C. Box - Force of Nature

As the audi neared the turnoff to Bighorn Road and his house, Joe could feel his stomach clench and his scalp crawl-two sensations that always kicked in just before a fight. Instinctively, he reached down with his right hand and touched the stock of his shotgun, which was muzzle down on the floorboards.

“You take that road, mister,” Joe said aloud, “and things are going to get real western real fast.”

The crossover continued on without slowing down for the exit. Joe exhaled.

Twenty miles out of town, Joe got an inkling where the crossover might be headed.

So much so, in fact, that he decided he could slow down and allow the cushion to lengthen, reducing the risk that he’d be spotted. Since dark timber now formed walls on both sides of the road and he couldn’t see his quarry ahead, he decided to simply stay in the tracks to see if his speculation proved correct.

If so, he’d located the headquarters of John Nemecek.

And now that he was sure of Luke Brueggemann’s involvement-or whoever his trainee really was-he smacked the steering wheel with the heel of his hand.

It made perfect sense.

Joe had no intention of following the Audi all the way to its destination. He just wanted to make sure it was going where he thought it was. When he confirmed it, he’d return to his house and have a lot of thinking and sorting and worrying to do-while he packed.

The road narrowed, and the tracks he was following went straight down the center. The trees were so thick and close on both sides that if the crossover stopped suddenly and Joe came upon the vehicle it would be nearly impossible to turn around quickly. It wasn’t much farther until the old road he guessed Nemecek was aiming for intersected the pavement.

He envisioned rounding a corner to find the Audi blocking his path, Nemecek straddling the tracks, rifle ready. Joe slowed down around the next turn, eyes straining through the darkness beyond his sneak lights, hoping to see the vehicle before the occupants of the vehicle saw him.

The tracks made an abrupt turn off the old highway onto South Fork Trail, and Joe stopped his pickup. He would pursue no farther, because he now had no doubt where the Audi was headed. He was both relieved and anxious at the same time.

He backed slowly up the road he had come on, careful to keep his tires in the same tracks. If it kept snowing, the tracks would be covered and Nemecek would have no idea he’d been followed. But if the snow stopped suddenly, Joe’s pursuit would be revealed as plainly as if he’d left a note.

So he ground backward in reverse, keeping his tires in the tracks, until his neck hurt from craning it over his shoulder. When he thought he’d retreated far enough from the logging road that the evidence of a three-point turn in the snow could be explained away as a wandering elk hunter, he headed back toward Bighorn Road.

His cell phone burred a few minutes after he cleared the timber, and he snatched it out of his pocket. Joe wasn’t surprised to see who was calling.

“Hi, darling,” he said.

“Are you okay?” Marybeth asked.

“Okay enough,” he said. “Luke is working with Nemecek. I followed Nemecek as far as the road to his camp.”

“My God,” Marybeth said, and he heard sincere disappointment in her voice. “He seemed like such a good kid.”

“He might be,” Joe said. “I’m about forty-five minutes out. Is everything okay there?”

“Everything’s fine,” she said. “Mike is sticking around until you get back. Every fifteen minutes or so, he goes outside and looks around. He said nobody is out and about yet.”

“Good,” Joe said.

“You sound distracted,” she said. He didn’t realize he was, but she was good at pulling things out of him.

He said, “I was thinking about something.”

As briefly as he could, and with a real effort not to color the theory or worry her any more than necessary, he told her about what Nate had said about the female operative on Nemecek’s team.

“Since we haven’t encountered any young women that would fit that profile,” Joe said, “something came to mind…”

She didn’t let him finish his thought. Her voice quickly rose through the scales: “A young woman, probably from the east. Sheridan’s new friend is from Maryland. She doesn’t know much more about her, I don’t think. The girl who wants Sheridan to go to the East Coast for Thanksgiving. It might be her. Nemecek may know Sheridan is Nate’s apprentice, and this girl might be in Laramie to keep an eye on her- or do something to our daughter to lure Nate.”

“Calm down,” Joe said. “We don’t know anything yet.”

“And she won’t answer her phone!” Marybeth said, clearly alarmed.

“She never does,” Joe pointed out. “Really, we can’t do any good getting worked up.”

“I’m not worked up!” Marybeth shouted.

The juxtaposition of her statement with her tone gave them both pause. He waited until she came back, this time more calmly. “I could try to call a couple of her friends to go wake her up, if only I knew they’d have their phones on,” she said. “Or better yet, we could call the dorm front desk or the Laramie police department.”

He told her about his conversation with Chuck Coon, and she agreed that was the best way to go.

“I’m going to keep trying to get in touch with her, though,” Marybeth said. “She’ll have to wake up and turn on her phone eventually, won’t she?”

“Yup.”

“Hurry back,” Marybeth said. “We’ll need to leave for the airport in three hours, and you haven’t packed anything.”

Joe shrugged, even though he knew she couldn’t see it.

“Oh,” she said, “I had something to tell you when I called.”

“Go ahead,” he said. The road was covered with an inch of slush as he descended from the mountains into the valley, where it was a few degrees warmer.

“I looked at that book I brought home.”

“Yes,” he said, prompting her.

“It’s a lot to digest. Did you know the idea for al-Qaeda got started in Greeley, Colorado, of all places?”

“Greeley?” Joe said, thinking of the northern Colorado city that smelled of feedlots and cattle. “Is that our connection?”

“Hardly,” she said. “That was 1949. It’s interesting and sick at the same time. The Egyptian named Sayyid Qutb was at the college there as a visiting professor, and he became disgusted with Western morality because he went to a barn dance! I’ll tell you all about it on our plane trip.”

“Okay,” Joe said.

“But that’s not what I found that makes me think we’re onto something. I think we might know the secret of Nate: why he is how he is and how he got that way. And maybe why they’re after him. The timing is perfect as far as Nate goes, and we know he was involved in some bad stuff. Listen closely…”

Joe strained to hear, as she obviously found her place in the book and began to read aloud:

“In early February 1999…”

Nate and Haley drove through Riverton without seeing a single person awake or out on the streets. It was 2:30 in the morning and the bars were closed and not even a Riverton town cop was about. For the past hour he’d filled her in on assignments he had undertaken on behalf of Mark V, and some of the things he’d seen and done. He said he used to have several passports, issued to him under different names. In fact, he said, he’d used the last clean one a month before to fly to Chicago and back under a false identity.

Before they cleared town, Nate stopped at a twenty-four-hour convenience store and filled the gas tank as well as his reserve tank. Inside the Kum amp; Go, he awoke the Indian night-shift clerk. He bought two large cups of coffee, granola bars, and energy drinks, and handed over five twenty-dollar bills. Although it hadn’t occurred to him yet that he hadn’t slept for nearly twenty hours, he wanted to stave off exhaustion when it came for him.