High Lonesome

by Tanya Chris

  “Must have snuck out,” Susan said. “Muir knows better than to let anyone through, but I’ll remind both huts. No new guests for the High Lonesome.”

  He thanked her and rang off. He went back into the foyer and confirmed for Pyotr that they weren’t expecting visitors. Pyotr pursed his lips and then got to his feet and walked past Tanner to the staircase.

  He waited until he heard Pyotr’s footsteps in the dormitory overhead before going to Tanner.

  “Did he force himself on you? If he did, I’ll put him out. I don’t care if he does die out there.”

  Tanner huddled deeper into his own wrapped arms, but he shook his head. “He didn’t make me do anything I didn’t want to do. I was into it at the time. That’s not what’s going on.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing. Forget I said anything. I just got homesick. I don’t want to be here.”

  He looked Tanner over, noticing how much pupil showed and the way Tanner shivered. He was coming down hard.

  “Yeah, OK. So you’ll go upstairs and make yourself feel better, maybe get some sleep. We’ll get you down in a day or two. It’ll be OK.”

  “Not in two days it won’t.”

  It was the closest Tanner had come to admitting what Joe already suspected. He didn’t have enough dope with him to cover the delay. Either he hadn’t planned to be at the hut this long or he was running through his stash faster than he’d counted on. And wasn’t that every junkie with any stash ever.

  Joe glanced up as Pyotr’s footsteps sounded on the stairs again. His eyes latched onto the gun in Pyotr’s hand and his first thought was how fucking stupid he’d been to tell the guy with the gun that they were definitely isolated here, but another part of his brain registered that the gun was open and that Pyotr was carrying it butt first.

  “It’s not loaded.”

  He looked into the handle and the barrel as Pyotr tilted the gun around, displaying it to him. He nodded, as if he knew anything about guns. It looked empty to him.

  “You hang on to the gun,” Pyotr said. “I’ll keep the ammunition. But when this place opens up to business again and we can get Tanner out of here, I’ll need it back.”

  He took the gun with a nod, though he had no intention of giving it back.

  Pyotr turned to Tanner and rubbed a hand up his arm. “OK, Tasha? Feel safe now?”

  Tanner shrugged him off, pushing past him for the stairs.

  “You don’t have to guard him,” Pyotr said, as they watched Tanner climb the stairs. “I won’t hurt him, and I’d never force him to do anything he didn’t want to do.”

  He didn’t answer, not sure if he believed Pyotr or not. Or rather, he did believe him, but he had no idea why.

  Now to figure out where to hide a gun.

  Chapter 7

  Pyotr

  Was there any place more boring than a high altitude hut in the middle of a snowstorm?

  Pyotr prowled around the empty great room, picking up magazines and decorative chunks of rock and putting them back down again. He’d long ago shut off his cell phone. There was no signal anyway and though he had remembered to bring the charger for it, there was no power to charge it either.

  Since the tense encounter in the foyer, Joe had kept himself apart. Doing chores, so he claimed. Tanner was upstairs sleeping, which was also what he’d been doing since that scene. It seemed like too much sleeping. Pyotr had checked on him once, but he felt funny being up there while Tanner slept considering how scared Tanner had seemed of him earlier.

  He didn’t like that Tanner was scared of him, but he was pretty sure it had nothing to do with the blowjob that morning and everything to do with who Tanner thought he was—a Russian spy. Maybe most people would be scared of a Russian spy, but why should Tanner be when that was who he’d come to meet?

  Tanner wasn’t the pigeon he’d expected to find. He was fragile, lost, hardly seeming to have the mental faculties required to engineer a meeting with the FSB or to have secured anything the FSB would be interested in. He was more like a kitten than a traitor, so slow and soft in his movements, quiet and sweet in his speech, begging to be cuddled and petted.

  The sex hadn’t even been sexual to Pyotr, not to begin with. It’d been about letting Tanner have what he needed, acting as a human security blanket for him. He definitely hadn’t intended to sex up the enemy, but ultimately he hadn’t been able to resist the sight of Tanner’s plump limps stretched around the shaft of his cock or Tanner’s soft way of worship. He’d come hard, to the accompaniment of Tanner’s own enthusiastic moans. If they hadn’t discovered Joe watching them, he’d have returned the favor.

