by Mark Henwick
I was distracted by a Were scent that lingered around a camping shop. I went inside and pretended to browse the shelves while I sniffed.
I was too late; the scent was old, maybe a day old, but at least it seemed to validate my theory—supplies would have to be bought. I paused in front of the maps and guides. I needed a map with more detail than the one I’d gotten in Santa Fe.
“Hi, can I help you?”
The assistant was eighteen or nineteen, dressed in a red lumberjack shirt and baggy brown work pants. He was tall and skinny, with sandy blond hair. And he was horny, the way only late teen, small-town boys can be. His eyes had locked on my butt the moment I’d come in.
“Oh, I needed a break from running, and I’m looking for some local info.”
“It’s cold out, eh?” He grinned, looking at my lightweight running clothes. He nodded back at the counter he’d abandoned to come stalking me, while bouncing on his toes like a puppy. “There’s a heater back there. I’m Frank. What’re you looking for?”
“You could tell me about the big houses around here,” I said. “I mean outside of town. I’m interested in old architecture. Or point me to a guidebook, if you don’t know.”
He puffed up. How could I suggest that he didn’t know the town?
I guessed he wasn’t going to offer me a book.
Another shopper waved from the counter.
“I gotta look after the till,” he said. “Come sit. I’ll go through the best old houses to see. I was born and raised in Taos, and I know them all better than the guidebooks.”
“I’d like that,” I murmured, and fluttered the eyelashes. Blink. Blink. Blink. Mwah ha ha, you are in my power, weak human male. Maybe I’d get a coffee out of it as well.
Never quite mastered the eyelash flutter.
“Something in your eye?” he said as he rang up the customer’s purchases.
When they’d gone, and only after a lot of nudging him back to the point–away from where I was staying and whether I had a boyfriend in town with me—he turned out to be a good source of local knowledge. So much so, I had to buy a hiking map, pen and a notebook to take it all down.
There was Taos Pueblo, which I had to pretend interest in because it was old and large. Then all the tourist places, the museums and hotels, the old church and the Martinez fort. And finally, there were the ranches and farmhouses. Places with acres of ground. Places that were at the ends of roads, difficult to get to. Some of them held by the same families for a long time.
Too many possibilities, even when he mentioned those where he knew the families and I could eliminate them.
He was running out of ideas when Tullah called on my cell.
“I just have to take this,” I said to Frank. “Was that all of them?”
“Come back after the call,” he said. “I’m sure I’ll remember a couple more. I’ll make us coffee.”
I ducked out. It was cold outside after sitting next to the heater.
“I’ve got a list of possibles for the Amaral hideout that Matt and David came up with,” Tullah said.
“Shoot.”
She ran through their list and I checked it against the one I’d gotten from Frank in the shop. Between us, we eliminated everything but four ranches, with a couple that I held in reserve.
The trouble was, they were all in different directions.
How to get to them quickly? It would take hours to run. I was sure little Franky would drive me around, but that would mean waiting until his lunch break. And I’d spend all my time fighting him off. It wasn’t really fair, either, not least because it might suddenly become dangerous.
I could rent a car, but if Amaral had this place staked out, he’d get a warning.
A cab? Tullah had most of the cash from the poker game.
I’d strolled half-way back to the main plaza while Tullah and I talked.
There was a battered pickup truck across the street that caught my eye. I’d seen it earlier, loaded with food. Now it was empty.
It meant nothing. A second errand for the nuns, something forgotten earlier.
It had always looked odd to me, a nun driving a car, let alone a big ole pickup like that—somehow out of place. Which was a stupid thought: how did I expect them to get around out here?
There’d been two nuns before; now there was only one. A store employee was helping her load her new purchases. And I was interested to see what those were. Toilet paper. An entire pickup full. I knew they’d been buying beans earlier, but this was too much.
“Tullah.” I cut off her one-sided debate about the merits of one remote farmhouse over another. “Is there a convent in that list? Or a monastery?”
“Yeah, but I mean, it’s a convent. Hardly—”
“What have you got on it?”
“The address, size, ownership—let’s see,” she mumbled. “Been a religious retreat for over twenty years, Eastern Orthodox Christian, fifteen nuns…”
She came to an abrupt halt while my mind freewheeled.
Fifteen nuns? That was a lot of supplies for fifteen people. Of course they’d need to stockpile supplies for the winter. Maybe they got a good deal for bulk buys. Maybe the road to the convent got closed by snow regularly. But still…
Tullah broke back into my thoughts.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered. “Oh, my God.”
“What?”
“The convent…they’re an orphanage as well.”
I immediately saw the same connection and felt ice forming in my belly.
I flashed back to the McIntire-Harriman ball. Ethel Harriman taking my arm. What had she said? “I know Señor Matlal does good work with his orphanages and so on, but I find I can’t warm to him.”
And the report on Matlal that Matt had compiled for me—part of Matlal’s public persona was that he ‘supported many orphanages in Mexico’.
Where the children at Bow Creek had come from.
Matlal didn’t support orphanages—he ran them as blood banks.
