Exile Hunter

by Preston Fleming

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Roger said excitedly. “Of all the places!”

  “Whatever you might think about Tom Horvath, I want you to promise you won’t say a word about him to your friends in the government,” Patricia shot back. “I will not repay a kindness by letting any harm come to that man.”

  “Oh, I don’t need to say anything to them. Either he’s Linder or he’s not. Of course, I’d know right away if I saw him. But so will the Department. And I’d hate to be in his shoes when they catch up with him, though the bastard deserves every bit of it for what he did to us.”

  “What nonsense are you talking now?” Patricia scolded. “What could Tom Horvath ever have done to us?

  “If Horvath didn’t tell you his real name was Warren Linder, then I don’t suppose he would have told you Linder was the undercover operative who came to your father’s apartment in Beirut disguised as the Mormon rebel Joe Tanner.”

  Patricia’s eyes widened involuntarily as she realized that this must have been what Linder had tried to tell her the night before.

  “Listen, Patricia,” Roger went on, “I got all this straight from Linder’s mouth. It seems he was roped into going to Beirut at the last minute to meet with your father and me. But the operation failed to go down as planned. And while he and your father were out on the veranda alone, your father offered to turn himself in if the DSS would leave the rest of us alone. Against orders, Linder agreed to pass his offer along but, when his superiors learned of it, they were furious and accused him of conspiring to aid the insurgency.”

  Patricia looked away.

  “Poor bastard,” Roger reflected, “now I see why Linder went so soft-headed when we were in the hospital together. He already knew you from before.”

  In that moment, Patricia Kendall realized that, despite Linder’s having come to meet her father in disguise as Joe Tanner, it had never been his intention to capture them. On the contrary, if he had been allowed to deliver her father’s message, she and Caroline and Roger might still be living peacefully in London. Instead, Linder, too, had been arrested and subjected to the very same treatment as Roger. But unlike her husband, whom captivity had corrupted, Linder had never caved in under pressure and, having escaped the camps, had even risked his life to come to her aid.

  Now, she realized, her best hope for the future lay not in Roger’s self-serving proposal to meet with DSS lawyers, but in returning to Coalville, warning Linder, and perhaps even fleeing with him if it were not already too late.

  “Stop the car,” she ordered. “We’re going back.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?” Roger objected.

  “I said turn around,” she repeated.

  “We can’t turn around,” he answered, holding fast to the wheel. “They’re expecting us.”

  “I don’t care. Take me back. Now!”

  “You don’t understand, Patricia,” Roger answered, his voice taking on a pleading tone. “When I said they would go after Caroline if you refused, that was no figure of speech. Dennis drove over to the Middle School to pick her up before you and I left the house. You’ve got to do what they want or they’ll send her back to Kamas. Alone. Without you or anyone else to protect her.”

  All at once Patricia felt as if her head would split.

  In a sudden fit of rage, she seized the steering wheel with both hands and wrenched it toward her so that the sedan veered onto the right shoulder. Roger wrestled it back and now the car swerved left across both lanes and ran off the road, careening down a steep embankment. It came to a sudden stop amid a jagged rock formation, where it burst into flames and burned with an all-consuming heat.

  * * *

  Jay Becker drove past the crash site a half hour later and watched a fire crew finish dousing the smoke and flames. Paramedics carried two stretchers toward the ambulance, each bearing a corpse in a zippered body bag.

  “Looks like a government sedan,” Jay observed. “Poor slobs, probably choked on their doughnuts.”

  “Don’t slow down,” Linder urged. “Let’s get past.”

  A sudden feeling of melancholy struck Linder as he watched the stretchers and he felt an odd sense of loss without knowing why. He glanced behind him to Caroline and noticed a dejected look on her face.

  When they reached the deserted supermarket parking lot where they were to meet their underground contacts, Linder got out of the pickup and addressed Caroline through her open window.

