River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy)

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  “He’s a U.S. citizen?” Loesser asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And there’s no definitive evidence of foul play? Have the locals completed their investigation? Probably not, if it all happened last night.”

  “Of course they haven’t. I don’t know how big Creede, Colorado is, but it’s no major metropolis. It’s going to take them a while.”

  “Then let them do what they have to do,” Loesser said. “No sense in you running off to Colorado. You’d just be in the way, and we don’t have any indication that this is any of the agency’s business. We don’t mess around with American citizens inside the U.S.”

  He said that last part as if he were explaining something that Truly had never heard before. “But he works for us.”

  “Part-time. He works for others, too, right? Or for himself? What’s to say this is at all related to what he does for us?”

  “What Millicent Wong told me, for starters.” He left out her warnings of global catastrophe, which would just muddy the water even more.

  “Unless Millicent Wong pays your salary, Jim, you ought to give more credence to what I tell you.” He crushed the empty cup and looked about for someplace to toss it. “Just wait and see.”

  Ron Loesser rose from the bench and walked toward a freestanding trash can. He tossed his cup at it. The cup hit the rim and bounced away, but Loesser was already taking rapid strides toward the building. He didn’t look back, at his cup or at Truly.

  Truly picked up the cup and dunked it into the can. He felt an obligation toward those who had worked for the agency, even if it wasn’t their primary occupation, even if no practical application had been found for their abilities. But given the way his day had begun, he didn’t mind being told not to put any effort into finding out what had happened to Lawrence Ingersoll. Just staying alert and coherent would take all the energy he had to offer.

  Walking back toward his office he realized some of Loesser’s coffee had leaked onto his fingers. He shook a drop away, then sniffed his hand. Loesser took his coffee black, strong and rich. Suddenly a cup of coffee seemed like a good idea. Truly couldn’t drown himself in booze at work, and he wasn’t a hard-drinking guy under any circumstances, but a good jolt of caffeine might keep him going until it was time to head back to his empty home, and his now equally empty life, on the other side of the Potomac.

  THREE

  The Colorado River. The Conchos. The Crooked. The Cannonball. The Missouri, the Musselshell, the Madison. The Snake, Salt, Salmon, Secesh, St. Mary. The Canadian River. The Russian River. The American, the Frenchman, the Republican. Shoshone, Sheyenne, Gila, Mohawk, Flathead, Klamath, Kootenai, Pawnee. Eel, Snake, Swan, Bear, Beaverhead.

  In his cell—a cave, really, with a triple-locked solid steel door over the opening—Wade Scheiner tried to make the hours pass by remembering the names of as many western rivers as he could. He had visited many of them. Some he had run in rubber rafts or wooden dories or canoes made of steel or fiberglass. He had gone swimming in some, wearing trunks or not, most often in the company of Byrd McCall, his best friend during those carefree summer days of youth when hurtling headlong into the greenish brown waters of the Guadalupe or the ever-present Rio Grande seemed like the ultimate expression of sweet freedom.

  Outside his prison, he was certain, the war raged on, Iraqis killing Iraqis with Americans caught in the middle. Before his abduction, he had covered it for CNN. Now he was part of the story.

  Tongue, Milk, Knife, Kettle, Boulder, Sun, Powder, Encampment, Big Hole. The Green, the White, the Red, the Ruby, Big Blue, Little Blue, the Greys, the Vermilion, the Verdigris, the Yellowstone. Neosho, Niobrara, Little Nemaha, Wynoochee, Owyhee, Coweeman, Humptulips.

  Wade had attempted to keep track of the days of his imprisonment by scratching hash marks into the cave wall with a bit of stone. Without windows, though, with captors who fed him when they wanted to and woke him at will and allowed him to bathe (using lukewarm water in a metal pail) only sporadically, he had no way to accurately gauge the passage of time. At least ten days had passed, he believed, but maybe it had been two weeks or a little more. Seemed like forever.

