Blind Instinct: A Tess Barrett Thriller

by Michael W. Sherer

  “We’ll check the headhouse first,” I said as I finished.

  The short walk to the ramshackle building took less than a minute. The roads through the camp had grown weedy with disuse. Nothing suggested anyone had used the camp recently, as a prison or for any other purpose. I’d never felt a place so devoid of human life, and it surprised me. I’d expected a guard of some sort. A shiver ran through me as I truly appreciated the meaning of the term ghost town for the first time. The headhouse door hung askew on a single rusty hinge that groaned as I pulled the door aside far enough to peer inside.

  “He’s not here,” I said.

  “How do you know? You haven’t even gone inside. What’s the matter? Scared?”

  “No. The place hasn’t been used in decades—thick dust, no footprints. You hungry?”

  I pressed an energy bar into her hand, and unwrapped one for myself.

  She took a bite and chewed thoughtfully for a moment. “Okay, so now what?”

  I turned slowly so she could follow my movements, and walked several paces away from the building. The headhouse stood on higher ground next to the shoulder of the mountain. My gaze panned the other buildings down the gentle slope of the meadow. The faint outlines of a track ran from the headhouse to the smelter. A similar depression disturbed the natural landscape just enough to feel out of place. I traced the indentation with my eyes and saw it wind from the smelter toward the steep rise of the ridge that towered over the camp.

  “Come on.” I cut across the tall grass to intercept the track on its way up the slope.

  “Where are we going?” Tess sounded more curious than concerned. She kept pace easily.

  “There’s a track leading up to the ridge. I think another mine entrance might be up there.”

  The track, when we reached it, was an old rail bed that followed the sloping meadow up to the base of the mountain. Though dirt had covered most of the gravel, allowing grass and weeds to grow over it, remnants of some of the old wooden ties poked through like splinters stuck under skin. The rails had long since disappeared, pulled up and used for other purposes—melted and shaped into tools or horseshoes, or used for cattle guards or fence rails. Tess followed silently and stayed with me without complaint though she stumbled a couple of times. As the track curved around a knoll, an opening appeared in the mountainside.

  “Looks like a mine entrance up ahead,” I said. I swiped a sleeve across my forehead.

  “How much farther?” she huffed, winded by the climb.

  “Not far. A hundred yards.”

  The path leveled out, giving us a chance to catch our breath, and once we stepped into the opening of the mine, the air instantly grew cooler.

  I stopped and shrugged the rucksack off my shoulder. Pawing inside it, I pulled out a bottle of water and placed it Tess’s hand, and dug inside again for the flashlight.

  “This is the place,” Tess said, her voice echoing hollowly.

  I pointed the flashlight into the tunnel. Darkness swallowed the beam of light just beyond the range of my vision. “And you can tell this how?”

  She sniffed. “Smell it?”

  I caught a whiff of hydrogen sulfide and something metallic.

  “A tunnel, you said?” Tess took a couple of faltering steps inside until her outstretched fingers touched the rock wall. Without waiting for an answer, she headed deeper into the mountain, walking briskly, with only the light touch of her fingers to guide her. Darkness was her element. I had to trot to catch up.

  “Whoa! Slow down. You don’t know what might be up ahead.”

  She laughed and walked faster. “Afraid of the dark?”

  I hustled after her. “Come on, Tess. We might run into a shaft any minute. Or a cave-in. Or a guard.”

  As I drew closer to her, I heard a soft clicking sound that I hadn’t noticed before. It took a moment before I realized Tess was making the sound with her tongue. Echolocation. She was tracking the changes in pitch of the clicks as they bounced back at her off the walls, ceiling and floor of the tunnel. Like a bat, or a dolphin.

  “Something up ahead,” she said.

  The tunnel wall curved to the right. All I saw was rock and timbers holding up the tunnel ceiling. But I heard what she did—a tinny sound to the echo of her clicks. As we rounded the curve, the flashlight beam glinted off metal blocking the way ahead. A four-inch wide streak of blue ran down the rock wall next to it. Copper. I aimed the light at the obstruction.

