Hidden Path

by Melissa F. Miller

  As he ate, he maintained a leisurely pace and focused principally on the nourishing food the monks had prepared. Sweet carrots, purple potatoes, and late tomatoes from the garden swirled in his bowl with fresh herbs and plump kernels of corn. He found himself wondering where the corn had been grown. He felt sure the monks wouldn’t buy corn from Supra Seed. Perhaps Jason Durbin had watered and tended the corn in his stew.

  After the meal, Roshi Matsuo announced that the next few hours would be dedicated to working meditation. The students who’d spent most of their morning sitting seemed eager for the more active form of mindfulness.

  Bodhi understood the impulse. Sometimes focusing narrowly on a task at hand—washing dishes, sweeping a floor—was a joyful meditation. The job was always what it was, but by bringing attention to it, a person could honor it and enjoy it.

  He waited patiently as the senior monks read out names and work assignments. Bhikkhu Sanjeev said his name last.

  “Bodhi, we weren’t certain you’d be here, so we left a solitary task for you. You’ll be cleaning out the root cellar in the basement.” The monk smiled kindly.

  Bodhi got the distinct impression that this particular job had just been invented on the fly. But it made no difference. A few hours spent clearing out a basement would also help him to clear his head.

  “Yes, bhante,” he said because it seemed as if the monk was waiting for a response.

  Sanjeev glanced at Matsuo, and the Zen teacher handed Bodhi a small glass canning jar and a square of cardstock.

  “Spider catcher?” Bodhi guessed.

  Matsuo nodded and smiled his beatific smile.

  “Thanks.” Bodhi swallowed a laugh.

  He spent a good bit of his time mucking about inside dead bodies, up to his elbows in blood and viscera. Given the requirements of his day job, he wasn’t particularly squeamish and had no difficulty following the Buddha’s teaching not to harm any living creature, including insects, rodents, and arachnids.

  Besides, he had a suspicion the teachers were playing up the spiders in the basement angle to keep the rookies on their toes. No one ever said Buddhists didn’t have a sense of humor.

  Three minutes in the basement made it clear that Matsuo and Sanjeev had not been exaggerating the likelihood of spiders. In fact, Bodhi thought, as he scooped up yet another black spider and transported it to the high, small window that opened out into the garden and released the critter, the root cellar cleaning effort might be nothing more than an exercise in spider removal.

  He returned to the dimly lit front cellar and took stock of the piles. The best way to clear it out would be to just pick a corner and work his way out of the room. He decided to start in the back right corner and picked his way through some old wooden crates and glass milk bottles.

  The corner was occupied by what looked to be a large rectangular piece of furniture—a low coffee table or perhaps a storage trunk—covered with a faded blue blanket. Bodhi removed the blanket and shook out the dust. He pretended not to see the spider that fell out of its folds and skittered across the floor. He set the blanket aside to be laundered and inspected the trunk that had been underneath it.

  It wasn’t, as he’d thought, a piece of furniture. It was a wheeled foot locker. The sort of thing a teen might take to camp. If he had to guess, he’d venture that one of the novice monks had used it to transport his belongings to the house then had stowed it down here after he’d set up his bedroom. He tried the push button key lock but it was secured.

  He turned his attention away from the corner and selected a crate full of vinyl record albums that was next to the locked trunk. Assuming the monks didn’t have a record player, they could sell these to a vintage record store, he thought, as he flipped through the album covers. He placed the crate near the doorway.

  Returning to the corner, he ducked his head to avoid the bare lightbulb that hung from the stone ceiling into the middle of the root cellar. As he did so, the foot locker caught his attention again.

  Forget it. It’s locked.

  He turned his back and sorted through a haphazard pile of paperbacks—mainly romances, thrillers, and westerns. Not exactly the sorts of books the monks kept in the library, but he’d take them upstairs and see if anybody wanted them. If not, he’d add a stop at a used book store or library donation box to his list of errands.

