by Tom Hron
How many times had he seen it in his own life? … The joy of growing up outdoors, almost losing his life in the world’s dumbest war—marrying the woman of his dreams, losing her to heart disease—watching his children grow up, having them leave home—the shifting circumstances that he had already lived through, besides all the littler things in between. Maybe Harry was a harbinger like the raven of his ancient faith, telling him to renew his soul and stop living in the past.
He had two choices—either wait for the FBI and hope they would be satisfied with all his answers or make himself scarce until they got tired of looking for him. The problem was that neither choice was very appealing. On the one hand, there wasn’t any reason for him to run, because he hadn’t done anything wrong, but the FBI’s reputation with Native Americans wasn’t all that great. In addition, he was all by himself in the high desert. His memory of what had happened to the Ogallala Sioux at Pine Ridge, South Dakota, despite it being way back in the 1970s, was still clear, and Rudy Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas, however you came down on those infamous old bloodbaths, didn’t encourage much faith in the FBI either, particularly if there was any chance they might see you as an extremist of some sort. And he knew damn well what he looked like—long hair, owned guns, and never had much good to say about the government, which fit all the FBI profiles to a T. They could take any posture they wanted with him, and it would be his word against theirs, a no-win situation if there ever was one.
On the other hand, if he skedaddled, they would get suspicious. Nothing made the FBI madder than being made to look bad, especially by some low-tech, two-bit “Injun” who, in their minds, should have stayed on the reservation and kept his mouth shut long ago. They would retaliate if they ever caught him. No matter how he looked at it his choices weren’t good.
Standing, he filled a drinking jug with water, found his binoculars, and stepped out onto the porch. Cochise and Geronimo were waiting for him. They had heard the telltale noises in the house and loved nothing better than his daytime jaunts.
“Come on, you guys, let’s climb up on the mesa, crawl into some hole, and see what happens. I got a notion we might be getting company, and I’d just as soon look them over before I decide what to do.”
The dogs led the way, seeing from his single glance where they were headed. Both had come from the same litter, the prodigy of a blue-ribbon winner of a Flagstaff kennel, and he’d had them ever since they were pups. They knew the valley even better than he did, an advantage of their wolf-like ways.
After his children had left home, he had seen an advertisement for them in the paper and driven up to Flagstaff, wanting the companionship and needing the help as well. Now both dogs were his family, and he was theirs. All he had to do was to look at a cow and they would bring her right to him. Six good men on horses couldn’t do the work of his collies, and he wouldn’t trade them for a brand-new truck.
Once his nearest neighbor had asked him how he’d trained them so well, since the fellow didn’t realize herding came naturally to them. Not wanting to embarrass the neighbor or hurt his feelings, he had answered by saying that he’d fed them raw beefsteak when they’d been little and they’d caught on real quick. His witticism had passed around Gila County, making the rounds of the coffee shops and booze joints. He loved those dogs as much as life.
They worked their way up the high mesa that stood behind the house until they reached its steep face, then followed its sidewall a few hundred feet, using an old game trail. Deer, loins, and coyotes had burrowed their way through the brush growing along the mesa since time immemorial, leaving a long tunnel of green, interspersed with sunny spaces. Every mesa had these hidden trails, and the ancient people had used them for nearly as long as the animals, in turn leaving behind hideouts from which they had ambushed the game, or sometimes one another. For miles around Joe and the dogs had explored these places, sniffing their secret smells and even finding arrowheads now and then. One of the best places was a half-mile behind the house, he supposed because of the nearness of good water.
All three crawled inside and lay down, catnapping in the cool shade. The noontime passed and they watched the sun reflect silver mirages, mirroring imaginary lakes in the distance. Wondering if Harry had been wrong in worrying about him, he pulled some beef jerky from his shirt pocket and shared it with the dogs. There wasn’t anyone for miles around. After eating he fell asleep again.
