Patriot Acts Read online

  Alena and I had to split up. I knew that, and I knew the reason for it, the logic behind it, and I knew both were solid and good. It had been forty-two minutes since we’d managed to sneak out of the hotel and the siege we’d been put under. As far as the world was concerned, we were still trapped in our room, not out and running free. At least, if everything was going according to plan.

  But that wouldn’t last for long. Maybe another four or five or six hours, if we were exceptionally lucky. Then time would run out, and Bobby Galloway would give way to HRT or a squad of Deltas, and the door would come down, and the people with guns would find our room empty and a hole in the ceiling. The APBs would issue forth like threats of damnation from a Southern Baptist pulpit.

  Those APBs would be for a man and a woman, traveling together.

  We had to split up.

  But I didn’t want to. This wasn’t going to be like Whitefish, where the cold and the pain had brought me to doubt, because then, doubt had been all it was. This was different. This was each of us traveling alone.

  For the first time in over three years, we wouldn’t be able to protect each other.

  That scared me. Looking at Alena, still staring out the windshield at the flight school, I knew it scared her, too.

  “We can find another way,” I said.

  She shook her head, then shook it again, more vehemently, resolving herself. “We’re wasting time. I’ll see you in Wilmington tomorrow.”

  She slipped out of the truck cab, letting a gust of cold in to take her place.

  “Be smart,” I told her.

  “Be smart,” she agreed.

  Then she slammed the door shut and started for the terminal, and I turned the truck towards the Interstate, and tried not to believe that I would never see her again.

  Here’s what she did:

  There were five people in the flight school office, all of them gathered around the television, still watching the live play-by-play of the siege, and all of them past the point of boredom with it. One was a woman, working behind the counter, but the other four were men, the youngest in his early twenties, the oldest perhaps in his mid-fifties. Two were wearing coveralls, clearly maintenance, and so it was the remaining two that Alena focused on even as every eye turned to mark her entrance, and it was the younger of those that she directed her words to, because he would be the most likely to need the opportunity she was about to provide.

  “Please,” Alena said, and she said it like a local, and not like a woman who was born six thousand miles away. She said it earnestly, and she said it with just enough emotion that everyone could hear it, with the thinness that comes from speaking out of the throat rather than the chest, and that says tears are only a heartbeat away. “Please—are you a pilot?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the man said. “Well, almost. Not certified yet. Can I help you?”

  “I need to get to Omaha,” Alena said, and the tremor in her voice increased, and the tears began to well in her eyes so much that the man looked away, embarrassed for her obvious distress. “I have to get to Omaha tonight, my mamma got hit by a car, I have to get to the hospital to see her. There aren’t no flights out of Lynch, I can’t get a flight. I asked Sarah, my friend, Sarah, she said I should go to the flight school, she said that if I offered to pay for fuel and the rental and all of that, someone might be able to fly me, someone might need hours and be able to fly me. She says there are always people who need hours and that someone could fly me. Can you fly me?”

  “Calm down,” the man said. “Just…why don’t you sit down, catch your breath.”

  She snuffled, wiping at her nose with the back of her hand. “Do you need hours? I’ll pay for the rental, I will, please. I have to get to Omaha, I have to go tonight.”

  “Do a good deed, Brian,” the woman behind the counter said, her attention already back on the television. “Fly her to Omaha. Get yourself another five hours, at least. Not like you’re going to miss anything—they’re still waiting for the Feds to show.”

  “Go on, son, do it,” the older man said. “The damsel’s in distress.”

  “Please?” Alena said. “Please, I’m so scared she’s going to die. I have to see her, I have to be there for her.”

  The man, Brian, hesitated for a moment longer, and Alena saw his eyes sweep over her face, and she saw there was no recognition of her in them at all.

  “Sure,” he said. “I’d be glad to help you, ma’am.”

  They landed in Omaha just past midnight, local time, taxiing into the charter terminal, and just like at the charter terminal in Lynch, there was no security to speak of, only a bored guard at the door to the tarmac whose job it was to keep unauthorized people out. As with all charter terminals, there was no passenger or baggage screening either going or coming. Alena passed the security guard without earning a second glance, caught the first cab she could, and took it straight to the nearest hotel, where she checked in using her half of the St. Louis identity that Sargenti had provided us.

  Once in her room, she used her MacBook to purchase a ticket from Omaha to London that required a change of planes at Washington-Dulles. The flight was scheduled to depart at ten past six that morning. She spent the next three and a half hours watching television coverage of what was happening in Lynch, and determined that what was happening was nothing. As predicted, the authorities in Lynch were playing out the siege by the book, and that meant waiting us out through the long, cold night. The Feds would assume command in the morning, and shortly thereafter determine the rooms were empty.

  Alena watched until she had to leave for the airport, checking out at twenty past four. She was in her economy-class seat at forty minutes past five. She was still wearing the cowboy hat.

  She reached the Wilmingtonian Hotel in Wilmington, North Carolina, shortly after one that afternoon, driving the rental car she had picked up at the airport outside of Washington, D.C. She parked in the lot, entered the lobby, and found that Sargenti had done as she had asked and as she had expected, and that there was a room waiting for herself and her husband.

