Exile Hunter (48 page)

That morning the
weather was unseasonably mild and the air fragrant with blossoming
lilacs, crabapples, and wildflowers. Unlike northern Alberta, where
the bitter end of winter still reigned, Linder had walked into the
warm embrace of spring, where birds sang, fields exchanged their
coats of brown for green, and flowers displayed colors that made
Linder’s spirit sing.

Before long, he found
an overgrown trail where old ruts from all-terrain vehicles and dirt
bikes led south. Within another hour, he came upon a metal sign on a
ten-foot post. The sign said “United States Boundary/Illegal to
Enter U.S. on This Trail” with pictographs showing that ATVs, dogs,
and firearms were prohibited. Further ahead was a sign with
“Warning!” written in bold red letters, and the words “If you
are entering the United States without presenting yourself to an
Immigration Officer, you may be arrested and prosecuted for violating
U.S. Immigrations and Customs Laws.” Similar notices were posted at
varying intervals in both directions, spaced according to the contour
of the land, so that a traveler could not help but see one regardless
of where he might cross the border.

Of course, Linder knew
very well that America’s border with Canada was a polite fiction
now that the Unionist regime had effectively annexed southern Canada.
But he had heard somewhere that the border was still patrolled
intermittently in the hope of catching the odd rebel, fugitive, or
smuggler. Would this place be patrolled? Linder doubted it, just as
he doubted that drones, satellites, or ground sensors monitored it.
With most of America’s electronic surveillance capabilities
destroyed or disabled since the Events, those that remained were too
important to waste in the backwoods of northern Montana.

Linder accordingly
stole past the warning signs and kept going until he reached the
north-south highway into Montana, skirting it just inside the tree
line for another hour or more. At last he came upon a road sign in
the shape of the State of Montana and read it aloud, his voice close
to breaking: “Montana Route 214. To East U.S. Route 2, Shelby 38
miles. To Glacier National Park 55 miles. To U.S. Interstate-15 at
Great Falls 124 miles.” And, with that, he let out a raucous cowboy
”Wahoo!”

* * *

Linder flagged down
the first car he found on Route 214 and hitched a ride to Shelby,
telling the driver he had been hiking in Glacier National Park and
lost his way. He used the same story at the thrift shop to buy fresh
clothes and a fresh backpack, and at a dollar store to buy a razor,
soap, and toothbrush. He did the same at a convenience store for food
and beer, and finally at a shabby motel, where he paid a reduced day
rate to take a bath in one of the many vacant rooms. As he expected,
the thrift shop owner was delighted to exchange a hundred Canadian
dollars illegally for greenbacks and cheated Linder shamelessly on
the exchange rate, to which Linder made no objection since the
illicit profit assured him of the owner’s silence.

Once in his motel room,
Linder ate every bite of food he bought before undressing and
settling into the bathtub for a hot bath. While soaking and
scrubbing, he pondered his impending identity change from escaped
fugitive Warren Linder to logging engineer Thomas Horvath. The key to
his transformation, he knew, would be his complete mastery of the
documents that Rhee had given him and the assumption of a persona
consistent with what was on paper. Linder examined the documents
closely and committed their details to memory. Then he set his mind
to fabricating corollary details of Thomas Horvath’s life.

Rising from the bathtub
and turning his face to the mirror, Linder gazed at his shaven visage
and then at Horvath’s photograph and back again. His own face was
leaner, more angular, a touch more severe. He struck the same pose as
in Horvath’s photo, with chin raised and head tilted at a dramatic
angle, and suppressed a laugh. Rhee had been right. The resemblance
was close enough for anyone but a trained professional or a biometric
face scanner. The documents might give him a fighting chance, after
all.

Linder changed into his
new clothes and stuffed the old ones into his fresh backpack. He took
pains to leave the bathroom tidy to preclude complaints from the
management, and left his key in the room to avoid showing his face to
the clerk. In case the clerk nonetheless saw him leave the premises,
he made a show of heading west from the motel and stopping to window
shop at storefronts along his path. Once out of view from the motel,
he entered one of the shops and left by the rear entrance to proceed
toward the bus station from a different direction.

