Necessary Evil (4 page)

"What did you mean by that?" she said as she followed him to the barn.''Do you have something against federal agents or just women?"

"How long have you been worried about it?"

"I'm not worried about it."

''Am I right that shoving people around, shootouts and the like doesn't detract at all from your personhood?"

She stood openmouthed. "Well, that's hardly—"

"Good, then I guess it's not a problem."

Instinctively he knew that she cared what he thought of her. He hadn't figured out why. Maybe it was the reason he seemed to be talking so much. As the women stood in the doorway, watching the storm, the mare arrived. With the women looking on, and holding lights, he began the tedious job of dressing the wounds.

An hour later, his back hurting, he joined Jessie and Claudie at the barn door. The snow had grown alarmingly deep already.

As he reached for his bag, he looked over his left shoulder and across the barn to a head peering around a pile of five-gallon plastic containers. Kier looked into the dark eyes of Turtleneck, the Donahues' pet llama. As always, Kier silently cussed his failure to save the animal's mother. Tentatively, the young creature walked across the board floor, coming to see Kier.

She was a pleasant diversion from all the troubles of the day. He stripped off his rubber gloves, stroking the rich woolly coat of her back, and in turn she offered her nose and nuzzled his hand. Knowing that she was being weaned from the bottle, Kier hummed a Tilok chant and let her suck on his finger. The furling tongue felt like caterpillars.

Jessie came over. She too began petting the llama. Glancing out of the corner of his eye, Kier noticed a nervous little smile. He would wait for her to speak. Evidently she had the same idea, because the llama was basking in the quiet chant and all the attention.

She cleared her throat. He remained impassive, saying nothing as he rubbed the llama between its eyes.

"I guess maybe we didn't get off on the right foot," she finally said.

"Why is that?"

"Well, the fender. And I guess you don't much care for FBI agents."

"How do you feel about them?" he asked. "That's like asking how I feel about postmen. Some good, some not so good." She looked at him, apparently expecting some sign of agreement or understanding. He studied the llama's limpid eyes.

"Well, for example, how do you feel about Indians?" she asked.

"About like that. Some good, some not so good."

"So do you think maybe we could start again?"

"You gonna be a postman or an Indian this time?" She breathed as if to speak, then paused, unsure. He gave her a rare smile. "I'm more or less just kidding you."

"Oh." She looked nonplussed. "Well, it certainly worked."

"Look, I'm pleased to meet you." He extended his hand. "I think women as attractive as you make me nervous. To be honest."

Jessie shook his hand gamely. "Will you be staying for a while? I mean with the blizzard and the pass and everything? Claudie and I would like some company. I'm visiting over Thanksgiving, trying to help Sis with all she's got going. This shingles is a weird disease. Anyway, will you stay?"

"Really, I ah . . . well, I think I better go. I have a cabin, and I have a little building project there." He was amazed and irritated at how nervous he felt. Leaving sounded good and bad all at the same time. "Actually, I've gotta be on my way."

"Okay," was all she said. But it was at that moment that he realized something was wrong. Maybe it was the way Jessie said the word, the shrug of her shoulders, or her tone when she had asked him to stay. Or maybe what was unconscious had just become conscious. He felt as though he had just kicked a helpless creature.

Claudie was coming back through the doorway to check on her horse. Or her sister. Kier wasn't sure which.

"Hi, how you doing?" Jessie said to Claudie, taking her arm. Jessie seemed confident, soothing, and strong. Perhaps he was imagining things. Never in a single day had he had so many catastrophes.

Things would get better, they always did. Perhaps things were actually not so bad. The foal would survive, and the mare would recover. He doubted Winona would be doing any more surrogate mothering. She could work in his vet clinic.

Kier was bidding Jessie and Claudie farewell, still thinking about Jessie, when it happened.

It started as a barely audible roar, but turned into shrieking thunder. The air seemed to compress; even the storm seemed to still. Incredibly bright light flashed overhead, streaming through the falling snow.

Concussive shock waves sent a rolling vibration through the barn, and a series of muffled booms shook the air again. Kier allowed his awareness to expand as his body absorbed the reverberations. He looked everywhere and nowhere, marveling at the intensity of the light. On the wind he smelled kerosene, pungent and foreign.

