Chapter 83

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They journeyed into hell.  Not a hell Jack ever imagined, but a frozen, wind-blown hell, where gravity was stronger than it was supposed to be and there wasn’t enough air.  He was a concussed, exhausted man dragging an injured woman on a makeshift sled piled high with gear, up an obstacle course at altitude in the middle of a blizzard.  He didn’t know how badly his head would have hurt without trying to do daylong wind sprints.  He didn’t know if there would have been fluid in his lungs if he’d had a way to stay warm and rest.

It was another day and night of hell.  It was haul and stop for food and rest. Then it was haul and stop to pitch camp and cook and fight to sleep while coughing and fight to wake up and struggle to move.  They finally made it to the top of the top of the last pass.  Lee stepped off the sled, wanting to do her share on the downhill.

Downhill was too hard on her knee.  Twenty minutes later she was back on the sled.  They made it down the eastern side a thousand feet before he stopped. He’d fallen and he couldn’t get up.  It wasn’t that he wouldn’t get up.  He was spent.  She helped him onto the sled.  Instead of fighting the sled down the rest of the way she climbed onto the pile of gear and used one of the poles as a rudder to steer the pile down the hill into the shelter of a leaning rock.

He’d never seen it snow on the eastern side.  He knew it did snow on the eastern side, because he’d been there with snow on the ground, but he expected, once they crested the pass, to walk out of winter.  They were still in winter, but here in the rain shadow of the mountain, it was a different, dryer winter.  Lundy Canyon received a sixth of the rainfall of the Grand Canyon of the Yosemite, yet they were only fourteen miles apart. The wind was forty miles an hour slower.  The sandpaper ice was gone.

Every time he exhaled he felt a wet, rasping rattle.  Either his head hurt less or he was so worried about his lungs that, by comparison, his head was better.  Concussions are supposed to get better unless you have a little bleeder in your head seeping into your brain.  Sometimes they could drill in and take the pressure off.  Sometimes the little bleeder sprung a big leak and you were dead before your sphincter let go.  Sometimes your mind turned into something with the computing power of a Brussels sprout.

Fever fried his brain. He didn’t remember any of his dreams that night. Maybe the cough kept them away. He woke at three covered in the sticky film that’s left after a fever-sweat. He felt brittle, as if on his next fall he would crack and shatter, like some ice sculpture weakened by an unexpected sun.

The wind had dropped off in the night, blunted by the mass of moisture that had been great enough to force itself over the mountain.  There was a half-foot of new snow on the ground on the eastern side. That meant the Yosemite side would have gotten record snowfall.

He was a hunted man, more tired than he ever remembered being. He had very little chance of succeeding in his mission.  His chances of making it out alive were slim.  He buried his nose in Lee’s neck, smiling, thinking he’d never been happier.

“Have a nice nap?” She asked as he opened his eyes.

Her eyes were slits.  What white he could see was mostly a bleary mix of red and yellow. The skin on her nose had been abraded by the ice-filled wind.  She’d tucked jet-black hair behind her ears. Her left ear was swollen and the knuckles of her right hand were scabbed and bleeding.  She was so beautiful.  Somewhere in his sleep he’d decided to tell her the rest of the plan.  It was so dangerous now. She had to know it all before they dropped down into the valley.

The coffee was scalding hot, too strong, and too sweet.  Perfect.  After it had loosened his jaw enough to talk he said, “After I pee, I’ll tell you the whole plan, the real one.”

He slid part way out of the tent, stopped and buckled on the shoulder holster and made sure the Sig Sauer was locked and loaded.

“We’re in enemy country,” he said as she watched him sling the weapon.

The wind had dropped off even more.  His headache was down to the throbbing pain of a toothache. A sliver moon played hide and seek through the clouds.  He walked as close to the edge of the mountain as he dared, and peed off the edge.  His water felt thick, the way it did when he passed a stone. Some trick of the moonlight showed his water red as it splashed into the snow.  Lee had showed him the bruises on his lower back using compass mirrors.  He was lucky he could pee at all.  He started to zip up.  It felt as if a door in his brain opened and he felt the mass of hate and fear slice the night.

“Run, Lee, Run!” he shouted at the top of his lungs and sprinted toward the tent knowing he was too exposed, knowing he’d never make it.  He heard a bolt slide back.  The chicken-shit sound of an SKS modified to fire full-auto tore holes in the night.

A deep, parade ground voice shouted, “Hold your fire, Kaffirs!” just as something slammed into him.  He tried to keep his balance on the edge of the cliff.  The last thing he saw before he fell was a burst shred the top of the tent.  His mind grabbed at the world.  Everything turned sideways and slowed.

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Chapter 82

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Jack’s arrogance nearly killed them.  The trail would have been brutal on a late spring day.  In the middle of a driving snowstorm, weighted down as they were, with what they faced at the end, it was nearly too much.

They were nearing ten thousand five hundred feet.  There was no cover of any kind. Sitting in the comfort of your home watching the weather channel talk about gusts over a hundred miles an hour on the mountain passes simply did not connect. How would you understand that ice crystals would sandpaper the exposed skin off your face?

When he stood, the wind made a sail of his pack.  Gusts turned him at the hips, trying to rip his snowshoe-planted feet from the snow.  When he walked hunched over, lactic acid turned the muscles in his lower back to fire and then jelly.

Jack took the lead, forced to use a rest step to save lungs and aching back. They built a sled with the cross-country skis as the frame and base.  It was easier to pull than to carry.  So it was step, pause for one second, then step with the other leg and pause for one full second again.  The pattern was walk ten feet, wait for Lee to close the gap by the same ten to take tension off the rope connecting them and then repeat, over and over and over again.  They had covered less than a quarter mile of trail in the last hour, the fifteen hundred feet to the top of the pass seeming like fifteen hundred miles.  He stooped into the wind and slogged another five feet, thinking for the thousandth time that this was too hard, when the tension on the rope stopped him.

He stopped and turned.  Lee was on all fours in the snow, swinging her head back and forth. He tried to hurry, stubbed a foot, and slid the last five feet to stop in a heap next to her.

Lee reached up to her mouth, pulled something out and threw it into the snow.  The wind caught the thing and carried it to him, nearly landing on his hand.  It was a tongue depressor from the first aid kit.  It was covered in freezing saliva and teeth marks.  She had used it as a gag, biting down hard so she wouldn’t cry out in pain.

He pushed her onto her side.  He reached to pull up her powder pants and look at her knee.  He didn’t have to.  The fabric was taut over her swollen knee.  She looked up, eyes glazed with pain.  A jet flew low over their heads, much lower than the five thousand feet above the park that flight rules called for.  He tried to spot the fighter jock nuts enough to be out in this, much less at low altitude.  The ground shook.  A sea of snow carried them down the ridge toward the rocks below.  He grabbed Lee and clipped his carabineer directly to hers as he tried to hold her head up.

The avalanche wasn’t much as avalanches go, but they go far.  He kept them oriented with their heads up. Even if they were buried he couldn’t let it be head-down.  Most skiers who die in avalanches suffocate suspended head down in the snow, unable to get out of their bindings to dig their way out.

Dying of suffocation was near the bottom of his wish list.  He felt a thump on his left hip like a berserk linebacker’s helmet and then another thump on his back.  As it occurred to him that he probably wouldn’t survive a thump like that on his head, his head kissed a rock.

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LEE RELIED ON her tiger-man’s strength, tried to keep her head up, confident that if anyone could keep them alive it was Jack.  She hung on, fighting the panic, knowing that they were riding a white wave of death.  She had surfed the big waves off South Africa, where the danger from the great white shark was real.  She knew that panic was as big a danger as the waves and made sure she was not guilty of that self-destructive sin.  The wave of white terror seemed to slow and then she watched his head spray blood.

“No!” she shouted.  They came to a stop among rocks and broken trees stabbing up through the snow like giant punji sticks. She knelt over her man thinking the worst.  She ripped off her gloves and checked for a pulse.  He had one, strong, steady and slow.  She turned his head to look at the wound.  There was a flap of scalp hanging, over an inch square and much blood like most head wounds, but she felt no give in the bones.  He was profoundly unconscious.  Their sled, piled high with gear, had miraculously come to a stop as if neatly parked only fifty yards away-up hill.

