Desolation Mountain

by William Kent Krueger

  “So. End of story.”

  “Maybe. I’m not letting go yet. There are still some loose ends.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like how the brigade knew where to find the flight recorder.”

  “Didn’t you say that word got out on the reservation?”

  “That’s one possibility. It’s also possible someone involved was bugged.”

  “But you’re not buying it?”

  He waited a moment, then, “Who did you tell on your end?”

  “You still think Gerard might have somebody on the inside here?”

  “I’m just trying to consider all the possibilities. Who did you tell?”

  “Olympia’s father, that’s it.”

  “Who did he tell?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Ask him.”

  “All right,” she agreed, but she didn’t sound happy. “What about you? What are you going to do?”

  For the first time since she’d brought him into this situation, he wondered if he should tell her the truth. “Get some sleep, then get back to work.”

  Bo brewed himself some coffee, sat at the table in his cabin, and as the sun began to peek above the trees along the inlet on Iron Lake, listened again to what he’d just downloaded from the recorder hidden at Gerard’s command center. It was nothing but static, which could have been the result of defective equipment. Bo sipped his coffee, watched the sun ease itself into the day, and didn’t for an instant think that defective equipment was the reason.

  CHAPTER 42

  * * *

  The news, when it broke the next day, was big, and Aurora swelled once again with media people thick as summer tourists. Just as Bo Thorson had predicted, the O’Connors and the folks on the reservation became the targets of significant and unwanted attention. When Cork attempted to reopen Sam’s Place, reporters descended like locusts, and he shut down again. Stephen tried to return to his classes at the community college but was dogged even there by reporters and barraged with questions from his classmates, so he stopped going. He’d begun texting regularly with Marlee Daychild and found her company, even in a virtual way, comforting. Mostly, the O’Connors hid out on Crow Point, waiting for things to quiet down.

  Allouette was overrun. Phil and Sue Hukari took off to stay with relatives in Oregon until things died down. Tom Blessing muddled along in the preparations for his mother’s funeral. Ned and Monkey Love, whose cabin was nearly impossible to find, were the only lucky ones.

  Although the FBI had reported that the flight recorder recovered in the lodge on Celtic Lake was wiped clean by the brigade, word had leaked that the NTSB’s investigation confirmed the senator’s plane had, indeed, been shot out of the air by a missile. A national manhunt for Cole Wannamaker was under way. Members of the Lexington Brigade were being rounded up and questioned. The president, in a news conference, praised the work of the FBI and vowed that protecting the nation against terrorism, both domestic and from abroad, was a top priority. At the Capitol, the Senate prepared to begin debate on the Manila Accord.

  The nightmare should have been over. But Stephen’s vision continued to plague him.

  Three days after the rescue of the Hukaris and Blessing at the lodge, Stephen sat with Henry Meloux, Leah Duling, and Beulah Love on the shoreline of Iron Lake. It was a perfect morning, the lake a mirror reflecting the powder blue of the sky and the trees along the shoreline full of autumn fire. Beulah Love had shown no inclination to return to her home in Allouette or to her former existence. A woman Stephen had always seen as cold and aloof had undergone a remarkable transformation. She’d formed a deep friendship with Leah Duling and was constantly expressing her appreciation for Stephen’s heroic effort in saving her from the men of the Lexington Brigade. She’d just finished weaving a wreath of wildflowers, and she leaned far forward and studied her reflection in the mirror of the water.

  “I used to make these when I was a girl. A long, long time ago.”

  “Before boarding school?” Leah said.

  “The end of my childhood,” Beulah noted with sadness.

  “But you have found again the child in your heart,” Henry told her.

  “I would never have thought something good would come from all this.”

  “I think there is still more good on the horizon,” Henry said. “More good before the storm.”

  “Storm?” Stephen turned his gaze from the far islands that lay like sleeping dogs on the mirror of the lake.

  “These woods,” the old Mide said. “They still speak of a great evil.”

  “The monster at my back,” Stephen said.

  “Maybe at the backs of us all.”

  “You’re scaring me,” Leah said.

  “And me,” Beulah chimed in. “Are you afraid, Henry?”

  “Unsettled.” To Stephen, the old man said, “I would like to see this monster that does not show itself to you. When you face this thing, and I think you will, I would like to be with you.”

  Stephen was torn. If he ever confronted this terrible thing, he would like his old mentor at his side. But he was also afraid for Henry, who sometimes seemed so frail that a strong wind could blow him over.

  “It might show itself when you’re not with me, Henry.”

  The old man thought about that. “Then I will stay with you.”

  “I’m not sure that’s feasible.”

  “Then we must flush this beast from its hiding.”

  “I’d love to. Any idea how?”

  “I will think on it.”

  Henry rose slowly and began to make his way back to the cabin. Beulah stood and followed, but Leah remained seated beside Stephen. “I’m afraid for him,” she confessed.

  As the old man moved away, he seemed to grow smaller. Stephen said, “So am I.”

