Willing Hostage

  “TV tends to glamorize us. We murderers are mostly just plain folk.” He grinned and began to do up their dishes, which consisted of dribbling a few drops of water on a plate and scraping it across the grass.

  Leah was in no mood to help him. She took a perverse pleasure in watching a man do the domestic chores. The cups, plates, and pots all nested neatly into each other, ending in one compact bundle.

  “But last night you said something about breaking training. What kind of training would an engineer—”

  “That was my other job.” He rolled Goodyear off his sleeping bag and stuffed the bag into its sack. “You might say I moonlighted.”

  Leah began to do the same with her own bag. The sleeping bags, their stuff sacks, even the parkas were all the same grass-green color as the backpacks. She was beginning to loathe that color.

  “What was your moonlighting job?”

  He knelt to help her and his dark face was very near when it closed, hardened, and he became the old dangerous Glade. “I worked for the government.”

  “You mean like in the army or what?”

  He watched her in a still, curious way that made Leah hold her breath. This went on for so long she thought he might not answer. A muscle twitched in his cheek and another at one temple. “No. I worked … for the Central Intelligence Agency.”

  That gave Leah enough to chew on for the rest of the morning.

  This was fortunate because she hadn’t the breath to talk under the heavy pack. Even here a trail, almost too narrow to walk in, cut deeply into the turf so that when her boots hit the sides she tripped. But when she tried to walk outside it, the clumpy grass turned her ankles.

  She plodded on behind him, afraid to lose him, afraid to go back alone even if he’d let her, but alarmed that she might not be up to what lay ahead.

  Goodyear, forced to walk this trip, complained loudly behind her, lagged, but kept them in sight. She would have expected him to wander off and get lost, being a cat, but he too seemed to sense that this man was their only safety in the wilderness. This, she was fast deciding, was no ordinary cat.

  The terrain was hilly, but not steep. Yet any rise, no matter how gentle, exhausted her.

  Silent agony. Growing shame at a body she had always been proud of, a body she had kept fit and slim even on an ulcer diet, a body that had been photographed and praised. But a body that seemed to fail her now. Was thirty that old?

  Eventually, shame gave way to anger. Consuming anger at the stalwart figure ahead who didn’t tire, get thirsty, fear this vast empty world, or have to talk to someone of his own species for reassurance. Finally she was spitting mad and she stopped.

  “Wait!” Leah tried to put her hands on her hips to pose a defiant stance. But she was so tired her knuckles slid off her jeans and her arms hung drunkenly at her sides.

  He turned, eyebrows raised in question marks over shadowed sockets, his own body straight and nonchalant under a pack that must have weighed twice her own.

  “Glade what?” she croaked, trying to sound aggressive with a dry, airless throat, demanding some small payment for this pointless, endless journey.

  Glade walked back to her, uncinched her waistband, and slid the pack off her shoulders. They had stuffed the down parkas into sacks as they had the sleeping bags, and he’d insisted they wear only wind-shirts over their clothes, thin pullover jackets with hoods. Now he drew off her shirt, tied it by its arms around her waist as he had his own, and replaced her pack. The sun was higher and she’d been hotter than she’d realized. The slight chill was invigorating. But when he started off, she didn’t.

  “Glade what?” she demanded again. “If I’m going to tramp to the end of the earth with someone, I’m going to know his name at least.” This time her knuckles stayed on her waist.

  He shrugged and turned that closed face to her. “Wynd-ham.” He sounded like he was suffocating. And he stepped off purposefully.

  Strange patches of white on the shaded sides of hills or under the few trees that lived. Leah reached out to touch one. “My God, it’s snow … in July.”

  He didn’t stop at the sound of her voice and she struggled after him. Glade Wyndham. Was that really his name? Would a CIA agent tell you his real name? He probably had dozens. Why would the FBI have to pay the CIA for information? But the CIA was after them, too. No matter how many answers she dragged out of him, they only confused her more.

