Those Who Wish Me Dead

by Michael Koryta

  “You’re correct,” he said.

  “And when did you notice his absence?” Every question so formal, like they were in a courtroom.

  “Middle of the night. When we were hiking down.”

  “So you can’t show me exactly where you lost him?”

  “I can get you to the point last seen.”

  “The point last seen?”

  “It’s how you start,” Ethan said. “When someone is lost. You go to the point last seen, and then you think. You try to think as that person would have when he was there.”

  “Marvelous. I’m glad we have an expert along. It’s a tremendous bit of good luck. To the point last seen, then. There we’ll see how good you really are.”

  On up the mountain they went.

  22

  Hannah stood alone on the deck of the tower as the searchers came toward it. About twenty-four hours had passed since the first smoke sighting. There was much more of it now, and she stood on the balcony and stared through her binoculars at it. Tried to act like she was doing her job. She looked through the glasses one last time as the searchers reached the plateau. The shadow man followed, as was the way with shadows. Already Hannah was developing a fear of him. Maybe not one that matched Connor’s, but it was there, and it was growing. She had four men on the way, two of them armed, and there was only the one behind. Common sense said to tell them about him. Common sense said tell the truth, give up the boy, trust the system that was in place here. Follow your protocol. The last time she’d broken protocol, people had died.

  You get another chance.

  Maybe she couldn’t look at it like that. Maybe that was the worst thing, the most dangerous thing for the boy. She should just play her role, turn him over to them. What was his pursuer going to do then? If she took all of these men up to the tower and told them the truth and gave them the boy? One man wasn’t going to risk taking on four. Even an assassin wasn’t going to risk taking a shot in these circumstances. He’d never make it back out of the mountains.

  You think it hurts much? the boy had asked. Getting shot? He had truly wanted to know. It was probably the most important question he’d ever asked.

  “Hello! Hello up there!”

  The searchers were shouting for her now. It was time. Two choices, two options, right hand or left, heads or tails. Ask them for help and trust that nobody was going to shoot. Or send them on and trust that she could get the boy to a safer situation. Send them on and let the shadow man trail behind and fade out of sight. All she had to do to make that happen was go down and answer some questions. Hang in there for five minutes.

  She held the railing as she went down, leg muscles liquid, like after the dreams, her heart hammering so hard, it seemed dangerous. Maybe she’d die before she reached them. Could your heart burst from fear? She thought it had to be possible. She’d read once that some doctors theorized that people who died from heart attacks in the night had literally fallen victims to their nightmares. It was something she’d been unable to purge from her mind once her dreams started.

  No dream here, though. The boy in the tower behind her was very real.

  Second chance. The kind almost nobody gets. You came back here for a reason, didn’t you? Stay on your damn feet, then. Stand your ground. You don’t get to run.

  She knew she was going to lie by the time she was at the bottom of the stairs. She was going to lie to someone, that much was required now, and it was either these men or the boy hiding under her cot. She had promised him she would send them away. She could imagine lying to these men, but not to him.

  The searchers covered the ground to meet her fast. They were on an open plateau rimmed by tall trees and rocks, and somewhere in them the shadow man with the rifle hid. They were certainly within range. A finger squeeze away from death.

  “Don’t see many visitors,” she said. “And you guys look like business. Everything okay?”

  “Oh, we’ve had better days.”

  “I heard,” she said.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “I was the one who called it in.”

  They exchanged puzzled glances. “Pardon?” a second officer said. He was a younger guy, complexion and cheekbones that hinted at Native American blood. “What did you call in?”

  “The fire.” She waved her hand to the smoke. “I understand there was a victim.”

  This was unplanned, but she was proud of it. She was demonstrating her knowledge and eagerness to help.

  “We’re not here for the fire,” the one who looked like an Indian said. “We’re looking for a missing boy.”

  “Haven’t heard about that.”

  “They were supposed to put out a call to you.”

  Shit. Of course they were. How could she have failed to anticipate that?

  “Really? Must have hit my bathroom run. Toilet’s down here, not up in the tower. That would have been, what, midmorning?”

  The bigger one nodded. “Kid ran off from a group that was camping out here. They’re, you know, problem kids.”

  “Yeah?” She turned from them, stared to the west so the wind blew hard in her face. “Would he have been carrying a pack?”

  “That’s right. You speak with him?”

  “No. But I watched him go by, and I thought it was strange. Kid that age hiking alone.”

  “You could tell how old he was from up in the tower?” This came from the Native American with the skeptical stare.

  “My eyes aren’t that good. But these?” She tapped the binoculars that dangled around her neck. “These are pretty good. He was wearing a big green pack, an army-surplus-looking thing?”

  “That’d be our boy,” the big one said. “He came right through here?”

  She nodded. “Looked up at the tower, and I thought he might try to climb it. Some people do, you know. But he just hung a right, caught the trail, and went on along.”

  “When you say he caught the trail, you mean—”

  “Right there.” She pointed to the place where the trail led away from the plateau. “It goes on toward Cooke City. Been a few hours, at least,” she said, thinking that she wanted them to hurry. Thinking that if her heart beat any harder, it would blow apart.