Though Linder had
considered hitchhiking the rest of the way to Utah, he rejected that
idea, fearing security measures so close to the Canadian border and
not wanting to subject himself to the close scrutiny that a long
drive might invite from his driver. Instead, he considered the
relative anonymity of bus travel and the cursory examination that his
Montana identity documents might receive at a small-town bus station
like Shelby’s. If he were to rely on these documents from now on,
the safest place to test them would be within the state of Montana.

It was a calculated
risk that he was willing to take.

So Linder screwed up
his courage, strode into the bus station and approached the ticket
window.

“When does the next
bus to Idaho Falls leave?” he asked the grandmotherly woman in the
ticket window.

“In about an hour,”
she answered.

“And how much is the
fare?”

“Eighty-two dollars
and change. Would you like to book the ticket now?”

“I would,” Linder
replied. “Do you accept Canadian?”

“I can make that
conversion for you at the official rate,” the agent replied
cheerily. “But you might do better down the street. You’ve got
plenty of time before the next bus leaves if you want to try it.”

“That’s okay,
ma’am. Don’t want to get in any trouble using a moneychanger.
Here, this ought to cover it,” he said as he handed her cash for
the ticket.

With the change he
received in U.S. dollars, Linder bought some snacks for the road, a
bottle of genuine Canadian whiskey, and a couple of newspapers while
he settled in for the wait. The rest of the change, plus what was
left from his purchases earlier in the day, would be enough for bus
fare from Great Falls to Salt Lake and meals along the way, with
another Canadian fifty held in reserve.

When the bus’s
departure was announced, Linder was one of only a dozen passengers to
board. The driver barely glanced at his identification, comparing
only the name on the ticket with the name on Horvath’s Montana
residence permit. The bus looked far from new but it seemed well
maintained and the steady hum of its engine was reassuring. Linder
took a seat near the rear of the bus and soon fell asleep.

He was awakened when
the bus stopped at a State Police checkpoint just outside Great
Falls. While Linder had expected such checkpoints near the border,
their absence during the first hour of the southward journey had
raised his hopes of avoiding them altogether. So when the driver
opened the front door on command and four Department of State
Security officers boarded to check identity papers, Linder’s heart
sank.

The officers worked in
pairs, each pair working one side of the bus. From the time they
entered the vehicle, no one spoke except for the officers and the
persons being questioned. They moved rapidly and spent only a few
moments with the elderly and the very young, focusing their attention
on passengers between the ages of fifteen and sixty.

“Identification,
please,” the first officer, a stocky thirtyish black man with a
shaved head, demanded of the woman seated directly in front of
Linder, a bleached blonde of about fifty in a faded ski jacket. The
woman fished a wallet out of her handbag and slipped out a photo
identity card. The agent gave the photo a quick look, compared it
with the woman’s face, and handed back the card.

When the duo reached
Linder, the same agent took Linder’s identity card and asked him
his name.

“Tom Horvath,”
Linder replied, offering a friendly smile while making eye contact
with the unsmiling officer.

“Date and place of
birth?” the DSS man continued without returning Linder’s gaze.

“May 10, 1980.
Missoula,” Linder answered.

“Your current place
of residence?” came the next question.

Linder recited the
address written on the residence permit and added, “Except I don’t
live there any more. I lost my job and I’m moving down to Utah. I
hear they have openings down there.”

But the officer showed
no interest in the answer.

“Where was your last
place of employment?”

“At a government mine
up in the Yukon. No town, just the middle of nowhere,” Linder
replied with studied vagueness.

“And before that?”

“A lead-zinc mine in
Alaska,” he shot back, having anticipated the question.

“Do you have a
written offer of employment in Utah?” the officer asked next. But
Linder did not, and this was something he could not fabricate.

“Not yet, sir,” he
replied.

“Are you aware that
Utah is a restricted zone? Your Montana residence permit allows you
to visit for no more than thirty days and it’s not a work permit.
Would you mind following me outside? I’ll need ask you for a few
more questions.”

