Exile Hunter (51 page)

* * *

After dinner at the
bungalow, Linder withdrew to his room and brought out the writing
paper once again. Throughout the day until his meeting with Jay, his
thoughts had repeatedly returned to his sister. He even had
considered putting aside his plans to find Patricia and Caroline
Kendall and traveling to Cleveland instead to help April. But he
could not realistically undertake the hazards of a trip to Cleveland
until he recovered his strength, saved some money, acquired better
identity documents, and planned the trip with meticulous care. Until
then, he had made a promise to Roger Kendall that he aimed to keep.

For the present, the
challenge he faced was how to communicate with April. He did not dare
mail her a letter directly, as her mail, phone, and other means of
contact would almost certainly be monitored, even more so since his
escape. And even if he did find a way to reach her without the DSS’s
knowledge, he could not be certain of her continued loyalty. In the
wake of his conviction for crimes against the state, she would likely
have lost her Unionist Party membership, her teaching job and most
other government benefits. Even if the DSS investigation failed to
turn up any offense of her own, once the investigators began
questioning those who knew her, even April’s closest friends would
likely abandon her and her isolation would be complete.

April was still his
sister, and Linder had faith that she would forgive him someday. But,
for all he knew, she might despise him now. So, when he finally
settled on a means to contact her at relatively low risk to her or
himself, he set pen to paper once again and drafted a letter to a
Cleveland cousin who had been one of April’s closest childhood
friends.

“Dear Ruth,” the
message began. “I hope my letter finds you in good health. Though
my return address may be unfamiliar, I think you will guess who wrote
this. My purpose in sending it is to learn how April is doing and to
let her know that I am alive and well. Do not respond to this
address, as I selected it at random and will pick another when I
write to you again. Instead, post a broadly worded message from
‘Cousin Margaretta’ in Cleveland via the National Refugee Locator
Bulletin. Refer to April as “Cousin Eliza.” I will respond to you
with another letter. With warmest regards.”

* * *

During his lunch
break on the following day, Linder went to the business office at
Becker Laboratories and asked Larry Becker’s receptionist-assistant
whether the boss might be free to see him for a few minutes at the
end of the day. She checked his schedule and confirmed that Larry was
free any time after four. Linder thanked her and returned to work.

Shortly after five,
Linder watched the receptionist leave for the day and approached the
owner’s office.

“Hi, Larry,” Linder
began. “May I have a moment of your time?”

“Sure, Tom, have a
seat,” Larry offered after signing a stack of invoices. “Jose
tells me you’re a fast learner and you’re doing a fine job for
him and Jay over in packaging. Glad to hear it. So what’s on your
mind?”

“Did Jay happen
mention to you the conversation he and I had yesterday?” Linder
asked in a low voice.

“You mean the one
about his time in Alaska?” Larry replied with a knowing look.

“That would be the
one. I wanted to apologize to you for putting you and your company at
risk for hiring a former camp inmate.”

“Don’t worry about
it,” Larry assured. “The truth is, I’m no friend of the
President-for-Life. And I can’t be too picky in who I hire or we
wouldn’t be able to keep this place running. My philosophy is, I
don’t need to know who you are or what you did to piss off the
regime so long as you don’t make trouble under my roof. I’ll take
care of the rest. But you and I aren’t ever going to have that kind
of trouble, are we?”

“Not if I can help
it, sir,” Linder answered.

“Fine then. It’s
settled. Do you have anything else on your mind?”

“Actually, there is
one more thing,” Linder ventured. “I’d like to ask a favor. I’d
like you to mail something for me. It’s a letter to my sister. And
I’d ask you to post it in North Dakota, if that’s possible. It
can’t be postmarked anywhere near here, if you know what I mean.”

Entrusting this task to
Larry Becker carried risks, of course, not only to himself but also
to his sister. But Larry and Jay had the power to turn him in at any
time, and if they did, the letter would make little difference. On
the contrary, the primary risk of posting the letter was to Larry and
it would put his good will to the test.