Lee unhooked herself, tied the rope into Jack’s harness and looped a quick lasso over a rock splinter aiming sharply at the sky only twenty feet away.  She dragged herself up the hill to the sled, climbed on it and used her good leg as a rudder to steer it well wide of him next to the downhill side of the largest rock.  She brought the sled to a stop, rather proud of her steering and slid off.

She stepped back and fell through a thin layer of snow, falling far enough to knock the air out of her lungs when she landed on something. What?  She grabbed the little flashlight out of her inside pocket and shone it around.  She had fallen through the snow near the lip of an overhang that was buried in snow and protected from most of the force of the avalanche.  The ledge formed a natural cave nearly fifteen feet deep and about as wide.  The cave smelled musky and strong, but the smells weren’t fresh.

Hot damn, she thought.  My luck is good.  The bear that hibernated here decided to sleep somewhere else this year.  

She climbed up out of the hole and crawled to Jack.  He was still unconscious.  She dragged him down the hill to the edge of the hole and stopped.  Perhaps he was a bear and not a tiger.  He was much too big for her to carry down into the hole and she could not risk simply dropping him.

Hong Lee, scion to one of the wealthiest trading families in Hong Kong, Stanford MBA and magician, unclipped a carabiner from the sled and went to work making a pulley.  The snow fell like a blanket around her.  As she worked she thanked the hours grandfather insisted she spend on the old boats, learning knots and currents and wind and hard, physical labor.

A frustrating hour later, missing most of a nail, having strained her left shoulder and more tired than she could ever remember being, she had her man safely in their cave. She wanted so badly just to sleep, to zip him up in his bag and just sleep, but she didn’t dare.  She laid her man on the sleeping pad after she had inflated it as much as she could in the thin air and climbed back out.  Their cave was so nice and warm compared to the storm outside.

Her knee had swollen so that she could barely bend it, but she climbed out of cave and used a branch to sweep their path away.  Snow was falling so quickly their trail to the cave would be invisible in another hour.

She cried tears of pain as she tried to bend her knee.  Jhew lun dou! she thought, and smiled.  Swearing in English was so vanilla compared to Cantonese or even that heathen Mandarin.  Eventually she bent the knee enough to slip the needle under the patella and drain out some of the bloody mess. So began the longest eighteen hours of her life.

JACK DREAMED.  This was not the omen dream.  This one was tops.  He was warm and dry, bundled up in something soft, smelling of Lee’s special perfume.  He was sore in places he hadn’t known he had.  He smelled something wonderful and salivated.  It smelled like gravy and carrots and onions and beef-like beef stew only more better.  He didn’t want to wake up, but he had to so he could eat.  There was a reason he needed to wake up, something important. He would much prefer to be asleep to the headache that made him groan when he woke.

He opened his eyes.  There was something over them.  When he tried to sit up the pain in his head split from one big pain to a hundred little ones.  These little pains grew until they were bigger than the first one and then split again.

“Shit,” he croaked.  Perhaps the horrible taste in his mouth had killed his ability to speak?

“Well, if that’s what you think of my cooking, I’ll throw your share out.” Lee told him the story as she fed him, one spoonful at a time.

“You kept us heads-up somehow.  I thought you were conscious, but when I tried to talk to you, you couldn’t open your eyes. You wouldn’t let go of me until you passed out completely.  I dragged you here.”

Here was an overhanging cave, near the edge of the cliff they nearly slid over.

“You’ve been out a long time.”

She looked away as she said the last. The circles under her eyes, the unshed tears, and the shaking hand as she spooned the stew, all painted the picture of her fear and courage.

“How long?”

“Eighteen hours,” she said.  “I was so scared.  I couldn’t wake you and I didn’t know what to do.  I literally stumbled into this cave, falling backwards into it after I rode the sled down part of the hill.  I had to climb out and lower you down here and my knee hurt so badly.  At first I thought you were going to die, and then you started talking in your sleep, shouting really, things that scared me.  You kept telling people you were sorry, yelling to the Stud Man, Charlie Tuna, Cool Breeze, Heat Wave… silly names.”

She stopped the story long enough to ask him, “Are they real people?”

“They were real people, in my A-team.  My team was ambushed after I left the war to go back to the States, after Mom and Pop died in the car wreck, so I could take care of Meghan. Only three of them lived. One is a paraplegic, one is blind and the one that was okay died of cancer.  And me.”

She held him, stroking his face, while she told the rest of her story.

“The cut on your scalp was clean.  I used every kind of antiseptic we had.  It took me a half hour to find the fucking sewing kit.  I sewed you up while you were still unconscious.  The pressure in my knee got worse and worse.  I…I couldn’t stand it after a while,” she didn’t act embarrassed or weak when she said it.  She knew pain was something to be managed.

“I took the big syringe from the medical kit and used it to drain the fluid out of my knee. By then my leg was so stiff, it was all I could do to bend it to get the needle under the patella.”

She laughed, “A cramp straightened my leg and the patella slid down against the needle and it bent. I can’t get the fluid to draw at all through the smaller needle.”

What must it have been like to be alone for 18 hours?  What must it have been like to think about burying someone you loved in the snow?

“Do you think we can still make it?  You kept muttering something about the schedule.” She wasn’t just asking for an answer about the schedule.  She was asking for an explanation. She knew he hadn’t told her the whole plan.  It wasn’t fair not to tell her. It was even less fair to tell her and ask her to be part of it.

“We can make it,” was all he said.
 

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Chapter 81

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Her Grace told her wheelchair to move forward.  The wheelchair asked, “Do you want me to move forward?”

She said, “Yes.” Then she told the chair to stop at the appropriate place.  The chair obeyed the stop command instantly.  She had her computer call the head of security.

“Yes, Your Grace?”  Kurt asked and then waited.

Her Grace was not certain Kurt was a true believer.  She knew he hated the enemy.  She was simply not sure that he loved their savior.  She had no doubts he would do whatever was necessary to stop the enemies of the Church.  And, he was certainly very good at what he did.  He was good at what he did because he loved it.  His record as an officer in the parachute regiment of the French Foreign Legion was extraordinary.

“Have you spotted them yet?”

“Not yet, Your Grace.  Soon.  If our information is correct, we will meet them the day after tomorrow, or the day after at the latest.  I am surprised they even considered the plan you described to me, much less chose to attempt it.  Their dossiers show them both to be highly intelligent people.  What we believe they are now attempting is foolhardy at best.  I would even say insane.  Are you sure we are not ourselves the subject of a disinformation campaign?”

She would not have accepted the question from anyone else.  From Kurt she welcomed it.  She had learned to trust his judgment. She considered the question.  Again.

“I am sure we are the subject of a disinformation campaign.  This information, as arrogant, insane, and misguided as it is, I believe to be true.  We went to a great deal of trouble to get this information and this information was guarded passionately and carefully.  This is why we believe it to be true.”

Kurt asked the question she would have asked if she were him: “Are you sure we need to meet with them?  They have proved resourceful. The man is very dangerous.  From a risk-assessment standpoint it would be better if we used a different solution.”

Even on their internal telephone system, in their own buildings, they made sure that they spoke of nothing that would be actionable.  She had considered following exactly the same course of action.  That Kurt recommended this confirmed her well-deserved and long-standing trust in him.  She thought about the money these heathens had stolen from her.  If it had not been for their damnable interference, the Church would have, conservatively, $42 million more for their savior’s work.

The real number was probably $75 million.  Her Grace at first did not see that someone was countering her trades, the sabotage, and the disinformation campaign. She simply thought that the markets had gone against her, in their mindless mirror of the whims of investors. She held course, believing it was simply a matter of time before the markets came back.  This is what had made the losses so painful.

“‘Need to meet with them’ is the correct phrase.  Our savior’s work needs money-a lot of money.  We will meet with them.  After we meet and they understand, I am sure they will be eager to make a contribution.”

