by Mark Henwick
“Amber?” David’s voice was faint.
“Yes.”
“Taylor found data on Weaver you need to see.”
“At this hour?” It was 5 a.m. I hardly expected my sister’s fiancé to be putting that kind of effort in, but clearly David had other ideas.
“We’ve been working all night,” he said. His voice faded out and came back. “... wrapped himself up in a string of companies, but as far as Taylor’s concerned, it’s amateur hour.”
“Good to know.”
“Yeah. Hardly any untraceable offshore cut-outs or traps like that.” Even as his voice came and went, David sounded almost offended that Weaver had thought his commercial structure was secure. “... doesn’t pinpoint... land purchases... emailing you a list... especially... got a deep interest in something up there.”
“You’re breaking up, but it sounds like good news so far. Keep working. Anything that can help us find him quicker is gold at the moment.”
The link cleared and David’s voice came through stronger.
“We’ll call again when we find more,” David said.
Vernal was coming in sight as he ended the call.
He’d meant he’d call if they found any more.
It was frustrating that he couldn’t just tell me where Weaver was, but to cut the territory down to a list of properties was a huge improvement.
We only had a day, but we could do this.
I had to keep believing that, in spite of the chill in the pit of my stomach.
Kane flew us directly to the Denver pack’s house on the edge of the town. The house didn’t have a heliport, but the backyard was more than big enough for the Arapaho to land.
Annie and Ops 4-10 had beaten us here. She’d driven a truck convoy through the night to deliver the Hill Bitch, a bleary-eyed group of my trainee werewolf cubs and five squads of Ops 4-10.
The Ops 4-10 troops looked ready for anything. The cubs, not so much. We’d keep them away from trouble if we could. It would be a good exercise for them, and maybe an opportunity to prove to Ops 4-10 they weren’t a complete waste of space.
The local Denver pack patrols had turned up overnight. They were agitated, their Call bubbling beneath the surface, impatient to be out hunting.
All the senior Denver pack lieutenants were with Felix down in Louisiana, so I didn’t know the guy heading up the teams. He came across and shook my hand.
“Nathan Woodside, ma’am.”
“Amber, please. Good to see you, Nathan. Thanks for getting the patrols here. You understand the situation? Tracking down where Weaver has Tullah is really important.”
“Tullah’s part of your House, which I reckon means she’s part of the Denver pack,” he said simply. “For us, it’s like that bastard kidnapped a sister. Don’t worry, we’ll find her.”
The chill wind caught my eye and I had to turn away, just in time to see a couple more SUVs come in.
They were the first of the El Paso and New Mexico werewolves.
Zane and Alex had chartered a plane and flown them up to the closest airport, Roosevelt Municipal, about twenty miles away. One hundred of them had come, but there were only a dozen crammed into the two SUVs and nothing on the road behind them.
Annie came out from the house listening to her cell phone. Bad news: they’d run out of SUVs and trucks to rent in Roosevelt. They’d been able to rent some town cars as well, but there was heavy snow on the road. Five werewolves can lift a car out of a ditch, but we’d need truck levels of clearance on the snowbound roads and tracks in the Ashley.
Nathan’s local Denver teams called in favors. Another five trucks in half an hour. More would try to get to us from Grand Junction, but that was hours away and those highways were snowed in too.
It was all happening unbelievably fast, given how short a time we’d had to work with, but also impossibly slowly, given the task ahead of us.
“We can use the trucks we have like shuttles,” Nathan said. “Dropping some off and coming back to collect them later. That’d work around ranches, but obviously, we can’t run four-footed through towns or anything.”
“Work on plans,” I said. “If we have to, we might use the Arapaho to drop groups off.”
I handed over some of Tullah’s clothing to Nathan. It’d all been washed of course, but werewolf noses would still be able to get her scent from it. Then I rushed into the house to find a computer and printer, leaving Annie and Nathan in charge of making sure everyone got into a team and each team had a piece of clothing to work with.
I prayed that the list that David and Taylor had sent broke the vast search area up into more manageable pieces. The problem with the trucks meant time was slipping away.
The email summary David had sent was long, but it included maps which had been marked with coordinates and property boundaries. All of them were well away from towns, which was good in that the local population wouldn’t be involved, but bad in that the access tracks to them wouldn’t be well maintained.
I set the printer to producing copies and took the first set out to Annie.
“These are known to be used or owned by Weaver,” I said. “Prioritize them. Use them as center points for search patterns.”
“Got it,” she said. “We can send some of the SUVs back to Roosevelt with just a driver to pick up the teams there and head out to these sites further west.” She ran a finger down the five furthest properties. “Any place on the way they find suitable vehicles to rent, the driver drops them and returns.”
“Good.”
A few more of the New Mexico and El Paso wolves turned up in cars just as I was heading back in to pick up more maps.
I hesitated, then made myself keep going.
I wanted to be there to greet them. Damn, I wanted to go out and run with them. But the most useful thing I could do at the moment was direct the search, and I needed to be here to coordinate the next step with Felix, Cameron and Skylur if... when we found Weaver.