Then the cold silence of a winter pasture reclaimed the Donahue ranch. Turtleneck had disappeared behind a haystack.

"What in the name of heaven—" Claudie began.

Kier's heart picked a slightly faster rhythm, but his calm remained. Separating things in his mind, like untangling a snarled line, he knew that the explosions, the light, the roar, and the odors had been man-made. No natural phenomenon could account for what he had just experienced.

"That sounded like a jet crashing," said Jessie.

"Like jet engines near full throttle," Kier agreed. "Before the impact."

"Oh my God," Claudie breathed.

Kier squinted into the blizzard, which showed no sign of letting up.

"I'm going," he told them.

"I'm coming too," said Jessie just as quickly.

Kier knew it would only waste time to argue with her.

"Suit yourself," he said and ran into the storm.

A man who ignores the bear in the night will be the feast by morning.

—Tilok proverb

S
talking Bear sat on Iron Mountain under the outstretched branches of a giant Douglas fir. There were two faces to this tree: the windward (the angrier face) and the lee. On the lee side, a large boulder created a wall. Between the rock and the tree, the mountain made a shelter as peaceful as the place for a babe between its mother's breasts. Despite the storm, the snow had scarcely dusted the old man's blankets.

A host of men had descended upon Iron Mountain over the past twenty-four hours. They had guns and walked about with maps and gadgets, trampling the forest underfoot, and defecating like sick dogs. They talked on and on, with a separate complaint for every twig that pressed into their oversized haunches. Only one among them could listen to the forest, and this man was driven by something unnatural. The other men seemed no more than careless accidents.

With eyes closed and the blankets over his head, Stalking Bear slept. The pestilence that had drawn so close fanned his dreams into giant flames.

A distant roaring opened his eyes. It grew and tore across the landscape. He heard it making junk of the trees and covered his ears.

It stopped as quickly as it had come.

Stalking Bear rose and stood motionless, watching. He felt the cool in his lungs and the sweat soaking his shirt in the chill of the howling wind. All around, granite cliffs stood in silent witness to this sudden intrusion into the mountain valley.

Above Stalking Bear, kier, the fish hawk, unfurled its wings and slid through the blowing snow to disappear against the evergreens. In the sudden quiet, a slow shiver of anticipation crept up the old man's spine.

In that instant, he knew. He was being called to a danger he did not understand in a place that had been Tilok forever.

Jessie held on to the back of Kier's coat, maintaining actual physical contact and tolerating this lash-up only because it was the simplest way to be sure that they weren't separated. Endless FBI training exercises had taught her to go from an ordinary state to the edge of an adrenaline high in seconds without the mind-spinning disorientation that ordinarily accompanied the shock of extremes. Being in a howling blizzard and looking for God-knew-what qualified as such a situation. She expected to find spilled jet fuel, with maybe more explosions, and probably people at death's door.

This was not the time or place for a triage operation, Jessie realized. Kier's veterinary medicine would do little for people who needed plasma and blood. It would be agonizing for injured survivors. This was also not the time to allow quibbles with this man to prevent their cooperation in a potential disaster.

Only after Kier turned to take her arm did she realize that she must have been dragging. She tried to concentrate on keeping up with him in the snow, an almost impossible task, for Kier Wintripp was superbly fit.

As she put her head down to gut it out, she glimpsed snow-laden branches low to the ground, probably the firs between the field and Elk Horn Mountain road. The whole area around her sister's home was a jumble in her mind. Grudgingly, she credited Kier with an almost inhuman ability to find his way— and to find people, from the stories Claudie told. Jessie assumed he had a perfect map of this mountainous terrain in his head.

More trees—a wall of them, with heavy brush beneath— slowed their progress. They slid through the dense stuff with a slapping of branches and barely audible crashes in the thickening whiteness. Kier paused. Correcting slightly, he headed off at a new angle—away from the road, she was sure. As they topped a steep rise, thigh deep in snowy windfalls, they spied a giant hole through a thicket of evergreens. It had to be the jet's crash path, if indeed it was a jet.