  “Yeah?”

  “At least,” she repeated. She was watching the skeptical man. He had moved to the point where the trail met the plateau and was on his knees, studying the ground. This was not good. A man who believed the ground could tell him more than an eyewitness was not good for her plan at all.

  “What do you see, Luke?” the bigger man called.

  “I got three clear prints, and none of them are his.”

  “You sure? Dry as it is?”

  “Not so dry that he walks on air. The dust here holds a clear track, and his isn’t one of them.”

  “That’s because he didn’t walk there,” Hannah said.

  “Thought you said he caught the trail?” the one named Luke said, still kneeling.

  “He did. Climbed up right there”—pointing was a small salvation, because it forced them all to turn their eyes away from her—“and then started back down the way he’d come. Not far, just a few steps. Kind of looking around. Then he walked across the side of the hill there, cut through those trees—you see those pines? Cut through those and he was on the trail. I think the trail surprised him. It wasn’t like he knew it would be there. But once he found it, he was gone.”

  Not a bad liar, Hannah, you are not bad at this at all, a damn fine dishonest woman when you need to be. Put that on the Match.com profile that all your friends want you to create—Hannah Faber, single white female, killed last boyfriend, excels at lying, please call!

  “Hell, it has to be the right kid.” These were the first words from a guy who looked tired and impatient and thus was Hannah’s favorite of the men.

  “Good luck,” Hannah said. “I’ll have to get going.”

  “Places to be?” This was from the skeptical man, Luke, who was returning to the group. A fine question
too—she stayed in the tower day and night, and she was rushing them along? “You seem in a bigger hurry than we are.”

  “Remember when I said my toilet was down here?” she asked, and then gave him a nasty smile. “Ah, you’ve got it now! Good work! So, yes, I have places to be too.”

  “Go ahead,” the bigger cop said. “Sorry about that.”

  “No problem. Good luck with the search.”

  “Pretty good view from that tower. Might be worth going up and having a look around, see if we can get a visual on him,” Luke said, and Hannah wanted to kill him.

  “You can’t see him,” she said. “I watched him for as long as I could. He took the trail and booked on out toward Cooke City.”

  “You watched him that long?”

  “That tower might look really exciting to you, but it can get a bit boring, believe it or not. I watch everybody.” She began moving away from them as she said it. “I’m sorry, but I’ve really got to go to the bathroom. You want to hang here, I’ll be back in just a minute.”

  “We need to get moving,” the big cop said. “Appreciate the help, though.”

  “You bet,” she said over her shoulder. “Good luck, guys.”

  She reached the outhouse and fumbled with the door; the latch was uncooperative and she was panicking and so when she finally got it open, she nearly fell in her hurry to get inside. It should look real enough to them—somebody who had to go. They were probably laughing at her, but that was fine. So long as they believed it, and they left.

  She sat on the closed seat of the toilet and held her head in her hands until her breathing steadied and the dizziness was past. She could hear their voices but not as loud. They were moving on. She hadn’t been impressive, but she’d been functional.

  And now she was alone with a boy who was pursued by killers.

  When she opened the door she was ready to see the man with the rifle, but the plateau was empty again. She crossed to the tower and went up the steps and opened the door of the cab.

  “Connor? It’s just me.”

  The words carried more weight than they should have. I did not lie to you. I made you a promise and I have kept it and you are still safe and I am part of that.

  “They’re gone? Really?” He poked his head out from under the cot.

  “Really. Stay down while I wait to see that the other one passes by too.” She turned from him and added, “Once we know he’s gone, that he’s still following them, we need to head out, in the opposite direction. We need to get out of here.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I lied to them, and they bought it, but it won’t take long for them to figure it out. Somebody will come back. When they do, you need to be gone. Now, give me a minute.”

  She opened the door and walked out onto the balcony again. Leaned her forearms on the rail. If she was being watched now, it was important for her to look relaxed. To look as if she had all the time in the world. She forced herself to stay there for a while so it wouldn’t seem like she was checking on anything in particular. She counted the seconds as a child would: one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three. When she got to three hundred, she straightened, stretched, and lifted the binoculars. Started by facing the smoke. She’d meant that as a ruse for the shadow with the rifle, but the smoke caught her attention and held it; it had grown substantially in the time she’d been occupied with the search party. They needed a break from the wind down there. The blow-dryer, Nick had called this sort of wind. You added a blow-dryer to a red-flag day, and you had serious trouble.

  At length she turned from the smoke and found the men soon enough, maybe a half mile away. They were trusting her tip, following the trail out. The tracker, Luke, was going to be screwed now, because there were enough hikers here that following boot prints was not an easy task. In the backcountry, he’d have had better luck.

  It took her much longer to find their shadow. He’d moved off the trail and climbed up to where an overgrown ridgeline ran parallel to it but elevated, some eighty feet above. Following that would slow him down but it would also allow him to see everything a little faster. While she watched him, he turned back toward the tower, and he swung the rifle with him. For an instant her stomach tightened and her bowels knotted and she was certain he was going to shoot.

