All Souls: A Gatehouse Thriller

by Karin Kaufman

  “Let me know if you need anything else,” she said as she left the office.

  Nathan reached into his suit jacket for his cell. “I’ll be right back. Take a seat. You’re good at sensing patterns. Look at that map and tell me what you see.” He hit a quick-dial button on his cell and exited the office, phone to his ear. Knowing I’d be up most of the night, I took a white mug from the tray and poured myself some coffee. For my own safety I needed to stay wide awake.

  “Patterns,” I said aloud as I took a seat behind the desk and again studied the map. Right away I noticed that the red circles, unlike the green ones, were concentrated along and near Interstate 25 and Highway 287, and there were as many Sack killings in smaller towns like Trinidad and Castle Rock in Colorado as there were in cities like Santa Fe and Colorado Springs. On the other hand, the green circles were well away from the interstate and other major roads.

  A muffled thud, like a heavy box hitting the floor, sounded from somewhere in the house. Silence followed. Lydia? Maybe she’d dropped something in the kitchen. I listened for voices and kept an eye on the office door, suddenly afraid that at any second Nathan would burst through it, tell me his name was Traitorous Bastard, and put a bullet in my head. I took a gulp of coffee and told myself my fears were ridiculous. I had to trust Nathan, to believe that he was not only on the side of Gatehouse but also my friend. Besides, I knew of no one else who could get my name off the kill list—or find out why I’d been put on it in the first place.

  I heard Nathan calling to Lydia, something about more phone calls, then he walked back into his office.

  “I just talked to Brent Vogel,” he said. He turned on his computer then pulled a brightly colored wood chair up to the desk and sat. “He knows who you are, but your real name doesn’t appear on his return list, just the name Falter and the condo address. He doesn’t know you personally, so he didn’t recognize your photo.”

  “But that address—”

  “I know. He should have questioned it. Instead, he assumed Falter was an infiltrator and Gatehouse had decided to return her in a safe, controlled place.”

  “And what better place than the condo.” I flopped back in the chair, dumbfounded that Vogel could have been so stupid. “How could he have assumed?”

  “We’ll deal with that later. The more serious question is how your name got on the list. I don’t believe Vogel put it there.”

  “Why not?”

  “First, he doesn’t have the power. Porters receive their lists, they don’t compile them. The only information they can add without a review by Gatehouse is the target they’ve selected and whether that target has been returned. Second, as I said, I’ve known him a long time, and I believe him when he says he didn’t know he was targeting you. I’ve asked him to email me his list.”

  I thought suddenly of Steven Lake’s horrible, lonely death. He’d been toyed with before he was killed. Maybe they’d gotten to Lake, or to his list. “What about Steven Lake’s kill list?”

  Nathan shook his head. He knew where I was going with my question. “His return list was destroyed. Gatehouse operates on the understanding that files belonging to a murdered porter or Gatehouse member have been compromised, no question.”

  “What about Vogel’s list?”

  “He won’t use it again.”

  “Gatehouse’s lists?”

  “They know what happened tonight.”

  So Nathan had called them. What other porter could do that? I knew of none. Most porters had little direct contact with Gatehouse and probably never phoned a Gatehouse member. They got their lists and that was that. Maybe now, with a compromised list that had targeted me, there would be a little more communication.

  “Well, someone’s targeting hunters and porters.” I examined the map. “Far more than they used to. And somehow finding out where they live. I know I’ve only been at this two years, but Sacks used to be afraid to go after hunters.” I concentrated on the green circles, two in New Mexico, five in Colorado. “Were any of the hunters and porters on this map killed by other hunters?”

  Nathan rose and poured himself a mug of coffee. “No,” he said, his back to me. “I haven’t heard of any incident like that.”

  “That’s comforting,” I said, my voice laced with sarcasm.

  He turned to face me. “So what does that map tell you?”

  “The Sacks are traveling,” I replied. “They’re traveling up and down highways for the express purpose of making a large number of random kills. They get off the highway, drive a short distance, then get back on the highway.”

