by Joanne Pence
Michael stopped listening to the bureaucratic wrangling as he considered Zhao’s words. If Zhao wasn’t lying, Lady Hsieh’s corpse must have disintegrated. But how did it happen so quickly?
Michael wondered how much his brother Lionel knew. That Lionel might be involved in something shady wouldn’t be impossible to believe. Michael and Lionel were completely different, always had been, always would be.
Calls to Lionel’s cell phone and Georgetown landline were unsuccessful, but the call to George Washington University yielded better, if unexpected, results.
Michael phoned Boise State University’s anthropology department and received even more shocking news. Lionel hadn't checked in from his remote location, and all attempts to reach him had been unsuccessful.
Assurances were made that an electronic or technical glitch must be the reason, and that Lionel and his students were fine. They had supplies, a seasoned guide, and the weather was clear and warm. A search party had been dispatched. A group that size would be easy to locate, and they expected good news to arrive any moment.
Michael hung up on the garbled platitudes. Lionel was a desk jockey, not an out-in-the-field guy. He wouldn’t know the right end of tent. He had once mentioned Idaho to Michael in connection with the French alchemical book, and now he was missing in, of all places, Idaho.
It only took Michael a split second to make up his mind.
Time to go to Idaho
Part II
Idaho
Chapter 1
DEREK HAMMILL SNORTED with derision when he saw the two supposed tough guys sitting at a bar in tiny Riggins, Idaho. The dark tavern’s unpainted wood walls were decorated with posters and back-lit fixtures advertising beer and whiskey. A couple of dim amber pendant lights hung over the lacquered bar.
A former Delta Force major, Hammill had the wide shoulders and washboard abs of a weight lifter. He peeled off his sunglasses, revealing deep-set steel blue eyes that peered coldly from narrow slits in a hard, lean face with a heavy jaw. Pale blond hair made his tan appear darker than it was. Hammill’s men never referred to him by anything other than The Hammer.
A private jet had brought Hammill and the other seven members of his team to the McCall airport.
It didn't take long for them to track the stolen satellite phone to Riggins, a few miles east of Hell's Canyon near the confluence of the main Salmon River with one called the Little Salmon. The halfwit who took it must have used it to call just about everyone he knew. The town was small enough that Hammill found his quarry in the second bar he hit. Simply dialing the number and waiting for the phone to ring once told him exactly which of the customers he sought.
Hammill took a stool near Skinny Buck Jewel and ordered a beer. He then motioned the bartender to refill Skinny Buck and Big Kyle’s whiskey glasses. Small talk followed.
After a couple rounds of drinks Hammill convinced the guides to go outside with him to discuss hiring them for some private business. Big Kyle and Skinny Buck suspected that Hammill would propose something illegal, but that had never worried them before.
They sauntered down to the river and along the bank. Once there, Hammill pulled out a 10 mm Smith and Wesson 1076, its bulk making it look lethal. He released the safety. Big Kyle and Skinny Buck stumbled backwards, ready to run. “I wouldn't do that,” Hammill's words were soft, yet deadly. The two froze.
They continued on for nearly a mile to a remote, lonely spot sheltered by pines and thorny hackberry trees.
“The students and professor you stole the camping gear from,” Hammill said, “where are they?”
“What students?” Big Kyle asked innocently.
Hammill didn't bother to respond.
Skinny Buck couldn't tear his eyes from the weapon and broke into a cold sweat. “We don't know!” he said. “They wanted off the rafts after they overturned. We left them on the river bank like they told us to!”
“Without their gear?” Hammill's face contorted with contempt.
“Put the gun down, man.” Big Kyle shifted nervously. “No need for that. Who are you, a relative? Those kids forgot a couple backpacks, that's all. You want them, they're yours.”
“Where did you leave the kids?” Their lies bored Hammill.
“Far from here,” Big Kyle said earnestly. “On the main Salmon, up past the Middle Fork.”
“Where were they headed?”
