He saw it a tenth of a second before his foot touched down, time enough to recognize the mistake but not redeem it. The bare patch of dirt, no larger than a dinner plate, was dark and moistened, either by snow runoff or a spring somewhere beneath it. All the dirt on this slope was moist, but grass roots held it firm—where there was grass. Travis had simply taken his eyes from the ground a half second too long, watching the ridgeline for the chopper.
His foot hit the soft earth and slid sideways as if on ice.
For a second—his balance gone, his body pivoting without any pretense of control—he simply knew it was over. They would sprawl. The chopper would be on them before he could even pick himself up, much less Paige. And just for a challenge, here was a jagged boulder in his path, perfectly placed for him to crack his head against when he fell.
Somewhere in the churn of his thoughts rose the impression of driving on ice. Spinning out. Turning into it instead of against. Stupid—but all he had. He pitched his shoulders forcefully counterclockwise, the direction of the spin, and found himself standing still so suddenly that it was almost disorienting.
The rotors were drumming against his skull now. Any second.
A single hope had tempered his anxiety during all the time spent in the open: the men in the chopper had no idea who had killed their friends at the camp. They’d be forced to assume a hidden survivor from the jet had arrived, or that the captives themselves had somehow taken the upper hand. Either way, they would expect the fugitives to be dressed for room temperature inside a 747—not an Alaskan hike.
The boulder, just above knee-height, was only a step away. He turned and backed against it, sitting roughly and keeping Paige in his arms, her legs now draping across his lap. She was already wearing his heavy coat, minus a sleeve to let the wound breathe. He let that arm—her right—press against him, out of sight to anyone high above.
Then he pulled her face to his, close enough to create the illusion that was their only chance for survival: that they were an ordinary couple hiking in the back country, caught in the middle of a kiss.
At that instant the chopper broke into the clear above the nearest ridge, angling north at a good clip. Then it stopped. The pilot had seen them. Travis had only a peripheral sense of the thing; Paige’s face took up most of his vision.
The clatter of the blades intensified as the aircraft fixed on them and moved in.
Travis shut his eyes—they’d be visible from the chopper’s height—and tried to make the kiss look real. One hand holding the back of her head, the other around her waist. His mouth pressed against hers. The turbines settled in directly overhead, screaming and pounding and lashing their hair against their faces hard enough to sting.
All of which provided enough sensation to wake Paige.
Travis felt her body flinch. He opened his eyes and found hers staring right back at him, wide and startled, from less than an inch away. This was it. This would blow it. She’d pull away, and a few seconds later, machine-gun fire would herald the last seconds of their lives.
Then her eyes changed, and she understood. She pulled him closer, her free arm coming up, her fingers in his hair. And now she was really kissing him, her mouth parting, so warm and intense that for the most fleeting moment it was all Travis could focus on. No thunder of turbines, no rotorwash, just her kiss, as desperate as her need to keep breathing. For that moment, it almost didn’t matter that it was fake.
It occurred to him only in passing that they should probably wave at the helicopter, as almost anyone would, but by then he heard the engine change pitch, and a moment later the aircraft was moving away up the valley and taking its downblast with it.
She continued kissing him for another ten seconds, until the chopper was far away, and then they separated, eyes still locked on each other’s, six inches apart.
“Good thinking,” she said, whispering because it was all she had the strength for.
He managed a nod, suddenly hard up for dialogue.
She turned to stare after the helicopter, but had hardly moved when her breath caught and she nearly passed out from a wave of pain. She’d accidentally pressed her damaged arm into his side, so lightly Travis had barely felt it.
She regained her composure and slowly brought the arm out in front of her. She saw the purpled veins spiderwebbing her forearm, more than a foot from the infection’s source, and for the first time since he’d met her, Travis saw fear in her eyes.
“How far from town now?” she said.
“Just a few hours,” he lied. “Close your eyes again and we’ll be there.”
For a long moment he thought she would do just that. She leaned into him, her forehead against his cheek. He was about to stand when she spoke again.
“Remember this. From the place where they tortured me, go in the opposite direction from the crash site, and at fifty steps find the biggest tree around. You can’t miss it. The Whisper is on the far side, buried two feet down. I scattered needles to hide the ground I disturbed.”
“You don’t need me to know that,” Travis said. “You’re going to report it yourself.”
He waited for her reply, but none came. After a moment her breath against his neck fell into a steady rhythm, slow and even.
VERSE II
AN OCTOBER NIGHT IN 1992
Through the sheer curtain across the living-room window, Travis sees that he was close to right: they are seated, holding each other, though they’ve squeezed into one of the big recliners instead of the couch.
He knocks, and sees the man’s shape turn. A moment later Travis sees his face through the little window in the door as he approaches across the laundry room. The man’s eyes are blood red from crying. Behind him, the dining-room table is covered with flowers and somber cards.
The man does not even look through the door before opening it—he expects someone else, anyone else—and when he finds himself face to face with Travis, he flinches angrily. His eyes narrow. A tear spills from the left one.