They were trotting instead of running now, Jessie's bursting lungs filling in short gasps. The brush grabbed at her jeans and jacket. Tough, prickly branches raked her legs and shins.

Kier stopped abruptly. "Through the brush," he said, pointing ahead. "It's big, but it's no 747."

She could see the hole through the forest clearly now. Broken trees lay everywhere along the flight path. A small bunch of evergreens—Jessie thought some sort of fir, each tree about a foot in diameter—had been shattered six feet above the ground. Climbing through the downed trees looked impossible, but Kier scrambled over and under, breaking a trail, pulling and lifting her through the hardest spots.

A silver squirrel with obsidian-bead eyes stood on the remaining stump of a sheared-off evergreen. Apparently his tree had snapped right at the roof of his hollow in the trunk, leaving him miserably exposed, shaking and chattering—the squirrel version of "Oh shit."

They came upon more broken trees, oaks still not completely shed of their leaves. Big pieces of sheet aluminum lay about the ground and among the fractured branches. Everything was frosted with snow. She didn't see the jet engine until she had almost run into it, smoking hot and steaming in the cold. Not more than a few feet away a still-smoldering wing looked like the shredded remains of a popped balloon. They followed the trail of mangled foliage until they saw what looked like the main body of the plane. Squinting in the blinding snow, Jessie saw a blurry scene of shadow and white.

The plane had the sleek look of the private jets used by corporate moguls and Hollywood stars. It was the size of a small commuter jet, perhaps a little shorter than a 737. It lay in a tangle of woody debris and earth, the cockpit partially covered with snow on the windward side, a gaping hole near the tail. The fuselage seemed mostly intact.

Jessie stepped over a shoe containing a foot and a shinbone— nothing more. Trying not to slip on the snow-covered rocks and cluttered debris, she muttered thanks to Kier, who briefly steadied her by her arm. As they drew nearer, they found the body that went with the foot spilling out of the wreckage. Caucasian, maybe in his thirties, dead of multiple, massive injuries.

Jessie whisked snow from his face... and sucked in a lungful of icy air. There, neat and round as a Concord grape, was a bullet hole in his forehead. Little blood stained the snow. He had been shot in the plane before it crashed.

The man wore an empty shoulder holster, reddish-brown, and twisted bizarrely over his chest.
Think. Draw your gun.
Training took over. Jessie reached under her coat for her 9-mm. semiautomatic, which was housed in its own business-black shoulder holster. Standard issue now was 10-mm., but the recoil was excessive for her light body and she did, after all, spend her time in offices, so carrying a cannon seemed unnecessary. She had never drawn it except to practice.

Breathe deep. Scan. Scan.
It was Dunfee shouting in that gravelly, knock-down-a-wall voice she'd never forget. Special Agent Mike Dunfee might as well have been standing behind her. Assuming the stance he'd taught her, adrenaline fluttering her legs and pounding her heart, she pointed her gun directly in front of her and began a 360-degree pivot around Kier. She could see only desolation.

Should she rush into the plane? Better to be careful, she decided as she felt Kier pulling her down into a crouch next to the plane's rear entry. Facing him, she saw calm in his eyes.

"Give me the gun and let me go in there first," he said, nodding at the hulk that had been a jet.

"This is my job."

"Right." He took a deep breath, obviously trying to figure what he should say next.

"Listen. I know you're an FBI agent, but you run computers, don't you?"

"I run computers. You doctor sick animals."

He stared off to the side with his jaw clenched.

"Yeah, well, I hope it doesn't bury you."

"Well, if it does, I died doing my job."

Without saying more, he let his eyes gaze over the landscape, searching, trying, Jessie knew, to devour every inch, to know more than could be known. Kier motioned with his head and they moved just inside the fuselage through the rear hole.

"This is my deal, Kier," she said again, trying to slow him down.

She fought to find the confidence that had gotten her this far in life. She worked with computers because she was good at it, not because she was afraid of the field.

Quickly she surveyed what she could see of the main cabin. In the darkened interior to the left, she could make out a scramble of bodies and debris. Nothing moved. There were papers and blood everywhere. To the right, she found that the tail section contained large plastic pods, most of them broken open and covered with ice. Some were full of documents; others had what looked to be the remains of lab vials. Thousands of small plastic containers were strewn around. Kier was like a shadow standing so close that she could feel his breath as he looked over her shoulder.

