Montana (2 page)

I
N
B
ALTIMORE,
an editor, one of the new ones, tilted back in his chair and avoided her eyes. “It’s not personal,” he said. “We’re shuttering all the foreign bureaus. We’ll find you something here. Maybe in one of the suburban offices. The layoffs left us pretty thin out there. At least you’ll still have a job. Consider yourself lucky.”

Lola examined a paperweight of milky swirled glass that sat between a file and a newspaper on his desk. It looked heavy. She picked it up. It was. “The suburbs. Lucky me.”

Floor-to-ceiling windows formed one wall of the office, the legacy of a newsroom renovation dating to the days when profits sloshed through the paper, spilling over into heralded new foreign bureaus, yearlong prize-savvy investigative projects, and wink-and-nod expense accounts. That tide had swept out a long time ago, leaving behind pay cuts and layoffs and unpaid furloughs. Packing boxes sat atop several desks in the newsroom. Others looked as though they’d been bare for months. Stubborn cracks left unrepaired veined the tall windows. Grit dulled their surface. The popcorn burst of automatic weapons fire sounded faintly through them, and Lola counted silently, reckoning the distance, before she saw the man hunched at the curb, a jackhammer anchoring his bobbling torso.

“I’d be reporting on school boards,” Lola said. “Zoning hearings. Neighbors pointing lawyers at each other over a foot of property line.” She tossed the paperweight high. It dropped into her palm with a satisfying sting.

“There’ll be some of that. It’s what people care about.”

“Interns cover that shit.”

“We don’t have interns anymore. Haven’t for three or four years now. You’ve been overseas a long time. You don’t even have a smartphone, do you? We’ve got plenty of younger reporters in the suburbs who can get you up to speed on the technology. Look, would you mind putting that down? It’s expensive.” His cheeks were pink and smooth, his shirt starched and palely gleaming against the fine dark weave of his blazer. Lola tried to remember a life that allowed for easy cleanliness. She straightened her legs, taking up too much room in the too-small office, the scuffed toes of her cleated hiking boots nearly touching his pretty polished loafers. Standing, she had six inches on him.

“You can’t pull me out now,” she said. “The warlords are rearming. Somewhere, somehow, someone’s getting money to them—a lot of money. Not to put too fine a point on it, but what’s going on there is going to determine the course of history for the next decade at the very least. You know that. And yet you put today’s story from Afghanistan on . . .” She exchanged the paperweight for the newspaper. She turned the pages, counting aloud. “Page One—no. Two—no, not there either. Three, four—Here’s something about everyone twittering a crotch shot of an actress with no undies. That one’s right above a story about a massacre in Congo. Glad to see you’ve got your priorities in order.”

“Tweeting.”

“What?”

“Never mind. The wire services can cover Afghanistan.”

“Damn it!” She rolled up the paper and slapped it against his desk. The paperweight shuddered. “The wire services aren’t getting the job done. They’ve had layoffs, too, in case you haven’t noticed. The only guy the AP’s got left in Kabul is too scared to leave the city. He does most of his work by phone. But I’m out there where it’s all happening.
Was
there. Until you called.”

He reached across the desk and took the newspaper from her. “Our readers care more about how a property tax increase is going to affect them right now than they do about how things in Afghanistan are going to shake out in ten years.” He opened the file and slid some forms from it. “You’ve got some—a lot—of time off coming. You haven’t taken a vacation in years. It’s really played hell with our accounting. You have to take it. Go get some R and R.”

Lola hefted the paperweight again and looked at the ceiling. “I’ll take it back in Kabul. Softball amounts to R and R. I play a lot of softball. I’m the pitcher on the Kabul Kabooms. We’re on track to take the championship away from the Talibanieri.” Her hand flashed. The paperweight shot up and rocketed back down. She snatched it from the air above his head. “Do you really want the Italians to beat us at our own game?”

“Jesus Christ.” He righted himself in his chair. “All of you correspondents are a pain in the ass when you come back. It’s June. The way I count up all this time, we’ve got to give you something like ten weeks off with pay. That’ll take you until nearly September. You should be housebroken again by then. Take that vacation. Given that we budgeted for flights home that you never took, we’ll pay plane fare—within reason. Don’t go to Tahiti. And don’t run up a big hotel bill. Go someplace where you can sponge off friends.
Put that damn thing down.”

