“You have a guilty conscience, Willard?”
“Don’t you?”
Dalton had no answer for that, other than silence. The silence ran on. Fremont was right, about the doctrine. Covert operators didn’t work for justice; they worked for government, a very different thing. And Fremont had been right to run, as it turned out, since a short time later someone had spent most of September trying to kill him.
Fremont, his early adrenalized chatter having burned him into a daze, as Dalton had expected, lapsed into a reverie, and neither man said anything else for the next few minutes, staring out the window at the canyons and valleys rushing by as they plummeted down the eastern slopes of the Bitter Root range, hypnotized by the stream of SUVs and RVs they were passing. At the next stop they got Fremont out of his shackles and squared away — they both did what was necessary in the rank, dank echoing urinals — and in a few minutes they were back out on the Interstate, both men having fallen into a thoughtful silence, immersed in entirely separate worlds, worlds that were related only by the enigmas that bound them together.
The big car wound its effortless way through Lolo National Forest with the sun slipping down into a turquoise evening sky behind the black peaks of the western Rockies, long purple shadows crossing the road, the slender needles of lodgepole pines pricking the narrow gap of twilit sky above them, an eagle circling lazily far above, the liquid gold of the setting sun bright on its motionless wings, the tires drumming on the blacktop, the radio hissing and popping with cross talk from the state patrol cars as they moved into and out of range. The easy rhythm of driving, the sense of being in a timeless middle passage with the road uncoiling ahead took them both deep into their separate minds.
As they swept in a wide arc of Interstate around the tableland that held Missoula, Fremont’s head, nodding these last ten miles, sagged forward onto his meager chest. His breathing grew deep and regular, tidal. Dalton glanced at him from time to time, feeling a certain kinship: the man was under a terrible strain, living with the fear of death for weeks, but for the moment, this brief moment, here in this drumming silence, Fremont was at peace.
Dalton envied him.
The “safe house” was a rambling post-and-beam construction set far up an unmarked and well-camouflaged dirt lane that led, through a thick screen of blue fir and cottonwood, into a broad upland valley in which a meandering tributary of the Clark wound a snakelike path. Its stony riverbanks were choked with bending reeds, nameless wild birds wheeling above, bats flitting in the violet half-light under a few cold stars. In the far north a pale-yellowish aura marked the lights of the hardscrabble old mining town of Anaconda.
Their heels crunched in pea gravel as they stepped out of the car, their breath frosting in the chill mountain air. The house itself was low-roofed and dark, with a long veranda running the entire width of the front, the windows shuttered with heavy planks, the thick oaken door fortified with iron bands.
Fremont got his bag out of the trunk and shuffled up the steps, his head turning this way and that, as nervous and wary as prey, not taking a breath until Dalton got the door opened, led him inside, barred and bolted it shut again. Even then, Fremont stood with his back against the door and waited while Dalton, a big Colt Python in his hand, did a walk-about through the entire Mission-style ranch house.
He came back and flicked on the lights, revealing a large main room lined in pine, a massive fieldstone fireplace, the fire set and waiting for a match, three big plaid couches and matching plaid armchairs, a braided rug on the stone floor by the fireplace — a warm, comforting room done in the Santa Fe style favored by Hollywood stars who move to Montana and try to pass for normal in towns like Livingston and Bozeman.
“Nice place,” said Fremont, sitting down in one of the chairs while Dalton lit the fire. There was a high-mountain frost in the night air and it had seeped down into the bones of the house, which had been shut up unused for over six months.
Dalton, watching the tender shoots of flame beginning to spread out in the dried thatch, felt himself drawn into the fire. The smell of pine smoke filled the room, and white smoke began to billow outward from the fire.
“Jiggle the flue,” said Fremont.
Dalton twisted the wrought-iron handle set into the stones just under the mantel. There was a puff of in-drawing wind and the fire flared up, pulling the smoke back in and sending it up the chimney. Dalton got up, dusting his palms, picked up his luggage, and walked over to the huge pine sideboard along the interior wall.
He pulled out his laptop, opened it, and plugged a DSL cable into a wall jack. The screen cycled up, and after a few clicks he was looking at a computer-generated video schematic of the safe house and the surrounding woodlands. In the bright field of green-and-blue detail, the rectangle of the house itself glowed a warm yellow, and inside the rectangle there were three vivid red objects, a few feet apart, one rounded and indistinct, the other two man-shaped; the thermal images of Dalton, Willard Fremont, and the open fire.
Dalton looked at the rest of screen, the green-and-blue area. A few small pale red objects drifted through it, and one larger shape, glowing a deeper red. A small foraging bear, from the shape, and two smaller red blobs, probably her cubs, about a hundred and fifty yards northeast of the house, heading down a long treed slope toward the deep silvery-blue thread of the Clark Fork.
Dalton clipped a remote alarm beeper to his belt and opened the pine cabinet, looking at the interior, bottles of scotch, bourbon, a built-in fridge stocked with mixes, cold beer.
Fremont had gotten up while Dalton was setting up the laptop, and now he was standing beside him, staring down at the screen with envy but also with the professional appreciation of a skilled technician. “What kind of perimeter controls do you have?”
“This laptop is connected to a mixed-receptor array on the cliff face of that peak we saw when we came in. The array gives us a very wide field of coverage, including the entire house and about three hundred yards of perimeter. Sensors all over the terrain, cabled to the array and hardwired to this laptop through this DSL connection. Hackproof program. Gear shielded from EMP and jamming. Motion, infrared, thermal. Carbon dioxide. And night video. Right now we’re looking at a bear and two cubs. They’re moving down the hill toward the stream, maybe a hundred yards to our north. This beeper lets me know when the system sees something more manlike.”
“A bear is a manlike object. How does it tell the difference?”
“Bears stink. Men don’t.”
“You never bunked up with Al Runciman.”
“Remind me not to. The house itself is fully awake, in the sense that a central computer monitors every window, all the doors, even the roof. Servo-assist cameras. Relax, Willard. Have a scotch.”
“Just a beer, if you got it.”
Dalton popped a Lone Star for Fremont, poured himself three fingers of twenty-year-old Laphroaig, dropped two cubes into the heavy crystal glass, and handed Fremont his beer. They crossed the fieldstone floor and dropped with heavy sighs into opposite couches on either side of a big slice of lacquered redwood that served as the coffee table.
Dalton lifted his glass in a weary toast, Fremont replied in kind with a nod of his grizzled head, and as they drank the ghost of Porter Naumann flicked into being, sprawled, boneless, at his languorous ease, still in his green pajamas, on the third couch of the square.
Dalton dropped his glass, spilling the contents all over himself.
“What’s the matter?” barked Fremont, sitting upright.
Dalton sent Naumann a vicious look — which Naumann returned with a jaunty salute — while he mopped at his wet crotch, cursing.