Ranger (The Bugging Out Series Book 5) (14 page)

“I’d like to get everything but our personal supply out of the town hall,” Schiavo said, looking to Mayor Allen. “Can you think of a new location for a town armory?”

The mayor thought for a moment, instinctively glancing back toward the town, only the peak of the church’s steeple visible from the distance we’d traveled.

“There’s an old auto shop just north of downtown,” he said. “I was told the man who owned it left early on after the blight started. During the building inventory it was considered for a food storage location, but it’s not the cleanest space.”

“We can clean,” Schiavo said. “How secure is it?”

“Steel doors,” Mayor Allen said. “A big rollup door at the front.”

Schiavo looked to Private Quincy.

“When we get back to town, talk to Sgt. Lorenzen about getting this space readied for use as the town armory.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The captain looked to me next.

“Fletch, will help Mayor Allen with the request for residents to transfer part of their ammunition to the town armory? People respect you.”

“Meaning we need to balance the presence of a dirty politician,” Mayor Allen said, smiling.

“We’ll be the first to bring half of our supply,” Elaine said.

“That’s a start,” Schiavo said.

Everyone had been heard on the idea. Almost everyone.

“Martin...”

The man turned toward me as I spoke his name.

“A centralized town armory sound good to you?” I asked.

He nodded an acceptance of the idea, but said nothing. He was preoccupied, some thought, or series of thoughts, filling his head right then.

“What is it?” Schiavo asked her husband.

“I was just thinking that this might not be such a good thing we’re doing,” Martin answered.

“What?” she asked.

He looked to her, to Mayor Allen, then to the dead woods beyond the green fields.

“The town’s political and military leaders are standing right here,” Martin said. “And we’re probably being watched right now.”

Eyes shifted slowly to the still dense forest, grey and tall. The enemy could be right there, as Martin suggested. A single sniper of moderate skill could eliminate the town’s power structure in a few seconds. It was unlikely they would make such an overt move.

But not impossible.

“We need to get you two out of here,” I said.

Martin backed away from the fence and stepped close to his wife.

“Mayor,” Elaine said, gently placing her hand on the elderly man’s elbow to guide him away from the open space.

“Ma’am,” Private Quincy said, bringing her M4 up to a ready position.

“In a minute, private,” Schiavo said.

Elaine looked to me and I signaled with a nod to keep moving and get the mayor clear of the area.

“Angela, let’s go,” Martin urged his wife mildly.

Still she didn’t move. She stood her ground, staring out across the fields, past the livestock, to what was unseen in the distant woods.

“Private...”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“You stay sharp when you’re out here,” Schiavo instructed.

Quincy nodded and kept her eyes on the line of dead trees.

“Will do, ma’am.”

With that, Schiavo turned away and began following Elaine and Mayor Allen back toward town. Martin and Quincy trailed her, but I hung back. For just a minute. Scanning the shadows between the trees for any movement. Any sign of presence. I could see none.

But I could feel it.

F
og shrouded the town the morning the stranger arrived.

He came from the east, overland, ignoring roads and trails as he slipped through the barren woods and was spotted by Sergeant Lorenzen and Private Westin walking along the street two blocks from my house. The patrol escorted the man to the garrison’s offices downtown. That was where I first saw him after receiving a call to get there ASAP.

In fact, it wasn’t the first time I’d laid eyes on the stranger.

“Who is he?” I asked Schiavo in the center’s lobby, glancing past the captain to an interior room beyond a window, the stranger sitting and chatting with Lorenzen.

“You don’t know him?” Schiavo asked.

I fixed on the man and shook my head.

“But I’ve seen him,” I told her.

On the table before him lay a weathered Cattleman. The same hat and the same man I’d seen at the cabin in the woods.

“When I was out there,” I said. “He was stalking me. Or stalking someone.”

“He was carrying that,” Schiavo said, gesturing to the corner of the room where we stood.

I looked and saw what she’d directed me to. Leaning against the wall was a Winchester lever gun. The same .30-30 I I’d seen him carrying at the cabin. A small shoulder bag sat next to it on the floor, top flap open after some obvious search.