  He stacked the books on top of the records. His thumb caught on a small paperclip that someone had once used to mark his or her page in the book on the top of the pile. He unclipped the paperclip from the thin paper and bounced it in his palm.

  He returned to the foot locker and examined the inexpensive lock. He straightened the paper clip and inserted it into the keyhole. The lock resisted his efforts. He removed the paperclip and scanned the bins and boxes.

  Under the stairs, behind a cardboard container filled with canning jars and lids, he found a small metal toolbox. He popped it open and selected a small, slotted screwdriver.

  The blade fit perfectly into the key hole. He turned the screwdriver ever so slightly to the left, and this time, the lock yielded instantly.

  He unlatched the clasp on each end of the trunk and lifted the lid. As soon as he looked inside, he knew. The contents of this trunk had belonged to the dead man he’d found in the meadow.

  He inventoried the carefully folded clothes first: Two long-sleeved shirts (one gray, one green); two short-sleeved shirts (one black, one gray); two pairs of pants (both tan); three pairs of underwear (white); three pairs of socks (two black, one white); and one pair of blue-and-white striped pajamas. The brand label and size tag for each item of clothing had been neatly removed, leaving behind only a straight, thin narrow line of fabric as evidence the tag had ever existed.

  One knife sheath, leather, the same color as the dead man’s knapsack. It held a seven-inch knife with a sharp, curved blade. He turned the knife in his hand. It glinted in the light thrown by the bulb. He slipped it back into the holder and placed it gingerly on top of the folded clothing.

  On the bottom of the trunk, nestled under a toiletry kit that had been emptied of its contents, he found a small, bound journal. A thrill of anticipation ran along his spine.

  Was he finally going to learn the dead man’s name?

  He flipped the book open to the first page and eagerly scanned the lines. The page was filled with letters and numbers— more letters than numbers—filling every line from margin to margin.

  He paged through the book. It was three-quarters full. The numbers were Arabic and the letters were Roman, but they didn’t form a single word of English. He stared down at the diary—or whatever it was—in disbelief.

  It was encrypted.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Wednesday night, late

  Hannah didn’t know what time it was. She’d left her cell phone at home as she’d been instructed to do, and she never wore a watch. All she knew was that it was dark and cool, and the smell of fire lingered on the air. She could almost feel the heat rising off the fields, but she dismissed that as her imagination.

  Supra Seed’s tanker plane had dumped two loads of water on Mark Olson’s fields, totaling nearly fifteen hundred gallons. She’d heard the engineers talking about it. There was no way the ground was still hot. It would be soggy and ashy, but not hot, not even warm.

  It was foolish to be out here given the circumstances, she knew. Supra Seed’s security teams were likely to be patrolling all night—not just the Olson Farm, but every field in the county where an experimental crop had been planted. The destruction of any more crops would be a terrible blow. The entire company was on edge.

  Her own supervisor had called the fire ‘a declaration of war’ but had been unable to articulate who the enemy might be. A competing seed company? A rogue farmer?

  She had her own theory, which she pushed deep down into the recesses of her mind and refused to consider. But the thought resisted being suppressed. It kept worming its way up to her consciousness.

  W
hich was why she was roaming around at this hour, alone, while the rest of the county hunted an arsonist. The only other person stupid enough to be out walking was some guy looking for owls.

  She stumbled over the uneven ground, swore, and caught herself. She had to be almost to the field now. She strained to see in the dark.

  Yes, there, in the distance, she could make out the sign for the farm stand. Another fifty yards or so and she’d reach the cattle fence. She crouched low and ran, ducking out of sight of anyone who might be watching from the house up on the hill.

  When she reached the third fence post from the end, she crouched down and pulled the spike out of the ground. Her hand shook as she opened the hollow container.

