“Who are you?” Sabrina asked.
“My name is Lynn Deschaine.”
“I’m Sabrina Baldwin.”
The woman cocked her head. “Baldwin.”
“You’ve heard my name before?”
“I met your husband. You’re the reason…you’re why he was so strange.”
She had met Jay? This seemed incomprehensible, like someone bringing a message from the dead.
“Where was he?” Sabrina said. “How is he? Do they have him here or…” She heard her voice rising, took a breath, then whispered. “Where do they have him?”
“Nowhere,” Lynn Deschaine said. Her dark hair had fallen over her face as she shifted, and she blew it away to clear her eyes. “He was at home. We interviewed him about the vandalism on the lines. Mark was right. Your husband was scared of us. Because of you. You were already gone, weren’t you?”
Sabrina was listening, but her brain had stuck on he was at home. That news gave birth to tangled emotions—relief that he was safe, but also astonishment at the idea of him just being at home talking to people about vandalized power lines when she was up here, chained to a cabin wall.
As if sensing this, Lynn Deschaine said, “I think he’s going through the motions to keep them happy and keep you safe.”
Sabrina nodded numbly. Sure, that was it, he just wanted to keep her safe. But still, she felt betrayed.
“Do you know more about them?” Sabrina said. “About why we’re here?”
Lynn seemed to choose her next words carefully.
“I don’t know why we are here, if you mean the specific location, but I understand why they have us. I know why they have me, at least. I’ve been investigating him for years.”
“Eli?”
“Yes.”
“Who is he?”
This time, Lynn didn’t hesitate. “If you gave Charles Manson the mind of Nikola Tesla,” she said, “you would find yourself with Eli Pate. Or so he thinks.”
Sabrina had a strange memory then. A clear recollection of the way the lights had blinked on the morning of her kidnapping, the outage that summoned Jay out of the house and into the storm. Just like a knock, she thought. Like there was evil at the door, announcing its presence. They’d blamed the storm then, but by midday she’d known it wasn’t really the storm. She just hadn’t known it was Eli Pate.
“How many do you think are up here?” Lynn asked.
“At least three. Maybe more. When they brought you in, you were talking about Violet’s son. They seemed concerned about him. Who is he?”
Even in the shadows, she saw something change in Lynn Deschaine’s face. “I don’t even know anymore,” she said. “I fell asleep feeling this horrible guilt because I hadn’t told him the truth. I thought I knew more than he did, and that wasn’t fair. But he knew more than I did. He knew exactly where I was headed.”
“They don’t seem to agree,” Sabrina said.
“What do you mean?”
“You were incoherent when they brought you in. But the idea that you were with him seemed to…shock them, really. They never lose their composure, but they came close when they heard that.”
For a time, there was silence. Then the quiet was shattered by the sounds of engines. Voices rose briefly, then faded away until the second engine started. Actually, the second and the third—two different pitches that merged into one sound.
“Not motorcycles,” Lynn said thoughtfully. “Maybe a four-wheeler?”
“Yes,” Sabrina said, and she was disappointed with herself for not recognizing the sounds first. “That’s exactly what it is.”
“And they’re only arriving. They’re not leaving.”
They looked at each other in silence as they contemplated what that meant.
Thirty minutes later, another engine. Five minutes after that, another still. Then two more.
Sabrina and Lynn had stopped looking at each other.
44
Mark’s uncles had spent some time on the rodeo circuit, though neither was much of a rider. Larry was a trick-rope artist, as good as any Mark ever saw, and he could shoot like he’d been born with a gun in his hand. All of the stunts in Westerns that people said couldn’t be done in real life, Larry did in real life. He’d toss a quarter in the air and draw a revolver and put a hole through the center, shooting accurately by fanning the hammer, and even though he wasn’t a lefty, he was better with his left hand than most marksmen were with their right. For a couple years he’d done sporadic stunt work for film and TV gigs. Then, as the popularity of the Western died and computer effects removed the need for any real human achievement, he was just an unemployed trick-shooter with a few stories about Hollywood starlets.
