Samantha fell asleep in her chair about two minutes after she finished the apple. Her head tipped over onto her shoulder and her mouth came open a little. Seth decided he would never tell her.
Vlad climbed into the cab of the truck and sat behind the wheel with the seat tipped back and his arms folded. Seth couldn’t tell if he was asleep. Marcus was snoring in the back of the shell with his foot up on the pack and Cooper’s pill bottle in his fist.
That left Seth and Cooper. Cooper had the third chair and wasn’t giving it up.
Seth dragged his own chair to the end of the spur, where he could see the forest road in both directions. He opened a Diet Coke and ate a Kind bar. Then he ate another one. He reached into his vest for his phone to check the time, and then remembered it was on his kitchen counter. He hadn’t worn a watch since he got his first iPhone. He missed his phone.
Somewhere between the second Kind bar and the third, he decided that Vlad reading his email was ok. Vlad would have read anybody’s email.
By the middle of the afternoon the loop was full. Across the road, four college kids in a Honda Element strung a slackline between two lodgepoles and took turns falling off it. One of them had a speaker playing country music. Seth hated country music.
A green Forest Service pickup came slowly around the bend. It stopped at the college kids’ post, and a young ranger in a gray shirt got out with a clipboard. He talked to the kids for a minute, then walked around behind the Element and wrote something down. At the next site he did the same thing with a Subaru. At the one after that he bent over to look at the bumper of a van.
At first Seth thought he was counting people. By the van he understood the ranger was writing down plates. He guessed it was for the fourteen-day limit. He also guessed that a bored ranger with a clipboard full of plates might run a few of them for fun.
The red truck was backed into the trees with its plate a foot from a lodgepole.
Seth got up, clipped the leash on Cooper, and walked down the spur so he would be standing at the post when the ranger got there.
The ranger was maybe twenty-five and had a peeling sunburned nose. His name tag said BOYD.
“Afternoon,” Boyd said. “How long you been up here?”
“Since this morning. We’re out tomorrow.”
“Good call. Tomorrow’s gonna be a zoo. The aspens are turning up by Caribou and everybody in Denver knows it.”
He crouched down and held out his hand. Cooper smelled it, licked it, and then leaned his whole weight against the ranger’s leg.
Boyd walked around the back of the Range Rover and wrote down the plate. Then he looked up the spur at the red truck.
“That one with you?”
“My nephew’s,” Seth said. “He drove up from Denver with his friends last night. They’re sleeping it off.”
“I’ll need the plate on that one too.”
He started up the spur. Seth walked with him, and Cooper went along, delighted.
“Fair warning,” Seth said. “My nephew’s a grump when you wake him up, and he backed it in so tight you’ll be climbing through the trees. I can have him pull it out and bring it down to you.”
Boyd looked at Samantha asleep in the chair, and at the cab, and at the trees behind the tailgate. Seth guessed he had been walking this loop since noon and wanted to be done with it.
The radio on Boyd’s belt said a loose dog on the upper loop was chasing somebody’s horse.
Boyd stopped and listened. Cooper looked up at the radio with great interest.
“Every Friday,” Boyd said. He turned around. “Tell your nephew to pull it out of the trees before he leaves. I’ll be back through around nine.”
“I’ll tell him.”
The ranger went off around the bend. Seth’s hands were shaking. He had lied to a federal officer and been saved by a horse.
When he got back up the spur, Samantha’s eyes were open. He had no idea how long they had been open.
“Nephew,” she said.
“Vlad.”
“He’ll hate that.”
“I will,” Vlad said from the cab, with his eyes closed.
Seth sat down in the chair next to Samantha. Cooper jumped back into his.
“He’s coming back at nine,” Seth said. “We should be gone before then. Tonight, I think. Tomorrow there’ll be three hundred people on this loop.”
“Where,” Samantha said.
“I know a place. A friend of mine has a cabin off East Portal Road, past Tolland. Out by the Moffat Tunnel behind a gate.”
