by Ian Rankin
The binoculars he showed me were small but powerful. “Bird watchers love them,” he said, like this was a recommendation.
I handed them back. “Got anything with a night-vision facility?”
“You’re talking major expense.”
“So let me talk.”
He went off to find a night scope. Bel was picking out thick socks to go with her boots. “We want to look like tourists, right?”
“Right.”
“Then we’d probably have too much gear, all of it brand-new.”
“Right again.”
“So I want some new sunglasses.” I nodded and she went to choose some. Meantime I picked out a compass, and studied a few of the available knives. The survival knives looked good.
There was one with a hollow handle, inside which were fishing line, hooks and a needle, a tiny compass, stuff like that. Another was so versatile you could turn it from knife into ax or shovel or even a flashlight. It was big too. I reckoned it was big enough to scare most people.
“I’ll take that,” I said, pointing it out to Archie, who had come back with a plain cardboard box. He was licking his lips, excited at the total sale but nervous about the ease with which we were spending money. Maybe he thought we were going to pull a gun or even one of his own combat knives on him. Instead I pulled out a wad of cash and waved it in his face. He nodded and relaxed a little.
I checked the night scope. It was perfect. I could use it like a telescope or, with a couple of adjustments, fit it to my sniping rifle.
“How discreet are you, Archie?” I asked.
“That depends.”
“Well, I want to buy all this, and I want to pay cash. But I’ve a job I’d like to do. Do you have a workshop back there?” He nodded. “Could I borrow it for, say, fifteen minutes?”
He shrugged. “You buy that lot, you can bunk in the back for all I care.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
Bel was asking Archie about maps when I left the shop. She’d slid a survival knife into the top of her right boot to see how it felt. Clancy stared at the knife for a moment, then followed me out. Clancy wasn’t a country boy or a born-again backwoodsman.
Seattle still had something of the frontier town about it, but he was strictly latte and art museum. He told us the only times he’d been out to the Olympic Peninsula had been to visit the hot springs resort. He’d driven past the Disciples’ compound, but only on day trips, and he’d hardly budged from the car.
But a lot of the Olympic Peninsula was wilderness, mountains, and first-growth temperate rain forest. I knew there was no such thing as being underprepared. Clancy stood watching as I unlocked the trunk and lifted out my bag.
“Come on, Mike, who the fuck are you, man? You’re security, right? I mean, a secret agent or something. Reporters I know, they wouldn’t have the expenses to claim for that hotel you’re staying in, never mind leaving the room empty for a night. Even if they could claim it, they’d stay someplace ratty and cream the cash. And they’d never ever have so much cash on them. Strictly plastic, and a receipt every time you spend.”
I locked the trunk. “So I’m not a journalist. All you have to know is, if you stick around I’ll give you a story. This is better for you, Sam. See, I don’t represent any competition. It’s your exclusive.”
He was shaking his head. “I’m not going.”
“Sam, we don’t need you anymore. You want to stay here, fine. Maybe it’ll take us an hour or two longer to find the compound. But we’ll find it. I’m not going to beg you to come with us.”
“I could blow you wide open, man. All it would take is a call to Provost.”
I smiled. “We’re not your enemies, Sam. Why would you do that?”
He thought about this. “I wouldn’t do it. Forget I said it.” He followed me into the shop. Bel was trying on a red-and-black-check lumberjack coat. Archie gestured for me to follow him.
Sam was still on my tail. We entered a back room full of equipment and workbenches. There was even a metal-turning lathe.
And there were bits and pieces from gun-cleaning kits. I put the bag down on a bench and unzipped it.
“I just want to know,” Sam was saying. “See, people have been trying to kill me, and I can’t afford not to be choosy about my friends. Someone comes up to me with a chickenshit story about being a journalist, and it turns out he’s not, then I’ve got to wonder what he really is.”
The words died in his throat as he saw the Varmint being unwrapped, then the pistol, and finally the Colt Commando.
“Sweet Lord Jesus,” he said quietly. I started seeing if I could fit the night scope to the Varmint.
“Sam,” I said, not looking up, “you’re safe with us.”
“I hear that.”
“I’m a friend of Bel’s. I was a friend of her father’s. He sold me guns from time to time. I saw what those bastards did to him, and I intend finding out just why they did it. That’s the whole story, except for one thing.” Now I looked at him. “I don’t care what it takes.”
His mouth was suddenly dry. There was an open can of beer on the bench, and he took a swig from it.
“Why don’t you go get us a pack of those things from the grocery?” I suggested. “Think things over while you’re there.
If you want out, we’ll get your camera from the car and you can catch a cab back into town.” I made to hand him some money. “I don’t need your money, Mike. I can stretch to a few beers.”
“Okay then.”
And he was gone. Archie put his head round the door.
“Sorry to interrupt, but that lady out there is going to put you in the poorhouse.”
“We’ll be the best-dressed paupers there.”
He laughed. This was turning into a more interesting day than usual for him. He looked at what I was doing. “Nice gun.
Give you some help there?”
“I might just need it. The receiver and the sight mounting are all wrong.”