  His dark blond hair was matted, his normally clean-shaven cheeks and chin thick with whiskers. He itched all over, but when he scratched, he worried that he was rubbing the stench of this place into his pores. His jeans and long-sleeved dress shirt were torn and filthy and they had taken his belt, his wallet, his ID, had thrown his cell phone out the car window as soon as they had shot his driver and squeezed inside around him. He was glad he’d left his iPod and his satellite phone and his video equipment in the hotel room, along with backup identification and most of his cash reserves. He just hoped it would all still be there whenever he was freed. The cave’s temperature was steady, humid and not too cold, and he had been taking off his shirt and wadding it up as a pillow when he slept.

  All he knew about the time now was that he had slept for a longer period than usual, and he was hungry. No, starving. No one had come with food. His captors had left nothing in his cell to occupy his attention; once the crude steel bunk and toilet had lost their entertainment value, all he had were occasional meals and even more occasional conversation. Lacking both left him with only his rivers, in whose waters he could feel untethered, adrift. There he could stave off the terror that threatened to drown him when he considered his lonely plight.

  The San Joaquin, he remembered, the San Jacinto, San Pedro, St. Joe, St. Regis, St. Maries.

  And that dream! He inspected the rugged rock wall next to his cot, where during the night he had believed that he saw several glowing shapes. They had reminded him of some of the Indian rock art he had seen at Smuggler’s Canyon and Hueco Tanks close to home, and scattered elsewhere throughout the West. A jagged line, a double arch, an openmouthed face with looping ears. He remembered seeing them, an unexpected source of light in the dark cave (which never happened, since the weak steel-caged incandescent bulb in his cell stayed on all the time) and getting up for a closer look, feeling faint heat reflecting off them. At the time he would have sworn he was awake.

  But that wasn’t possible, he realized now. None of it was. He had dreamed the whole thing. It was not the first bizarre dream he’d had in captivity; they were quickly becoming the norm—nightmares of being cornered and shot, or beaten to death, or having his limbs sawed off one by one. He bolted awake at least once during every period of deep sleep, and then, not knowing how long he had been asleep or if he would soon be visited, he would have difficulty going back to sleep, and he would lie back on the hard cot, willing the panicked drumming of his heart to slow down and the surge of adrenaline coursing through him to taper off. Few of these dreams had seemed so real, though. He tucked the memory away, returned to countering fear and hunger with thoughts of his beloved rivers.

  Rio Costilla, Rio Paraje, Rio Chama, Rio Peñasco, Rio Puerco. The Rio Grande, on whose banks he had grown up, and where he would rather be, at this moment, than somewhere near the Tigris. McKenzie, James, Dolores, Gunnison, Owens, Solomon, Reese, Quinn, Madison.

  The names were coming more slowly as the protestations of Wade’s stomach grew more insistent. His last meal had consisted of stale bread and cheese, which he’d been given with a cup of water before going to sleep. Fear trumped hunger in the short term, Wade figured, but in the long run, a man had to have something in his belly if he was going to put any energy into being afraid. He hadn’t seen anyone since the one calling himself Ali had come to collect his dishes. He just assumed all the names he’d been given were phony, but having nothing else to go by he used them just the same.

  That had been many hours ago. By now someone should have come in to shout abuses at him, accuse him of being a spy, hit him with sticks, or else engage him in what seemed like a serious discussion of the Koran and the advantages of the Muslim faith over the Christian—“seemed,” because while Wade was no religious zealot, he didn’t have any problem with Islam except when it was used as a
n excuse for murder. The few arguments he tried to make in favor of Christianity’s precepts as he understood them were shouted down instead of being given a legitimate hearing.

  But they were in charge, so he listened when they talked and he didn’t try to convert them. He wanted them to see him as a person and not an object, certainly not a soldier for Christ. They called American soldiers “crusaders” and “occupiers,” and he tried to impress upon them that he was a journalist, not a soldier, without a horse in the race except for the truth.