  “A barricade of some kind,” I said. “Like a metal grate. Or a gate. Wait, I’ve heard of these. It’s a bat gate. Designed to keep people out but let bats fly in and out of a cave.”

  Tess slowed. “How far?”

  I counted down the distance as we walked. “Thirty feet, twenty-five, twenty… Where did you learn that, anyway?”

  She knew immediately that I referred to her locating skill. “Yoshi taught me. It doesn’t always work. Only in small spaces. I’m still learning how to use it.”

  I walked up to the grate and inspected it under the light. “Jeez, somebody ripped this thing right out of the wall. Recently, too. The supports have been chiseled out of the wall, and the marks on both the rock and the metal are fresh. I can’t imagine how long this took, or how much strength it took to pull it out of the wall and bend it back on its hinges.”

  Panning the flashlight beam beyond the grate, I peered down the tunnel.

  “There’s a rock slide about twenty yards farther that blocks the tunnel,” I told her. “The tracks for the mine cars are still in place, and it looks like there are some empty water bottles and trash back near the slide. Someone’s been here. The perfect prison cell, until someone decided to break out.”

  “Uncle Travis,” Tess said, her voice tinged with excitement. “I know it.”

  “Yeah, maybe. But where is he now? Why hasn’t he tried to call you?”

  “I don’t know!” Her excitement turned to frustration. “He could be lost out there somewhere, Oliver. We have to find him somehow.”

  “We don’t even know if this is the right place. We’re guessing here, Tess.”

  She faced me, sightless eyes imploring me, and shivered in the cold.

  I took her elbow. “Come on, let’s go back to the Range Rover. I need to look at the map. We need to think like Travis if we’re going to figure out where he’s gone.”

  When we emerged into the bright sunlight, I stopped for a moment, blinking against the glare. Tess waited silently, pensive since we’d found the tunnel empty. As we started back the way we’d come I noticed another track heading straight out from the tunnel, more road than rail bed. I wondered where it led. We wound our way back down through the mining camp to the car. Tess sat in the passenger seat with the door open, sun on her face and hair gently waving in the breeze like raven’s wings. I broke out two more bottles of water and the maps, gave one bottle to Tess and spread the maps out on the hood. It was hot to the touch.

  Despite the detail in the county road and topographical maps Haskell had provided, I didn’t see the trail leading the other direction from the mine entrance. If Travis had taken that route, we would have to follow it to see where it led. That is, if Travis had been held in the mine in the first place, and if he had escaped. A lot of conjecture on our part. Something broke my concentration. I raised my head and saw Tess leaning out of the Range Rover, head cocked to one side. I heard it then, an engine, a vehicle of some kind, getting closer.

  “Oliver?”

  “I hear it,” I said. “Stay here. I’ll go see what it is.”

  I leaned in the driver’s side and grabbed a pair of binoculars from the center console. The sound came from somewhere far on the other side of the camp, so I jogged past the headhouse toward the smelter, keeping the buildings between me and whatever was coming. I rounded the corner of the ramshackle building, pressed the field glasses to my eyes and slowly panned the horizon. In the distance, a Jeep popped into view over a rise on the meadow. It looked similar to the vehicles I’
d seen parked up near the highway earlier in the morning. For a time it headed straight for me, slowly growing in size in the lenses. My pulse started to race. As near as I could tell, only one person occupied the vehicle. Then it veered off toward the mountain, and I knew it was headed for the mine.

  As soon as it disappeared behind the knoll up the slope near the mine entrance, I ran back to the Range Rover as fast as I could. I jumped in, breathing heavily.

  “What is it?” Tess said. “What’s going on?”

  “Don’t know yet,” I managed as I punched the start button. “But we’re going to find out.”

  I drove through the camp and pulled up behind the smelter close to where I’d been moments before. Keeping the Range Rover well out of sight of the ridge where the Jeep had gone, I parked and got out, leaving the engine running.

