”

  “Damn.”

  “Everything is locked down tight. Tighter than you can believe.”

  “What do you mean when you say ‘serious complaints’?” Nate asked. “About what?”

  “The quality of Nemecek’s team. There is some grumbling from ex–Five operators still in the business that quality control isn’t what it used to be when he’d been selecting men. I get the impression,” Kennedy said, “there is a feeling Nemecek has surrounded himself with a close group of men without strong character. Not that they aren’t well trained like we all were, but that he’d let the intangibles slip. There’s been some chatter that Nemecek prefers yes-men to patriots these days. That at least some of the Peregrines are there to serve John Nemecek instead of their country. He’s ambitious—we both know that. He likes power, and he always thinks he’s the smartest man in the room.”

  Nate nodded. “So he’s surrounded himself with thugs.”

  “That sums it up pretty well. But you know how it is. Ex–Five operators always think they had it tougher than the new recruits. It’s part of the game.”

  “But in this case they may have a point,” Nate said. “The three men I saw in Colorado wouldn’t have been in Mark V ten years ago. They would have washed out, believe me.”

  “Because you defeated them?” Kennedy asked.

  “Because they weren’t that good,” Nate said. He looked around the small kitchen, at the thick window and the steel window frames. At the dishes undone in the sink.

  “Maybe we should all get out of here,” Nate said.

  Kennedy quickly shot that down. “Never. This is my home, and my church needs me. I owe them. I can’t just leave. My work has just started here, Nate. The word is starting to get out that people like us have a place to come and find fellowship and worship God.”

  Nate didn’t argue. Kennedy was adamant.

  “Can you print out some of the chatter you found?” Nate asked. “I might be able to decipher some of it. I need anything I can get.”

  “I’ll find what I can,” Kennedy said, wheeling back from the table. “I’ll check to see if there’s anything new. Maybe we can find out what happened to our friends out there.”

  “Thank you.”

  Kennedy spun in his chair and propelled it toward the next room, where his computers hummed. But in the doorway he stopped suddenly, and turned a half turn so he could look at Nate.

  “Are you finally going to tell me what this is all about? A lot of blood has been shed, and we’ve lost some really good men. I’d like to know why directly from you, because I’m not sure I can believe what I read on the Net anymore. I’m sure Nemecek has changed history.”

  Nate said, “You know why.”

  Kennedy’s face flushed with anger. “I know John Nemecek is your mortal enemy. But what I don’t know—and I deserve to know—is exactly what happened back in 1998 in the desert.”

  “Nineteen ninety-nine,” Nate corrected.

  “So be it,” Kennedy said. But his face was set and he wasn’t

  moving.

  “Print out what you can,” Nate said, “and I’ll tell you if you really want to know.”

  The Reverend Oscar Kennedy glared at Nate for a while until his expression finally softened. “Okay, then,” he said.

  WHILE KENNEDY was in the computer room, Haley reentered and strode purposefully toward Nate and sat down at the table. There was no avoiding eye contact this time. She was all business.

  “I want you to find the men who did it,” she said. “You owe it to me and to Gabriel. Not to mention the others.”

  He stared back at her and again felt the little tug inside him as he looked into her wide blue eyes. He had always been a sucker for long black hair and blue eyes, especially if they belonged to intelligent women.

  “I’ve heard a lot about you,” she said. “At one point I really wanted to finally meet you and hear if what they said was true. But not under these circumstances. Now I just want you to go and find them.”

  He remained quiet.

  She said, “I’ve heard about the falcons and a little about what you were involved in years ago. Gabriel talked about that big gun you carry. He said you’d just show up from time to time without any notice. He also said if it came to a fight, he’d want you in his corner more than anyone else he knew. That’s saying something, you know.”

  Nate had to look away because it seemed her eyes were reaching inside him.

  “Diane Shober told me how you brought her here. She said you were good to her, but she couldn’t figure you out. She said she got the impression you were carrying a very heavy weight around with you, but you wouldn’t talk about it. I liked her, although she was very intense. We got along, and it was nice to have another woman in the place. I never had a sister, and she was like a sister to me. To think that they would hurt her, too … it makes me sick.”

  Nate nodded.

  “Oscar is a wonderful, gentle soul,” she said, her eyes shifting toward the computer room. “He really does want to help people, and he’s a true believer. I can’t really say I buy everything he says, but I know in my heart he’s sincere and kind. He almost makes me believe in God, to be around a man like that. If a man as tough and practical as Oscar becomes an evangelical, I almost have to concede that there is something out there bigger than what we see, you know? And after what’s happened to us here, I have no doubt there is true evil in the world. So doesn’t it make sense there would be true good? If nothing else, you need to do what you can to protect him. You need to eliminate the people depraved enough to try and hurt him.”

  Before Nate could reply, she said, “I’m going to go pack. You can take us both out of here. Maybe someday Oscar can come back when it’s safe.”