Kurt smiled.  He was sure he could make them eager to do anything.  He thought that if somehow his men misunderstood his instructions, fired on them and killed them, he would be in very bad trouble.  And sometimes being in very bad trouble was acceptable to remove a serious threat.  He would make the decision when it was necessary to make it.  

Chapter 80

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Robert E. Lee White, wounded and decorated veteran and deeply religious man, leaned heavily on his cane as he walked up the steps of the church.  He knelt in prayer, waiting his turn at the confessional.  “Forgive them, Father, for they are weak, as are all of your children.  I know I commit a sin coming here and using this…thing that wears the robes of a priest to confuse my enemies, but I must do this.  I know that my friend is not a religious man, in any way or form.  And, I know that he is more Christian in his heart than any other man I know.  He is a good man and on a mission that is pure.  Perhaps one day he will see the error of his ways and accept God into his heart.  I must help him.  And, you must know that these people who profess to follow your word do the work of the devil in the most direct and horrible way.  You must know this.” 

He saw the woman leave the confessional and pushed himself to his feet.  The weight in his heart was heavier than the burden of his wounds and the memories of the horrors of war he would always carry.  He depended on his cane more than he had in a long time as he made his way into the booth.

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”  As he told his part in the story, with very few changes, and very few important details missing, the weight in his heart lifted.  By the time he finished the story and scattered seeds that fell on such eager soil, he was sure what he did was God’s work in the truest sense.  When he walked down the steps and out onto the street, it was with a much lighter step.

He hailed the cab and headed back to the office to put the finishing touches on his part.  Now, other than delivering the package to where Jack needed it to be, and a little target practice, what he had to do next was wait.  Waiting was the hardest.  He prayed that his best friend, and now the number three most wanted man in America, could do his part.  He was sure that if any man created by his savior could accomplish this most important mission, it would be his best friend and brother in arms.

When he got to the office he plowed through the mountain of emails that always waited, even after his executive assistant had culled the wheat from the chaff, with renewed vigor.  Then he entered the combination into the keypad and placed his right thumb on the screen.  The lock clicked open with a solid and satisfying sound.  He reached into the drawer and pulled out three files.

He reviewed the files on ‘Miss Smith’ and the technician.  Miss Smith was doing very well.  Perhaps after all this was over he could persuade her to actually come to work for him. He made a note to tell his head of network security to let her hack her way into “the plan.”  Her attempts had been admirable. Nowhere in her FBI jacket was there note of these talents.  Very few were personable, driven, attractive and had hacking skills.  If Miss Smith received tutoring from a master hacker, like his wonderful Alice, she would become even better.  Miss Smith had an intuitive feel for programming that was rare.

The technician was a different matter.  The technician was a good worker and a valuable member of the team.  Even so, he was seriously flawed.  How could a man hit a woman, not in self-defense? Robert E. Lee White was not a man of violence by nature.  When violence was called for and it was the only option, then he would be as violent as was possible.  But, for a man to strike a woman, the mother of his children, in a fit of anger, or even worse to satisfy some need to hurt or dominate, this he could not find a place for in his heart.  He would give the man a chance to take his problems to counseling, to see if this flaw could be fixed. He would make it worth this man’s efforts.  This man was a veteran and he had been wounded and lost a limb.  Some folks needed more help than others.

Bob suspected this man had been flawed before he went to battle and used his loss as an excuse not to control his baser emotions, but Bob was not sure.  He would give the man a chance, as he had given so many men and women a chance over the years.  He gave them a single chance, letting them know the consequences of failure, spelling it out in no uncertain terms.  His staff all knew that once they earned trust they were allowed mistakes, as Robert E. Lee White was no stranger to mistakes, but until they passed their test period, they were not allowed a second chance.

He would first speak to the man’s immediate supervisor to see what she thought.  If she thought the man was worth the effort, then he would have the conversation.  If she did not, he would not put forth the effort.  Robert E. Lee White knew that his current employees would share stories with the man, stories that would help carry the message.  Bob believed in accountability more than anything.  He believed in accountability to himself in the form of discipline, and accountability to others.  His people would make sure the man knew he would get no second chance and this place would be a home to him if he was able to do the right thing.

He put thoughts of the technician aside and reopened the Miss Smith file again, for entertainment really. He caught himself smiling as he reread the reports.  She was very, very good.  It had proven difficult to make sure she gained no other information on her way to the plan.  The unvarnished truth, if it is so unbelievable that it must be fiction, can be a wonderful drug.  To hide in plain sight was genius.  He and Jack had finally decided this was the only course.  He prayed that his best friend would survive the truth.

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Chapter 79

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The next day dawned even colder, but the snow held. Driving Tioga Pass road was a time machine, taking Lee and Jack further into winter and the Park’s past. The high-pressure system kept the valley floor in late fall, but with every thousand feet of altitude the temperature dropped three to five degrees.

The occasional hardwood gave way to conifers at higher altitudes. As they climbed, evidence of man, other than the weather-beaten road, disappeared. The thick forest showed man’s interference.  Men suppressed fire here since the early 1900s.  A forest not doomed by man would have six inches of fuel on the ground, all that was left from the regular cleansing fires of nature.  There were places in Yosemite where fuel was six feet deep.  Fires here, once they had a foothold, were infernos and then firestorms.

When John Muir walked the woods of the Sierra Nevada he talked about their inviting openness. Not anymore.  Bark beetles killed the pines. The heat from the fires men insisted on putting out were the only thing that killed the bark beetle.

Lee slowed to pull off the road at one of the few approved parking spots in Tuolumne Meadows.  She pulled out the offending spark plug wires, having already made up the labels for the plugs and distributor.  She taped the signs to the inside of the windshield.

Please leave our car be

Went to town for plug wires

They crossed the meadow at a brutal pace.  If rangers spotted them weighted down as they were, they’d know they were headed for high country.  No one was permitted in high country in winter except park personnel.  The rangers said it was suicide for anyone to be out, but the rangers got to play in the snow whenever they wanted.  A properly equipped expedition could survive any weather, if they didn’t panic or outlast their supplies, and if their luck held.

They made the tree line, what little there was of it, over wet ground with heavy packs at nine thousand feet five hundred feet, in under fifteen minutes.  In a straight line they were only nineteen miles from Lundy Canyon.  They would have to walk at least twenty-five miles to cover those nineteen miles.  They would climb three thousand very rough feet. Then they would lose over eight thousand feet and then gain nine thousand before they dropped the nearly ten thousand feet into the Canyon.

The racers who finished the Western States 100 gained and lost a total of over 41,000 feet over the course of one day.  Of course they were seasoned, obsessed athletes carrying only their body weight, sunscreen, goo, and water enough to make it to the next station.  And they didn’t do it in the dead of winter.

It took five minutes to catch their breath enough to go on.  Jacks throat was already raw from dragging thin cold air into straining lungs.  The air was so dry sweat evaporated right away, despite the cold.  They would have to be very careful about hydration.  He forced as much water as he could.

He was so proud of Lee.  She’d kept up and didn’t look hurt by the sprint. With the cross-country skis they were carried, on top of heavy packs, their pace slowed to less than a half mile an hour. The trail was barely marked.  Once snow hit it would be nearly impossible to find without GPS. And they couldn’t use GPS because of the electronic footprint.  So it was time for map and compass.

“I’VE GOT TO REST,” Lee said, slumping down on the side of the trail, and then on her side to get out of the pack.

She was cramping badly. He rubbed her back until most of the knots in her trapezius muscles were gone.  She guzzled Gatorade.

“Sorry I’m pushing so hard baby. Why don’t you rest for a half hour?  I’ll give my woodsman’s skills a test and sneak up on you.”

She was too tired to keep disbelief out of her bleary eyes. The woods called to him.  There was a higher pitched shushing sound from the wind through thin needles and branches in the top of the pines.  Lower down thicker branches thrummed like bass strings plucked by the same wind. Dry leaves on low evergreen bushes rattled like a medicine man’s tambourine.

HONG LEE, favorite granddaughter of the retired head of the Three Dragons Triad, watched her Jack disappear into the brush next to the trail.  She had shoved the feelings about him fucking that bitch into a little box.  He was a man.  And, such a man, like all men, had needs.  Chinese women looked at things differently.  Was she really Chinese?  She had been born Chinese.  She had always been different, like her father.  She had known very early that she was some kind of mutant, also like her father.