“Well, let me take a look. No extra charge.”
“It’s all yours, Archie.”
It took us a little while, but Archie had a few bits and pieces in the back, and one of them seemed to be what we needed. It made the gun look like something from The Man from U.N.C.L.E., but it seemed okay.
“I never ask customers what they’re planning to shoot,” said Archie.
“Maybe an animal or two,” I said.
“Yeah, maybe, but that other gun you’ve got there, that’s strictly terror.”
I grinned. “I hope so, Archie. I really do.”
When we went back out front, there were no new customers and Clancy hadn’t come back.
“Where’s the nearest place to buy beer?” I asked.
“There’s a grocery on the corner,” Archie answered. I nodded to myself. It looked like Clancy had just walked away.
“Better start adding this lot up, Archie.”
“And then maybe I better close for the day for restocking.”
He got to work on his calculator.
Bel was back in her ordinary clothes. She hadn’t worn anything on her feet but the cowboy boots since she’d bought them.
“Where’s Sam?” she said.
“I think we’re on our own.”
“He didn’t even say good-bye. Will he tell anyone?”
“I doubt it.”
“What did you say to him?”
“I admitted I wasn’t a reporter.”
“Did he see the guns?” I nodded. “No wonder he ran. They have that effect on me, too.”
Archie had paused in his addition so he could fill a few shopping bags with goods already added up.
“Just put them straight in the backpacks, Archie, we’ll sort them out later.”
I added another flashlight to the total.
“Listen,” he said, “I know you may not need it, but I’m giving you a first-aid kit and some mosquito repellent. Plus all my cash customers receive a ten-percent discount.”
“Thanks.” I turned back to Bel.
“So we’re going on our own?” she said.
“I suppose so. I think we can find the ferry terminal, don’t you?”
“We can also save some money.”
“How’s that?”
“We don’t need two tents now, and one big sleeping bag would do us.”
“You’ve got a point.” But just then the door opened and Clancy staggered in. I thought he was hurt, and moved forward, but he was only staggering under the weight of the shopping bags he carried.
“A few provisions for the trip,” he said, putting down the bags. “Beer, potato chips, cans of chili, tuna, franks, and beans.”
He put his hand into one bag. “Look, I even packed the can opener.”
We all laughed except Archie, who was too busy on his calculator. When he’d finished, it was his turn to laugh. I counted out the money, and Clancy snatched the receipt.
“If you can’t claim, maybe I can.”
“Then you can pay for the boat tickets,” I said, hoisting a backpack onto my shoulder.
“It’s a deal.”
The ferry was busy with families heading off on vacation.
“Where are they all going?” I asked Clancy.
“The same place as us,” he said. “The Olympic Peninsula’s popular this time of year.”
“I thought it was wilderness.”
“Mostly it is. The folks you see here probably won’t get more than a couple of hundred yards from their vehicles all the time they’re away. There’s a highway circuits the Peninsula, but almost no roads at all in the national park itself. Here, I brought a map.”
It was the map the National Park Service handed out to visitors. As Clancy had said, there were almost no roads inside the park, just a lot of trails and a few unpaved tracks. The one good road I could see led to the summit of Hurricane Ridge. We were headed west of there, to Lake Crescent. Clancy pointed it out on the map. Outside the national park boundaries, the rest of the peninsula was considered national forest. The national park ended just north of Lake Crescent.
“See, what Provost did, he took over a house that was already there. They’re very cautious about new building inside the park, but there’s nothing they can do about homes that were there before the area was designated a national park. He didn’t have too much trouble getting permission to add a few log cabins of the same style. He even had the timber treated so it looked weathered.”
“I bet he’s kind to dumb animals too.”
We were part of a slow-moving stream coming off the ferry.
There were backpackers trying to hitch a ride with anyone who’d take them. Bel smiled at them and shrugged her shoulders.
Everybody took the same road out of Bremerton along the southern shore of Hood Canal. There were no stopping places, other than pulling into someone’s drive, so Clancy just pointed out Nathan’s house to us as we passed. It had a low front hedge, a large neatly cut lawn, and was itself low and rectangular, almost like a scale model rather than a real house, such was its perfec-tion. Beyond it we could see the canal itself, in reality an inlet carved into the land like a reverse J. We kept along Hood Canal for a long time, then headed west toward Port Angeles.
“From what I’ve heard,” said Clancy, “as well as what I’ve seen today, I think our first priority should be to find a campsite.”
He was right. Fairholm was the closest campsite to the Disciples’ headquarters, but by the time we got there it was already full. We retraced our route and called in at Lake Crescent Lodge, but it was fully booked. So then we had to head north toward the coast where, at Lyre River, we found a campground with spaces. It was less than a mile from the Strait of Juan de Fuca, beyond which lay Vancouver Island, Canadian soil. The air was incredible, intoxicating and vibrant. You felt nobody’d ever breathed it before. It wasn’t city air, that was for sure.
Clancy had been telling us that there was bad feeling in the Pacific Northwest about logging. A lot of loggers were losing their jobs, a lot of logging towns were going broke. They’d asked if they could go into the national forest and tidy up fallen trees, but this request had been rejected. There were other forests they couldn’t touch because of a protected species of owl. They were getting desperate.
