Ann Shoyo sat back and blew a stray strand of hair out of her face. “I’d like to talk to Alice myself,” she said. “But she hasn’t come in for two days. I would really like to talk to Alice.”
Joe quickly fished a card out of his pocket and handed it to her. “Please call me if she shows up or if you hear anything,” he said.
“Not good news,” Joe said to Brueggemann as they approached the pickup.
His cell phone burred and he retrieved it from his pocket. Deputy Mike Reed calling.
“Joe,” Reed said, “I’ve hit a brick wall. Pam Kelly isn’t here, and her stock is going crazy, kicking the fences all to hell and screaming at me.”
Joe could hear braying and anguished bleats in the background.
Reed said, “They act like they haven’t been fed for a couple of days.”
“Did you look inside the house?” Joe asked.
“I looked in through the windows, is all. I’ve got no probable cause for going in, although I might just make something up. I wonder if she did herself in, considering she lost her husband and her son?”
Joe paused for a moment, then said, “That doesn’t sound like her. She’s too mean.”
“I’ll keep looking,” Reed said. “I’ll let you know if I find her. But this place gives me the creeps, and I’ve got a real bad feeling about it.”
Joe understood. He felt the same way as they turned into the rough driveway off Black Coal Road that led to the back of Alice Thunder’s home. Her GMC wasn’t parked on the side, which gave him an ounce of hope.
“Give me a minute,” Joe said to Brueggemann as the trainee reached for his door handle. “I’ll be right back.”
Brueggemann shrugged a whatever shrug.
Joe realized as he walked up Alice’s broken concrete path that something was amiss. It was when he rapped on her back door that he realized what it was: no dogs. Every time he’d ever been there, her little dogs put up a cacophony and she’d have to push them aside to get to the door.
She wasn’t home, and the dogs were silent.
He thought: Bad Bob, Pam Kelly, and now Alice Thunder. His chest tightened, and he took several deep breaths as he stepped back and pulled out his phone. He was surprised to see he had a message from Marybeth. Apparently, she’d called while he spoke to Mike Reed and he’d missed it.
He punched the button to retrieve it.
Her voice was tense. “I’m frustrated. I’ve looked everywhere — every database I have access to. John Nemecek doesn’t exist,” she said.
He thought: Yes, he does.
17
The next morning, in the long cold shadow of the sawtoothed Teton Range in the mountains outside of Victor, Idaho, Nate Romanowski smeared a tarry mixture of motor oil and road dirt below his eyes, across his forehead, and over his cheeks. The morning sun had not yet broken over the top of the mountains. Light frost coated the long grass in the meadows and the cold, thin air had a scalpel-like bite to it. Below him, through a descending march of spindly lodgepole pine trees that strung all the way to the valley floor, a single sodium pole light illuminated the center of a small complex of faded log structures. It was 7:40, Thursday, October 25.
He raised the field glasses. Below was a lodge and four smaller outbuildings in the complex: a garage, a sagging barn, a smokehouse, and what looked like a guest cabin. He focused in on the hoary metal roof of the lodge and noted several wet ovals on the surface, meaning there were sources of heat inside. That was confirmed when he shifted his view to the mouth of a galvanized chimney pipe that exhaled a thin plume of white woodsmoke.
When the wind shifted from east to west, he thought he caught the slight aroma of coffee and bacon from below. Breakfast, he thought. The place was occupied, but by whom?
He turned to his vehicle and slid the scoped Ruger Ranch rifle from beneath the front seat of his Jeep. It was the rifle he’d liberated from the old man in the boat. He checked the loads. The thirty-round magazine was packed full with red-tipped Hornady 6.8-millimeter SPC shells in 110 grain. Nate seated a live round in the chamber with the Garand breech bolt-action and slung the weapon over his shoulder. His .500 shoulder holster was buckled on over his hoodie and fleece for quick access. A pair of binoculars hung from a strap looped around his neck.
He was ready.
The trip from Colorado Springs to the compound in Idaho had taken slightly more than nineteen hours after the killing of the third operator.
Despite initial objections from Gordon, Nate had persuaded his father to take his family away. Nate gave him half a brick of cash and apologized to his stepmother and half sisters for meeting the way they did.
Nate didn’t leave the scene until 1:00 in the afternoon. No other operators arrived.
He’d debated himself how much evidence — if any — to leave behind. The body contained no legitimate identification. The man had a wallet in his pocket with $689 in it and a Colorado driver’s license. No credit cards, no receipts, no other cards of any kind. And when Nate studied the license, he recognized a professional forgery right away. The license was too new, stiff, and shiny. It was the kind of identification Nate had been given to use a hundred times in the past. There wasn’t a single thing wrong with it except the wrong name, Social Security number, address, and birthplace. Nate had nodded to himself in recognition. In the rare circumstance that the body of a member of The Five was left in a country they weren’t supposed to be in, there would be no means of identifying him. It rarely happened — they prided themselves on bringing everyone back every time — but it was standard operating procedure. This alone would send Nemecek a message.
Rather than backtrack through Colorado Springs and drive north on highly trafficked I-25, he took rural county roads for sixty miles until he merged onto I-70 west and on to Grand Junction, Colorado. The way north and west from there lost him five hours more than if he’d taken the other route, but he thought if anyone were looking for him, he’d escape their attention. It was evening when he hit the outskirts of Grand Junction and stopped to fill the tank and spare gas can before proceeding west into Utah, and then north toward Salt Lake City. He was never out of sight of the mountains, and he drove with his eyes wide open, noting every potential escape route toward those mountains if he encountered a roadblock or an enemy vehicle.
As he drove and lost his light, he replayed all the events of the morning, from meeting his father to sending his old man away from his own house with a wad of unmarked cash. He could only speculate on what faced him, based on his knowledge and experiences with John Nemecek. When he ran everything back through his mind, he concluded with more questions than answers.
Nate needed to know how many people were in the team with Nemecek. Once he knew for sure, he could tailor his strategy and defense. His mentor liked working with small strike forces of no more than eight, but it wasn’t a hard-and-fast prerogative. Nemecek liked eight because the number was perfect for a small footprint but an effective infiltration. Only one large vehicle or two midsized cars were necessary to move everyone into place on the ground. Eight could be broken up into the smaller units Nemecek favored: two killing squads of four each, including the team leader, a communications operative, and a jack-of-all-trades (JOAT) operator trained in emergency medical triage and whatever other special skills the particular mission required.