Exile Hunter (49 page)

It is not necessary to hope in order to undertake, nor to succeed in
order to persevere.
Charles the Bold

MID-APRIL, THURSDAY, IDAHO FALLS, IDAHO SECURITY ZONE

The bus delivered
Linder to Idaho Falls by early evening, where he exchanged his
remaining Canadian dollars for greenbacks and bought himself a cheap
steak dinner before renting a room at a rundown hotel near the bus
station.

The next morning,
Linder considered economizing on bus fare by hitchhiking the rest of
the way to Utah, having encountered no further checkpoints since
Great Falls, but decided not to take the risk. Instead, over
breakfast, he plotted the bus route from Idaho Falls to Park City,
and by local jitney bus to Coalville, the town whose name he had seen
in his vision the morning before reaching the ranger cabin. According
to the map, Coalville was located only thirty miles from the Kamas
labor camp where Roger Kendall had said that his wife and
stepdaughter had been held.

From Idaho Falls to the
Utah border, the I-15 highway was nearly empty. No border checkpoints
were encountered and, on crossing into Utah, Linder felt a sudden
exhilaration at having come so close to his goal. Yet, when he
thought of the hardships endured along the way, and the loss of his
fellow prisoners, he felt a profound sadness that nearly drained him
of his strength. But instead of repressing the sadness and guilt, as
he had done toward his DSS targets over the years, now Linder held
each comrade’s image before his mind’s eye and vowed to honor the
man’s sacrifice by completing the mission he had promised to carry
out.

Emerging from his
reverie outside Ogden, Linder noticed that traffic had thickened and
consisted primarily of military vehicles, long-haul trucks, buses and
a few boxy sedans of the kind found in government motor pools. Closer
to the city, the road became clogged with delivery trucks,
ride-sharing vans, and swarms of noisy, exhaust-spewing motorbikes
like those commonly seen all over the Third World. Upon reaching the
Ogden bus terminal, Linder rushed to board a local line from Ogden to
Park City and promptly fell asleep for most of the hour-long ride.

Entering Coalville,
population 1120, in a jitney bus, Linder’s gaze was drawn to
towering mounds of leftover snow flanking both sides of the road from
a bygone snowstorm. A layer of black road dirt encrusted each mound,
from whose base a trickle of melt water flowed along the curb and
into sewer grates below. Paradoxically, the sight of winter’s
doomed remnants left Linder feeling safe and warm, as if to assure
him that he had passed irretrievably beyond the north country’s icy
grasp.

He stepped off the bus
in the center of town and noticed at once that most of the buildings
within view seemed in serious need of repair. Tattered political
banners from some long-past civic event hung across the main street
at every second block, flapping in the steady breeze. The place gave
Linder the impression not so much of a sad little town as of one that
had never known joy.

After walking a couple
of blocks, he stopped at a seedy sandwich shop on South Main Street
to buy a burger and a soda. Then, finding the town’s sole hotel
padlocked as twilight fell, he kept an eye peeled for a cheap
boarding house until he found a “room to let” sign posted on the
door of a well-tended bungalow on an adjacent side street.

He knocked. A
stern-looking woman of about sixty, with long graying hair pinned in
a bun, answered the door wearing a clean white apron over a cotton
print housedress.

“I saw your sign,
ma’am,” he greeted her. “I just arrived in town and found the
hotel closed. Do you rent rooms by the night?”

“The room rate is
twenty dollars a night, one hundred a week,” she answered, looking
him steadily in the eye. “Payable in advance. How long do you
expect to stay?”

“Depends on my
finding work around here,” he said. “I have enough to cover a
week, but would you mind if I pay you just for tonight? I’d like to
see a little more of the town before I decide to stay longer.”

“What sort of work
are you looking for?” the woman asked in a not unkindly way.

“Whatever I can
find,” Linder answered. “I’ve done mining, logging, ranching,
factory work, office work, you name it. But things are tough all
over, so I really don’t know what kind of jobs might be open in
these parts. Do you happen to know of anyone who’s hiring?”

The woman shook her
head, yet her sympathy seemed aroused.

“Strangers looking
for day labor around here usually line up along the lower end of
South Main, just off the freeway. But I’d go early, no later than
seven, if you aim to have a chance. I can wake you up if you like.
Breakfast is three dollars, assuming you might want some ham and eggs
before you set out.”