  She also found that the man listed as her husband had yet to check in.

  Here’s what I did:

  It took me until just past eleven to reach a truck stop that I liked the looks of, outside of Casper. I parked the pickup at the far end of the lot, out of the lights. In exchange for the flannel shirt, cowboy hat, and lipstick that Alena had taken, I left behind our makeshift bed linen rope and the pistols we’d been carrying, hiding them in one bundle wedged beneath the seat bench. I took a couple of minutes to give the interior a wipe-down before abandoning the pickup.

  The drive had been unpleasant, filled with a rare fear, physically intense, that seemed to rise from the groin and race along the spine. I didn’t want to lose Alena, and I couldn’t help but sense that, somehow, someway, I already had. I kept the radio on the entire drive, bouncing from AM station to AM station in search of news, and even though the situation in Lynch seemed to remain the same, it gave me no comfort.

  Once inside the truck stop, I rented myself a shower and a rack, and bought myself a pack of disposable razors and a can of Gillette shaving cream. Under the water, I shaved my head, but left the stubble that had been growing on my face alone. It took me three of the razors and a lot of time, mostly because, on top of everything else, I was afraid of taking a slice out of my scalp.

  After I’d finished, I dressed in the last of the clean clothes from my bag, then found one of the multiple banks of pay phones and started calling airlines. Twenty-two minutes later, I was booked on a flight from Casper to Amsterdam, via Minneapolis and then Dulles. I got myself a bite of something that tasted remarkably like wood, then spent a couple minutes going through the offerings in the gift shop, where I purchased a cowboy hat of my own and a new jacket. The jacket was blue denim, with a bald eagle flying against an American flag embroidered brightly on the back.

  Then I hit my rented rack and tried to get some sleep, and instead procee
ded to have one of the worst nights of my life.

  Every noise outside was a threat. Time and again I started awake at the sound of a laugh, or a voice, or a door slamming closed, or a horn sounding at the pumps. My mind wandered, refusing to focus, refusing to surrender to sleep. Over and over again, I found myself wondering what the hell I thought I was doing. Over and over again, I found myself doubting my commitment to the course I’d chosen. Over and over again, I worried about Alena, about her progress and her safety.

  And over and over, I would close my eyes, and I would see Natalie Trent, lying on her blanket of leaves.

  At six that morning I called myself a cab to the airport then wandered through the gift shop again while waiting for it to arrive, trying to get a look at the television there and the latest news. What I saw surprised me. Apparently, there had been no change in the standoff in Lynch.

  That was no longer the case by the time I reached the airport, and I was on my way to the security checkpoint when I caught sight of yet another ubiquitous television, this one in a food court. On the screen, men in tactical gear and full body armor were finally storming the hotel. I glanced at my watch, and realized it had been just over twelve hours since I’d hung up on Bobby Galloway for the last time.

  They’d played it by the book.

  I was showing my St. Louis ID and my ticket to the TSA agent at the security checkpoint while, one hundred and sixty miles away, the door to our hotel room was being smashed down. While they were clearing the hotel room and securing the perimeter around the Outlaw Inn, I was settling into my seat. Somewhere, somebody with a badge was putting two plus two together, and coming up with a stolen pickup truck.

  By the time I was changing planes in Minneapolis, the news was reporting that the truck had been found in a lot outside of Casper. Someone on the screen speculated that Danielle and Christopher Morse could be almost anywhere by now, and asked the audience to be vigilant, and report any possible sightings. If I’d been anywhere else, I might have abandoned my track then and there, gone for an alternate route. But I’d made the first connection, and the way airports work, I was already behind the security screen. I walked from my arrival to my departure gate without incident, the only attention drawn due to my spectacularly embroidered jacket.

  It was twenty-seven hours and fourteen minutes after I’d left Alena at the airport in Lynch before I saw her again. When she opened the door to the suite at the Wilmingtonian, I saw in her expression that she’d felt the time as acutely as I had. I came through the door, dropping my bag as she threw the locks, and when she turned back to me I was ready for her, and I took her in my arms without a word.

  I was content just to hold onto her for a very long time, then.

  She was content to let me.

  PART

  FOUR

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  I slept late into the next morning, my body greedy to make up for the rest I’d denied it over the last day and a half. By the time I got up it was working towards noon, the sun was shining, and there was no snow to be seen anywhere when I stepped out onto the balcony of our suite at the Wilmingtonian Hotel.

  I was profoundly grateful for that.

  Alena had already gone out, leaving a note asking that I stay put, and adding that she would return no later than one that afternoon. There was plenty of room in the suite, so I did yoga for half an hour before climbing into the shower to the accompaniment of the television. The yoga served as a self-diagnostic of a sort, and I was pleased to see that everything on me appeared to be in working order. The bruises were still lingering, and there was a new one on my hip from the fall I’d taken on the ice in Lynch, but that was all. Alena, I had noted the previous evening, had a companion bruise of her own, but on the right hip, not the left.