  Nathan nodded slowly. “Yes.”

  “There’s no such pattern to the deaths of hunters and porters. I’m guessing Sacks are targeting them, killing them where they live or work.”

  “That’s right.” He walked around the front of the desk, put down his mug, and lifted the map, exposing another map beneath it. “Now look at this. Montana south to New Mexico. The orange shaded areas are recent land acquisitions by the Land Conservation Alliance, a land preservation organization. The red areas are sales of land by that same group, and the pencil hatch marks indicate land sales and acquisitions over the past six months.”

  There were hatch marks through two-thirds of the shaded areas. “Anything unusual about those sales and acquisitions?” I asked.

  “Like the killings, only in number and frequency.”

  Puzzled by what this had to do with Sack killings, I squinted at the map then looked up at Nathan. “You’re saying the LCA is snatching up and selling more land than usual?”

  “From Montana to New Mexico. LCA’s land moves in other states haven’t changed.”

  “Why do they sell land?”

  “Money.”

  “I thought the idea was to buy as much land as possible from private owners and make it untouchable.”

  Nathan put the first map aside and took a long, deep gulp of coffee. Like me he was recharging, figuring he’d be up all night. “They don’t just buy land. Sometimes they condemn it and take it over, sometimes owners give them land in their wills. Some of this land they keep, but some of it they sell. They try to acquire adjacent pieces of land so their smaller acquisitions make larger acquisitions.”

  Looking at the map, I noticed that many of the LCA’s recent acquisitions enveloped land they’d acquired more than six months ago. It looked as though they were making a quilt, piece by piece.

  “In turn,” Nathan continued, “they sell those larger acquisitions, and that allows them to buy even more land.”

  “But why? What’s their endgame?”

  “More land and more money.”

  I scratched my head in confusion. “What’s the connection between Sacks and LCA land?”

  “The new president of the Colorado chapter of the LCA is a Festal, the new vice president of the Wyoming LCA is an Elation, and two board members of the New Mexico LCA are Resolutes.”

  “Hell.”

  He took another gulp of coffee and moved to my side of the desk. “Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico,” he said, pointing to each state. “What do you see in this map?”

  “I see smaller patches making bigger patches, and those bigger patches growing. I see the LCA likes to acquire land bordering state or federal land.” I looked over at Nathan. “Making even bigger patches.”

  “Anything else?”

  I shook my head and chuckled at the absurdity of what I was seeing. “It’s almost like they want to clear a pathway from Canada to Mexico.”

  Nathan straightened, folded his arms, and stared ahead toward the office door, saying nothing.

  When his computer gave a small, bell-like ring, I glanced at the screen. “Email,” I said.

  “That’s Brent.”

  I grabbed my mug and got out of his way so he could sit at his desk and open his mail without me hovering. As I finished my coffee and Nathan opened files, I wondered what the LCA was up to, and whether the organization’s recent land acquisitions were
the main event or a sideshow, a distraction from something bigger.

  With an eye toward self-preservation, I also wondered how I fit into the group’s plans. What did the LCA—and Sacks—stand to gain from my death?

  Chapter 6

  “Take a look at this,” Nathan said, waving me over.

  I peered over his shoulder at his computer screen. In a file marked “Birthday Party” was a list of Sack names and addresses, “Falter” and the Santa Fe condo included. The name was third on the list, but porters had the option to jump order, and Gatehouse often instructed them to do so.

  “Is there any way to tell when that name was added or the file was created?”

  “No. There’s a time stamp on the file, but that can be altered.”

  “So there really aren’t any real names on Vogel’s list?” I asked.

  “Not on any porter’s list. Only Gatehouse has the real names, though porters can cross-check their lists with Gatehouse’s separate list of real names if they want. Most of them don’t.”

  “They don’t want to know.”

  “It makes the job twice as hard.”

  “Is my real name on that Gatehouse list?”

  “I’ll check later.”