Vlad opened his eyes and got out of the cab.
“Doug Carlisle,” he said.
Everybody looked at him.
“He is in Lisbon until the end of November,” said Vlad. “He sends you a photograph of a custard tart every Tuesday.”
“Pastéis de nata,” Seth said. “He’s very proud of finding them.”
“Everyone in Lisbon has found them,” Vlad said. He turned to Samantha. “The cabin is in his name. Doug is his friend. When they look for Seth, they will look at his friends.”
“I have a lot of friends.”
“You have one thousand four hundred and twelve contacts,” Vlad said. “You regularly talk to twenty-nine of them.”
“Doug’s one of the twenty-nine.”
“Yes. That is my point.”
Vlad was right, but not about the timing.
“Nobody’s going to look for me until Tuesday,” Seth said. “Then they’ll call my partners, and my assistant, and the guys I run with. It’ll take them a while to get to a guy in Lisbon.” He shrugged. “His place also has a garage.”
Vlad turned back to him.
“How big?”
“Two bays. There’s a snowmobile and a canoe in one of them.”
Vlad looked at the red truck for a long time.
“Then the truck goes in the other one,” he said.
“Does his cabin have a bed?” Marcus asked from the back of the shell.
“Three.”
“I’m in.”
“Nobody asked you,” Samantha said. She turned back to Seth. “Does Doug know?”
“No.”
“Would he say yes?”
Seth thought for a moment. Doug would say yes on the phone and then call his lawyer as soon as he hung up. He had given Seth the gate code in June so he could go up once in a while and check on the place. Seth had been up once.
“Probably,” he said.
If this went badly, Doug’s cabin would end up in an indictment. Seth figured he was going to owe him a very expensive dinner.
“We’ll go,” Samantha said. “When it’s dark.”
They broke camp at dusk. Seth watched Vlad take the dish down and pack the laptops, the batteries, and the water filter into the truck in a very specific order. Samantha took care of the sleeping bags. Seth eventually folded two of the chairs and then stood over the third one. Cooper was lying in it with his chin on the arm.
“Come on, buddy.”
Cooper looked at him.
Seth tipped the chair over, gently. Cooper got up with enormous dignity and walked to the Rover.
Seth and Vlad got Marcus down the spur between them, one arm over each of their shoulders, his left foot held up off the ground. Marcus was heavy. He was also sweating and Seth could feel it through his shirt.
“He’s hot,” Seth said to Samantha over the roof of the Rover.
“In multiple ways.”
They put him in the passenger seat of the Rover, and Seth reclined it all the way and put the bag of groceries under his foot.
“Heated seats,” Marcus said.
“Don’t get used to it.”
Samantha drove the red truck with Vlad. Seth led in the Rover. He took them out the bottom of the loop to 119 instead of back through Nederland, then south. It was completely dark by the time they got to Rollinsville, which was a bar and a post office. He turned right onto East Portal Road.
Marcus had been quiet on the forest road. On the pavement he started talking.
“I’m sorry about the text,” he said.
“You should be. You really scared me.”
“I should have called you back. I should have called you back the first morning. I was going to, and then Vlad showed us what he’d been doing with everybody’s phones, and then there wasn’t really a time where it would have been—”
“Marcus. It’s ok. Let’s focus on what we need to do now.”
“Why did you come?”
Seth drove silently for a while. The road turned back to dirt outside of town, and the headlights of the truck bounced around in his mirror.
“When I wrote you the first check I told you I work for you guys until you screw me,” he said. “You haven’t screwed me.”
“I texted you at three in the morning and then disappeared for eleven days.”
“That’s not screwing me. That’s just you being you.” Seth glanced over at him. “I was worried about you. All three of you.”
They were both quiet for a minute. Then Marcus unloaded, telling Seth about Kestrel. The machine, the building, Curtis Ames letting them in, the patrol car that came around every eighty minutes, and something about numbers Samantha had made Vlad write on his arm.
“There was a guy who sat in the dark all night,” Marcus said. “Mike. He wouldn’t let us tell him anything.”
