Alex Berenson: The Midnight House

“I’ll take her,” Wells said.

“Just like that? ”

“Why not? ”

“Dog’s a commitment. Ever owned one before? ”

“Growing up.”

“You live around here?”

“Berlin.” Berlin was about fifty miles north of Conway. “Moved in a couple months back.”

“Do you travel a lot? ”

“Once in a while,” Wells said.

“And you’re sure you’ll be able to take care of her, Mr. Cant? ”

Wells’s new driver’s license and credit cards identified him as Clarkson Cant. Every time he had to use them, Wells imagined Ellis Shafer smirking. Shafer, his sort-of boss at the agency, a man with the sense of humor of a not-so-naughty ten-year-old. Wells had almost demanded a less ridiculous alias before deciding not to give Shafer the satisfaction.

“Yes,” Wells said evenly. He refrained from pointing out that the dog would surely choose him, whatever his flaws, over the alternative.

The woman looked Wells over, considering his patched-up jeans, shaggy hair, and half-grown beard. Finally she nodded. “Okay. Fill out the papers, pay the fee, she’s yours.”

Wells and the dog had gotten along fine ever since. She’d been a boon companion during the winter, which had been harsh even by the standards of northern New Hampshire. For two straight weeks in February the temperature stayed below zero, a lung-burning, skin-sloughing cold that kept Wells inside except for runs to the grocery store and stretches of wood chopping. Wells loved working the ax. The sky was bright blue and the air bone-dry, and the logs split easily under the blade. Tonka, no dummy, watched from inside the cabin. He couldn’t pretend he was entirely alone. Trucks rumbled distantly and snowmobiles whined along the creek trail. But Wells didn’t mind. In fact, he liked being reminded that the world was still there, with or without him.

A YEAR BEFORE, Jennifer Exley, Wells’s fiancée, had almost died in an assassination attempt aimed at Wells. In the aftermath, she’d demanded that he quit the agency. Wells couldn’t. But he couldn’t accept that he’d lost Exley, either. So he’d fled Washington, fled her. Though even Shafer, never known for his tact, was too polite to use that word.

For months he backpacked through Europe and Asia, bunking in hostels alongside students half his age. Then he rented a cabin in southwest Montana, where he’d grown up. But after a week, he left. Heather and Evan, his ex-wife and son, lived in Missoula with Heather’s second husband. Their proximity disturbed him. He wanted to make amends with Evan, at least announce his presence to the boy. Take him out for pizza. But the simple act of picking up the phone, asking to speak to his son, left him shaking his head.

Years before, when he’d last talked to Heather, she’d told him she wouldn’t let him parachute in and then disappear again. At the time, Wells understood. The agency had been on the verge of declaring him a terrorist. These days no one would question his loyalty to the United States. His judgment maybe, but not his loyalty. But he knew Heather’s feelings hadn’t changed. Quit the job, she would tell him. Come back to earth and then we’ll talk. Just as Exley had.

Only Wells couldn’t quit. He wished he could tell himself that his sense of duty and honor wouldn’t let him. And those fine words were part of the reason. But only part. In truth, he feared being bored. Feared, he supposed, that one day people would ask him, “Didn’t you used to be John Wells? ”

No, he couldn’t quit. But he wasn’t ready to work again — not yet, anyway. So no to Exley, no to Heather, no to Evan. He would be alone.

He left Montana, headed east, to the Presidential Mountains of New Hampshire. Wells remembered his surprise when, as a fresh-man at Dartmouth, he’d first seen the Presidentials. He’d imagined that mountains in the East were hummocks. But Mount Washington towered nearly a mile over the valley to its east. And its weather was fierce. The observatory at its peak had measured the highest wind ever recorded, 231 miles an hour. If the Sawtooth Mountains were out, the Presidentials would do.

Wells rented a two-room cabin on a gravel road in Berlin, a little town just north of Mount Washington. He had twelve acres to himself and a woodstove for heat. The place also came with DirecTV, and Wells had to admit that he watched more television than he’d planned. Still, he plowed through a couple books a week, mainly biographies. Jackson, Lincoln, Rockefeller, Churchill, great men facing great obstacles. War, slavery, depressions global and personal. No women, and no religion. Not the Bible, not the New Testament, not the Quran. In his cabin, alone, he wanted the tangible consolations of the world as it was, not the uncertain promises of paradise.

For the same reason, he worked out incessantly. He turned the cabin’s second room into a miniature gym. Every weekday afternoon he turned on the television — okay, he’d admit it, he watched General Hospital and then Oprah ; he wasn’t proud of himself, but the truth was the truth — and spent an hour running and an hour lifting. On Saturdays, before the winter got too nasty, he hiked Mount Washington, carrying a frame pack loaded with twenty-pound bags of dog food. In the winter he substituted a three-hour climb on the treadmill, eight thousand vertical feet.

A mental renaissance came along with the physical. In his first months without Exley, he’d awoken more than once certain that she was beside him. When he reached for her and didn’t find her, his mind refused to accept her absence. He told himself that his fingers were lying, that she really was with him. As though he were an amputee insisting on the presence of a lost arm or leg. Then he would wake fully and feel the same emptiness he’d felt when he’d learned his mother had died and been buried while he was eight thousand miles away.

Slowly, though, his dislocation and loneliness faded. He still missed Exley badly, but part of him was happy that he was no longer hurting her. She’d made him choose, her or the job, and he’d chosen. One day, if they were meant to be, they would be.

As the days got longer and the worst of the winter faded, Wells felt his thirst for action returning. Hard as the job had been, it had given him the chance to see worlds most people couldn’t even imagine. Years before, during the worst sickness of his life, he’d had a dream — a vision, really — that the guns he carried were part of his body. He couldn’t put them down even at the cost of losing his chance at Heaven. Wells was no fan of tarot cards or psychics, but he had never forgotten that dream, or doubted its truth. He couldn’t stay in New Hampshire forever. Soon enough, the call would come, and he’d have to answer.

But for now he was free. And so this morning, with clouds hiding the sun and the wind whistling from the north, he had decided to brace himself with his first big hike of the new year. He hedged his bets slightly, choosing to go up Mount Adams, slightly lower and easier than Mount Washington. He packed his daypack and offered Tonka two cans of her favorite high-protein food. She knew where they were going without being told. When he opened the cabin door, she headed straight for his Subaru WRX, her tail wagging wildly. Then she stood against the front door and tried to open it herself.

NOW HE WAS CLOSING on the peak of Mount Adams, scrambling over trees that the winter’s winds had torn down. He hopped over an iced-over stream and landed in a thick patch of muddy snow that dirtied his jeans. As he reached the final stretch, a cold drizzle began, matting down his unkempt hair. Tonka had changed her mind. She looked up at him, asking wordlessly why he’d brought her out in such weather.