She was six when she discovered she was different.

She’d been lying in her little bed.  She wanted the card Father sent to her from the US.  It was so small.  She reached her hand out.  The card was in the middle of the nightstand, where she had put it to keep it safe. She couldn’t reach it.  She was so tired.  She wanted to read the card again, but she didn’t want to get out of bed.  She reached again one more time and still couldn’t get it.  One more time, and then she would either get up and get it or go…to…sleep.  She reached out again and stretched as far as she could and the card slid off the table onto the floor.

She sat up in bed and turned on her reading light. She picked the card up and put it back on the table.  She lay down and reached for the card again.  Nothing happened.  She tried again.  She tried seventeen more times before she fell asleep.  When she woke in the morning, while she was still half asleep, she reached for the card again.  It slid off the table on to the floor and slid a few inches toward her.  By the time father returned from his trip she could make the card slide off the table and move along the floor every other time.

Hong Lee didn’t know why, but she didn’t tell anyone about her new trick.  Father traveled so much then.  She liked to wait for him to return to show him the new things she had learned.  Mother always said that she and father were alike in many ways; that they were both…different. Hong Lee heard her mother talk about her when her mother didn’t think Hong Lee could hear and her mother used another word:  “Strange.”

Father always bought her little gifts when he traveled.  She waited until he was alone with her in her room to show him.  She showed him her new math skills.  He was always quick with numbers too, just like her.  He was so very tired.  But, she put the card on the table and told him to watch and then made it slide off on to the floor.  She thought he would applaud and bow like he did when she showed him that she could do what Americans called long division. He looked sad and asked her to show him again.  She did.  He did something that she had never seen him do.  He picked her up and held her and cried.  She asked him what was wrong and he said:

“Nothing is wrong, my little butterfly.  You have a gift.  I have the same gift.”

He reached out to hold his hand over a pencil that she used to show him her math skills.  The pencil flew into his hand.  She giggled and made him do it again.  Then he said that he needed to tell her a story, but that she was not old enough to understand it yet.

He thought that by the time she was ten she would be old enough.  What he had to tell her now was that she would have to keep her gift a secret from all of her friends, and all of her relatives, even her mother. He asked if she could do that.  She said that she could.

Then he asked her about her gift, when had she discovered it, and how she thought that it worked?  She did not have the words.  She did have the words when she was ten.  By then she had explored her talent and refined it.  And, practiced and practiced until the gift was hers all the time.

Hong Lee shivered in the cold and thought about her crazy, lovely man and what he would think about her gift.  He had a gift too, one different than hers, but still a gift.

She stretched her leg, and felt it again, “Fuck!” she muttered under her breath.  Her knee was already starting to swell.  She swallowed four ibuprofen and threw rocks with her mind.

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GRAY SQUIRRELS scrabbled after every morsel with an urgency that let Jack know the storm was indeed coming.  Ravens watched the squirrels scratching for any forgotten treasures.  Landslides started ant-sized, caused by the heavyweight combination of erosion and gravity, cascaded down the mountain.  Some gathered enough momentum to land with a crash.

Something was missing.  What?  Water.  Even this late in the year there was always sound, sometimes close, sometimes not, of moving water.  Snowmelt, anyway.  It had been such a dry year that there was almost no snow pack. When this storm hit it wouldn’t release its energy as water until late spring.

The key to moving without being heard wasn’t to move silently.  It was impossible to move without making sound in the real world.  The keys were to move slowly and only make sounds that fit in. Jack could imitate that medicine man rattle of dry leaves, the chattering quarrel between squirrels, and those tiny landslides.

He stepped into the low evergreen brush at the base of the trail and walked far enough downhill to hide from view.  The cold, clean smells forced their way through his human brain and into his reptilian brain.  Quick fear tried to empty his stomach as the raw smell of a bear in a den somewhere close by ran up his nostrils and into his spine. He forced the fear away.

The picked-clean bones of a squirrel lay at his feet. He flashed on the cat that had adopted him, toward the end when cancer had eaten the tough old Tom down to nothing.  Marmot’s tracks cut across the squirrel run, unusual this late in the season.

He slid through the forest, closer to who and what he was with every breath, each step, and all the notes of the symphony of the wind.  He fought the urge to keep going forever into the woods.  He turned back toward the trail.  The bear smell came and went on the wind.  The plaintive cry of a hawk that should have left for the lowlands a while ago was answered by a challenging caw from a raven.

He low-crawled back to the lip of the trail, checking for sign before he crossed.  A group of four people had passed toward the meadows a few days before.  They were probably women from the narrow, small boots and light tracks. One of the women, the one with the biggest feet and newest boots, had a serious hitch in her get-along. Bob’s prints were similar, one leg carrying all the weight and the other dropped and dragged.

Jack jumped across the trail and climbed near straight up for a hundred yards.  He exposed himself briefly as he topped the military crest of the ridgeline above the trail.  He walked back along the ridge, keeping far enough below the crest so Lee couldn’t see him.  Once he was well past her he crawled to the lip of the crest and looked down.

She stood in the middle of the trail, arms wrapped around her body in a self-hug, staring back up the trail the way they had come, not looking up.  He slid down over the crest in a crouching crawl that took him a hundred feet closer.  He low-crawled until he could smell her perfume.  The alchemist who designed it guaranteed no real man could ignore the scent. Jack knew the alchemist was right.

As Jack watched, she placed a row of pebbles on a rock and sat on another rock a few feet away.  He smiled, expecting some kind of puzzle or game, perhaps a cairn.  As he watched, the pebbles, without being touched or pushed or anything he could see, flew off the rock and chased a squirrel that sprinted for its hollow.

He felt fear and elation and then confusion.  He didn’t know what he felt.  He knew he felt closer to her and a little scared at the same time.  She had a talent too!  What to do? Let her know he knew?  If he did, he could share his talent with her.  Would she think he was a freak?  Would it bring them closer together? This was neither the right time nor the right place to have a discussion about sixth sense or ESP or magic or voodoo or whatever it was.  There was no good time or place for some conversations.  She took him to a Dr. Phoon.  The healer had used her magic to take metal out of his back.  Perhaps then would have been the right time and place.

Jack waited until Lee paced back up the trail, looked at her watch and sat back down.  She pulled her parka close around to keep out the chill of wind and thirty minutes alone.  He stood, took a step closer, and breathed her in.  He reached out to touch her and stopped. He took four steps back and coughed. She let out a girlish squeal and moved into his arms.  Her look of relief, and the salty damp smell of her mixed with perfume was a tonic.

They shouldered their heavy packs and leaned into the hill.  They stopped the march at three, having looked since two for a campsite.  He wanted overhead cover, knowing the enemy could have air power.  For all he knew the sons-of-bitches had access to NSA satellite imagery.  If they did, his plan for the compound would fail very quickly.

They weren’t in cave country, but found the next best thing.  A slab of rock had fallen away, split vertically off a cliff face that begged for a climb.  The fifty foot tall splinter had driven itself into the earth at the bottom of the cliff, then fallen into a lean-too.  The split had occurred long enough ago for scree to build, mostly blocking the back. There was a natural chimney and crawl-way if they had to leave by the back door. The floor of their temporary home was littered with boulders from the size of his fist to that of medicine balls.

Moving the smaller rocks was Lee’s job.  He lifted the smaller boulders and levered the bigger ones away using a staff as thick as his calf that looked like it had been singed off a pine by lightning.  The triple devils of altitude, exercise, and fear chewed at their strength. When they finished they were stoned from exhaustion.

The package of linguini with alfredo sauce followed by mug after mug of hot chocolate tasted better than food had a right to.  They had eaten bars high in protein and fat on every other break.  He ate as much on the trail as he could.  He never knew when he’d be able to stop for food and any excuse to feed his natural gluttony was a good one. They finished dinner by four-thirty just as the sun dropped behind the mountains to the west.  The air temperature fell as if a curtain drawn. By five-thirty it was twenty degrees colder.