  * * *

  That same day, Daniel and Rainy returned to work. Daniel took his truck, but Stephen shuttled Rainy in his old Jeep. In Allouette, he dropped her at the clinic, then passed the stop where the kids from the reservation waited for the school bus. Winston Goodsky wasn’t among them. Stephen parked and went into Harmon Goodsky’s gallery. The place felt empty. He prowled, admiring the photographs on the walls, and came to one of a familiar scene, a gray-green outcrop crowning a hill of stone. Desolation Mountain. The photo made the rock outcrop look like a castle keep, a foreboding structure against a threatening sky, a powerful and disturbing image.

  Harmon Goodsky stepped from the curtains that closed off the back rooms. “Boozhoo, Stephen.” He walked like a man teetering at the edge of a precipice, doing his best not to fall. Looking at him, the healer in Stephen understood that he was beyond the help of even Henry Meloux. “What can I do for you?”

  “Just looking. I like this photograph. Did you take it?”

  “One of Winston’s. My grandson’s got a natural eye for drama. I forgot about that one.” He removed it from the wall.

  “You should leave it up. It’s good.”

  “He’s shot better.”

  “I didn’t see him at the bus stop this morning.”

  “Isn’t feeling well. I’ve been keeping him home. Things okay with you and your family now? That was some big stuff went down.”

  “Not quite back to normal, but we’re headed there.”

  Stephen left, but Winston Goodsky’s photo had nudged him in a direction he hadn’t thought of in a while. He decided to make a visit to the place where everything had begun.

  * * *

  The road to the base of Desolation Mountain was clear and empty. Stephen hiked the path that most people took to the top and made his way through the ring of aspen trees. The path was blanketed in fallen gold leaves. He walked in stillness until he came to the end of the aspens and stood at the edge of the wide, bare apron of rock that lay around the base of the crowning outcrop.

  It was a golden day. The sun sat atop the mountain like a king on his throne, and Stephen shielded his eyes against the brilliance. Under the shade of his hand,
he saw a figure fifty yards up the slope. The figure was turned toward the mountain crest. To Stephen it appeared as if one of the figure’s arms was pointed toward the crowning outcrop, and the image shook loose a startling recognition.

  At the sound of Stephen’s approach, the kid spun, his face full of surprise and fear.

  “Easy, Winston,” Stephen said. “Just me.”

  The kid held a camera, to which was affixed a long telescopic lens.

  “I thought you were sick,” Stephen said. “That’s why your grandfather’s keeping you out of school.”

  The kid looked down at the hard rock beneath his feet. “He wants me to stay home for a while, until everything settles down.”

  “Does he know where you are?”

  Winston shook his head. “I told him I was going to shoot along the lakeshore. He doesn’t want me coming up here.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s afraid.”

  “Of what?”

  “I should go.”

  “Wait. I’ll make you a deal. There’s something I want to tell you about this place, something that might sound pretty strange. If it makes sense, you tell me why. Okay?”

  “Really, I have to go.”

  “It’s important.”

  The kid let a few seconds pass. Stephen wondered what he was weighing in his thinking. Then the kid gave a simple nod.

  Stephen told him about the vision in which they both played a part. When he finished, he said, “I see this night after night. Does it mean anything to you?”

  The kid looked away from Stephen. His eyes settled on the outcrop that topped the mountain. “There’s something you should see.”

  He tipped his camera and, in the shade of his own shadow, studied the LCD display screen as he scanned through images. He stopped and handed the camera to Stephen. The image showed the crown of Desolation Mountain, that outcrop like a castle keep. But to the right was something else, something smaller and squarish in design. Stephen squinted but could make out only that he was looking at a vehicle of some kind. “I don’t understand.”

  The kid took the camera, zoomed in on the image, and returned it to Stephen. Now what Stephen saw was a military-looking truck painted in camouflage. From the open bed in back rose a huge device that, with its hood and forked tongue, reminded Stephen of a cobra about to strike. Three men seemed to be attending to the device.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know,” Winston said. “But look at this.”

  He shifted the focus on the LCD display to a bird in the sky above the vehicle and zoomed in even farther on the display. Now Stephen could see that it wasn’t a bird at all.

  “Is that Senator McCarthy’s plane?”

  Winston didn’t reply, but his face said it all.

  CHAPTER 43

  * * *

  The final meeting with Gerard went, as Bo had suspected it would, with all the emotion and formality of an exchange of chips at a casino window. He was paid in cash for his services, and Gerard didn’t even bother to shake his hand. It took place at Bo’s cabin, and as Gerard headed toward the door, Bo said, “What about my bonus?”

  “Bonus?” Gerard turned back. “What bonus?”

  “You told me if I got the black box, there’d be a bonus in it.”

  “The FBI got it in their sweep of the lodge on Celtic Lake.”

  “Ah, but how did it get there?”

  “Search me.”

  “That wouldn’t do any good. You’d be clean as a new bathtub.” Bo was sipping a beer, Leinenkugel’s. He lifted the can in a toast to himself. “I didn’t do a bad job of sorting out the players. NTSB and FBI, they were obvious. I tracked a lot of vehicles up here back to DoD, several different departments. The Lexington Brigade, of course. Elements of the Ojibwe community. But I still have no idea who hired you.”

  “Is that important?”

