CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
“Scoobie Snack”
Wednesday afternoon.
The crash of gunfire filled the cave as slugs careened off millennia-old stalagmites, off the limestone flow and caromed around the chamber like a pack of livid hornets. Otto and Alvarez sought shelter beneath a limestone ledge, Otto hanging onto Steve’s collar and pulling him close.
The fusillade lasted four seconds but it seemed like forever. The gunman stopped firing and a roaring filled the chamber along with the smell of cordite. Otto’s ears rang with tinnitus. Every time this happened, he feared he would suffer permanent hearing loss but gradually the ringing subsided and he heard Steve’s rasping breath.
Alvarez was prone on his belly with pistol in hands. Otto scoped the terrain. The cave floor undulated like a frozen sea with water in some of the depressions. Otto whispered “stay” in Steve’s ear and crawled to his left into a depression that surfaced five meters away behind a fat stalagmite. Water seeped into his shirt chilling him.
He crawled up behind the pillar tearing his shirt and peaked around the base from the left. The chamber was the size of an aircraft hangar with numerous protuberances caused by dripping lime. The shooter could be behind any one of them. He thought about sending Steve but he didn’t want to lose his dog.
He could retrace his steps to the ordnance room and grab a couple of grenades but he wasn’t certain he could find the right route, it would take too long, and who knew what effect grenades would have down here? Images of the mountain crashing in on them clouded his brain. He had vivid memories of a
Li’l Abner
adventure wherein the hapless hillbilly was sealed inside a mine for a month with nothing to eat but mushrooms. He had gained a great deal of weight.
Otto had known a tunnel rat who used to get drunk and tell Otto the most harrowing stories of soldiers trapped underground, skewered with punji sticks dipped in human feces, rabid foxes and monkeys turned loose in the tunnels.
Those tunnels had been barely big enough for a man to squeeze through. The cave was enormous. But the atavistic fear was the same.
Otto looked back. Lying behind a ridge Alvarez signaled that he was going to try and circle behind the shooter moving counter-clockwise. Otto gave him the thumb’s up.
Otto inched clockwise keeping stalagmites and columns between him and the shooter. He heard a ka-chunk. The shooter was reloading. Otto ran up a smooth slope and hunkered behind a series of stalagmites that resembled a dog’s lower jaw. He looked through the gaps and there was Casey crouched in a natural bunker scanning the cave to Otto’s right. Casey was ten meters away. Otto was confident he could nail him with the Ruger.
A minute glimpse of Alvarez’s tan shirt alerted Otto to the agent’s presence at 160 degrees from where Otto stood. They had Casey in a crossfire without endangering themselves.
When all else fails, follow the rules.
“Casey!” Otto shouted. “Federal agents! Throw your weapons over the ridge and lie prone on the ground with your hands behind your head!”
Casey swiveled and squeezed the trigger. Three-oh-eight slugs slammed all around Otto sending cave chips flying. Alvarez fired three times striking Casey twice in the back. Casey staggered and went down. Vapor spewed from his mouth.
“Shit!” Otto exclaimed popping his head up and looking around. The nearest man-sized pond was twenty meters back. They’d never make it in time.
“GET DOWN GUS!” Otto shouted through cupped hands. Alvarez moved out of sight. They waited. A minute passed, then another. Otto was about to get to his feet when Casey went nova like one of those secondary IED bombs designed to catch first responders. An inner sun erupted turning the cavern into a dazzling light globe, blinding Otto who stupidly looked. A wave of heat washed over him growing in intensity. There was a fat crackling sound as the flames consumed flesh and sinew.
Then came the disturbing smell. Otto’s stomach rumbled. Steve growled and his hackles rose.
“You okay?” Otto shouted.
“I’m good!” Alvarez responded.
Otto dug his fists into his eyes as the intense combustion blazed once more and faded down to a glowing white worm. Otto stood and carefully made his way over the slippery rock toward the smoking remains. Alvarez approached from the other direction holding his pistol in both hands.