The sky was clear to the west and stars shone like a carpet of light.  Their tired went away for a little while.  They moved inside the tent.  He again thanked the gods of technology.  The three-season tent that weighed six pounds would keep away anything but the strongest blizzard.  His bag, which weighed less than four pounds, would keep him warm down to thirty below zero, Fahrenheit.  His boots kept his feet warm and dry in near-Arctic conditions.  The two stoves, which weighed only ounces, put out as many BTUs as fireplaces that had roasted sides of beef in king’s castles.

They snuggled as much as they could.

He brought it up.  “You know we never talked about how the doctor fixed my back.”

Lee asked, “Why do you need to know how?  I don’t know how the machine language in my Mac works, but I happily use it every day.”

Jack heard something in her voice, caught a feeling. “I’m beating around the bush.  While I was sneaking around in the woods I saw you using magic to throw pebbles.  I have a talent as well.  Mine detects danger almost all the time.  And I can feel fear.  I can detect fear.  And, sometimes, more often than not, I can persuade people to do things, to at least tell me things.  That’s how I had the big payday in the market, back when the tech bubble burst.  It was this big…wave of fear and panic.  People in the City went from being crazy with excitement to crazy with fear, but not so crazy that they couldn’t sell stocks.”

Jack watched Lee’s beautiful face as he talked. He had already decided he would never play poker with her.  He renewed his promise to himself.  At first she wouldn’t let her face let him in.  When she saw that he loved her as much, maybe more because of her talent, and she let him in.

Lee said, “I knew you had a talent.  I heard too many stories about your ‘intuition.’ I watched you with people.  I found out about my talent when I was six.  My father had the same talent.  My little brother, the one who died on the motorcycle, had a different talent.  His was much like yours.  My father had a theory that it was some genetic change in just a few people.  He thought most humans had talents in ancient times and that they went away, were forced away, or they would be killed by the priests and shamans.  He thinks the bomb tests in the forties and fifties and sixties maybe changed some genetic code so now they are back.”

They talked, snuggling as much as they could, until late, almost 8:00 PM, when they both fell into exhausted sleep.

Jack had the omen dream again that night.  This time his chute had no static line.  He was first man in the door and the jumpmaster was mad at him for holding things up.  The jumpmaster used dental floss, instead of a static line, tying it to the end of the chute and looping it over the cable.

Jack said, “You tied a granny knot.”

The jumpmaster said, “It’s a square knot,” and kicked him out the door.  Jack tumbled out the door knowing his chute wouldn’t open.  When he reached for the reserve handle he pulled away a glass doorknob.

He woke to Lee shaking him gently and whispering, “My precious man, it’s all right.  Just a dream, baby.”

He held on to her until his heart slowed enough to talk without gasping and tried to tell her about the dream until sleep took him again.

JACK AWOKE THAT morning in Lee’s arms. She’d put on three more layers of her clothes and some of his. She wore glove liners and mittens.  Leaving her legs inside the bag with him inside his, she held him.  Ice had formed on the inside of the tent, and in the water bottle he put between his bag and pad the night before, there was a mixture of slush and water.

The thermometer said two degrees.  Lee didn’t wake as he slid out of the tent.  His trapezius muscles felt as if they were permanently dented.  His gluteus felt as if someone had hit them with a hammer.  His quads felt worse.  He swayed and leaned and stretched through a Tai Chi warm up for ten minutes before he could move without groaning.

He had the stove going and water on for tea and coffee, minutes after that.  Lee and he had discovered a matching taste for oatmeal.  The strong coffee smelled so good he expected squirrels to be lined up with nut-cups ready.

Lee was in as bad shape as he was, but recovered faster.  Jack’s ten minutes of agony were cut to five for her.  Except for her knee. The left one was spongy right below the cap and swollen.  The best treatment was rest, but they couldn’t do that.  Instead, they had ice, ibuprofen, and knee wraps.  Jack saw that Lee was bothered to her core.  At first he thought it was from the pain in her knee and didn’t understand.

Pain is a quirky thing.  He had known women who’d go through natural childbirth without a whimper.  The same woman would cry and whine as if tortured from the soreness after a first workout.  He had seen her in pain before and this reaction didn’t jibe.

He knelt in front of her, the icy cold of the ground coming up through his trousers into his knees.  He took his gloves off and knelt on them as he gently took her face in his hands.  He looked deep into her.

Jack had seen a look like hers before.  Olga Boganskia’s car had been in the shop and he gave her a ride to school to pick up her little boy at the end of his first day of kindergarten.  A little girl stood off to the right by herself.  The little girl had the same look on her face that Lee did. The little girl’s look said she was certain her parents had abandoned her at this strange place and she was never going to see them again.

He said, “If it comes to that, I’ll carry you on my back.  If I can’t carry you, I’ll stay with you until you can move again. I will not leave you.”

She smiled, pretending she believed him.  They broke camp.  Within an hour she walked without a limp.  Temperature rose and wind speed fell as cloud cover moved in.  The air smelled wet and felt thick enough to take a bite out of.  Snow came.

It was one thing to intellectually wish for a snowstorm to use as cover.  It was a thing of a totally different kind to be out when a major mountain storm hit.  It was impossible to imagine how fast snow could accumulate.  They walked along on a bare, dry trail and two hours later pulled on snowshoes to get through the foot of new snow. Six hours after that they buckled on cross-country skis for the dip down into the Grand Canyon of the Yosemite.

The change in weather was a blessing for Lee’s knee.  Tendonitis was a repetitive motion injury.  Lee’s stride changed from the narrow one-foot-almost-behind-the-other she used walking in boots to the figure-eight swivel in snowshoes.  Then her stride changed again to the sliding, lifting, planting glide of cross-country skis.  This helped her knee for a while.  The changes were brutal on her musculature and cardiovascular system and easy on her knees-at least for a while.

Jack hated cross-country skiing. He felt like he was on a snow-covered NordicTrack, stuck in a giant freezer, never quite getting into the rhythm he saw others use.  Today it felt right.  He would lift and slide and plant, swing his weight forward, push off with the pole and nearly glide over the snow.

Lee set the pace and he discovered she was a great cross-country skier.  At first he kept up with her, entranced by the bunch and flow of her butt muscles under the white tights she’d slipped on.  They were both in white, draped with white where they didn’t have white clothing.  Soon he was gasping as he tried to suck in enough oxygen to keep up.  He tried to yell out to her to slow down.  She heard the croak and glided back to where he stopped, barely able to stand.

They were too exposed to stop and confronted by a problem he hadn’t planned for.  The sharp rocks and deep crevices were all camouflaged in white.  They could be skiing over what looked smooth and inviting and was actually a death-trap, waiting for one of them to take a fall they couldn’t recover from.

They couldn’t stay out in the open and couldn’t move quickly across the snow without risking injury or death.  They headed on again, him leading this time, their pace slowed to a tenth of what it had been hoping to hit the tree line.

She said, “Let’s dig out the tent, climbing harness, and rope.  Extend the shock-corded tent pole and wrap where it connects with duct tape. Slide the pole down into the snow ahead of us and pull it out checking each few feet.”

“Damn I love my smart, hot, sexy, did I say smart, woman?”

It wasn’t perfect, but they made do.  They put on the harnesses and, using a quick release set-up, clipped themselves together.  They found shelter and settled in for a hot lunch of macaroni and cheese, mixing in whey protein, more mugs of hot chocolate and as much dried fruit as they could eat.  Dessert was Girl Scout cookies they’d bought in Manteca in front of Wal-Mart.

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Chapter 78

The technician took one last look at his instruments and made the call. “Room is secure, no critters of any kind.”  He had finally found a company he liked working for.  A good bunch of men and women, mostly vets like him.  They didn’t treat everyone the same like in the military, but there was that same sense of teamwork and pride.

The officers, management, were pretty good too.  They let people do things their own way, even encouraged it, as long as goals were met.  They were uncompromising on standards, but then so was he.  It almost seemed like they looked for chances to catch you doing things right.  That made what he had to do even worse.