The next set of maps I thrust into Kane’s hand.
“Fly down toward Salt Lake, passing over these properties on the way,” I said. “Check for unusual amounts of traffic, unusual heat signatures and so on, but don’t circle over anything suspicious. Annie will make some calls while you’re in the air, and if there are SUVs to rent down the road, ferry some of the troops from Roosevelt to pick them up. Then stop at Roosevelt on the way back and make sure your tanks are full. If we need to get somewhere in a rush, the Arapaho is it.”
“Understood.” He trotted back to the helicopter.
Annie and I distributed the remainder of the maps, and the group started to divide up into teams.
It was moving forward, but so slowly.
Back inside, there was an email from Abel Mathis, the Rock Springs alpha. More werewolves on the way to help and would I please call him about pack territories in the Ashley.
That was important.
“I guess it was too much to hope for that the Salt Lake pack wouldn’t use the Ashley as part of their territory,” I said to him.
“We’re civilized,” he said. “We both run in there and we manage to get along. I’ve called the alpha, and he says they haven’t anything planned, but there’ll be some wolves out there anyway. Best you take my Rock Springs guys and make sure there’s one or two in every team you put out there, especially with New Mexico or El Paso wolves. Salt Lake’ll recognize Denver, but not the others.”
“We’ll do that, thank you, Abel.”
“Also, most of my guys will be coming down in their trucks with plenty of room to spare.” He laughed. “Knowing the area, I’m guessing you kinda overloaded the capacity of the local economy for renting.”
“You got that right.”
I felt a rush of gratitude for his support—and his valuable knowledge of the local Were situation. All without exact knowledge of the importance.
“My boys will be there any time now,” he said.
“Thank you again, and I’m sorry this is all
so secret. It’s really important. When I’m cleared to tell you why, I’ll call you.”
He was silent for a second.
“Appreciate that, but you need to know, Amber...” he stumbled a bit using my name, as if it made him embarrassed. “The Denver pack turned the Confederation around when they steamrollered us. And you yourself... well, my youngest brother was at that ritual at Bitter Hooks.” His voice went very quiet. “Truth be told, there ain’t that much to the Rock Springs pack, but you call, and we’ll come.”
We ended the call. I wiped my eyes and went outside with more maps. Annie and Nathan were getting some order in the melee. I updated them on the call.
Nathan looked much happier.
“Once Rock Springs arrive, we’ll have enough trucks to get everyone where they need to be,” he said.
Annie gave me the master TacNet headset.
“Your callsign’s Alpha 6,” she said. “I’m Hotel 6. I’m going to reorganize the teams and objectives based on Rock Springs pack members and trucks. I’ll give you a copy when I’m done.”
The pair of them ran off and the group began to seethe again as new instructions were made.
There was tension in the air, but also an excitement, and a Call.
Run! Hunt!
Chapter 67
A couple of hours later, the last of the trucks had left, having churned the yard into a sculpture of freezing mud and snow.
I’d had to fight the urge to join them. Instead I was studying Taylor’s list on the computer screen. What Amanda would probably call displacement activity.
There were about twenty companies, all controlled by Weaver. Through them, he owned ranches in the foothills, leases in the park itself, a couple of stores in the towns. There wasn’t any pattern to the locations other than they were scattered along the line of the Uinta Mountains as far west as the town of Hanna, and as far east as the Whiterocks, not too far from Vernal.
Something tugged at my memory reading those names, but it refused to surface.
I had a copy of Annie’s plans on one of the maps, with the team that had been assigned to each of the properties, their callsigns and the team leader’s name.
No one had even called in yet to say they’d arrived.
Frustrated, I did searches on the internet. If there was anything there, it was well hidden in millions of hits. Too much. The search parameters were too wide. The same as our physical search in the mountains.
Outside, I heard the Arapaho return.
If he’d seen something, Kane would have called ahead, so I blocked the noise out and stared at the screen as if there was a magic pixel there that would reveal where Weaver was.
“If it were you, which of those would you go to hide in?” Scott’s voice startled me. He’d picked up one of the maps showing Weaver’s properties and he was talking to Flint.
Alice and Gabrielle were sitting down listening. I’d held them back from joining the hunt on the basis that, if Weaver were alert, he might notice Adepts sneaking around his backyard.
Yelena had stayed as well. She’d told me she wasn’t going to leave my side until we’d found Tullah, which I guessed meant she was there to stop me from doing something stupid.
“Why didn’t you join in, Scott?” Alice asked. “Chasing the cubs through the forest.”
Scott smiled. “They’d probably prefer that, which is why I left it to Rita.”
Actually, I’d kept him back as well.
I turned away from the screen. Computers can only achieve so much, and it was better to leave David and Taylor working on the data. I had a team here, so I should use them.
“I know everyone’s tired, but I need your help,” I said. “Can we kick this around, please? Starting with Scott’s question. If Weaver’s at one of his properties, which one is it likely to be and why?”
“Which would be easiest to put a shield around?” Yelena asked. “That’s where I would go.”
Flint nodded. “Not something you do in a hurry, if you want a strong shield.”