  Glade Wyndham, if that’s who he was, was two men in the same body. The one capable of the patience it took to get her up there at all and to drag along an unnecessary cat. The other, swift, cruel, and secretive. She never knew which would surface next.

  There were signs even here, burned in wood anywhere that the trail branched, with arrows and names like WALL LAKE, TRAPPERS PEAK, TWIN LAKES, BIG MARVINE, BIG FISH LAKE. It sounded as if they were in Texas.

  Glade turned from the trail and stomped up a hillock and over it to disappear from sight.

  Leah gasped at the thought and followed, bent double now under her load, watching her ankles turn between the springy grass clumps, feeling something warm ooze about her toes.

  When she’d labored to the top of the hill, she looked out upon a small pond so shallow and clear that she could see the rocks and mud at its bottom. A grove of dead trees behind it and a flat shelf of rock the size of a dining room table beside it.

  Glade Wyndham leaned over the rock with his maps spread out and his pack propped against it.

  Leah winced down the hill and crawled onto the sunwarmed rock.

  Goodyear crept toward them, his tongue as well as his stomach dragging on the ground. He too sought the rock and lay out on his side like a dead horse.

  Leah unlaced the horrid boots. “You were right last night.” She drew off a boot to find the socks pink with blood. “I have misjudged murderers. They’re worse than I thought.”

  He looked up finally. “Hmm?” He focused on her face.

  It started as a rumble and at first she didn’t know what it was. But then it erupted from deep in his middle and came out laughter. Laughter that softened the lines of his face, lit in his eyes as he threw his head back. Here was a third Glade. A few more, she admitted, and he might become an all-around human being.

  If she hadn’t been so angry, the startling depth and warmth of his laugh might have been contagious. But she would not laugh with a man who had offered to kill her several times.

  Even worse, he couldn’t seem to stop. He’d look away and begin to regain control and then look back into her face and lose it.

  Leah saw red and tears at the same time. She drew off the other boot and dangled all four socks stained with her own blood.

  This produced only another fit of mirth. Leah dropped the socks and leaped at him, her hands flailing at his head in the abandon of revenge.

  He caught her in midair and carried her, kicking, to the pond where he dipped her to her ankles in frigid water. She screamed rage. He dipped her again. “This’ll help, believe me,” he managed between gasps.

  Glade deposited her, dripping bloodied feet and all, back onto the rock. “I’m sorry, Leah, but I haven’t had a good belly laugh in ten months. I thank you. I needed that.” Now he was puffing. He still couldn’t look at her. “You were so bedraggled—”

  “And you think I like looking like this? Feeling like this? You.…” Leah gave up and stretched an unwashed, miserable body back on the rock. “Now I can see how one person can kill another. I could kill you right now.”

  “Well, for some people it takes provoking.” He’d stifled his mirth to a fake coughing. “It looks like we’ll stop here for today.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Tell me about Clifford.” Glade handed her a slice of rye bread smeared with a cheese spread he’d made by adding water to a packet and squishing it between his fingers.

  “Clifford?” The spread tasted of cheddar.

  “At the travel agency. One of the other nasty men who ruined your life.”

/>   “I’ve got better things to do than provide you with comic relief.”

  He grinned and gestured at the landscape. “Like what?”

  She told him about Clifford. Leah had quit college one year short of her degree to work in a travel agency to help support her mother and sisters after the lawyer’s warning that the Harper life-style would have to change. She’d been at the agency almost two years when a promotion became available, and Leah and the rest of the office knew she would get it because of her work record.

  Glade wasn’t laughing yet. He was boiling water for soup, but there was a faint upturn at the corners of his mouth.

  Clifford Averill, a man-boy of twenty with one year of college, no personality, who hadn’t been with the agency long enough to build a work record, who was the brunt of office jokes, got Leah’s promotion. Clifford Averill was inexplicably on his way up.

  “He was the boss’ son?”

  “He was the only male who had been there longer than two months.”

  Glade emptied a dried-soup packet into a plastic cup and added hot water. “You sound like sour grapes.”

