Ravenous Dusk (44 page)

The big hot hand slowly let go of Schumate's head, and Heeley turned back to the window. "Dude," Schumate pleaded.

"Just be what you are," Heeley muttered again, and went back to sleep.

Everything sucked.

Cundieffe's red-eye flight from DC touched down in Boise at 06:30 MST. A highly caffeinated office agent met him at the gate and walked him to his connecting flight, briefing him all the while on the latest developments. As of yesterday, Heilige Berg was a ghost town. By all accounts, they just shut up the place and went home. The suspect in custody in White Bird had given up nothing since his initial outburst, but other field agents from Headquarters had already interviewed him, and were observing the situation.

Cundieffe blanched, but didn't bother asking. Other agents from Headquarters? Had he jumped the gun? He thought of calling the Assistant Director, but then Wyler's strange deference to Hoecker reminded him that he could not bring his superior into the loop.

He rode a bumpy hour-long commuter flight to Lewiston, and was in a rental car, a blue Oldsmobile Alero, that should've had skis and tanktreads, reading the map in his lap as he traced the 95 south to White Bird.

The highway was two lanes, the slow lane and eastern exposure dominated by an endless convoy of semis, so he had to watch the odometer to guess where he was. The winter here was harsher, but purer, than what he'd suffered in Washington. It demanded a whole new repertoire of skills from a driver for whom snow was an oddity you paid to play in at the zoo at Christmas, between the Komodo dragon paddock and the monkey house, and more exotic than either of those exhibits.

Though he was cold, he drove with the window open. The car smelled of cigarettes, and he abhorred car heat. The charred smell of the recycled engine air reminded him of his childish horror the day he learned what fossil fuels were made of.

There was a TV ad campaign at the height of the gas crisis, in which whimsical cartoon dinosaurs were squashed into the gas tank of a car. Enamored of dinosaurs as every small, bright boy his age, young Martin had been thunderstruck to discover that the mighty kings of creation had been driven to extinction to fuel automobiles. Mother explained to him that one, the dinosaurs died millions of years ago as a result of their own stupidity; and two, oil was actually formed from old plants, not dinosaurs at all. The good people at Chevron just dumbed down the message, because they figured most people were idiots, like the dinosaurs. Cundieffe felt better about it then, but still had bad dreams about being burned up in some future race's automobile engine.

In another forty minutes, he steered the Alero in a suicide-lunge through the truck convoy, and bombed down the off-ramp. By the time he slid to a stop at the first intersection, he was already halfway through downtown White Bird, Population 103.

He drove past a strip mall with a Dairy Queen out front. The whole façade of the building was boarded over, but a line of pickup trucks still filed past the drive-thru window. At the end of the town's other block, he parked in front of the sheriff's station.

The sky was the color and texture of steel wool, and sparkling walls of ice fog rolled down the silent streets. A pair of deputy's cruisers, a Ford Bronco with the Sheriff's name stenciled on the door, and a rental car identical to his own were parked out front. He walked painstakingly, like an old man nursing an inflamed hip joint.

The meeting with Sheriff Bert Manes and the two Bureau interlopers was short and uncomfortable. The Sheriff, shaken and not entirely possessed of the breakfast he drank this morning, had reluctantly called for Bureau help and gotten more than he'd asked for with Agents Macy and Mentone, and now felt he was getting triple-dipped.

Macy and Mentone were a male-female team, which amused Cundieffe, since he knew at a glance they were both Mules. He held Agent Mentone's hand a moment longer than protocol called for, and
knew
, just as they knew him. Both Agents gave a tiny nod, and Cundieffe felt Mentone's hand squirm and do something in his that might've been some kind of signal.

They listened to the tape of the boy's first statement, which was fragmentary and incoherent, with the deputies cutting off the suspect whenever he started talking about what happened on the mountain. Then Sheriff Manes told them about the exodus. So far as anybody could tell, all two hundred and fifty residents of the Heilige Berg community had left the county in chartered buses. Nobody knew where they were, and nobody had checked on them, because except for Karl Schweinfurter, none of them had broken the law. And not a federal law, either.

