Off the Grid (20 page)

44

T
hey sat at the big table in the cabin’s dining room, Magozzi, Gino, the Chief, and Claude on one side; John and the Monkeewrench partners on the other. Harley and Roadrunner shoveled food into their mouths; Grace and Annie picked at their plates, the way women do when adrenaline was suppressing appetite.

Chief directed his attention to Grace. “You weren’t followed?”

“No. We were careful.”

“Then why are you so worried?”

She thought about that for a moment, examining a piece of dry toast that seemed harmless. “I don’t know. Just a feeling.”

Chief was watching her with those dark, impenetrable eyes. “You feel a presence?”

Grace raised her brows, took a bite of toast that turned to sand in her mouth.

“You’re certain you weren’t followed, but you sense danger,” he persisted.

Grace laid her toast next to the untouched eggs on her plate. “I tend to overreact.”

Chief’s dark brows reached for each other as he studied her, but his thoughts were someplace else. “Rabbits find their burrows when a storm is coming,” he said, standing up. “Birds fly.” He left the table and went out the front door while the others watched him, mystified.

“He’s got a spiritual bent to him,” Claude explained. “He sees signs in everything.”

“He’s also a cop,” Gino added. “He’s onto something. Where’s Charlie?”

“Still outside, running the kinks out, watering stuff,” Harley said.

A few moments later Chief came back inside, holding a tiny black box. “Someone’s tracking you,” he said perfunctorily. “This was under your truck, attached to your chassis. It’s one of the new transponders. You didn’t see a tail because they never got close enough. This thing tracks from two miles, minimum.”

Annie felt a spidery shiver creep up her spine. All that watchfulness, all their precautions, and all the time someone had been just a few miles behind them, waiting for an opportunity.

While Chief went to another room to make some phone calls, Grace spoke quietly to the others. “We have to leave now.”

Harley stood up and tucked his chair under the table. “Right.”

Annie stood, fluffed her dress, and smiled at Claude. “It’s been far too brief, Mr. Gerlock.”

“Sit down,” Claude said. “All of you.” Not one of them sat down, and Claude wasn’t used to that kind of defiance. Normally when he gave orders, everyone jumped.

On the other hand, no one ever ordered Grace to do anything. She squared her shoulders and stared him down. “This is our trouble, not yours. We’re leaving now.”

Claude shook his head at Grace, his expression immutable. “You’re not thinking clearly. They could already be here, hiding out there, just waiting for you to move. The reservation is over a hundred square miles. Lots of places you could ditch a car and disappear into the woods on foot.”

Grace almost smiled. Poor man had made a little mistake. “If they’re on foot in the woods, we can be off the reservation before they get back to their cars. And without the tracking device, they’ll never find us.”

Chief came back into the room and hesitated; he knew a standoff when he saw one. “What’s this about?”

Claude tipped his head toward Grace and rolled his eyes. “Little Miss Speed Demon thinks she can blast out of here before anyone chasing them can get back to their cars.”

Something about the Chief changed as he walked up to Grace and looked her in the eye. He was just a little bit shorter than she was, but in that moment it didn’t appear that way. “Then you’d better think again, Miss McBride. These people aren’t amateurs. They tracked down Agent Smith, they tracked down the marina owner in Florida, and now they’ve tracked you down. You think they’re sitting on their hands in the middle of the forest toasting marshmallows? We’re setting up a tight perimeter around the cabin and we have people guarding the road between the cabin and the lodge, but the minute you get past that, they’re going to be waiting on the side of the road out of here and your Rover will be full of holes before you get another twenty yards.”

Magozzi waited for Grace to tie into the Chief, but she remained silent. Maybe she was going to fool them all and be reasonable. “He’s right, Grace,” he said, and Gino nodded his agreement.

She sat back down at the table and the others followed suit, relief obvious on their faces.

Chief looked over at John. “Agent Smith, we have lives on the line here and it’s about time you started talking. We need to know everything.”

John told the rest of them what he’d already told Monkeewrench in the car: about tracing serious terrorist chatter on the Web to their points of origin and anonymously passing on home addresses to law enforcement. “Somebody who received my tips apparently decided to see to it that these suspects were taken out before they could do any damage. That’s why they’re after me. They found out I was the source of information that was getting their people killed.” He looked over at Gino and Magozzi. “I never put it together until I read a news report about your Little Mogadishu homicides—those men were terror suspects on the lists I sent out.”

Magozzi and Gino both stared at John, speechless, while the final puzzle piece finally dropped into place. “Holy shit,” Gino breathed. “Somehow, Joe Hardy got his hands on your list. That’s why he went to those two houses.”

John said, “It’s not just one guy who’s doing this. Ten more of the men on that list have been murdered. But who’s Joe Hardy?” John asked. “Name sounds familiar, but I can’t place it.”