  “And you are a spy and a male chauvinist.” Who would have thought Lipton’s instant chicken and noodle could taste so good?

  “Correction. I was a spy. Now I’m a criminal.” He quaffed the soup as if it weren’t boiling hot. “So you quit the travel agency.”

  “Yes. And then I got into modeling underwear for catalogues.”

  Now he was laughing.

  “I was desperate. We had to pay for Suzie’s abortion. She was the youngest, only sixteen when we transferred her to a downtown school. She couldn’t handle the adjustment. Then there were hospital bills because the abortion almost killed her.” A certain fantasylike unreality about discussing her life with a criminal on the sunny top of a mountain.

  They had another cup of soup and some chocolate squares. At least they weren’t walking. Leah lay out on the rock, feeling almost human.

  She had thought that they were on top of the world already, but another mountain rose from their level on the horizon. He stretched out beside her and caught the direction of her glance.

  “According to the map, that’s Big Marvine. Sure like to climb it.” A wistful note in his voice.

  “Count me out!”

  “So what did you do after your little sister’s abortion?” He was still gazing longingly at Big Marvine.

  “I’d left college so Annette and Suzie could have some training after high school. But Annette quit junior college to work as a receptionist to help her fiancé get through med school. I got mad and went to New York.”

  “To do what?”

  “Model more underwear.” Leah finally reached the point where she could laugh at herself again.

  This seemed to do something to Glade Wyndham, because he leaned over and kissed her. Scratchy beard, warm skin, weather-dry lips. Leah felt it all the way to her bloodstained toes.

  “No, not here,” he whispered, looking at the lone giant mound on the horizon. “Big Marvine. Now, that would be the place.”

  “Count me out,” Leah repeated and moved away from him. The kiss and her body’s reaction to it had caught her by surprise. Her crazy attraction to strength again. And this guy was no proud Jason to shrug off and stop at the first rebuff. Set this man in motion and there’d be no stopping him. And Leah, the fool, had put herself in a position to be alone with him in this wild place. Even she knew that one did not dabble with Glade Wyndham.

  The sun offered all the comforts of a sun lamp but without the civilized surroundings. The sky was so clear and intense a blue mat it looked solid, the green of the grass so sharp and vivid, the outlines of each rock and tree so distinct. No city haze to deaden colors or blur lines. Leah thought of the fairy tales of her childhood, the enchanted dangerous places and forests. This landscape too was enchanted, haunted—something frightening and hostile in all this beauty. And the last thing she needed in her struggle for independence was to become involved with a powerhouse like the man beside her.

  Glade, how long do we have to stay out here?”

  “I don’t know. We’re just buying a little time.” He rolled over on his back to stare at the sky. “Any minute now I’m going to make plans for what we’ll do next,” he said lazily. “It’s possible we’ll meet other backpackers or a shepherd. If we do, keep quiet and let me do the talking.”

  “You mean people do this on purpose?”

  “Of course. You don’t think all this newfangled paraphernalia we’re using was invented for a few cowboys or shepherds, do you?” His sun-darkened skin was leathery. Lines ran across a wide square forehead now that the dark tangled hair fell back in repose. With the sun lighting his upturned, relaxed face, his features lost their shadowed brutal look.

  They lazed away the afternoon beside the pond in a meadow of tiny buttercups, the yellow-cream heads peeking up and around vibrant green grass clumps. The sounds of bees and flies busy in sunlight, Goodyear’s soft snore, the occasional high-pitched hissing of a giant mosquito.

  Glade roused himself to cover the places where the boots had worn away her skin with moleskin, a sheet of what looked to be corn-pad material with a sticky side. He cut patches to fit her wounds and insisted she get back into the devil boots to help him set up the tent.

  The tent seemed to bewilder him as much as it did her. It was in pieces, like a child’s toy, nylon, metal pipe, and string. They assembled it at last under the dead trees behind the pond, and prepared dinner by the rock.