Big Kyle glanced at Skinny Buck and swallowed hard before answering. “Don’t know.”
“But you know where you left them.”
“Sort of,” Big Kyle said. “But it’s far from here, and I’m sure they’ve moved on.”
Hammill grimaced as another man appeared from the tree-lined bank. “Nose, good timing.”
Brownley, aka Brown Nose or simply Nose, smirked. His hair had been clipped to no more than a quarter inch, his black mustache connected to a goatee that circled large, rubbery purple lips. He held an H&K G36 assault rifle across his chest, the stock nestled under his arm, and one hand on the trigger.
“They aren’t being helpful,” Hammill said.
Nose marched toward Big Kyle. Without hesitation he spun the H&K around and drove the butt into Big Kyle’s mouth and nose. Blood spurted, and the mountain of a man went down flat on his back, his eyes glazed as pain hit. Nose struck two more times.
“Wait! Don’t!” Skinny Buck cried. “No need for that. They were looking for pillars! We can’t take you there ‘cause there’s no such place! We left them on the banks of the Salmon. That’s all. They were fine. Let us go, please, fellas. We didn’t hurt no one.”
Nose turned on him. After two hard blows, Skinny Buck howled like a baboon. His attempts to fight back were pathetic. His nose split open, and blood gushed through his mustache to his mouth and the sides of his face. He lay on the ground whimpering.
Hammill turned to Big Kyle now on his hands and knees. “So they’re wandering around, and you can’t help us.”
Big Kyle’s bruised mouth swelled, his broken nose, and cracked front teeth left his face unrecognizable, but he somehow managed to open his eyes wide and look innocent. “Maybe...maybe I do have some idea where those pillars might be. There was talk, the kind that old timers tell kids. Don't go here. Don't go there. Bad medicine. Bad spirits. Weird, scary animals that nobody never seen before. Folks go there and are never heard from again. But it's all mumbo-jumbo. Not real.”
“Where did they say those pillars were, these old timers whose tales you're just now remembering?”
“Way the hell out in the middle of nowhere. The central wilderness area. Nobody goes out there. Never have. That's the reason for the tales. Heard tell there are some plenty weird animals there, too. Big, dangerous things. Nobody’s ever caught one, but those who survive tell tales that don’t even sound real. That’s why people stay away, even the Indians.”
“You've got a reason for everything, don't you?” Hammill said.
“It's God's own truth!” Big Kyle insisted.
The Hammer grabbed Skinny Buck by the hair, lifted his head up off the ground and held a Blackjack hunting knife against his throat. Skinny Buck's eyes opened wide and he made croaking sounds of terror. “I don't believe you.”
“Tell him!” Skinny Buck croaked, wary of the sharp steel touching his skin.
“All I know,” Big Kyle blubbered, “all I can tell you is the professor wanted to go northwest from Telichpah Flat. To the pillars.”
“That you say don’t exist.”
“I could be wrong! I could find them!”
“I doubt it.” Hammill drew the knife in one slick slice across Skinny Buck's throat, opening his carotid artery and jugular vein. Blood gushed out, splashing Big Kyle.
He crouched down, rocking and shaking so violently he could barely speak. “Please! I'll take you there. I’ll find them.”
Hammill shook his head. “Now you're lying to me.”
Big Kyle cried hard now. “No! I swear it!”
Hammill said, “Nose, y
ou know what we do to liars, don't you?”
Hammill walked back into the forest to the sound of Big Kyle's gurgled screams as the Nose pried open his broken mouth and cut out his tongue, leaving him to drown in his own blood.
Chapter 2
ON THE FLIGHTS between Washington D.C. and Boise, Idaho, Charlotte finally slept. Her emotional and physical exhaustion left her blissfully unaware of the news story captivating the area she headed toward.