  No doubt it was, and he didn’t want me to know.

  He lowered his chin in one hand as he continued to stare at the monitor. “I’ll look for other hunter, porter, or Gatehouse names at the same time.”

  “You know the names of current Gatehouse members?”

  “I’m going to check Brent’s list against mine,” he said, ignoring my question and inserting a flash drive into a USB port.

  Aside from that unanswered question, he was continuing to open up, telling me more than he should have as a porter, and that both cheered and worried me. It worried me because I was in deep crap and Nathan had come to the conclusion that one phone call to Vogel and another to Gatehouse wasn’t going to get me out of it. He had a single criterion for divulging private Gatehouse matters, and it was a simple one. If a hunter needed to know something for his own safety, he would know.

  He leaned back in his chair and wearily ran a hand down his tie. He looked my way, and I knew before I reached his computer screen what I would see.

  “I’m on your kill list too,” I said, tears filling my eyes.

  “It wouldn’t have gotten that far,” he said, laying a hand on my shoulder, trying to reassure me.

  I straightened my back. “It did with Vogel.”

  “Right now porters in every state are being told that their lists have been compromised. They won’t be using them.”

  Angry with myself, I wiped the tears from my face. This wasn’t the time to fall apart. “What are they going to do, stop all hunts until they check the lists?”

  “Exactly.”

  I was surprised by his answer. It was a necessary move, I knew, and the least Gatehouse could do to correct its frightening screw-up, but a temporary halt to all hunts was itself a terrifying prospect. On any given day, a hundred hunts took place in the United States alone. Now, with the numbers of Sacks growing and so many Sacks moving to the Rocky Mountain states, a halt to hunting meant Sack numbers in the West would skyrocket. Maybe that was the Sacks’ purpose all along.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Are these lists by state?”

  “By region. This is the list for New Mexico and Colorado. Wyoming and Montana are on a different list, Idaho and Washington on another, and so on.”

  “How do porters know they’re not doubling or tripling up, sending two or three hunters to return one Sack? And how does Gatehouse know when the Sacks on this list have been returned?”

  Nathan put his flash drive in a separate USB port, asked me to turn away, and typed in what I presumed was a password. When I turned back around, he’d connected with Gatehouse.

  “Here’s Banishment,” he said.

  I bent lower to see the screen and saw a check mark and the initials NT and JP next to my kill’s name.

  “The check means a porter has scheduled a hunter.” He entered an X next to Banishment’s name, right after the check. “This means the return was completed.”

  “NT for you and JP for me.”

  “Porters checkmark their lists at pre-scheduled times, so no other porter could have sent a hunter for Banishment—not once I’d marked her.”

  As he scrolled down, I looked for the initials of other hunters I knew in the region—Neil Kellogg, Connor Doyle, and Chester Avila. Kath and Zack, too—the only hunters I knew who didn’t have Nathan as a porter. The only familiar initials were KN, next to the name Falter. My name. There was a check mark next to the name, along with the initials BV. Nathan typed “Cancel Return on Orders” next to the name and unplugged the flash drive.

  This checkmark system, and the fact that the name Falter was on both Vogel’s and Nathan’s list, meant one thing: the error that targeted me as a Sack had originated inside Gatehouse. And Nathan, without saying so, had just told me that. He was well aware of it.

  And I was aware that Nathan had just added information to Gatehouse’s master list, something he said mere porters weren’t able to do. I sank into the painted wooden chair. “Could Sacks have infiltrated Gatehouse?” I asked. The possibility had occurred to me earlier, at the safe house. I hadn’t wanted to say anything to Kath. But now, in light of the checkmark system and the green circles on Nathan’s map, the possibility had reemerged. Maybe we weren’t dealing with a rogue porter or two, but with a thoroughly infiltrated Gatehouse.

  He waited a long time before answering. “It’s very unlikely,” he said at last. “But not impossible.”

  “What about state or federal governments? Gatehouse is part of the federal government, isn’t it?”

