When they’d all had a good look, they settled in for the night, some of the men in sleeping bags, some with only survival blankets. Lewis wrapped himself in his bivvy sack, then dipped his finger into a single-serve packet of instant coffee and licked the crystals off his finger like he’d done with Kool-Aid when he was a kid. Kept his eyes on the edge of the bowl and watched for ghosts.
None appeared.
At first light they were up and moving, the air sparkling and surreal with no sleep and the anticipation of the day to come, the men quiet as they checked their gear and rolled their shoulders in the cold. Harms, the sentry, came in complaining that his balls were frozen, and somebody needed to warm them up. Laukkanen said it was Harms’s own fault for taking them out and playing with them all night instead of leaving them in his pants where they belonged.
They followed the gathering river of snowmelt to the edge of a cliff, where it fell off into thin air. Lewis stood on a wicked little rock ledge with a pit where his stomach used to be and searched for some way down other than the narrow descending ladder of rock, wet with spray.
Peter was down there. Lewis had work to do.
He took one step down, then another.
51
SHEPARD
Shepard stood on the edge of the precipice, the valley open before him, watching the line of men picking their way down the rock face.
His primary client had finally made contact. The conflicting interests had been laid to rest. Shepard welcomed the clarity.
It had taken most of his considerable stamina to keep up with the man from the Escalade the day before. Shepard had stopped at the edge of the bowl-like snowfield as the stars were coming out. Some instinct for self-preservation prevented him from venturing into the open.
He told himself that it didn’t matter. He knew where the protector’s friend was going, and he wouldn’t be going there after dark. Shepard retraced his steps and found a place to be invisible for the night. He was more tired than he’d expected.
By the time daylight began to trickle past the eastern peaks, he was back at the edge of the open bowl. When he saw the multiple bootprints in the dawn-lit snow, he realized he was still missing crucial information.
Shepard did not enjoy surprises.
He had knelt in the gloom of the tree line examining the tracks when the shadow form of a sentry materialized like mist over the rock pile in the middle of the bowl. Shepard had held himself still and waited to die, but the sentry had not seen him, had turned and walked away, and Shepard knew how close he had come to oblivion.
This was another signal, he thought. That this life he’d been living would come to an end, one way or another.
Not that it changed anything.
He skirted the perimeter of the snowfield and discovered the men’s deserted bivouac behind the shelter of a boulder. They had chosen a good place, the kind of place Shepard would have chosen for himself, and had left nothing behind to show they’d been there, nothing but the marks where they’d rested and their bootprints in the snow. Another day or two of inexorable melt would render even those signs unreadable.
Shepard found the man from the Escalade in the line of figures descending the rock face by the waterfall, the man’s deft grace clearly visible even from far above. There was something beautiful about him. About all of them.
It would be a shame to kill them when the order came. If it came at all. Their fates were still undecided. The entire enterprise hung in the air, unresolved, awaiting only a word.
He wondered if this, too, was some kind of signal.
He looked across the valley to where a mated pair of golden eagles rode the rising thermals in search of the meal that would sustain them until the next day. It would be one of the small mammals that lived in the orchards, or perhaps even a young goat—a kid, he thought idly—that had wandered from the safety of its shed. A necessary death in order to preserve life. The order of things.
Would he still think in this way when he retired to grow tomatoes? Would he remain so fascinated with the relentless melee of life?
After all, tomatoes didn’t cry out when you plucked them from their stem.
They didn’t try to kill you, either.
That possibility was part of what kept his interest in the enterprise of living.
He looked up above the eagles, past the rim of the valley, where another golden bird flew, watching.
Shepard waved at the bird, then turned to begin his own descent.
52
PETER
Peter consulted the map in his head. The contours of the valley, the buildings June had laid out on the paper the day before. But the map was not the territory. He had to see it for himself.
He took the trucker’s .357 from under the seat of his truck and threaded the holster he’d bought onto his belt. He took out the little daypack with the pair of Glocks, extra ammunition, binoculars, a liter of water, and some energy bars. No reason to be undergunned or underfed while he waited for Chip Dawes to show up.