"Sheriff Manes," said Cundieffe, "I didn't come here to arrest the boy. I came to try to stop a massacre."

Manes looked as if he'd skipped a page while reading a particularly bad novel. "Run that by me again, mister. I told you the Heilige Berg people done cleared out for the winter. So who's going to get massacred?"

"Sheriff, what do you know about the Radiant Dawn hospice community in the area?"

Manes blinked and sipped his fortified coffee. "Weren't they them sick people, blowed themselves up down in California? We got nothing like that up here."

"But in the boy's statement—"

"Boy probably saw it on the TV. Guy owns that land, he only lets Heilige Berg use it because he's a Nazi, too. Not that there's a law against that, yet—"

"So there're no other people living up there."

"That's what I said. Ain't nobody up there now, but a National Guard unit doing civil defense maneuvers."

Cundieffe's teeth almost met in the thin flap of his lower lip. "The National Guard is up there?"

"Yeah, it's shorter notice than usual, but I don't see what trouble they could cause, with the Nazis flying south."

"And you've been up there?"

"My men have, a few times since last summer, but the road's closed through the winter, and they don't like the law poking around uninvited up there. Around here, we respect people's right to privacy. I think this is an awful lot of fuss over one bad boy, folks, and I've got real problems to deal with, so if you'll excuse me?"

The Sheriff left the conference room. Agent Macy shut the door and studied Cundieffe as if he were a multiple choice question.

"
I came to try to stop a massacre
," Mentone sneered in an eerie falsetto rendition of Cundieffe's voice.

"Are we working at cross-purposes, here, Cundieffe?"

"I wasn't aware anyone else was working this case," Cundieffe deadpanned. "How did you come to be involved?"

"The Steering Committee," Macy answered. "And you?"

Cundieffe's mouth opened and he started to say the name. Was he supposed to keep secrets from other Mules? Were there levels of secrecy, or warring factions, or was this just another test? His mind ransacked itself for some solid precedent under which to crawl, settled on something AD

Wyler had said.
Information passes to the most appropriate level for direct

action, Martin.
"I'm here in an official Bureau capacity."

Mentone smirked. "Chasing stolen cars?"

"Don't be coy, Agent Cundieffe," Macy said. "We know why you're here. Your skills as an interrogator."

"And you?"

"Containment," Mentone said.

"Compartmentalization," Macy added. "This is going to happen, Agent Cundieffe."

"Do you know what's really up there?"

"We haven't been. We were waiting for you."

"You had instructions?"

"We failed. You're here. It follows."

"What else can you tell me about the boy?"

"He claimed at first that his people were sick, and then that they'd been 'replaced,' but when he was told that they'd vacated the compound, he refused to talk any more, and he's refused food and medical treatment. We have people tracking the Heilige Berg residents, but all other assets are still in play."

"Can I see him?"

"We hoped you would."

They led him out through the office and down the hall to the cells. None of the deputies took any notice of them as they took keys off the wall and let themselves in to the small cell block. There were four small cells facing each other across a featureless gallery. Only one of them was occupied. A badly beaten teenaged boy lay in a fetal position on a bunk. His untouched breakfast sat on the floor in the center of the cell, in a Dairy Queen bag.

"Good heavens, no wonder. I'll be right back."

Cundieffe went back to his car and drove down Main Street to the strip mall. He went in to the deli counter at the Circle K and ordered a deluxe roast beef sandwich. When the sluggardly clerk seemed hell-bent on assembling a loveless, pathetic specimen of the sandwiching arts, Cundieffe stormed the counter and made the sandwich himself, an unsavory task since he had embraced vegetarianism himself, but necessary to gain the suspect's trust. He paid for the sandwich and a bottle of orange juice and went back to the sheriff's station.

After the interview, Cundieffe shook off Macy and Mentone and the Sheriff's deputies, got in his car, studied the map, and went up the mountain.