Though Montana was a
restricted zone like Utah, and Linder had been aware that legal
residents of one such zone enjoyed the right of free entry into
another, he had been unaware of labor restrictions between the zones.
For him to enter Utah was no crime and the DSS had no authority to
turn him back, but it was the nature of DSS men to prey on the weak
and unprotected. Having seen it done, and having done it himself so
many times during his tenure with the Department, he did not expect
to get off lightly. At the very least, his unemployed status was
likely to prompt a criminal background check that, depending on its
level of detail, could be his undoing.

With one officer behind
him and one leading the way, Linder was escorted off the bus and into
the doublewide trailer that served as the State Police outpost. Upon
entering the overheated entrance to the outpost, Linder could feel
the perspiration gather on his forehead and upper lip and smell the
sour odor of his own fear.

A uniformed DSS officer
with the rank of lieutenant entered the room within a few moments. To
Linder’s astonishment, he recognized the officer as Dan Dorsey, a
former guard at the Camp N-320 disciplinary unit, who sometimes also
guarded transit prisoners en route to the northern camps from Glasgow
AFB in Great Falls, where Linder’s own transit flight had refueled
en route to Ross River.

Linder could never
forget the remark Dorsey had made one frigid afternoon at The Point,
to the effect that letting prisoners warm themselves during breaks
made them lazy and that the cold was the only thing capable of
squeezing work out of them. Calculating that Dorsey was unlikely to
recognize him from among the thousands of prisoners he had guarded or
escorted over the years, Linder decided on a desperate gamble in
hopes of averting a background check. Though the attempt would likely
put his undercover role-playing skill to the acid test, he plunged
ahead.

“Hey, Dan, how are
you doing?” he greeted the officer warmly, advancing to hold out
his hand. “Tom Horvath. Great to see you again!”

Dorsey eyed him
suspiciously and declined the handshake. Linder remained unfazed.

“Don’t you remember
me?” he confronted the officer. It was a high stakes bet and Linder
knew it. If Dorsey possessed a memory for names and faces as sharp as
Linder’s, or if for some strange reason, his face had stuck in
Dorsey’s mind, Linder would be undone.

“No, I don’t,”
Dorsey replied.

“Well, how about
that!” Linder continued, undeterred. “You and I were on a plane
together up north. Your family name is Dorsey, and you were telling
me how you met your wife Carolyn at an airport in Yellowknife. She
had enjoyed a libation or two before boarding and they weren’t
going to let her on. But you put in a word with the crew and got her
aboard, anyway.”

Linder paused to flash
Dorsey a congratulatory grin. The DSS man looked puzzled, but seemed
to be warming.

“Anyway, after the
two of you became acquainted, you asked her out a couple times and
started dated by long distance. A couple of months later she brought
you home to meet her parents and the two of you got engaged. What a
story, eh, brother?”

Linder laughed heartily
and Dorsey soon joined in. Every word of the story was true, except
that Linder had overheard it not on an airline flight but while
Dorsey was regaling fellow guards around an oil-drum fire at Camp
N-320. Linder guessed from the guard’s garrulous manner that he had
told the same story dozens of times and in nearly as many places.

Dorsey seemed delighted
to hear the tale retold and to renew the acquaintance with the mining
engineer. Each then spoke briefly about his life and work since their
acquaintance, but without any mention of labor camps. After their
exchange, Linder offered to look up Dorsey on his next trip through
Great Falls and the officer returned Linder’s documents with an
apology, even offering him a cup of hot coffee for the road. Linder
accepted the cup eagerly and hurried back aboard the bus to wary
looks from his fellow passengers. Since State Security rarely gave up
its prey, he could hardly blame them for suspecting he might be an
informant. In fact, the irony of it brought a smile to his lips.

The world works in
mysterious ways, Linder thought when at last the bus lurched forward.
Though still a fugitive, he was now a documented resident of a
restricted zone and thus, at least on paper, more or less a free man.
For reasons that he could not quite fathom, the contradiction made
him feel right at home.