“My boy, I’m looking at you because you’re the one talking.”
Blame, like a sledgehammer, was about to drop on one of our innocent heads. This was going to devolve into something nasty, not to mention detrimental to our survival. “Nathan, I need to show you something.” I started for the kitchen, giving him no time to argue.
At the kitchen island, I opened the laptop and waited as it woke and the photo of Lydia again filled the screen. Nathan entered, his gaze dropping to the island. God, I was about to upend his world. I felt sick, shaky. He came around to my side of the island.
“What is it?” he asked, taking a seat.
I almost shut the laptop. Then I told myself this was for his safety too. He had to know who Lydia was. That’s how I played it in my mind. That’s how I was able to turn the screen in his direction and stand there as he leaned toward it, his eyes narrowing, recognition sweeping over his face.
“It’s on one of Hall’s drives,” I said in a voice just above a whisper. “Taken last summer.” Even someone as technologically inept as Hall could have changed the photo’s file date, but she hadn’t. I knew Lydia, and I had just seen Manifest. The photo on the laptop was no more than a few months old, and it bore no sign of having been manipulated on a computer program.
Nathan rested his forearms on the island and continued, without a word, to look at the image on the screen. The raw intimacy of the moment was unbearable, but I stood there, staring down at my hands, massaging my knuckles. Even if he’d wanted to, I didn’t think Nathan capable at that moment of telling me to leave the kitchen. He still had not said a word. He reached for the touchpad, reduced the size of the photo, and studied the other faces on the screen.
“Hall embedded a simple code in the captions,” I said. “It was an instruction to use this photo against you.” Dropping my hands, letting my arms dangle at my sides, I circled the island and sat opposite Nathan.
Two seconds later he stood and stormed from the kitchen.
The front door opened, closed. Footsteps pounded the deck, the deck stairs. Out the kitchen window I saw Nathan head across the grounds for the junipers in the distance. When he drew close to the downed Sacks, he angled away, slowed his steps, and finally came to a stop.
“Jane?” Claude hovered just inside the kitchen, his eyes shifting from the front door to my face.
What was I to do? I glanced out the window at Nathan, his hands in his pants pockets, the cold wind cutting through the fabric of his suit.
“I need to show you this,” I said, nodding toward the laptop. Trusting Claude was suddenly as necessary as trusting Nathan. Reaching for the laptop, I rotated it and again enlarged the photo.
At first Claude’s reaction was as silent as Nathan’s had been. Then he asked me how I knew the photo was genuine. I’d seen many manipulated photos, I told him, and this was a JPEG straight from the camera. Then I told him, emphasizing each word so there was no mistaking the depth of my certainty, that Nathan had been stunned by the photo. By Lydia’s betrayal. Claude nodded.
“I introduced her to him,” he said.
“When was this?”
“About four years ago, when he was my boss at Gatehouse.”
“Nathan was your boss?”
“You didn’t know?”
“He never tells me anything.” Claude had been Three, and in Gatehouse parlance his boss would have been Two, the man just below Head. Hell, Nathan had been the number two man at Gatehouse. That was like being deputy director of the CIA. Why on earth had he left that life to become a porter?
Zack wandered into the kitchen, his attention drawn to the coffee carafe, and I closed the laptop.
“If he keeps you out of the loop, it’s usually for a good reason,” Claude said.
I hadn’t heard Nathan’s steps on the deck, or the front door opening as he came back to the house, but I heard the door slam shut, and I saw him march into the great room. Claude, Zack, and I followed and stood just inside the room as Nathan latched onto his backpack and emptied its contents over the coffee table, shaking the pack vigorously then turning it inside out.
He sat on the couch and began to run his hands over his clothes, his fingers—like an antique clothes wringer—squeezing every inch of every item, even his tie and socks. He grabbed hold of, clutched, and explored everything in his pack, and with a pocket knife he pried the heels from his shoes. I watched with a mounting sense of pity and anxiety, knowing he was looking for a thin, advanced tracking chip that only Lydia had access to and could have placed. Turning to his coat, he tore at the stitches of the lining, moved his fingers along the seams, turned his pockets inside out, and cut the threads on the hem. Pausing for a moment, he looked down at the coffee table and its contents, none of them tagged with a GPS device, then yanked off his wristwatch. With the tip of his pocket knife, he snapped off the back of the case then stared at the watch.