  “Each of us will travel separately now,” he said, placing both his hands over hers on the door’s windowsill. “In a few days, we’ll all meet again in North Dakota and stay with Jay’s people until we figure out what to do next,” he explained. “I know some folks on the Great Lakes who might get us aboard a freighter to Europe. Give it some thought and we’ll talk more when we’re together again.”

  Without further leave-taking, Linder pressed his hand to Caroline’s cheek with a reassuring smile before crossing the lot to an old black SUV with tinted windows where a prosperous-looking couple in their mid-sixties awaited him. He climbed into the back seat and introduced himself as Tom while Jay parked the company pickup and Caroline was led off to another waiting vehicle. The couple in the black SUV, whose names were Ted and Joan, said little and seemed very anxious to get started. As the SUV left the parking lot, Linder removed pen and paper from his breast pocket and wrote hastily.

  “Dear Ruth: Tell April I will come for her soon. She should watch for me outside the Rapid Transit Station on her way to or from work and be ready to leave at a moment’s notice.”

  He folded the paper, sealed it in an envelope, and addressed it to his cousin in Cleveland before handing it forward to Ted.

  “Would you mind dropping this into a mailbox before we get too far?” he asked Ted.

  “Sure thing,” the driver replied as he accepted the letter. “I know just the place. But for now, I need you to lie on the floor and pull this blanket over you. And don’t move or say a word till I say so.”

  A few minutes later, the car stopped.

  “Okay, you can get up and stretch now, but keep the windows closed and stay inside the car,” Ted instructed.

  Linder saw that they were parked outside a convenience store equipped with gas pumps, phone booth and a mailbox. Joan stepped out to mail the letter while Ted turned around in his seat to instruct Linder in how to lift the rear seat and enter a hidden compartment large enough to conceal a grown man with ample room to spare.

  “Don’t worry,” Ted assured Linder with a smile. “It’s well ventilated and you won’t be in there for long. Once we get through the next couple of towns, you can come out again. We won’t be using the Interstate, so it’s going to be a long drive.”

  “I’ve done worse,” Linder answered with a gentle laugh and lowered himself into the dark compartment.

  S22

  History never repeats itself but it often rhymes. Mark Twain

  MID-OCTOBER, CLEVELAND, OHIO

  Warren Linder downed the last of his lukewarm coffee and stared out the windshield of his ancient minivan into the predawn gloom. Half a block ahead was the floodlit steel-and-glass head house of the West 25th Street commuter rail station, tucked behind Cleveland’s West Side Market. The market, an immense yellow-brick cathedral of a building with barrel-vaulted ceilings and a 130-foot clock tower built shortly before the World War I, represented the focal point of Cleveland’s historic Ohio City neighborhood, founded nearly a century before.

  On entering the neighborhood, Linder observed with sadness the broken windows, vacant storefronts, and heaps of trash that showed how far this sooty wasteland had fallen. He recalled from his schoolboy days that St. John’s Episcopal Church, only a few streets away, was one of the final stops of the original Underground Railroad in northeastern Ohio during Civil War I. That the New Underground Railroad had brought him to Ohio City was no coincidence, he mused, and felt renewed gratitude for the volunteers who had helped him at each stage of his trip east, ju
st as they assisted many others fleeing the modern-day slavery of the Unionist labor camps.

  Linder had picked up the minivan in Detroit, where Caroline Kendall joined him for the drive to Cleveland. Caroline lay asleep in the back seat while he watched and waited. From his cousin Ruth’s final posting on the refugee locator board, he knew that his sister April now worked at a public high school near the West Side Market and that she commuted to it by the Cleveland Rapid Transit Red Line. The high school, once a private Jesuit school for young men famous in the city for its successful athletic programs, had been renamed for the President-for-Life the year before.

  Linder shook himself awake and looked at his watch. It was a few minutes past seven and classes started at eight. Since it was only a ten-minute walk along Lorain Avenue from the station to the school, April would likely pass the minivan some time in the next half hour. With the arrival of each commuter train, a growing number of teenagers carrying book bags emerged from the station.