  Had they forgotten about him? He didn’t see how that was possible, unless perhaps they had captured someone else with a higher profile. He was sure the U.S. media was covering his disappearance, which probably meant that Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya were as well. Still, he was just a TV reporter, and the city teemed with better captive material than that.

  He had tried not to call undue attention to himself. He didn’t want to be the kind of problem that was most easily solved by putting a couple of bullets in his skull and dumping him in the reeds beside a road. Now, though, his stomach felt like it was twisting in on itself. Even last night’s stale bread would taste like a slice of heaven on a plate. He steeled himself for the worst and pounded on the steel door with both fists. “Hey!” he shouted. “I’m hungry!” He repeated the appeal in his functional Arabic.

  He didn’t hear any response. He waited several seconds and banged again, getting a steady drum riff going. The Max Weinstein of the cell block, he thought, before realizing that while his own Germanic name had set off some alarms for his captors, the name of the E Street Band’s drummer would have been even worse to have in this situation. Not much was less palatable to the Sunni fundamentalists who had captured him than an agnostic journalist, but a Jewish rock musician would easily top that on the hate parade.

  I could sure go for a rocking version of “Rosalita” or “Badlands” or “Adam Raised a Cain” right now, though, he thought. He’d heard the expression “I’d give my left nut,” but never before in life had the likelihood of needing that body part again seemed so remote—and the desire to hear some flat-out rock and roll so strong—that he would have considered it.

  Even more than music, though, he needed food. His anger growing along with his hunger, he grabbed at the door handle and pounded again.

  The handle turned easily in his grasp.

  Wade pulled. The door creaked and swung open.

  A trap? It almost had to be. He couldn’t see any other reason why his captors would have left him in his cell with all three locks on the door unlocked. Still, they weren’t the kind of people who would need the “prisoner trying to escape” excuse if they wanted to snuff him. The Sunni insurgency had made no secret of its willingness to kill for their cause, with little provocation or none at all. Journalists were not exempt from this; they seemed a favorite target, as somewhere around eighty of them had been murdered so far during this war. If they wanted to kill him, they would do it, excuses or no.

  Still, he looked both ways, up and down a dimly lit tunnel, before stepping through the door. When no one shot at him, he kept going.

  He had been brought in with a canvas bag over his head, his hands zip-tied behind him, insurgents hauling him along by the arms. Now he wasn’t sure which way to go. He stood in the hallway—the hairs on the back of his neck tickling as if someone stared down a gun sight at him—and tried to hear anything except the beating of his own heart.

  He couldn’t. Total silence. As if the world had gone away.

  Wade didn’t know if he should call out, or keep his trap shut and thank whatever god was looking out for him. If he did encounter his captors, surprising them might guarantee that he would take a bullet. And really, what were the chances that he could get all the way outside, with no clue about the layout, how far underground he had been held, or anything else about his prison?

  He walked a dozen steps to his right and stopped. The air tasted stale. He turned and went the other way. Fresher. Fresh enough, anyway, to make him aware of his own brutal stink.

  The arching cavern ceiling brought back horrific memories, as did being beaten up, memories that threatened to… He shook his head to halt that train of thought, back-burnered both topics and kept going. Ahead, the strand of wires connecting caged light bulbs took a sharp right. Wade followed. Now he could feel an actual draft, faint but unmistakable.

  With every step, he expected to hear the click of a weapon being readied, the banging of a door or the scuff of anxious shoes on the tunnel floor. None of this happened. He reached a staircase that spiraled upward, the steps shallow and worn smooth by what must have been centuries of use. As Wade climbed, a smell insinuated itself into his consciousness, overpowering his body odor.

  He allowed himself a fleeting grin.

  A river.

  An urban river, with water and fish and organic waste—feces and corpses—and spilled diesel fuel mixed into it in equal proportions. It had to be the Tigris. Wade hurried his ascent, his right hand brushing against the rough inner rock wall of the tightly curving staircase. Here and there wooden timbers shored up the roof.