They stared at the blackened cave floor. The flames had not entirely eradicated Casey. His right leg from the knee down looked perfectly normal, except for the blackened point of bone protruding from the cauterized flesh. The remaining pant leg looked clean and creased.
“Steve, come!” Otto said.
The big dog loped up, gave Otto a courtesy lick, seized Casey’s leg in his jaws and retreated behind a stalagmite.
***
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
“The End of the Affair”
Wednesday afternoon.
Stella landed at DIA at eleven-thirty. At the airport, she went to the bottom level where the storage lockers were and retrieved her pistol and a box of nine mm shells. By the time she’d picked up her rental and headed north on the Interstate it was twelve-thirty. She’d tried calling back the number in her phone several times and each time it went to Pawnee Grove’s voice mail.
A very dry voice saying, “You have reached Pawnee Grove. We are unable to take your call right now so please leave a brief message and a number where you can be reached.” It sounded like a Shakespearean actor. Ian McKellan or somebody.
She took Baseline to Boulder, cut through town on Broadway and headed north through Lyons on 36. She found a Clear Channel station and listened to the news, recognizing the fiction surrounding Tyler’s death.
Fall my peach-shaped ass
, she thought.
He burned
.
An anti-terrorism expert spoke about the frightening phenomenon spreading among the world’s wealthiest nations: The U.S., Russia, China. Professional rabble-rousers parroted eschatological soothsayers in that whoever was incinerating capitalists and politicians was delivering justice on nature’s despoilers and exploiters of the poor.
Stickin’ it to the man!
Up against the wall, motherfucker!
Less sophisticated cultures went boogie bullshit. Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria Zimbabwe declared states of national emergency sending thugs swarming through villages and tenements looking for witches, seers, shamans and Satanists. Lynch mobs sprouted in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and the Philippines. The specter of a new Dark Age loomed, driven by fear, superstition, and black magic.
That’s what we’re up against, Stella realized, Black magic. What was magic but technology you didn’t understand?
It was the shape of the thing that frightened the most. Death by burning, traditionally reserved for heretics, warlocks, and witches, exploded throughout the third world. Only the Arab world seemed to escape the scourge.
What if they apprehended the perpetrators? Could she defend them?
Would
she defend them?
Stella smiled ruefully. No, of course not. And she wouldn’t be asked, thank God.
Sam’s death had left a Colorado-sized hole in her heart. She was not unaware of the shady deals, back-slapping and outright lies that were the stock in trade of every politician, but Sam had never personally short-changed her. He had always been honest about what he did and what he thought.
“Honey, I’d rather see you become a crack whore than a politician. ‘He brings disaster upon his nation who never sows a seed, or lays a brick, or weaves a garment, but makes politics his occupation.’ Kahlil Gibran. He was one smart A-rab.”
She saw with her own eyes the ever-revolving door of women in and out of Sam’s life but he had left her standing tall and unafraid. She patted the purse on the passenger’s seat feeling the hard metal inside. Otto had been predicting the collapse of civilization since they’d met. She wondered if he secretly longed for it. Men like Otto were no good in peace and times of plenty. They only rose when society fell.
At least Otto wasn’t the jealous type. She looked forward to seeing both her boys.
Estes was a clusterfuck. It took longer to get through town than it had to drive from Lyons. Eventually she turned north on Devils Gulch, the site of the grove circled in red magic marker on the map next to her. She hadn’t trusted GPS since it had directed her to a Baltimore neighborhood that looked like the aftermath of Dresden. She’d barely escaped with her life and a cracked back light.
It was three o’clock by the time she reached the Grove. She drove past the closed gate once without stopping and had to turn around. Yes, there was the gate and the correct mileage fencepost, but there was no one guarding it. She pulled off the narrow road and pulled up to the closed aluminum gate. She took out her cell phone to call Director Yee and alert her to the lack of security, but of course there was no service in the mountains. There would be a land line at the lodge.