“I understand,”
Larry answered thoughtfully as he leaned back in his swivel chair.
“The goons have her under close watch, do they?”

“I expect so,”
Linder replied. “Right now I don’t even know where she is. The
letter will be addressed to a cousin of ours, and my goal is to find
out how my sister is doing and how best to reach her. The cousin is
completely trustworthy. And I promise I won’t contact my sister any
more directly till I’ve left Utah, so nobody here in Coalville will
land in hot water if I’m caught.”

“North Dakota,”
Larry mused before looking away thoughtfully. “I don’t go back to
Bismarck very often any more, to tell you the truth. Since my wife
died and Jay’s residence permit was transferred here, there didn’t
seem much point to it. My business holdings there are all passive
minority interests now.”

“I’m sorry to hear
about your wife,” Linder interrupted, but Larry Becker went on as
if he hadn’t heard.

“At home they all
treat us like strangers now. Ever since Jay was arrested, they dance
around us on tiptoes so as not to say anything that might get
themselves in trouble. Even when no snitches are within earshot, it
seems like one wrong word is all it takes to set the other person on
edge and push a relationship into decline. I just don’t like going
back there any more. Here in the Zone, everything is right out front
for everyone to see: martial law, checkpoints, troops, labor camps.
The trip wires are laid out in plain sight and everybody knows enough
to step clear of them.”

“I see,” Linder
acknowledged. “But are you planning any other trips soon? Might you
be able to mail it from somewhere else?”

“I’m flying to
Pittsburgh Tuesday afternoon. If I mail it from there, would that
work for you?”

“Perfect,” Linder
replied with a broad smile. “I’ll bring the letter to you first
thing Monday.”

* * *

Linder spent most of
the weekend in bed, dropping in and out of a shallow sleep, and
rising long enough only to walk into town for meals. As Mrs. Unger
had traveled to Salt Lake City to visit a daughter over the weekend,
she left him a key so he could come and go as he pleased.

Linder ate
distractedly, but with a voracious appetite, never leaving a speck of
food uneaten. After dinner at the sandwich shop, he sat at the
writing table in his room, brought out a yellow pad and began writing
cryptic notes of names, dates, and places, as well as recurring
thoughts and phrases that swam around in his head, with the hope of
organizing them into a coherent plan for the future.

When he finally
abandoned the effort soon after midnight, he slept hard, with dreams
almost as disturbing as those that had plagued him before his arrest.
The new dreams, however, picked up where his life in captivity had
left off, and he found himself sawing timber in the snow under
mercury vapor floodlights, crawling through dark mineshafts, fleeing
from armed guards and their snarling wolf-dogs, crossing snow-covered
peaks and ridges, dodging drone aircraft, and falling through river
ice.

All weekend it was the
same, with the repressed memories and feelings from his sojourn in
the north displacing all ordered thought. On Monday, he barely
remembered to drop off April’s letter at Larry Becker’s office,
sealed in a double envelope bearing instructions to open the outer
envelope and mail the inner one without looking at the address. The
rest of the day went by like a blur and Linder felt as if he had
dropped headlong into a bottomless pit of depression that thwarted
all attempts to escape.

Throughout the week,
the iron self-discipline that Linder had developed in the camps and
during his escape substituted for conscious thought, and allowed
Linder to perform his routine duties on the packaging line without
incident. He walked about as if in a daze and reverted to old habits,
like eating only half his lunch and stashing the rest in a pocket to
eat later in the day. Now, whenever the nightmares returned, Linder
fought back by switching on the bedside lamp and jotting notes about
each dream on a pad. By week’s end, nearly the entire pad was
filled.

The names that came up
most often in his nightly notes were of people who had been
significant to him before his arrest: his father and sister, Philip
Eaton, Roger Kendall, Patricia Kendall, Bob Bednarski and Neil
Denniston. The places mentioned were also ones he had known before
his arrest: Cleveland, Washington, London, and Beirut, plus one
other: Kamas, Utah.