He drank on those stories for years, though. His brother began to call one of Larry’s actress conquests the Annuity because of how consistently the tale paid out for him. Chivalrous.
By now enough years had passed that Larry would have had to wait for people to Google the names of the starlets he’d bedded before he began the stories, and even then, nobody would have bought him a drink just to listen, but he was still shooting. Matter of fact, he was giving lessons, and that was how he’d met Eli Pate. It wasn’t trick stuff, and it wasn’t pistols.
“Your mother told me she knew a guy who wanted to learn how to shoot a sniper rifle,” he said as he and Mark sat in the small cabin and the early-morning light began to creep down from the peaks and fill the pines. Larry had started a fire in the ancient cast-iron woodstove and the small space quickly filled with heat.
“Now, usually when your mother says I met this guy, it’s trouble from the get-go,” he said, and then he caught himself and awkwardly added, “Sorry, Markus.”
“Come on, Uncle. It’s not like I don’t have a sense of the woman.”
Larry nodded ruefully and ran a hand over his unruly white hair as if to flatten it against his skull. He was sitting close to the stove, the fire poker still in one hand.
“So I never look forward to meeting the fellas, but, you know, I needed the money at that particular juncture. I’d hit a hard spell.”
Larry had spent his life hitting hard spells like a bug hits a windshield.
“At the time I was working for an outfitter in Wyoming named Scott Shields. He’d bought a ranch just outside of the Bighorns, had plans to put in a bunkhouse, get a good cook, set it up right, you know? He’d made his money up in Alaska, guiding for bear and moose out on the peninsula, but he was a Wyoming kid and wanted to come back. I met him through your mother. They had a good situation all the way around.”
“But it didn’t last,” Mark said.
Larry shook his head. “She was living with him down in Cody and I was working on this property, fixing up the cabins, and she brought Pate up, said he wanted shooting lessons. He had top-of-the-line equipment for a man who didn’t know how to use it. At least five thousand in the rifle and scope. He wasn’t much of a shot, but he asked all kinds of questions about range and impact. What he wanted to shoot at was metal.”
“What do you mean?”
“The questions he had were about different rounds and their damage at point of impact. He had these things he wanted to use as targets, like big ceramic canisters. Looked like electrical equipment, insulators maybe. He didn’t even want me to tell him how to shoot, he wanted me to do the shooting so he could see how these things blew up with different rounds at different distances. I said, ‘Okay, let’s set the bullshit aside, chief, and you tell me what you’re really after.’ And the weird bastard looks at me with this smile like a pedophile in an amusement park and says, ‘I intend to remind people about the true nature of power.’ That’s exactly what he said, word for word. I remember it because it was strange and the look on his face when he said it chilled me to the bone.”
Mark said, “He wants to shut the electrical grid down. I have no idea why.”
“Here’s the bullshit he’s slinging, and it’s bullshit your mother has bought: Spirits tal
k to him. Spirits of the mountains and of the old Indian chiefs. You know how much that pisses me off, listening to a white man claim that?”
“It’s smart,” Mark said. “It’s exactly what Mom would want to hear.”
“You got that right,” Larry admitted. “The last time I saw your mother, she told me about how he’d go up into these caves in the Pryor Mountains and wait for the spirit voices to tell him…Markus? What’s the matter?”
Mark hadn’t moved, but his face must have changed plenty. “Nothing’s the matter. I just had a bad experience with caves.”
An understatement. He could see Ridley Barnes standing in water a few hundred feet underground. Ridley, whose corpse had never been found, saying, She doesn’t want you yet. Saying, When things go dark, you’re the one who will have to bring the light back.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Mark said.
“What doesn’t?”
“You say it like Mom’s buying the con. She’s usually selling it.”
