Victoria was silent for a moment, the breeze hissing through the leaves, clicking branches. She pulled the vest closer around her.
“Annual suicides among civilian women is about five per hundred thousand. For women in active duty or veterans, it’s twenty-nine. You’re a mother and you go to the Whole Foods after soccer practice in Omaha and the newsstand next to the door blows up, killing four. You’re a businesswoman just shooting the shit with your buddy, having crabs at a restaurant in Baltimore, and your friend gets hit by a sniper shot you don’t even hear until he’s a pile of clothes on the ground.
“If that happens to you, you’re never the same again. Ever. But we put on a uniform and so people think we must be different, we must be immune. We’re not. It’s just as bad for us. And the worst thing that somebody can say to you is, oh, let it go. The next life, you’ll be fine. Eli had to be stopped.”
After a moment, she put the darkness away. Smiling, she said, “Do me a favor?”
“Sure.”
She handed him her phone. “Get a picture of me here.”
Victoria walked out onto the grassy field and turned to face him. He lifted the phone. He took several shots. The lighting was good and with the resplendent mountains as a backdrop, he thought she’d be pleased.
Turning away, Victoria gazed skyward. “You see the eagle? I’d love to get him in the shot too.”
Shaw was scanning the sky. “No bird.”
“Call his agent,” she said, laughing. “Have him set it up.”
As he aimed the lens once more, Shaw heard the sound of brush rustling. He turned to see someone sprinting quickly through the woods toward the clearing. A heavyset man in a Foundation uniform burst from the foliage, red faced, sweating. He was gasping from the exertion. The climb up here from the camp was steep.
It was Journeyman Samuel. He glanced from Shaw to Victoria, who was closest to him. He sprinted toward her.
“Victoria!” Shaw shouted. “To your right!”
She turned.
It was too late. She had no time to strike a defensive posture. The big man’s bulk and speed slammed her flat to the ground. She lay stunned and breathless.
Shaw dropped the phone and started running. “No, Samuel! No!”
The man gripped Victoria by the sweater, dragged her to the edge of the cliff and without a moment’s hesitation pushed her over. Shaw heard her piercing cry as she fell the hundred or so feet.
Samuel rose and looked at Shaw, his tear-filled eyes revealing both sorrow and anger. He whispered, “Goodbye . . . until tomorrow,” and leapt after her into the emptiness.
THREE:
ECHO RIDGE
72.
June 20
This time the rattlesnake was real, unlike the imaginary serpent Dalton Crowe had used as an excuse to shoot a hole in his rental car’s Michelin a week or so ago.
Colter Shaw was hiking up a narrow trail of rock and dirt and gravel in a remote corner of his family’s property in eastern California. The snake, a big one, was smack in his route, in its coiled state, lazy, probably full of a tasty rodent lunch. Still it was ready for a defensive strike, which would be fast and accurate. They are, after all, pure muscle.
Shaw had spotted it and paused at the same time as the urgent rattle from the tail began. Amazing how creatures come to be, he was thinking. It would have taken hundreds of thousands of years to develop this curious feature, which said, in effect, Stop or I’ll shoot.
Shaw was not alone on his trek. He was accompanied by a solidly built black-and-brown Rottweiler. Another canine might have instinctively charged—not having learned from YouTube or 1960 TV Western reruns what the rattle meant. Chase tensed but Shaw’s command, “Wait,” froze him in position.
There aren’t many defenses against a rattlesnake, other than gaiters—leg guards. Pepper spray is useless. Their eyes are protected with an impervious shield, and the capsicum that blinds us is like water to them. And, as many a person who’s ever tried to Mace a snake can attest, if you’re close enough to hit them, they’re probably close enough to hit you.
As for Chase, the dog, a canine’s physiology is less susceptible to snake toxins than a human’s. But as an added precaution for this outing, Shaw had administered snakebite vaccine. He recalled, from years ago, his father’s question to the youngest of the Shaw children: “So, Button, the odds of a vaccinated dog surviving a rattler strike are what?”
Nine-year-old Dorion had squinted, considering. “Depending on size—of the dog and the snake—and where it strikes, maybe around eighty percent.”
“Yep, good. And the odds of a vaccinated dog surviving a dead rattler?”
“Pretty much a hundred.”
“You’ve got it.”
“But I don’t want to shoot a snake, Daddy.”
“Who does? But sometimes it’s a question of you or them, Button. And the answer is always: you.”
Shaw was wearing a hip holster in which sat his Colt .357 Magnum revolver (a model ironically named after another snake, a Python). But he didn’t want to shoot a snake either. His thinking was that he and Chase were in its backyard, not their own—and, truth be told, the creature wasn’t behaving badly at all; it was simply being a snake.
So he chose another option. Detour.
Shaw found a fairly straight branch, about four feet long, and trimmed it with his Ka-Bar knife.
Never go into snake brush without a trekking stick. You can push plants aside ahead of you, and if there’s a strike, the snake will likely go for the stick.
“Heel,” Shaw commanded and together he and Chase turned left and struck out through the dense woods. The rottie hewed close to Shaw’s left thigh as they circumvented the rattler and continued on their mission, the human probing thickets before they trod through them.