  I leaned back in. “Someone’s up at the mine. If Travis was there, that someone’s about to find out he’s gone. I want a better view, so I’ll be about twenty feet away. Okay?”

  She nodded, and I hurried to the corner of the building and trained the binoculars on the spot where the Jeep had vanished. It didn’t take more than half a minute before the Jeep reappeared, heading down slope at breakneck speed. I had a hard time keeping the glasses steady as the Jeep bumped down the trail. The driver had a phone pressed to his ear. I frowned and pulled my own phone out of my pocket. No signal. We hadn’t gotten one since we’d left the main highway earlier. Raising the binoculars again, I got another look at the driver. An antenna poked up from the object in his hand. A walkie-talkie. Lowering the glasses, I saw that the Jeep had nearly reached the distant edge of the meadow.

  I ran back to the Range Rover, tossed the glasses in the back seat, and put it in gear.

  “Guy just hightailed it out of here,” I said as I wheeled around the smelter and took off across the meadow to intersect the track the Jeep had taken. “Looked like he was communicating with someone by walkie-talkie. We’re going to follow him and see where he goes.”

  “Why? What good will that do?”

  “Think like Travis, Tess. What would he do if he escaped?”

  “Call the police? I don’t know.”

  “These people had to be good to snatch him. He probably didn’t see it coming. They’ve kept him way the hell out here in the middle of nowhere in an abandoned mine. It’s dark, cold. They gave him water, but probably not much food. If I were Travis I’d want to know who put me in there, and I’d want something to eat, maybe not in that order.”

  “You think he went looking for them?”

  I gripped the wheel tighter as the Range Rover bounced through the meadow. Tess clutched the seat with one hand, and braced herself with the other on the door.

  “It’s the kind of man he is. From what I’ve learned in the past few weeks about your uncle is that this is what he’s trained to do. He’s a soldier, Tess, a hunter.”

  She chewed on that for a while in silence, which was just fine with me. I focused on steering the Range Rover on the right path, keeping the Jeep in sight, yet hanging back far enough not to attract attention. Fortunately, the track didn’t present a lot of choices, and when we finally reached a junction with a more substantive road, a plume of dust kicked up by the other vehicle showed me which way to turn. Though not paved, this road was wider and smoother than the rutted track we’d just left. I took care not to increase our speed to the point of stirring up the same amount of dust as the Jeep, or catching up to our prey.

  The road wound through stands of pines and alders, up a ridge and down into a gully before ascending another ridge. Something glinted in the sunlight through the trees, and I realized the light reflected off a window.

  “The ranch is just ahead,” I said. “We’re coming up on the back side.”

  “You think he’s here? How did we miss him before?”

  “I don’t know, Tess. I’m just saying it’s what I’d do.”

  “You’re not Uncle Travis. You don’t know the first thing about fighting.”

  She was right. We were headed into a nest of vipers, and if Travis was in there, I didn’t see how we’d get him out.

  “Yeah, well, I’ll figure it out,” I muttered.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Get in as close as I can and see what’s going on.”

  The road leveled out near the top of the ridge where the ranch buildings spread out. I pulled off the road into a copse of thinly spaced trees that provided some cover but gave me room to maneuver. I inched forward until I had a relatively unobstructed view of the back of the lodge building. The Jeep had pulled up in the drive, and the driver now stood next the open door talking and gesturing to three other men. All were dressed in jeans, boots and long-sleeved shirts, and two wore cowboy hats—the attire of ranch hands, not some paramilitary group. I wondered if we were dead wrong. A fourth man emerged from the back of the lodge—Buck Evans, the manager who’d shown us around. The others stepped aside as he approached the Jeep driver.

  “What are they doing?” Tess murmured.

  “Buck just showed up, and the guy in the Jeep is explaining what happened.”

  Evans apparently got the picture quickly because he pointed at each of the men, barking orders. They scrambled to comply, running off in four directions. Suddenly they all stopped and eyed two men emerging from a back door, a large man wearing a chef’s coat and checked pants appearing to escort the other one outside. The pair looked up in surprise at the men assembled in the driveway, giving me a clear look at the second man’s face—Travis.