“Smart guy.”
“He was, actually. He told Sam something at the end that saved the whole night. I was asleep for that part, but—”
Seth had always been able to hang up on him.
“Marcus,” he said. “I love you. Shut up for a few minutes.”
“Okay.”
“Play Dark Side of the Moon,” Seth said to the car.
Marcus was asleep before “Breathe” ended. Seth looked over and felt sad for Marcus. He was way out of his depth.
They went through Tolland: a meadow, a few old cabins with their windows boarded up for the winter, and a sign about private property. Doug’s gate was a steel pipe across a two-track on the right, with a keypad on a post. Seth got out, left the door open so he could see the keypad in the dome light, and typed zero six one four, the code from Doug’s email in June.
The light on the keypad blinked red.
He typed it again. Red.
The truck pulled up behind the Rover. Vlad got out and walked up through the headlights with his hands in his jacket.
“He changed it,” Vlad said. “On the ninth of August. Four, one, seven, seven.”
Seth typed it. The light went green and the gate swung open with a whine.
“You know my friend’s gate code. You really are a piece of work.”
“He asked you to confirm that you got it,” Vlad said. “You didn’t answer him.”
Vlad was right. Seth felt silly, and said, “Sorry I just said that. I’m impressed by your surveillance. When we are done with this, maybe we should do a different company together.”
Vlad walked silently back to the truck, shaking his head a little.
The two-track went up through aspens for a quarter of a mile. The cabin was dark logs with a green metal roof and solar panels on the south side, and the garage was off to the left of it. The key was in the obvious place, which was under a fake rock beside the front door. Doug must have thought the rock was very clever. Or maybe he thought it was ironic.
Seth let himself in and opened the garage from the inside. Samantha backed the red truck in next to the snowmobile on the first try. Vlad pulled the door down behind it.
Somewhere up the valley a train came out of the tunnel. It was loud. It took a long time to go by. Cooper barked at it.
“Doug likes the trains,” Seth said.
Inside, the cabin was cold. Seth found the switch by the door and nothing happened.
“Solar,” he said. “Doug turned it off when he left. I don’t know how to turn it on.”
“I do,” Vlad said, and went back outside with a headlamp.
Seth and Samantha got Marcus out of the Rover and onto Doug’s leather couch. Samantha pulled a headlamp out of her jacket, crouched by his foot, and turned it on.
The red had gone past the ink line all the way around. She put her hand flat against it and held it there.
“Give me a pen,” she said.
Seth took a green Uni-ball out of his pocket. She drew a new line around the edge of the red, all the way around his leg.
“What time is it?”
Nobody in the room knew.
“Eight fifty-one,” Vlad said from the doorway.
Samantha wrote 8:51 on Marcus’s shin, next to the line.
“If it’s past this in the morning,” she said, “he needs a doctor.”
“I’m fine,” Marcus said, without opening his eyes.
“You’re not.”
Seth knew a couple of doctors who would drive up to a cabin for him in the middle of the night and not ask about it. He didn’t want to call any of them, but started to get his mind around it.
Samantha sat back on her heels. She looked exhausted.
“I’ll sit with him,” Seth said.
She looked at them, then gave Seth the headlamp and went down the hall. He heard a door close. Vlad came in a few minutes later, said nothing about the power, and went down the hall also. The lights stayed off.
Seth built a fire in the woodstove. Doug had conveniently left matches and kindling in a basket next to the stove. Cooper lay down on the rug in front of it and fell asleep in about ten seconds. Seth sat in Doug’s armchair with the headlamp in his lap.
The trains came through every hour or so, and after a while he started using them as a clock. After the first one he checked the line. It was fine. After the second one it was fine.
He dozed off in the chair and woke up when the third one came out of the tunnel. He got up and put the headlamp on Marcus’s leg.
The red was past the line by about the width of his thumb.
Cooper’s pills weren’t working. Seth was scared. He went down the hall to wake Samantha.