“She took it,” he said.
“I wish we still had her flash drives.”
He smiled. “We do.” He reached into his coat pocket twice, both times retrieving several drives and setting them on the table in front of me. There were six in all. I was certain Hall had taken only five with her. Somehow I’d missed the sixth drive.
“She hid one at the bottom of her pack,” Nathan explained. “Don’t go online with them, and use only Claude’s laptop. One of these is Gatehouse password secured. Let me know when you want to see it.”
“Do you know how many hunters were sent after Hall before she called herself restored?”
“Two,” he said. “She killed both of them.”
“The second hunter, the one in Estes Park, is that why he was older? Because he was supposed to be more experienced?”
“Russ McFarland, that was his name. Yes, he was more experienced.”
When we left the ranch, the four of us crammed into Claude’s Ford truck, the autumn sun was a half-circle on the horizon, pushing pink and orange before it into the winter-white sky. It was a tight fit in the back of the cab, though Nathan helped out by using two of our backpacks as a footrest on the floor of the front passenger seat and holding Claude’s computer on his lap. Zack complained about his knees being too close to the back of the driver’s seat, but his real problem was mine as well. We had been chased and chased some more, and here we were on the run again. Imagine your worst road trip, then imagine it ten times worse. The difference was that Hall wasn’t with us.
How were other hunters and their porters faring? Were they on the run too? I longed to know if other hunters had been hunted as we had, if other porters, cut off from Gatehouse, were shuttling their hunters from town to town, battling platoons of young Sacks who marched dutifully, like high-stepping colonial Brits, to an almost certain death. And what did the outside world think of all the deaths since late October? Did they blame them all on the full moon, Halloween, drunks on the highway?
We drove west to Questa then hopscotched our way from highway to highway until we hit Route 84 and crossed the state line into Colorado. When we passed the “Welcome to Colorful Colorado” sign, Zack yipped his approval. According to him, we were finally traveling in the right direction. Pagosa Springs, thirty miles to the northwest, was the first town of any size we’d pass through if we stayed on 84. Then came U.S. 180 and Durango.
Of course. Nathan and Claude were ten steps ahead of me. Manifest Manifest was from Durango, as was Capitolina, the Sack who had killed Chester Avila. The city was Avila’s home too, and the home of Joseph Madden, the Colorado LCA treasurer. And Hall? Although Nathan and Claude hadn’t said so, I had no doubt that the trackers they had placed in and under our old rental SUV were hitching their way to Durango.
Four hours after leaving the B&R, after passing through downtown Durango, we headed east, into the foothills, and wound our way to a large metal-roofed house on Saddle Ranch Road. Another house in the middle of nowhere. I wondered if we wouldn’t be safer staying at a hotel in downtown Durango—though hoteliers might frown on our gunplay and the mess we left behind. I thought back to Claude’s kitchen and remembered the face of the Sack I’d shot in the neck. A Desire named Advancing, as it turned out. I’d felt no pity when I shot him—killing an attacker bent on killing you is different from hunting, from taking a Sack by surprise and watching fear, dread, and regret cross his face in rapid parade in the seconds before death—but I wished I hadn’t looked into his eyes afterward.
This timber house with a blue metal roof was larger even than Nathan’s house in Santa Fe, something I didn’t think possible, and being on higher ground than the neighboring houses, it gave us a good view of the surrounding area. It must have belonged to a friend of Nathan’s or Claude’s, but I didn’t bother asking them for details. Nathan picked the lock, and Claude keyed a code into the alarm pad by the door.
“What if we’re tracked here?” I asked as we dropped our backpacks by the great room’s stone fireplace.
“Then we’ve got a serious problem,” Claude said, setting his backpack on an armchair and unzipping the top. “Because neither my truck nor our belongings were tagged with a tracker, and only the four of us know we’re here.”
Apparently former Threes have no interest in subtlety. If we were tracked, Claude was saying, one of us was a traitor.
“Here,” he said, handing me his laptop. “Why don’t you get started on those drives?”