Geronimo’s cold nose woke him, but there wasn’t any rolling dust on the road or anyone in sight. He waited, since the dogs were seldom wrong. Then he heard it, the faraway buzz of a tail rotor, a Bell Jet Ranger by the sound of the blades. Again, he waited. It wasn’t unusual for helicopters to fly over his valley, although this one was coming closer and closer from the direction of Phoenix, its main rotor slapping the air as it slowed near the house and barn. Wheeling its shark-like nose around the yard, it looked everything over, then landed on the driveway, curling up whirlwinds of dust and leaves. Three men jumped out wearing wire-rim sunglasses and jackets with lettering on the back, reading FBI when he glassed them. He watched as they, side by side with their jackets pulled free of their pistols, walked to the front door. Harry had been right after all.
“Why do they think we’re such threats?” Joe whispered to his dogs. “What has Harry got himself into?…” He inched forward, using his glasses again. A fourth man, the pilot had stayed behind in the helicopter, keeping it at idle power.
After knocking, the agents went inside for a few minutes, then came back out and searched the barn and outbuildings. At last, they stood in the yard and shaded their eyes with their hands, looking off in the distance. They knew he was out there, but where they didn’t know. After a few minutes, they climbed back into the Jet Ranger, lifted off, and started searching in concentric circles, flying low. Joe wiggled backwards and hid himself and the dogs better still.
The agents flew a half-hour looking for him, covering a radius of several miles, then flew off, fading behind the distant mountains, returning to Phoenix. Coming out of his hiding place, Joe sat in the late afternoon sun with both dogs alongside him. They would wait until sundown before going down.
No matter how long you lived in Arizona and no matter what took place, he thought to himself, the sundowns always made things better. The red and gold of the earth filled the western sky as the sun fell below the horizon, leaving the sunset aglow with an amalgamation of colors. The celestial brightened to yellow, then crimson and orange, igniting the evening with living light, as though the heavens had caught on fire. He never grew tired of watching the sundowns, and the older he got the more he understood what they meant to him.
At dusk he stood and walked downhill, letting the dogs lead the way home. Still a little unsure of what he should do, he wondered if the FBI had left a note for him. Maybe a warrant, although he couldn’t imagine why.
It hadn’t taken much to guess that Harry had been flying a test aircraft, and it must have been a lot more sophisticated than the F-35 Lightning II, the military’s latest strike fighter. But so what? That only made sense. Beyond that, however, everything was pure speculation, the kind of BS you heard whenever you stopped for coffee in Globe or wherever. Because Nevada’s Area 51 had been the subject of so many television documentaries and magazine articles, everyone in the Southwest had an opinion on what the government was currently testing. It just didn’t make sense why the FBI would come after him.
The dogs and he dropped off the mesa and started crossing the stream. Both dogs suddenly stopped, he thought to get a drink. He picked his way across the deeper water to the opposite shore. The dogs whined behind him, and he looked back at them. Sidling away from the water, they clearly wanted him to turn around. Both whined once again, louder this time. Puzzled, he peered back and forth, certain there wasn’t anyone within a mile. What in hell was wrong? he wondered again.
All at once he heard it. With his mind seeing flashbacks from long, long ago, he splashed back across the stream, following
the dogs as they streaked away. “Incoming!” he screamed, “Incoming!”
CHAPTER 8
ALEXIS’S APARTMENT
Her place was lousy with bugs, thought Alexis, although she didn’t mean the creepy-crawly kind … or maybe she did with nanotechnology the way it was these days. Picking up her cat, she tried to calm him, meanwhile forcing herself to act the same way as she always did when she first came home. With Tungsten so upset, it didn’t take much brains to figure out (she hadn’t read all the spy stuff for nothing) that someone had gotten into her apartment and scared him out of his wits. He had never liked strangers, so it made sense that someone had snuck in while she’d been at work. In addition, there wasn’t any damage to the door and she lived on the fourth floor, ruling out the windows. Logic left her but little choice but to believe some FBI spark-chaser had wired her apartment with a few nifty little fisheye cameras, which meant the same intruder had tapped her laptop computer and telephone as well. The agency really did think she was guilty.
