*****
Eventually, he crossed the Colorado River via the footbridge in Eagle Rim Park and followed the curve of Riverside Parkway toward the town's large rail yard. To scout the security of it, he walked its length, ducking in and out of side streets dead-ending at the rails. He crossed the rails at 29 Road, and then approached the yard once more from the east via a dusty access road paralleling Interstate 70. There was no visible video surveillance. And while there was a small glassed-in booth atop a short tower amid the parked railcars, there did not appear to be a security guard present.
Arkin jumped a broken fence, slipped into the long lines of coupled train cars, and quickly found what he was looking for: A Union Pacific train oriented for west-bound departure. The Union Pacific main line ran into Utah, where another line turned north, into Idaho, and then northwest toward the Columbia River, running along the border of Oregon and Washington. There—Arkin knew from having familiarized himself with rail lines during a manhunt several years earlier—he could jump over to a northbound train of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad, which would get him within striking distance of the Canadian border. Better still, this westbound Union Pacific train looked to have several dozen autorack freight cars loaded with brand new pickup trucks that might offer some modicum of shelter—even comfort. But just as he was feeling that things might finally be turning his way, an engine blew several short blasts of its horn, and the train jerked and began to move. Arkin immediately began to jog alongside, watching for a freight car door without the usual giant padlock. The train was slowly gaining speed, and Arkin was running out of train yard as its many sets of side tracks began to converge into the main line. He could hear the clang-clang of a crossing signal bell as the engine approached a cross street. Soon he'd be plainly visible to motorists waiting at the crossing. He broke into a sprint, huffing and puffing as he ran. Just short of the first cross street, he spotted an unlocked door. He grabbed hold of the cold, dirty metal of lowest rung of an access ladder, hauled himself off the ground, shimmied around the corner of the car, and scrambled up onto the narrow coupler. There, he balanced precariously as he caught his breath and studied the door. Puzzled as to how to unlatch it, he decided to simply give the door a pull and was relieved to find that it was unsecured and swung open. In moments, he was inside the freight car and unlocking the door of a big, American made, double-cab truck, using the lockout tool he'd made out of the aluminum strip he found outside Ouray. A minute later, he was lying down across the big back seat of the truck, his gear stowed out of site, as the train continued to roll forward, gaining speed, into the West.
*****
His first night on the rails was a fitful one. The train seemed to move at a snail's pace. He knew it was going faster than it felt. But it still frustrated him, and his frustration, in turn, kept him awake. Still, he knew it was a lot more secure than trying to hitchhike so many miles, risking attention—or a potential ID check—from a passing cop.
When he finally did nod off, he dreamt that he was back at Hannah's hospital. But it was different. It was much larger, and seemed mostly abandoned, with entire wings empty, the power off, the doors of antiquated rooms hanging open, their old-fashioned steel-frame beds unoccupied and covered with dust. He was trying to find Hannah. He had no shoes on. Empty, dim hallways disappeared into impenetrable darkness in all directions. When he was able to chase down a doctor or nurse, nobody could help him. Nobody knew anything about Hannah. Nobody could even direct him to the information desk. He grew frantic, running down seemingly endless halls, short of breath, shouting her name into the cavernous dark. But there was no answer.
*****
Waking from the dream, in a cold sweat, to find the train at a temporary stop on a side track in the middle of nowhere, he gave long, pained thought to jumping off and, come what may, finding his way home to Hannah. But he held tight, and soon the train began to move forward once again.
TWENTY-SIX
Four days and three freight trains later, Arkin's thumb was in the air as he walked north on Washington State Route 9, on a bridge over the Snohomish River, having just hopped from the slowing train as it passed a small airfield busy with prepping skydivers. It was a cool, damp, overcast morning, the fresh northwest breeze carrying a hint of the nearby Pacific Ocean. Arkin managed to hitch his first ride—in a Volkswagen Westfalia van driven by a young couple wearing frayed alpaca wool sweaters and smelling of patchouli—before reaching the far end of the bridge.
