Necessary Evil (10 page)

"It's a fast way to die," he said to no one in particular.

Grabbing Diggs by the forelock, Tillman let the stilletto's tip cut to the skull and describe a rough circle around the top of the head. He knew that, once started, the human scalp peels like an orange. Using his thumb and forefinger, he separated scalp from skull and held up his gory trophy.

Doyle looked sideways to see what was happening with Diggs. Tillman walked slowly around the tree and dropped the scalp at the feet of Doyle, who didn't move a muscle.

"I understand what you're doing," Doyle said. "You think it's the Indian, Kier, and you want to bloody well make the point to the men. You could never trust Diggs with what he read in that paper. Two birds, one stone. But I think you sense that you can trust me."

"I'm impressed."

"I'm the man to help you catch the Indian."

Tillman removed the cuff from Doyle's wrist.

They hiked back to the burned-out jet, where Tillman let Doyle explain this latest atrocity to the shocked troops.

"A dangerous and cunning Indian has scalped Diggs. He's made fools of every man out here today," Doyle concluded.

Now the hunt would begin in earnest.

Men will kick an apology ahead of them like a stone,

thereby ensuring that they never quite catch up to it.

—Tilok proverb

"
M
iller, or whoever you are, if you're out there, give me a jingle."

It was the voice Kier had heard before—calm, authoritative—coming over the operative channel on Miller's radio. He assumed it was Tillman. Kier heard the rage only at the edge of his tone. He knew that to talk—even to talk as he ran— would be a death sentence. First, it would totally eliminate their confusion as to whether Miller was indeed whom they were looking for. More important, they could triangulate his position. Over time, they might even determine his direction of travel. They probably had the best equipment available.

"Listen," the voice said. "We can make peace. You'll never get out of these woods alive unless we make a deal. Even if you do, you'll be a hunted man forever. You've got the journals, haven't you? We've figured it out. Okay. We're pissed, but you've got something we need, so let's deal."

Kier believed that they had figured out nothing except that some guy in a white camouflage outfit was killing and maiming their people. Tillman had perhaps twenty men, probably ex-soldiers. Maybe Special Forces men who couldn't find anything else to do in life—hired mercenaries, pumped up with some concocted story about how they were doing the world a favor. Or maybe such people didn't care for abstractions.

At a flat-out run, Kier took the trail directly to the Donahues'. Even if Jessie had traveled at a much slower pace and had covered more than twice as much ground, she should have long since arrived and departed. But he had to make sure.

From the densest thicket, as the last light faded, Stalking Bear scrutinized every detail. He placed the object that would be the salvation of his people in a safe place—a place where, if need be, one other would find it. With it, he left a written note.

Now Stalking Bear was pulled in two directions.

A pregnant Claudie and her two little boys, Bren and Micah, climbed into Kier's truck. Theirs was the immediate peril. Tomorrow would always lie with the children. Even if the Donahue boys were not Tilok, they were friends to the Tilok. And Stalking Bear's grandson had no greater friends than Jack and Claudie Donahue.

Moving like a shadow with easy strides, Stalking Bear vaulted into the bed of the pickup truck as it passed. He folded himself into one of several storage compartments barely large enough for him, making himself very small, and slowed his breath, his heartbeat. He became the sleeping bear. The tension flowed out of his body, and he listened, dreamed.

"Sorry I startled you."

Kier piled into the driver's seat of the Volvo as Jessie slipped over the center console.

"What the hell happened?" she asked.

In the backseat, Miller groaned.

"I didn't kill anybody, but Miller's friends killed one of their own." Kier glanced at his watch. "You were supposed to be gone two minutes after you got here."

"So I'm a slow walker. Only one dead?" she asked, her voice sharper now.

"I think so."

"It sounded like a war. I'm sure you saved our lives."

"See how long that lasts," Miller said.

"Miller here is getting quite a reputation," Kier said.

"You mother—"

"We better get you out of here fast." Kier stepped out of the car and opened the back door. "These guys want to carve you up." As Kier dragged Miller back to the car trunk and locked him inside, he watched the treeline in the last of the gray light.

