'Sir,' said a staff assistant with the grave face of a junior officer carrying the news no one wanted to hear, 'we got some real problems out there.'
'Go ahead,' said Bonson, trailing along in Bob's wake into a room that could have been any meeting room in any office building in America but just happened to be in the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia.
'There's a freak front moving in from Canada across central Idaho. The weather service people say it'll dump sixteen, eighteen inches on the place. Nothing's moving there, the roads will be closed until they can be plowed, and they can't be plowed until morning. Nothing's flying either. That area is totally sealed off. Nobody's going anywhere.'
'Shit,' said Bonson.
'Notify FBI. Tell them to stand down.'
'Yes, sir, but there's more.'
'Go ahead.'
'We have been in contact with Idaho State Police authorities.
Just to make things worse, there's been a double homicide at the phone company. A supervisor and his secretary, coming on to run the snow emergency shift, were shot and killed. Whoever did it got completely away.
Nothing was stolen, nothing taken. Maybe it was domestic, but they say it looked like a professional hit.'
'It's him,' said Bob.
'He's there. He probably had to get the final location out of the phone company files or something. He got surprised by these two people and he did what he had to do.'
'Cold,' said Bonson.
'Very cold.'
'I'll tell you what we need real fast,' said Swagger.
'We need an extremely good workup on the terrain there.
Let's figure out, given the time of the shootings, if he'd have a chance at making it on foot to a shooting position.
Where would he dump his car, how far would he have to go, what kind of speed could an experienced mountain operator be expected to make? Then double that, and you'll know what this guy is doing. What time will he make it there? Where would he likely set up? He'd want the sun behind him, that I know.'
'Get cracking,' said Bonson.
-Nikki watched the snow.
'It's pretty,' she said.
'But I never knew it could snow in June.'
'That's the mountains,' said Aunt Sally.
'It snows when it wants to.'
'When we get back to Arizona,' said her mother from the sofa, 'you'll never see snow again, I promise.'
'I think I like snow,' said Nikki, 'even if you can't ride in it.'
She watched in the fading light as the world whitened.
Outside, she could see a corral and beyond that the barn.
There were no animals way up here, so there was nothing to worry about. The highway was about a half mile away, and it was her job to follow the long dirt road each day and check the solitary mailbox that stood where Upper Cedar Road, that high, lonely ribbon of dirt which connected them to Route 93, passed by.
But the mountains dominated what she could see. The house was in a high meadow, surrounded by them. Mount McCaleb was the closest, a huge brute of a mountain, it loomed above them, now unseen in the driving snow. Farther to the north was Leatherman Peak, farther to the south, Invisible Mountain. These were the peaks of the Lost River Range, dominated farther toward Challis by Mount Borah, the highest in Idaho. There was the sense of their presence, even though they were invisible. On an evening like this, it was much darker, you could feel them through your bones, dark and solid, just beyond the veil of the seen.
'Brrrr,' Nikki said.
'It looks so cold out.'
'This snow'll be gone by the end of the week,' Aunt Sally said.
'That's what they said on the radio. Unseasonable cold front from Canada, but it'll be in the seventies by Monday. It'll melt away. Maybe it'll cause some flooding.
It does feel like midwinter, doesn't it?'
'It does,' said Nikki's mommy, who was at least ambulatory now. Her left arm and collarbone were secured in a half-body cast, but the abrasions and cuts had healed enough so that she could move about. She wore a bathrobe over jeans. She looked thin, Nikki thought.
'You know what?' said Aunt Sally, who with her spunky personality and Southern accent had quickly become Nikki's favorite person in the whole wide world, 'I think it's a soup night. Don't you girls? I mean, snow, soup, what else goes together better? We'll do up some nice Campbell's tomato with crackers, and then we'll settle down and watch a video. Not Born Free, though. I cannot sit through that again.'
