Of course, Linder knew very well that America’s border with Canada was a polite fiction now that the Unionist regime had effectively annexed southern Canada. But he had heard somewhere that the border was still patrolled intermittently in the hope of catching the odd rebel, fugitive, or smuggler. Would this place be patrolled? Linder doubted it, just as he doubted that drones, satellites, or ground sensors monitored it. With most of America’s electronic surveillance capabilities destroyed or disabled since the Events, those that remained were too important to waste in the backwoods of northern Montana.
Linder accordingly stole past the warning signs and kept going until he reached the north-south highway into Montana, skirting it just inside the tree line for another hour or more. At last he came upon a road sign in the shape of the State of Montana and read it aloud, his voice close to breaking: “Montana Route 214. To East U.S. Route 2, Shelby 38 miles. To Glacier National Park 55 miles. To U.S. Interstate-15 at Great Falls 124 miles.” And, with that, he let out a raucous cowboy ”Wahoo!”
* * *
Linder flagged down the first car he found on Route 214 and hitched a ride to Shelby, telling the driver he had been hiking in Glacier National Park and lost his way. He used the same story at the thrift shop to buy fresh clothes and a fresh backpack, and at a dollar store to buy a razor, soap, and toothbrush. He did the same at a convenience store for food and beer, and finally at a shabby motel, where he paid a reduced day rate to take a bath in one of the many vacant rooms. As he expected, the thrift shop owner was delighted to exchange a hundred Canadian dollars illegally for greenbacks and cheated Linder shamelessly on the exchange rate, to which Linder made no objection since the illicit profit assured him of the owner’s silence.
Once in his motel room, Linder ate every bite of food he bought before undressing and settling into the bathtub for a hot bath. While soaking and scrubbing, he pondered his impending identity change from escaped fugitive Warren Linder to logging engineer Thomas Horvath. The key to his transformation, he knew, would be his complete mastery of the documents that Rhee had given him and the assumption of a persona consistent with what was on paper. Linder examined the documents closely and committed their details to memory. Then he set his mind to fabricating corollary details of Thomas Horvath’s life.
Rising from the bathtub and turning his face to the mirror, Linder gazed at his shaven visage and then at Horvath’s photograph and back again. His own face was leaner, more angular, a touch more severe. He struck the same pose as in Horvath’s photo, with chin raised and head tilted at a dramatic angle, and suppressed a laugh. Rhee had been right. The resemblance was close enough for anyone but a trained professional or a biometric face scanner. The documents might give him a fighting chance, after all.
Linder changed into his new clothes and stuffed the old ones into his fresh backpack. He took pains to leave the bathroom tidy to preclude complaints from the management, and left his key in the room to avoid showing his face to the clerk. In case the clerk nonetheless saw him leave the premises, he made a show of heading west from the motel and stopping to window shop at storefronts along his path. Once out of view from the motel, he entered one of the shops and left by the rear entrance to proceed toward the bus station from a different direction.
Though Linder had considered hitchhiking the rest of the way to Utah, he rejected that idea, fearing security measures so close to the Canadian border and not wanting to subject himself to the close scrutiny that a long drive might invite from his driver. Instead, he considered the relative anonymity of bus travel and the cursory examination that his Montana identity documents might receive at a small-town bus station like Shelby’s. If he were to rely on these documents from now on, the safest place to test them would be within the state of Montana.
It was a calculated risk that he was willing to take.
So Linder screwed up his courage, strode into the bus station and approached the ticket window.
“When does the next bus to Idaho Falls leave?” he asked the grandmotherly woman in the ticket window.
“In about an hour,” she answered.
“And how much is the fare?”
“Eighty-two dollars and change. Would you like to book the ticket now?”
“I would,” Linder replied. “Do you accept Canadian?”
“I can make that conversion for you at the official rate,” the agent replied cheerily. “But you might do better down the street. You’ve got plenty of time before the next bus leaves if you want to try it.”