"We need to hide for a while. We have to figure out what the journals mean,'' Kier began, back in the car. He turned the car left, toward Johnson City, driving as fast as he dared, forcing the Volvo over the drifts and the chained tires into the roadway.

''We've got to head for civilization,'' she said, her fist gently tapping the side window. "Why can't we just try for Johnson City like Claudie?"

He didn't answer. Instead, he looked for a turnaround. They came to a drive marked mollander. It was the only nearby dwelling—a summer cabin about a half mile from Claudie's, usually unoccupied this time of year.

"You're not talking."

"I'm thinking."

When he reached the end of the narrow roadway to the cabin, he turned the Volvo around and got out.

"Now what are you doing?"

"I'm still thinking."

"You're lying in the snow."

"I'm removing the chains."

"What if I want the chains to go to Johnson City?"

"They'll have men at the pass. They'll kill you. If you try to walk around them, you'll die in the snow."

He removed the tire chains quickly and dumped them on the floor in back.

"That's my choice," she said.

"Uh-huh," he said. He would hog-tie her if he had to, but he certainly wasn't going to say so.

" 'Uh-huh.' What's that mean?"

"It means I'm listening."

"You're driving back toward my sister's and away from Johnson City."

"If we go back without the chains, it'll throw them off, at least temporarily."

"We need to get to a town, to telephones. I've got to insist."

"This side of Elk Horn Pass you're off the grid. No power except home generators and no phone but cellular. With luck, they're confused. They'll suppose that people fleeing would more likely head toward Johnson City than away from it. Our only choice is to lose them in the wilderness and come out in our own time and our own way."

"What about the cell phones?"

"There's one in my truck. Claudie's got one. We don't have either of them, and they won't work unless you're higher on the mountain. We can't drive that high in this snow, even if we had one, which we don't."

''Listen, that plane was full of some medical research, including every disease in the
Merck Manual.
They could be experimenting on those Tilok girls, for God's sake. We've got to tell the world—"

"You can't tell anyone anything if you're dead. They might let Claudie past, but they're never gonna let us through. And this car won't make it over the pass anyway. No chance."

"So we should run off into the mountains in a blizzard, maybe with some deadly disease? These people could be back out on the county road by now just waiting for us around the next bend. I say we make a plan that moves us toward town, even if we walk."

"That's what they expect. They'll likely have snowmobiles. It won't work."

"Why?"

"Resources. I saw their truck tracks. They weren't driving around with empty trucks. Either they have a lot of men, or men and snowmobiles. Whatever they have will be directed at Elk Horn Pass if they lose our tracks."

''If we aren't going to make definite progress toward a phone, maybe I should go by myself."

Kier slowed down and looked at her.

"You do that and the odds are very high that you will die. Be patient. I will get you to civilization. I promise."

Her jaw hardened, and he knew she was trying to control her anger.

"So I've got to live with you because I can't live without you. That's what you're saying. So what are the odds of an epidemic of some sort?"

"I have no idea." He paused. "Those guys were killing each other before the jet crashed, right?"

She nodded.

"There was a firefight in that plane."

"Okay," she said with a reluctant tone. "And you're going to say the grenade guy feared Tillman enough to die killing us—or just to keep a secret, or for some other damn reason. So we ought to be a lot more afraid of those guys who'll kill us instantly than a disease that will take time, and that we may not even have. That's your point?"

"Something like that."

For a time Jessie didn't say anything more. Finally, "What makes no sense is the private army. How did they know this jet would crash in these mountains?"

Kier shrugged.

"I think this decision making needs to follow democratic principles."

"I think that before I let you kill yourself we're going to have a serious fight."

"I've got a gun."

"That's my point. To win you'd have to use it."

He watched her bite her lower lip.

