Night Moves

nearest border was only a mile or three away.

Next to him, Saji stood, looking much more like a Native American than a Tibetan. He wore faded blue jeans, cowboy boots, a long-sleeved work shirt, and a white ten-gallon hat with a rattlesnake skin band around it.

'Smell the water?' Saji said.

Jay, dressed much like Saji, but with a shadier, wide-brimmed Mexican sombrero, shook his head. 'All I smell is desert. Dust, sand, and baked rocks, that's it.'

Indeed, every step they took kicked up more reddish brown dust, fine as talcum powder. It coated his boots and clothes, stung his eyes and nose, and made breathing hard. There was no wind, so at least the dust settled quickly. A very realistic scenario, and it was Saji's. Something like this was still beyond Jay's capabilities.

'Okay, let's see if we can cut some sign.'

Jay shook his head. 'How did you learn all this tracking stuff?'

Saji smiled his idiot's grin. 'Jerry Pierce, a Navajo buddy of mine, is a Son of the Shadow Wolves. Tracker for the Border Patrol. He taught me about this, I taught him about the Middle Way.'

'A Navajo Buddhist?'

'Why not? Buddhism doesn't get in the way of most other religious beliefs, at least not the ones that aren't militantly monotheistic. Come on.'

The two of them walked carefully over the sandy ground. After a few yards, Saji said, 'Stop. You see it?'

They were maybe ten feet from the edge of a steep drop-off, a cliff that went down sixty, seventy feet. 'See what? The end of the world?'

'Nothing quite so dramatic. Right there in front of you.'

Jay strained his eyes, staring at the ground. Here were three things: hardpan dirt, a single broken blade of pale green grass, and a weathered, dusty, reddish rock. The ground here wouldn't hold a track. 'I don't see anything.'

'Not anything?'

'Okay, fine, I see something. There's a patch of hard dirt, a rock, a piece of dead grass. That's it.'

'Look around. Any other vegetation?'

Jay raised from his crouch, glanced at the area around him. 'There's something looks like a creosote bush about ten yards that way.' He moved toward the cliff edge, peered over it. Nothing growing down that way. 'Nothing close. There's a big cactus way the hell over there. It's desolation row here.'

'Okay, think about that for a minute.'

'No offense, Saji, but if I could think for more than thirty seconds without going blank-stupid, I wouldn't need you!'

'Close your eyes, count your breath.'

Jay sighed. He did as he was told. One… two… three… what… did… I… see…?

He opened his eyes. 'The grass.'

Saji nodded. 'What about it?'

'It doesn't belong here. How did it get here? There's nothing else around like it.'

'Good. Could it have blown here?'

Jay shook his head. 'No wind. And if it had been here very long, it would have been dry as a bleached bone, but it's still green.'

'Which means?'

'Something put it there. Maybe it fell out of a shoe or was stuck to somebody's pants leg.'

'Very good. Now what?'

Jay considered it. Saji had told him, but he couldn't remember it. Okay, think logically, Jay. It was hard, but it wasn't like he had to do any major programming, just take the next small step. Which would be…?

'Spiral out, look for tracks in any dirt that will take them?'

'Good. Let's see it. Careful — you don't want to obliterate any sign.'

Jay spiraled out from the grass, moving slowly, looking for tracks. He couldn't spot any for fifty feet in a circle around it. He shook his head. 'No tracks.'

'You sure?'

'Hell, yes, I'm sure!'

Saji waited for a few seconds.

'Sorry. I'm on edge.'

'No problem. Look over here.' Saji led Jay to a patch of dust, pointed at it. 'There.'

'Come on. That dirt is perfectly smooth, not a mark on it, you can't tell me you see a track there!'

'Carpet People,' Saji said.

'Come again?'

'They wear pieces of cut carpet on their feet, booties over their shoes, that don't leave tracks. You see a perfectly smooth spot in the desert, it's wrong. Look there, next to it. See the wind riffles? The rain pocks? The way the dust is uneven, here and here? Now look back at that spot, there.'

Jay looked. Yes. The dust was perfectly smooth.

'Get down to ground level, get the sun to the side.'

Jay did. Yes, he could see a slight edge around the smooth spot, a rough oval shape. 'I see it!'

'Sometimes, what you have to look for is the absence of something that should be there. Sometimes it will be very subtle, like this no-print footprint. Our quarry passed this way, heading north, staying close to the cliff edge. A man tracking him on horseback wouldn't get too close to the drop-off, even if the horse would let him. That big cactus you mentioned, way the hell over there?'

'Yeah.'

'I bet he stopped there to rest in the shade.'

'How could you possibly know that?'

'It's to the north. There's no shade behind us for miles. After walking out here in the hot sun for a couple of hours, your half-cooked feet wrapped in carpet booties over shoes, moving slow so as not to disturb the dust, wouldn't you stop in the shade to take a drink?'

Saji started walking briskly toward the barrel cactus.

'Uh, Saji? Don't we need to be careful of stepping on sign?'

'Nope. If he went to the cactus, we don't need to know how he got there. He didn't go over the edge, or we'd see the buzzards circling his body. He didn't come back our way. He went to the cactus. We'll pick up his trail there.'

'Right,' Jay said. 'You're the boss.'

'No, Jay, you are the boss. I'm just a guide.'

He moved off. Jay followed him.

Wednesday, April 6th

Jackson, Mississippi

John Howard stood staring in the Holiday Inn room where Mikhayl Ruzhyo had spent the night before. The maid hadn't cleaned the room yet; Ruzhyo had paid for two nights and put a Do Not Disturb sign on the door before he left. Even so, the room hardly seemed to have been occupied. The bed was made, the single used towel had been refolded and put on top of the unused ones. A paper-wrapped glass in the bathroom had been rinsed clean, dried, and put back where it came from. And if he had used the crapper, the man had even folded a new point on the remainder of the toilet paper roll when he was done.

'No-impact camper,' Fernandez said. 'Wish my bride was so tidy.'

Howard chewed at his lip. 'I suppose it was too much to hope he'd leave a map with a destination circled, along with his airline reservation number and flight times.'

'We'll get him, Colonel. We traced him this far, we'll pick up his trail from here, too. Looks as if he is heading east.'

'Maybe.'

'Maybe he is heading east, or maybe we'll get him?'

'Both.'