Stella got out of the car and looked around. “Hello?” she called. Her words echoed back to her faintly. Something glinted in the grass. She saw the clipped padlock. She pushed the gate all the way open, drove through and put the vehicle in park. Shutting the gate behind her Stella got back in her car and drove through the pine.
She came around the bend and saw the lodge glowing gold in late afternoon sun against the blue lake, a postcard of how the world ought to be. There were a handful of official vehicles in the lot and a couple unmarked. Stella drove slowly toward the main lodge noting the Jeep in the handicapped spot. Seeing healthy people park in handicapped spots had always irritated her.
Gabe came out on the deck in blue jeans and a blue knit shirt with Pawnee Grove stitched on the breast in gold, grinning with his hands on his hips. He appeared to be the only one there. He stood at the top of the stair while she parked the car in a visitor’s spot, slung her purse over her shoulder and got out.
Why didn’t he come down the stairs?
She stood by her car for a minute. “Gabe!”
“Lookin’ good, babe! Come on up here!”
Something in his voice, a false note of bonhomie made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. She’d dealt with enough psychopaths to identify unnatural inflections, a certain glibness.
Gabe was a better actor than that.
She stayed where she was, “What’s going on?”
“Come on up here and I’ll show you,” Gabe breezily replied.
“Where is everybody? Where’s Otto?”
“Otto’s up the mountain! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. Come around to the veranda you can see him through the telescope.”
“Okay--let me grab my purse.” She slid back into the car, slipped her hand into the purse and found the Sig.
Stella went up the stairs eyes fixed on Gabe. As soon as she gained the veranda, Gabe wrapped her in his arms, drew her close and kissed her passionately, his erection obvious, hands slipping to her ass.
“Come on, beautiful,” he whispered huskily. “We have to make up for lost time.”
He took her arm and steered her toward a corridor. Stella twisted free.
This wasn’t Gabe.
“What’s the matter with you? Where is everybody?” she said calmly, slipping her hand into the purse.
Anger flashed behind the actor’s blue eyes and he grabbed Stella’s left wrist in both hands, dragging her down the corridor. Stella choked up on the purse strap and swung it at Gabe’s head as hard as she could. The pistol made a dull bonking sound on impact. Gabe staggered and let go.
Stella’s hand slipped into the purse, seized the Sig and thumbed off the safety.
Gabe stared at her as if she were an alien creature. His eyes flared yellow from within.
He charged.
Stella kicked him in the nuts and backed up several feet. An expression of shock appeared on Gabe’s face and he froze. Stella brought the pistol up and jacked a shell into the chamber. Gabe snarled. Vapor issued from his mouth.
He lunged.
Stella shot him five times in the chest.
***
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
“Down the Rabbit Hole”
Gabe flipped backward exploding into flame. Something sharp zinged across Stella’s scalp drawing blood. She sagged and put a hand to her head. The fireball filled the corridor and physically shoved Stella down the hall, and for an instant time stood still and she felt as if she were floating near the ceiling looking down from above. The blast knocked her four meters through the air and rolled over her leaving behind a rancid pong of burning flesh and a layer of slimy soot.
Gagging, she crawled on hands and knees through blinding smoke. The sprinkler system rained water. Gasping, she dragged herself into the lobby, pulled herself up the side of an overstuffed leather chair and collapsed coughing. The sprinkler system was site specific and did not affect the rest of the hotel.
She still had her purse. She opened it up and took out a tissue she used to rub the grit from her eyes.
Gabe, Gabe, Gabe. What have they done to you?
Stella was numb. She was sick at heart--beyond crying, in a state of shock. She ran a hand through her savaged hair and it came back red. Shrapnel. Her skin was sticky with Gabe’s incinerated remains. The gorge began to rise and she barely made it to the big bathroom off the lobby where she knelt before the porcelain god and heaved and heaved until there was nothing left but a bilious yellow fluid.