“I don’t know anybody here anymore. You laid them all off. Except for one who beat you to the punch.” She realized, too late, that she’d given him an opening.

“Who’s that?”

“Mary Alice Carr,” she said slowly, wishing she’d thought to offer up another name. “She left a few years ago, back when this place was still giving buyouts. Before your time, I think.”

But he nodded. “I remember her. She left right after I got here. Went to some crazy place. Idaho, Wyoming, something like that. She called us a couple of weeks ago.”

“Montana. What did she want?”

“She was all excited about something happening out there, trying to sell us the story. Some delusional person sent her my way.” He grimaced. “She didn’t know we’d gone all local-local in our news coverage. No reason to buy a national story, and no freelance budget for one, anyway, even if we had been interested. Which we weren’t.”

Lola stood. “I’ve really got the whole summer off?”

“Legally, we’ve got to give you the time. Something I’m short on.” He looked pointedly at the message light blinking on his phone. “Go to Montana, then. Fly-fish, ride horses, whatever it is they do out there. We still have a travel agent. I’ll have her make the arrangements before they cancel that contract, too.”

“I don’t fish,” Lola said. “And I don’t like horses. I don’t see why it’s a problem for me to just go back to Kabul and finish up what I was working on. I’ll see you in September.” Like hell she would. But first she had to get back. She could figure out how to stay later.

He pushed his chair back. “I don’t think you understand,” he said. “You
are
finished over there. You can drop off your laptop and satellite phone with the clerk. You won’t need them anymore. As of the minute you walked through this door, we no longer have any more foreign bureaus.”

“I left the sat phone in Kabul, along with my body armor and all the rest of my stuff. I should go back and get it.”

“Nice try,” he said. “Just have those French freaks you live with—the ones who think it’s so funny to answer your phone and hang up on me when I try to call—ship your stuff. You’re not going back. We’ve already canceled your company credit card and the travel account.”

He kept talking but Lola’s focus shifted to a panel truck, the perfect size to hold a dozen oil drums packed with a sludgy mix of fertilizer and racing fuel, moving slowly past the building. Lola stared hard at the driver, watching for the quick yank at the wheel that would send the truck into the lobby, the thumb to the detonator that would follow. The concussive force would bend the newsroom windows outward, the panes bubbling like a soapy mass across the face of the building, then suck them back in with such speed and intensity that the glass would burst, shards rocketing across the office, razoring through furniture, paper, flesh. Lola blew out a breath, slammed the door behind her and strode the length of the underpopulated newsroom, the stupid expensive paperweight in her pocket banging against her thigh with each step.

CHAPTER TWO

B
aggage Claim stopped Lola dead in her tracks.

She was used to all manner of haphazard Third World arrangements—places where airport workers held Kalashnikovs in one hand and flung the luggage onto a dirt runway with the other, places where bags arrived slit open and regurgitating what remained of their contents, places where would-be porters mobbed her with bags not her own. But she had also forgotten that not every American airport was like JFK or LAX, with acres of briskly revolving carousels forested with identical black roller bags. There was but a single carousel in Helena, Montana, and it emptied fast. Lola walked past with only a small duffel in her hand and her book bag, stuffed with her sleeping bag and her laptop, slung over her shoulder. She cast sidelong glances at her fellow passengers, retrieving an array of towering backpacks and cylindrical cases that looked as though they could contain grenade launchers. Fly rods, she decided after some consideration.

Within minutes it was just Lola and a gum-chewing young woman lounging behind a rental-car counter, idly blowing pink bubbles that she inhaled with audible retorts. An elk head with shiny startled eyes hung on the wall above her, antlers stretching toward a skylight. A grizzly bear stood on its hind legs within a glass case, lips lifted away from incisors that looked capable of punching holes through steel. It was taller than the rental-car clerk, taller even than Lola. Lola walked over to the case and pressed her palm against the cool glass. Claws as long as her fingers curved like scimitars from the bear’s raised forepaws.

“Need a car?” the woman called.

“No. I’m waiting for a friend.”

Another bubble vanished with a crack. “Your friend’s late.”