Next he moved to his four remaining burners. When he removed the back from the first, Claude headed for the couch, sat, and took hold of another burner. Neither of them looked at the other as they worked on the phones. I poked Zack’s arm and the two of us returned to the kitchen. Without telling him why, I asked him to leave Nathan alone for a while and pester only Claude with questions.
Lydia was a traitor, possibly a recently turned Sack and one hell of a dung-mouth. No one else could have placed tracking chips in every single burner in Nathan’s backpack—the backpack hidden alongside hers in their secret spot in his office. She knew her house would be attacked, knew Nathan would have to go on the run with his backpack, knew every single place he would stop for safety along the way so her Sack minions could draw close and pinpoint our location. She’d probably told her attackers to avoid hitting Hall—maybe to wound her to cement her position in Gatehouse—but to take out the rest of us, including Nathan. It was a betrayal of the innocents who would die or suffer because of her, Hall, and Manifest, and equally astonishing to me, a betrayal of her husband.
She had fooled me. Claude too. And Nathan, whose one weakness was his need to trust, had been monumentally blinded by that weakness. But knowing that, and what his weakness had cost us, I didn’t want him to change—to harden so that his reserve became total silence and his quiet strength turned to ice—and I was so selfishly afraid he would.
Nathan had driven the chips twenty miles outside of Durango, tossed them into a single pile, and come back to the house. Claude had extracted a promise from him to return, I was certain. I’d seen them argue on the driveway. Claude knew as well as I that Nathan’s impulse was to take the chips and drive them down to New Mexico or some other place far from Durango, painting a target on his back.
Now he sat alone in the great room with a rifle, wearing a pair of black sneakers he’d found in an upstairs closet and surveying the landscape for Sacks. We all knew that dumping the chips outside of town would confuse our attackers only briefly, maybe buying us an hour or two, so Claude had contacted a retired hunter, a trusted friend—when he said “trusted” I choked down a laugh—who was on his way here. Going on the run again was out of the question, now that we knew Nathan was a marked man. Where would he go? Home to Santa Fe?
So we would take it to them. When Nathan brought up alternatives to Claude’s plan, Claude told him we weren’t splitting up, and when Nathan insisted Zack and I leave, we said no. Even Zack, who was clearly terrified. I was proud of him. I told Nathan none of us would ever be safe until we lopped off the head of the snake. For a second he seemed to think I meant Lydia, but I meant Hall. When that Elation monster discovered her latest Sack attackers had failed in their mission, she’d send all hell against us. Our advantage was we knew she was five miles north of Durango. We knew exactly where.
Claude made a couple more phone calls on one of Nathan’s tracker-free burners, and I continued to explore Hall’s drives for anything that might help us. I found Joseph Madden’s house, an address west of Durango, and an office building the LCA owned just off Route 550
, two miles north of Hall’s location. But in my search I found nothing that would give me a clue to Lydia’s motive. What was so terrible about her life with Nathan that she would turn on him? She seemed happy, and if she wasn’t, divorce was the quickest remedy, not conspiring with the enemy. She didn’t lack for money, though with Nathan out of the way his money would have been all hers. I skimmed the remainder of Hall’s photos looking for more shots of Lydia, maybe one of Hall handing her a suitcase full of cash or the deed to an enormous ranch outside Taos, but there were no more photos of her or Manifest.
Looking for a concrete, logical reason for Lydia’s betrayal was probably a waste of time, like trying to figure out why Hall had no problem slitting the throat of a boy looking for his dog. Evil didn’t need a reason, except perhaps hatred for those who weren’t like them and the joy derived from choosing evil. Festals, Elations—that’s why they called themselves those names, their joy blossoming as they rose to the upper ranks. In destruction, chaos, and misery, they experienced great happiness. The Embodiments? Sacks proclaimed they were joy itself.