  “The FBI may have the black box, but the information that was on it? That went to whoever brought you in. Then you wiped the recorder clean.”

  “The Lexington Brigade wiped it clean.”

  “That’s certainly the story.”

  “I know another story, Thorson. One about a man hired to do a job. Then he sells himself out to another employer. What do you think of a man who’d do that?”

  “Like everything that happens in the world, Colonel, it all depends on the reason.”

  “In this story, if I were a romantic, I’d say the reason was affection.”

  “Maybe you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. But the truth is more complicated.”

  “Truth?” Gerard’s face was a gray slate on which nothing was written. “We float on a sea of lies. There is no solid ground called truth.”

  “What poem is that from?”

  “No poem. Just the way it is.”

  “And that’s where we differ.”

  Gerard turned back toward the door. “I’ll expect you to leave this county today.”

  “Always a pleasure dealing with you, Colonel.”

  For the next couple of days, Bo lived out of his Jeep, staying off Gerard’s radar, avoiding communication with everyone. Communications had clearly been monitored. He was almost certain that, from the beginning, Gerard had known about her. The bug, he suspected, was probably on her end the whole time. Without knowing it, she had been compromised from the get-go, or Olympia McCarthy’s family had been.

  Although the man had made it quite clear that Bo was not to stick around, Gerard himself made no move to leave, which led Bo to believe there were still loose ends to be tied up. The knots Gerard used to tie up loose ends were often of a lethal kind. Bo was concerned about the safety of the O’Connors and the people on the reservation. He was also concerned about getting to the truth. A U.S. senator had been assassinated, and her family killed along with her. As corny as it sounded, Bo wanted justice for them.

  He practically hijacked Cork O’Connor. He’d been waiting half a day near the double-trunk birch that marked the path to Crow Point. When Cork finally showed and began the hike, Bo stepped from the cover of the trees.

  “Jesus!” Cork jumped back and tensed as if for a fight. “What the hell, Bo? I thought you were gone.”

  “We need to talk.”

  “I’m heading to Crow Point. Why don’t you join me? You’ll be welcome there.”

  “Maybe not after you hear what I have say. There’s something I need to explain.”

  Cork waited. Everything around them was quiet. Bo felt as if the forest, too, was listening. After all he’d heard the old Mide say, he’d come to accept that the forest might have eyes and ears and spirit. That it might already know the truth.

  “That ransom I told you about, Cork? The Argentine diplomat’s son? It was Gerard who brought me in. I’ve worked with him a few times over the years.”

  Cork looked stung, then wary. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Were you working for him up here?”

  “Yes. And no. After the senator’s family contacted me, Gerard did the same. I knew if he was involved, something definitely wasn’t right. I accepted his offer, thinking that what I learned from him, I could pass along to the senator’s family.”

  “Like some kind of double agent?”

  “More or less.”

  “And you couldn’t tell me?”

  “Safer for you and for everybody if I didn’t. I’m sorry about that, but I hope you understand.”

  “So who is this Gerard?”

  “An operative of sorts for the government. A kind of fixer.”

  “A fixer?”

  “He’s brought in to manage delicate situations.”

  “Like the assassination of a U.S. senator?”

  “Let’s walk,” Bo said.

  As they made their way toward Crow Point, Bo explained to Cork about the bug he’d placed at Gerard’s headquarters and that Gerard had eventually discovered and disabled.

  “They talked about looking fo
r bear tracks on Desolation Mountain and looking for waves on the beach. Code, of course, but code for what?”

  “The flight recorder,” Cork said, as if it were obvious.

  “Bear tracks? I don’t know. And waves on the beach? I get a different feel.”

  “Maybe he’s talking about evidence of the brigade’s missile attack. Bear tracks could, I suppose, refer to the trail they left up on the mountain.”

  “What about waves on the beach?”

  Cork thought for a bit. “Got me.”

  “Waves,” Bo said. “It sounds electronic to me.”

  “So how do you want to proceed?”

  “I’m not sure. Mostly I wanted to warn you. Gerard hasn’t left Tamarack County. If I were a betting man, I’d lay odds that he got to the flight recorder ahead of us. I think he downloaded the info he wanted from it, wiped it clean, then planted it at the lodge on Celtic Lake.”

  “Planted it?” Cork stopped and stared at Bo. “Are you saying Gerard killed all those men?”

  “I wouldn’t put it past him.”

  “How did he know about them?”

  “I don’t know if he was aware of them from the beginning, or if he picked up that information along the way. There are still a lot of unanswered questions. But one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you was just to alert you to the fact that he’s still around, maybe still monitoring you and your family and those folks on the reservation. Be very careful what you say and who you say it to. And keep watching your backs. There must still be some loose end, and until he’s tied it up, Gerard won’t leave.”

  They’d come to the creek Cork told him was called Blood in the language of the Ojibwe. Bo paused there.

  “Don’t tell anyone you saw me. But, Cork, if you learn anything of value, anything that might point us toward some answers, let me know.”

  Cork studied him, and Bo knew that he was making a difficult decision. The man understood the whole truth now and had no reason to trust him.

  “A call?” Cork finally said.

  “That’s fine. But let’s use a code word to let me know without saying it.”