Willing Hostage (15 page)

“You're one to talk. You kill people.”

“I've never killed for sport, Leah.”

“Then for what, the government?”

He shrugged and walked on.

At the base of Big Marvine they snacked on dry granola and water. Leah lay back with her head on a soft part of her pack. The only good thing about hiking was that it felt wonderful when it stopped. Streaky clouds scudded before a wind that was not apparent below. They were early today.

He let her rest for a surprisingly long time while he broke twigs between his fingers, threw pebbles to crack like bullets against a log, scratched an ecstatic cat, looked often at the huge mound that rose behind them.

“Let's have lunch on top of Big Marvine,” he said suddenly, hurling a pebble so far that it cleared the log and Leah couldn't hear it land.

“You go ahead. I'll wait for you down here.”

“Cheese, rye, sausage, Maalox … you're about out of Maalox.” He put the lunch into a nylon stuff sack and tied it to his belt.

“That's because of your cooking. Leave the Maalox with me.”

“No Big Marvine. No lunch.” He lifted her from the ground so fast, she felt dizzy.

“I thought you were in a hurry to get to a telephone.”

“It'll take days to walk out of here. One afternoon won't matter that much.”

“The shepherd will see us.”

“He's seen us by now. They see everything. They don't have much else to do. Besides we're just a couple of backpackers.” He strapped the canteen and two rolled plastic bundles over his shoulder.

“What are those?”

“Ponchos. In case it rains. You don't have to carry anything.”

“Rain!” Leah sat down again.

“Just a precaution. Come on.”

“Only if you answer some questions first.” Anything to get out of climbing that damn mountain.

He rolled his eyes toward the clouds, shifted his weight from one foot to another, sighed, and finally said, “Okay. What?”

“Did you kill on orders from the CIA?”

“Leah, I was not an assassin like the fictional James Bond. Once in a great while I would get into a situation that I couldn't have gotten out of if I hadn't killed someone. My job was much less exciting than James Bond's, too. In fact, it was rarely exciting at all. Next question.”

“This property that has to get to the press—this information—you're not trying to start another Watergate or Pentagon Papers or … anything. Are you?”

His brow lowered to shadow his eyes. “What?”

“Look, I'm not brilliant, but I'm not completely uninformed.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.” His voice went flat and secretive. She sensed he was thinking hard.

“If the CIA and the FBI and an oil company are after these papers. And you have to get this information to the press. The government doesn't want you to …
How big is this thing
?”

“It's big, Leah.” He shifted his weight again and looked away. “I don't know how far up it goes, but.…”

She hoped he wouldn't go on, because she didn't want another Watergate and she didn't want to climb Big Marvine.

“I worked for this oil company,” he said finally. “I was placed there by the agency.”

“An American oil company?”

“Yes.”

“And your brother sold your ranch to an oil company. Oil shale?”

He nodded, his expression haunted. “I worked on a study with many other people. We looked into the possibilities of mining shale, strip, open pit.…”

“But the CIA wanted more information than what you had access to in your work?”

“There was a deal going. Between the government and the company.”

“But you worked for the government.”

“There are many forms of ‘the government,' Leah, separate, distinct, and suspicious of each other. It was a CYA sort of thing … it had to be. But I'd been out here, saw what was happening … what could happen. It was the first time I'd been home in years. If shale—”

“CYA' More bureaucratic alphabet soup?”

“It means, cover your ass. It's the dominant survival technique in organizations of any size, in and out of government. Leah, do you really want to know more?”

“No.” She felt sick.

She climbed Big Marvine with him.

Chapter Nineteen

They wore the hoods of their wind-shirts so that the shepherd couldn't determine the color of their hair, although Leah was sure he was too far away to see them. She could just make out his tiny horse graying beside a white tent.

The trail zigzagged constantly to get up the steep and completely open side of Big Marvine. Leah stopped looking down at about the fourth switchback. She decided Glade wanted to climb it only to keep her too winded to ask questions.

Goodyear had followed them a short way, but when Glade made it clear he wouldn't carry him, the cat returned to the bottom. Leah would have loved to go with him but her companion looked so stony she was afraid to say so.

She'd made little sense of what she'd learned. If she thought it all through carefully, she might be able to piece this story together. But Leah had taken in enough to know that—if he wasn't lying—that story might be more than she had any desire to tangle with. He was planning to expose another scandal and everyone was out to stop him. The murderer-spy had become a man with a mission and even more confusing.

By the tenth switchback, she began to hate him for making her climb, for taking her away from the civilized world, for being in such good shape that the climb didn't bother him, for involving her in this ridiculous situation of government and information and oil companies, and finally for existing.

She lost count of the switchbacks, stopped often to rest, was afraid to look down, afraid to look up.

Glade waited tight-lipped and impatient when she stopped to rest, spoke only to warn her of treacherous places in the path and then with curt civility. Another mood change. Because he'd told her too much?

At the end of the trail he stood with his hands on his hips, his breathing deep but even and Leah lying at his feet.

She didn't smoke, drink, overeat. She'd been in the habit of rigorous calisthenics since her modeling days, but she was not ready for the Rocky Mountains.

And they were still not on top of Big Marvine. The path disappeared but the terrain sloped upward past a line of scrubby pine bushes, all grotesquely bent over in the same direction by the wind, and farther on, a jumble of broken rocks on the skyline.

“This is as far … as I can go. I don't want … lunch. I'll wait here.”

“You've come this far, damn it.” He spoke through clenched teeth that contrasted with several days' growth of black beard. He looked like a wolf. His canine teeth seemed to have grown on the way up Big Marvine. “You're going to the top.”

“Why? So you can push me off?”

“Don't tempt me.” The rough hand on her arm again as he pulled her up. “Trust a woman to spoil the one good day I've had in months.”