  With that, she reached out and patted the back of Nate’s hand and left the table to go upstairs and pack.

  NATE TOOK a chair next to Kennedy and opened a laptop.

  “Do you mind?” Nate asked, gesturing to the computer.

  “Feel free.”

  “Is it a secure IP address?”

  Kennedy said, “As secure as I can make it. But that’s no guarantee of anything with the capability they have.”

  “Got it,” Nate said while the laptop booted up. If Nemecek had gotten to Gordon in Colorado and sent a team to the compound in Idaho, there was only one other target close to Nate: Joe Pickett. And his family. He prayed they weren’t u
nder surveillance, or worse.

  He called up the old falconry site and started a new thread:

  TRAINING AND FLYING MY NEW KESTREL <0COMMENTS>

  Under it, he wrote:

  TRAINING MY NEW FALCON IS TURNING OUT TO BE A VERY BAD EXPERIENCE. NOTHING I TRY WILL WORK, AND I’M GETTING FRUSTRATED AND CONCERNED. IT’S A DISASTER ON EVERY FRONT. I JUST WANT TO SAY TO THAT BIRD, “FLY AWAY NOW AND DON’T LOOK BACK.”

  “Thank you,” Nate said to Kennedy, closing the laptop.

  “I’m finding some stuff,” his friend said. “I’ll be back with you in a minute.”

  WHEN OSCAR KENNEDY rolled back into the kitchen with a sheaf of printouts, he eyed Nate with suspicion.

  “I hope Haley didn’t unload on you,” he said.

  “She didn’t.”

  “She can come on pretty strong.”

  “I like that in her,” Nate said.

  “Uh-oh, you’re smitten,” Kennedy said simply, shaking his head.

  “She agrees with me that we should all leave now.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Kennedy said. “But I’m not going anywhere. You can take her, though. Get her on a plane somewhere so she can fly back to her family.”

  “Are you sure you won’t go?”

  “I’m sure, and that’s that,” Kennedy said.

  He handed the printouts to Nate. “I was able to locate most of the blog posts. But a few have been scrubbed since the last time I saw them.”

  Nate took the stack and put it aside on the table for later. Upstairs, he could hear Haley shuffling around in her room, no doubt throwing clothing into a suitcase.

  “Unburden yourself,” Kennedy said.

  “We don’t have much time,” Nate said, gesturing toward the upstairs room.

  “We have enough.”

  Nate sat back, putting himself back in that place again. Recalling the heat and hot wind and dust, the smells of desert and cooking food. The elaborate tents and fifty four-by-four vehicles flown in just for the occasion. The flowing robes of the guests. And the dozens of falcons, hooded and still, roosting on their poles.

  “Have you ever heard of the houbara bustard?” Nate asked

  Kennedy.

  “No.”

  IT TOOK NATE ten minutes to tell the story. As he did, Kennedy’s reaction changed from intense interest to seething outrage. Red bloomed on his cheeks, and beads of perspiration appeared across his forehead.

  “Holy Mother of God,” Kennedy said, when Nate was done. “It’s worse than I imagined.”

  “That’s who I’m dealing with,” Nate said. “And what I’ve been dealing with for all these years. I hate that all of you’ve been dragged into it.”

  “Nate,” Kennedy asked, his tone softening. “How have you kept this to yourself?”

  “No choice, because I’m responsible for what happened, too. And the result.”

  Nate heard Haley descending the stairs heavily, likely with her suitcase. He rose to go help her, but Kennedy pushed his chair back and blocked his path.

  “You can’t blame yourself, Nate.”

  “I do,” he said, attempting to step around the chair. Kennedy was quick and rotated the wheels sharply and pushed back into the doorway. Mid-morning sun lit up his face from the window above the sink.

  “Oscar, let me by.”

  “We need to talk about this. No one can shoulder the burden of what you’ve just confessed.”

  “I’m just going to give her a hand with her suitcase.”

  “We need to talk—”

  Oscar Kennedy didn’t finish his sentence because his head snapped back violently and his hands fell limply to his sides and there was a simultaneous crack-pock sound inside the kitchen. Blood and matter flecked the wall behind Kennedy from floor to ceiling, and Kennedy slumped in his chair.

  Nate instinctively dropped into a squat and fought an urge to cover his head as he did so. He wheeled and saw the neat dime-sized hole in the glass of the window above the sink, then dived toward the chair to push his friend out of the view of the window.

  From the stairwell, Haley called out, “Hey? What was that?”

  Nate shouted, “Sniper! Get down now!”

  On his hands and knees, he scrambled into the computer room, pushing Kennedy’s chair in front of him. Nate hoped to God the injury to his friend wasn’t as bad as he thought it might be.

  But it was. When Nate rose to look he saw how much damage a .50 caliber armor-piercing sniper round could do to a man. Then he looked up and saw Haley in the stairwell, almost to the bottom of the threshold, clutching the handle of her suitcase with both hands. When Haley saw Kennedy’s splayed-out body in the chair, she dropped the suitcase and screamed, covering her face. The suitcase tumbled down the last four steps.