“The news was all over that one,” Gino said. “Reporting that Hardy killed the two Somalis in the second Little Mogadishu house.”

“Oh yeah. The hero that takes down the two trying to kill him.”

“Turns out, that’s not the way it went down,” Magozzi said. “Joe killed all four of our Little Mogadishu vics. Premeditated, and we were thinking that he had knowledge the men in those houses were terrorists when the Feds didn’t, and decided to take them out himself. Still fighting the war, maybe. That’s why Gino and I came up here. Claude and the Chief were Joe’s best friends. He was up here with them the night he was killed and left his computer. The Feds wanted a look at it to see if they could find out who fed him the information. Turns out it might have been you. You could be the source we were hoping to find.”

John was shaking his head. “That list only went out to law enforcement. Was Hardy on the job?”

“Hell no. He was two years off his last tour, dying of cancer, and no friends on the force as far as we know.”

“So how did he get the names?”

Chief cleared his throat. “Who knows? Maybe someone you sent it to talked. Maybe even put it on the Web. These days everything ends up there eventually, and that’s the kind of thing that would go viral. At any rate, if an unfamiliar vehicle comes onto the rez, my deputies have orders to stop it and detain the occupants until we can take a closer look. So for the time being, as long as you all stay put in the cabin”—he nodded to Monkeewrench and John—“you should be just fine.”

Magozzi glanced at Gino and got the nod of permission. “Uh, Chief, we may be talking about more than one vehicle. A lot more. This isn’t a couple of radicalized students trying to make a name for themselves like the kids on John’s boat. It’s a major operation. And John isn’t the only target anymore. Anyone who’s had contact with him is. That means all of us, and all of your people.”

Claude actually rose from his chair to parry that one. “You mind telling us how you got there, son?”

“They’re not after John just because he’s getting their people killed. He’s getting people killed who were supposed to be participants in a multistate terrorist attack set to go down in three days.”

That shut everybody up.

Chief walked to the window and looked out at the weather. “What kind of hardware are we talking about?”

“Automatic weapons for sure; maybe more than that. This is all-out war for them. John, do you still have a copy of that list?”

He nodded numbly and pulled a thumb drive out of his pocket.

“Agent Dahl at the Minneapolis Field Office. He’s running the show down there. E-mail him that list right now.”

“Computer’s in the den,” Chief said, getting up from the table. “But we’re going to need some help. I’ll check in with my FBI liaison to give them a heads-up on what might be happening here and ask if we can get some backup.”

“Gino and I will check in with Agent Dahl in Minneapolis. Is there a landline in the living room? My cell is dead.”

“Yeah. Side table next to the fireplace.”

Agent Dahl answered on the first ring. Of course Magozzi was calling his cell number so he could have been home in bed, but he didn’t think so. He could hear multiple conversations and the clatter of computer keyboards in the background. “Agent Dahl. Magozzi here. We’ve got a situation in Elbow Lake.”

“More important than a multistate terror attack?”

“We think it’s connected.”

Dahl was quiet for a moment, then said, “Tell me everything.”

Magozzi did, ending with, “Monkeewrench and Smith were followed up here. We found a tracking device.”

He heard Dahl shout at the other people in the room, and the background noise stopped abruptly. “Listen to me, Magozzi. You saw the weaponry in that Little Mogadishu house. And that probably wasn’t the only cache. Whoever is tracking Smith is going to be armed with a whole lot more than your service pistols can handle, and besides your people, you’ve got a local population of innocents you need to keep safe. Find a place you can defend and dig in until we can get some teams up there through this storm.”

Half an hour later, Chief came in to stoke the dying embers while Magozzi was relaying his conversation with Agent Dahl to Gino. “He got John’s e-mailed list, he’s all over it.”

Chief layered oak logs, then kindling, then paper into the huge fireplace and struck a match. “I hope you asked him about getting some support up here. My guy in Duluth said nothing’s moving out of their city.”

Magozzi nodded. “I did. Minneapolis is getting this storm, too. Flights are grounded all over the state, shutting everything down, and they just closed I-94, I-35, and Highway 10—semis jackknifed all over the place and the ditches are filled with spinouts. Dahl is pulling together some teams that will be ready to move whenever the weather clears, but for the time being, we’re on our own here. How many men can you put in the field?”

Chief pushed against his knees with a sigh, rising to his feet. He felt the right one crunch a little, making him wince. “I’ve got a lot of men, but not so many I’d want to put in this kind of situation. High on macho, low in skill. But I’ve got ten more men with recent combat experience in addition to the fifteen deputies already surrounding the cabin. All of them were on the front lines in either Afghanistan, Iraq, or both, and can do some damage with firearms if it comes to that. I’m going to meet the extra ten at the lodge for a briefing and deputize them all to keep everything legal. Trouble is, we don’t know how many we’re up against.”