She had to have a plan. However, the first thing was to learn what SiddhArtha meant so she could decide what to tell Reechi in the morning, if anything at all. It was almost surely an Indian word … Buddhist, and seemed familiar. If she could only use the internet, but she didn’t dare. Putting down her cat, she walked to the refrigerator and poured herself a glass of cranberry juice. Barnes and Nobles was her only alternative, since she often went there anyway, which, in turn, wouldn’t seem suspect to anyone they’d have tailing her, assuming the salespeople greeted her as they normally did. God, she couldn’t even take a shower without them watching her. She shivered, because the whole thing had gotten out of control.
Waiting for the lunch hour, in her mind the least suspicious time to once again leave her apartment, she read the morning paper for appearance sake, then drove across town to Barnes and Noble. The redbrick, wood, and dark green décor had always made her feel at home, and the café had long been a favorite of the latte crowd, who often filled the place on weekends and evenings. When she went in, she stopped at the bestseller’s display just inside the front door and thumbed through the latest novels, eyeing the people who had followed her inside, but then gave up. No one looked any more suspicious than the next, and she decided it would be almost impossible to identify a tail when there were so many people coming and going. Leaving the bestsellers, she walked to where the dictionaries were kept, believing it would be the best place for her to start. Pulling a giant Webster off the shelf, she flipped to S, then SID. Bingo, there it was—SiddhArtha. Hardly believing her eyes, she read its meaning—an epithet of Buddha that meant, “He who has attained his goal.” She stood there, feeling her anxiety and confusion snaking together, coiling one around the other but never becoming the same. What did a Buddhist epithet have to do with Dewey Chamber’s death?
She walked to the religious section and selected a book on Buddhism, then another and another until she found one that told about SiddhArtha Gautama, a six-century B.C. prophet, who, after six years of ascetic life, had become the Buddha, himself. She suddenly remembered—SiddhArtha was the “Enlightened One,” the one who had found the “Middle Way,” and the one who had taught the “Four Noble Truths.”
It all only confused her more. Buddhism was good, not bad, and, taken in context, there was nothing ominous at all in what she had read. The only curious thing, besides what was in the dictionary, was an oblique paraphrase of what SiddhArtha meant, he who would be king of the world. However, none of it made any sense when she thought of Chambers. Lost in thought and a bit melancholy, besides dreading the next morning, she left the store. Reechi’s eyes would be all over her like snakes.
Wheeling out of the parking lot, she started driving home, wishing she had somewhere else to go. Oddly, she craved the single thing that she never ate anymore—Pinwheels, those wonderful chocolate and marshmallow cookies that she had loved so much as a child. That’s what she needed, something to pick up her spirits. Her trip to Barnes and Noble hadn’t given her much to work with, and unfortunately, she’d come away with more questions than answers. Whichever way she looked at it, it seemed her best bet was to admit that Dewey had given her some sort of code name, but she had no idea why.
All of a sudden the car ahead stopped. She slammed on her brakes, heard the screeching, then the crunch as her Honda Civic plowed into the older Buick in front of her. She hadn’t seen any stoplights! Her car bounced backward, leaving her gaping at the black paint she’d left all across the larger car’s bumper. In next instant, she saw the driver start calling someone on his cell phone. The police … and what else could go wrong in just one day? Jumping out of her car, she hurried forward to see if he was hurt.
Rolling down his window, an older man with flicked-up eyebrows and a long, French-looking face smiled up at her, startling her with his sudden friendliness, especially after being hit from behind. She stood there, wondering what to say.
“Young lady, don’t look so frightened, I’m perfectly fine. I suppose my backlights quit working again, didn’t they? Don’t worry because I’m certain it was my fault, and I called the police and they should be here any minute.” Then his smile grew even bigger. “Let’s see how bad the damage is, but don’t be worried because I’ve got good insurance.” He opened his car door and stepped out.