  He reached a level where another rock-walled tunnel led away from the stairs. Lights led down this tunnel as well, but the staircase continued to wind upward, and it seemed like the river smell wafted down from above. Wade skipped the side tunnel and kept climbing.

  Finally, he came around a curve and saw a door at the top of the staircase. End of the line? He thought he might just sit down and weep if that door was locked, after all this. Maybe the whole thing was some new form of torture. Maybe he was being videotaped right now, his captors watching a monitor and laughing at the distraught expression on his face. “Stupid American spy journalist actually thought he could walk out of here,” one would say, and the rest would just crack up.

  Whatever. He wasn’t turning around now, not without at least trying the door. He climbed to the top and listened, pressing his palms against the door’s bare wooden planks. He couldn’t hear a thing on the other side.

  He pushed against the door. The wood was old and weak, spongy. Locked or not, he could smash through it without much trouble. Not without making noise, of course. If insurgents were on the other side, they’d hear him coming. At this point, he no longer cared. He had come this far and he would keep going as long as the slightest hope of freedom remained.

  As it happened, he didn’t need to break the door down. A rusted bolt held it closed, and that snapped easily. He passed into what seemed like a vast chamber, although the light from the bulbs in the staircase below didn’t penetrate far and there was no light source inside. The river smell was overlaid here with something sour, like garbage.

  This looked like a storeroom, although not one that had seen any use in the last century or so. Wooden shelving had collapsed near one wall, with what appeared to be many layers of dust coating the debris. Wade oriented himself and let the door close long enough to scramble to the pile and snatch up one of the larger pieces. Retracing his steps, he found the door and propped it open with the hunk of wood.

  He still hadn’t heard a sound made by anything but his own progress. Twenty minutes must have passed since he had left his cell, but no audible alarm had been raised. Something didn’t add up. Not that I’m complaining. It was strange enough to keep him on edge. He expected an ugly surprise at any moment.

  The big room contained trunks and crates, all of which, like the shelves, looked ancient and seldom visited. Wade had no idea what might wait beyond where the faint light fell. He couldn’t imagine that the door he had come through was the only entrance, though. Why put a storeroom at the top of a high staircase, when there seemed to be plenty of space in the tunnels below?

  So there had to be another way in. Wade walked across the floor—ceramic tile, not bare rock like the cave floors—into the darkness beyond the light’s reach. He barked his shin on something hard and round and muttered a soft curse. Feeling his way around it, he kept working his way to
ward where the far wall should be.

  After two more bruises on his legs and a growing ache in his lower back from bending forward to grope for obstacles in the dark, he found another wall. It felt dry and dusty, but relatively smooth beneath the layer of dust. Plaster maybe, instead of bare stone. Solid, too. Tapping on it, Wade felt no give beneath his knuckles.

  He kept one hand on the wall and started working his way left. After a couple dozen steps, the wall vanished. He probed with his foot and found a stair. He crouched beside it. Wood, not stone or plaster. The staircase was at least eight feet wide, leading up into impenetrable darkness.

  Anything could be up there. He wouldn’t be able to see a snake, a tiger, an entire Sunni militia. Or a Shia one. They were no better.

  Biting back his fears, Wade climbed again.

  This had all taken too long. By now they knew he was out. They had to. Maybe it was a trap all along, and maybe not, but they would certainly have the exits covered. If this indeed led to an exit, and wasn’t just a long, exhausting journey toward ultimate disappointment. Hopelessness filled him and he almost sat down where he was, to wait in the dark until they found him with their flashlights and their guns.

  Then he smelled the river again, and so he climbed.

  At the ninth stair Wade had to push through a spiderweb that wrapped around him like a shroud. He pawed it from his eyes and mouth and kept going. A dozen stairs, fourteen, and then he came to another wooden door. A double door, this time, latched from the other side. Pressing his eye to the minute gap between the two doors, he saw natural light.