Necessary Evil, page 7
Kier listened for more talk, but heard nothing. Perhaps the men were pulling back. He curled into a tight ball; he hadn't noticed the discomfort of his confinement until now. Water dripped from overhead-the ice melted by his body heat. Inactivity brought on chill. The heavy muscle in his thighs cramped. Tightness of body, the feeling of being closed in, began to occupy a place in his mind. The sense of being caged mixed with his adrenaline to form the beginnings of panic. He knew what to do. His mind went to a different time, to a different place, to the solace of Grandfather's lake. He replaced the pins in the grenades with his teeth and relaxed.
It is evening. No-see-ums swirl around his head, put off only by Grandfather's liberally applied bay leaf oil on his bare skin. Around the lake stand dense evergreens as old as anyone Grandfather can remember and far older still. They are fir, hemlock, cedar, and pine, forming a velvety fragrant thickness over the earth. Protruding into the water, like creamy brown natural leather, a sand spit simmers in the late-summer sun.
Near the spit there is a small clearing carpeted with spring-fed grasses and edged with the softer verdant hues of huckleberry and myrtle. In the midst of this meadow the cabin enjoys the shade of hand-planted mountain bilberry, the leaves tinged with the first autumn color. There is no breath of wind. The water, soft as satin, glistens under the bursting yellow-reds of sunset.
Grandfather stands beside him and puts a strong hand on his shoulder. Kier wants to understand the power in this touch, a better touch than he has ever felt, a healing salve to his loneliness. His father is dead. For many days there was little feeling. Life on ice. Now a sense of loss has eaten a giant hole out of his middle. All that stands between him and the incomprehensible abyss is Grandfather's hand.
A fish hawk rises on the wind. Kier watches his namesake, and something about the bird stirs him. There isn't a way to say what he is experiencing except that it is a longing. So he lets the sense of this go through him without trying to understand it. There is a gentle squeeze on his shoulder and once again he is aware of the hand. It is as if it is guiding him to the bird.
"A man might know the currents on which he glides and then he would be free," Grandfather says.
As Kier waits and remembers, he wonders about the currents. In his mind is a puzzle, the pieces of which are strewn about- very few of them put together. There is his mother and her iron will. That is part of the puzzle. His dead father. That is a bigger piece.
Immediately after his father's funeral, his mother had moved them another ten miles from the Tilok reservation. Before this precipitous relocation, they had been a good two miles outside the reservation and on the outskirts of Johnson City. Their new house was in the forest to the far side of town and surrounded by white people. His mother said only that the world was mostly white and not red and mat he better "get used to it." She worked for a local groceryman and was said to be very good at keeping his books.
Kier went to a public school and worked by the lamplight every night under his mother's tutelage. Grandfather moved off the reservation in order to be with them, and with him, Kier escaped to the forest to learn Indian ways. Tracking became a passion. His mother tolerated that part of his life, maybe even in her own way encouraged it, but it was always subserviant to his studies, always trivialized.
Nathaniel Wintripp, Kier's father, was a half-blooded Tilok Indian whose own father had been of Spanish descent. By trade Nate was a stonemason. He had been the most prolific and artistic craftsman in the rural areas nearest mountainous Wintoon County. But Nate Wintripp had a certain reserved aloofness about him. He'd grown up with his grandparents and struck out to live on his own at age seventeen. Although he ably supported himself through two years of Chico State University, he quit after the second year to work full-time in his growing business.
Kier had struggled to know his father. He wanted to get beyond the pats on the head to something undefinable, to something he didn't understand. On October 12, 1969, his father flew into a rage, banged Kier's wrists on a washbasin, stalked out the door, and never came back. A month later, Nate Wintripp was dead, never having let his son, Kier, find the bond that he so fervently pursued.