  “Unofficially.”

  “And Sacks have been known to worm their way into political and bureaucratic positions. They’re such accomplished dung-mouths.”

  Nathan smiled faintly at the hunter term for Sacks who were especially talented liars. Which was most of them. He didn’t like most hunter slang—he preferred neutral, dispassionate terms—but he tolerated it from me.

  “Sacks have always infiltrated institutions, and government at any level is no exception.”

  “I wonder how many of those infiltrators are known.”

  A ringing sound came from inside his suit jacket. He pulled out his cell and glanced at the caller ID, frowning. “It’s the condo phone. Did you tell Kath you were coming to see me?”

  “Yes, but at El Tirador, not here.”

  He answered the phone, and I could tell by the conversation on Nathan’s end that he was talking to Kath and that she was bearing bad news. Kath must have hit quick-dial number after number on the landline until she found Nathan.

  “Don’t hang up,” he said, setting the cell on his desk with his right hand and clicking the office TV remote with his left. A few seconds later we were both watching a live news report from Albuquerque about a home breakin that had taken place not half an hour earlier. A man named Brent Vogel had been murdered—shot four times in front of his wife. His wife was unhurt but was “shaken,” the reporter said. Shaken. Jesus, I’ll bet she was.

  Nathan instructed Kath to get into her own car and head up I-25 for Colorado. Drive with other cars around, he said, not on your own. Stay in a pack. She wasn’t to call anyone or stop anywhere along the way until she crossed the state line. She could sleep at a truck stop there if she needed to, but it had to be a brightly lit, well-trafficked one. Then she should head for the designated safe house in northern Colorado.

  Kath must have been in a panic because Nathan spent several minutes trying to calm her before he hung up. To spare him the same with me, I focused on mechanical movement, making fists with both hands, tightening and releasing my grip repeatedly as I watched the TV. Someone was upping the ante. Brent Vogel wasn’t some newbie porter. Like Nathan, he’d been in Gatehouse. And he’d just become another green circle on Nathan’s map.

  Nathan l
ifted the coffee tray from the top of the bookcase and laid it on his desk. “I’m about to take out a revolver and pistol,” he said, raising a false top on the bookcase and reaching behind the books on the first shelf. “I want you to know what I’m doing.”

  “OK.” My sense of fear grew. I tasted it at the back of my throat. I wasn’t afraid of Nathan, but of a war grown out of control. Not every evil deed was committed by a Sack—far from it. There were all kinds of evil and evildoers in the world. But Sacks were devoted to causing as much pain and misery as possible. They lived to see agony in their victims’ eyes. The bastard Sack who had killed Emily even took a photo of her with his phone, moments before he killed her with a tire iron and as I screamed for him to stop. His eyes danced with joy and he turned triumphantly to me when she took her last breath.

  Now, as Nathan removed his Smith & Wesson revolver and HK 9mm from his bookcase, I hated Sacks all the more.

  “You’ve got a weapon?” he asked, tucking the 9mm into his belt holster and reaching into the bookcase for two extra mags.

  I showed him my Seecamp. “Just for starters.”

  He smiled.

  “This is a royal mess, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “Looks like it.”

  I heard a soft ping followed closely by another ping from somewhere behind Nathan. On hearing the first, he marched to his desk and hit a key on his computer keyboard. Staring intently at the monitor, he hit three more keys, then shifted on his feet and lowered his hands to the desk, moving closer to the screen. He stood bolt upright.

  “Follow me,” he said. He dashed for the office door, calling out Lydia’s name.

  Lydia met Nathan in the kitchen. She’d heard the same pings in the television room while watching the news. “Brent Vogel,” she said, directing a finger toward the room.

  “I know,” Nathan said.

  “I heard the—”

  “Yes. There are two of them outside. Take this and go down to the cellar.” He handed her the revolver.

  “Nathan ...”

  “Take it now.”

  She took the revolver, and I could tell by the way she held it that this wasn’t her first time holding a gun.