by Noah Mann
“You were afraid of us out there,” I said. “You said that we were ‘from there’. What did you mean?”
“You’re from Bandon,” she said. “That town on the coast.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“They said...they said you do things to people there. You kill them. For food.”
Glances volleyed between those of us who’d come from that very place. A place that was not at all what the woman had been told.
“Who told you this?” Enderson asked.
She tensed, the question requiring an answer that she was not yet ready to give.
“You’re safe here,” Mike told her, negating the need for any reply. “I promise you that. We all do.”
Still, Dorothy regarded us with overt suspicion and distrust.
“Why did you come here?” I asked. “Was it just to get food because you’re on your own?”
“Yes,” she said. “For food. Just for food.”
There was an abrupt insistence to her agreement that more than hinted at some other agenda being present in her appearance in Remote. Everyone in the room could see and hear that.
“Dorothy, it would help us tremendously if you—”
“I think we’re done now,” Rebecca said, cutting off Enderson’s attempt to probe further. “It’s already late.”
There was no reason to allow Rebecca to dictate the parameters of the questioning, or any end to it. But Corporal Enderson did not seem eager to cross the line she’d just drawn in the sand. Beyond that, it might be best to pick this up in the morning once Dorothy had some time to eat and rest.
“We can find a place for you to stay, Dorothy,” Enderson said.
“Can I talk to you all outside?” Rebecca asked, looking to Dorothy. “Will you wait here while I talk to my friends?”
Dorothy nodded and held the still warm mug of coffee against her chest, its heat soaking through her sweatshirt.
We followed Rebecca outside, standing beneath the old overhang, the recently repaired window in front letting us continue observing the woman within.
“She can stay with me,” Rebecca Vance said, making any need to search for a host moot.
“That’s a generous offer,” I said. “But she needs more than we can give her here.”
From the corner of my eye I could see Hart nodding.
“Commander Genesee should have a look at her,” the medic said. “Especially that hand.”
“She stable now, though, yes?” Enderson asked, and again Hart nodded. “Then her staying with Miss Vance will be—”
“Mrs.,” Rebecca corrected, the interruption both jarring and sobering. “Mrs.”
I’d known Rebecca Vance since I’d arrived in Bandon. Or known of her. She’d always been a private person, with a very close circle of friends. From my place on the very periphery of that circle, I’d never even sensed a hint that the woman had been married.
“Of course,” Enderson said. “Dorothy can stay with you, Rebecca, until we can evacuate her.”
“Good,” Rebecca said.
She waited not a second more, heading back into the outpost and speaking to Dorothy for a moment, the both of them leaving a moment later, passing us as they walked toward the highway and crossed it, disappearing up Sandy Creek Road.
“She’s not telling us something,” I said.
“She’s not telling us a lot,” Enderson countered.
It was Mike DeSantis, though, who synthesized the cold reality of the situation for us.
“Isn’t that her right?”
There were reasons to disagree with the man, but none were good. If criminals had the right to remain silent, didn’t a scared woman who’d suffered unspeakable abuse have the same? Maybe she had even more of a right to say nothing and to tell us to go to hell if we didn’t like it.
And, very clearly, in Rebecca Vance she’d found an ally without even knowing she’d been seeking one.
Thirty Three
Dawn broke, grey and cold, thunder rumbling in the distance at the same time a knock sounded on our door.
“At this hour?” Elaine wondered as I left the kitchen where we’d been finishing an early breakfast.
“Someone wants to get started early,” I said.
Nick Withers was supposed to come by and head out with me to finish removing roof panels from the storage building next to the outpost. But I wasn’t expecting him for another half hour. As it turned out, eagerness to begin the workday wasn’t what motivated the interruption of our meal.
Revelation was.
“Fletch,” Rebecca Vance said as I opened the door.
Elaine came into the front room behind me, holding Hope.
“Rebecca,” my wife said, surprised.
“I’m sorry to come by so early.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “We were already up. Come on in.”
I took Rebecca’s AK from her and leaned it next to my AR near the door.
“Do you two need to talk?” Elaine asked, ready to leave.
“Yes,” Rebecca confirmed. “But you should probably hear this, too.”
We sat, Elaine and I on the couch, facing Rebecca, her chair near the fire I’d started just after rising.
“Mike’s wife came by with some breakfast for Dorothy a while ago,” Rebecca said. “I asked her if she’d just sit with her for a bit so I could come talk to you.”
“About what?” I asked.
“We talked last night after I got her back to my place. We talked half the night. When I left, she was still sleeping. She was exhausted to begin with, but getting things off her chest...it drained her.”
“What did she tell you?”
“Up until four months ago she was with a group that she’d been with for over a year,” Rebecca explained. “She was born and raised in New Mexico, but most of the people she joined up with were from back east. They originally were heading for Eagle One.”
“Bandon,” Elaine said.
“By the time she found them, they’d given up on that and were mostly scavenging and raiding.”
“Raiding,” I said. “You mean killing.”