Not Amaral’s hideout. One of Matlal’s network. Not stocking up for winter. Loading in supplies for a large group of Confederation Were that had just joined them.
Amaral had been dealing with Matlal directly all along, and now he was here, using Matlal’s network to hide.
Frank was upset at how focused I was when I came back. I was in too much of a hurry even for coffee, but yes, he did know the place.
“Sure, I didn’t mention the old convent,” he said, radiating hurt feelings, “’cos there’s no point going there.”
“Why?”
“You’ll never get in. Those penguins don’t even speak to each other. Hardly anyone gets inside, and you need to arrange it, like, a month in advance.”
A silent convent, close enough to town and yet completely isolated from it.
My gut was sure.
“You haven’t drunk your coffee,” Frank complained.
He was laying it on thick. He wasn’t as upset as he made out. And he had a nice line in flirting to go with all those raging teen hormones.
My jaw throbbed and my Athanate wanted to tease him.
“I might come back with my girlfriend,” I purred, “and I promise we’ll take you out, maybe for coffee.”
“Oh. Oh, my God. Girlfriend.” He totally hammed it up, going all doe-eyed, before murmuring: “My mama warned me about big city girls like you.”
I laughed.
“Look, come back at lunchtime and I’ll drive you to the Fieldings’ place out on the Angel Fire road,” he said. “It’s awesome. Jus’ chill, have a look at the town this morning. Forget the convent. You won’t get in there.”
“I’ll take a look from the road, then.”
“You won’t see anything. They have like a wall, all the way around it.”
Yeah, I bet they do.
Chapter 48
The convent was set well back from the road, and shielded from view by walls twelve feet high. Added to that, on the inside, the place hid behind a
mixture of dusty green cypress and desert willow trees.
The entrance to the convent was barred with heavy iron gates set between thick square pillars. There was a security camera on the left-hand pillar and a sign on the right-hand one—simple stamped letters on metal.
I wasn’t going to get close to that security camera, but it didn’t matter; I could read the sign from the shelter of the trees fifty yards away.
It said Orfelinatul de la mănăstirea - Sfanta Vasilica with the translation below—Convent and Orphanage of Saint Vasilica. Admission by prior appointment only. Frank had it right.
The road was the low point, so the ground sloped up behind me and I climbed until I could just make out some of the main buildings inside the compound.
They were a blend of Spanish colonial and old adobe styles. Pitched roofs of terracotta tiles shaded dusty pink walls studded with vigas, the wooden beam-ends that jutted out. It had been a farm, in frontier days, when the building had doubled as a fort. It had two stories, with only a few narrow windows facing the outside. From my vantage point, it looked to have been built around two courtyards, laid out like the figure eight on a digital clock.
In the middle of the side facing me, the main entrance had been reconstructed in quarried stone. It was a circular tower, about thirty feet wide and ten feet taller than the walls. At the base, it had a deep arched passage wide enough for a pickup.
Above that main arch, there were two smaller arched openings onto what looked like a covered walkway. They bracketed a large black metal cross set into the wall.
Whatever the architect had intended, it made me think of a face, with the main arch forming a mouth opened in an endless scream.
As I peered at the cross, something stirring in my memory. It wasn’t the standard Christian cross; it was an Orthodox cross: ornate, with bulbous ends like a three-leaf clover, and two extra crossing elements, one above and one below the main horizontal bar. The one below was set at an angle. I remembered from my schooldays that it was intended to represent a footrest.
But fragments of the comparative religion lesson evaporated when I remembered where I’d last seen one of those crosses.
Matlal’s Diakon, Vega Martine, had worn one to the McIntire-Harriman ball, on a silver necklace.
Maybe this wasn’t Matlal’s hideout, but Vega Martine’s.
Movement at the entrance distracted me.
A drawback of designing the old farm like a fort was that any loading or unloading of deliveries had to be done from inside the courtyard. There were no major openings in the outer walls except the entrance. And the width of that meant it was restricted to one vehicle at a time.
A loaded pickup was being driven out as an SUV was being driven in.
It wasn’t a real problem—a moment for the incoming one to back up and then both were through. But it gave me enough time to train the binoculars on them and see the logo on the side of the SUV going inside. It was a grinning wolf cub. I couldn’t be positive, but it looked the same as the logo on the van that the Confederation had used when they came visiting in Denver.
Great. The gang’s all here. Or at least, they were gathering.
Ten minutes later and from half-way up a tree on the east side of the property, I could see a row of pickups and SUVs parked on a paved area, most packing full loads.
Someone was getting ready to move.
That could be good and bad.
The bad part was that, if they moved, I’d need to find out where and I had no method of tracking them. I guessed I could hide my secure cellphone on a vehicle. That might let Naryn track it as long as there was a signal, but it’d leave me out of touch.
And there wasn’t room in these pickups for me to hide myself.
On the other hand, there’s no time better for covert infiltration than when everything’s in chaos, preparing for a move. Security systems get turned off. Doors get left propped open. People get taken off guard duty to help.