Gino looked up from his seat on a cushy chair, thinking beautiful thoughts. The terrorists hadn’t followed Monkeewrench. They weren’t up here at all. They were all going to have a nice meal, stay inside out of the weather, and then maybe watch an instructional movie in the media room, like
Dances with Wolves
.

Magozzi took a seat on the hearth. “Can we hold the cabin until the Feds get here with backup?”

Chief took a moment, looking around the living room as if he were considering his reply carefully. Magozzi hadn’t known him long, but he’d already noticed that the Chief did this often—pretending to assess your question, giving it weight, when the truth was, he’d known instantly what his answer would be. The man was a scary politician.

“Lots of windows here,” Chief said. “They’ll strafe those nonstop, making it impossible for anyone inside to get a clear shot outside. We can’t defend this place by sitting tight. We have to do it out there, in the woods.”

45

C
hief and Claude dressed in their blaze orange winter gear and left by the cabin’s back door, hefting their personal rifles, both outfitted with scopes that could magnify a mouse into Godzilla from half a click away. They traveled stealthily through the woods in complete silence, like any hunters would, but the quarry they sought wasn’t the four-legged type; not today.

The trees and shrubs and grasses were encased in crystal shells of ice. Had they not been so focused on keeping their hides, they would have been completely distracted by nature’s pageantry. The morning’s relentless sleet was now giving way to wet, thick snow, and that gave the Chief pause. Snow made it easy to track your enemy, but it also made it easy for your enemy to track you. His people knew better than anybody on the planet how to move through snowy woods without leaving a trace, but the city cops worried him. He’d have to find a place to keep them stationary.

When they were finally satisfied that there was no imminent danger within range of the cabin, they veered up over a berm and started walking the ice-glazed road to the lodge, treacherous already and getting worse with the addition of accumulating snow.

“We’re too damn old to risk breaking any bones, Chief,” Claude complained, choosing his steps carefully and keeping his voice low. “Besides, we’re exposed out here. We should have stayed in the woods.”

“The deputies are watching this road. Besides, we’re just hunters heading to the lodge,” he replied. “If there are intruders here, they probably don’t want to reveal their position shooting a couple of old yahoos stupid enough to wander around in blaze orange. And they probably didn’t figure on us finding their tracking device or tying this all together, so they have a false sense of security right now. This gives us a chance to scope things out a little, but I’m not seeing anything, are you?”

Claude didn’t, and for all the other things that age had diminished, he still had the sharp eyes of the sniper he’d once been. “False sense of security or not, if they’re smart, they won’t move until dusk.”

“Don’t know if they’re smart or not, but either way, we’ll be ready and waiting for them.”

Claude took a deep, cleansing breath of crisp air, but he still couldn’t shake the anxiety that was tightening his chest. “Lord, this is one hell of a crazy mess we’ve suddenly got on our hands. A lot of innocent lives on the line. You sure we’re doing the right thing here?”

“No choice, Chimook. Not anymore.”

“What are you going to tell your men?”

Chief blew out a moist breath that turned into fog. “I’ll tell them it’s a police action—which it is.”

“But they’ll ask some questions, and they deserve some answers. So how’s it going to go down when somebody like Moose or Eugene Thunderhawk asks why they should risk their lives for some troubled white folks they don’t even know? And really, why should they?”

The Chief paused for a moment, regarding a clump of young aspen trees that looked about ready to snap under the weight of their icy burden. They’d lose some trees during this storm. “These people are terrorists, which makes them our common enemy. That makes us a tribe, and warriors fight for their tribe. You know that firsthand, Chimook. Besides, the Somalis are into this up to their eyeballs and we’ve got a past with those bastards, and when they kidnapped those Sand Lake girls right off the reservation, they declared war.”

Claude lowered his head, finding a loose stone in the road that had somehow escaped an icy entombment. He kicked it and watched it skid across the slick road, leaving an erratic trail through the mounting snow. “I still can’t believe Joe did that,” he finally said. “What the hell was he thinking?”

The Chief didn’t react at all, just lifted his hand and froze in place. He put a finger to his lips, then pointed.

Claude felt his heart speed up, wondering if they were walking into an ambush of cold, pissed-off, fully armed terrorists, but he saw nothing but a rabbit a few yards ahead of them, its fine gray fur frosted with snow. Its twitching ears heard them even though they were standing stock-still, and it pounced hell-for-leather across the road into the ditch to make its escape. “For crissakes, it’s just a rabbit,” he finally said. “This place is lousy with ’em.”

The Chief nodded and continued walking toward the lodge, the rational part of his brain knowing what Claude had just said was true—this place was lousy with rabbits. But the other part of his brain couldn’t help but think of waboo from his dream, crunching across the ice on the forest floor, freezing in place because the coyotes were moving in on him.