  Linder reached for Caroline’s ankle and gave it a gentle tug.

  “Time to wake up, Caroline,” he announced gently. “She’ll be coming out soon. Do you remember what you’re supposed to do?”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” she answered in a sleepy voice.

  “Why don’t you repeat it to me one more time, just to be sure.”

  “When you point out your sister, I’m supposed to follow her to the market hall. Then I need to get her attention just before we reach the first entrance to the hall on the right,” Caroline replied.

  “What are you going to tell her?”

  “I’m going to say ‘I have news from Warren and would you please come inside.’ Then, once we’re in, I’ll tell her that you’re waiting for us in the van. Whether she comes with me or not, I go out the opposite side of the building into the alley. Then I turn right until I hit West 24th Street and then right again to come back to the van.”

  “Bravo,” Linder replied. “And don’t forget to give April a big smile. Once you do that, it’s a cinch she’ll follow you.”

  A few minutes later, another group of students emerged from the brightly lit head house, and so did a dark-haired woman in a navy pea coat and matching knit hat with a book bag slung over her shoulder.

  “That’s April,” Linder declared with suppressed excitement. “Now go get her. But if she won’t come, don’t argue—just break off and come right back here, okay?”

  “Got it,” Caroline replied, locking onto her target. A moment later, she rolled the minivan door shut behind her and set off in pursuit.

  Linder watched Caroline close in on the woman in the pea coat and, for a moment, he worried that he might have misidentified her. But then the woman turned her head to listen to Caroline and Linder breathed a sigh of relief at recognizing his sister. As requested, April promptly followed Caroline into the Market Hall and the next few minutes passed with agonizing slowness as Linder scanned the streets and alleys for signs of surveillance. Finally, he spotted the two women in his rear view mirror and started the engine.

  Caroline opened the front passenger door and stood beside April as she peered inside the van.

  “Warren? Is that really you?” came his sister’s anxious voice.

  “It’s me, all right,” he answered, choking back his tears. “Now get in and give me a hug.”

  Caroline, showing a presence of mind that had often surprised Linder, closed the passenger door behind April and looked up and down the street before hopping in the back seat. She waited until the siblings finished their hug before she spoke.

  “Shouldn’t we be going now?” she asked. “You’re making me nervous.”

  Linder laughed as he reached down to put the car in gear. Once in motion, he glanced frequently in his sister’s direction as if to make sure she were still there.

  “I received your messages but I hardly dared hope I’d ever see you again,” April told her brother, laughing and crying at the same time. “Is it true you escaped from a prison camp, or were you let out on parole? I heard there might have been an amnesty.”

  “Not for me,” he said. “Escape was my only option. And now that I’m out, I intend to keep moving till I’m free. Together with you, if you’ll come.”

  April looked at him as if he had just landed from Mars. Linder pretended not to notice the troubled look in her eyes as he turned onto Lorain Avenue toward the Northeast Freeway.

  “But that’s impossible,” she replied a pause. “It would be suicide even to try. Everyone knows Homeland Security has the borders completely sealed.”

  “No more impossible than my being here in Cleveland,” he asserted. “I got this far, didn’t I? Listen, I don’t see this as a suicide mission at all. If I did, I wouldn’t be asking you and Caroline to come with me.”

  “Hey, can we talk about this over breakfast,” Caroline broke in. “I’m starving.”

  “Sure, after we get on the freeway and put a little distance between us and downtown,” Linder replied. “But we’ll all have to put on disguises whenever we leave the car in case there are surveillance cameras around. Why don’t you show April how to wear hers while I drive.”

  * * *

  They stopped to buy breakfast from the drive-through window of a family restaurant near the airport. From there, Linder drove April and Caroline on to Strongsville, a bedroom community about ten miles further south, where he dropped them at one of many low-priced motels near the junction of Interstate 71 and the Ohio Turnpike. After giving April cash to book a room, he instructed them to stay indoors until he returned that evening. Next, he searched for a pay phone to call Jay Becker, who awaited his call in a town a hundred miles to the west.