“Doing what they had to do to survive,” Rebecca said. “Right or wrong didn’t matter.”
“Right and wrong always matters,” Elaine told our guest.
Rebecca nodded at my wife.
“That’s what Dorothy said. It’s why she split from them. Or tried to. They did to her what you can imagine, if you want to.”
“I don’t,” I said.
“She finally escaped,” Rebecca explained. “If she hadn’t, she’d be dead. Like the rest of them.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“She saw their bodies by the highway between here and Camas Valley.”
“The ambush,” I said.
“They were the ones who hit you,” Rebecca confirmed.
“Wait,” Elaine said, shifting her hold on our daughter as she stirred a bit. “If she left them, how did she know about this?”
Again, Rebecca nodded, Elaine keying in on the most salient point of what she’d shared so far.
“That’s why I’m here,” Rebecca said, looking very purposely to me now. “She threw in with someone else after leaving them.”
“Someone?” I asked, emphasizing the singular nature of what she’d just said.
“Yeah,” Rebecca answered. “A man. With a cowboy hat and a lever action thirty thirty.”
“Olin,” Elaine said, no surprise in her voice.
And there shouldn’t have been. She’d already convinced me that the man who’d killed Neil had to be near, and was trying to get into my head in an effort to find the sample of BA-412. Now, to find out that Dorothy had connected with Tyler Olin, it added a new layer to her appearance in Remote.
“She wasn’t just looking for food,” I said.
“Last night she was,” Rebecca said. “Before that, when you saw her near your place, she was there because he told her to go there. She was supposed to put a couple rocks
on your porch, so you couldn’t miss them.”
Another sign of his presence. Another attempt to trip me up, borrowing from Elaine’s Bureau knowledge and training. And, if he was shifting his efforts this close to my home, to my family, it meant he was beginning to press the issue. He was upping his game, either because he felt confident, or because he was getting desperate. Neither option was in the least bit heartening.
“You saw her before she could put the rocks there,” Rebecca said. “And when she returned to where Olin had been hiding out by the two creeks south of here, he was gone.”
“He’d been supplying her,” I said. “Giving her food.”
“Exactly,” Rebecca said. “He’d use her to spy on places. On people. To leave messages.”
“Messages?” Elaine asked. “Messages for who?”
“She didn’t know. And she didn’t want to know. He was feeding her, and he wasn’t hurting her, so she didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize that arrangement. She’d just leave a little container with the message wherever he told her to, and pick it up when he told her to.”
“She never looked at the messages,” I said.
“Like I said, he was keeping her alive. She didn’t want to risk that. Plus he was feeding her false information about Bandon.”
“Those lies came from him?” I asked.
“Not entirely,” Rebecca said, hedging her certainty. “He did push them, but she’d heard them before from the group she was with.”
I looked to Elaine.
“You think he was spreading the same rumors to the hiders he encountered?” Elaine wondered. “To poison any perceptions of Bandon?”
“That would explain why we’d had no response to the beacon,” I said.
Beckoning people to come to town over the airwaves had resulted in a net population gain of zero. The reason for that might just have been revealed.
“So he tells her all this, uses her, and then he abandons her,” Elaine said. “Why?”
“Because she failed,” I said. “And he knew she failed. Because he was watching.”
I thought for a moment, Rebecca letting me process what she’d shared as the silence lingered. When I’d absorbed all the morsels of information, letting them mentally spin off into likelihoods and possibilities, I looked to the woman who’d brought the news into my home.
“Have you told anyone else?”
Rebecca shook her head.
“Not even Nancy DeSantis?” I pressed.
“No one,” Rebecca said, a sense of promise in her words.
“Can we keep it that way?” I asked.
Now she puzzled at me, some true confusion about her.
“Fletch, our radios can relay off the Camas Valley repeater,” she said. “You could put out a call and have fifty people here in two hours.”
“And he’d just go to ground,” I said. “We’d never get him.”
“Is that what this is about?” Rebecca asked. “Revenge? Getting him for what he did to Neil Moore?”
To be honest, I wasn’t sure if that was my motivation. Or what mainly drove me toward what I’d asked her. But it was part of it. A big part.
“He’s dangerous,” I reminded our visitor.
“So bring a hundred,” Rebecca said. “Get the people from Camas Valley involved. They’re your allies now, right? Put that many people in the field and someone will...”
She didn’t finish her suggestion. Realization made doing so unnecessary.
“You don’t want that,” Rebecca said, seeming wary of what she’d just come to understand. “You want to do it yourself.”
Elaine seemed ready to counter the assertion. To say that her husband, a new father, was far too realistic to seek out some mano a mano resolution with the murderous covert operative. But she didn’t. And I knew why. It was my hesitation to do that for myself. To state my own objection to the scenario Rebecca had implied.
“Eric...”
I looked to my wife. There was no way to lie to her. Even if I’d tried, she would have seen right through me.
“He can’t get away,” I said. “If we bring in the cavalry, we might never see him again.”