After his father walked out, a quiet desperation seemed to grip Kier's mother. It ran so deep that for years he couldn't bear the thought of stepping from the groove that she was charting for him. Although she was pure Tilok, he could not determine what she wanted to be-except for one incontrovertible opinion that she held with utter conviction. Even though he must be a success in the white man's world, even though he must have the best university education, even though he must bear no trace of his lineage in his speech, he would marry an Indian woman or certain calamity would befall him. After all, Nate, her own husband, being half white, could never really accept an Indian. How would a white woman ever accept Kier?
In the secret places of his soul, Kier wondered if his father could ever have accepted him. Or if his father accepted no one. Or if Kier wanted something from his father that was not to be found on this earth. It seemed to Kier that just before his father's death, they had been somehow reaching for each other. There was, he had imagined, a peaceful joy that lay just beyond his reaching fingers, that was forever snatched away at the very moment of his most profound awareness. He could not reconcile the shame he felt when he thought of his father.
He did not try to create this missing bond of communion with his mother. Theirs was a union fashioned from the mutuality of their struggle to survive on little income in a mountain town and from their shared tragedy.
Kier did not sort out the cauldron of emotions that he buried in a place in his mind and covered over with layers of keen intellectual musings. When he met his first wife-a white woman-the uneasy feeling was passed off by the simple observation that he had never made a genuine friend nor found a genuine love. He knew only male comrades in adventure and female partners in sex. This he supposed was a good and sufficient reason for the temporary loss in equilibrium. When he reached to grasp and share his new bride's love, he floundered as if drowning, with no concept at all of swimming. It frightened him.
Now he relived the feeling. His breaths grew deeper and there was tightness inside him. He felt the shame. His mother's raw determination still felt like a dead weight crushing his soul. This stew of old emotions had brought him to a place where he could not taste certain of life's flavors. He could not, it seemed, taste the flavor of love or savor it with another. What he didn't know was why.
Jessie had heard nothing during the several minutes since Kier had left. Then she heard a single shot. As Kier had suggested, she put Miller in the lead, with his hands cuffed behind, and backtracked on Miller's trail. Shortly they heard more shooting.
"Tonto's a bullet-ridden carcass," Miller said.
"Shut up," she said, wondering if he was right and feeling a lot more than she expected. They traveled easterly, then angled to the north, heading away from Claudie's and the Volvo, until they came to the creek. Finally, leaving Miller's track, they turned south down the creek. Jessie understood Kier's logic. New tracks that took a different direction heading off toward the Donahues' would need explaining.
Walking in the water, she discovered a torture more exquisite than any she had known-save one. The pain was bluer than the dead blue of a particular glacial lake that would forever stand in her memory. The sensation spreading in her feet was like the lifeless cold of that pristine water: A horrible, bone-deep ache that would, she knew, eventually cut her feet from her body. She had thought they would simply go numb; well, they did, but only after pain like a twisted gut. Kier's strategies and this wilderness seemed to demand suffering.
At first, as she and Miller walked, Jessie thought of survival, of spotting the next paramilitary trooper before he spotted her.
After a time, though, as the sounds of the battle receded and the frothy air and dense forest closed in around them, her mind departed the macabre of Wintoon Mountain for the ordinary macabre of her office, of her nightmare with Frank. Tears came to her eyes and she cursed herself. How, when she was barely alive, when she had come here to this godforsaken brush patch at the other end of the United States to escape-with this place turning into a war zone, people maybe dying-could she think about Frank and his sick friends?
She wasn't going to do it. The one thing that had to remain hers was her mind.
As she began to wonder whether Kier were dead or alive, something crashed in the distance, the woods resounding with numerous explosions and the staccato of automatic weapons. More firepower than she would have thought possible was unleashed in the next minute. She felt unusually alone.
Using a small stick between fingers that still clenched a grenade, Kier cleared a hole at the far edge of the log. It seemed from the conversation that at least two men had remained with Crawford. They had walked a little way up the hill now, by the sound of their receding voices. Kier listened as best he could. After a time, he heard nothing. Still, they could be watching. It would be more dangerous to come out slowly.