She had snuck away from her burning house amid the hubbub of fire trucks, police, and nosey townspeople, made a quick stop at the bank to clean out her savings account, and then used cash to buy a plane ticket to Idaho. She might have been crazy to go there, but she had nowhere else to turn. Hiding and hoping that somehow, miraculously, this madness ended wasn’t her style. The scum behind this had taken away her home, her sanctuary, and years ago, her husband. She had nothing left to lose.
For a brief moment, in Jerusalem, she remembered how it felt to live, not merely to exist. She remembered how it felt to love, to laugh, to care.
She refused to go back to the emotionless woman she had been, the one filled with bitterness. Bitterness be damned; anger filled her. Despite her exhaustion and fear, doing something to answer unspoken questions buried deep in her soul caused her to feel more alive than she had for the past thirteen years.
As she left the Boise airport, a startling Idaho Statesman headline caught her eye. Professor Lionel Rempart and a group of his students had disappeared.
She bought the newspaper, absorbed every detail of the story, and even then remained stunned by the news.
Dennis had often said if something was too coincidental to be believable, it was no coincidence. Lionel Rempart’s disappearance was no accident, neither was the fact that he had come to Idaho, and that Dennis had learned Idaho was important to all that had happened.
A grim rage spurred her to action. Many phone calls later, she found a car company willing, for a hefty deposit, to rent via cash instead of a credit card. At a local D&B Supply sports outfitter, she bought boots, warm clothes, an extra box of ammo for her Glock, and a map showing the way to the town named headquarters for the search operation.
An all-night drive over winding mountainous roads took her to Telichpah Flat. Only it wasn’t a town. It was no more than a blip on a dirt road north of the Salmon River.
The Telichpah Flat General Store, a white clapboard building with a covered porch at the main entrance, seemed to be the only active business in town. A hand-painted sandwich board read “Temp Search Hqtrs In Back.”
The back of the building also had an outside entrance. A Lemhi County Sheriff Department car and gray Ford F250 were parked beside it, and a large make-shift parking area had been set up. She approached a scene of barely controlled chaos with news trucks, vans, trailers, satellite dishes and communications gear. Beyond that, to the right of the store, she saw a permanently closed bar-restaurant, and a couple of houses. To the left, a trash dump that included two rusted trucks and six wagon wheels. Nothing but darkly forested emptiness surrounded the town.
Welcome to Telichpah Flat. She parked at the edge of the town, lit a cigarette, and watched until the sun came up.
Chapter 3
“JUST KEEP HIM away from me!” Lemhi County Sheriff Jake Sullivan growled at his deputy as he pounded the stapler on his desk only to find it empty. Barrel-chested and muscular, he had close-cropped brown hair mottled with gray and receding at the temples. World-weary green eyes in a craggy, weather-beaten face missed little. They glowered now at the mounting paperwork around him.
He'd had it with the journalists, family members, university people, and miscellaneous busybodies who descended on Telichpah Flat, his patience stretched thinner than string on a crossbow.
Two days before, he received a call from the president of Boise State University informing him a visiting professor, his graduate student assistant, six seniors, and their guide had vanished on a field trip to the national preserve. The U.S. Forest Service area station wasn't staffed for search and rescue, so the job went to local law enforcement. Although only a small portion of the Wilderness Area was situated in Lemhi County, the university group had entered via Telichpah Flat which was, so Jake got stuck with the operation.
Everyone from the governor on down didn't want their names connected with the potentially tragic situation, and agreed the sheriff should take complete charge of the problem. It had rapidly turned into a very big problem for Jake Sullivan.
The college students' mysterious disappearance had captured the public's imagination. Human interest stories about them abounded. The fact that the professor's brother was Michael Rempart, the broodingly handsome archeologist that People magazine once called “a modern day Indiana Jones,” added fuel to the media fire.
Phone calls, emails, and media reports, along with the usual flood of crank sightings, dubious eyewitnesses, and publicity-seeking, self-appointed best friends bombarded Jake. At one point, he slammed down the phone before he realized it really was Katie Couric.