Shortly after midday, he left the road and, checking that nobody was watching him, ducked into a stand of poplars. With great reluctance, he ditched his gun and spare magazines, burying them in a plastic bag in the off-chance he might come back this way. Then he hoofed it through a series of muddy cow pastures, climbing over half a dozen rusting, barbed wire fences, before crossing the grassy ditch, string of slightly leaning telephone poles, and small two-lane road marking the approximate location of the U.S.-Canada border. Three more miserable miles of walking in the rain, one more hard-earned ride, and he was on the outskirts of Vancouver where, on the north bank of the wide Fraser River, he found a small marina with coin-operated showers and cleaned himself up.
By evening, in a park on the southeastern edge of Vancouver's Granville Island gallery and shopping district, and with a free tourist map in hand, Arkin stowed his pack in a thicket of bushes and reconnoitered the area, noting the best escape routes and hiding places. With the approach of dusk, a sprinkle of rain began to fall from the gray overcast sky. The air smelled of the cooking in the vast food halls of the public market, just upwind, near the other end of the small island-peninsula. An exotic variety of frying pierogies, Asian noodles, smoked salmon, sausages, hearty soups, waffles, tacos, pizzas, and more. He remembered the food halls well from a time, years ago, when he and Hannah wandered the city after disembarking from an Alaska cruise ship. But he had neither the funds nor the free time to visit them now.
On his left, on the opposite side of a relatively quiet street lined with small galleries, workshops, a glass blower's studio, and small offices for architects and wine distributors, the address of record for Seastar Aquaculture was coming up in a few dozen yards. Warm yellow light emanated from its tall windows. Arkin made a slow pass, pretending to peer through the windows of the shops opposite the address, all the while studying the address in the reflection. A sign—with letters formed of bent rebar welded to a rectangular backing of rusted carbon steel floor plate—read "Liber." It appeared to be an art gallery of some sort. Arkin could just make out frames on the walls, as well as indeterminate shapes of sculptures here and there about the showroom. He continued his stroll, playing the gawking tourist, even stopping in a wine shop for a quick tasting of British Columbia chardonnays, before coming to a dead end and doubling back on Liber's side of the street. Reaching the address, he peered through the window, doing his best to look lost. The gallery was lit, but he could see nobody inside. He tried the door. It opened. He went in. The air smelt of drying acrylic paints. An artist was at work, somewhere. He wandered the floor, examining each piece. The works were anything but cheerful. Several gray sculptures of grotesque, melting humanoid forms, their mouths agape in seeming agony, eyes looking upward, arms raised to the sky as if in earnest appeal to some unseen deity. One labeled "Srebrenica." Another, "Truth." Then there were the paintings. The first he saw appeared to be some sort of interpretation of a sunset before a great storm. A last, narrow band of red sunlight disappearing below the black horizon, dark and ominous clouds blotting out the sky everywhere else. The next painting he came to was large—maybe six feet wide, four feet tall—dominating the entire left wall of the gallery. It depicted a dark landscape of bare rock and crumbling stone structures under a twilit but starless sky. Colorless, fiendish humanoid creatures—naked, with emaciated bodies, their faces the very picture of horror and suffering—stood in clusters around bonfires of white flame that looked as though they provided no warmth. As with the gallery's
sculptures, many of the humanoids in the painting were looking skyward, their faces raised up in sorrowful, deeply fearful pleading, but with nothing above to answer them. Arkin's attention zeroed in on one of the figures who stood out from the others. He, assuming he was a he, sat on a broken stone wall, his hands resting in his lap, facing not the sky, but the horizon. His skin seemed to have at least some trace of color. Just a hint perhaps, but more than the others. Perhaps it was Arkin's imagination. Arkin looked closer. Was the figure smiling?
"What do you think?" a heavily accented female voice asked.
Arkin, startled, suppressed the urge to spin around, and instead turned, with forced casualness, to see a tall woman with long, straight, brunette hair tied back, leaning against the frame of a narrow doorway to a back room. How long had she been there?
"What is it?" Arkin asked, ostensibly returning his attention to the painting, but keeping close tabs on the woman in his peripheral vision.
"The piece depicts the consequences of man's refusal to accept that there is no God."