  She plucked the scrap of paper from inside the tube, but even in the dark she could tell it wasn’t an answer. It was her question. The one she’d laboriously written out on Tuesday. After she’d signaled with her office blinds that she was making a drop, she’d sat in the coffee shop in town and worked through the code. It had taken her nearly an hour to craft the three sentences using the process he’d taught her.

  Why had he gone dark and silent? Could he possibly have set fire to the field?

  No. Why would he? He didn’t need to do that—she was giving him what he asked for, what he said the country needed. Then where is he, Hannah? Her inner voice scolded her. What makes you think you can really trust him? Why did he put that strange seed in the spike? Where did he get it?

  She crumbled her note into a ball and jammed it into her pocket. Then she capped the spike and shoved it back into the ground. She wasn’t sure she should even bother—he was probably never coming back. But the dead drop container didn’t belong to her, after all. So what else was there to do but put it back?

  In a way, it would be a relief to stop all this cloak-and-dagger nonsense. She’d refused to help him in the beginning, but then he’d shown her the photographs. Chinese citizens—men, women, children, all rail-thin from hunger in a country unable to grow enough food to feed its people, increasingly at the mercy of the whims of foreign politicians for their next meal. Living under the constant threat of trade sanctions and embargos. She’d known the only way to erase the memory of the haunted eyes, the visible rib cages, the bent postures of the people of her ancestral land would be to cooperate. So she had.

  But now, it seemed, he’d taken a different tack—if he’d started the fire. If not, maybe he had everything he needed and had returned to China. What did she expect, that he’d risk his mission—their mission—just to leave her a thank you note in the spike?

  She didn’t want his gratitude, anyway. She’d helped him in the service of something bigger than him, bigger than both of them. But maybe now she was free.

  She turned to start the walk back home, her spirits lighter, her step springier.

  Then a man’s voice rang out from somewhere inside the cattle fence, angry and close. “Hey, whaddya think you’re doing? I have a gun. Now, get the hell off my property!”

  Her stomach lurched, her heart thudded, and the ground rose up and whirled around and around. She squeezed her eyes shut against the dizziness. Her blood was pounding; she could hear her pulse echoing in her ears.

  She opened her eyes and forced her trembling legs into action. She ran as fast as she could, a dark streak flashing through the night. As she ran, the crack of a rifle sounded in the air. One shot. She half expected her legs to give out, or a hot bullet to explode in her back, or blood to run down the side of her head. But she kept running.

  He missed. He missed. He missed.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Thursday morning

  Bodhi woke before the sun rose, before the morning bell rang. He took the encrypted book out from under his pillow and dressed silently in the dark. Then he walked through the sleeping house and slipped out the kitchen door. He stepped off the porch and reached into the window well on the side of house nearest the garden. He retrieved the knife and the backpack from under the coiled garden hose and slung the bag over his shoulder.

  As he walked down the long driveway to the road, the knife jostled inside the bag and bumped up against his back. The rhythmic sensations reminded him with every step that he was carrying a dead man’s weapon and code book.

  He pulled out his cell phone to call Chief Clark. It was very early, but maybe he could leave a message.

  She answered on the first ring.

  “This is Clark.”

  “Good morning. It’s Bodhi King. You’re up early.”

  “Jason Durbin was shot and killed last night in his field. I’m at his farm.” Her voice was flat. It could have been from lack of sleep, but he suspected it was more than that.

  “I’m sorry, Bette.” He stumbled over her first name, but it felt right to use it for this purpose. She wasn’t just a police chief. She was a human being. And from the sound of it, she was a human being who was suffering.

  “Jason had a quick temper, but he was a good man, a sweet man. He didn’t deserve to go out this way.” Anger crept into her deadened tone.

  “Call me when you can,” he said. This was not the time to tell her about his discovery in the basement.

  “Thurman and Clausen are on their way to pick you up and bring you here. Can you help me with the body?” Her voice nearly broke and she barked out a cough.