“That’s okay, ma’am. Don’t want to get in any trouble using a moneychanger. Here, this ought to cover it,” he said as he handed her cash for the ticket.
With the change he received in U.S. dollars, Linder bought some snacks for the road, a bottle of genuine Canadian whiskey, and a couple of newspapers while he settled in for the wait. The rest of the change, plus what was left from his purchases earlier in the day, would be enough for bus fare from Great Falls to Salt Lake and meals along the way, with another Canadian fifty held in reserve.
When the bus’s departure was announced, Linder was one of only a dozen passengers to board. The driver barely glanced at his identification, comparing only the name on the ticket with the name on Horvath’s Montana residence permit. The bus looked far from new but it seemed well maintained and the steady hum of its engine was reassuring. Linder took a seat near the rear of the bus and soon fell asleep.
He was awakened when the bus stopped at a State Police checkpoint just outside Great Falls. While Linder had expected such checkpoints near the border, their absence during the first hour of the southward journey had raised his hopes of avoiding them altogether. So when the driver opened the front door on command and four Department of State Security officers boarded to check identity papers, Linder’s heart sank.
The officers worked in pairs, each pair working one side of the bus. From the time they entered the vehicle, no one spoke except for the officers and the persons being questioned. They moved rapidly and spent only a few moments with the elderly and the very young, focusing their attention on passengers between the ages of fifteen and sixty.
“Identification, please,” the first officer, a stocky thirtyish black man with a shaved head, demanded of the woman seated directly in front of Linder, a bleached blonde of about fifty in a faded ski jacket. The woman fished a wallet out of her handbag and slipped out a photo identity card. The agent gave the photo a quick look, compared it with the woman’s face, and handed back the card.
When the duo reached Linder, the same agent took Linder’s identity card and asked him his name.
“Tom Horvath,” Linder replied, offering a friendly smile while making eye contact with the unsmiling officer.
“Date and place of birth?” the DSS man continued without returning Linder’s gaze.
“May 10, 1980. Missoula,” Linder answered.
“Your current place of residence?” came the next question.
Linder recited the address written on the residence permit and added, “Except I don’t live there any more. I lost my job and I’m moving down to Utah. I hear they have openings down there.”
But the officer showed no interest in the answer.
“Where was your last place of employment?”
“At a government mine up in the Yukon. No town, just the middle of nowhere,” Linder replied with studied vagueness.
“And before that?”
“A lead-zinc mine in Alaska,” he shot back, having anticipated the question.
“Do you have a written offer of employment in Utah?” the officer asked next. But Linder did not, and this was something he could not fabricate.
“Not yet, sir,” he replied.
“Are you aware that Utah is a restricted zone? Your Montana residence permit allows you to visit for no more than thirty days and it’s not a work permit. Would you mind following me outside? I’ll need ask you for a few more questions.”
Though Montana was a restricted
zone like Utah, and Linder had been aware that legal residents of one such zone enjoyed the right of free entry into another, he had been unaware of labor restrictions between the zones. For him to enter Utah was no crime and the DSS had no authority to turn him back, but it was the nature of DSS men to prey on the weak and unprotected. Having seen it done, and having done it himself so many times during his tenure with the Department, he did not expect to get off lightly. At the very least, his unemployed status was likely to prompt a criminal background check that, depending on its level of detail, could be his undoing.
With one officer behind him and one leading the way, Linder was escorted off the bus and into the doublewide trailer that served as the State Police outpost. Upon entering the overheated entrance to the outpost, Linder could feel the perspiration gather on his forehead and upper lip and smell the sour odor of his own fear.
A uniformed DSS officer with the rank of lieutenant entered the room within a few moments. To Linder’s astonishment, he recognized the officer as Dan Dorsey, a former guard at the Camp N-320 disciplinary unit, who sometimes also guarded transit prisoners en route to the northern camps from Glasgow AFB in Great Falls, where Linder’s own transit flight had refueled en route to Ross River.