“He had a bigger pack when I saw him,” I told the captain.

“He’s travelling light,” she said. “Probably has a camp somewhere close by.”

He’d cached his supplies and come to town with only the minimal amount he’d need. But need for what?

I looked from the man beyond the one-way glass to Schiavo again, seeing immediately that her attention was focused hard on me, not on the visitor.

“And it was you he was stalking,” the captain said. “He asked for you when we brought him in. By name. Said he was looking for Eric Fletcher.”

Once more I looked to the stranger. To the man who had been seeking a very specific prey—me.

“He won’t tell us anything about himself,” Schiavo explained. “There’s nothing identifying in any of his possessions. He said you’re the only one he wants to speak to about why he’s here. Hell, he’s talking baseball with Paul in there right now.”

It didn’t appear that the man was worse for wear. Not wasting away, or even thinned out, as one might expect of a lone stranger appearing out of nowhere. He’d appeared well supplied when I’d seen him at the cabin, and, looking upon him now, from a closer distance, I thought it almost certain that he’d been supported somehow. Supplied by others.

“You think he’s part of the group that grabbed me?”

Schiavo thought for a moment, then shook her head.

“I don’t see how that makes sense. They take you, release you, then have this guy shadow you until, for some reason, he decides to make contact? To what purpose?”

She was right. I hadn’t asked the question with any surety that what I was suggesting had been the case, but the man’s appearance here, in search of me, made no more sense than anything we could imagine at the moment. And there would be no understanding until I did what I knew Schiavo had summoned me here to do.

“I’ll talk to him,” I said.

I removed my belt, the holstered Springfield heavy as I passed my rig to Schiavo. She set it on a desk behind her.

“We’ll be right out here,” she said. “Watching and listening.”

*  *  *

A
moment later I sat where Sergeant Lorenzen had been, facing the stranger. Alone with him.

His hands rested atop the table, folded, a slight smile on his lips as he seemed to study me.

“You’re a hard man to find.”

“Not really,” I said. “Chances are I’m the only Eric Fletcher left alive.”

“Could be...Fletch.”

He spoke my nickname with such knowing, such familiarity, that I felt a brief chill ripple up between my shoulder blades. The kind of iciness that comes both from within and far away at the same time.

“Yes, I know a lot about you, Fletch. Pretty much everything. Up until the blight, that is.”

It was my turn to appraise the man, the stranger. To seek some clear understanding of the who, and the what, and the why of his presence before me. Nothing showed on his face but that thin, almost smug grin.

Then, he glanced away from me, to the window. Light in the room and near darkness beyond the glass mostly hid the space from which I’d come.

“The cavalry is close,” he said. “They don’t trust me.”

“They don’t know you,” I said, adding almost too quickly. “
I
don’t know you.”

For a few seconds the stranger just looked at the glass, as if meeting the stares he could not see boring into him from the far side. His gaze then shifted to me and he sat back in his chair, hands slipping easily to his lap. Out of view. I knew he’d been searched before being placed in the room. There would be no weapon on him. But still I was wary. Something about those hands, and not being able to see them, unnerved me.

“Tyler Olin,” the stranger said.

“Excuse me?”

“Now you know who I am,” he said.

Tyler Olin. If he was being truthful, it offered me no insight into who he really was. The name meant nothing to me.

“Okay, Tyler—”

“Ty,” he interrupted. “People call me Ty...Fletch.”

Again, he wielded the familiarity like a scalpel, carving shallow cuts in my defensiveness. As much as I hated to admit it, this man, in an inconceivably short time, had found a way to push my buttons simply by uttering a nickname given to me by—

“Neil,” I said, and Olin’s grin deepened.

“Good old Neil,” he said.

“You know him.”

“
Knew
him,” Olin corrected. “Or I thought I did.”

“Who were you to him?” I asked, some fervor to my question. “Friend? Colleague?”

Olin sniffed a quiet chuckle.