That mission was the second of the two he’d been thinking of for the past several weeks, the one he’d put aside to pursue Erick and Adam . . . and, as it turned out, that little trip to the Osiris Foundation.
He was looking for what his father had hidden here in this mountainous part of the family property years ago.
In some University of California archives, Colter had found a clue that told him that the mysterious message was here, in an area roughly the size of a suburban neighborhood. A daunting search to many, but even if Shaw did not know the exact location, he knew how to find it.
The path now led them to the crest of Echo Ridge—where, years ago, the woman who’d been hunting his father, Braxton, had sent one of her hired guns to follow Ashton and torture him to give up his secret. Ashton had tricked the man and come up behind him. In the ensuing struggle, though, Ashton had slipped and fallen to his death. Teenage Colter had discovered the body—that was the motivation for his mad, and pointless, high-speed rappel down the face of Echo Ridge to the creek bed where his father’s body lay.
Shaw reflected that he’d thought of Adam as the man on the cliff. Now, he realized that he was, as well—and so was Ashton.
Shaw had learned recently that Braxton had dealt harsh justice to her thug; the man was no longer among the living. The woman, apparently, had little tolerance for incompetence.
The hired muscle, Ebbitt Droon, had taken over his job.
Ironically, Braxton and Droon never guessed that Ashton had hidden the secret here. If they had, they would have returned to search and they never did. There was no other access to Echo Ridge except past the cabin and its security system, which Mary Dove had installed just after her husband’s death. Braxton would assume the secret was hidden in San Francisco, where Ashton’s efforts had been focused. To them, Echo Ridge was a conveniently deserted place in which to waylay Shaw’s father and force him to tell what he knew.
The dog now tensed and looked to the left, through a tall line of sycamore, black walnut and gray pine. Brush too: bladderpod, creosote, lu
pine and snowberry.
A sound? Not a rattle—a crackling of dry leaves. Maybe deer? Bear? Detour was not often an option with the latter, and Shaw’s hand dropped to the Colt. But whatever it was meandered away, as ninety-nine percent of forest inhabitants will do when they hear, see or smell you. The two continued on. He kept his eye on the trail and checked his phone for GPS directions.
Shaw felt the urgent anticipation that comes with closing in on your prey. What had his father found, and why were some people willing to kill—and others die—for it?
At the direction of the electronic navigator, he and Chase now turned away from the cliff and headed into the woods. They climbed onto a limestone shelf. Shaw checked his phone once more. They were on the eastern edge of the hunting ground. His father’s coordinates defined an entire square mile, one filled with dense forest, thickets, brush and brambles, rock formations, streams and ponds.
He surveyed the expanse now.
“Let’s get to it.”
This was not an official dog command but Chase caught the gist, and they started down to the forest floor.
73.
Rottweilers fall into the American Kennel Club’s “Working” group, a category of large dogs bred to guard, to pull small wagons and sleds and to perform search and rescue. The latter meant they were skilled trackers.
Shaw dug into his backpack and withdrew a plastic bag. Inside was a piece of what appeared to be wood, but was actually recycled plastic.
One of the survival skills taught by Ashton Shaw to his children was the art of hiding objects that could be found only by your allies. He never would use anything electronic, of course, but stuck with the basics. A popular technique among survivalists is to wrap the object you’ll hide in something that has a distinctive odor detectable only by tracking dogs. If you need it to be hidden for only a few days, the dog will track the hider’s scent. Ashton, however, chose something that off-gassed scent molecules for far longer than that: plastic, specifically recycled plastic, which has a strong and distinctive scent.
There were field scentometers—including the wonderfully named Nose Ranger—that might have detected the smell. But nothing located aromas better than a dog, and when circumstance provided one, he leapt at the opportunity.
Whatever was hidden here, Shaw knew, it would be in or beside something that was still, after all these years, radiating its unique smell. Shaw held it down to Chase’s nose, and he sniffed enthusiastically. Shaw hooked a long lead to the rottie’s collar and gave a true command: “Find.”
The dog didn’t race forward but moved fast in a zigzag from rock to rock, tree to bush. Shaw kept up, hurrying behind, his hand near the grip of the Colt. Detours weren’t possible now, and if it came to a confrontation, a rattler would lose.
The rottie’s nose was up, as he was air tracking. The buried treasure would be stashed in a cave somewhere, Shaw assumed, protected from the elements.
As the minutes turned to hours, Shaw began thinking that maybe this was folly. Was he here on the basis of false information? It was possible that Ashton, in one of his foggier moments, had thought he’d left the package yet in fact he had not.
However, this proved not to be the case.
Chase braked to a stop. He did what all search dogs do upon finding the target. They don’t point, they don’t bark. They sit down.
He was in front of a small cavern. A rock slide had covered most of the opening but there was a six-inch slit toward the top. Shaw gave the rottie a piece of venison jerky and crouched down, firing a beam from his tactical halogen light into the cave. No snakes. Just dust and rocks and—about eight feet past the rubble—what seemed to be a white box, about 9-by-12 inches and an inch thick, made, of course, from recycled materials. The seams were glued with thick adhesive, probably of the industrial-strength waterproof variety.