The airport’s main door sighed its slow revolutions. Lola headed for it, feeling the woman’s gaze at her back, and stutter-stepped through. Beyond the low-slung city, mountains prodded an infinite sky that drew her gaze and held it hard. Lola took a deep breath of crystalline air and scanned a parking lot sardined with pickup trucks. None met the description of the saucy red number that apparently had claimed whatever was left of Mary Alice’s buyout money after she’d bought the cabin in Montana. Lola went back into the airport and looked for an electrical outlet. She’d postponed recharging her cell phone, avoiding as long as possible the inevitable outraged calls from her editor when he realized she’d failed to turn in the laptop. Now that there were two thousand miles between them, she plugged it in, settled into a plastic chair and tried to compose an adequate explanation for Mary Alice as to why her summer vacation would amount only to a long weekend.

She’d gone straight from the newsroom in Baltimore to a bank and raided what was left of her dwindling retirement account. Part of it went toward a ticket back to Kabul. She asked for ten thousand dollars in hundreds—old ones, with no telltale crackle to make things even chancier at checkpoints—and took the brick-like packet immediately into a restroom. With quick, experienced movements, she’d lined the cups of her bra, the soles of her boots, the zippered compartment inside her belt and all the pockets of her cargo pants with cash. She reversed the process at the airport, stashing the money in her backpack with the bank receipt rubber-banded around it just before she went through the body scanner, then found another ladies’ room and transferred it back to its earlier hiding places.

Over the next few days, the rasp of cash against skin would lessen as warmth and sweat oiled the bills and they molded themselves to the contours of her body, a reassuring shield of plenty in Afghanistan’s cash economy. She had enough, she hoped, to pay her share of the rent on the Kabul house and to travel back to the highlands before chaos consumed the region so completely that even inexperienced fixers would refuse the outrageous bribes she was prepared to offer. She’d prepaid the satellite phone’s SIM card for the next three months so that it would work when she returned, and acquired a new Internet provider against the inevitability of the paper shutting down her account.

As a last resort, she carried the second passport that she’d obtained some years earlier in the deceptively somnolent riverside town of Gujrat in Pakistan, where forgers—their eyes red and watery and their fingertips brilliant with colored inks—plied their trade. Maria diBianco was an Italian woman with Lola’s cropped chestnut curls and a full upper lip at odds with her angular features. Her narrowed grey eyes stared a challenge from the document littered with blurred stamps for exotic-but-plausible destinations such as Thailand and Bali and Mexico. Maria apparently enjoyed beaches. Lola had delayed her trip back to the United States to make a quick visit to Gujrat so that Maria could obtain a new passport stamp showing that she’d gone through customs at Baltimore Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport on the day of Lola’s arrival. The fake passport, for use only in the direst emergency, was as likely to create problems as solve them, but it made Lola feel safer to have it. She was ready.

“Vacation, my ass,” she said to herself. She opened her newly juiced phone and, as expected, saw her editor’s number stacked repeatedly in her voicemail list. She held her finger to the delete key. Once he saw the stories she’d file when she got back to Kabul, he’d realize it was a mistake to close the bureau. Sandwiched among his messages was a single one from Mary Alice. Lola skipped directly to it.

“Hey, you. I might be late. I’ve got to take care of something here. I’ll call when I’m on my way. You sit tight ’til I get there.” A pause. “Love you.”

Lola stared at the phone. “Love you?” Theirs had been a spiky friendship based on outward cynicism and the one-upmanship of fast-paced insults. In all the years she’d known Mary Alice, Lola could recall only a single hug, Mary Alice clutching her fiercely before waving goodbye as Lola walked down the jetway to the first in the series of planes that would eventually deposit her in Kabul. A year later, Lola had been on assignment in Jalalabad, unable to return the favor when Mary Alice surprised her with the news of her own unlikely move to Montana. Lola checked the message’s time stamp. Mary Alice had sounded rushed, breathless, as though she were hurrying toward the airport, but the message had been left twenty-four hours earlier. Lola punched and repunched Mary Alice’s number into the phone, hanging up each time the voicemail began its automated spiel. It was already late afternoon and Lola was nearly a day into her so-called vacation. She tossed the phone high, palmed it on the return, and headed toward the rental-car counter.