  Above them, clouds formed from nothing, fleecy and etched across the intense blue like billowing sheets on a clothesline.

  He lit the can under the little stove and put water on to boil, took a flattened plastic bottle from his pack and filled it with water, adding pills to purify it.

  “Surely the water’s pure up here.”

  “Not where people come.” He tore twigs from the dead trees and built a fire, adding larger pieces he broke by bending around his knee.

  And not a minute too soon. The sun set in red and purple swirls behind Big Marvine and, as if waiting in the wings for a cue, the chill wind returned. Buttercups closed, Goodyear came to life, and Leah sought the parka. They poured boiling water over freeze-dried beef Strogan-off and ate it out of the packet. Then bullet like peas and coffee. Leah heard not a word from her stunned ulcer.

  “What really happened ten months ago?” she asked when darkness enclosed them.

  He poked a twig at the fire until its tip flared. “I stole something … what you call the property.” He brought the burning end of the twig up to his face and stared into her eyes across the flame. “I was supposed to photograph it. Instead I bagged it and ran.”

  “Stole what from whom? Why?” She had a right to know if he had indeed involved her in this dangerous business, even mistakenly.

  The twig waved back and forth, making the shadows ripple over the planes of his face and the rock behind him. “Some papers from the oil company where I worked because the agency ordered me to. Okay?”

  “Why did you run? Why didn’t you just photograph them and put them back?”

  “Because I made the mistake of reading them and I couldn’t stomach what I read.” A hissing sound as he doused the twig in the dregs of his coffee.

  Glade Wyndham looked so huge, so strong across the fire, so relaxed in the shadowy wilderness night. Leah resented her reliance on him, the fact that every time an owl hooted or something rustled the grass she wanted to shift to his side of the fire.

  “What’s a bag job done on a farm?” Could he become so angered by her incessant questioning that he could go off, leave her alone here on the Flat Tops? Could she survive without him?

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I realize to bag something in your jargon is to steal it … but I heard Charlie say something about showing off bag jobs on a farm when I first saw you at Ted’s Place.”

  “Oh, the farm. It’s a place f
or field training agents … how to climb barbed wire and avoid mine fields and drink a lot … kind of thing you can’t get out of a textbook at headquarters in Langley. If I hadn’t turned renegade I could have retired there as an instructor. I’m not a caseworker, my specialty is breaking and entering, safes—”

  “And murder?”

  He shrugged. “I took care of a hit man once and there have been others. But that’s not my specialty. Sometimes I was just in the right place at the wrong time.”

  A keening on the wind, far away but eerie, high-pitched, joined by others until it sounded like a chorus of yips that synchronized to a drawn-out yowl wailing mournfully toward their fire …

  Leah scooted across dirt and rocks and grass painfully, her rear never leaving the earth or missing a bump. She was now on the same side of the campfire as Glade Wyndham. “What’s that?”

  The wail of twenty saddened banshees in unison …

  … drowned out by deep-throated male laughter. A hard protective arm drew her in. “You’re a funny woman, Leah. You can keep your head while being chased by airplanes and gazing on the disfigured corpse of a tortured woman, but howling coyotes chase you right into the arms of a murderer.”

  “It’s just all this … this openness—”

  “There’re walls even here,” and he sounded sadder than the coyotes. “They’re getting tighter every day. You just can’t see them yet. But the coyotes and deer and elk can—”

  “Do coyotes attack people?”

  “No, they’re waiting for sick ewes or does or tiny lambs … for the weak.”

  “Like you? Like you and Welker wait for people like me? The weak and honest?”

  The low laughter drowned out the coyotes again. “No, Leah, I’m honest, too. That’s how the whole problem started. If I’d just done my job.” He snuggled closer until one whole side of her warmed without the help of the fire.

  “I wish.…”

  “What?”

  He stood suddenly and left her to the cold night. “Nothing, Leah Harper. Nothing.”

  “But why has it taken everybody ten months to find you?” she persisted, telling herself she didn’t mind the rebuff.