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Knowing he was locked in didn’t calm his nerves. He didn’t feel at all protected.

For several minutes, he stood there in the pitch black, breathing carefully so as not to make a noise. His heart beat so loudly he swore it would have been audible to others, if there’d been any others in there with him.

At first he couldn’t tell the difference between when his eyes were closed and when they were not. But in a minute or so, his eyes adjusted to the gloom and he saw tools and rakes and bottles. He appeared to be inside a sort of maintenance shack where the National Forest Service kept supplies to maintain the trails. Such shacks are built to blend into the environment. They’re never disclosed on maps used by the hiking public. Tiny cracks of dim light filtered in where one log in the shack’s walls didn’t completely meet the other. The shack was well constructed; he was impressed.

He wondered again who the hell his rescuers were, what they were doing there, and why. He knew the FBI thought he had killed his own friend, Alec Wood. And who knew what else they suspected him of doing.

He’d impersonated another person, yes. That was true. For five years, he’d been living under the name and Social Security number of Grant Anderson. Criminal impersonation in the first degree was a felony in New York and a lot of other places around the United States. He knew this. He had looked it up several times. It wasn’t as serious as pretending to be a law enforcement officer or a U.S. government employee, but in some states it would net you at least three years in prison. In New Hampshire, he was pretty sure, it was a misdemeanor. So: no big deal.

Did it really justify an aggressive pursuit and arrest? He didn’t think so.

He knew there was more, much more. He was the man who knew too much.

In roughly five minutes—he didn’t know for sure; the hands of his Timex didn’t glow in the dark like his old Omega’s had—he heard voices in the woods.

“Watch where you’re walking—look out for a tripwire. Guy could have set up booby traps for us.”

“Spread out as far as you can but stay within sight of each other.”

“. . . order up a FLIR.”

It was the FBI team he had earlier evaded. They were clearly searching the forest for him.

He thought: if they managed to find him in this shack, wouldn’t it be better to be held in a U.S. prison facility than to surrender to Galkin’s goons—who would almost certainly kill him . . . and probably inflict plenty of other horrors on him beforehand?

The voices had come nearer, and then the doorknob of the shack was turned, back and forth, back and forth. Paul’s chest grew tight. He held his breath. He heard something about “locked” and then something about “keys,” and then he heard, perfectly clearly, someone right outside the shack’s doors say, “Nah, you can’t get in, he couldn’t get in. Let’s move on.”

Paul breathed in silently, out silently, and waited.

He heard footsteps crackling on the forest floor, the crunching of dead leaves and twigs. Heard the FBI agents exchanging words he couldn’t make out.

Ten minutes slowly went by. He could just barely see his Timex.

Then, a gentler rustling outside. The doorknob turned again, and this time the door was pulled open. Soft dappled light filled the shack’s interior. He felt a jolt of adrenaline.

“Shit, you got a whole SWAT team after you,” said one of the bearded men who’d dragged him here. “What’d you do?”

“Long story,” Paul said. “Who are you guys?”

“The Deacon wants to see you,” said the other one, ignoring his question.

“The who? And for what?”

“Are you going to follow us, or do we have to drag you again?”

“Sorry, but my goddamned ankle’s hurt.”

He rose to his feet and followed them, limping. “Want to know, who the hell are you?”

They traipsed ahead, not answering, walking skillfully through the forest, their gaits expert, the sounds they made minimal. Paul followed, painfully. Every once in a while, they had to stop for him, waiting impatiently.

The two men didn’t speak further. They seemed to weave their way among the trees as if they knew them all. Now and then, they’d come to a stopping point, and the one with the black-and-white beard would look for something, seem to find it, then continue on.

This went on for more than half an hour. The party went uphill for quite a distance, then downhill, then through a particularly dense section of forest until they came to a clearing with a drift of dead leaves around the stump of a scrub oak tree. Standing beside the pile of leaves was a third bearded man, only, his beard was even longer and fuller, a full grizzled Jeremiah Johnson. This had to be the Deacon.

“Why are the feebees after you?” he asked. “It’s not homicide, is it? Or kidnapping?”

Paul ignored the question. “Tell me: Who are you guys? You’ve saved my ass. I don’t get it.”

“Tell me what you’re running for. Or from.”

“Long story.”

“If you think we’re going to protect you without knowing what you did, you’re hallucinating.”

“Protect me?”

“Hal and Leon locked you in a maintenance shack; that wasn’t protecting you?”

“But who are you guys? Why are you doing this?”

“You first tell me why you’re running from the feds.”

Paul exhaled, a long sigh. “I don’t exactly know, okay? I’ve been living under someone else’s identity, for one thing.”

“And the feds caught up with you.”

“Right.”

“What’d you do?”

“What’d I do?”

“Why you in hiding?”

Paul heaved another sigh. “I’m on the run from a goddamned Russian oligarch.”

The Deacon chuckled dryly. “You rip off some Russian billionaire?”

“Well, I took something that I think belonged to him, yeah.”

“You don’t know for sure?”

Paul shook his head.

“The feebees coming after you for ripping off a Russki?”

Paul thought for a minute. “Maybe for using someone else’s Social Security number.”

“So you’re trying to keep yourself safe, but all the federal government cares about is that you broke one of their ridiculous rules.”

“About right.”

“What is government but a protection racket? Organized crime. No different from the mobster in the neighborhood who’s extorting money from you by saying your candy store needs protection. You don’t pay up, you have an unfortunate fire, burns down the place. Same with the government: You give up your rights to the government in exchange for protection. They make war to protect you, they say, and they tax you to pay for it.”

“Right,” Paul said, recognizing the rhetoric.

“There’s no ‘consent of the governed,’” the Deacon continued. “It’s submission of the frightened.”

“War made the state, and the state made war,” Paul said, suddenly remembering something his father used to say.

“Exactly. Violence is legit if the government does it, whether it’s the electric chair or the war in Iraq. What most people call organized crime is just less successful and smaller in scale than governments.”

“The government has a monopoly on legitimate violence,” Paul said, repeating yet another of his father’s mantras. He knew all the rhetoric, from his father, and wanted to make nice.

“You got it.”

“You guys live in the woods?” he asked, pointing at the two men who had brought him there. These men didn’t look like hikers or campers.

The two men said nothing. They looked at him warily.

The man they called the Deacon said, “You can hide in here.” He pointed to the drift of dead leaves. Paul furrowed his brow.

The Deacon pointed again at the pile, and Paul could see that it was actually a well-constructed shelter built from forest debris. He glimpsed a hole where a human could crawl in.

“It’s a debris shelter,” the Deacon said. “You’ll want to get in there for a few hours. We can talk later if you want.” He held out his hand. “Stephen Lucas.”

Paul hesitated a moment, then said, “Paul Brightman.”

The Deacon smiled. “I thought so,” he said.