The technician didn’t want to do what the priest asked, but he had no choice.  He loved his God and his Church more than anyone or anything.  The Church was really all he had after the wife left with the kids.  It was crazy.  He didn’t hit her nearly as hard as his father hit his mother almost every weekend.  The technician shook his head.  The priest said that the owner of the company was helping someone who was trying to hurt the Church.  The technician tried to explain it to the priest. If he did what they wanted him to do he would get caught and lose his job.

As the technician stored all of his tools and equipment neatly in their labeled boxes he checked off the job on his iPad.  Maybe there was a way to look like he was giving the priest what he wanted and not really do it.  Damn it, he liked the people he worked with and they loved the boss.  Hell, the boss was crippled up, just like him.  The boss was a decorated ex-ranger. And, the boss was a black man who’d made it in lily-white world of corporate security at that.  The technician had finally found a home.  He had to find a way to serve two masters.

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Chapter 77

Lundy Canyon was on the northern side of Yosemite Valley, and slightly to the east.  Jack planned to hike north out of Tuolumne Meadows, through the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne, over the mountain passes northeast and then down into the Canyon.

He told Lee what he thought they’d need for the trek.  She broke the purchases up into two groups, perishables and non-critical supplies from Wal-Mart and the trekking supplies from Bass Pro Shops.

Lee asked, “Take one more look at the list.  I’d rather buy things that we don’t need than do without.”

He looked at the lists and at the bottom wrote, “Make Sweet Love,” and underlined it.  Then he handed the list to Lee.  An hour later, just before he went to sleep so fast it was like throwing a switch, he watched her walk to the table, humming to herself, and cross that item off the list.

Thanks to Lee’s organizational skills, they finished shopping in less than two hours.  They’d picked up two internal frame packs, a reasonably light cold weather tent, boots and subzero-degree bags, light weight sleeping pads thick enough to keep the cold ground off the bags, snow shoes, cross country skis, rope and all the other necessaries.

His war experience taught him footwear was critical. You only had to pour blood out of your boots once to know how important proper fitting boots were.  Lee’s feet were small, but she wore a woman’s standard size six.  His boots should have been a problem and weren’t.  Sports Authority had a size-thirteen-wide Vasque boot.

As they drove back to the hotel to put everything together, Lee asked, “You fucked her, didn’t you?”

She asked it with as much emotion as she might ask, “You ran into her at the grocery store, didn’t you, or, please pass the salt?”  He drove on.

He told her the story-all of it.  They arrived at the hotel before he was done talking.  He drove around Manteca while he finished.  At first she sat hunched forward leaning out into the door.  As the story went on she leaned further back into her seat.

She didn’t say anything as they assembled gear.  She didn’t say anything as they carried their packs to the car.  He drove deeper and deeper into winter as they approached the park. There was a light dusting of snow at the top of the pass.  The sign said Tioga pass was still open, but be prepared for sudden and severe winter weather.  On the news last night they heard this was the latest the pass had ever been open.  The grandfather of all storms sat off the coast, trying to fight through the high-pressure system that made this the driest fall on record.  When it hit, it was going to be a killer storm.  Jack needed it to be.

Lee said, “There are things I didn’t tell you.  They got to Sir Ian.  He was fine six days ago, but we couldn’t wake him, let’s see what day is this?  It must be four days ago now.  His doctor thought stroke at first and was going to run all the tests, but I called Mai Li Phoon.  The minute she saw him she knew.  His valet was missing and they found him in the wine cellar, dead of the same poison.  Sir Ian’s doctor wanted to do a transfusion.  Uncle Chin wouldn’t let them and then Dr. Phoon said okay as long as she could give Sir Ian a potion afterwards.  He’s recovering but his mind doesn’t seem to be as sharp and Dr. Phoon says his liver is permanently damaged, how much we won’t know for a while.”

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Sir Ian was as much a part of the family as if he were Chinese.  Uncle Chin’s father had carried Sir Ian’s father out of Selarang Barracks, what most people thought of as Changi Prison, on his back.  He had done this because Sir Ian’s father had saved his life.  Twice.

“Some of our businesses require couriers to travel under assumed identities, sometimes disguised.”

Jack didn’t want to speculate on what requirements those were.

“Outfitting me with phony papers and the granola look I wore after switching with my cousin wasn’t a problem.  Getting my cousin, who was using my passport after I landed, into Vancouver alive had been a problem. Convincing Uncle Chin to let me come had been near impossible.  I finally told him I would go with or without his help.  He knew the chances of me arriving alive were much better if he helped.”

He listened to her story.  His hands hurt.  He looked down to see that he was trying to choke the life out the steering wheel.  He relaxed his grip, knowing he would extract retribution on the people who had tried so hard to kill both the women he loved.

Jack had never been to Yosemite in winter without deep snow on the ground.  In his youth he’d stayed at Sunnyside Walk-In, now known as Camp 4, partied and climbed. He was always the biggest guy on the rock.  As an adult he stayed in the Ahwahnee.  Yosemite in winter was a hard beauty that most people never saw, unlike its lush spring in every way.  Winters in the Sierra Nevada were swift and brutal.  Tourists always expected California to be warm and predictable, like Malibu. Yosemite in winter was not a predictable thing.

This winter wasn’t picturesque enough to fill the lodge yet.  Stories of the upcoming storm kept most people away so Lee had no trouble getting them another room.  She moved cleanly with no sign of stiffness or pain.

“How is your neck?”  He asked.

She looked blank for a second and then said, “Oh, you mean the trouble with the van.  I’m fine.”

At five thousand feet, he was blowing hard carrying loads up two flights of stairs.  He watched Lee bending and lifting, leaving her the sixty-pound backpack.  She lifted it without effort, slipped both arms into the straps, and carried it upstairs.  She was barely winded when she dropped the pack on the floor.

He needed an ammo bearer for his assault on the Church’s compound in Lundy Canyon. She was elected.  He put a woman he once loved on a train so she could be with the woman he loved differently, but more than anyone.  Now he was taking the woman he loved more each day into danger certain.  What kind of bastard was he?

“WHEN ARE YOU going to tell me the real plan?”  Lee asked.

The coming storm was to be his Haley’s Comet.  He’d come in during the worst storm of the century almost exactly forty years before.  If he arrived in the Canyon five days hence, it would be for his birthday.  What kind of birthday fireworks he saw depended on the reception party the Church had planned for them in Lundy Canyon.  Forty years was enough if it had to be.

“It is an assault on the Church of the Seven Sisters compound.  We’ll go in over the top, walking out of Tuolumne Meadows, through part of the Grand Canyon of the Yosemite, over the crest and then down the eight thousand feet into the canyon.  If we are lucky, it will be in the middle of the worst storm to hit the high Sierra in years.”

She listened to the whole story and the plans within plans within plans. She stared at him for a while.  He couldn’t read her face. Then Lee said in what he hoped was admiration, “You know, Jack, Uncle Chin is right.  You are one crazy motherfucker!”

She had him go through the whole thing again while she took notes.  “Have you accounted for what happens when we leave the car in Tuolumne Meadows?” she asked.

He hadn’t.  She pointed out that it would be counterproductive to have the Park Rangers run a search and rescue for them while they tried to run and hide.  Lee’s solution was to leave a note saying to please not tow the car, because they had gone into town to get replacements for the bad plug wires.  They had food for eight days.  Was that enough for five days at altitude in the cold, Lee asked?  The questions she asked were the same kind of questions Meghan would have asked.

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Chapter 76

Police in films and books staked out airports, bus lines, and train stations.  In real life, cops watched hours of traffic camera video and pressured snitches.  Americans are a nation of drivers with an occasional airplane ride.  A few city dwellers used public transportation, or even more un-American, walked or rode bikes, but mostly it was cars.

They took BART under the Bay to the Amtrak station in Oakland and from there boarded the Capitol Corridor to Sacramento. They’d timed their trip to hit early rush hour. Most of the people got off in the East Bay, but a few got off in Suisun and another big chunk got out in Davis.  That still left the train almost half full as they pulled out of Davis.  They’d bought the Sacramento Bee and the Auto Trader at the kiosk before boarding.

