Blood of the Faithful (12 page)

“Jacob
was
our prophet,” Ezekiel corrected. He approached his father, who flinched. “Jacob
was
called. Of course he was. But he turned away when given difficult commandments. When ordered to repent, he hardened his heart against the Lord. And so the Lord chose someone more worthy. I’m not perfect—you’re my father, you know that. But I will obey the Lord, my God, and that is why He chose me. Because I will obey without question.”

“I don’t believe it. I
can’t
believe it.”

“Father, listen to me.” Ezekiel took the older man by the shoulders. “The spirit repelled Jacob. It literally pushed him out the doors. It’s terrible, it makes me weep, but you can’t deny it. Our leader is a fallen prophet. The blessing of the Lord has been taken from him.”

“And you . . . ?”

“I have strapped on the breastplate and not died. I have held the Sword of Laban in my hand and not been smitten by an angel. No other man may do this and live. No man but the One Mighty and Strong.”

“I don’t . . . I can’t.”

“Touch the sword if you doubt me. Pick up the breastplate. You know what will happen.”

His father pulled away with a groan and put his fists to his temples. “I don’t understand. Jacob saved us. His people love him. What do we do? Tell him to step down?”

“Father, no,” Ezekiel said. His father’s anguish touched his heart. “You don’t ask a false prophet to step down. What if he refuses?”

“Then what? Drive him from Blister Creek?” Smoot let out a harsh bark. “Send him into the world to take his chances?”

“Our people are too soft-hearted, too loyal. They would never let him go. And his wives would fight for him, Miriam and David. His sister, Eliza, when she returns.”

“You said Miriam and David were with us. Are you lying?”

“They’re with us,” Ezekiel said. “But it’s one thing to ask them to stand aside while we force Jacob to stand down. Another thing for them to watch us drive Jacob out of Blister Creek. Their loyalty will blind them to the will of the Lord.”

Ezekiel turned away from his father and walked slowly back toward the objects he’d dug out of the ground. He picked up the blade and turned it over in his hands, his heart heavy. He took no pleasure in any of this. He turned around to face his father.

“The Lord told me what to do,” Ezekiel said sadly. “The Lord commanded me to find Jacob Christianson and cut off his head.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Miriam listened for Jacob as he moved through the darkness west along the base of the Ghost Cliffs. When she could no longer hear him, she picked her way slowly to the east. There was just enough light that her straining eyes could pick out the forms of the larger boulders to her left. To the right lay the inky blackness of Witch’s Warts.

Periodically, she put on her night vision goggles and climbed one of the boulders or sandstone fins to see how far her view carried.

The best spot was on a hump of rock shaped like a two-story loaf of bread. It took a few minutes to find a way to climb the thing, but when she got up top, she knew she’d chosen the right place. The rock offered the perfect combination of height and isolation that would allow her an expansive view both east and west. Too bad she didn’t have the rifle; she could have propped it right over her backpack and enjoyed a wide range of fire.

But Jacob had insisted on taking the rifle with him. She understood, she got it. He didn’t trust her, and probably with good reason. She wasn’t here to screw around. She was here to stop Chambers.

The stone was warm, but the breeze picking up from the cliffs already had a bite to it, so she zipped up her jacket and made sure she knew how to get to the solar blanket if it kept growing colder. She checked her pistol ammunition by feel, then ate some beef jerky, even though she wasn’t hungry.

Miriam turned on the goggles. The black turned to pale green and cast stones into sharp relief. The eyes of an animal glowed up at her from the sand below. A jackrabbit. She scanned the cliffs, both above and below. Nothing unusual caught her eye, but it was early yet.

There was probably some overlap with Jacob’s position to the west, so she mostly looked east. Every twenty or thirty minutes an animal would pass along the desert floor below her. Some she recognized—a coyote, a mule deer—but some of the smaller animals were furtive, creeping shapes that she couldn’t identify.

It had been several years since Miriam had sat on an extended stakeout, but she found her emotions following the same pattern as the hours crawled by. At first her attention was sharpened like a knife drawing back and forth across a whetstone, until it was well honed.

But the edge dulled as time crawled by. First, her mind started to wander, thinking about her baby, her husband. Then thinking about her parents and her brother and wondering if they’d survived the war on the West Coast. She hadn’t heard from them for years, not since her mother and father tried to stage that ridiculous intervention to get her out of Blister Creek, believing she’d joined a cult. Right, like Miriam was that weak-minded. But surely her parents would think about her on occasion, wonder what had happened to their daughter. It filled her with an unexpected longing. Not regret for her path in life, exactly, but the sense of something lost.

