Page 44

CHAPTER 44

“H erc is retiring?” Dmitri said as I gave up trying to keep a signal. “In Rocky Start? I would not want him for a neighbor.”

“I don’t want him within a thousand miles.” I was annoyed that Dmitri had listened in, although there really wasn’t an option for privacy inside the cab of the pickup truck.

Marley had directed Dmitri onto a single-lane mountain road which was, thankfully, paved but had been unevenly plowed. We were moving deeper into the mountains where cellphone reception was pretty much nonexistent. I was proud that Rose was running Barry out of town. I didn’t know how to take the Herc retiring thing given that Herc was prone to lying. Then again, I couldn’t think of another reason why Herc would be buying the pharmacy at an exorbitant cost and interested in the other properties. I just couldn’t imagine Herc living in Rocky Start. Then again, I’d never thought about where Herc lived; I guess I’d kind of assumed he crawled into a coffin in some dark basement under his office.

Still, Barry’s comment that it had been Herc’s plan all along resonated. He always planned ahead. I could see him sitting there, over forty years ago, thinking about his landing spot in old age while the rest of us were just trying to muddle through the day. And things were changing in his world. The fact he had survived this long was a testament to his ruthlessness and his network of spies and leverage. But that kind of thing never lasted forever. Herc had known that, and he had had the ego to believe that he would actually make it to old age, something that most players rarely considered.

“Nothing is as it seems with Herc,” Dmitri said.

“No shit,” I said.

“Pike hates him,” Marley threw in.

“The feeling is pretty much universal,” I said.

“Does it bother you that you worked for him?” Marley asked me, a question which stabbed to the core of my anxiety that Rose’s observation about Herc being my entity had initiated. “I asked Pike that once and he got kind of upset and didn’t say anything.”

Surprisingly, Dmitri answered him. “It is easy to judge from the outside. Especially by those who do not understand the gray world that people like us exist in.”

“I’m not judging,” Marley said. “I’m trying to understand. Sometimes, late at night, I could hear Pike calling out. Nightmares. The man has some serious PTSD. The weed helps, but still. It’s bad.” He hesitated. “It’s better when he stays with Coral.”

I looked at him. “You and Reggie have some PTSD, too, I understand. From your time before Rocky Start.”

Marley nodded. “Pike will never tell us what my grandfather did or how he knew him well enough to send us here. But whatever it was killed him.”

Dmitri looked over at Marley, then back to the road. “People like Max, and me, and your adopted father, Pike, and probably your grandfather, did many things others might look down upon or pass judgment about. But one must take the larger view when viewing covert operations.” He took one hand off the wheel to help make his point. “When there are disagreements among nations, there are two obvious ways of settling them. One,” he held up a single finger, “is diplomacy. The second,” another finger, “is when diplomacy does not work. And that is war. Not something anyone desires. We, those like us, we are a third option. Covert operations.”

“ Tertia Optio .” I hadn’t thought of that in a long time, but it was the motto of one of the classified units I’d worked alongside of over the years.

Dmitri nodded. “I like to think that I played some role, no matter how small, in preventing World War III between the great powers. A war which would have concluded, inevitably, with an exchange of nuclear weapons and the end of the world. It was only twenty years between the First World War and the Second. But for the last eighty years, no Third has come.” He sighed. “It is, however, a very dirty game where one can never be certain who is who or even what side they are on.”

Which brought me back to one of my first questions for Dmitri. “Was Serena Stafford a double agent?”

“A double agent,” Dmitri said, “is just as easily a triple agent, which makes them just an agent.”

Marley shook his head. “I don’t know how you guys keep things straight.”

That made two of us.

“Nothing is straight,” Dmitri said.

“Your answers sure aren’t,” I replied. Had Serena been playing both sides, but ultimately been working for the Americans? That didn’t jive with her desperate attempt to get the microfilm. Which I really needed to take a look at. Except, as Lionel had pointed out, it was tens of thousands of pages of messages.

“Hold on,” Marley said, checking the map. “Take this right.”

A snow-covered narrow road. Whoever had gone this far had given up and headed back. Virgin snow ahead.