Lee said, “Let the expert do it,” as she grabbed the paper out of his hand and looked through the newspaper.  She hummed happily and circled car ads.  Even the humming sounded like a gay guy.

When they were in the City she had been content with giving him an occasional pinch on the butt.  As they neared Sacramento she turned it up a notch.

“Baby,” Lee asked in a stage whisper, “Why won’t you kiss me?  You still love me don’t you?”  She said with a particularly whiny voice that carried through the sudden quiet of the car.

He looked up, nervous.  No one seemed to take notice except a woman who had Christian Coalition written all over her pinched and glaring face.

“Damn it, are you trying to draw attention to us?”

“I am making us invisible, you just don’t see it.  People will look away, normal people, to give lovers the privacy they are due.  The few who are left that still judge will look away in discomfort.  What people will remember was a gay couple having a little lover’s quarrel. There is no way people are going to connect us with Lee and Jack.”

Jack thought about what smart Lee said. Her over-the-top affection was like a magician’s misdirection on stage.  The cop shop in Sacramento was only a block from the Amtrak Station, so they caught the first local bus they could find, heading down J Street toward the college. They had to keep the cash transaction for the car small enough to avoid reporting it, yet they needed dependable transportation.  They settled on eight possibilities.  The first ads she called said the owners kept tight service records.

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Jack listened to Lee grill the first guy about compression testing and miles on the engine.  She didn’t like the answers and hung up.  The second one had a message on his cell that said the car had been sold.  The third one was a Nissan Maxima.  The ad said the owner was an Air Force recruiter who was being transferred. The guy was home, and as Lee went through her checklist she smiled.

“Dwayne, has it ever been wrecked?” She asked.

She frowned at the answer, then covered the mouthpiece and said, “His wife hit the carport with it last week, little ding to the right front quarter panel. Dwayne says it’s not bad. I believe him.”

The first two cabs they called didn’t show.  The third asked to see the money.

“It’s a tough neighborhood, mostly black,” he said as he answered Lee’s unasked question. “Imagine how the cabbies in the City would act if you called from Golden Gate Park and said you wanted a ride to Hunters Point or East Oakland.”

They left the tree-lined solidity of J Street for the freeway and took the Fruitridge exit off Highway 99.  It was old-home week for Jack.  He’d started Judo at the Sacramento Judo Club.  The Sensei who became Jack’s surrogate father had been master’s heavy weight champion of the United States.  Two and sometime three-a-week ass whippings there toughened him and taught him discipline was the key.

They took a left on a street that was sad enough to make you cry. Two of the first five houses were boarded up and another had been burned to the ground. From the smell coming into the cab, the burn was recent.  Further down, the houses were neater with less trash on lawns.  The last street they turned on was mostly single-family older homes, with a lot of pride of ownership.  The Maxima sat under the carport of the next to the last one on the left.  Dwayne’s and his neighbor’s places looked well cared for.

Dwayne sat in a lawn chair, bouncing a girl-toddler on his knee and watching the game through the door open into the living room.  He was about the same height as Jack without the boots and about the same weight. He had the perfect body some people seem blessed with and everybody else puts hours in the gym trying for.  He had the shaved arms and legs of the serious bodybuilder.  His muscles stood out and his veins showed clearly through his skin like he was closing in on contest time.

Dwayne’s wife came out with another baby girl on her hip.  Lee did all the talking as Jack stood and played winking, hide and seek with the first little girl.  At first she scowled and twined herself through her daddy’s legs.  He talked her mom into giving him some rubber balls their Rottweilers hadn’t chewed up yet.  He entertained them juggling.  He started with a simple fountain and finally broke a sweat juggling three balls one-handed.

It was the cleanest lived-in house he had seen in a long time.  His place was cleaner, but he had maid service and didn’t have an infant and a toddler.  No, that wasn’t right.  His former house was now a messy hole in the ground, covered in rubble.

Aleesha wasn’t obsessed with her body the way Dwayne was.  His casual examination of the house revealed the plaque from Mississippi Valley State honoring her efforts in student government.  Study books for the LSAT were out and open on the kitchen table.

Lee’s first thought was to give the guy cash so they could get out of town quick.  After a heated discussion in the back of the cab, she agreed, if she liked the car, to go to a branch of “her” bank and buy a cashier’s check made out to the fellow for part of the cost and cash for the rest.

They piled into the car, him in the back, Dwayne in the front, with Lee driving.  After Lee put the car through its paces, Dwayne said, “You sure can drive.”

They dropped Dwayne off after they took him to his bank to deposit the check.  Aleesha and the children waived from the door.  Lee hit freeway doing nearly ninety while she whipped into the right lane to pass a gray primer-covered Chevy pickup that hadn’t pulled over quickly enough.

“If you’ll do CHIP watch we can make real time.”

“I have a better idea.  Slow down,” he said.

Maybe it was the edge in his voice.  Lee looked over at him sheepishly and asked, “I guess we aren’t in a race, are we?”

They were in a race.  It was a race they might not win. If his theory were right, losing would mean much more than the end of their lives.  Losing the race would leave fanatics with way too much cash to do bad things. The thought he hadn’t shared with Dvora was about something worse.  If his theory was right, the Church was doing what the allies had tried to do to the Germans in World War II.  The allies had bombed factories, rail-yards, power lines and bridges.  They were destroying the enemy’s capacity to do battle. Right before the invasion of Normandy, they had destroyed defenses that might stop them.  The Church was doing the same thing. They made sure any promising antiviral research was stopped in the private sector.  He was certain that antiviral biotech the world over was being sabotaged.  And, he was certain the Church was directing government research and grants to universities into dead ends.  This all only made sense if they were destroying defenses in preparation for an attack.  And that attack would be a virus.  He hoped like hell the virus wasn’t ready yet.

THE HOTEL was called the Starlight Inn.  It sounded romantic.  After turning down the first two rooms, Jack figured it took its name from how little light there was in the rooms.  The smell of the gas heater had him thinking carbon monoxide poisoning, but after he cranked the heat up all the way, his worries about frostbite were stronger.  The shower was tepid and took way less time to fill the tub than it did to drain.  At least the bed was firm and the sheets weren’t stained.  Best yet, according to the What to See and Do in Scenic Manteca pamphlet, there was a Wal-Mart and a Bass Pro Shop in town.

Lee and Jack had been pushed off the news by the boat wreck.  Michael Ilyich Riyalin and his rock star wife were both missing.  They missed a check-in signal the night before and either ignored or hadn’t heard the calls from the Coast Guard. Their boat ran aground on a sand bar forty miles northeast of their last reported position. No distress call beforehand, lifeboat still tied down.

“We’re going to die, aren’t we?”

Jack didn’t answer right away.  “I have a feeling about this.  Call it ESP or my second sight or a hunch, but I don’t see us buying it any time soon.  I guarantee if we do go, we’ll take a bunch of these fucking fanatics with us.”

He was going to tell her some bigger lies than the fairy tale he’d just spun before the week was out.  His plan didn’t include taking her with him on his final assault.  The pervasiveness of their enemies astounded him.  The newshounds recycled a quote from Riyalin’s ex-wife. According to her, “The Bitch Goddess” (as she called the rock star) had not only hooked Riyalin with sex, but “He’s been acting so irrationally I am sure he is on drugs.”

Two ex-employees of the company, one the ex-CFO, agreed that Michael had been acting irrationally recently.  Reuters had two stories of rumors about quality control of their new AIDS treatment Riyalinaze. In both stories the informants were “highly-placed industry sources who commented only on the condition they remain anonymous.”

There was a voicemail from Bob.  The research Bob had done was even more alarming.  He was convinced that the Church of the Seven Sisters had deep connections in the Christian Fundamentalist movement in the States.  This translated to political pressure, which was why the FBI, SEC, and Treasury Department had gone ahead with their investigations.  The agencies pursued inquiries despite there being no evidence to start the inquiries, much less pursue them.

There was a strong streak of homophobia in the Christian Fundamentalist movement.  Backlash to liberal support for all things gay was part of it, but the reaction was strong enough to mean real money. The Church of the Seven Sisters had made over $50 million their team knew about simply from shorting a few stocks.  Taking into account the gains from even average performance in the market over the last ten years and they had over a hundred million to bribe with.  Double that number if they were playing foreign stocks as well.