“Give her points for both this time. She’s still peddling the stories, but they’re chapters in a bigger one now, and Pate writes that. She can draw in a different type for him. People who wouldn’t trust him, or at least not trust him easily…they believe in Violet. Always have. You know how she does that.”
“What’s she getting out of it?”
Larry looked away and made a drinking motion with his hand and then a plunging motion with his thumb, and Mark felt a sick, impotent rage as he remembered the syringes he’d taken from his mother and the bottle she’d had in her hand on one of the last days he’d ever seen her, the day he’d gone out into a howling snowstorm and found her passed out in a drift, near death, her flesh tinted the blue of a pale winter sky.
“Of course.”
“She got clean for a bit,” Larry said, somehow always able to rise to his sister’s defense. “She really did. After you left. That knocked her sideways, son. When you left, she got clean and dry and held on for a long time. But then…”
“Right,” Mark said. “But then.” He shook his head. “You mentioned the Pryor Mountains. You think Pate is up there?”
“No idea.”
“Well, I’m going to need some ideas. I’m not the only one looking for him either. The police are too by now. But I need to get there first.”
“Why?”
“Because I think the man who killed my wife is with him. She wrote three words in her notebook on the day she was killed that didn’t make sense to anyone I knew. It makes sense to everyone around Eli Pate, though. Rise the dark. I suppose it’s referring to the moment, this attack they’re planning. The man who told his cell mate he killed Lauren is supposed to be up here with Pate. I just need a shot at him, Uncle.”
Larry said, “You came up here to kill a man?” His voice steady. Unfazed.
“Yes.”
“Then you should know this: After my first go-round with Pate, I went looking for your mother to get her the hell away from him. Scott Shields had left by then, gone back to Alaska, and she and Pate were living in a campground. Couple bikers, guy with an RV, a few tents. You said something about preppers earlier? That’s what this group felt like, sure. And they protect him well.”
He got to his feet and pulled his undershirt off and Mark hissed in a breath and nearly turned away. Larry’s torso was wrapped with ribbons of scars, raised and red. Though the wounds had closed, the flesh would never look right again.
“That’s from a whip,” Larry said quietly. There was anger in his voice, but also shame. “They chained my hands to the tow hitch of an old Jeep and my feet to a cinder block and they whipped me like a dog. Why? Because they’d heard me telling your mother what I thought of Eli Pate. They told me that disrespect—that was the word they used, disrespect—wouldn’t be tolerated.”
Larry regarded his own wounds in silence for a few seconds, then said, “The most important lessons are the ones that leave scars, boy. That’s what your grandfather used to say, whether we’d gotten a lip split in a fight or been thrown by a horse or whatever. The most important lessons leave scars.”
He pulled his shirt back on.
“So that was the last time I saw Pate’s crew. Saw your mother once more. She came up here looking for me, wanted to apologize, she said, but it was more warning than apology. She knew what it would mean if I went back at them, and she knew I had the inclination to try.”
“Why?”
Larry looked at Mark as if he’d asked why he needed oxygen.
“They whipped me, Markus. Tied me down and whipped me. The hell do you mean, why?”
“Tell me where to find him,” Mark said.
“You don’t want to find him. It’s not worth it.”
“They shot my wife twice in the head and left her in a ditch,” Mark said. “Don’t tell me it’s not worth it.”
“You go after Pate, the same thing might happen to you.”
“So be it. I’m not concerned about this being my last ride.”
“And I’m not supposed to be concerned about it being mine either?”
“Just tell me how to find him. I don’t need you to come along.”
“Oh yes, you do. Because he isn’t going to be easy to find, son! This boy is the type you need to flush out of the deep weeds.”
“Tell me where to start, then. Who to ask.”
“You’re not going to find Pate by asking, Markus. And you’re going to need me riding with you, or you’ll be dead before you get started.”
“Then ride with me. Please.”
Larry let out a long breath and opened the stove door and poked at the dying fire. When the flames were licking upward again, he closed the door, set the poker aside, sat down, and said, “I would’ve liked to know you got married. That would have been a nice thing to hear. Anything from you would have been nice to hear.”
