Rise the Dark (23 page)

“Damn it, Larry,
shoot! Shoot him!
”

But no gunfire came from his uncle, and the Silverado hit the fence at fifty miles per hour at least. It tore through the chain link as if it were so much twine; the engine howled and the truck fishtailed and bounced over a short clump of brush, down into the ditch, and then up onto the road. The tires burned rubber, smoke rose from the pavement, and the truck was gone.

Mark dropped to his knees in the parking lot. His chest was heaving, and he could not take his eyes off the spot where the truck had just been.

Where Garland Webb had just been.

Had him. He was here, and so was I, with a gun in my hand. Finally.

He felt so tired, so beaten, that it took two tries for him to rise to his feet. By then, Larry had reached him and was in midsentence as well as midstride.

“…stupidest stunt I've ever seen! If he'd had another clip you'd be splattered over this parking lot like roadkill! Running into the wide-damn-open with nothing but a pistol, and you—”

“Why didn't you shoot?”
Mark screamed. “You had a three-hundred Mag and you couldn't get off a
single shot!
”

“I don't drive around with that thing loaded up and ready to fire from the hip, Markus! If you hadn't run up there like a damned kamikaze pilot, I'd have been ready to pick him off no matter how he came out.”

They stood there and stared at each other, both of them glaring and breathing hard, and then Mark turned away and said,
“Stupid son of a bitch!”
He was talking to himself, not his uncle. Larry was right; if Mark hadn't forced the issue, there would have been enough time to load and scope in, and then no matter how Webb chose to leave, it would have ended with a squeeze of the trigger.

It would have ended.

Mark reached into his pocket and closed his hand over Lauren's old dive permit. There was blood on his hand from either the glass or the fence, and he could feel it oozing between his fingers.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“You should be, acting that damn foolish,” Larry said, unaware that Mark hadn't been apologizing to him.

“That was him,” he said. “Uncle, that was the man.”

“I got that impression, son. Tell you something else—I know whose truck he was driving.”

Mark turned to him. “What?”

Larry's face, speckled with fresh cuts leaking blood, was taut with anger. This time, though, it didn't seem to be directed at Mark.

“That Silverado belongs to Scotty Shields.”

“The hunting guide? I thought you said he was in Alaska?”

“He did say it. But he wouldn't leave that truck behind. Not by choice.”

For a moment Mark was silent. Then he said, “Let's see what he left in there.”

They crossed the parking lot and approached the open side door from which Webb had emerged. Even though it seemed unlikely there was anyone still inside, Mark lifted a finger, asking Larry to wait. Mark had made enough foolish mistakes in this place. He motioned to the doorway and then back to himself, indicating that he was going through first, and Larry nodded and stepped to the side, ready to provide covering fire. Mark went in low so Larry could shoot over him if needed.

Nothing but silence and darkness greeted him. The inside of the barn smelled of rust and something with an acidic tang that Mark couldn't place. He turned sideways and checked both sides of the door and found the light switches.

“I don't want to turn these on,” he whispered.

“Hell, son, ain't nobody here but us and the rats. Light the place up.”

Mark glanced into the expansive dark, clenched his teeth, and hit the lights.

The fluorescents had that little hitch, the half-second pause before full glow, and by the time the barn was illuminated Mark had placed the smell—there were pallets of fertilizer stacked around the room. A fine explosive material. Along the far wall were more grates for the cattle guards, loose pieces of steel, and a pair of commercial-grade welders. Quite the workshop.

What was most troubling about the place, though, was how empty it was. Mark didn't think it was a case of slow stockpiling. It looked more like they'd been taking supplies out. Fresh tire tracks lined the floor, and a Bobcat with a front loader was parked near the huge barn doors on the opposite side, where the Silverado had evidently been. It looked like they'd been loading.

“They're getting ready,” he said softly.