Stella got up coughing, went to the counter and looked at herself in the mirror. She looked like Baba Yaga after her cook pot explodes in her face. She’d seen enough of the corridor to know there were private rooms and she had to get out of those clothes.
There had to be a shower.
When she emerged from the restroom, the sprinkler system had shut down leaving a soggy mess in the hall.
She went to the front desk and tried the land line. Dead. Likewise the phone in the administrator’s office. She found the dead deputy dragged behind the portable bar in the big living room, blood trail cursorily wiped away.
Focusing her gaze on the wall, she went back down the corridor, through the black ring of Gabe’s death. Why hadn’t Gabe set the lodge on fire? Seventeen hundred degrees should have done the job, but it was as if the fire focused itself into a tiny sun.
On the other side of the blackened corridor, she found a room with the door open.
Inside was a typical hotel room with a made-up king-size and a private bath. Stella stripped off her filthy garb and took a shower turning the temperature as hot as she could stand it. She dumped an entire hotel shampoo on her head and worked it like pizza dough.
She toweled herself off, wrapping a green and gold Pawnee Grove towel around her head. She checked the dresser. It was filled with men’s clothes. She’d brought a change of clothing but it was still in the car. Salvaging only her bra, Stella put on jockey shorts, a loose-fitting pair of carpenter’s pants, a Pawnee Grove T-shirt and a Pawnee Grove sweatshirt. The Sig fit neatly in a front pocket. She found a beaded belt in the closet and threaded it through the loops. It was so long she had to tie the ends together.
Seeing that her room opened directly on the back deck Stella went outside and put her arms on the rail. God it was beautiful. She inhaled deeply feeling her lungs swoon with relief. Under any other circumstances she would have been awestruck. She inhaled deeply again, holding it in to cleanse her lungs of any memory of that awful cloud. A few meters to her right a white telescope and been set up on a tripod aimed at the mountain at two o’clock.
Stella had no idea which mountain Otto had climbed or even if the false Gabe had been telling the truth.
What had taken over Gabe’s body and why? Had it summoned her from Washington so it could rape her? That didn’t make sense. None of it made sense.
Girl, you’re thinking too small.
It was terrorism. Why else would it only target big shots?
Stella pulled up an Adirondack, perched on the end and peered through the telescope. The mountain gleamed gold, violet and white in the afternoon light. She saw two Rocky Mountain longhorns grazing on a ledge but no people. She moved her eye slowly, the way Sam had taught her, leaving no visible part of the mountain unobserved. She trained the telescope on the mountain at ten o’clock and worked it top to bottom. No sign there either.
Where was everybody?
Sam whispered in her ear. “Get back in your car and beat ass out of there, girl!”
But she couldn’t. Not until she had some answers. Sam had also told her to question fiercely and fearlessly.
Pawnee Grove was a land of dread. The dead deputy, the absence of personnel was unnerving and uncanny. There were supposed to be two FBI agents on the scene and at least two Larimer County Deputies. She stood and her scalp pulsed where the shrapnel had struck. She went into the lodge, into the kitchen in search of a First Aid kit. There was a wall bracket for one but it was empty.
Stella went out to the lobby and looked behind the desk finding a stack of maps of the property. She placed one on the desk and looked at it. Certainly, the garage/workshop would have a first aid kid. She went back through the lobby to the broad veranda facing the lake, turned left and down three steps to the ground. A black asphalt trail circled the lake and stopped at the garage/workshop, a large pole-barn building painted beige.
She entered the building through a side door that took her into an office. She tried the phone, but of course it was dead. She went from there into the garage proper, scanning the walls for the familiar red cross. And there it was, across the big garage at the workbench, clamped to the wall.
As she reached the bench, she looked left and saw the second deputy.
***