“And that’s a bad thing because...”
My wife’s wondering needed no answer. Tyler Olin disappearing would be a victory. But it would not mean the man was defeated. Driving an enemy away was one thing. We’d done that to the Unified Government forces, but they’d simply repositioned and forced the survivors of San Diego into the sea. A sea which swallowed them as their ship likely foundered in the storm near Bandon. If we’d annihilated them, the story would have ended differently for those innocents who’d perished seeking freedom.
Annihilating a force that size, though, was impossible with our resources. Tyler Olin, if he could be located, was one man. And one man could be taken out by another man. An army was not needed.
“Will you keep this quiet, Rebecca?” I pressed her.
She thought for a moment, exchanging a look with Elaine. My wife shook her head and stood, taking our daughter down the hall and closing the door to the bedroom we slept in.
“Will you, Rebecca?”
She needed to consider my request no further.
“You made it so we could come here, Fletch. I suppose someone owes you for doing that.”
“Thank you, Rebecca.”
She took her AK and left, walking out into the morning mist that hung thick in the fields. I closed the door behind and looked down the hallway, steeling myself before going to the bedroom where Elaine had secluded herself.
When I finally walked in I found her sitting on the end of the bed, cradling Hope, tears skimming her eyes.
“We were going to go back to Bandon,” she said.
“We still are.”
“Back there we’d have people around us. People to watch your back. I told you this.”
“Elaine...”
She shook her head, not wanting to hear any explanation I could offer.
“Are you some avenging angel? Is that how you see yourself?”
“He’s not going to stop,” I told her. “Until someone stops him.”
“You mean until you stop him.”
“He’s communicating with people,” I said. “You heard Rebecca. For all we know he could have coordinated that ambush. It could have been his idea.”
“You really believe that?” Elaine challenged me. “How does you ending up dead on the highway get him what he wants?”
She had more than a point. I was reaching, searching for any justification to show that Olin was already too dangerous for us to allow him another chance to get away. But he was in contact with someone, if Dorothy was to be believed. Someone who...
Wait...
“Hold on,” I said, my gaze shifting to the window as I thought. “Something’s not right.”
“Of course something’s not right,” Elaine said, too loud, our daughter whimpering in her sleep. “You want to put yourself up against a man who kills for a—”
“No, not that,” I said.
Elaine calmed, sensing that I was struggling with some internal doubt.
“What is it?”
“Dorothy went all in with Olin for food,” I recounted. “Rebecca said that, right?”
“Right.”
“So, tell me this—where did he get the food to give her?”
My unsatisfied curiosity now infected Elaine. She puzzled over the same incongruity, likely facing the same obstacle to full understanding which vexed me. He could not have carried enough food to supply both himself and another, even if he’d had some cached somewhere, or if he’d been resupplied by his masters back at the CIA. He had to have a local food source, for both himself, and for any he would bribe with sustenance.
“Camas Valley,” I said.
“Dalton?”
“No,” I said. “Ansel and Moira. It makes sense.”
Elaine was coming to the same conclusion that I had.
“He had them break
into our house,” she said. “The first play at tripping you.”
“Every other break-in was a diversion,” I said. “Just like Martin thought.”
“And if you think you’re targeted, that’s the paranoia,” Elaine said. “All part of his plan.”
“It might have worked,” I said. “If I’d known where Four Twelve was, I would have checked on it to make sure it was secure.”
Elaine placed our bundled daughter on the bed and came close to me, her voice low.
“Eric, I was wrong. You need protection here now. We all do. Put a call into Schiavo. At least have her send a couple more of her people out here.”
I heard my wife’s request, not quite to the point of begging, but not far from it, either. Still, my mind was elsewhere, chewing on Olin’s connection to Ansel and Moira. There was no direct proof of their communication, or their collusion, but even the possibility raised more questions than it answered.
“Elaine,” I said, ignoring what she’d just said. “We know what Olin gets from them. He gets food, and people to do his dirty work. But what do they get from him?”
“Are you not listening to me?” Elaine pressed me. “This is too much, okay? He’s not just some well-trained spook. He’s more than that. Do you see that?”
I looked to her, still glossing over her concern.
“What do they get for helping him?”
She grabbed my shirt, bunching its front in her fists.
“Are you even hearing me?”
“You’re right,” I said. “This is bigger. If Dalton’s people are involved with him, then we have to tread carefully. Schiavo was afraid to jeopardize the alliance, but I think she undersold the possible consequences.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about an ally becoming an enemy,” I said, then headed for the front door.
Elaine stepped into the hallway, worried. Even more so when she saw me pull my vest and all its associated gear from the closet.
“Eric, what are you doing?”
“If you truly care for me, you’ll keep this between us,” I said. “I need you to trust me. Please.”
For a moment, she just stood there, silent, not ignoring my plea. Rather, it seemed she knew how she wanted to respond, but couldn’t, because it would crush me. In the end, she simply stepped back into the bedroom with our daughter and closed the door.