Miriam yawned and forced her attention back to the business at hand. One difference between tonight and the old FBI stakeouts was that she’d have had a gallon of black coffee on hand. The Word of Wisdom prevented hot drinks, but a little caffeine would surely come in handy about now.

She was growing drowsy again when a high-pitched whine caught her ears. She was instantly alert. A few seconds passed before the whine cut out. She couldn’t pick it up again, no matter how she strained. But she was certain of what she’d heard. It was the same ATV as last night.

No, there it was again. Definitely to the southeast this time. Faint, but clear. She looked, but couldn’t see anything through the tumble of Witch’s Warts.

Could Jacob hear it too? Probably not; he was a mile or so to her west. Her hand went automatically to her backpack, where she found the radio and turned it on. After a moment of hesitation, she turned it off again.

“Can’t risk it,” she said aloud. Even in a whisper, her voice startled her. Strange thing to voice the words instead of thinking them. “Chambers knows what frequency we use. What if he’s listening?”

Don’t lie to yourself. You know what you’re doing.

Well, yes. She knew. She wasn’t worried about Chambers listening in on a radio. The truth was that she didn’t want Jacob to know she’d heard the ATV. She wanted to handle Chambers on her own.

A flashlight appeared on the edge of her vision, flaring white in her night vision goggles like a miniature sun. Miriam’s heart took a leap like a startled rabbit.

Staying low, leaning against her backpack, she slid the goggles to her forehead to have a look. Her naked eyes took several seconds to adjust to the darkness. The light was nothing but a small penlight, a good two hundred yards away. It disappeared behind rocks, only to appear again.

Miriam put on the goggles and dialed down the intensity so she could see the man behind the light. Only it wasn’t one man, it was two. One man had the flashlight; the other was pulling the cart through the soft sand. The cart was heaped with bulging sacks.

Two men? There was a second traitor?

The light kept coming toward her along the cliffs until it was about fifty yards away. Then it blinked out for good.

Miriam turned up the goggles. The two people stood by the cart, discussing something in voices too low to hear. Without taking her eyes from them, Miriam touched a hand to her pistol holster, then to the knife sheathed at her side. She crawled backward in the darkness, looking for the rainwater fissure that had helped her scale the rock.

She climbed down to the sandy valley floor and walked slowly through the darkness, pressed against the stone, the goggles still on. The men weren’t looking at her, instead turning their gaze up the cliff, but she still took no chances in her approach. Kick a pebble, stumble into sagebrush, and they’d whirl around and turn on the flashlight.

She moved from boulder to boulder until she was about forty feet away, where she squatted behind a rock not much bigger than an overturned garbage can. Both men wore sidearms, but that only mattered if they could get their guns out and locate her in the darkness. She eased the pistol from its holster. From this distance, with this much time to aim, she could hardly miss. Two shots. They’d go down, one after the other.

But who was that second person? Definitely a man; he had a beard and a masculine posture and height. But through the green glow of night vision, she couldn’t tell any more than that.

It could be anyone.

Anyone? Even David? Would she shoot her own husband if she thought he were smuggling food out of the valley? Of course not, most especially because he’d have a damn good reason for doing . . . well, whatever he was doing. Anyway, it wasn’t David. She felt ashamed that the thought would even cross her mind.

Beyond that, who? Maybe one of the squatters, who’d infiltrated and was helping Chambers steal their food. Miriam had to find out who and why before she killed the man.

“There it is,” one of them said. It sounded like Chambers. “Get the rock.”

The two men grabbed one of the large rocks at their feet and wrestled with it until they got it turned on its edge. There was a rope tied around it, which Miriam had missed in her earlier search. One of the men tugged on the rope, which she could now see stretched up the cliff into the darkness. So Jacob had been right about the rope, although she couldn’t figure out why the men didn’t untie it from the rock. Then suddenly, and to her surprise, the rock heaved off the ground. It soared up into the darkness until she lost sight of it.

A minute later, a wooden barrel came dropping silently from above. When it reached the ground, the two men tossed out skull-sized chunks of rock from the barrel until it was half-empty, then they heaved it on its side to empty out the rest of the rocks. When that was done, the men filled it with sacks of what she presumed were foodstuffs from the cart.

The thing was a primitive elevator. Instead of relying on brute strength to lift the food several hundred feet, there would be a pulley above, working by sending down a counterweight that would provide most of the lifting power for the barrel. Lift the rock to lower the barrel, or lower the rock to lift the barrel. A little extra muscle power would even out any difference in the weight of the two objects.

Miriam was still turning this over in her head when the men stopped loading. They’d tossed in roughly half the sacks of food, and at first she wondered why they didn’t top off the barrel. Then, to her surprise, one of the men helped the other climb into the barrel on top of the sacks of grain.

“You good to go?” Chambers asked. No question now it was him.

