“A what?”
“Vide. Out.” He saw she was looking at him blankly. “A videout blizzard. So much snow you can’t see your hand in front of your face, so please drive carefully.”
“Thank you. I will.”
He smiled a broad cheerless smile, showing off his gums. “Have a good day.”
With that cheery send-off, she began driving north toward the address she’d found for Dale WilmotR a t="0e17;s estate. The GPS showed the distance as only thirty-five miles, so she hoped she could get there before the roads became impassable.
The first part of the drive along US 90, wasn’t bad. It was snowing hard, but the traffic kept the right lane relatively free of snow. The car felt stable and sure-footed, even at highway speeds. But then she swung off onto a rural route that wound upward into the higher elevations toward Priest Lake, and the conditions quickly deteriorated. Within minutes of turning off the highway, she began to feel a relentless tick of nervousness. Soon she was driving through four or five inches of virgin snow, not a single tire track on the road. She had rented a four-wheel-drive vehicle, a Toyota Land Cruiser, but still the car occasionally came unglued as she cornered, and once she even drove off the road far enough to worry about plunging down a hillside.
After that she drove with more caution.
To make matters worse, the map she carried was not very detailed, and the GPS in her car seemed to have no record of the road she was traveling on. She had finally switched it off after the condescending English-accented female voice had said “Turn around as soon as possible” for about the ninetieth time.
The wipers were going full speed, and the heater was blasting, but the windshield was getting clogged with snow. And even in the brief seconds when the wiper blades cleared it, she was unable to see more than a few feet in front of her. She found herself driving five miles an hour, more or less completely blind, up a mountain road. The notion that she might have to pull off the road and sit for a while started to seem entirely plausible, and the possibility made her hungry. She had eaten a nasty little ham and cheese sandwich in Las Vegas before changing planes. But that was six and a half hours ago.
And now the world had turned to an impenetrable gray mass. Finally, she gave in, stopped the car, got out, and stood in the snow. She had never seen anything like it before in her life. Raised in Tennessee, she had never even felt a snowflake on her cheek before she joined the FBI.
She would have thought that a whiteout blizzard would have been pretty and soft and white. But instead it had a grim grainy quality, like the soot from a crematorium.
She could more or less tell where the road was because the dim, black shapes of trees loomed over her, half visible through the snow. She glanced at her watch. A little after four o’clock. The sun would be going down pretty soon, which would only make matters worse. She’d probably be stuck there for the night.
For the first time she began to feel something that edged toward panic, when suddenly, mercifully, the snow let up. Perched on a hillside not more than a mile or two away, she saw a massive post-and-beam lodge, a house so big it almost could have been a hotel.
That was it. It had to be.
Five minutes later she was pulling up in front of the house. She climbed out and knocked on the door. But no one answered. Nancy looked around the house, trying to see inside, but there was no sign of life. Then, in the dimming light, she made out a dark figure trundling up a path, bundled in a heavy coat. It was a woman, a good four inches taller than Nancy, who outweighed her by at least a hundred pounds. She wore pale green scrubs beneath a huge parka. Nancy followed her inside. Framed by the furry hood, the woman’s expression was tight with panic. Nancy showed the woman her identification.
“How did you know?”
“Know what?”
“That Evan is missing.”
“Who’s Evan?”
“Mr. Wilmot’s son. I was just about to call the police.”
“I didn’t come for Evan. I came to talk to John Collier.”
“He’s not here. He’s with Mr. Wilmot. They flew out together earlier today, but I need to find Evan. He’s in a wheelchair, so he can’t have gone far. My God, Mr. Wilmot will kill me.”
“Slow down and tell me what happened so I can help you,” Nancy said, trying to calm the frantic woman.
The nurse explained that she’d been given explicit instructions to keep Evan inside. He was not well, and might try to defy her, but for his own safety and health he needed to avoid the cold outdoors. Now she feared he might be dead from exposure. She was close to a nervous collapse. She had picked up the phone a dozen times to call Mr. Wilmot but had hung up every time.
“I told him not to go outside, but he did it anyway. You have to help me find him.” The woman grabbed Nancy by the collar and yanked her though the doorway. She was immensely strong.
Nancy Clement thought for a moment. If Wilmot and Collier were gone, the son Evan might know something. Besides, she wasn’t going anywhere in this weather.
“Have you got a heavy coat I can borrow?” Nancy asked. “Mine’s kind of thin.”
The nurse had searched for an hour by herself before she had come back and found Nancy at the door. The hapless caregiver had been looking in the wrong place, however. She assumed Evan would try to go down the driveway to the main road, but in fact he had gone off toward the woods.
It was Nancy who suggested they check the logging trail, and they soon found him. He had pulled himself into a ball inside his coat, protecting his head and face from frostbite. He was unconscious. The nurse picked him up and began staggering through the snow back to the house, carrying the young man like a baby.
Ten minutes later they had immersed him in a bath of warm water in a bathroom large enough to house an entire family. It took Nancy a moment to adjust to the young man’s wrecked body—his truncated legs, his missing arm, the scar tissue that formed the topography of his face.
After a few minutes Evan began to shiver so hard that the women had to brace him.
“That’s a good sign,” the big nurse said. “It means he’s warming up.”
Soon the shivering stopped, and a few minutes later his eyes opened. He stared around dully, his eyes finally settling on Nancy.
“Who are you?” he asked
“My name is Nancy Clement,” she said. “I’m with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
The nurse said, “She came to help me find you.”
The young man squinted at the nurse skeptically. “No, she didn’t.”
“Of course she did,” the nurse said. Nancy had told her not to call the police, and now Margie felt indebted to the FBI agent, for saving not only Evan, but also her job.
“Margie, can you give me a minute alone with this nice FBI lady?”
“Why?” the nurse said.
“Please,” he said. “Just once, can you just do what I ask?”
The nurse’s slab of a face reddened. But finally she stood and stalked out of the bathroom.
Nancy felt awkward now, alone in the room with a naked man. But Evan Wilmot seemed unfazed. She supposed when you were disabled, you got used to people hauling you around, washing you, bathing you, seeing you naked.
“No,” the young man said, as if reading her mind. “You never get used to it. It always sucks. But I have to stay in this water or I’ll get sick.”
Nancy cleared her throat.
“So,” Evan said sadly, “my father has done something terrible, hasn’t he?”
Nancy cocked her head. “Has he?”
Evan smiled sadly and looked off into the steamy distance. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, he has.”
30
MANASSAS, VIRGINIA
By all accounts, Gideon Davis was a gifted diplomat—engaged, charming, and direct. But because many of the qualities that make a diplomat effective are diametrically opposed to those that make a good soldier, the two professions often find themselves at odds. Gideon had often been sent places where only soldiers dared to go and had overcome the occupational bias against him. Over the years he had befriended a wide range of soldiers and CIA operatives and military contractors—some of them fairly shady characters.