  “Of course. Does this mean you and the feds have reached a mutual understanding of all our mutual roles?”

  “More like it means I have people being murdered and crops burning, and I need all the help I can get.”

  “Fair enough. Don’t forget you also have a missing person.”

  “Right, Boris Badenov with the cold feet. Clausen and Thurman can fill you in, but they know him. That’s why they’re in town. I have to go.”

  “See you as soon as I can, chief.”

  Bodhi ended the call and reached the mouth of the driveway. He figured the government-issued sedan would be coming from the East, but he wasn’t positive. He hesitated for a moment near the mailbox.

  Before he stepped to either the right or the left, the dark sedan came into view over the rise. He stood still and waited. Clausen was driving today. She brought the car to a stop beside him.

  Thurman gave him a little salute. Neither agent was wearing sunglasses. But then again, the sun hadn’t yet managed to crest over the low hills.

  Bodhi pulled open the rear passenger side door and climbed into the car. He gently placed the leather bag on the seat beside him.

  “Good morning, Dr. King,” Clausen said formally.

  “Morning,” Thurman mumbled around a mouthful of egg sandwich.

  “Good morning.”

  “Charlie, if you get crumbs in the foot well, you’re vacuuming this thing.” Clausen didn’t take her eyes off the road. Her icy exterior seemed extra brittle.

  “Elise doesn’t like ants. She thinks my eating habits attract them,” Thurman explained cheerfully.

  “What’s in the bag?” Clausen nodded her head toward the back seat.

  “A knife and a diary or journal of some kind.”

  “Not yours, I take it?”

  “I assume the dead man’s. I found it in a trunk in the basement of the monk’s house.”

  “Does it say anything interesting?”

  “Wouldn’t know. It’s written in some kind of code.”

  Clausen’s eyes flashed interest in the rearview mirror. “What kind of code?”

  He shook his head. “No idea. It’s not really my area of expertise.”

  “Luckily for us, it’s hers.” Thurman jerked a thumb toward his partner.

  “Great. You can have a look at it later. So what happened to Jason Durbin?”

  Thurman shook his head mournfully but didn’t pause in the work he was doing on the breakfast sandwich. “Shot from a distance, looks like. Single shot from a hunting rifle. Right through the gut.”

  “This happened last night?”

  “A call came into the emergency dispat
ch just before midnight. A woman who didn’t give her name. Said she was out taking a nature walk, hoping to see some owls. She heard yelling, then a shot.”

  “Who’s the woman?”

  Clausen took over. “The dispatcher said she must have called through a voice-over-Internet program on her computer. The numbers those VOIPs assign aren’t permanent. No way to trace it. Well, no easy way for the Onatah PD to do it. We could do it.”

  The NCSC agents exchanged looks.

  Bodhi changed the subject. “This woman said she heard yelling? Two people?”

  “No. One. A man shouted something like, ‘I’ve got a gun, get off my property,’” Thurman said.

  “You think it was Durbin?”

  “Most likely.”

  “Did he have a gun?”

  “Sort of. They found him with his kid’s BB shooter jammed in his back pocket.”

  They fell silent. Clausen turned off the county road.

  After a moment, Bodhi said, “Chief Clark tells me you’re here because of Boris Badenov.”

  Thurman chucked. “That alias gets me every time. Your missing retreat goer is a mercenary of sorts.”

  “What sort of mercenary?”

  “He’s a spy. His real name is Gavriil Fyodorovych. He’s former SVR, but he’s freelancing now. He operates out of Kazakhstan, sometimes Belarus. He specializes in industrial espionage for hire.” Clausen did the explaining in a dry voice.

  “What’s SVR?”

  “The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. After the Soviet Union dissolved, the KGB was split into two arms, a domestic agency and a foreign agency. He worked for the Russian equivalent of the CIA.”

  “Why would a former Russian spy be staying at a Buddhist retreat center in central Illinois?” Bodhi asked.