I set up shop in the kitchen, on a stool at the granite-topped island, while Nathan got the coffee going—the house’s owners, I quickly discovered, were strangers to tea—and Zack peered into the well-stocked refrigerator. He tossed a chunk of white cheddar onto the island and grunted, his way of letting me know the plastic-wrapped treasure was for me.
I began by searching each drive for inappropriately but innocuously named folders and files, something that didn’t belong on a drive belonging to a supposedly restored Sack. On one of the drives there were three such folders, two named “Summer vacation” loaded with JPEGs and another named “Favorites” containing MP3 files, but nothing in them screamed Sack at me.
And none of Hall’s files, including the text files on her Gatehouse drive, which Nathan opened for me, were of a size that might suggest hidden data. A look around Hall’s home office had told me she was no computer geek. I doubted she was capable of embedding data in a JPEG or text file. Still, I went so far as to search each drive’s directory for executable files, the kind of files that could hold large amounts of undetectable data. I didn’t find any. If Hall had embedded data, she had embedded precious little of it. It was time to go low tech, to read what was right in front of my face.
I began with the folders containing information on Sacks. The folder marked “Returns” contained a return list that, like Nathan’s, named only Sacks living in New Mexico and Colorado. Folder after folder, photo after photo, idiot Sack name after idiot Sack name. I found Capitolina, Manifest Manifest, and, in the folder marked “S–U,” Sever. That is, I found Sever’s name. Someone—one guess who—had wiped clean every speck of information on him, including his photo and address.
When Nathan entered the kitchen, I ran my finger over the touchpad, scrolling Sever’s name off the screen. It occurred to me then that in my file search, I might run into the Alarm who killed Emily, if Nathan hadn’t wiped him out of the records too. As far as I knew, that Sack was still alive, though by now he had to be a Resolute or Festal. Six years had passed, but in my mind his image was crisp and focused, like a photograph—every line of his face, every curve and angle of his body.
“Anything interesting?” Nathan asked, pouring the last of the coffee from the carafe. He leaned back on the kitchen counter, blew over the top of his mug, and took a sip. A tired, frazzled look had once again settled over him, but that business suit, minus the tie, was still there.
“Nothing yet. I’m pretty sure she didn’t embed anything in a file.” I idly scrolled down the page, noting the Sack levels as I went. “Interesting thing. I’ve yet to see an Embodiment in these folders. Why is that?”
He pulled up a stool and sat at the island. “Supposedly there are only a hundred of them in the world. I wouldn’t be surprised if none of them lived in the mountain West, or even the United States.”
“What do you mean ‘supposedly’ there are only a hundred?”
“I’ve never met an Embodiment, and I’ve never known anyone who has.”
I stopped tugging at the plastic wrap spot-welded around the cheese and sat up straight. “In all your time at Gatehouse you never met one?”
He shook his head.
“No one you knew at Gatehouse ever met one?”
“I’m not convinced they exist.”
I was stunned by his words. Who the Embodiments were, what they were—this was the talk of hunters. Gatehouse discouraged speculation about them. I wasn’t even supposed to be looking for them on Hall’s drives. But of cou
rse hunters talked among themselves. Zack said all the evil Embodiments committed caused physical changes in their brain, and Connor—I remembered—had always believed that changes to the brain wrought changes at the cellular level, making Embodiments something beyond human.
“But you’ve never said anything.”
“I’ve never talked about Embodiments, with you or anyone else.” He grimaced as he took a sip of coffee then put his mug down on the island.
That was true. He didn’t talk about them, and he didn’t like his hunters talking about them. “Why would so many people say they exist if it weren’t true?”
“I’m not saying they don’t exist, I’m saying I don’t know if they exist. But I’ve never met one, and I have serious doubts.”
I hopped off the stool and headed for the coffeemaker to brew a fresh pot. Processing this new information would require caffeine.
Nathan swiveled on his stool. “What do you think of the Embodiments?”
“They freak me out, scare me,” I said, spooning coffee into the basket. “I never want to run into one.”