Dmitri didn’t hesitate.

We rumbled along that for a little way, driving slowly and carefully. Finally, Marley indicated an opening in the trees to the right. There was a narrow forest road there, sealed by one of those locked pole gates that blocked access to many forest roads when they closed for the season.

“Your young friend and I will offload the snowcat,” Dmitri said. “There are bolt cutters in the bed of the truck.”

I wondered who had appointed him boss, but, really, we had to do it anyway, so there was no point complaining. We got out. I grabbed the bolt cutters. I figured I was committing a federal crime as I cut the padlock. As if that were a concern. With Marley ground-guiding, Dmitri backed the snowcat off the trailer and rumbled through the gate, then waited for us to join him. I closed the gate. Anyone passing would see the tread marks of the snowcat heading into the forest. But it was not really an issue since no one had passed down this road in at least a week.

We clambered on board, Marley again taking the front, the topographic map on his lap. Dmitri drove us down the trail.

We had to cut two more locks on pole gates as we went farther into the National Forest. The sky overhead was gray, portending more snow in a season that had already set records. The surrounding terrain was quiet and ominous. Snow tends to absorb sound, and the wildlife was running away from the sound of the snowcat. We ended up on a path that could barely be called a road. Branches on either side scraped along the side of the snowcat.

We were still a distance away from the locale that Marley had determined when we came upon several interlocking, downed trees blocking the way..

“That ain’t natural,” Marley said.

Dmitri looked over his shoulder at me. “They prove we are on the right path.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“How do you know?” Marley asked.

“Ozzie blew those trees down with explosives,” I said.

I opened my door and Dmitri killed the engine.

I got out and walked forward, the other two joining me. A half-dozen trees had been blasted down, forming an abatis. “Ring charges,” I said, looking at the remaining stumps. “The way we clear landing zones in the jungle. Or an obstacle across a trail. Ozzie knew how to do that.”

“Why would he do this?” Marley asked.

“To keep someone from getting there,” I said, pointing ahead.

“We’ll need a chainsaw,” Marley said.

“Easier if we do as Oz,” Dmitri said. “Explosives.”

“I’m not blowing up the National Forest,” I said. “Chainsaws and the winch. It’ll take us a while to clear. And we could use help. Tanke and Luke come to mind.”

Dmitri nodded. “Some muscle would be helpful.” But he was looking past the blown trees, as if he could see gold.

“Tomorrow,” I said.

Dmitri, of course, had thoughts. “If Oz did this, he didn’t plan on coming this way again. Perhaps he removed the treasure.”

“Perhaps.” I shrugged. “If he did, we have no idea where he hid it. Definitely not in Oddities. We’ve searched the entire place. More likely, he knew he couldn’t do anything with it so he left it here, where nobody could find it.”

“Perhaps you missed something,” Dmitri said.

“Oz wouldn’t have blown this if he’d removed the treasure,” I pointed out. “Plus, he left the clues only Pike could have found. And Marley,” I added. Then I heard it. The same sound from that night at the cottage, very faint but coming closer. “Drone.”

We all looked up. About a thousand feet above us was a black dot against the gray sky.

“Is it armed?” Dmitri asked because, yeah, that’s the first place a player’s mind went to.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “It’s an observation drone. The Ferrells have one. Supplied by Herc. It’s being flown by the Ferrells on his orders.”

“That is not good,” Dmitri said. “He knows where we are right now.”

“Another good reason to head back,” I said.

“Can we disable the drone?” Dmitri asked. “When we get back?”

“What do you mean ‘we’?” I said. “I tried cutting Herc’s feed. That didn’t last long. If we go to the Ferrells and disable it, Herc will know. He will not be happy.”

Dmitri muttered something in Russian, indicating he wasn’t happy either.

Join the crowd , I thought.

“We go back,” I said. “We’ll be lucky to get back to Rocky Start before dark.”

“But now Herc knows the way,” Dmitri said.

“Do you want to cut up fallen trees in the dark while Herc watches, waiting for us to clear the way for him?” I said.

“No,” he said and got back in the snowcat.