“One man’s paradise . . .” I said.
At the campground, there was a box full of envelopes. We put our fee in the envelope and pushed it through the slot. Then we stuck our receipt in a little display case on a post next to our own little site.
“Isn’t this cozy?” I said. Bel looked dubious. She’d been sleeping in too many real beds recently to relish a night under the stars. It was about fifteen miles from here to the Disciples’ HQ, so we pitched our tents. Or rather, Clancy and I pitched the tents while Bel walked by the river and chatted with a few other campers. Then, happy with the state of our accommodations, we got back in the car and headed off. We were on the wrong side of Lake Crescent, as we soon found. No road went all the way around the lake. The main road went round the south, and to the north it was half unpaved road and half trail. We were on the trail end, which meant we couldn’t take the car anywhere near the Disciples without going all the way around the lake and heading in toward them from the west along the unpaved road. We took the car to the trailhead past Piedmont and got out to think. It looked like it was about a three-mile walk. Driving around the lake might save a mile of walking.
“Well,” I said, “we might as well get our money’s worth from all this gear we’ve brought.”
So we got ourselves made up to look like hikers, Clancy carrying the only backpack we’d need, and I locked the car.
“You’re not carrying heat?” he inquired.
“You’ve been watching too many gangster flicks.”
“But are you or aren’t you?”
“No.”
“Good.”
We walked for about half a mile, until Bel suddenly stopped.
I asked what was wrong. She was looking all around her.
“This,” she said, “is the most beautiful place I’ve ever been.
Listen: nothing. Look, not a soul around.”
She’d barely got these words out when a party of three walkers emerged on the trail ahead of us. They nodded a greeting as they passed. They hadn’t spoiled things at all for Bel. She looked the way I’d seen girls in my youth when they were stoned at parties. She was an unfocused, all-encompassing smile.
“It’s the lack of toxins in the atmosphere,” Clancy explained.
“If your system isn’t used to it, weird things start to happen.”
We walked on, and she caught up with us. Clancy had the map.
“There’s a picnic area at North Shore,” he said, “but we’ll see the cabins before that. They’re between this trail and the one leading up Pyramid Mountain.”
We came upon them sooner than expected. It was a bit like the setup at Oban, but a lot less obtrusive. No signs or fences or barriers, except that the very existence of the cabins, here where there should be nothing, was a barrier in itself. I couldn’t see the Disciples getting many casual visitors.
“So what do we do now?” Bel said.
“We keep walking,” I told her. “We’re just out for a hike.
We’ll soon be at North Shore. We’ll have our picnic and we’ll talk. Just now, we’re walking.”
But from the corner of my eye I was taking in the cabins, the small vegetable plot, the boat on its trailer. I couldn’t see any signs of life, and no cars, no pickups or vans. No smoke, but then the cabins didn’t have chimneys, with the exception of what I took to be the original structure, slightly larger than the others.
Instead, there were solar panels on the roofs, and a couple more on the ground. There was plenty of tree and bush cover around the cabins, and no sign of any pets. I wasn’t even sure you were allowed to keep pets inside the park.
There were boats out on Lake Crescent. They looked like they’d come from
Lake Crescent Lodge. I could see fathers wrestling with the oars while mothers caught the antics on video and the children rocked the boat further to discomfit Pop. We sat down at the picnic site and gazed out over the lake.
“It is beautiful,” said Bel.
“Almost as pretty as a baseball game,” Clancy agreed. Bel ignored him.
“So that was it?” I said.
“That was it.”
“I was expecting more.”
“The Disciples are small-time, Mike. 1 could show you a dozen cults bigger than them in the U.S., including the Cult of the Sainted Elvis. They’re not big, they’re just rich and obsessed with their privacy.”
Bel turned away from the view. She had been bitten already, and sprayed more gunk on her bare arms. I’d bought a dark blue baseball cap at Archie’s, and was now glad of it. The sun beat down with a sizzling intensity. Clancy opened the cooler and handed out beers.
“So now we go and knock at their door,” said Bel, “ask them what the hell they were doing murdering my father?”
“Maybe not straightaway,” I cautioned.
“But I thought that was the whole point?”
“The point is to play safe. Sam, have you ever heard of anyone leaving the Disciples?”
He shook his head and sucked foam from the can. “That was my first line of inquiry. If you’d been a real reporter, it’s about the first thing you’d’ve asked me. I was desperate to find someone with inside info, but I never found a soul.”
“Ever talk to any existing members?”
“Oh, yes, lots of times. I’d strike up conversations with them when they went into Port Angeles for supplies. I have to tell you, those were very one-sided conversations. Hamlet’s soliloquies were shorter than mine. I got snippets, nothing more.”
Bel was sorting out the food. We had ham, crackers, cold sausage, and potato chips.
“Bel,” I said, “how’s your acting?”
“I think I played a policewoman pretty well.”
“How about playing a very stupid person?”
She shrugged. “It’d be a challenge. What sort of stupid person did you have in mind?”