  “I said, Get down!”

  Still shrieking, she sat straight back on the stairs, her face still hidden by her hands.

  NATE RETRIEVED his rifle as he ran through the mudroom to the back door and then pressed the lock-release mechanism. Once he heard the click and the door was free, he kicked it open rather than fly through it into the grass.

  Wondering if the shooter would anticipate his exit from the house and fire again. But there were no shots. Did the shooter even know he was in the house?

  He kicked the door wide open a second time—no reaction—and followed it out on the third, hitting the ground and rolling until he could find cover behind a tree trunk.

  When he raised the rifle to where he thought the shot had come from—a V in the brush on the northern horizon—he clearly heard a motor start up and a car roar away. Forty-five seconds later, it was gone.

  He stood up, bracing himself against the tree. Only then did he realize he’d landed on his injured shoulder, and the pain screamed through him. But not as loud as the screaming from Haley inside the house.

  Nate thought of Oscar Kennedy and spun around with pure rage and cried out: “Goddammit!”

  Then: “Come on, Haley. We’re going after them.”

  19

  DUSK CAME QUICKLY on Teton Pass as Nate crossed the border from Idaho east into Wyoming. He had ruthlessly scoured Victor, Swan Valley, Driggs, and Tetonia for any sign of the assassins throughout the afternoon and into the evening. His only lead had come from the manager of the Rendezvous Motel in Driggs, a spindly old tattooed galoot openly wearing a shoulder holster, who said two men had checked out early that morning after a ten-day stay.

  Their descriptions fit: mid-twenties, hard, businesslike, no small talk about the weather. The manager said he pegged them for mountain climbers or hunters based on the number of gear bags they possessed, but they’d claimed they were in the area to look for work in construction. Apparently, several multimillion-dollar resorts were being built on the Idaho side of the Tetons. The manager said the men were unusual in that they kept odd hours and were often gone the entire night. Also, they requested their rooms not be entered and made up during the day. The owner said they shared a late-model white Chevy Tahoe with Colorado plates. Their names on the register were Bill Wood and Tom James, and they paid seven days in advance with cash and daily after, as if they knew they might have to leave at any time.

  Nate peeled off several twenties and gave them to the manager for the information and made him promise he wouldn’t clean the vacated rooms right away. The manager agreed with astonishing speed.

  “WHERE ARE WE GOING?” Haley asked, as they climbed the mountain. A heavy horizontal curtain of storm front reached across the sky from north to south, devouring the jagged range of mountain peaks as it came. From their elevation, they could see it coming, and it had no end in sight.

  “Jackson Hole,” he said.

  “Why?” she asked. She was apparently cried out and slowly coming back into the here and now. Throughout the day, while Nate drove from small town to small town and crept around mom-and-pop motels, she’d sat in the passenger seat of his vehicle and wept. He’d offered water and food, but she refused both. As with
Alisha in the past, he marveled how her tears seemed to slowly expunge the tragedy from inside her, how it seemed to help her recover. He envied the phenomenon but could not imagine replicating it himself. His release, he knew, would come another way.

  “Jackson is a choke point,” he said. “I don’t know which road they took to get back into Wyoming, but they’ll have to go through Jackson to get to the Bighorns. They may stop, or they might drive right through. But my guess is they think they’re home free. Their mission is accomplished, and it’s time to take a breather before they reconnoiter with their team leader. So they might not be looking over their shoulders right now.”

  “Why not?” she asked. “Don’t they know we might be chasing them?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so. I don’t think they knew I was there, and I’m the primary target. If they knew I was in the house, they would have held off for a shot at me, or stuck around to hit me when I came out of the house.”

  He explained that by approaching the compound from the back through the timber that morning, he likely couldn’t be seen from where the assassins had set up a mile away, facing the front of the house.

  “A mile away?” she asked. “I don’t know much about guns, but isn’t that a little far?”

  “No,” Nate said. “Not with the kind of weapon they used. You saw that hole in the window, didn’t you?”

  She nodded.

  “It was a perfectly round hole. It didn’t even shatter the glass. That round passed through the so-called bulletproof glass and through Oscar’s head and through the other side of the house. I’m pretty sure it was a fifty caliber round and the shooter has a specialized sniper rifle. We used them overseas. It’s accurate at two thousand yards. The shot that killed Oscar wasn’t even that far.”

  “This is just so unbelievable,” she said. “All of it. I can’t believe this is happening.”

  Nate said, “It is.”

  “Why did they kill them all? It’s so cold-blooded.”

  “Two reasons,” Nate said. “They thought our friends knew my secret, and if they were allowed to live, they’d leak it. Especially Oscar, since he had the contacts and his computer network. If Oscar decided to broadcast the information it would be around the world and back within a few minutes and it would destroy Nemecek and The Five.