“Exactly. Every hunter feels the same way. So do porters who believe in the Embodiments. And fear is a very handy tool.”
I leaned back on the counter, listening to the soft drip of water as the aroma of hazelnut coffee filled the kitchen. The kitchen lined with warm wooden cabinets, the scent of coffee, the quiet conversation—it was almost cheery, despite the topic, and despite feeling that we weren’t entirely safe in this new house. “Hall believes they exist.”
Nathan frowned. “She’d like you to think that.”
“She said they were ‘extraordinary.’ That was her word.”
“So how do you fight an extraordinary, even superhuman creature?”
I shrugged. “Got me.”
“You don’t. That’s the point. They want you to give up before you’ve even started. Demoralize you, distract you.”
I poured myself coffee, inhaled the steam, wrapped my hands around the mug. “Isn’t it demoralizing enough that we’ll never completely defeat them?”
He took his mug to the sink, dumped his dregs-like coffee down the drain, then refilled his cup from the fresh carafe. “I’ve told you before that this is a never-ending battle, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be fought.” He spoke emphatically now, with more emotion than he usually allowed himself. “What would our lives look like if those who lived before us hadn’t decided this was a battle worth fighting? What will the world look like a decade from now if we don’t fight it today?”
He was right, but damn, I wanted finality. In my weaker hours I wanted it at the expense of losing—just to be done with it all. A lifelong battle without hope of victory went against my nature.
“Do what’s right,” he said before heading out of the kitchen. “Don’t think about forever, think about what you need to do today.”
Buoyed by coffee and Nathan’s pep talk, I sat down at the computer, vowing to knock Sever and my sister’s killer off my radar screen for now. We needed to find the second Robert, fast.
I exited the Sack list and returned to Hall’s vacation folders. Again I opened the first folder, this time carefully scanning the photos, then I clicked open the second folder. Right away I noticed a difference in this second folder. Within it were two additional folders, one named “RMNP, July 2, Aug 3,” the second titled “RMNP, Aug 2, Sep 1.” RMNP, Rocky Mountain National Park, was a common enough abbreviation, but the dates were off. Vacation folders were usually labeled with one date only, or a pair of inclusive dates. Why was August 3 in the first folder and August 2 in the second?
In the second RMNP folder, there were thirty high-resolution photos, all with short captions and, as far as I could see from the thumbnails and captions, all photos taken last summer of people and mountains. “Think low tech,” I said aloud, skimming the thumbnails. How would I hide information if I didn’t know a router from a modem?
One caption, “Nathan at Big Thompson, July 2,” caught my eye. Could it be? But the Nathan in the enlarged photo was a teenager fishing, casting a line into the Big Thompson River. Eyeing the camera over his shoulder, his expression was one of confusion and offense, as though the photographer lacked good manners. In the next photo, “At Pepino’s, July 2,” five diners at an outdoor café wore similar expressions, one of them, his image blurred, turning sharply from the camera lens. The next five photos were the same—bewildered faces, frowns, and testy glances over shoulders. Hall, if she’d been the one wielding the camera, didn’t know any of these people. They were props, like the pre-printed husbands and wives that came with newly bought picture frames.
Then why name one of the strangers Nathan? I exited the photos and went back to the display of thumbnails. Low tech meant things in plain sight: names, letters, numbers. The fishing teenager, Nathan, was photo number seven of thirty. I mentally played with the numbers, but they were meaningless to me. Then I saw it. A connection so obvious it was laughable. Seventh month, first day—“Sep 1” in the folder title—equals seventh photo, first word. “Sep 1” was the word “Nathan.” My pulse quickening, I worked backward through the captions using the four folder dates as guides.
The sentence I assembled, “Use 17 on Nathan,” made no sense by itself, but Hall, low-tech creature that she was, no doubt meant “17” literally, as in the seventeenth photo. I double clicked on photo seventeen in the first RMNP folder and enlarged it, searching for clues, but to my eyes it was just another photo of outraged tourists having their picture taken by a nosy stranger.