“Colleague,” he repeated selectively. “That makes us sound so...ordinary. Like bankers, or doctors.”

“So you did work with him at the State Department,” I said, zeroing in on what had to be a certainty.

As it turned out, I was more wrong than I could have imagined at that moment, or at any in the span of time that I’d known my absent friend.

“I didn’t work for the State Department,” Olin said.

I stared at him, wary and confused.

“And neither did Neil Moore,” Olin added.

The silence I responded with opened the door for him to continue. To set my head spinning with foul revelation.

“Your friend wasn’t some low level diplomat lackey,” Olin said. “That was his cover.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” I pressed the man. “I’ve known him since we were kids. I know what he did for a living.”

The grin was gone. Now Olin managed something that might have been a smile, though it seemed more an involuntary expression that was part bitter, part sweet.

“My wife thought I worked for the Department of Agriculture the entire time we were together,” Olin said. “From the day I first asked her out until the moment she took her last breaths in my arms.”

He stopped there for a moment. Seizing on memories from old, dark places, it seemed. When his attention refocused on me there was no hint of a smile.

“Your friend and I both worked for the CIA,” Olin said.

M
y world didn’t come crashing down around me. Just a portion of what had been, that place held only in memory, crumbling now, beliefs peeling away, like a building whose foundation had just been compromised.

“Yes,” Olin said, answering the doubt my slack silence expressed. “The Central Intelligence Agency.”

I shook my head, slowly. There might have been dispute in the gesture. Or just denial.

“You don’t have to believe me, but that won’t change the reality of what I just told you.”

“The CIA,” I said. “The CIA?”

“Langley,” Olin said, with just a hint of nostalgia. “The Company. Whatever you want to call it. Den of spies. Black Ops Central. All of those things are true and false.”

Black is white. White is black
.

Neil’s parting words came to me without warning, the flash of memory bursting like a thunderbolt.

Neil...

For a moment I thought of my friend. Just thought of him. Of our simple times. I pictured his dumb smile. Imagined his almost impish laugh. That was how I remembered Neil Moore.

The Neil Moore
I
knew.

“This makes no sense,” I said, coming up from the recollections.

“Doesn’t have to,” Olin said.

I fixed on the man now. As calm and knowing as his gaze had regarded me, mine now bore at him with the opposite intensity.

“So you’re some master spy, I guess,” I challenged Olin.

The clumsy jab bothered him not at all.

“You can insult me, but your friend is what he was, and what he still is.”

What he still is...

“Are you saying he’s...performing some mission? That his leaving us was planned?”

At that instant, if only for a few seconds, the tables turned, with Olin in the dark without any apparent way to throw light upon what he’d been tripped up by.

“What do you mean ‘leave’?”

I could have easily withheld information, which he clearly was doing, maintaining as much of a one-way flow of information as possible. But I needed to know more. I needed to know what he knew. For my own benefit, and, maybe, for everyone else’s as well.

“A stealth helicopter came down one day and took him and his family away,” I said.

“Family?”

I explained about Grace, and Krista, and the child that they would have had by now, but did not reveal details about the baby, wanting to hold close the fact that my friend’s family had since returned. I shared the tale of how Neil had reached my refuge north of Whitefish, our journey together continuing from there in search of Eagle One. Then to our trek across the wasteland to find the salvation in a greenhouse. And on to our mission north to Skagway, and then south again to our adopted home in Bandon.

“That explains a few things,” Olin said as he processed what I’d just shared.

“To you, maybe,” I told him. “So what the hell is he doing? Why did he leave?”

Olin considered the question for a moment. Then he, too, seemed to summon some memory, a quick glint flashing in his gaze. He smiled at me.

“I don’t know what he’s doing,” Olin said. “I know what he was supposed to do before he took off and joined up with you.”

In that statement I found part of an answer to the question that had nagged since I’d first laid eyes on the stranger by the cabin in the dead woods.

“You were looking for me to find him.”

Olin might have nodded. Or his head might have just shifted as he crafted a response. His momentary hesitation, though, was all the confirmation I needed to my query.