Judge White’s order moved the boy out of CYA and into isolation at a juvenile facility in Sacramento.  Judge White had done this despite Jack becoming, in the eyes of the state of California and now the United States Government, a suspected murderer, kidnapper, and conspirator.  If Jack lived through this, he would have to find a way to thank the Judge.

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Chapter 75

“Stop!” Her Grace told the wheelchair.  The wheelchair stopped in time to position her perfectly in front of three large computer screens.  She went through the awkward steps she needed to establish secure email contact.

The message from Canada was one of failure.  Again.  The woman they had kidnapped was a stand-in.  Through amazing bad luck, the woman’s body, which should never have been found, was found immediately.  This woman was a cousin who had been sacrificed so Hong Lee could enter the country.  Her Grace entertained a moment of doubt about the Church’s ability to deal with this foe.  These people were resourceful and tenacious. Years ago she might have entertained a brief thought of admiration or respect, perhaps even questioned her decision to go down the road she had chosen.

She had burned with her fire of faith for too many years now to think of anything but her mission.  Nowhere in her mind would she acknowledge that she hated those who had enjoyed the pleasures of the flesh and not been given the virus.  She had flowered and never known the love of a man.  Years ago she had railed against the unfairness of it all.  She now understood that this had been His way to show her that even the most righteous were at risk as long as the plagues of marital infidelity, homosexuality, and drug abuse stalked the world.  Now her only feelings were the need to carry out her savior’s will.

Sometimes she wished she still had her father.  She thought about those times when she was a little girl and he slipped into her room after mother passed out.  He had made her feel so good and she had given him pleasure.  She watched on her monitors as her blood pressure and respiration climbed.  If she stayed on this course of thought the alarm would ring and the doctor would order her sedated again.  Enough, she told herself as she used her tremendous will to relax.  She planned the next steps.

They would be able to use the priest who heard Robert Smith’s confession.  She thought long and hard about how to proceed.  Every time they had come up with a way to thwart these people and act on it, these people had countered.  This time she would try a different approach.  She was certain these people would not simply lay low.  They would take action.  She was sure this action would be violent and directed at her.

Once she learned of their plan she would wait until the last possible moment to counter their plan so they would not have a chance to create another. They would take the man and the woman and ransom them.  Then they would kill them.  Perhaps she could find a way to kill one of them herself?  Perhaps by pushing a button to have one electrocuted or blown up?  She fell asleep with a smile on her face dreaming of the brother burning on the cross. She woke from the dream because she heard him screaming for forgiveness for his sins.

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Chapter 74

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The adrenaline letdown hit Jack and Lee as they walked through the door. They lay in bed to wait.  The memorial piece on Donald O’Hare filled local news. One of the interviews talked about Donald’s drive and ambition.

“What drove you?” Lee asked.

It was a question Jack would have never asked himself not all that long ago, until therapy before the divorce.

“I never had any heroes.  A shrink once said that was why I was always dissatisfied, never content, driven.  Mom and Pop were drunks and beat me bad.  It took me years to see they did about the best they could with the training they had, simply passing on the beatings they took regular when they grew up.”

He lay stroking Lee, not having to wonder how big an asshole he was to have fucked Dvora.

Jack said, “My parents took me to the library once when I was in the third grade.  It saved my life.  I didn’t like to read.  I’d rather be out fighting or stealing, so I wandered.  I found this little room upstairs.  I pulled down a book.  It was on the Special Forces.  Six hours later I was still reading.  Mom and Pop looked all over thinking I had run away again.  I’d discovered the heroes that had been missing in my life.  I tried to be like them.  I’d always hated bullies like Pop.  The Special Forces motto was ‘De oppresso liber’: To liberate the oppressed.”

Jack moved his numbing arm from under Lee’s head, shook it out and put it back.

“I knew that I had to get super-fit and educated to join.  I didn’t have to join to kick bullies’ asses, though. I started working out in the fourth grade.  I tried to get Mom and Pop to buy more protein.  As soon as I was old enough I got a job under the table at a local dairy part-time so I could get whey protein.  I got big and strong and lost a lot of fights. I studied martial arts and fought even more.  Pretty soon I was winning.  I was thirteen when I first fought my father to a draw.  He’d put me in the hospital ‘cause I’d tried too soon, when I was twelve.  I was fourteen when I kicked his ass.”

“What about you?” he asked.

Lee played with the hair on his chest for a few seconds before she answered, “I was given anything I wanted, as long as I earned it.  It could be a simple thing, new underwear, a toy, or a trip.  I would have to hit some kind of goal.  When I was young the goals were easy.  My father and mother knew, part of Chinese culture, that many rich people ruin their children.  Although my father was usually not…affectionate, I knew that he loved me.”

She rolled over on top of him and bit his ear.

“What did you do that for?” He asked after he’d pried her jaws apart.

“To make sure you were listening.  My mother tried to interest me in the more traditional Chinese role, but I wanted to work with my father.  He always traveled so much.  I was in boarding school in Switzerland when he died.  My parents did so many wonderful things for me.”

She was silent for so long Jack thought she had fallen asleep.  She lay on her back under the filthy ceiling, and said.  “I have so many stories to tell you.  Once, when I was eight, I tired of a doll and left it in the park.  The next time my father was in town I was awakened very early.  He and my mother dressed in peasant clothes.  They dressed me the same way.  We went down to the docks and I watched my father ask for work loading and unloading small ships.”

She lifted his arm so she could lie in the crook of his arm again.  She said, “I did not understand why I missed my piano lesson.  We ate peasant food and sat on our heels the whole day. My mother sat next to me on a mat and put beads on strings making cheap jewelry.  I was told to watch and be still and then help my mother.  It was very hard to put the little beads on the string.  Eventually the day ended.  My father could barely walk because of fatigue.  My mother had to go to the, what is your word…chiropractor… the next day.”

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Lee shifted to make herself more comfortable.  “We sat down at the dinner table that night.  My mother and father asked if I knew that I was lucky and that we were rich.  I was confused.  Then my father put the money on the table he had earned that day and my mother added a smaller amount.  They asked me to count the money.  I did.  They had both worked twelve hours that day at jobs to earn a third of the money the doll cost that I had left in the park.  This is only one of the lessons they taught me.”

Jack lay holding Lee, thinking about how happy he was… and how sad.  He thought about how happy he was for her.  He thought about how sad he was for himself and all the other little Jacks of the world who had learned to be too vigilant and hyper-observant. For all the little boys and girls who learned to defend themselves at too early an age.  And, he was most sad for all those who didn’t learn.

You learned to be vigilant so if you fell asleep and the blows came you could defend yourself from the worst of it.  You couldn’t defend yourself completely.  That wouldn’t give them any satisfaction. If you were too efficient in your defense you might hurt them.  Then their anger would make them hurt you and somehow it would be your fault.  If it was real bad, you’d have to go to the emergency room and they’d ask questions.

That was your fault too.  It was better to be hyper-observant and not fall asleep if the drinking made their mouths narrow and cold.  They looked for a target, someone they could take their frustrations out on.  You were small and they were cowards, so they would take it out on you, because they couldn’t take it out on anyone else.

He knew he had to tell some of it to Lee.  Maybe he’d tell her all of it one day.  If it pushed her away, so be it.  The hour and a half passed quickly as they told each other things they sometimes hadn’t told themselves.

LEE AND JACK DROPPED their old selves into three separate dumpsters.  He wanted to burn the stuff, but there was a chance the smoke alarm in the hotel room might work. The green, rip-stop nylon gym bag had been replaced with a leather satchel, more in keeping with his new persona.  Lee’s white canvas shopping bag held most of the money.

The gangster was twenty minutes late.  There was a new suck mark near the base of his neck on the left side and he’d missed the second to the top button of his tight, black, silk shirt.  He languidly reached out a hand for the rest of the cash and, not bothering to count it, handed them the envelope.  As they stood checking the papers he pointedly snubbed the leggy hooker as she walked past, hunched over, trying to hide the new mouse under her left eye.

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