“I’ll give you all the apologies you want, but right now isn’t the time.”
“The hell it isn’t! You just showed up at my door and asked for my help killing a man. Don’t tell me what you’ve got time for and what you don’t.”
Mark didn’t speak. Larry turned and looked out the window, up at the crown of Mount Republic, and made a soft sound with his tongue.
“And God made family,” he said. Then he got to his feet.
“Tell you something, Markus—older you get, the more you realize the only things in this world that can really cause you pain are the people you love. I always did love you, son, and it’s damn clear you loved your wife. No doubt about that. It would be easier on us both right now if we weren’t so afflicted, right?”
Mark stayed silent. Larry nodded as if the silence were a good enough answer, then said, “I s’pose it’s time for me to put my pants on, isn’t it? We’re burning daylight, and you’re running a race against the police. Won’t win that one sitting here by the fire, will we?”
“Thank you,” Mark said. His voice was rough. “And I’m sorry.”
His uncle stood looking out the grimy window at the mountain. “You know what I thought, the day those cocksuckers whipped me? I thought, Lord, if only my brother were still alive. Not that it would have put the numbers in my favor, but with Ronny, I didn’t mind being outnumbered. Ronny’s been in the ground a long time, though. I always miss him, but never more than I did that day. I needed a brother, and my brother was gone.” He turned back to Mark and gave a cold, humorless smile. “I got a nephew, though. How ’bout that. Now the question is, how much of Ronny is in you, boy?”
Part Three
Wardenclyffe
45
The council fire had been planned for evening, but Eli’s accelerated timeline forced him to move it to dawn, and for once he saw a benefit. The sunrise was more powerful than the sunset in this location; from the ridgetop, the earth seemed to be lit from within for a few spectacular minutes, an ethereal glow that spoke of the ancient world. That would matter to the group he was assembling. Any extra touch that enhanced their missio
n commitment was valuable, if not imperative. Eli’s command was going to be tested during this ceremony, and he would need to call upon the natural world for power. While the gathering crowd had been pliable enough in initial talks, everything was different on the eve of action, and they would arrive with at least some level of doubt. The group en route was as close to battle-tested as any Eli could assemble, minus a few key parts. He thought of the women in the cabin, of the empty shackles that lined the walls, and the image was bittersweet. He had counted on five more alongside Sabrina Baldwin, and Lynn Deschaine had not been in that mix. But those people remained available to him for the future, and in the future, a world of fear would be easier to rule.
When darkness fell, chaos would reign, and the man who controlled the chaos? His ascent to leadership was natural order. Proof of this was in the history books of every civilization.
Eli read voraciously about biological warfare and understood both the potential and the challenge—you needed to determine how to infect the first wave of carriers with the virus. A careful study of human nature, however, told you that every human on earth already carried two viral qualities: fear and hope. Each was contagious and could spread rapidly under the right conditions, but at first glance they seemed to be natural enemies.
False.
Fear and hope were fundamentally joined, inseparable. Anyone whose fear drove him to make predictions, to offer dire warnings, nursed a secret hope that these things would actually come to fruition. If you devoted much of your energy to, for example, a political campaign against a candidate you feared deeply and then that individual rose to power, would you not wish him to fail? Perhaps with spectacular consequences?
Eli believed that most people would. And for those he had found on the radical fringes, the ones itching to be mobilized for a cause, it was simply a matter of joining their fear and their hope. This is what he had nursed so long among so many. First he coaxed forth a prediction born of fear—The Islamic terrorists are coming; The Christians will kill us; We’ll die when they take our guns; We’ll die because they won’t take our guns; the details of these fears were less interesting to Eli than what they could do, because all fears harbored potential for action. They harbored, he believed, a secret hope: The doubters will finally see that I was right. Any prophet wanted his prophecy fulfilled.
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