Exile Hunter (63 page)

In a sudden fit of
rage, she seized the steering wheel with both hands and wrenched it
toward her so that the sedan veered onto the right shoulder. Roger
wrestled it back and now the car swerved left across both lanes and
ran off the road, careening down a steep embankment. It came to a
sudden stop amid a jagged rock formation, where it burst into flames
and burned with an all-consuming heat.

* * *

Jay Becker drove past
the crash site a half hour later and watched a fire crew finish
dousing the smoke and flames. Paramedics carried two stretchers
toward the ambulance, each bearing a corpse in a zippered body bag.

“Looks like a
government sedan,” Jay observed. “Poor slobs, probably choked on
their doughnuts.”

“Don’t slow down,”
Linder urged. “Let’s get past.”

A sudden feeling of
melancholy struck Linder as he watched the stretchers and he felt an
odd sense of loss without knowing why. He glanced behind him to
Caroline and noticed a dejected look on her face.

When they reached the
deserted supermarket parking lot where they were to meet their
underground contacts, Linder got out of the pickup and addressed
Caroline through her open window.

“Each of us will
travel separately now,” he said, placing both his hands over hers
on the door’s windowsill. “In a few days, we’ll all meet again
in North Dakota and stay with Jay’s people until we figure out what
to do next,” he explained. “I know some folks on the Great Lakes
who might get us aboard a freighter to Europe. Give it some thought
and we’ll talk more when we’re together again.”

Without further
leave-taking, Linder pressed his hand to Caroline’s cheek with a
reassuring smile before crossing the lot to an old black SUV with
tinted windows where a prosperous-looking couple in their mid-sixties
awaited him. He climbed into the back seat and introduced himself as
Tom while Jay parked the company pickup and Caroline was led off to
another waiting vehicle. The couple in the black SUV, whose names
were Ted and Joan, said little and seemed very anxious to get
started. As the SUV left the parking lot, Linder removed pen and
paper from his breast pocket and wrote hastily.

“Dear Ruth: Tell
April I will come for her soon. She should watch for me outside the
Rapid Transit Station on her way to or from work and be ready to
leave at a moment’s notice.”

He folded the paper,
sealed it in an envelope, and addressed it to his cousin in Cleveland
before handing it forward to Ted.

“Would you mind
dropping this into a mailbox before we get too far?” he asked Ted.

“Sure thing,” the
driver replied as he accepted the letter. “I know just the place.
But for now, I need you to lie on the floor and pull this blanket
over you. And don’t move or say a word till I say so.”

A few minutes later,
the car stopped.

“Okay, you can get up
and stretch now, but keep the windows closed and stay inside the
car,” Ted instructed.

Linder saw that they
were parked outside a convenience store equipped with gas pumps,
phone booth and a mailbox. Joan stepped out to mail the letter while
Ted turned around in his seat to instruct Linder in how to lift the
rear seat and enter a hidden compartment large enough to conceal a
grown man with ample room to spare.

“Don’t worry,”
Ted assured Linder with a smile. “It’s well ventilated and you
won’t be in there for long. Once we get through the next couple of
towns, you can come out again. We won’t be using the Interstate, so
it’s going to be a long drive.”

“I’ve done worse,”
Linder answered with a gentle laugh and lowered himself into the dark
compartment.

History never repeats itself but it often rhymes.
Mark Twain

MID-OCTOBER, CLEVELAND, OHIO

Warren Linder downed
the last of his lukewarm coffee and stared out the windshield of his
ancient minivan into the predawn gloom. Half a block ahead was the
floodlit steel-and-glass head house of the West 25th Street commuter
rail station, tucked behind Cleveland’s West Side Market. The
market, an immense yellow-brick cathedral of a building with
barrel-vaulted ceilings and a 130-foot clock tower built shortly
before the World War I, represented the focal point of Cleveland’s
historic Ohio City neighborhood, founded nearly a century before.