  Except. Except Tanner hadn’t had an erection, at least not anything visible through the sleep pants he’d worn, and it wouldn’t take much of one to be visible in those. His moans had said he was into it, but his flaccid cock said something else.

  Still, he was sure he hadn’t forced himself on Tanner. Tanner had reached for him. Joe hadn’t been there for that part, that was all. Joe shouldn’t have been there for any of it. That was weird. And also hot. He couldn’t even figure out where his sexual energy was directed. The whole hut echoed with it.

  He’d come here for a simple mission and now the snow had fucked everything up and his own emotions were fucking things up worse. He’d given his gun away, for fuck’s sake. Hadn’t been able to stand Tanner, or Joe either, looking at him like that, like he might hurt them, and had just turned it over.

  He’d dropped in expecting to meet a traitor, to give him a bundle of cash in exchange for the submarine plans and watch him trek back down the mountain. The traitor would’ve been picked up once he got far enough away so as not to alert the real Russian spy, the one whose arrival Pyotr’s team had delayed by a couple of days, the one who was still out there, somewhere, and who’d sure as hell be gunning for Tanner and those plans as soon as the storm lifted.

  If all had gone according to plan, he would’ve used the plans he’d bought from Tanner to lure in the real Russian spy. A two-for-one slam dunk success. Tanner was nothing more than a piece on the board, not his job to protect. He sure as fuck hadn’t had any sympathy for a guy willing to sell classified plans to a foreign agent when that helicopter had touched down yesterday. But now?

  Assuming Tanner was an engineer—and engineers were the only people who could’ve gotten their hands on those plans at this point in the development process—his annual salary was probably twice what he’d agreed to sell them for. Why would someone sell out their country, and their own integrity, for half a year’s salary?

  Tanner didn’t have Bolshevik sympathies, not as far as they’d been able to determine by monitoring his communications with the FSB. His motive was money. Pure money. So why did a kid with a college degree and a job at a company big enough to have Department of Defense contracts need money that badly?

  He threw himself down into one of the chairs in front of the stove—the only truly warm spot in the hut. Tanner invoked his protection instinct, but there was no excuse for him doing what he'd planned on doing. Tanner had come to Longline to commit treason. Full stop.

  Not that Pyotr’s own motives in joining the CIA were any less selfish than whatever Tanner was up to. Sure, changing allegiance from Russia to the U.S. probably put him more on the right side of history than the wrong one, but both sides were made up of liars and turncoats, people who’d do anything to advance their own agenda, and he was no different. Even when he’d told Tanner he wouldn’t hurt him, he’d been lying, hadn’t he? He was there to get him arrested, tried for treason, imprisoned, and possibly executed. All of which was going to hurt.

  Sometimes he told himself he should get out of the game, but he was too cynical even for that. He had no faith that there was a different way to live, not for him, not after all these years alone trusting no one but himself. Not even trusting himself if it came to it.

  He heard low voices coming from the foyer and looked up from his bored perusal of
a copy of Alpinist Magazine to see Joe and Tanner walk in together. Tanner slumped into the chair next to him. His eyes were sleepy and soft and his demeanor was a complete change from the angry, antagonistic man who’d confronted him in the foyer.

  “Sleep well?” he asked as his eyes followed Joe’s path through the swinging door that led to the kitchen. It was dinner time, apparently.

  Tanner hadn’t answered his polite query, looking almost as though he were about to fall asleep again even though he’d been napping all afternoon. He was beginning to wonder if there was something wrong with the kid. The mood swings, the lethargy, and those little glances between Joe and Tanner that spoke of a shared secret. Tanner had said they’d just met, that there was nothing between them, but he’d been in Joe’s bedroom and Joe treated him like a lover. Or an invalid.

  “You OK?” he asked Tanner, making his tone less polite and more forceful.

  “Sure.” Tanner heaved himself into a more upright position. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Tell me something about yourself,” he said, trying to keep Tanner’s attention from drifting back inward. “Where do you work?”

  “You know where I work.”