With Larry Becker gone
the entire week and Jay struggling to pick up the slack at work
during his absence, Linder felt alone and adrift. Other than the
Beckers and the foreman Jose, he spoke to few others during the
course of an average day. Mrs. Unger, apparently recognizing his
desire to be alone with his thoughts, served his meals and cleaned
his room each day with minimal intrusion. Linder’s trance-like
mental state broke on the tenth day when he awoke at dawn, anxious
and weak, but with a purpose clearer than any he could remember.

Be kind to all, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.
Philo of Alexandria

LATE MAY, COALVILLE, UTAH SECURITY ZONE

On the following
Monday, Larry Becker returned from Pittsburgh and Linder went to his
office to welcome him back.

“By the way, I mailed
your letter,” Becker assured him with an indulgent smile. “Don’t
worry, I slipped it right out of the manila envelope into the mail
slot. Your secret is secure.”

Linder thanked him
quickly and left as soon as Larry’s secretary entered the room.

Later that week,
instead of taking the jitney bus back to Coalville, Linder made a
detour to the Park City Public Library. After signing in and showing
his library card and residence permit at the entrance, he approached
the front desk and asked the librarian where he might find the most
recent issue of the National Refugee Locator Bulletin.

The librarian consulted
a dog-eared periodicals list.

“I see that we no
longer receive hard copies of that publication,” the woman
responded crisply. “The National Refugee Service stopped printing
the bulletin recently and is publishing everything on their
electronic message board instead. You can access the board on the
library’s computer monitors. Do you know how to log in?”

“I think so,”
Linder answered, trying not to show his irritation at losing the
anonymity of reading a printed document. He sat down at the last
monitor in the row, logged in, and found the message board without
difficulty, scrolling down to the Ohio listings. Midway through he
found the message he was searching for:

“Cousin Eliza is home
after an extended stay in rehab and is enjoying a speedy recovery.
She is back at work on light duty and is eager for news from her dear
siblings. Please write to Cousin Margaretta in Cleveland or respond
via this message board.”

Linder shook with
excitement, but as he parsed each word, a wave of sadness swept over
him because “rehabilitation” had become a common euphemism for
investigative custody. And “speedy recovery” implied that April’s
health might have suffered under interrogation. Similarly, “light
duty” probably meant that April had been demoted from her job as a
public school teacher and reported instead to a “rubber room”
where teachers on disciplinary leave spent idle days while drawing
reduced wages.

Though Linder longed to
help his sister, he was at a loss how to go about it. To deliver any
meaningful sort of help without endangering them both would require
time, money, and planning. Meanwhile, his work in Utah had barely
begun.

That evening, he
conversed with Mrs. Unger over dinner as if he didn’t have a care
in the world. Odd as it seemed, after temporarily setting aside
concerns for his sister, he felt more at ease than he had for some
time. Whatever he might face in the days ahead, it could not be worse
than what he had endured over the past year.

* * *

How often beneath a
calm surface, turbulent waters churn. Though Linder had slept soundly
all week, that night his dreams dragged him through one distressful
scene after another from the final days of his escape. He watched in
slow motion as the farmer’s bullet knocked Will Browning off his
feet, then felt the searing pain in the injured man’s calf and
tasted the fear and fatigue of their flight in the rain-soaked
darkness. Later, Linder sensed Browning’s faintness from loss of
blood, the alternating heat and chills of fever during the night, and
the rancher’s regrets as his life slipped away by degrees. Linder
felt as if he was both observer and participant of a 3-D movie shot
with a fisheye lens, viewing all perspectives at once, complete with
the full range of emotions that beset Will Browning during his final
hours. Yet, at the final moment, was that a smile on Browning’s
lips?

Next, in the blink of
an eye, Linder found himself walking along the railroad bridge with
Mark Rhee when the approaching locomotive came into view. He heard
the train’s deafening roar and felt the bridge shake with a
deepening sense of dread. The moment the train passed and Rhee rose
to his feet, Linder suddenly watched him fumble with his backpack,
then slip and reach out to break his fall. But just as he went over
the side, the panic in Rhee’s eyes was replaced by an expression of
ineffable joy and wonder.