On entering the
neighborhood, Linder observed with sadness the broken windows, vacant
storefronts, and heaps of trash that showed how far this sooty
wasteland had fallen. He recalled from his schoolboy days that St.
John’s Episcopal Church, only a few streets away, was one of the
final stops of the original Underground Railroad in northeastern Ohio
during Civil War I. That the New Underground Railroad had brought him
to Ohio City was no coincidence, he mused, and felt renewed gratitude
for the volunteers who had helped him at each stage of his trip east,
just as they assisted many others fleeing the modern-day slavery of
the Unionist labor camps.

Linder had picked up
the minivan in Detroit, where Caroline Kendall joined him for the
drive to Cleveland. Caroline lay asleep in the back seat while he
watched and waited. From his cousin Ruth’s final posting on the
refugee locator board, he knew that his sister April now worked at a
public high school near the West Side Market and that she commuted to
it by the Cleveland Rapid Transit Red Line. The high school, once a
private Jesuit school for young men famous in the city for its
successful athletic programs, had been renamed for the
President-for-Life the year before.

Linder shook himself
awake and looked at his watch. It was a few minutes past seven and
classes started at eight. Since it was only a ten-minute walk along
Lorain Avenue from the station to the school, April would likely pass
the minivan some time in the next half hour. With the arrival of each
commuter train, a growing number of teenagers carrying book bags
emerged from the station.

Linder reached for
Caroline’s ankle and gave it a gentle tug.

“Time to wake up,
Caroline,” he announced gently. “She’ll be coming out soon. Do
you remember what you’re supposed to do?”

“Yeah, I guess so,”
she answered in a sleepy voice.

“Why don’t you
repeat it to me one more time, just to be sure.”

“When you point out
your sister, I’m supposed to follow her to the market hall. Then I
need to get her attention just before we reach the first entrance to
the hall on the right,” Caroline replied.

“What are you going
to tell her?”

“I’m going to say
‘I have news from Warren and would you please come inside.’ Then,
once we’re in, I’ll tell her that you’re waiting for us in the
van. Whether she comes with me or not, I go out the opposite side of
the building into the alley. Then I turn right until I hit West 24th
Street and then right again to come back to the van.”

“Bravo,” Linder
replied. “And don’t forget to give April a big smile. Once you do
that, it’s a cinch she’ll follow you.”

A few minutes later,
another group of students emerged from the brightly lit head house,
and so did a dark-haired woman in a navy pea coat and matching knit
hat with a book bag slung over her shoulder.

“That’s April,”
Linder declared with suppressed excitement. “Now go get her. But if
she won’t come, don’t argue—just break off and come right back
here, okay?”

“Got it,” Caroline
replied, locking onto her target. A moment later, she rolled the
minivan door shut behind her and set off in pursuit.

Linder watched Caroline
close in on the woman in the pea coat and, for a moment, he worried
that he might have misidentified her. But then the woman turned her
head to listen to Caroline and Linder breathed a sigh of relief at
recognizing his sister. As requested, April promptly followed
Caroline into the Market Hall and the next few minutes passed with
agonizing slowness as Linder scanned the streets and alleys for signs
of surveillance. Finally, he spotted the two women in his rear view
mirror and started the engine.

Caroline opened the
front passenger door and stood beside April as she peered inside the
van.

“Warren? Is that
really you?” came his sister’s anxious voice.

“It’s me, all
right,” he answered, choking back his tears. “Now get in and give
me a hug.”

Caroline, showing a
presence of mind that had often surprised Linder, closed the
passenger door behind April and looked up and down the street before
hopping in the back seat. She waited until the siblings finished
their hug before she spoke.

“Shouldn’t we be
going now?” she asked. “You’re making me nervous.”

Linder laughed as he
reached down to put the car in gear. Once in motion, he glanced
frequently in his sister’s direction as if to make sure she were
still there.

“I received your
messages but I hardly dared hope I’d ever see you again,” April
told her brother, laughing and crying at the same time. “Is it true
you escaped from a prison camp, or were you let out on parole? I
heard there might have been an amnesty.”

“Not for me,” he
said. “Escape was my only option. And now that I’m out, I intend
to keep moving till I’m free. Together with you, if you’ll come.”