Naryn had tasked me with finding where Diana was. This was probably the place.
But I wasn’t sure, and recon sometimes had to change mission on the fly.
I climbed down and thought it through as I headed for the back of the property.
Going in by myself would be extremely difficult and dangerous. I might find Diana. Even with the disruption of moving, the last place security would be relaxed would be the guard detail for such an important prisoner. I’d done a dozen hostage rescues in Ops 4-10, but that was enough for me to know that this would be nearly impossible for me to carry out single-handed, even with my full equipment.
On the other hand, if I did free Diana, the chances of getting out might be much higher. She was formidably powerful.
Or I could just sit and wait for Naryn, and hope Diana wasn’t being moved.
I had no idea what Naryn would do when he got here—he hadn’t shared anything with me.
I was sure he’d have a plan to get in and kill Amaral. But he’d arrive with a team, and the larger the team, the more likely they’d be spotted. And what would stop Amaral from killing Diana or using the threat of that to make Naryn hold off?
Going in alone and undetected might be the best chance of getting Diana out alive.
Should I listen to my instincts and risk it?
Asking myself questions about what I would have done if this had been an Ops 4-10 mission didn’t seem useful; there were paranormals inside that fort and I had almost no equipment.
Not that kind of mission, Tara said.
She was right. There was another kind of mission more suited to a single person.
Assassination.
What would Naryn say? Kill Amaral or Diana. Either way, the threat would be neutralized.
I texted Naryn the location of the convent as I crept around to the back, then I sent him some pictures. The layout would be difficult to assess, but between this and the internet, he should be prepared.
Behind the main house, the ground rose. There were greenhouses, vegetable plots and fruit trees. The convent looked to be partly self-sufficient. Some cottonwood indicated they had a source of ground water; maybe there was a small stream running down off the hill.
There was one discordant note in the pastoral simplicity—an area had been levelled and converted to three tennis courts. Was I being too suspicious? If nuns could drive pickups, they could play tennis. But why three courts? I peered through the binoculars. There were floodlights on one side only. No nets or net posts. And why were there fire extinguishers racked alongside the floodlights?
Not for tennis. The convent had a good-sized helipad.
One other thing looked odd. Between the buildings and the fruit trees, there was an area screened off with black fabric stretched between metal posts.
Some kind of plant protection?
Then, as I watched, a couple of guys came out of an opening in the screens, carrying camping gear.
I’d found the Confederation’s troop barracks—tents behind the convent, hidden by screens.
There was more movement at the side where the vehicles were parked. A few last things being loaded. A convoy was ready to go.
They might be moving Diana.
I made my way back as quickly as I could.
If they were moving her, how would they do it? Someone down there probably had the sort of military training I had for moving sensitive prisoners.
Put the prisoners in the middle vehicle, out of sight.
When moving onto heavily trafficked roads, stop to ensure the convoy would not become separated. Preferably with someone to hold up traffic.
That would be difficult on public roads in the US, but I was sure they’d stop at the gate to the convent, waiting until everyone was ready. It was a point of vulnerability. People wouldn’t be fully engaged in the task, wouldn’t be expecting trouble while they were still in their base.
I couldn’t take out a convoy with a single HK handgun.
I might delay them, shoot out some tires, though neither
hunting me down afterwards nor fixing the tires would take very long. Or…
I shuddered. It would be an opportunity for a strike. Ten rounds into the back seat of an SUV in less time than it took them to get out and kill me. A reasonable chance that Diana would be dead.
And if I didn’t kill Diana here, they could take her anywhere. This might be the only chance.
I made it down to the gate undecided, my heart in my mouth, uncertain what I should do, or would do.
I hid in the scrub and watched.
As it turned out, there weren’t any SUVs in the convoy, and they had no convoy discipline. The gates were opened automatically and there was no one on the road to halt any traffic. It was just a stream of three or four Weres per pickup and a stack of equipment in the flatbeds.
The Confederation were moving their camp, but they weren’t taking Diana at the moment.
Just as they finished pulling out, there was a holdup on the narrow road. A convent SUV and a beat-up box van were trying to come into the convent.
The road was an old donkey track; there was barely enough room to pass. To let the convoy get by, the incoming vehicles had to ride up into the scrub that lined the way and stop there.
Which gave me plenty of time to see Frank from the shop down in town, sitting in the SUV. He was unconscious, his head back and his eyes closed. I couldn’t see his hands; they were behind him. The way they’d be if he’d been tied up by the nuns who accompanied him.
Shit. I’d put him in real danger just by talking to him.
The convoy was nearly clear and the SUV began to ease out impatiently.
I didn’t spend any more time thinking.
The back of the box van had clearance. The driver couldn’t see anything behind him.
I slunk through the scrub and dived underneath the back of the box van, where I clung like a limpet as it drove past the security camera and into the convent grounds.
I could sense more Were inside the van. Not Santa Fe, Albuquerque or Gold Hill, and I didn’t think they were Confederation. Very scared. I guessed that probably made them Ute Mountain.