  “I don’t, actually.”

  Tanner hadn’t been their original target. They’d been monitoring Green Tea, as they called this particular Russian spy thanks to his incongruous user name—GreenLovePotion4U—and had intercepted his communications with Tanner who’d used an equally ridiculous user name, Tan2mount2treeZn. Tantamount to treason. Pyotr got it. Thing was, this wasn’t tantamount to treason. It was treason.

  But Green Tea was their original target. Tanner was merely the method they were using to get to him. All they knew of Tan2mount2treeZn was that he had submarine plans for sale and that he’d be at the Longline hut on the 24th. Pyotr’s IT team had spoofed Tanner’s ID to reschedule Green Tea to the 26th and here they all were: Pyotr masquerading as Green Tea, Tanner the Traitor, and—somewhere out there, poised and probably impatient—the real Green Tea.

  “I probably shouldn’t tell you where I work,” Tanner mumbled.

  Fine. He picked up the magazine and pretended to care what it said. He’d like to help Tanner if that was possible, but if Tanner didn’t want to trust him, then he could get himself out of the trouble he’d gotten himself into. Whether he actually turned those plans over or not, he’d come here to sell them. He’d still be facing charges when the agency picked him up at the bottom of the mountain.

  Assuming any of them ever made it back down to the bottom of the mountain.

  Although … he had to admit that he hadn’t been able to find the plans. Tanner hadn’t been wrong about him searching through his belongings, and there were no submarine plans mixed into them. Of course, they were probably just image files loaded onto a thumb drive, but he hadn’t turned up any thumb drives either.

  He flipped through the magazine idly. Some beautiful pictures, that was for sure. Growing up in Russia he’d seen his share of snow. One of the benefits of moving to the United States was seeing less of it, but their hike that afternoon had reminded him of younger days, before the political realities of his homeland soured its natural beauties. If he had time, he might be an alpinist like the rugged people pictured on the glossy pages in front of him. But his job meant never making friends, never growing roots. Fitness was a chore he checked off daily, far from photogenic.

  Dinner that night beat the PB&J Joe had served him the night before—spaghetti with a sauce that had probably come out of a jar but was good all the same and a medley of vegetables he was surprised to realize were fresh. The world the three of them currently inhabited was so quiet, so separate from reality, that he’d almost forgotten that everything had been normal twenty-four hours ago. It was possible for fresh vegetables to exist.

  They ate in a growing twilight as the sun set and clouds that heralded the fresh storm closed in. When they’d finished, Joe cleared their dishes into the kitchen, then brought over a lantern and a variety of plastic-wrapped goodies.

  “Little Debbie’s?” Pyotr asked.

  “Hey, that shit keeps.”

  “I’m not complaining.” He snagged a pack of Zebra cakes, one of his guilty, rarely-indulged pleasures, and pushed the rest of the pile in Tanner’s direction. Tanner hadn’t eaten more than half the dish Joe had set in front of him, poking at it with distaste while Joe monitored his every bite. Tanner picked a package at random, pulling it in front of him but not opening it.

  Joe came back to the table again, this time with a trio of shot glasses and a bottle of vodka which he placed in front of Pyotr. Pyotr raised his eyebrows at him. After Joe’s attitude the night before, he hadn’t expected an open bar.

  “What’s your poison?” Joe asked Tanner. Tanner shrugged and Joe carried over a bottle of tequila and a bottle of Amaretto. He plunked the Amaretto down in front of Tanner. “It’s sweet. You’ll like it.”

  “We getting drunk tonight?” Pyotr asked as he watched Joe fill their shot glasses.

  “We’re playing a game. You’ve heard of Truth or Dare? Well, tonight we’re going to play a game called Truth and Also Truth. Drink up.”

  Pyotr knocked back his vodka while Joe did the same with the tequila. Tanner took a tentative sip from his glass like it was a tea cup, but he followed the first sip with another.

  “What are we telling the truth about?” Pyotr asked.

  “Good question. So far, I’d say not much. You’ve both been lying to me. I don’t know why you two are here, but you do. Both of you. You want to fill me in on what I’m missing?” He refilled their glasses.