"Yes?"
"It is inspired by Lord Byron's poem 'Darkness.' Are you familiar?"
"I know of Byron. I don't recall that particular poem."
"'The brows of men by the despairing light wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits the flashes fell upon them.'" The woman began to take slow steps toward Arkin as she recited the poem. Arkin pretended to be transfixed by the painting while his mind raced through the most effective options for a hands-on counterattack if the woman turned out to be one of his shadowy pursuers. "'Some lay down and hid their eyes and wept. And some did rest their chins upon their clenched hands, and smiled. And others hurried to and fro, and fed their funeral piles with fuel, and looked up with mad disquietude on the dull sky.'" She paused as she came alongside Arkin, seeming as lost in the painting as Arkin was pretending to be. "What is your impression of it?"
"My impression?" he asked, turning to look at her. She had crystalline green eyes, their color brought out all the more by dark eye shadow. She also wore a pair of overly large golden ankh earrings that were probably expensive but certainly ostentatious and corny. She stared at Arkin with a penetrating intensity.
"What do you feel or think of when you look at the painting?"
Arkin thought for a moment. "Evil."
The woman smiled. "Precisely. To the extent that such a thing as evil exists—then yes, evil."
"It exists."
"You sound certain."
As they both stood facing the painting, Arkin had the urge to ask if there were any other businesses at this address, or if the woman had ever heard of Seastar, or whether her accent happened to be Balkan, or whether her employer, boyfriend, or husband happened to be a sniper and murderer.
"This one figure here," Arkin said, pointing to the humanoid that faced the horizon and was possibly smiling. "He's different."
"He represents men who are ruled by reason."
"As opposed to what?"
"Animal instinct."
Arkin considered that. "But animals aren't conscious of their mortality." The woman shrugged. "And you are the artist?"
"No. The artist is the magnificent Andrej Petrović, owner of this gallery."
Her use of the word magnificent struck Arkin as more than a little odd. "And what is the magnificent Andrej Petrović asking for this piece?"
"I'm afraid this one is not for sale. But works of similar size and quality generally sell for around $40,000."
"Canadian?"
"Yes."
"I imagine that art of this, ah, uniqueness appeals to a limited number of potential buyers. What sorts of people purchase these works?"
The woman's eyes conveyed a sudden loss of interest in talking with Arkin. "I don't understand your question."
"It's just that these works are very. . . ."
"Dark."
"Yes."
"The buyers tend to be people who appreciate the beauty of truth. Sometimes the truth is dark."
"So it is."
Arkin made a brief inspection of the gallery's other works, all the while stealing furtive glances to study the layout of the room, of the building. Of the windows, doors, and locks. There didn't appear to be any motion sensors. That was good.
"Thank you," Arkin said, and he opened the door and stepped back out into the rain-wet street.
*****
Electing to conserve the remainder of his cash, Arkin spent the next two hours scavenging a meal of sourdough bread crusts and half-eaten fruit from the garbage dumpsters behind the public market. As it grew dark, he positioned himself on a park bench that offered a distant view of the Liber gallery storefront. He pretended to read a discarded Vancouver Sun newspaper by streetlight, all the while keeping his eyes on the gallery.
The flaws of his vantage point worried him. For one thing, it looked like there were ways someone could slip into the gallery without him seeing him or her. Worse, there were too many places from which someone else could keep a lookout over the gallery and remain concealed. Unfortunately, unless he took the excessive risk of breaking into a nearby building, the park bench was about the best he could do.
A 'closed' sign appeared in the gallery's window at 8 p.m., and the lights finally went off just after 10. Shortly after that, a ludicrously tiny European car emerged from a parking access alley two doors down from the gallery. As it turned away, in the direction of the Anderson Street Bridge, Arkin was reasonably certain he saw the silhouette of the sycophant art gallery docent at the wheel.