“I’ll take it,”
Linder declared with a smile, reaching into his trouser pocket for
money. “Here’s twenty-five to get us started. By the way, I’m
Tom Horvath and I’m pleased to meet you.”

“I’m Sharon Unger,
but I hope you’ll call me Sharon. Being called ‘Mrs. Unger’
makes me feel like a dinosaur.”

Linder laughed, and
when the woman smiled in return, he could see from the wrinkles at
the corners of her eyes that in times past she had laughed often and
long. She stepped aside to let him in and showed him to the rear
bedroom, a small space with a single window and its own tiny
bathroom. It was sparsely furnished with a twin bed, stuffed chair,
dark-stained oak writing desk and chair, and a pine chest of drawers.
Linder nodded his approval.

“One more thing,”
she added. “There’s a set of house rules on the desk. Nothing
unusual, I’d say, but I am very strict about a few things. I won’t
permit alcohol, tobacco, firearms, or illegal drugs in my house. Do
your drinking and smoking off the premises, if you must. Will that be
a problem?”

“Not at all, ma’am”
he answered, and wished her a good night.

* * *

The following
morning, Linder rose before dawn and feasted on Mrs. Unger’s ham
and eggs and stand-up-and-cheer coffee before plodding out to Main
Street to take his place along the curb. Pickup trucks and SUVs
cruised up and down, stopping to negotiate labor rates with men
judged suitable for work. He waited ten minutes, then twenty, as the
vehicles whisked by without anyone pulling off to the shoulder to
speak to him. Then by the dim light of the streetlamps, he noticed a
white cargo van approach slowly and stop opposite him. The passenger
window was down, so Linder approached.

At that moment, he
noticed a flashing blue light some fifty meters away, and watched
with growing unease as an unmarked police cruiser stopped behind the
van. A tall sheriff’s deputy dressed in a khaki uniform and a
Smokey the Bear hat climbed out of the cruiser and stepped between
Linder and the passenger door.

“You don’t look
like one of our regulars, mister,” the deputy drawled. “How about
showing me your papers?”

Linder retrieved
Horvath’s Montana residence permit from his trouser pocket and
handed it over.

“You been sick since
they took this photo?” the officer noted with a scowl. “It don’t
look much like you.”

“I was on a mining
job in Canada and lost a lot of weight,” he replied, keeping his
story as close to the truth as he dared.

“Well, why don’t we
just check out your ID back at the station?” the deputy went on,
more as a statement than a question. “Hop in. If your papers are
good, I’ll have you back here within the hour.”

Linder had a sinking
feeling as the deputy waved the van away and opened the rear door to
the police cruiser. He knew that to run would be a big mistake. His
only hope was to count on the documents being in order or the
government’s verification system being out of order. If God
existed, he thought, now might be a very good time for Him to show
up.

Linder stepped toward
the cruiser’s open door. But before he reached it, both men were
bathed in the headlights of a heavy pickup that pulled up behind the
cruiser. An older officer wearing a similar khaki uniform climbed
down from the driver’s seat while a fiftyish civilian wearing jeans
and a polo shirt approached from the passenger side.

“There you go again,
Eldon,” the civilian, a sturdily built man with a shaven head and
two-day’s growth of beard, addressed the deputy in a jocular tone.
“Don’t you know how badly we need machine operators in this
county? This one here looks like he might actually have what it
takes.”

“Don’t know if he
does or not, Larry,” the deputy replied evenly. “That’s your
business. Mine is to check out the strangers in town and that’s
exactly what I’m going to do.”

“That’s all fine
and good, deputy, as long as you aren’t being too fussy about who
you let in,” the civilian went on. “I’ve met lots of
undocumented ranch hands around this town, and you don’t seem to
mind that. You wouldn’t be discriminating against factory labor,
would you?”

“Now, Larry, you know
we do our level best to be fair to everybody,” the older officer
remarked with a steady gaze. “If you want to offer work to this
gentleman and are willing to accept whatever I.D. he might have, I
suppose we could look the other way.”

The civilian gave a
gentle laugh but rather than respond directly to the sheriff, he
addressed Linder.

“You ever done
factory work before, mister?”

