Exile Hunter (65 page)

Yost laughed.

“Tell me that when
you’re my age,” he replied before looking at his watch. “Anyway,
we’ve loaded as much as the truck will carry. You go on back and
fetch the women. Jay and I will meet you with the truck at the
rendezvous point at ten to eight for the phone call.”

Linder agreed and drove
the minivan back to the hotel to pick up April and Caroline, who
expressed their relief at seeing him by pelting him with questions.

“Where’s Jay?”
Caroline asked first.

“Is this it?” April
followed. “Are we really leaving?”

“Yes, grab your
things. The van is out front.” Linder replied.

“Can you tell us
where we’re going yet?” Caroline asked, her eyes wide with
excitement.

“I’ll be able to
tell you what’s happening in about an hour,” he told them.
“Meanwhile, let’s get going. We have a date at eight and can’t
afford to miss it.”

* * *

They bought dinner at
the drive-through window of a hamburger eatery and ate hurriedly in
the van. They reached the rendezvous spot, located a short drive west
of the motel, by half past seven. At a quarter before eight, Jay’s
truck had not yet appeared. At eight, still no truck. Linder
considered calling the DSS on his own but decided against it. At
eight fifteen, the truck came into view.

When it pulled up, Jay
dismounted and Linder noticed with alarm that he had come alone.

“Where’s Charlie?”
Linder demanded. “I need to talk to him before I make the call and
it’s already past eight.”

“Never mind the phone
call,” Jay answered. “Just bring April and Caroline and get in
the truck.”

“But that’s all
wrong,” Linder protested. “You were supposed to bring Charlie so
that he and I could go back to the farm while you took the girls up
to Lake Erie. What’s happening here?”

“All of you hop into
the truck and I’ll tell you on the way,” Jay replied, straining
to remain calm. “There’s no time to waste.”

“No, tell me right
now,” Linder insisted. He felt a sudden chill as a strong breeze
hit his back, which was damp with nervous sweat.

“Charlie made the
phone call himself from the farm,” Jay began. “He wants us to go
straight to a boatyard in Vermilion. A launch will pick us up there.
If he can’t join us in time, we’re supposed to go on without him.
He’ll catch up later.”

“Is something wrong?
Is Charlie okay?”

“Charlie’s fine.
I’m sure of it. I can explain everything, but we’ve got to get on
the road fast if we’re going to hit our window.”

Something was amiss. Of
this Linder was certain. He felt a chill breeze at his back once
again and looked up. Heavy gray clouds moved low across the
illuminated night sky like merciless tanks rolling in to crush
everything in their path. But he was not afraid. For reasons he could
not grasp, his intuition told him not to resist the change. Instead,
he rolled open the door to the minivan.

“There’s been a
slight change of plan,” he announced to April and Caroline in a
voice more calm than he had expected. “We’re driving the rest of
the way with Jay. Hop in and squeeze together. It won’t be very
far.”

Caroline hesitated
before stepping onto the pavement. Linder gave her a reassuring look
that seemed to have little effect. Similarly, April’s face was pale
and wore a grim expression as she stepped out of the van.

When they had climbed
into the cab, with Caroline sitting on April’s lap, Linder said,
“It’s going to be okay, now. Really it is.”

And he prayed that he
would not let them down.

* * *

Charlie Yost lay on
his back in a stubble-filled cornfield adjacent to the barn where the
cached bank loot was buried and looked up at the stars. The grass was
dry and the ground was warm but his arms and legs ached as badly as
they ever had after a hard day’s work in the Yukon. At fifty, he
already felt the way he had expected to feel when he reached seventy.
Doubtless the Yukon had shortened his natural life by a decade or
more, but by now he knew that something more was wrong with him than
premature aging. Though he dared not consult a doctor as an escaped
prisoner, it was obvious from his dark urine, swollen lymph nodes,
and the recurrent pains in his lower back and gut that he was
seriously ill.

Glancing at his watch,
Yost saw that it was nearly quarter to nine. Dogs barked in the
distance and shadowy figures in camouflage garb emerged from the tree
line on either side of him. Yost raised himself to his feet and found
himself surrounded by snarling attack dogs. He raised his hands over
his head and froze. Moments later, troops with night vision goggles
approached and snapped leads onto the dogs’ collars.