With a quick thrust of his elbows, Kier cleared away the snow, rising in silence, and bursting from the hollow. Go ahead, think about the guys who just tried to kill you. His mind prepared itself for slaughter. Hands ready to rise from his sides, biceps straining, and pectorals tight with anticipation, his breath rushing from his throat-at the last instant he held the grenade handles tight. He didn't throw. There was no one within sight, though Kier could now hear someone talking nearby.
They had taken the bait. The leader hadn't arrived. The men were assuming Crawford was a safely dead enemy and Miller was one of his victims.
Kier slithered away on his belly.
Chapter 6
The fire that succors a family will burn the enemy.
— Tilok proverb
Jack Horatio Tillman walked to the crashed jet with long, unflagging strides. He planned to work his way methodically along the track until arriving at the thicket where the men had found Crawford. They had come up with a neat little theory that had Crawford as a turncoat who stole the journals.
After arriving at the two unconscious soldiers, it took Tillman only a minute or two to determine that his men had not carefully read the signs. He managed to slap Jones awake; Jenkins was still out cold. His men had run past with barely a sideward glance, more interested in catching the attacker and obtaining the possible reward. Whoever took out Jones and Jenkins had a weak stomach. They had gone to great pains not to kill. It wouldn't be Crawford.
Tillman himself hunted big game when not occupied by the running of his pharmaceutical and medical research businesses.
If it was feasible, he would gladly run his empire from a canvas tent in the bush.
Tillman's father had inherited money. Not so much that he couldn't spend it all, or drink it all, but enough that it enabled him to hunt most of his life. For as far back as Jack Tillman could remember, when his father wasn't drinking, he was hunting. He had endured his father's drunken beatings and reveled in his hunting expeditions. The only thing they had done well together was track and kill for sport.
The track in front of him now-this so-called Crawford's track-was made by an athletic male much stronger in the legs than Crawford. Whoever it was had backtracked so perfectly, so rapidly, that his high-step rivaled that of a Tennessee Walking horse. Crawford could not have maintained this gait for a dozen paces without kicking snow.
The mystery man had kicked no snow. To lay this track was close to impossible. Carefully, Tillman pulled the loose snow out of a footprint until he reached the packed ice crystals beneath. The foot had been held much straighter than that of a duck-walking soldier. Crawford couldn't have left an imprint like this one. As the foot had landed, it hit the ball as much as the heel. Only a stalker moved this way naturally. The man who left this track, even while fleeing, was trying hard to confuse his men.
The runner was large and long legged, his pace steady and purposeful, not panicked. Each stride was approximately the same length. There was little deviation in the direction of travel. The person knew this terrain. Most obvious of all, the foot was much too large to be Crawford's. It was barely possible that it was Miller's. But if it were Miller, Tillman knew he had vastly underrated him.
A chill unrelated to the cold passed through Tillman. Not fear, he thought, but acute anticipation. His face burned with anger at the stupidity of his men. Doyle was out here, which frustrated him more. Of all his men, Tillman had begun to suspect that the new man, Doyle, was the kind he could count on. But during all the radio talk, Doyle had been strangely silent.
Things were going badly, badly enough that Jack Tillman could be prosecuted for serious crimes. But he didn't intend to be a candidate for capital punishment.
In his forty-eight years nothing had ever threatened Jack Tillman quite like this. The likelihood that the jet would crash at the drop site was infinitesimal, and yet it had happened. No doubt his men seriously underestimated Marty Rawlins and his four cronies. Most likely a fight had erupted when the scientists were told about the drop.
But even with that bit of bad luck, what were the odds that one of his own men turned or, even more unlikely, that combat-ready strangers had meddled with the crash site? Tillman had obtained background on all the residents near the drop site. Meticulous people had done the research. Tillman knew about the Tilok vet, Kier Wintripp, an outdoorsman who had been written up in magazines.