Photo seventeen in the second RMNP folder, a dozen men and women sipping drinks on a veranda, was something altogether different. Everyone in it was at ease, smiling at the camera or at one another. I enlarged the photo and scrolled it left to right, examining each face until I came to a couple at the far right. Jesus. I glanced up to see if anyone was in the great room. The man—I knew that face—was Manifest Manifest, and the woman was Lydia Tennant.
Chapter 21
Alert, on the edge of panic, Zack called out from the top of the stairs. “Somebody. There’s somebody—no, there’s three.” I shut the laptop and hurried to the large window overlooking the expansive grounds at the front of the house. “I see them,” I said, reaching for my gun. I watched as three men emerged from the safety of a juniper grove and dropped to the ground, flattening themselves a hundred feet from the house.
“Nathan!” Zack shouted. “Claude! They found us again!” He sped down the stairs and ran for the window, grabbing for his gun, unable to flip away the Velcro safety strap with his thumb. Exhausted, adrenaline coursing through his body, he’d already lost control of his fine motor skills.
“Zack, oxygen breaths,” I said. “Remember your training.” The men rose and hastened their pace toward the house.
Nathan and Claude, their footsteps like thunder on the stairs, came up behind us, weapons ready. “Everyone move away from the window,” Nathan said.
I spun to my right and flattened my back to the wall, suddenly aware that the Sacks who were striding so boldly to our door might have been sent to draw us to the window so snipers in the distant trees could pick us off. I’d never heard of a Sack sniper, but the typically sloppy monsters were learning fast.
“I don’t understand,” Zack said between jagged breaths. At the other side of the window, head thrown back, he implored the ceiling. “How do they keep finding us?”
“First things first,” Claude said.
“You two stay out of sight until you hear from me,” Nathan said. He nodded to Claude and the two of them sprinted up the stairs and cut left, out of sight.
Above us a door opened then slammed shut. Silence followed. Zack could no longer stand it. “Are the Sacks still coming?” he said, his voice cracking. “I have to look.”
“Don’t you move,” I said, swinging sideways, my left arm now pressed to the wall.
“I just want to go home,” he said pitifully.
I felt tears
come to my eyes. “I know. Me too.”
“I’m sorry to be such a chicken.”
“You’re not. I don’t know what we’d do without you.”
His lips trembled as he tried to smile. “Liar.”
Eight shots, like eight rocks striking stone, came from somewhere on the second floor, then all was quiet.
“They got them,” Zack said.
“They’re checking for more, don’t move.” What really was happening up there? My imagination reeled, the possibilities tumbling in my mind. Did Nathan know Manifest Manifest? Had he taken that photo of Manifest and his wife? Or was he in the dark, unaware that Lydia sipped cocktails with the enemy? He couldn’t be behind all this. It wasn’t possible. I’d known the man for two years, trusted him with my life in the worst of circumstances. And yet ... and yet, Nathan had been married to Lydia for three years. Jesus, one of us was so screwed. “Christ,” I said.
“Jane?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Just taking a breath.”
“‘Christ’ is a breath?”
Claude and Nathan emerged onto the landing and jogged down the stairs, each with a rifle in hand, and I silently admonished myself for wondering if one or more of the shots I’d heard hadn’t been directed at a Sack. I had to trust. As Nathan had told me just three days earlier, there’s not much point to life if you can’t. Trouble was, in our business a trust betrayed was a deadly thing. I’d trusted Kath and been proved wrong, and he’d trusted Hall. Both of us were lucky to be alive.
“Looks like it was just the three,” Nathan said. “But one of us needs to keep watch at all times. And keep well back from the windows.”
Zack relaxed, his shoulders sinking down and inward like deflating dough. “I hate to point out the obvious,” he began.
Still holding his rifle, Claude sank into the couch. “As I said before, we have a serious problem.”
“Well, don’t look at me,” Zack said. “I was minding my own business in Laramie.”
All Souls: A Gatehouse Thriller Page 21