“Are you Warren
Linder?” one soldier asked before frisking him for weapons.

“That would be me,”
he lied.

“Where’s the gold?”
another demanded.

“Buried under the
barn. I’ll take you to it if you call off the damned dogs,” Yost
offered.

“Lodi Six reporting.
The subject is in custody,” the soldier reported on a handheld
radio. “He claims the goods are hidden in the barn. Request
permission to escort him to the barn to commence search.”

“Denniston here,”
another voice crackled over the radio. “Permission granted. Report
when the goods are located and the site is clear.”

Yost led his captors to
the barn, opened the Dutch door, and offered to enter first. Lodi Six
brushed past him and entered with his night vision goggles lifted and
a brilliant headlamp switched on in their place. Yost followed him
inside the barn, crossed to a spot behind a wooden support column,
and swept away the layer of hay and dirt that concealed a trap door
beneath.

Yost lifted the trap
door and, as he had a moment earlier, offered to enter first. This
time, Lodi Six held him back while other troops shone their headlamps
inside and found a spacious cellar stacked with flat wooden crates,
one of them pried partially open. A headlamp caught the dull glint of
a gold bar.

“Send Buster into the
hole,” Lodi Six ordered, and one of the dog handlers descended the
stairs with a black German Shepherd Dog and issued the command to
search. The dog moved past the gold, approached another stack of
crates, and sat facing it.

“Buster’s alerted
to something. We have a Condition Orange,” the dog handler reported
when he saw Buster sit. “Order the perimeter cleared, pronto.”

The two troops closest
to Yost trained their rifles on him.

“Oh, don’t worry
about that,” Yost told Lodi Six with a knowing smile. “The dog
must have picked up the scent of explosives from some empty mortar
shell crates the team used to pack up the gold. I can show them to
you, if you want.”

But before Lodi Six
could decide whether to take up the offer, he was distracted by a
tall figure wearing a black DSS windbreaker entering the barn. The
troops appeared to recognize him, since each of them, except Lodi
Six, stepped aside when the man approached the trap door to peer
below.

“We have a Condition
Orange down there, sir,” Lodi Six repeated to the official. “Best
not to get any closer till the EOD squad shows up.”

“Neil Denniston here.
DSS,” the officer announced, as if everyone already knew who he
was. “I’ll take over now. First, I’ll need a quick look at
what’s in the hole. Tell me where it’s safe to stand so I can
snap a few photos.”

“Snap all you want,
sir,” Lodi Six replied with obvious reluctance. “Just stay on the
stairway, don’t touch anything, and don’t use a flash. I’ll
shine my headlamp wherever you need it.”

A few moments later,
Denniston emerged from the staircase.

“This is Denniston,”
he announced into his handheld radio. “The goods are secured.
Repeat. The goods are secured. Stand by for EOD clearance.”

Then he turned to Yost,
whose face was still obscured by darkness.

“Outstanding work,
Linder,” Denniston said in a tone laden with sarcasm. “You know,
when we lost Eaton, I doubted we’d ever lay eyes again on what he
stole from the banks. But I’ve got to hand it to Bednarski. It was
his idea to send you up to the Yukon to hobnob with all those
Cleveland militia types. If any of them knew where the loot was
hidden, he figured you’d be the one to find out. Too bad Bob’s no
longer among the living. He would have enjoyed this.”

“You son of a bitch,”
Yost replied. But before he could say more, Denniston’s radio
sputtered to life with a report that two women matching the
descriptions of April Linder and Caroline Kendall had been sighted at
a motel in Strongsville.

“Move in and arrest
them,” Denniston replied over the handheld. Turning to Yost, he
added, “Sorry, but the U.S. government does not make deals with
insurgents.”

As if to taunt him
further, Denniston stepped closer to Yost and shone a flashlight in
his face. But the moment he did, he let out a sharp gasp.

“You’re not
Linder!” he accused. “Where the hell is he? What have you done
with him?”

“He’s out of your
reach,” Yost said.

“Then who the hell
are you?”

“The one who removed
all this from the banks in the first place so you Unionists wouldn’t
get your filthy hands on it,” Yost replied. “Excuse me for not
being who you expected. But since you so obviously never intended to
keep your promise to let our side go free, the deal is off. Game
over, you lose. See you in hell.”