"Anybody hear me?" she called.

"Everybody I can see is dead," Kier said.

Quickly she checked the bodies that she could easily reach. Most had visible bullet wounds in addition to crash injuries All dead.

While Kier began looking through the papers strewn near the jet's rear door, Jessie returned to the corpse outside. Crouching by the body, she wished desperately for plastic gloves. She had studied bullet wounds in pictures, and in bodies at the morgue. This was different. Here there was the nauseating odor of a perforated bowel, the slaughterhouse reek of open entrails. And here she had to hurry. More bodies were inside. Who had done the shooting and why? Had this been a hit man or a bodyguard? Foreign agent? Mafia member?

She searched the body. Blood caked the torn shirt and suit coat—expensive clothing by the looks of it. Under the suit the chest was spongy, and the steaming innards had popped out through lacerations in the belly—bluish-green, translucent like twisted sausage.

"This is all lab stuff," Kier called from just inside the plane. He was opening a thick three-ring binder, one of many.

Jessie found nothing in the jacket or pants pockets, not even lint; it was as if the suit had been taken directly off the store rack. No I.D. This man was not law enforcement.

As she moved back to the rear of the fuselage, Kier did not even look up from his reading.

Inside and to the left lay seats for more than twenty people spaciously arranged. In the gray half-light she counted the bodies, some hanging lifeless in their belts, others squeezed between collapsed seats. Nine. Looking back, she saw Kier still studying the papers.

''We really shouldn't touch things," she said without conviction, knowing the plane could catch fire and burn, leaving nothing but a mystery.

A feeling came over her that she'd forgotten something. She looked back outside the way she had come. There it was. Partially snow-filled footprints circled the jet, ultimately leading off into the brush. She hadn't noticed them before. Someone must have survived, or found the wreck before she and Kier did.

"There are tracks," she called to Kier. "I saw. They're hard to read." He barely looked up from the black plastic binder. "What else haven't you told me?" ''I think the person doesn't want to be found.'' He shrugged. "He's long gone. Probably at the county road."

"I can't believe anybody survived," she said. "What's in the binder?"

"I'm not sure yet."

"You're taking this awfully calmly."

"The bland expression is hereditary." It struck her as the driest sort of black humor. She watched a moment longer as he pored over the pages.

The smell of jet fuel stung her nostrils. Better hurry. Stepping gun first, she began making her way through the passenger cabin. Teal leather and rose carpets told her the decorator had an eye for the gaudy. Oxygen masks dangled from the ceiling. The fuselage of the jet was crushed in places, but she saw no complete breach, except at the large hole where she now stood, and at the midsection, where a stump had pierced the side of the plane. Exposed wires, like veins on a skinned carcass, ran fore and aft. Blood stained even the ceiling.

The quiet was eerie—pregnant with tension, as if someone was waiting, watching. She took her uneasiness as a warning, and did not struggle with the illogic of it.

Four bodies, facing one another in club seating, sat slightly aft of the midsection. The stretched seat belts were almost ripped from their fittings. Near the first body, Jessie found a gun on the floor. Bullet holes riddled the back of the man's suit.

Struggling through his pockets, vomit tickling the base of her throat, she found no I.D. on this one either. On the other side of the aisle, the next body lay in the seats like a collapsed marionette without the strings. The way the body was compressed between the seats it would take a pathology team to pull it out and determine the cause of death. Only arms in camel-hair sleeves and legs in twill slacks remained visible.

In the next row forward on the left side lay the other two bodies. One had his head back, tongue extended betweet clenched teeth, and a 10-mm. Glock with a silencer in his hand. She put her nose close and caught the smell of a fired weapon.

Farther forward sat a macabre, five-person huddle—two women and three men who didn't seem to have guns. All of the men had wallets with ordinary-looking I.D., including drivers' licenses. They wore slacks and open shirts. One woman was dressed in a business suit, the other in a pantsuit. All the clothes looked middle-American plain, stuff that could have come from any mass merchandiser—nothing like the slick Italian suit of the gunman.