  Pyotr spun his shot glass around, sloshing some of the liquid over the rim. Joe was his kind of bartender, filling to the top, not to the line. Joe nodded at him and he went ahead and slammed the shot back, feeling it burn down his throat and warm his stomach. If Joe’s plan was to get him drunk enough to spill state secrets, it might just work. He was tired—tired of lying to everyone about everything, tired of being lied to back.

  “You know why I’m here,” he said. “It was bunk here or freeze to death out there.”

  “Or you could’ve stayed in the helicopter you rode in on.”

  Pyotr licked his lips. He picked up the bottle and poured himself another shot, delaying, then watched as Joe topped off Tanner’s glass. Tanner was still sipping at his, gentle and sweet, but it was going down. Joe, meanwhile, hadn’t taken a second shot. He really was trying to get them drunk.

  “You didn’t come from Muir,” Joe said. “I know that the same way I know no one’s on their way here from Muir right now. We keep track of where people are in conditions like these. You came from that flat spot that overlooks the valley. Given that you have no idea what the fuck you’re doing, you’re lucky you even made it that far, but there’s no way you came from Muir. You want to tell me where you came from?”

  “I came from a helicopter. Seems like you already know that.”

  “I know from where, but I don’t know why. Why does a copter fly through a storm to drop someone off on a mountain so he can spend a couple of snowbound days at Longline?”

  “I had plans to meet somebody.”

  Joe tilted his head, eyeing him speculatively. “A blond woman?”

  “What? No. If you haven’t figured it out from what I was doing with Tanner this morning, I’m not interested in women. Blond or any other persuasion.”

  Joe filled his glass again. Tanner’s too. Pyotr didn’t down this one, though Tanner reached for his quickly enough. His reluctance to put anything in his stomach was apparently being overcome by the alcohol. Joe and Pyotr eyed each other as Tanner licked around the outside of the glass he’d slopped sticky liquor over.

  “Where’d the blond woman come from?” Was this a jealousy thing? If Joe were going to be jealous of anyone, wouldn’t it be Tanner?

  “Just something the caretaker from the hut below us said. There was a blond woman who wanted to get up here and that’s what she said—tha
t she was meeting someone.”

  Huh. He filed that information away. Maybe they’d made a very wrong, very sexist assumption about Green Tea. But would Green Tea have called attention to himself—or herself—by trying to slip through an imposed embargo? More likely the woman in question was a stubborn tourist or a reckless adventurer. Still.

  “What’s your story?” Joe asked, swinging suddenly to pin Tanner with the stern gaze he’d been trying to use on Pyotr. “What’re you doing here? And don’t give me that bullshit about being with the AMC. You don’t know jack shit about climbing and they didn’t report you missing.”

  “I just wanted a vacation. I never said I was with the AMC. I was just hanging out with them, that’s all. You assumed.”

  Joe frowned. “You should’ve evacuated when you were told to. It wasn’t in your best interest to be trapped up here. We both know your clock is ticking.”

  Tanner scowled and downed what remained in his glass with a single gulp and pushed the empty glass over to Joe for a refill.

  What clock did Tanner have ticking, Pyotr wondered. Speaking of secrets, he was tired of being on the outside of whatever secret these two shared.

  “Why are you here, Tanner?” Joe asked. “Tell me.”

  “I have my reasons.” He pulled his refilled glass back in front of him.

  “Yeah?” Joe’s voice softened. “I want you to tell me about them, OK?”

  “He’s manipulating you,” Pyotr warned. “Stop drinking that.”

  “What do you care?” Tanner asked.

  “You’re going to say things you don’t want to say.”

  “Tell me,” Joe said, almost a whisper. He leaned in to Tanner and stroked his curls back from his face. “You know I’m going to take care of you, but I can’t do that if I don’t know what’s going on.”

  Tanner’s eyes shifted between Joe and him. He tried to hold them, to communicate wordlessly that he shouldn’t explain what he was doing at the hut. The more people who knew, the harder it’d be to extricate him from this situation without repercussions, but Pyotr’s attempts at ESP apparently failed because Tanner dropped his gaze and turned to Joe and blurted out, “He’s a KGB agent.”