Engrossed in my thoughts, my eyes on the laptop, I hadn’t heard Nathan enter the kitchen. He said he had something to tell both me and Zack and I was to listen very carefully because he meant every word of it.
“If you see Lydia,” he began, “if she’s there, you can’t hesitate.”
Don’t hesitate. Don’t falter.
“Whatever she does, Jane, whatever she says to you, do not hesitate. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“You think she’ll be there?”
“There’s a good chance. The safe house I told her to drive to is just west of Durango.”
For the second time in an hour, tears filled my eyes. “Would she kill me?”
“Yes, she would. Believe me. I think it was Lydia who put your name on the kill list.”
“I was starting to think that.” He was telling me to shoot his wife on sight, God help me. That if I didn’t, she would surely kill me. “Nathan, you have to tell me the truth, no more evasions. I deserve to know.”
He leaned against the end of the counter, waiting.
“Was Lydia supposed to be restored?”
His eyes squeezed shut. When he opened them, he said, “Yes.”
Before I could get my next question out, he told me in fast, tumbling words—I suppose it was marginally less painful that way, like ripping off a bandage—that she’d been a Festal and had convinced everyone, including him, that she’d been restored four years ago, a month before he met her.
After a long pause, I said, “Then this was a long-term plan.”
“It looks that way.”
He didn’t tell me—and I didn’t want to know—how she’d conned him, working first on his sympathy and then on his love. I didn’t think I’d have much of a problem shooting her.
He left the kitchen to find Zack and tell him too not to hesitate. Just a few days ago I’d stood in Nathan’s house complimenting Lydia on her pineapple chicken. All smiles and handshakes, the two of us. She was a phenomenal dung-mouth, a sleeper agent, a fortyish Anna Chapman. She’d probably been the one to warn Hall that Russ McFarland, the Estes Park hunter, was looking for her. All she had to do to intercept all kinds of Gatehouse information was keep her ears open at barbecues and rifle through Nathan’s files now and then.
Zack wouldn’t hesitate to kill her, and neither would Claude, but Nathan? I believed he’d rather die than shoot his own Sack wife. And so I vowed to shadow his movements and, if I had to, shoot her for him.
“My friend’s truck is coming up the driveway,” Claude shouted, “Keep your guns holstered.”
I shut down the laptop and rushed to the front door. Thank God for reinforcements.
My enthusiasm sagged when I saw Claude’s friend. Phil looked about sixty, even older than Claude, and he was puffy and paunchy from bad eating habits. But it wasn’t like we planned to challenge the Sacks to a martial arts tournament, I reminded myself. We were going to pick off as many as possible at a distance before moving in, and older hunters and porters, almost without exception, were the best shots.
Being the only woman around, now that Hall was gone, I hated taking on the role of coffee mistress, but I needed to keep my hands busy, so I offered to make Phil a fresh pot. Zack, Nathan, and Claude decided they’d like some too, as long as someone else was making it, and took seats at the kitchen island.
“Gatehouse should have sent us a dozen hunters by now,” I said as I filled the carafe with water. “Not that we don’t appreciate you coming,” I added, glancing over my shoulder at Phil.
“Imagine twenty on our side and thirty on theirs,” Claude replied. “A shoot-out of that magnitude couldn’t be explained away, even by Gatehouse.”
“What if Sacks have decided they don’t care about hiding their existence?”
“They still care,” Nathan said. “Otherwise they’d be testing the boundaries everywhere, not just in the West.” He took down cups from a cabinet and set them next to the coffeemaker. Looking at him, most anyone would have thought he was finding his bearings after learning about Lydia, but I knew better.