  “Uh-oh,” I said. “Looks like trouble.”

  Travis whirled to bolt back into the lodge, but the big cook stood in his way, confused. The others broke into a run toward them. I put the big SUV in gear and gunned it out of the trees, tires spinning in the pine needles and loose dirt.

  “Climb in back!” I said. “Open the door and stay down!”

  “What is it?” Tess yelped.

  “It’s Travis! I’m going in to get him! Now get back there!”

  She scrambled over the seat. The Range Rover bounced onto the road, all-wheel drive helping the tires bite into the gravel as I stepped on the gas. Heads turned at the growl of the supercharged engine. I aimed the nose of the SUV between the Jeep and the lodge, hoping to cut off the men headed for Travis, giving him time to get in. They scattered, diving out of the way, but one had already covered half the distance to the lodge. I changed course to get closer to Travis, quickly overtaking the runner. He threw a glance over his shoulder just as I spun the wheel away from him and slammed on the big disc brakes. The force threw Tess’s door open. I heard a thunk and a grunt as the heavy door swung into the runner and knocked him off his feet.

  I leaned out the open window. “Travis! Get in!” I shouted.

  His head jerked up, complete shock registering on his face when he saw me, but I didn’t have to tell him twice. He sprinted toward us, bent low.

  “Go! Go!” he yelled.

  I hit the gas pedal again, with more gentle pressure this time, accelerating slowly to give Travis a chance to catch up. He grabbed the top of the open door and ran alongside for two or three strides then gripped the doorframe with his other hand and swung his legs into the back seat. A glance in the side mirror showed he was in, so I tromped on the gas and the powerful SUV roared past the lodge. A group of startled guests on horseback coming in from their day’s ride stared at us in surprise as we passed.

  That’s when someone started shooting at us.

  Chapter 32

  Derek frowned at the screen on his notebook computer. He’d been going through the files he’d copied from the computer in Bradley’s office onto his flash drive for the better part of the morning. The more he saw, the more disturbed he became. He squirmed in his chair. The contents of the drive made him uncomfortable for two reasons, he realized. First, the level of intrusion on people’s lives these programs represented was beyond anything he’d imagined even the government might b
e experimenting with. The other reason was that he was a little ticked and a lot jealous that he hadn’t figured this out before anyone else had.

  All of it made eminent sense once he took a look at some of the code. Whoever had written it—and he assumed it had been Bradley—had used an illogical logic tree, if that made any sense. The human brain made leaps in logic from “A” to “L” with no stops at any of the points in between based on experience, or sometimes intuition. Computers took the whole route, and even then didn’t always arrive at the correct answer. Until IBM’s “Watson,” that is. Watson had used the same illogical logic that brains did by searching a huge database of cultural experience and weighing the odds of which possible answer would most likely be right. The results had been good enough that Watson had beaten the most successful contestants ever on the TV game show Jeopardy.

  But Watson had been a ginormous computer. The genius of this artificial intelligence system was that it accessed hundreds, maybe thousands, of servers and processors in the “cloud.” The app itself could easily fit within the confines of a game like Never Bitten on a mobile device. Derek knew none of it would have been possible without James Barrett’s brilliant knowledge of game theory. That’s what had made MondoHard’s video games so successful. James had designed games with an uncanny prescience for what gamers would do in any given situation. Building adaptive strategies into the games had been a simple matter of predicting what players would do and changing subsequent action sequences based on how players actually moved. Adding this layer of AI on top made the game seem uncannily intuitive.

  Next up on the list of files was the GPS tracker. Derek wanted to see if there was a cache file within the tracking program that might have a list of mobile device addresses Bradley had followed. He figured at least he could warn those people if nothing else. He sifted through the sub-file directory. Sure enough, a cache file lay buried inside the program. He opened the file, but before he could run down the list of contents it shifted down a couple of lines. Which meant data had been added to the file. Which meant the program was active.