  He didn’t. He was using the scope in the same way she was using the binoculars. Checking his surroundings, nothing more. He pivoted in a full circle and then continued on. The search party would hike down the trail and he would follow, and so she and Connor could not walk that way. Eventually, it would become apparent that a mistake had been made, and the shadow would return, and when that happened, she and Connor could not be here either. She needed to get him to help, but she’d just blocked her one path to safety by sending his pursuer on the only trail back to town. She had studied the map and stared through the binoculars for hours each day, and she knew well what waited for them off the trail. Treacherous climbs, impassable canyons, swift rivers, remnants of the glaciers. It would be slow going for Hannah and the boy, and they would leave a trail, and they would be caught.

  To the west, the smoke met the angled sun and she thought of what was happening down there. Dozens of men and women at work in the woods, radios at their belts, helicopters awaiting a call. The model of emergency response was in action down there, in a place where no one would think to search, because no one would ever walk toward a forest fire.

  Unless they understood a forest fire.

  A panic run was a fatal run, that much she understood far too well, had learned from far too many aspects of her life, and so she stared at the wilderness through her binoculars and she tried to think of a way out other than the one she saw.

  Still, her eyes returned time and again to the smoke.

  They could reach the fire by dawn and they would not encounter the man with the rifle, who was walking in the opposite direction, and once at the fire, help would be easy to find. Radios would abound, trucks would be brought in, helicopters might settle down and drop a sling for them if they required it.

  Can you make it there? she asked herself, and the ghost of the girl she had been answered, Of course, it’s not so bad a hike at all. Then the voice of the woman she was now said, It’s not about the miles. It’s about returning. Can you make it there?

  Neither voice had an answer to that one.

  23

  Between Red Lodge and Cooke City, Ethan began to count. It had started as a simple exercise, a fight against the adrenaline and rage and fear. It had started as simple numbers. One to a hundred, then in reverse. When that grew old, he counted the cars they passed, and then, because there weren’t enough of them, he counted the switchbacks. Later, higher up the mountain, he chose something else.

  He began to count the men and women he had trained in the art of survival. Started with the ones from the most recent days, the private work, and went back in time. Back to the Air Force, to the jungles and the deserts and the tundras where they’d dropped him off for a week or ten days or a month. There were about thirty in each group, and he trained four groups a year, and he’d trained for fifteen years. That was eighteen hundred for the military alone. Add in the civilians, and he believed it was close to twenty-five hundred. Perhaps, all told, it knocked on the door of three thousand.

  Three thousand people he had taught how to be survivors. For some of them, it had worked. He knew that. A pilot downed in the Pacific; a soldier separated from his unit in Afghanistan; a hunting guide who’d broken his leg in a fall. Ethan had received letters and phone calls. Not to mention commendations and awards.

  Three thousand sets of instructions.

  Not one test for himself.

  Not a real one, at least. He’d trained, and trained, and trained. With the best in the world, for a lifetime, he had trained, but he had never been tested. The finest fighter never to see the ring.

  Only he was no fighter. It was the old conversation with his father again: a Marine’s son who’d join
ed the Air Force, that had been the first offense, but his dad had been able to shake it off, reckoning that the world had entered a new age of combat and in the future all scores would be settled with missiles and drones, sad as that seemed to make him. Then Ethan had become a survival instructor, and that was even more of a personal affront to his father somehow, more disappointing in some perverse way that came from his father having measured his own worth based on his ability to kill.

  You just teach them what to do if they’re out there alone? he’d asked. From over here? How will you know if it works?

  How it had pained him, the idea that his son would always be over here. There was no war at the time, but that didn’t matter to Rod Serbin—there might be, there would be, and when it came, his son would be on the sidelines, by choice. Whether or not he saved any lives didn’t seem to matter. He wouldn’t take any lives, and that was the measure. It bothered him, but not Ethan. Not until today. Now he drove, and he planned, and he wondered.

  Could he do it? Would he?

  When they returned to town, the smoke from the fire was high and clear and Ethan was surprised to see how much it had grown since the morning. Then again, there wasn’t much of the world the same since the morning.

  “Where do you believe the boy is now?” the burned man asked into the quiet.

  “I have no idea. It’s been more than twelve hours. If he kept moving, he could have covered some ground. Or he could have been located already.”

  “We’re going to need to know that. The problem is simple: if they already have him, then we’re going into the woods for nothing, and I’m wasting hours that I can’t afford to waste. Rather, I’m wasting hours you can’t afford to waste. I’m sorry, Ethan, to have forgotten the joint nature of our venture. So you have to check. Your job is to find him, regardless of whether he’s hiding under a rock or in a hotel room with three marshals outside the door. It could have gone either way by now.”

  “Then I’ll need to make a call.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “We’ll have to stop,” Ethan said. “This isn’t cell-phone country. You lose signal in Red Lodge and don’t get it back up here.”