Looking into those eyes, Travis expects the man to turn from the door, stride into the next room, return with his shotgun and open fire. If it happens, Travis will not try to run. He knows he deserves it, for the misery he has brought to these people.
But Emily Price’s father does not turn away. Behind him in the house, her mother calls out to ask who’s there, her voice stretched and ruined by her own tears.
She gets no answer.
Mr. Price holds his glare on Travis and says, “What do you want, Detective?”
Travis hears the contempt behind the last word. He knows he deserves that, too.
“What have the police told you?” Travis says.
The man’s eyes harden. “Why don’t you go ask them? They trust you, right?”
Travis says nothing. He waits for the answer.
“They’re not going to charge anyone,” Mr. Price says at last. Hate and despair and torment become a unified whole in his voice.
“Why not?”
“No evidence. They didn’t even find her body. Just her car. But they said there was so much—” The man falters. For a moment he seems incapable of saying more. Then: “There was enough blood, her blood, that a girl her size couldn’t have sur—”
His voice gives out then, of its own accord. He looks down. His lower lip shakes.
Through the tremors, Mr. Price says, “She didn’t do anything to them. This is all you. It started with you.”
Travis manages a nod. He steps closer and speaks softly. “It’s going to end with me.”
Mr. Price looks up at him.
“I wasn’t here tonight,” Travis says. “Can you agree to that, Mr. Price?”
Emily’s father only stares. Seconds pass. He knows what Travis is saying. He knows what he means to do. For a moment he actually considers his response, as if there’s any real choice. But then, because Emily was his only daughter, because she took her first awkward steps into his arms, because when she was a teenager she used to fall aslee
p resting against his shoulder on the couch during The Tonight Show, and because three times today he’s gone into her bedroom and pressed her pillow to his face to breathe in whatever fading trace is left of her there, he nods.
“Okay,” Travis says.
Mr. Price closes the door, and Travis turns away, back into the night and the fog, and his hand goes unconsciously to the .32.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Travis ran the last thousand yards to the highway. His knee joints felt like they were riding on glass chips instead of cartilage. Through the front windows of the Brooks Lodge and Fuel Depot he saw half a dozen patrons, maybe the regulars watching a baseball game on the TV above the serving counter. It was eight o’clock at night, the sunlight slanting long and red from the northwest.
He stopped at the road, a hundred feet from the restaurant. Paige was stirring in his arms, jostled by the run but unable to regain consciousness. Her breathing had developed a rattle in the past two hours. Sometimes she took a deep breath and sounded like she was choking for a second before getting past it.
Travis studied the patrons as well as he could at this distance. They looked harmless enough—to the extent he could judge it.
There was every reason to expect trouble from Paige’s enemies here, the one place where their arrival could have been predicted—and predicted well in advance. The only advantage the town offered was its limited size: there was simply no place where the enemy could have set up a stakeout without attracting attention. No sprawling parking lots to conceal a van. No residential side streets, either. The one place in town where a person might sit for a few hours without drawing looks was the restaurant in the lodge, but if the hostiles’ reinforcements were anything like the ones Travis had seen at the camp—foreign nationals armed with halting English—then blending in that way would be off the table as well.
Granted, they probably had the connections to send someone who didn’t stick out so much, and they’d had a day and a half now to do it, but even at that, Coldfoot was just not a place where outsiders lingered. Truckers heading north to Prudhoe Bay might stop for a meal, and the occasional van full of tourists might spend the night, but nobody hung around. Coldfoot was a stop on a long road that went to exactly one place. It was nobody’s endpoint.
No, if there were watchers here, they were in concealment high above town. Travis swept his eyes over the encircling ridges; there were so many pine and alder groves it wasn’t worth scrutinizing any one in particular. Either they were there, or they weren’t. If they were, then trouble would arrive long before help, and it would simply have to be dealt with. The 9mm pistol from the hostiles’ camp, the only weapon he’d brought along, felt reassuring in his back waistband, his shirt draped loosely over it.
He crossed the highway and jogged the last distance over the gravel lot, past his own Explorer, two Jeeps, and a yellow Land Rover. When he was thirty feet from the building, a big guy in a John Deere hat inside saw him coming, looked confused for a second, and then ran to shove the door open and meet him.
“What happened?” the man shouted.
Behind him, the others had forgotten the ball game and were on their feet, staring through the windows as Travis ran up.
He had the abridged version of the story well rehearsed, and the stress in his delivery would simply be genuine.
“I found her in a valley west of here,” he said, hearing his own voice for the first time in twenty hours and finding it convincingly ragged. No doubt his appearance matched it.
The big guy held the door aside as Travis stepped through, and the gathered patrons reacted as one to the sight of Paige’s arm; it couldn’t have been much worse if he’d brought a corpse into their midst. A blonde woman who’d come from behind the counter—Molly, according to her shirt—choked down most of a scream, stepping back and knocking over a wire newspaper stand.