“Yup,” the other man said in a low voice.

Only one word; it wasn’t enough to identify the man.

Chambers jerked twice on the rope. A second later, the barrel inched off the ground, before it began to rise at a more rapid pace. Miriam watched, fascinated and alarmed, until the barrel disappeared out of sight. A minute or two passed, and the rock reappeared from above and settled on the ground.

The elevator system was crude, but effective enough to move thousands of pounds of food out of the valley. The limiting factor was the pace of theft from the silos and the transport to this spot.

What was even more worrying was what the elevator might be used for besides transporting food: people. Send twenty men down from the squatter camp, one at a time, and they could do serious damage to the church’s food supplies. Maybe they already had. Or worse, send a small army down one night, maybe forty or fifty men, then have them fan out across the valley, murdering people in their sleep.

Miriam clenched her jaw. This would end. Now.

There was no guarantee that the second man would return. But there was no saying he wouldn’t either. Quietly take care of Chambers here, then she could wait for the second man to either come back, or not. If he did, she’d kill him too.

She was barely thinking of Jacob as she returned her pistol to its holster and slid her KA-BAR knife from its sheath. No time to argue with him about this. Time to act.

Miriam rose from behind the rock. Chambers was still staring up, almost turned completely away from her, but not quite. He was taller than her and stronger, ex-FBI, around thirty years old. Miriam was confident, but not stupid. There was no guarantee that if she grappled with him she’d come out on top, knife or no. No, it had to be a quick thrust, the knife plunging into his back before he had a chance to respond.

She closed to fifteen feet, then ten, then five. Then he was in reach. She sprang at him.

Chambers must have felt something, heard something, sensed her somehow. He whirled as she came at him.

Miriam was already stabbing down with the heavy military knife as he flinched out of the way with a shout of alarm. The knife hit and hit hard. But not into his back. Instead, it thrust into his upper shoulder, the blade meeting resistance on bone as it slid in. But when he twisted away with a cry of pain, the knife wrenched out of Miriam’s hand. Chambers swung blindly with his other arm. His forearm whooshed past, almost catching her on the side of the head with a lucky blow.

By the time Miriam regained her balance, Chambers had the knife out of his shoulder. His left arm hung limp. His right swung and slashed at the darkness with the knife.

She got back until she was well out of his reach, then stopped and watched him without moving. Inside, she was furious with herself for failing at the job. He’d moved too quickly.

Chambers dropped the knife and drew his pistol. “Kite, you bitch. I know that’s you.”

“My name is Miriam.”

He snapped off a shot into the darkness in the direction of her voice. But she’d expected it and had ducked the instant she spoke. The shot would have gone wild anyway, she thought. Her own gun was in hand, and now that he’d fired at her, there was no longer a question of keeping silent. But she wanted to know. She returned to the protection of the rock where she’d crouched watching the two men.

Chambers stood panting, staring hard into the darkness, looking this way and that.

“You must have dropped your flashlight,” she said. “Too bad.”

He fired again in her direction. It didn’t hit the rock, let alone threaten her in any way.

Miriam chuckled. “You’re a terrible shot. And I have night vision. I can kill you any time I like.”

“So do it, bitch.”

“Who is the other man? I’ll let you live if you tell me.”

“Liar.”

“Tell me.”

“Go to hell.”

Miriam was getting tired of this. And she wanted him down before the people up top decided to send someone back down in the barrel. So she lifted the gun and took careful aim with her pistol. Right at his chest.

“Last chance,” she said.

He lifted his gun in her direction. This time he steadied his aim, and it looked more like a plausible shot in the direction of her voice. She didn’t wait to test his aim. Her finger squeezed the trigger. The gun barked in her hand. Chambers fell.

The shot was good. She didn’t need to go over to know the result. If he was still alive, it was only temporary.

Miriam now had two worries. The first was that the second man would come down in the barrel looking for her. The squatters could probably fit two men in the barrel once the food was unloaded. If they had flashlights, they might even get off a couple of good shots before she brought them down.

The second worry was Jacob. He’d have heard the gunfire too, and would be hurrying in her direction. Whatever she did, she needed to act before he arrived and ordered her to stand down so he could argue about what she’d done.

Still holding the gun and looking through the goggles, Miriam made her way cautiously to Chambers’s prone body. His gun lay in the sand a few inches from his outstretched hand. She kicked it away, then picked it up and flipped the safety before tucking it into her pants. After casting a final glance at Chambers, she returned her own pistol to its holster.

She reached the rock that had descended from the cliffs and touched at the rope. It was taut. There was some weight on the other end. But the stone wasn’t rising yet either. She made a quick decision and reached for her knife, only to find her sheath empty.