We had our coffee and explained our strategy to Phil. The satellite map of the house the trackers had settled at was helpful, but we needed close-in information. Phil volunteered to drive past the house in his truck, get the lay of the land, and come back with the best approaches. When he returned half an hour later, he drew a rough map of the house and driveway, the road on the low ridge overlooking the house, and the hill between the house and the nearest neighbor, who was almost half a mile away. The windows at the back, he said, were floor to ceiling. Break them and we could walk into the house. He’d even spotted our old rental SUV parked in front of the garage at the north side of the house—an “enormous” house, he added. Two stories high and three times the size of an average home.
Hall had chosen to gather her Sacks at a spot more isolated than any we had stayed at yet, which was both bad and good. Good because we didn’t have to worry about the locals reporting gunfire before we’d finished the job, bad because we didn’t know who or what lurked on such a huge chunk of land. Bear traps, trip wires, cameras.
At sunset we left in the house owner’s SUV, all of us carrying both rifles and pistols. Following Phil’s directions and watching the tracker readings on Claude’s laptop, we took 550 north, turned west onto White Horse Road, then took White Horse another two miles northwest.
“We’re a mile from the ridge,” Nathan announced, slowing the SUV.
Claude threw an arm over the back of his seat and turned, looking to the last row of seats, where Zack and I sat. “By the way, you two, my last name is Sutherland. Thought I’d mention it.”
“Claude Sutherland?” I said.
“My mother was French Canadian. Problem?”
“No, no. It’s nice to get our names straight before we ‘slip the surly bonds.’”
Phil laughed.
“I keep telling you, I have no intention of dying.”
“No one ever does.”
“You’re a ray, aren’t you?”
“We’re about to blow people’s brains out.”
“Think of it as preventing eight year olds from being slaughtered. Either the targets die or innocents die.”
“I know all that. Just don’t ask me to enjoy it.”
“Do you enjoy it?” Claude asked.
A weird question in light of what I’d said two seconds ago. What was he up to? “Usually not. Tonight I’m OK with it.”
I saw Nathan raise his eyes to watch me in the rearview mirror.
“Have you ever thought about joining Gatehouse as a researcher?” he asked. “You have keen observation skills from what I’ve seen.”
“I’m not bad with a gun, you know.” Why was everyone trying to lure me from the field?
“Lots of people can be taught to shoot well. Observation and instinct are rarer.”
Phil had described the ri
dge behind the house well. Parked far to the right, two wheels off the road, our vehicle was hidden from anyone standing at the back of the house, and all we had to do was crouch then crawl to the ridgeline twenty feet from the other side of the road and wait.
I had one last question before we left the safety of our car. “I like to throw Sacks off guard by using their names. What was Lydia’s?”
Nathan’s neck stiffened. Claude Sutherland answered. “Never to Rise.”
Chapter 22
We lay flat on the ground, on the dusting of snow among the piñons and junipers, searching for Sacks posted outside and watching the windows at the back of the house to get an idea of the number of Sacks inside. We whispered among ourselves. Nathan and Claude would hit the two Sacks standing on the back deck, conveniently illuminated by a pair of floodlights. There were no other Sacks outside as far as we could see, and after checking the two through his binoculars, Phil said he didn’t think they were wearing body armor. When it crossed my mind that the men on the deck might not be Sacks, my stomach lurched. But then I saw Hall—her unmistakable balloon pants floating by the great-room windows—and one of the Sacks on the couch twirling his gun like a schoolboy. Sacks.
As I watched I imagined the house guarded by Embodiments, golden beings with laughter on their lips. Where were the extraordinary creatures on our side? The saints to their sinners? Why were we alone in this battle? No one saw what we did. In my naïve first year as a hunter I believed that if only the world knew about us, our sacrifices would be lauded. Nathan, who knew his wife would die tonight but was still here by our side, would be awarded every medal the world had to offer.
What a fool I’d been. People didn’t want to know. As in every nasty but necessary endeavor, they simply wanted the job done. In moments of seasoned clarity, I understood that if people knew about Gatehouse, some of them would be angry. They would hate what we did, not because it was wrong, but because it would compel them, from the lofty heights of the safety we’d given them, to declare that it was wrong. How dare we? They wanted the toilet flushed without having to look into the bowl.
All Souls: A Gatehouse Thriller Page 22