They passed the line of scrub pine and headed for the rocky summit.

“If you start crying, I'll—”

“You'll what? Kill me?” Leah said sweetly. “Because I got you into a situation you couldn't get out of otherwise?”

He didn't answer, but pulled her along faster.

They ate lunch at the very top of Big Marvine, just as he'd said they would. The wind that had been blowing the clouds across the sky was with them now.

Leah drank the last of the Maalox and wolfed sausage, cheese, and rye as if she'd eaten nothing for days. She sat, as once before, between his legs with her back resting against his chest and one kidney against his gun. His body protected her from the cruelty of the wind but not from the razor rocks on which she sat.

The view was staggering, vaster than the one from their first camp on the rim. But she still couldn't see the third person on the Flat Tops, the shepherd, too tiny and insignificant a being to show up on the incredible panorama that finally reduced Leah to a need for confession.

She babbled to her sheltering spy about her mother and the view became comfortably distorted through tears.

“Christ.” The hard voice produced warm breath on the part in her hair. “And you found her?”

“I was just coming in to tell her that I'd lost another job. My mother was so fastidious … she took her clothes off before she got into the tub to slit her wrists. What I remember most is my own scream. It bumped off the tile and came back at me …”

“I thought you were in New York modeling underwear.”

“I'd quit that and gone to work as a secretary at a publisher's. But secretaries stayed secretaries in that company. Annette and Suzie kept complaining I wasn't doing my fair share so I transferred to the Chicago branch of the same publisher. I was still a secretary but we agreed to take turns living with Mother for one year each and that would give us two years off.”

The twin lakes looked like mere puddles. Clouds rimmed the sky white all around them, spilled like thin milk over flat-topped monsters in the distance.

“And then Suzie married Ed. That left two of us. And then Annette married Doctor Ralph. And Leah had Mother all to herself. I was fired from the publisher's because typing and filing bore me and they finally noticed it. I took a job as a sales clerk at a boutique—”

“And were fired because that bored you, too.”

“It went out of business. I was just going to break the news to my mother when I found her … dead.”

“So far your life does not sound like a roaring success.” There was no sympathy in his voice.

“I keep wondering how much farther down I can get. I did until I met you, that is.”

“Well, now you can get down a mountain.”

Before leaving the summit, they peered over the other side into a canyon lost in clouds. The sheer drop turned Leah's stomach. Something shiny under a corner of rock caught her eye and she bent to pick it up. “Coors Beer,” the label said. A strange thing to find at the top and the end of the world.

“What did you expect? The Ten Commandments?” He reached out to take the can from her. But it dropped to the ground between them as a new sound in the air came to them both at once.

“What is it? A plane?” she asked as they stumbled down the rocks and raced for the grotesque pine shelter.

“Helicopter.”

“After us?”

“I'm not taking any chances.”

Leah lay flat on her stomach and wiggled into a depression under curved branches. Glade crawled in behind her and they lay horizontal to the view and to the line of pine bush. She could just see the twin lakes over his dark head … and the military-looking helicopter as it cleared the side of Big Marvine.

It flew low over the plateau, circled the lakes, and angled gradually away toward the rim on which they'd camped that first night. Milk-thin clouds seeped in a slow tumble toward the helicopter. They could no longer hear its sound.

Leah felt Glade's body tense against her side as the copter turned and flew back toward them.

“What if they find our packs?”

“We've had it”

The helicopter, resembling a dragonfly in the distance, settled finally in the air … and then descended, landing beside the white tent of the shepherd. The miniature horse bucked and pulled at an invisible tether. Glade Wyndham made a nasty choking sound in his throat.

“Is there another way off this mountain?” she asked.

“No. We'll have to wait.” The fist next to her shoulder tightened until the black hairs on his fingers stood erect.

Now that she was out of the direct sunlight, the mountain's chill crept through her wind-shirt.

Two minuscule people moved from the stilled helicopter to the tent and then off toward the white specks of sheep.

“Maybe the shepherd didn't see us,” she said through chattering teeth.

“Not likely, but just hope, Leah. Hope hard.”

The two people disappeared. “Maybe the helicopter just came to bring the shepherd some food.”

“Anybody with an ounce of sense or knowledge about mountains wouldn't have brought a chopper in here now.” He put an arm across her chest and snuggled his warmth close against her. “It'll rain soon … at least fog. They won't be able to get it off the ground if they don't move fast. They'll be trapped up here. But so will we.”

The horse had settled down. Clouds trickled closer to the sheep. Leah thought of Sheila and the burning Volks. Her troubles with work and family suddenly seemed petty. “Glade, all those thing I said about my life.…”

“I know.” He nuzzled his hot face under her chin and kissed her neck. “You've had rough luck. Meeting me didn't make it any better. I'm sorry.” He slid sideways to lie on top of her and his weight and heat stopped her trembling. “You feel like a piece of ice.”

“I keep dreaming of that parka at the bottom of the mountain. What if Goodyear didn't go back to the packs?”

“He won't go near the shepherd because shepherds have sheep dogs.” He relaxed again and flattened her body into the depression in the earth.

She drew heat from him but felt the strangeness again at being here with this man at all. “Don't call me Leah Harper anymore and.…” She meant to add, “Don't kill me,” but his lips stopped her.

The horse and the helicopter stood motionless in the sun below, but milky mist shrouded the sheep and slithered toward the lakes.

“Your moods change so abruptly, it's hard to trust you.” Her legs, on either side of his, still felt the cold. Pine needles pricked through her jeans into her knees.

He chuckled and his ribs pressed against her. “What do you bet someone in Langley is saying that same thing about now?” He slid his arms under her, cradling her head in the palm of one hand, drawing back to look at her face. “You like your murderers to fit into the common mold, don't you?”