“I did when I was
younger,” Linder responded. “Worked an assembly line for truck
parts back east.”

“Are you good with
tools?”

“Any tools you’d
find in a mine, I can handle. And I know my way around most car and
truck repairs, if that helps,” Linder added.

“Think you could
handle a packaging line?” the civilian asked.

“I expect so. What’s
the pay?”

“Double minimum wage
to start. More if you’re worth it,” the factory owner proposed.
“I’d say that beats whatever Eldon here can offer, wouldn’t you
agree?”

Linder smiled and took
a deep breath. As unlikely as it seemed, perhaps somebody upstairs
was looking out for him, after all.

“It’s fine by me if
it’s okay with these two gentlemen,” Linder answered, nodding
toward the two officers. “Lead the way.”

The two lawmen stepped
aside to let Linder take a seat in the rear of the pickup’s
extended cab. The older officer drove it only a few blocks before he
stopped the truck opposite a late-model SUV and wished Linder and the
factory owner good luck.

As soon as Linder and
his prospective employer were aboard the SUV, the man introduced
himself as Larry Becker, owner and general manager of a newly
privatized nutritional supplement manufacturer. The company had lost
money ever since the Regional Economic Administrator of the Utah
Security Zone had seized the facility from its former owner, a Mormon
bishop accused of aiding and abetting the insurgency. Before coming
to Coalville, Becker had owned a feed store chain in North Dakota
before striking it rich in the shale oil business. He had been
attracted to Utah by the business opportunities created when the
President-for-Life forcibly resettled Utah’s practicing Mormons to
northern internment camps and seized their property under federal
asset forfeiture laws. All were charged with membership in an illegal
terrorist organization.

“How long have you
owned the company?” Linder asked at the first opportunity.

“Bought it from the
government last fall,” Becker replied. “My son and I moved up
here right after the deal closed. It’s been a pretty wild ride, to
tell the truth. We picked up the assets for a song, but it’s turned
into a real money pit so far. Jay and I haven’t had a moment’s
rest since we got here.”

“How’s it been
looking lately?” Linder inquired, intrigued by Becker’s mixture
of opportunism and initiative. Being taken under the wing of an
influential and businessman, he thought, might give him just the kind
of protection he needed.

“It’s slowly
turning around, but I can’t say it’s been easy,” Becker
answered with more enthusiasm than his words would seem to indicate.
“The market is absolutely starved for product, and we’ve been
buying up raw materials and packaging components from all our former
competitors. As long as those companies stay in government hands, we
ought to do just fine. For the moment, we’ve practically got a
monopoly out here.”

“What kind of
products do you make?” Linder inquired with growing curiosity.

“Multi-vitamins,
mostly. We could tie up our entire capacity with multis now, but we
also pound out tons of Vitamin C tablets, B-complex, garlic, and
other herbals. When we take on more capacity, we’ll add more
formulations.”

“How do you go about
selling them? Do you have your own retail stores?”

Becker laughed.

“Are you kidding?”
the entrepreneur answered. “We sell to independent reps, and they
sell to consumers from the back of a truck. No taxes, no red tape,
and it’s an all-cash business. That’s why Jay and I love it so.”

“And the government
doesn’t get in your way, what with martial law and troops on every
corner?” Linder pressed.

“Hell, no,” Larry
scoffed. “Out here, as long as you stay out of politics, the
military won’t go after you. Besides, the officers rotate so often
that they haven’t even figured out who to ask for bribes yet. Man,
are these restricted zones great for business, or what?”

Larry Becker gave a
hearty laugh and Linder joined in. Becker seemed to understand how
business worked under the Unionist regime and that gave Linder a
degree of comfort.

“You know, I’m
beginning to think I might like it out here,” Linder commented with
a grin. “Now, what can I do to be useful?”

* * *

They drove south on
I-80 for fifteen miles to a nondescript industrial park on the
outskirts of Park City, where Larry’s SUV pulled up outside a
two-story brick-façade building with “Becker Laboratories”
painted over the main entrance. Larry led Linder to a side door
between two loading docks, dodging a forklift on the way to a cramped
office with a picture window that faced the factory floor. Outside
the window were a half-dozen packaging lines separated from one
another by movable partitions and extending thirty meters or so to
the far wall.