  Linder found a pay phone in the lobby of a truck stop a quarter mile away and placed the call. Jay answered on the third ring. After each man each gave a prearranged greeting to verify that he was not under hostile control, Jay spoke first.

  “The competition paid a visit to Dad at the office two days ago,” he reported. “They also visited the folks we stayed with in my home town. But it doesn’t sound like they know what we’re up to, judging from the kinds of questions they asked. Of course, they’ll be looking in the usual places, but if you’re careful, you ought not to run into problems. How soon do you think you’ll need me?”

  “We’re on schedule,” Linder answered. “Let’s meet tonight as planned.”

  Linder hung up the phone, checked his watch, and continued south on Route 42 for another 15 miles before turning onto a county road and from there onto a one-lane dirt road. No more than twin tire tracks in the dirt and a center strip of tall grass, the road led through rolling pasture and up a steep rise to a deserted farmhouse flanked by a dilapidated red barn and a pair of small sheds. This was the place Yost had described to him in their final conversation before the avalanche. Perpendicular rows of tall poplars screened the farmstead to the north and west, while an untended apple orchard obstructed views to the south.

  Linder parked behind the barn and circled it on foot before tugging at the handle of a Dutch door beside the larger main door. The door would not budge. Nor would the main door, which had jumped its track. He gave the barnyard a long searching look, as if to commit its features to memory, before heading back to the van.

  Before he traveled more than a few steps, a gruff voice called out from one of the sheds.

  “Raise your hands and turn around slowly.”

  The voice was muffled but sounded oddly familiar. Linder turned around and faced the shed, watching a man approach from out of the shadows with a pistol raised and pointed at his heart. His jaw dropped when he saw that the man was Charlie Yost.

  “Yes, it’s me. And I’m not a ghost,” Yost assured him as he tucked the .45 caliber autoloader into his waistband.

  Linder stepped forward to embrace Yost, who had regained some of his lost weight and now looked like a stern old Ohio farmer in his rust-colored twill hunting jacket and plaid hunting cap. Linder grasped him by his sinewy shoulders
and examined him at arm’s length.

  “But I saw you fall in the avalanche,” Linder protested, his feelings a mixture of joy and confusion. “We searched every inch of it for you.”

  “You gave up too soon,” Yost said with a forgiving laugh. “When I came around, you were already gone. Fortunately, I had enough air around my face to breathe and was able to work my hands free and dig myself out. But my knee was twisted and I couldn’t hope to catch up. The next day, some Dene natives hunting elk in the next valley spotted my tracks and took me with them.”

  “But how did you make it all the way to Cleveland?” Linder asked.

  “When my knee got better, the Dene helped me find my way to Great Slave Lake. From there, I cadged rides on freight trains and trucks to Toronto, where I have friends from the old days.”

  “Amazing,” Linder commented, shaking his head. “But how did you happen to be waiting here today, of all days?” Are you really that lucky or did you know I was coming?”

  “It was a little bit of luck and a lot of patience,” Yost answered. “I thought you might try to reach Patricia Kendall if you survived the trip, so I did some digging to track her down at the Kamas camp. But she’d already been released and, before I could reach her, I learned that you had fled Utah with Caroline and that Roger and Patricia were dead.”

  “Patricia dead?” The news staggered Linder. “How?”

  “She and Roger died in a car crash near Coalville a day or two after the camp fell,” Yost answered. “Earlier that morning, Roger had called someone in Cleveland to say that he and Patricia would be leaving for Switzerland soon to claim what remained of the Eaton trusts. That’s all I know.”

  “But Roger was behind the wire at Kamas when they leveled the place,” Linder protested. “It doesn’t make sense that he could have gotten out.”

  “As it turns out, they released him just before the attack on the camp, so he could make one last pass at his wife’s money.”

  Linder’s mind reeled at the news.

  “But why even bother?” Linder asked. “Roger must have known that Philip had spent nearly all he owned on the insurgency.”