  The television was a different education altogether. After some hunting, I settled it onto CNN, and waited for the Montana Terrorists story to come back for an update as I worked through my poses. It was taking a while, and that struck me as odd, and I didn’t think it was because I was being vain. Two fugitives with an unspecified amount of ricin in their possession should have ranked pretty high in the Top Stories list; instead, we were buried halfway through the cycle. When they did finally get to talking about us, what they had to say surprised me, and I turned in the pose I was holding to give the screen my full attention.

  There had been developments, but not the developments I’d expected. Given Lynch, I’d have thought the media play would have been pure hyperbolic fear, insistent and foreboding, with plenty of informative pieces about how to protect yourself from exposure to ricin and the like. Instead, there was confusion and frustration, and an odd lack of anxiety, and it took the anchor cutting to a new talking head before I began to get an explanation.

  “According to sources at the Pentagon,” the anchor said, “the search for the Montana Two has now been suspended.”

  “That’s what we’re hearing, though federal authorities are refusing to confirm.”

  “How could they make a mistake like this, Jim?”

  “Well, it’s important to remember, Laura, there’s a lot that goes on that the general public simply isn’t privy to. Remember, one of the nine-eleven hijackers had his visa renewed fully three weeks after the plane he’d been on went down—that’s three weeks after his body had been identified. So it’s difficult to say. This may be a simple matter of a misidentification, or something else entirely. But it happens more often than you might think. I could regale you with story after story of this kind of thing. The real tragedy here is what it does to the people involved—”

  “Danielle and Christopher Morse, in this case.”

  “—yes, the alleged suspects. This has to have turned their lives completely upside down. We’re now hearing that they were never even in Lynch, that law enforcement there responded to a tip that later proved to be entirely unsubstantiated.”

  “No word, then, that the Morses are in custody at this time?”

  “Again, Laura, the Feds are saying no, but what we’re hearing unofficially from the Pentagon is yes. Take your pick.”

  “And meanwhile, there’s news of this new cell—”

  “Yes, Al-Qaeda of North America, apparently. This emerged last night, that intelligence agency officials believe that what happened outside of Glacier National Park in Montana was actually the work of four Syrian nationals who had come over the border from Canada. And that it’s actually this group that may be in possession of the ricin. Obviously, every effort is being made to find and apprehend these men.”

  “Really is extraordinary,” Laura the anchor said, turning back to address the camera and shaking her head with bemusement.

  She wasn’t the only one, though I was more troubled than amused.

  Alena returned as I was running the razor over my face, trimming my stubble in an attempt to shape what was growing into a beard that would, hopefully, do something to conceal my features. I didn’t like growing the beard; in another couple of days it would start to itch, I knew that from experience, and I’d have to fight myself to keep from scratching constantly at my neck. Still, there didn’t seem to be much of a choice in the matter. Even if I could believe what I’d seen on the television, my face would still be getting far more attention than it deserved or I desired.

  It wasn’t the first time my face had been seen nationally. The last time it had happened, I’d become famous, albeit briefly. Five years later, almost, it was happening again, but the fame was now infamy. I wondered how long it would last this time.

  Alena had bought more clothes, and I picked through the selections she’d made for me, getting dressed, telling her about what I’d seen on the news. It earned an arching of an eyebrow and a brief pursing of the lips.

  “Very interesting.”

  “Someone’s throwing up a roadblock for us.”

  “You were in the Army. Could it be someone you know from those days, someone now at the Pentagon?”

  “N
o way. Even if I knew people in the E-Ring, which I don’t. This is something else.”

  “Someone doing us a favor.”

  “Nothing’s for free. They’re doing us a favor, they’ll want one in return.” I pulled on the latest in what was becoming an endless stream of new blue jeans. She’d picked three shirts for me, as well, all of them plain, no logo, no slogans, one in white, one in blue, and one in green. I went with the green. My shoes, at least, hadn’t needed to be replaced. “I don’t want to think about what we spend on clothes.”

  “You think it’s bad for you, it costs two to three times as much for me,” Alena said.

  I finished tucking myself in, then asked, “We have weapons?”

  “The nearest cache from here is in Philadelphia. Clearing it would take too long.”

  “We might want to do something about that. Whether or not we’re still number one with a bullet on the nation’s Most Wanted list, I don’t want to risk running into any more shooters working for Gorman-North.”

  Her expression tightened, and she shook her head slightly. “I tried reaching Dan this morning when I went out. I didn’t get a response, Atticus.”

  “Vadim?”

  “Nothing.”

  I thought about what the reporter and the pundit had been saying. “They’ve been picked up.”

  “I think that’s likely. Where and when and by whom I do not know. Before I returned to you, I was inclined to believe it would be federal agents who had taken them in. Now, I am unsure. In either case, we must operate on the premise that one of them, if not both, are in custody.”

  “Would he talk?”

  “Dan, you mean?”

  I nodded.

  “Not on his life, and not simply because of any fear or loyalty he might feel for either of us. It would be a point of pride to him.”