The square-hewn beams of Douglas fir that ran from the eaves to the ridgepole at the peak of Kier's cabin shone golden in the soft light of the propane lanterns. Simplicity gave the place an elegant look. A large oval carpet adorned the board floor. In the center of the carpet stood a black oak dining table that gleamed with innumerable coats of varnish. Six cane chairs surrounded the table. On the walls pine bookcases held an assortment of fiction, from Hemingway to modern thrillers, as well as books on all manner of biological subjects, a stack of
Scientific American
magazines, and a collection of
National Geographic.

An old rocker was centrally located beside an irregularly shaped coffee table crafted from a redwood burl; a long-stemmed carved pipe with a pouch of tobacco lay on it beside a picture of a smiling brunette. On one wall next to the bookcases hung perhaps a hundred pictures of Indian kids, all in the mountains, all in camping settings. On another stretch of wall pencil sketches of native villages and landscapes were on display.

Jessie began pacing the moment they stepped in. ''How long do we dare stay here?"

"Right here? Only a few minutes. Underneath us is a cellar of sorts. We can stay there for an hour or two, then we gotta go. We can't risk them finding us."

"It's got to take them a while. The way we sneaked here, hiding the car, walking a half mile, and crawling through the damned brush—"

"Don't forget in a raging, deadly blizzard," he said with a sly smile—the first she had seen since the barn.

"How could I?" She and Kier had beaten a trail through the snow to the creek in back. Next, they had set about leaving tracks haphazardly behind the place. "I've frozen my ass off in it three times now."

While Jessie read over his shoulder Kier flipped through the laboratory binders, skimming only certain small sections of the voluminous work. Occasionally, he glanced at his watch, concerned about their pursuers.

"Waited as long as we dare," he said, finally rising to fill a pack with food.

Jessie continued flipping through the binders. "What do these small print tables in Volume One mean? Row after row of As, Cs, Ts, and Gs?"

"You're probably reading a decoded gene or segments of it." He finished in the kitchen and leaned the pack against the wall. "'A' stands for adenine, 'T' for thymine, 'G' for guanine, and 'C' for cytosine. Those four molecules, the nucleic acids, go together in pairs to make a DNA strand."

"Do all vets know this stuff?"

"Certainly the ones who keep up a little on their biology do."

Kier knew the basics cold. A gene was a unit of DNA. Each gene specified the sequence of amino acids that defined a specified protein. Each gene was therefore responsible for the production of a unique protein, proteins being the building blocks of the body.

DNA was structured like a ladder twisted in a corkscrew shape. Each rung on the ladder was a nucleotide base pair. A nucleotide base pair can be adenine/thymine or cytosine/ guanine.

"Everything genetic is determined by the order of those four paired nucleic acids. You could safely say that the order and placement of the nucleic acids in your genes account for your good looks."

"I think we can dispense with the compliments."

Kier did his best to give her a look of mystified innocence.

"Look, I don't mean to be rude, but—"

"You're still pissed about the telephone."

"I'm pissed because I don't think you take me seriously. There is this definite undercurrent that you're the damned chief and I'm the Indian."

"I'm not going to let you kill yourself, taking off into a blizzard trying to find a phone booth."

"So either I've got to do what you want or shoot you. I know. Let's get back to genetics."

"Okay. Now, the DNA of a virus has, say, tens of thousands of base pairs. A bacteria like tuberculosis probably has one or two million. The plans to the whole of every creature down to even bacteria and the lowly virus are in the form of these nucleic acid pairs. These guys found a new way to read those blueprints. On a human they have to read three billion nucleic acid base pairs to fully map all forty-six chromosomes. The government's Human Genome Project is mapping our DNA, but Tillman's group did that years ago. Some other private groups have rough maps. But Tillman's done a lot more than that."

"How did you get all that out of the fine print?"

Kier came over and put his finger in the text to a spot he had marked by dog-earing the page. "You see this paragraph where they're talking about deciphering genetic code—

'' 'The scanning, tunneling, atomic force microscopy working in combination with the Cray Sequencing Program produces outstanding results, accurately sequencing one hundred million base pairs per hour. Our early autosequencing technology sequenced only 100,000 base pairs per day. Methodologies available to the government still produce only about 100,000 base pairs per year for each electrophoretic processor.' "