front of them. The stars were out and twinkling, and the mountains were a black jagged silhouette against the sky.
‘The Montana hi-line,’ Alex said. ‘Where the great plains meet the Rocky Mountains. Nothing but wilderness.’
After a dozen more brutal miles, the terrain was becoming increasingly rough and the rocks and ruts were forcing them to take a wild path. Alex was getting exhausted, shaking her head to stay focused. Then the GMC lurched violently sideways and pitched to the left, almost going over. Ben felt himself sliding across the seat and braced himself with his legs. In the back, Zoe cried out. The car ground to a halt, something clanking from the front end. Alex swore and pumped the accelerator, but the wheels had lost traction and were spinning in the dirt. She swore again.
Ben opened his door and jumped down, clutching his shoulder. The bleeding had stopped, but his shirt and jeans were black with blood. He staggered in the dark, light-headed with pain, cold sweat on his brow. The GMC was tightly bedded into a rocky rut that had been hidden by bushes, impossible to spot in the dark. ‘We’d need a tractor to tow us out,’ he said. ‘We walk from here.’
Zoe’s jaw dropped open. ‘My God, this is your idea of a rescue? I’m not walking out there.’
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘You stay here to fend for yourself, among the rattlesnakes and grizzlies.’ He turned to Alex. ‘We’ll need to conceal the car. It’s easy to spot from the air.’
‘You think they’ll come out in helicopters?’
He smiled weakly. ‘Wouldn’t you?’
They salvaged what they could from the car – there were a couple of blankets in the back, bottled water, a Maglite, some matches, binoculars. Ben packed all the stuff into his bag together with the first-aid kit. Then he and Alex explored the wooded valley around them, gathering branches and bits of shrub by torchlight and building them up in a mound around the car. There were a hundred questions he badly wanted to ask her, but right now there were more important priorities. He felt he could trust her, though he didn’t know why.
After a few minutes the vehicle just looked like a big clump of vegetation under the moonlight. Ben nodded to himself, and hefted the heavy bag onto his good shoulder. They set out in single file across the rocky terrain, the moon lighting their path. Ben kept Zoe close by him, grabbing her arm to keep her moving when she fell back. She was sullen and unwilling, and complained loudly whenever she stumbled over a rock or a tree root.
He ignored her and trudged on. Every so often he glanced up at the stars to maintain their northerly course. Alex had said the hotel was fifty miles south of Chinook. It made sense that the closer they got to civilisation, the more likely they would be to come across a road or a farm from where they could work out their next move. And Ben knew that sooner or later he’d need medical attention. Untreated, the wound would fester. He was thankful for the recent tetanus booster he’d had – but he’d seen gangrene set in quickly in lesser wounds than this.
As he walked he could feel his energy gradually dwindling and the grinding pain in his shoulder beginning to intensify again. He fought the urge to take another painkiller. He couldn’t afford to waste them. There was a lot of distance ahead, and a lot of pain.
Chapter Forty-Three
The ground sloped steeply upwards ahead of them, rising out of the forested valley, the cold wind whistling about their ears. They walked wearily in silence, and after a while Zoe lost the energy even to complain any more.
At the base of a towering limestone mountain, fifty metres above the valley, they found a cave entrance shielded from the wind by an overhanging lip of rock. Ben shone the Maglite inside, checking for signs of wild animal habitation. The cave would have been an ideal lair for a grizzly or a mountain lion, but there were no traces of droppings or half-finished kill. Alex and a resentful Zoe gathered dry boughs and fern leaves for bedding while Ben built a fire at the back of the cave, arranged so that the smoke would rise up to the roof and escape through the entrance. He lit the tinder with a match, and after a few minutes he had a good blaze going. Exhausted from pain and drenched with cold sweat, he collapsed on the leafy floor. Alex joined him, frowning in worry as she settled next to him. She felt his brow and ran her fingers through his damp hair.
Zoe flopped down opposite, ignoring them. She grabbed a blanket for a pillow and lay down. She was asleep soon afterwards.
Ben prodded the fire with a stick. ‘It’s time for you and me to talk.’
‘I’ll tell you what I know,’ Alex said. ‘But it’s not a hell of a lot.’
‘Tell me about Jones.’
She sighed. ‘I was assigned to his unit eight months ago. I never liked the guy. He’s a class A creep. I was about to request a transfer to a different unit when things started getting strange. I was part of a team watching a guy called Cleaver. Phone taps, email intercept, close surveillance, the works.’
‘But nobody told you why.’
‘The Agency works in mysterious ways a lot of the time. You accept that they don’t always disclose everything to the field agents. But this was different. Only Jones ever saw the transcripts of calls. The rest of us were kept in the dark. I even started listening at doors, and that’s how I knew some agents had been sent to Greece.’
‘Marisa Kaplan was one of them,’ he said. ‘Know her?’
‘No, but I found her name on a file. One I could have got in a lot of trouble for looking at. She’s ex-CIA. No longer active.’
‘Then about ten days ago,’ Alex went on, ‘there was this sudden flurry of activity. Jones was all keyed up, on the phone a hundred times a day, real grouchy. Next thing, a team of us were scrambled together and posted up here in Montana.’
‘That was when Zoe was brought here from Greece.’
She nodded. ‘They flew her by private jet as far as Helena, and then brought her out here by chopper. We were told she was a key witness to a terrorist bombing in Greece. But I never bought it. The Agency just doesn’t operate that way. I’ve never seen a holding facility like this. I think they’re using Government resources for their own unofficial business. I was just about to report it to the top level. But I didn’t do it.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘Because of what happened to Josh Greenberg. I didn’t know him well, but he seemed like a good guy. Jones shot him in the face.’
‘Jones seems to like shooting people in the face,’ Ben said.
‘When that happened, I was just too scared to think straight. I felt isolated. I wish I’d done something.’
‘I know the feeling.’
‘But I didn’t know who I could trust. Then suddenly the call came through that we were all to fly back down to Georgia. They’d found out about you. You know the rest.’
‘I remember you from the day they caught me,’ he said. ‘The look on your face. I could see you were different.’
She glanced at him. ‘I shouldn’t have let them take you that day. I should have done something.’
‘There wasn’t much you could have done. You’d just have ended up like the two cops. These people are killing anyone who stands in their way.’
She gazed through the firelight at Zoe’s sleeping form. ‘I don’t know what the hell she’s got that they want,’ she said. ‘But they want it pretty damn badly.’
‘Maybe more than you know,’ Ben said. He spent the next fifteen minutes telling Alex everything that had happened. Her eyes widened in stunned horror as he described the bombing. Then he went on. One baffling detail after another. Laying it all out. Skid McClusky. Clayton Cleaver. Augusta Vale’s hundred million. Zoe’s discovery. The blackmail.
She listened carefully to every word. By the time he’d finished, she was staring at him in bewilderment, struggling to grasp the enormity of it. ‘It’s so weird,’ she breathed. ‘None of it makes sense. Why would they want some piece of pottery? Why is some obscure matter of theology important to them?’
‘How long was your team watching Cleaver for?’