His home was in Johnson City and his summer cabin was up the valley from the Donahues' ranch. He had led a manhunt for five militia-types that had raped and killed two Indian girls. The vet had tracked ahead of the sheriff's group. According to the story, he had told the authorities the wanted men had ambushed him. There was a firefight. The vet carried a lever action 30/30 while the men he hunted had submachine guns and other military hardware. All five of the men were dead by the time the sheriff arrived. The Indian didn't have a scratch. As a combat-hardened survivalist, this man would have the ability to kill, even if he lacked the stomach for it.
Tillman already knew a great deal about Kier Wintripp. And he had more information available-much, much more. He knew the very stuff of which the man was made and considered him the only immediate resident who was potentially dangerous. On the reservation, twenty miles distant, other Tiloks might pose a threat, but fortunately, several mountain ridges divided the Donahue ranch from the Tilok tribal lands.
Until now people and circumstances had always behaved more predictably than the wild animals Tillman hunted. His pharmaceutical firms succeeded because he understood ordinary people's fear of disease as well as the scientists who sought to conquer this fear through the power of healing.
Tillman had become an industry giant almost overnight because he also knew how to turn other people's failures to his advantage. His first venture was a dying company that had bet all its stockholders' money on a drug that failed its first major double-blind study. It was supposed to perform near miracles on the healing of wounds. In fact it only made the wounds less painful, which, when discovered, caused the stock to plummet.
Tillman talked his way into the company and was elected president mainly because he was the only interested and remotely qualified candidate. But he knew that the drug's analgesic properties could be enhanced to make surgical wounds less painful. By adding other compounds to the cream, company scientists made a new topical pain killer used on everything from wounds to babies' gums. Spectacular sales enabled Tillman to parlay profits from the pain remedy into a sophisticated laboratory with scientists he could use for more substantial projects. Research, Tillman knew, was made ridiculously slow by absurd rules and artificial constraints. Tillman undertook to solve the problems with the bureaucracy and succeeded again.
With the money came time to think, to devote himself to issues of global importance. Disease, it seemed to Tillman, was often associated with dysfunctional lifestyles. Poverty and the idle hand from which it stemmed created a host of maladies. Gluttony was tributary to a different set of diseases. Careless sexual habits spawned numerous others. It seemed that the flaws of mankind nurtured disease. The scourge of disease was nature's discipline.
Society needed a more advanced approach to disease than merely curing it, for to cure all disease was to take away nature's ability to chastise, which in turn slowed the process of evolution by promoting the dysfunctional. Disease was a thing to be used. Mankind could advance only by curing selected people and certain plagues.
Controlling disease, then, was essential to enhancing its function. The ability to cure was just a single component in such control (and not unhappily, a source of great wealth). The creation of convenient disease and its selective use, the natural corollary to cure, while profitable, would be appreciated only by a much more advanced culture.
Tillman saw himself as a man ahead of his time. His theories could not be broadly disseminated in his lifetime, for he would always be mortal, unable to escape the bonds of aging. No cure for aging was close enough to save him. He could only prolong his life. The ticking clock required that he conduct progressive research, the key to which had always been keeping each chief scientist at the various Tillrnan laboratories isolated from the work of the others. It was usually desirable to convince each team leader that he was the only one bending the rules, the only one in on the real secret, and the only one sharing in the big money. Only two pseudo-scientists on the business side knew nearly everything. These men Tillman trusted implicitly.
Then came Marty Rawlins-a genius whose abilities crossed many disciplines and who made brilliant technical decisions in every research program that he touched. A man like Marty could do far more if he knew the whole, and so the seduction of progress had led Tillman to deviate from his usual operating plan.
Ultimately, he let Marty and his team synthesize and direct DNA research on a wide-ranging basis, coordinating the work of three separate laboratories and many subgroups within those laboratories. By the time Tillman realized how much Marty had figured out and how pettily squeamish he was, it was too late.