Then everyone was talking, a short woman with her hand on her mouth, her eyes going from Paige to Travis and narrowing, maybe judging, the big guy in the hat coming around from the door now, reacting hard at the sight of the clamps, asking what in the holy fuck they were—
“This is how I found her,” Travis said over them all. “She hasn’t spoken, I don’t know who the hell did this. I don’t know anything, just call it in, okay? How fast can the cops and paramedics get up here?”
That last bit was for the locals’ benefit only—he had no intention of waiting around for police or anyone else, or entrusting her to their protection even if they somehow arrived before whoever Tangent sent.
But it worked. Any suspicion aimed at him vanished. Molly was already rounding the counter, picking up the phone and dialing something longer than 9–1–1.
“Gonna be five, six hours for the cops,” the big man said. “There’s no highway patrol on the Dalton. Medevac chopper out of Fairbanks, figure ninety minutes at least. Had a trucker come in here having a heart attack, couple years ago, took that long for them to make the flight.”
Molly, waiting for the call to connect, shouldered the phone and scooped a key from a pegboard. She tossed it to the big guy and said, “Three’s clean, he can set her in there.”
The man led Travis through the back exit of the room, into a short hallway lined with doors.
Room Three was simple and clean, lateral sunlight casting a coppery glow on the bedspread. Travis set Paige carefully atop the cover, taking the most precaution with her arm; letting anything press against the wound might traumatize her. As it was, the change of position triggered another of the deep breaths that seemed to nearly choke her.
The guy in the hat stood just inside the door.
Travis watched Paige’s breathing return to normal and then said quietly, “Do you have any weapons here?”
In the corner of his eye he saw the John Deere hat turn toward him.
“The camp I found her in,” Travis said, keeping his eyes on Paige, “there were different kinds of boot prints, three at least, none of them hers. No telling where those people are now, but if they were to show up here . . .”
“Christ . . .” the man whispered.
“The cops are six hours away, like you said,” Travis continued. “Anyone familiar with this area probably knows that too. If you’ve got a gun, be ready with it. You and anyone you trust, if you have more.”
The guy nodded, then went to the window and stared out, the brim of his hat touching the glass as he scanned the ridges to the west.
Travis felt bad lying to him, but the truth was simply not workable, and it would have been far worse to stay silent, given the risk he’d just brought upon this place. That part, he felt the worst about. But what choice had there been?
The man in the hat turned back to him. “Yeah, let’s not fuck around,” he said, and made for the hallway.
“Can I call out on this?” Travis said.
The guy stopped in the doorway and looked at the phone on the nightstand Travis had indicated. “Dial nine first,” he said, and left.
Travis pushed the door most of the way shut, took the First Lady’s note from his pocket and began to punch in the number she’d provided. As he finished dialing, he heard the door creak, and saw it swing slowly open again under its own weight. The phone cord kept him from reaching it now; no matter.
The call rang once and then a lively recording began. “Thank you for calling Laketon Associates, your consulting solution for dynamic—”
He entered 4–2–5–5–1. The line clicked, and within less than a second a woman spoke.
“Key term,” she said flatly, more a demand than a question.
Travis blanked. “I don’t know it.”
“Who is this?”
Matching her lack of banter, Travis said, “I’m a civilian. I found your plane. Everyone’s dead except Paige Campbell.”
Things happened very quickly then: a rapid exchange of voices somewhere, then muffled clicks as other extensions opened.
A man: “Where are you calling from?”
Travis thought they probably already knew that. “Coldfoot, Alaska,” he said. “The crash site is thirty-six miles west of here—”
“Stop,” the man said. “Your line’s not secure. Give us direct answers and don’t elaborate—”
“They’re dead,” Travis said. Exhaustion and stress had made it easy to get pissed. “You have one survivor, and if you want to keep her, you better send a goddamn cargo jet full of paratroopers up here, and make sure one of them’s a surgeon. She might last another hour, and I could be really fucking wrong about that.”
Silence for three seconds—either they weren’t used to being spoken to that way, or they were writing it down. Then somewhere in the background of the call, he heard a woman say, “Move on it, go,” and he felt better.
“Please answer this question with a yes or no only,” the man said. “Are there hostile elements that can reach you within the next hour?”
“Yes.”
“Again yes or no, can you estimate the number of possible aggressors?”
“No. But they have something you should know about.”
“Go ahead.”
“A helicopter. It’s not an attack chopper, I doubt it’s any threat to another aircraft, but whoever’s coming here should be aware of it.”
“Good,” the man said. Sounding more human, he continued. “Don’t say anything about your own defenses on this line. Be as prepared as you can manage, and wait for our people. I’m going to connect you to a surgeon who’ll ask you to describe Miss Campbell’s condition. Do that quickly and then set about your preparations.”
The conversation with the doctor took three minutes. He didn’t sound optimistic.
Travis finished, hung up, and pulled a chair from the corner to the bedside. He sat beside Paige and stared. She sounded terrible—worse now than when he’d stopped at the edge of the highway. Her good arm lay facing him; he took hold of her hand in both of his, and closed his eyes. Through the open door he could hear the baseball game on television.