Not only did the story intrigue the media, but also the utter desolation of the area. Reporters and photographers descended on the wilderness, acting as if they had just discovered Idaho and had just learned that it consisted of not thousands, not hundreds of thousands, but millions of acres of barely charted virgin land.
They airlifted in satellite dishes and expensive gear to give them a few of the comforts of home. Jake expected to see a Starbucks open up any day now.
The university group’s guide, Dan Hoffman, found himself the scapegoat for the disappearance. Cable TV talking heads bellowed that if any of the students or their teacher were found dead, he should be charged with negligent homicide for walking away from the group after the professor “allegedly” fired him.
A crazed psychic announced that Hoffman went mad and killed everyone as they slept. The story earned the main headline slot on The Drudge Report.
Hoffman led the search party to the place where he'd left the hikers, and pointed out the direction the professor had insisted on taking. The road back to civilization was well-marked. Had the professor so desired, Hoffman insisted, he could have easily turned around and marched the students to safety.
The searchers discovered, as Hoffman had warned, that the trail Rempart wanted to take had been cut off by a landslide, the terrain around it too steep and slick for inexperienced students to traverse.
Dogs brought in to track the students revealed that they hadn't traveled over the landslide, but avoided the area completely via a circular route to the banks of Squaw Creek. The creek entered the Salmon River just above some treacherous rapids.
Once the news leaked, the press, in a caravan of news trucks and rented SUVs, demanded to see the area. Higher ups ordered Jake to assist. He’d be damned if he would let a bunch of tinhorns trample all over a spot that might have some significance later in his investigation, and took them instead on a teeth-rattling, bone-jarring, off-road ride for several miles along the Salmon River road.
Their relief when the ride ended vanished when they learned they needed to carry their equipment uphill to see the wild, frothing turbulence of the Salmon's Pine Creek Rapids. Once there, the sheriff pointed out that they stood on the exact same location as Captain William Clark when he decided he could not navigate the Salmon River and turned away to meet up again with Meriwether Lewis. In his journal, Clark described the river as “almost one continued rapid...the water is Confined between huge Rocks and Currents beeting from one against another for Some distance below &c. &c. At one of those rapids the mountains so Clost as to prevent a possibility of a portage....The water runs with great violence from one rock to the other on each Side foaming & roreing thro rocks in every direction.”
The reporters and cameramen gasped at the dangerous flow, and seconded Captain Clark's wisdom.
Jake then told them they would need to hike yet another two miles to reach the place where the students had disappeared along �
��Sego” Creek. He lied about the name to keep the politically correct off his back. Exhausted, cold, and miserable, the reporters chose to go no farther. All were quite happy to return to the relative warmth and safety of their rented trailers.
Since the trail went cold at Squaw Creek, Jake believed Rempart must have met with some rafters who offered to help him. Unfortunately, once on the Salmon River, the university group could have ended up just about anywhere along its banks, provided they survived the rapids. That meant the search area was considerably larger than originally thought.
He had no choice but to call in reinforcements even though he hated that so many people would be tramping through the pristine wilderness. Normally, except for the heart of summer, this part of Central Idaho stayed almost devoid of humans. Rowdy sportsmen from out-of-state were the biggest problem Jake faced, and he liked it that way just fine. The attention the disappearance received would cause many more people to learn about Idaho’s national forests, and perhaps decide to visit.
He didn’t wanted to see any of this change. Born forty-eight years earlier in Salmon City, he had left as a young man for Los Angeles, only to crawl back to escape unwanted, regrettable notoriety. He found himself middle-aged, divorced, childless, and appreciating the beauty, peace, quiet and particularly the seclusion of the area. All of which were sadly lacking at the moment.
And now his deputy had just told him that someone from, of all places, U.S. Customs, wanted to speak to him! How lost was this guy? Since no international border, seaport, or air terminal was anywhere near, Jake wasn’t interested.
Deputy Mallick’s mouth felt dry as he pondered whether to say more or to hurry away from his mercurial boss. He swallowed hard before sheepishly adding, “The Customs agent is a woman.”