He started to pull away rocks but there was another mini-slide; he’d need a shovel and pickaxe and some timber to shore the cave entrance properly. He wasn’t going to end his quest for his father’s secret by being buried alive with it for all eternity. He’d return with the proper tools and lumber for shoring. He noted the exact location via landmarks and he and Chase began the hour-plus trek back to the cabin. They took their time on the descent—it was steep and gravelly in parts. Also, you never knew when you might come across a visitor in the middle of the path, coiled and cautious and just not in the mood to slither out of your way.
74.
Your boy did a good job,” Shaw said to the couple sitting on the front porch of his family’s cabin, which nestled in the expansive valley.
He rubbed Chase’s head.
“’Course he did. I trained him.” Teddy gave the dog an ear scratch too.
Velma laughed, nodded toward her husband. “Trained him to lie at your feet while you dish up a big helping of Netflix.” Her voice was low and as smooth as her husband’s was rough.
Teddy scoffed. “It’ll come in useful someday: That dog’ll never twitch a muscle when a superhero lands in front of him with a crash and does that down-on-one-knee thing. Why do they do that?”
Shaw had no clue what the man was talking about.
Velma and Teddy Bruin were visiting from Florida, where they were Shaw’s neighbors. Both of their properties—each several acres in size—fronted a large and picturesque body of water in the north central part of the state. It was reportedly gator free.
Never believe it when somebody selling you lakefront property tells you there are no gators.
In fact Shaw had never seen any of the reptiles but he was inclined to accept that rule.
Teddy, early sixties, was round and rosy and—as his names, both family and nick, implied—had a bear-like quality, enhanced by a lengthy beard of the sort favored by Civil War generals. The man wore a brown hat, a slouch—the Australian military one. The right brim was pinned up to the crown, so a slung rifle wouldn’t bump it. Not all that helpful if you weren’t on the parade grounds, as the uneven tan on Teddy’s face proved.
Slim Velma, about the same age, wore her gray-blond hair up in a do that dated to the 1960s, sprayed into the shape of a beehive, which Shaw believed was the style’s actual name. Like her husband, she was in trekking khakis.
While they were indeed Shaw’s neighbors, the couple was much more than that. They ran the business side of Shaw’s operation, scanning the media for reward offers and supervising a bot that did the same online. They also took care of the finances and accounting, tasks that utterly bored Colter Shaw and at which he therefore was inept.
He had yet to tell Velma that he’d given away the Ecumenical Council’s entire $50,000. Shaw was forever discounting rewards, if the offerors were in tough straits, or giving them extended payment plans. Velma didn’t approve of his generosity and was quite vocal about championing his financial well-being.
The couple and Chase were making a cross-country trip in their camper (Shaw had bought his own Winnebago largely because of the test-drive he’d taken in theirs). A visit to California, of course, meant a side trip to the Compound to visit Shaw and his mother.
Shaw examined something protruding from Teddy’s pocket.
“Is that an air horn?” Shaw asked.
“For bears,” was the raspy reply.
The black bear population in California hovered around forty thousand, which was a lot of bears. There’d been attacks over the years, though to Shaw’s knowledge the only black-bear-related fatality in the entire state in recent history involved a bear’s killing a mountain lion that was attacking a hiker, saving the human. The unharmed bear wandered off, leaving the man with a sense of breathless relief and more than a little regret that he’d neglected to get a video.
The creatures were generally docile and timid. And, yes, they did not like loud noises. If Shaw was concerned about bears, though, especially during cub season, he carried pepper spray.
/> Velma chided her husband: “Air horn versus a bear. Isn’t that like bringing a knife . . .” She paused.
Shaw knew the expression: bringing a knife to a gunfight.
However, she finished with: “. . . to a fight where the other guy has a bigger knife?”
Teddy and Shaw laughed.
Velma said, “We didn’t see any. Bears. I was hoping.” She frowned as a thought arose. “Hey, Colt. I got the check for the thousand sixty dollars—the reward Erick Young’s family offered. But I haven’t heard a stitch about the big one. The fifty K. Should I call somebody about it?”
Busted . . .
“Well. About that, Velma.”
There was nothing to do but tell her the truth.
The woman sighed. “Let me get this straight. You gave away a fifty-thousand-dollar reward, and then, for no money whatsoever, you spent the last few days nearly getting killed by Charles Manson and family.”
He sought grounds for dispute but found none. “Pretty accurate.”
“Lord, Colter, you’re not made of money.”
“You got a Barkley stuffed dog out of the situation.” Shaw nodded at the toy he’d bought for her on the drive here.
“Be still my heart.” She grunted, which given her melodious voice was a pleasant tone nonetheless. “Set a spell, Colt.”
“The boondocks’re growing on you, bride.” Teddy chuckled. “‘Set a spell’? You’ve never used that expression in your entire life.”
She opened her arms. “Look around you. You gotta talk Western.”
Shaw said, “Got some things to take care of right now. I’ll see you at dinner.”
Shaw walked into the kitchen where his mother was chopping vegetables.
The Goodbye Man Page 31