Linder could never forget the remark Dorsey had made one frigid afternoon at The Point, to the effect that letting prisoners warm themselves during breaks made them lazy and that the cold was the only thing capable of squeezing work out of them. Calculating that Dorsey was unlikely to recognize him from among the thousands of prisoners he had guarded or escorted over the years, Linder decided on a desperate gamble in hopes of averting a background check. Though the attempt would likely put his undercover role-playing skill to the acid test, he plunged ahead.
“Hey, Dan, how are you doing?” he greeted the officer warmly, advancing to hold out his hand. “Tom Horvath. Great to see you again!”
Dorsey eyed him suspiciously and declined the handshake. Linder remained unfazed.
“Don’t you remember me?” he confronted the officer. It was a high stakes bet and Linder knew it. If Dorsey possessed a memory for names and faces as sharp as Linder’s, or if for some strange reason, his face had stuck in Dorsey’s mind, Linder would be undone.
“No, I don’t,” Dorsey replied.
“Well, how about that!” Linder continued, undeterred. “You and I were on a plane together up north. Your family name is Dorsey, and you were telling me how you met your wife Carolyn at an airport in Yellowknife. She had enjoyed a libation or two before boarding and they weren’t going to let her on. But you put in a word with the crew and got her aboard, anyway.”
Linder paused to flash Dorsey a congratulatory grin. The DSS man looked puzzled, but seemed to be warming.
“Anyway, after the two of you became acquainted, you asked her out a couple times and started dated by long distance. A couple of months later she brought you home to meet her parents and the two of you got engaged. What a story, eh, brother?”
Linder laughed heartily and Dorsey soon joined in. Every word of the story was true, except that Linder had overheard it not on an airline flight but while Dorsey was regaling fellow guards around an oil-drum fire at Camp N-320. Linder guessed from the guard’s garrulous manner that he had told the same story dozens of times and in nearly as many places.
Dorsey seemed delighted to hear the tale retold and to renew the acquaintance with the mining engineer. Each then spoke briefly about his life and work since their acquaintance, but without any mention of labor camps. After their exchange, Linder offered to look up Dorsey on his next trip through Great Falls and the officer returned Linder’s documents with an apology, even offering him a cup of hot coffee for the road. Linder accepted the cup eagerly and hurried back aboard the bus to wary looks from his fellow passengers. Since State Security rarely gave up its prey, he could hardly blame them for suspecting he might be an informant. In fact, the irony of it brought a smile to his lips.
The world works in mysterious ways, Linder thought when at last the bus lurched forward. Though still a fugitive, he was now a documented resident of a restricted zone and thus, at least on paper, more or less a free man. For reasons that he could not quite fathom, the contradiction made him feel right at home.
S17
It is not necessary to hope in order to undertake, nor to succeed in order to persevere. Charles the Bold
MID-APRIL, THURSDAY, IDAHO FALLS, IDAHO SECURITY ZONE
The bus delivered Linder to Idaho Falls by early evening, where he exchanged his remaining Canadian dollars for greenbacks and bought himself a cheap steak dinner before renting a room at a rundown hotel near the bus station.
The next morning, Linder considered economizing on bus fare by hitchhiking the rest of the way to Utah, having encountered no further checkpoints since Great Falls, but decided not to take the risk. Instead, over breakfast, he plotted the bus route from Idaho Falls to Park City, and by local jitney bus to Coalville, the town whose name he had seen in his vision the morning before reaching the ranger cabin. According to the map, Coalville was located only thirty miles from the Kamas labor camp where Roger Kendall had said that his wife and stepdaughter had been held.
From Idaho Falls to the Utah border, the I-15 highway was nearly empty. No border checkpoints were encountered and, on crossing into Utah, Linder felt a sudden exhilaration at having come so close to his goal. Yet, when he thought of the hardships endured along the way, and the loss of his fellow prisoners, he felt a profound sadness that nearly drained him of his strength. But instead of repressing the sadness and guilt, as he had done toward his DSS targets over the years, now Linder held each comrade’s image before his mind’s eye and vowed to honor the man’s sacrifice by completing the mission he had promised to carry out.