April looked at him as
if he had just landed from Mars. Linder pretended not to notice the
troubled look in her eyes as he turned onto Lorain Avenue toward the
Northeast Freeway.

“But that’s
impossible,” she replied a pause. “It would be suicide even to
try. Everyone knows Homeland Security has the borders completely
sealed.”

“No more impossible
than my being here in Cleveland,” he asserted. “I got this far,
didn’t I? Listen, I don’t see this as a suicide mission at all.
If I did, I wouldn’t be asking you and Caroline to come with me.”

“Hey, can we talk
about this over breakfast,” Caroline broke in. “I’m starving.”

“Sure, after we get
on the freeway and put a little distance between us and downtown,”
Linder replied. “But we’ll all have to put on disguises whenever
we leave the car in case there are surveillance cameras around. Why
don’t you show April how to wear hers while I drive.”

* * *

They stopped to buy
breakfast from the drive-through window of a family restaurant near
the airport. From there, Linder drove April and Caroline on to
Strongsville, a bedroom community about ten miles further south,
where he dropped them at one of many low-priced motels near the
junction of Interstate 71 and the Ohio Turnpike. After giving April
cash to book a room, he instructed them to stay indoors until he
returned that evening. Next, he searched for a pay phone to call Jay
Becker, who awaited his call in a town a hundred miles to the west.

Linder found a pay
phone in the lobby of a truck stop a quarter mile away and placed the
call. Jay answered on the third ring. After each man each gave a
prearranged greeting to verify that he was not under hostile control,
Jay spoke first.

“The competition paid
a visit to Dad at the office two days ago,” he reported. “They
also visited the folks we stayed with in my home town. But it doesn’t
sound like they know what we’re up to, judging from the kinds of
questions they asked. Of course, they’ll be looking in the usual
places, but if you’re careful, you ought not to run into problems.
How soon do you think you’ll need me?”

“We’re on
schedule,” Linder answered. “Let’s meet tonight as planned.”

Linder hung up the
phone, checked his watch, and continued south on Route 42 for another
15 miles before turning onto a county road and from there onto a
one-lane dirt road. No more than twin tire tracks in the dirt and a
center strip of tall grass, the road led through rolling pasture and
up a steep rise to a deserted farmhouse flanked by a dilapidated red
barn and a pair of small sheds. This was the place Yost had described
to him in their final conversation before the avalanche.
Perpendicular rows of tall poplars screened the farmstead to the
north and west, while an untended apple orchard obstructed views to
the south.

Linder parked behind
the barn and circled it on foot before tugging at the handle of a
Dutch door beside the larger main door. The door would not budge. Nor
would the main door, which had jumped its track. He gave the barnyard
a long searching look, as if to commit its features to memory, before
heading back to the van.

Before he traveled more
than a few steps, a gruff voice called out from one of the sheds.

“Raise your hands and
turn around slowly.”

The voice was muffled
but sounded oddly familiar. Linder turned around and faced the shed,
watching a man approach from out of the shadows with a pistol raised
and pointed at his heart. His jaw dropped when he saw that the man
was Charlie Yost.

“Yes, it’s me. And
I’m not a ghost,” Yost assured him as he tucked the .45 caliber
autoloader into his waistband.

Linder stepped forward
to embrace Yost, who had regained some of his lost weight and now
looked like a stern old Ohio farmer in his rust-colored twill hunting
jacket and plaid hunting cap. Linder grasped him by his sinewy
shoulders and examined him at arm’s length.

“But I saw you fall
in the avalanche,” Linder protested, his feelings a mixture of joy
and confusion. “We searched every inch of it for you.”

“You gave up too
soon,” Yost said with a forgiving laugh. “When I came around, you
were already gone. Fortunately, I had enough air around my face to
breathe and was able to work my hands free and dig myself out. But my
knee was twisted and I couldn’t hope to catch up. The next day,
some Dene natives hunting elk in the next valley spotted my tracks
and took me with them.”

“But how did you make
it all the way to Cleveland?” Linder asked.

“When my knee got
better, the Dene helped me find my way to Great Slave Lake. From
there, I cadged rides on freight trains and trucks to Toronto, where
I have friends from the old days.”