He walked to the big double doors and pushed them open in a shriek of rusted metal. More tire tracks here, and they were wider than the pickup Garland Webb had been driving. A flatbed, probably.

Larry followed him outside. Neither of them spoke for a moment. The wind blew gravel dust into the air, and it stuck to the blood on Mark's face.

“You know where to find Scott Shields if he really is still around here?”

“Yes.”

Mark looked up the road where Garland Webb had vanished. Everything was completely silent again, as if the crush of steel and exchange of gunfire had never happened at all. No car had passed. The countryside spread out vast and empty, the sun high.

“How far is Shields's place from here?” Mark asked.

“Not very, but it'll take a long time walking.”

“I guess we'll need a car, then.”

“I haven't forgotten how to acquire one when necessary.”

They walked back to the truck. Larry handed Mark the two rifles without comment, and then he took the shotgun and his duffel bag. He gave his truck one last sorrowful look but didn't say a word.

They set off together down the dusty road.

E
li drove to Red Lodge after the morning council. The tribes were in motion, Jay Baldwin was behaving, and Garland Webb was in position to deal with Markus Novak if he actually appeared on the trail. Eli thought that unlikely, but it was good to have safeguards. For Garland's sake, he hoped Novak actually made it through.

His only concern—that news of her son's arrival might unsettle Violet and throw off the morning's rituals—had not developed. Overall, there was nothing in the warm, sun-splashed morning that suggested harm, and there were only a few remaining tasks. He wished that Janell had arrived, but he was not worried by her absence. If there was anyone among them who could be trusted to handle a crisis, it was Janell.

He stopped at a café in Red Lodge that offered Wi-Fi, ordered a coffee, and set up in a back booth where prying eyes didn't reach. He had a backpack with four tablets and five smartphones, and he had nine messages to send. The first, a text message to Jay Baldwin:

That done, he turned off the phone that had sent the message, withdrew a tablet, and set to work composing a longer, more emotional note. This one was his pet project, the most difficult of all the recruitment efforts, because he'd had to pose as the neophyte in need of convincing rather than the messenger. If the plan was effective, though, the rewards would be enormous.

Using an application called an Android emulator to mask his location and make it look as if he were posting from Seattle, he logged on to a locked social network. There his name was Fasiel, and he was a twenty-seven-year-old Web developer who had converted to Islam twenty months earlier. He had posted references to the vulnerability of Seattle's electrical grid time and again, urging his brothers to take action. The level of trust in Fasiel seemed minimal, although he was subject to recruiting efforts—Eli's post office box in Seattle, which was checked by one of the heavily armed men who had arrived this morning to provide security support at Wardenclyffe, had received everything from gift certificates to Islamic bookstores to a box of chocolates.

Now on to the most important messages, which Eli would write essentially in nine different languages. Each extremist group had a unique jargon with a shared constant—they all appropriated certain words, terms, or ideas that made them feel authentic. In the echo chambers of this online world, where people parroted one another and an original idea was not only discouraged but feared, it did not take long to learn how to join in the chorus.

My brothers,
Fasiel wrote,

He posted the message, refreshed the page to be certain it was visible, and then he turned off the tablet, took it into the restroom, cracked the screen against the toilet tank, and let it soak in the sink until any hope of saving the device was gone. He left it in the trash and returned to his booth.

“More coffee?” The waitress was a redhead with blue eyes. Eli smiled at her.

“Absolutely. It's a beautiful day, don't you think?”

“A
gorgeous
day. Hope you'll get outside to enjoy it.”

“Oh, yes. Trust me, I intend to enjoy the day.”

When she was gone, he withdrew another tablet, powered it up, and went to a site called Sons of Freedom. There, under the identity of a forty-four-year-old gun expert and motorcycle mechanic named Joe Walden, he issued his next warning.

Eli finished the note, read it again, and couldn't keep the smile off his face. The language was just right. He'd seeded the clouds of fear on each side, and when the news broke, the clouds would burst.