Emerging from his reverie outside Ogden, Linder noticed that traffic had thickened and consisted primarily of military vehicles, long-haul trucks, buses and a few boxy sedans of the kind found in government motor pools. Closer to the city, the road became clogged with delivery trucks, ride-sharing vans, and swarms of noisy, exhaust-spewing motorbikes like those commonly seen all over the Third World. Upon reaching the Ogden bus terminal, Linder rushed to board a local line from Ogden to Park City and promptly fell asleep for most of the hour-long ride.
Entering Coalville, population 1120, in a jitney bus, Linder’s gaze was drawn to towering mounds of leftover snow flanking both sides of the road from a bygone snowstorm. A layer of black road dirt encrusted each mound, from whose base a trickle of melt water flowed along the curb and into sewer grates below. Paradoxically, the sight of winter’s doomed remnants left Linder feeling safe and warm, as if to assure him that he had passed irretrievably beyond the north country’s icy grasp.
He stepped off the bus in the center of town and noticed at once that most of the buildings within view seemed in serious need of repair. Tattered political banners from some long-past civic event hung across the main street at every second block, flapping in the steady breeze. The place gave Linder the impression not so much of a sad little town as of one that had never known joy.
After walking a couple of blocks, he stopped at a seedy sandwich shop on South Main Street to buy a burger and a soda. Then, finding the town’s sole hotel padlocked as twilight fell, he kept an eye peeled for a cheap boarding house until he found a “room to let” sign posted on the door of a well-tended bungalow on an adjacent side street.
He knocked. A stern-looking woman of about sixty, with long graying hair pinned in a bun, answered the door wearing a clean white apron over a cotton print housedress.
“I saw your sign, ma’am,” he greeted her. “I just arrived in town and found the hotel closed. Do you rent rooms by the night?”
“The room rate is twenty dollars a night, one hundred a week,” she answered, looking him steadily in the eye. “Payable in advance. How long do you expect to stay?”
“Depends on my finding work around here,” he said. “I have enough to c
over a week, but would you mind if I pay you just for tonight? I’d like to see a little more of the town before I decide to stay longer.”
“What sort of work are you looking for?” the woman asked in a not unkindly way.
“Whatever I can find,” Linder answered. “I’ve done mining, logging, ranching, factory work, office work, you name it. But things are tough all over, so I really don’t know what kind of jobs might be open in these parts. Do you happen to know of anyone who’s hiring?”
The woman shook her head, yet her sympathy seemed aroused.
“Strangers looking for day labor around here usually line up along the lower end of South Main, just off the freeway. But I’d go early, no later than seven, if you aim to have a chance. I can wake you up if you like. Breakfast is three dollars, assuming you might want some ham and eggs before you set out.”
“I’ll take it,” Linder declared with a smile, reaching into his trouser pocket for money. “Here’s twenty-five to get us started. By the way, I’m Tom Horvath and I’m pleased to meet you.”
“I’m Sharon Unger, but I hope you’ll call me Sharon. Being called ‘Mrs. Unger’ makes me feel like a dinosaur.”
Linder laughed, and when the woman smiled in return, he could see from the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes that in times past she had laughed often and long. She stepped aside to let him in and showed him to the rear bedroom, a small space with a single window and its own tiny bathroom. It was sparsely furnished with a twin bed, stuffed chair, dark-stained oak writing desk and chair, and a pine chest of drawers. Linder nodded his approval.
“One more thing,” she added. “There’s a set of house rules on the desk. Nothing unusual, I’d say, but I am very strict about a few things. I won’t permit alcohol, tobacco, firearms, or illegal drugs in my house. Do your drinking and smoking off the premises, if you must. Will that be a problem?”
Exile Hunter Page 36