Intending to let another 30 minutes go by before approaching the gallery once again, he found himself torn over his next move. If he could afford the luxury of proper tactics, he'd surveil the gallery for at least a couple of days, figuring out patterns, best ingress and egress routes, and so on. Ideally, with a team of at least four operatives. He'd have blueprints of the layout of the interior of the target and surrounding buildings. NCIC printouts and DMV files on any employees or owners. Phone records. But time wasn't on his side. He had to make due. Had to take risks. He wanted to rush in without bothering with surveillance. Still, the rough voices of innumerable instructors roared at him from the Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia training courses of his past. Scarred, leather-skinned, barrel-chested trolls of men, chewing on the soggy butts of long-dead cigars, bitter for having been withdrawn from the field of operations before they were ready to hang it up, for having to endure the diminishment of coaching the generation that would replace them. Howling at him from the shadows, berating him for rushing, imploring him to take his time. What's the first cardinal principal of ops recon, dumbass? There are old eyeballs, and there are bold eyeballs, but there are no old, bold eyeballs!
At last compromising with himself, he settled on a delay of 24 hours. Twenty-four hours, most of which would hopefully be spent surveilling the gallery. Having made his decision, he worked out a plan for keeping watch, from concealment, through the night and next morning.
*****
Almost exactly 24 hours later, having taken a brief nap in the bushes just after dawn, having spent nearly $30 of his precious remaining cash after finding a store, many blocks away, that sold a flimsy and barely adequate folding mini lock pick set, and otherwise burning up time circling the area and observing while trying to be inconspicuous, he was sitting on the same bench, wearing a change of clothes and wide-brimmed hat he'd shoplifted, having just watched the same mysterious gallery hostess depart in her miniature car. He rose, stretched his stiff knees, and began his first pass. As he drew closer, walking along the opposite sidewalk, he saw that the interior was completely dark, just as it had been the same time the previous day. Instead of walking right up to the front door, Arkin slipped down the alley from which the car had emerged, turned right, and stood before a series of dingy, unmarked doors—the third of which was clearly the back entrance to the Liber gallery. Nothing seemed to have changed in 24 hours. Arkin scanned the area. All was quiet. He walked up to the door. An un-keyed kn
ob and a common deadbolt. Piece of cake.
Despite his confidence, it took him a good 10 minutes of raking the proper pick tool back and forth across the deadbolt's lock pins before they were all in the open position, allowing him to turn the lock open with the set's detachable torque tool. But at last, he opened the door, slowly and quietly, stepped inside, shut the door behind him, and switched on a small but impressively bright LED keychain light he'd snagged from a tourist junk shop. Scanning the room with the keychain light, he saw that he was in what appeared to serve as the office and workspace—the room from which the hostess had emerged yesterday. A semi-finished painting stood on an easel at the center of the room. Streaks of black over a thin band of red. Perhaps another doomsday sunset painting to be. A long table against one wall held cans and tubes of paint, a rack of brushes, and unfamiliar instruments Arkin could only assume were sculptor's tools. There was a tall wardrobe in the corner to the left of the back door, but no storage cabinets anywhere. In one corner, a small desk. Arkin went right to it and began searching though papers in its in-tray. Receipts for paint, sculpting clay, canvases, and the utilities for the studio. Rough sketches of projects to come. Articles torn from art magazines. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing useful. No phone or fax machine. The desk had one shallow drawer that he pulled open to reveal more papers under a small paperback book titled The Denial of Death. Arkin flipped through the pages of the paperback. It was well-worn and yellowing, with many dog-eared pages and underlined passages. He came to a page that was bookmarked. Notes scratched in a foreign-looking hand in the margin said Awareness and fear of death = destructive yearning for false feelings of immortality provided by myriad sources—power, control, victory, an enduring legacy, fame, a place in one of the afterlives promised by the world's religions = evil! Then he thumbed through the papers. They were a stack of identical copies of what looked like some sort of newsletter from a group calling itself "Sapere Aude." Though his Latin was abominable, Arkin thought the name meant something about knowledge or wisdom. The lead article had to do with qualities of childhood that facilitated the development of strong self-esteem, eventually fortifying people against anxiety over mortality. He closed the drawer, then dumped out the contents of the waste basket next to the desk. Crumpled receipts. Used coffee cups. Again, nothing of use.
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