“You
are
enjoying the day!”

The waitress was back, wearing a big dumb grin. “I can see your smile from all the way across the room, mister. Nice to see a happy face.”

“What's not to be happy about?” Eli said as he pushed Send. “It's a special day.”

J
anell used the satellite radio, their desperate-measures-only means of communication, from where she was parked behind an abandoned barn nine miles north of Doug Oriel's body. Eli answered quickly but his voice was soft and she wondered if Violet Novak was nearby. The thought of that trite, ignorant woman enraged her. She understood Eli's double life intellectually, but not emotionally. She hoped that her existence with Doug had troubled him in the same way.

“I'm en route but delayed,” she said, and then she explained the situation in the simplest terms possible: Doug had threatened the cause; died for the cause. The rest was irrelevant.

He listened without interrupting. For a man of such power and command, he was always a patient listener. Today, though, the silence scared her. Not because she was afraid of him—theirs was a relationship that transcended fear, mocked fear—but because she knew the disappointment he was feeling.

“I was relying on his skill and his devices,” he said at last. “Counting on them.”

She winced. “I know. Do you think I don't understand that? I've been apart from you for
nine months
to ensure that we would have him. If there had been another option, any other, I would have taken it. There wasn't.”

The silence went on even longer this time, and then he said, “I've never liked my contingency. It's been tried before, and without much success.”

“But you have it. We've got to try it now. We must.”

“Yes.” He sighed. “Much pressure rides on the shoulders of my man Jay.”

“Will he perform?”

“He's a motivated man.”

“That's not an answer.”

“Because there's no certainty. But Jay is no different than any other recruit. When faced with his worst fears, he will discover he is capable of more than he realized.”

This was, of course, Eli's entire worldview—and their earliest bond, dating back to their first conversation in Rotterdam, when they'd shared a dark amusement over a world that promised progress born from hope but acted, again and again, out of fear. It was not an untested theory, and the years had validated it repeatedly. Still, she was uneasy. She knew nothing of Jay Baldwin.

“I'm sorry it's come to this.”

“Sorrow rarely advances a cause,” he said. “Proper action, however, always will. So let's look at the energy of this situation and determine how to mobilize it. There's a way to capitalize. There always is.”

He explained the potential he saw, and as she listened to his instructions, she couldn't keep herself from smiling. It was brilliant, so perfect that it felt as if it had to have been planned, and to know that he had made this adjustment so swiftly, turning crisis into opportunity, was the ultimate illustration of what separated him from the common man.

“What the morning calls for,” he said, “are as many Paul Revere riders as possible. They'll be ignored today, but by tonight? By tomorrow? They'll be forever remembered.”

“I understand. I'll make sure the message goes out.”

“Good. Doug will serve his purpose, as you say.”

“Serve it better dead than alive. What about Markus Novak?”

“If he appears, he'll be killed by Garland.”

Good news, but still she felt cheated. Novak belonged to her. Both Novaks, in fact.

“Everything is accelerated now,” he said. “I can't delay. You know I would if that was possible, but at this point…we'd risk too much.”

“I understand,” she said, but a part of her died with the acceptance. All of their time apart had been predicated on this day together. “I wanted to be there for the morning. I tried everything to be there.”

His voice was tender when he spoke again, because he understood what it meant to her. “Dawn was trivial; dusk is critical. Join me then. We'll watch the world go dark together, and then we'll leave together.”

Together.
The word made her flush with anticipation.

“Give me the location,” she said. “I won't be delayed again.”

He told her which phone to power up and promised that GPS coordinates would be sent to it. From her current position, he estimated it would be most of a day's drive.

“Can you be there by sundown without taking risks?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Approach from the south. You'll see me. We'll watch the train go through, and then we'll leave.”

“Together,” she said.

“Together,” he echoed.

She shut her eyes. It had been years since she'd wept, but at that moment, she was close.