Yost watched
Denniston’s face closely for a sign that he understood he was about
to die. When he saw it, Yost pressed a tiny button on a keychain
transmitter taped to his forearm. Instantly, two hundred kilograms of
high explosives and assorted military ordnance exploded in the cellar
beneath them, vaporizing the few bars of gold and art objects they
had left behind for show, along with the barn itself, the adjacent
farmhouse, and everything else within a hundred meters of where they
stood.

* * *

The moving van was
just west of Elyria when Jay Becker’s illegal police radio scanner
came to life with chatter about a massive explosion at a farm a few
miles northwest of Chippewa Lake in Medina County.

Linder made eye contact
with Jay as he listened to police, fire, and emergency medical
response units describe the explosion and the resulting casualties.

“Did he tell you why
he stayed?” he asked Jay.

“Charlie was tired,”
Jay replied. “He wanted you and Caroline to get away clean. And he
wanted to end the search for the Eaton treasure once and for all.”

“So the stuff we left
behind…?”

“Whatever didn’t
fit in the truck we put back in the hole. If they think the way we
expect they will, the DSS will conclude we destroyed the entire cache
to keep it out of their hands.”

“And did Charlie say
anything else I should know about?”

“Well, he didn’t
say it in so many words,” Jay added, “but I got the impression
that Charlie saw you taking up where Philip Eaton left off. Not just
as Caroline’s guardian, but as guardian of the resistance.”

Caroline gave April a
searching look and April took the girl’s hand in hers.

“Hell, I’m just an
ordinary guy,” Linder demurred. “Eaton was a giant.”

“Then grow into it,”
Jay urged with uncharacteristic fervor. “Eaton and Yost are gone.
You’re all we’ve got.”

On hearing Jay Becker’s
words, Linder thought back to his meeting with Philip Eaton in Beirut
and his first contact with Yost in the Yukon. Suddenly he understood
what the two men had aimed to achieve. From the beginning, Yost had
been as much the architect of the Battle of Cleveland as Eaton. And
later, while Philip Eaton supported the insurgency from exile, Yost
had led it from within. Finally, when Yost, already a captive,
learned of Eaton’s death in captivity, he devoted his remaining
life to recovering the cached bank loot and entrusting it to someone
who would carry on the fight.

As Jay drove on toward
their rendezvous point, Linder pondered the unlikely sequence of
events that had brought him back to Cleveland. His expression while
thinking must have been solemn indeed, for after a few moments,
Linder felt a tug on his sleeve and looked down into Caroline’s
sweetly smiling face.

“It’s okay,” she
assured him. “You don’t have to do it all alone, silly. We’ll
help you.”

Linder returned
Caroline’s smile with tears welling in his eyes and slipped his arm
around her slender shoulders.

“I know, sweetie,”
he replied. “I’ll be counting on you, too.”

A half hour later, the
truck arrived in the lakeside resort town of Vermilion. Jay turned
off at a private boatyard, where dozens of yachts and cruisers,
shrink-wrapped for the winter, were lined up side by side on trailers
and jack stands. He followed the driveway to its end in a gravel
parking lot on the east bank of the Vermilion River. There, just
beyond the glare of streetlamps, only a few boat slips were occupied,
and all but one was dark.

As they filed past the
boats toward the dock, a spotlight from the occupied boat blinked
twice. Jay flashed his high beams twice and pulled up beside the
dock.

“All out,” he said.
“Time to unload.”

Every hero becomes a bore at last.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

BEIRUT, MID-OCTOBER, ONE YEAR LATER

Caroline Kendall
entered her apartment building in the Achrafiyé district of
Christian East Beirut bearing a box of Lebanese pastries from a
neighborhood
patisserie
. The building, a stately red granite
relic from French colonial days, resembled the building where she had
visited her grandfather two years before. She loved the breathtaking
view of the Mediterranean from the apartment’s veranda and never
tired of window-shopping on her daily walk to school.

When the elevator door
opened, she greeted an elderly neighbor couple in her best schoolgirl
French and waited patiently for them to exit before riding the lift
to the fourth floor. There, she entered a spacious marble foyer with
Persian rugs on the floor and walls covered with polished brass trays
with Arabic calligraphy inlaid in silver and copper. Beyond the
foyer, she entered a vast parlor furnished in teak and leather in a
distinctly masculine style.