He gave up on keeping the windows open five minutes out of town. Vicious gusts of wind swept through the interior, dumping half-melted snow in his lap and scattering all his papers in the passenger foot well. Peeling an orange in his lap and stuffing the wedges one by one into his mouth, he tried to digest what he was driving into.

Macy and Mentone obviously assumed he knew more than he did, and it had taken all his wits to keep from looking utterly baffled as they talked. They had known their roles far better than he, and as far as he could tell they were there to obfuscate in advance the truth about whatever was about to happen. So far, their presence was the only corroboration he had for the boy's story. He wanted to call AD Wyler. He wanted to call Brady Hoecker. He wanted a column of state police behind him—in front of him.

He passed the last ranch at the end of State Road 117, marked by a state sign warning that the road beyond was closed until April 15. The chain blockade across the road had been removed, so he set the automatic transmission down to second gear and climbed. He wiped his hands with a wet napkin and threw himself wholly into keeping the car on the road.

The road was recently plowed and the snow and ice broken up, but still there were patches where the rental car's snow tires squealed helplessly, and he felt a sickening lurch as all his forward momentum became so much empty noise, and the mountain dragged the car out on the right shoulder, beyond which there was only fog. He slowed down below twenty and watched the road, trying to predict which way it would bend or dip, and always coming up wrong.

He had lost track of time when he crept up to the first landmark—or the second, if you counted where his ears popped—the front gate of the Heilige Berg compound. He pulled over, as much to stretch his legs and regain his nerves, as to investigate the place, looked at the odometer and made a note on his map.

The gate stood about thirty yards back from the road, and looked like something out of a concentration camp production of Wagner's Ring operas. The boards had been plated in steel, and barbed hooks projected from the top of the fence—in both directions. Guard towers flanking the gate had halogen spotlights, mounts for heavy machine guns and big iron braziers filled with charred wood. Somewhere nearby, no doubt, there were cauldrons for dumping flaming oil on invaders. The towers were skirted in tumbleweeds of snow-crusted razor-wire, and ten-foot barbed-wire fence marched out to encircle the compound.

He stepped out into wind-ripped silence so profound he could hear his pulse in his ears. He cautiously walked around the Heilige Berg driveway.

They may be gone, but they'd be remiss if they didn't leave booby traps aplenty to strike in absentia against any federal stormtroopers who might blunder into their territory.

They were gone. They were not lying low in the compound; they had been observed leaving, all two hundred fifty of them, in six chartered buses. In defiance of all profiles of radical behavior, in spite of being dug in and, by all accounts, deathly ill, they simply left. Scant days before the Army National Guard showed up on their doorstep to practice putting down their freedom-loving type, they bolted to parts unknown.

Only the boy could explain it.

He thought of Storch, sitting as impassively as an iguana on a hot rock as Cundieffe caught him up on current events, then fighting like a drowning man to get words to come out of his own mouth.
We are all one flesh, becoming one mind…

He got back in the car and resumed climbing. The slope of the road was gentler and steadier after Heilige Berg, and the gorge meandered away from the right shoulder. A steep, forested ridge sprouted on the right, and an iron rod fence sprang up around it, about twenty feet back among the evergreens. Watching the ridge grow, his eyes picked out clustered shadows among the trees that might have been men up in the branches, watching him. He stared harder and almost drove through a double-row of sawhorses laid out across the road.

A soldier stood in the road before the sawhorses. Cundieffe stomped on his brake, and the car fishtailed and sailed into the first barricade. The soldier leapt back over the sawhorse, but tripped over the second one, and disappeared from view below the line of the hood. Cundieffe hopped out of the car, sure he'd run the sentry over.

The Guardsman climbed to his feet and wheeled on Cundieffe with one gloved fist in the air, but he froze at the sight of Cundieffe's gold shield under his runny nose.

The Guardsman looked to be about nineteen, and wore olive drab camouflage winter gear with a buck private's stripe, and a belt and shoulder harness with reflective strips and a battery pack on it. Cundieffe thought it looked like the sensors people wore when they played Lazer Tag. His M16 had a laser pointer instead of a barrel. At least this part of it was a simulation.