Alexis searched for signs of an injury. “Are you sure you’re not hurt?”
“No, not at all. Look, here comes a squad car already.” He pointed down the street at a police cruiser coming toward them, its red, yellow, and blue strobes flashing.
After glancing at the cruiser, Alexis, with her heart sinking into her shoes, walked to the rear of the Buick. The larger car hadn’t been damaged much at all, but her Honda looked as though it had been hit by a big sledgehammer, leaving its front end and headlights badly damaged. She could still drive, but it wouldn’t be pretty.
The squad car pulled up and a policewoman, smiling sourly and nodding hello, got out and walked toward them. Her face was middle-aged and skull-like, her hair was pulled into a ponytail, and her eyes were too round for her head. She waved the stalled traffic past the accident and inspected the cars.
“Guys, this isn’t at all serious and we need to clear the street.” She flashed another perfunctory smile. “Why don’t both of you pull into the parking lot ahead and we’ll do the paperwork there?” She tilted her head to one side, suggesting the shopping center next to them.
Answering, “Yes, Officer,” the Frenchman walked away, slipped back into his car, and drove ahead into the parking lot, swinging around so he faced the street. Feeling almost numb, Alexis followed with the cruiser right behind her. After all three had parked side by side, the policewoman motioned that both of them should come over to her car, using an added gesture to point Alexis into the right front seat. The Frenchman opened the back door and sat behind her, but she thought nothing of it.
Turning sideways, the policewoman faced her. “Miss Mundy, I want you to stay focused on me and whatever you do don’t look around, not in the back seat nor outside this car. We’re under surveillance right now and it’s critical that you remain calm. Please do as I ask because your life depends on it. Do you understand me?”
Alexis froze. The woman’s stare transfixed her, and she couldn’t have looked away even if she had wanted. “What do you want?” she asked after exhaling. “What’s going on?”
“Please relax because we won’t hurt you.” The policewoman’s unblinking eyes softened a little. “We staged this accident so we could talk to you. You have access to something we need, and since time is so important, we didn’t have any other way of contacting you, at least not without being discovered. You’re being watched, in your apartment, your car, and everything you say or do is being recorded.”
Alexis exhaled again. “My car—what are you talking about?”
“The FBI has planted a miniature camera in your rearview mirror, along with a microphone, and you’re being videotaped while you drive.
We had to get you out of your car.”
“Who are you? I haven’t done anything—“ For an instant she thought of running. But where? Somehow, she had been swallowed by a monster and lost in its hellish insides without any hope of escape. She must get a grip and fight, although with her mind. Let them think she was scared to death.
The Frenchman spoke next. “Alexis, we can’t tell you who we are but please believe that we’re here to help you. The people you work for are the ones following you. That only means one thing—you’re in danger of being arrested for spying.”
She forced her fear back down. “How do you know my name, and how could you possibly know that I might be arrested? You’re suggesting a setup, but even by talking to you I’ve set myself up for the very thing that you are warning me about. I’m getting out of this car.”
The policewoman’s face knotted into a furious look. “I’m a real cop and I’ll arrest you if you so much as try. It won’t hurt us a bit if we lock you up under some bright lights. You had better think this through, because you’re being framed for prosecution under the Espionage Act. You’re a smart young lady, figure out your chances if the FBI hauls you in.”
“I’m not telling you anything, and I still want to know who you are. If you’re really a cop, why are you doing this to me?”
The policewoman glanced backward as if to say it was now her partner’s turn. Alexis waited, listening to the muffled silence of the car. She had won a temporary standoff … was Magruder behind this, or Reechi?
“Alexis, we need to somehow work this out,” finally said the Frenchman, sighing afterward. “Dewey Chambers came to us with something he’d discovered while researching some old files, something so horrific, so unbelievable, it would alter the world we live in, especially if it falls into the wrong hands, like the Iranians or al-Qaida. Unfortunately, we’re missing the most essential part, so that’s why we need you.