Kane spoke from the door as he stamped the snow off his boots. “Also, not easy to maintain. Tullah used the snow covering to bind a working around the mill in the San Juan. Alice uses the water running down the walls in the dungeon at Haven in the same way. What’s Weaver going to use? Which of his properties is covered in snow?”
Good question, but easy answer, unfortunately.
“Probably most of them,” I said.
The town of Vernal had a foot or so in the streets. The higher you went into the Uinta Mountains, the more snow would have fallen. Covering a ranch was nothing.
Dead end.
“Okay. What clue might there have been in Weaver’s house?” Alice said when it went quiet.
She was speaking in the past tense. Rather than allow any traps we’d missed to go off and injure someone, Weaver’s house had suffered a catastrophic accident and thoroughly blown up, courtesy of Annie.
We kicked around whether there would have been a clue there at all. Had he put the traps in the house so we wouldn’t find clues? What about the books he’d taken from the shelves in his study? Were they significant? Taken because they were clues, or did he want some reading matter in hiding? Or, as Yelena pointed out, the books might be a false trail.
It was academic; I couldn’t remember which books were gone, only that there had been some missing from his study.
Another dead end.
“Could a magic shield prevent werewolves from picking up a scent?” Scott asked.
Flint and Kane shrugged.
“Maybe,” Flint said. “Not straightforward.”
“Need to work on it to answer that,” Kane finished.
My oath stirred with frustration. As rapidly as we’d moved, this was taking too long.
Need to find Weaver’s hideout. Need enough time to organize an assault. Got to finish this today.
It was late morning already.
I needed to do something. We were running out of time for Tullah, and that meant for Kaothos too, for me and Hana and Tara. I could feel it.
I took the original map we’d made from the direction-finding workings and taped it to the wall. I marked Weaver’s properties. About half of them were inside our estimated area.
Annie knew that, and those would be her top priorities. Within the hour, we’d start crossing the closest ones off the list, but the furthest away might take all day.
We stood and stared at the size of the problem on the map, and drank the coffee that Gabrielle brought out.
My mind strayed back to the flicker of memory that had tugged me earlier, as I read the list of properties. Something about that, and Weaver’s house…
I closed my eyes and tried to visualize when I’d last seen Weaver, in his study. I tried to remember everything Weaver had said to me, everything I’d seen.
“Looking for something,” Flint murmured, so quietly I almost missed it.
He was staring at the map. Alongside each property, he’d written the date it had been purchased. They ran left to right. West to east.
I blinked. He wasn’t making a stupidly obvious comment that we were looking for something. He was saying Weaver had been looking for something. He’d started by buying a property in Hanna, and worked his way east along the Uinta Mountains.
“Oh, shit!”
My jaw dropped. That nagging memory had finally surfaced. A legend. One that linked everything together.
They were all looking at me.
“Thomas Rhoads,” I said.
It clearly made no sense to any of them.
“Weaver’s house.” I was having trouble stringing words into sentences as the enormity of it hit me. “The artwork.”
“What about the artwork?” Kane asked. “Besides the gold paint and bad taste?”
He frowned and then his eyes widened. “Mining!”
“Mining,” I echoed. “Every single artwork was about mining.”
“He’s been looking for gold?” Flint ask
ed incredulously.
“In a manner of speaking. I say he’s found a legendry lost mine and he’s down inside it, right now,” I said, conviction gripping me as I spoke. “Water on the walls? A focus for workings? Got all that. Along with all the hills up here, there are a million lakes or something.”
I moved in front of the map.
“And they say, what you’re looking for is always in the last place you look.” I took a marker and made a ring around the property Weaver had bought last, over two years ago.
“Somewhere in the vicinity of this ranch, he found the mine,” I said. “And it’s not just any mine, so there’s no way he’d leave it unguarded or unprotected.”
“What on earth is it?” Alice asked.
“In the 1850s, a Mormon by the name of Rhoads made some kind of deal with the Ute who lived here. They told him where to find gold in the Uinta Mountains, and that he did. He was the wealthiest Mormon of his time, and all of it was from the gold he brought out of these hills. His son was so rich, he offered to pay off the US national debt if he was given a lease to mine all the Uinta.”
“But they didn’t give it to him?”
“No. If I remember the story correctly, politics prevented it, and the knowledge of where the mines were hidden died with Rhoads’ son and the Ute chiefs who dealt with him.”
“Now Weaver has found the mines. And that,” Flint tapped the map, “was the last place he was looking.”
Kane was holding the map with Annie’s scribbling on it. “Good news: it’s the closest to here. Bad news: that’s where your cubs and Rita have gone.”
Chapter 68
“Hotel 6. Hotel 6. Alpha 6.”
The TacNet was an incredible piece of equipment. Just not in this particular wilderness.
“Hotel 6,” I heard, followed by a wash of static. She knew I was trying to talk to her, but nothing else.
The cubs had been sent to the easiest, closest location, so when it came to rationing out the TacNet headsets, they didn’t get one. Cell phone coverage should have reached them. I tried calling Rita and got no answer. I left a message to bug out and call me.