Samantha took the Jeep down the east slope, both hands on the wheel. There was scree the whole way and the front end slid on every switchback. She rode the wheel against it and let the engine, growling in 4L, do all the work.
No one talked. Marcus sat tensely in the passenger seat with his arms crossed. Vlad was in the back, the tablet lighting his face. She caught the glow of it in the mirror and thought how carsick she’d be if she was working like that in the back seat.
She’d asked for the silence at the pass. She had it now.
The road turned back on itself above a drop and the front end pushed straight through the turn. She was steering into it but the wheels didn’t catch. She got off the brake even though her gut wanted her foot on it. The tires spun, bit into the rocks, and the Jeep came around with a foot of shoulder to spare.
She glanced over and saw that Marcus now had both hands on the grab bar.
She had run this road a few times. She tried to visualize it as she drove, but was just too tired.
The ridge behind them had stopped being black. It wasn’t light yet, but it was less dark.
Get to the Spur. Strip the Jeep. A mile through the timber to come out at a random, disconnected location. Then the road, in the open, all the way down to Timberline.
They would be walking that road in daylight.
Marcus shifted in his seat. He’d lasted eleven minutes.
“When Seth can’t reach any of us,” he said, to the windshield. “What happens?”
Samantha kept her eyes on the road. He wanted to know if he was still in trouble.
“I told you at the pass,” Vlad said from the back. The typing didn’t stop. “Six o’clock. Nobody picks up.” A pause. “Then he starts thinking. Seth is not stupid.”
Marcus didn’t answer. He crossed his arms again.
Every channel you have ever used, Vlad had said.
He hadn’t said only Marcus. She wondered if Vlad was monitoring her also. He probably was.
She’d built a company with both of them. She’d trusted them. She had to trust them.
The grade steepened through a stand of dead timber. She stopped thinking and drove — low, slow, both feet ready, as the Jeep crawled down over the roots.
The Midland Grade Spur opened on the right, a gap in the spruce off the old grade. She turned in, cut the headlights, and took the last hundred feet on the parking lights until the branches were dragging down both sides. She stopped and killed the engine.
“Battery,” Vlad said.
“I know.”
Vlad tapped her on the shoulder and held out a multi-tool, which she took. She popped the hood, got out of the car, and found the negative terminal by feel. Her hands wouldn’t close on the tool. Two hours on the wheel and they were shaped like it.
She grimaced, shifted the tool in her palm and used her whole arm. The nut was cold and it didn’t want to move. Suddenly, it jolted and she slipped. She took a deep breath, backed it off and worked the cable free. The parking lights died.
The engine block ticked while it cooled.
She stood there holding the cable.
Ninety seconds and she could put it back on. Ninety seconds and it would start, and she could take it down to Timberline and out to Leadville and be in a booth at the Golden Burro by six-thirty with her hands around a cup of coffee, sitting in a room full of people who didn’t know anything.
She wanted that so badly her throat hurt.
She coiled the cable, tucked it under the hood liner where the weather wouldn’t get at it, and shut the hood quietly with both hands.
A hermit thrush opened up in the spruce above her. Another one answered from down the slope. She knew they started about half an hour before the sun.
Marcus and Vlad got out and pulled the packs. Marcus took the heavy one without being told. Vlad zipped the phone bag into his jacket.
Something up the slope blinked red.
Samantha had a hand on Marcus before she knew why. One dull red point, chest height on a spruce, twenty feet above the Jeep. It held and went out.
Nobody moved. The thrush kept singing.
She walked up to it. A plastic box the size of a paperback, strapped to the trunk with a buckle, camouflage tape over the brand name, a lens looking down the spur at exactly the height of a person’s face.
“Game camera,” she said. “Hunters hang them and come back to see what walks the road.”
Marcus was next to her fast. “It just took our picture.”
“It took our picture when we drove in,” Vlad said.
He came up the slope and stood in front of it. He put his face close to the top of the case and stayed there a long time.
“Two kinds,” he said. “One kind writes to a card and waits for someone to come and get it. The other kind has a SIM in it and sends the picture to a phone.”
“Which is this?”
“There is a stub on the top. It is an antenna or it is a piece of plastic. I would have to open it, and opening it makes a photograph of me opening it.”
Samantha looked at the box. “Then we take it down.”
“No.”
“Vlad. It has our faces on it.”
“Yes.” He stepped back from the tree. “If it sends, it sent twenty minutes ago and we are standing here arguing with a thing that has already spoken. If it does not send, then it is a card in a box, and a few months from now someone walks up here and scrolls through nine hundred pictures of elk and four pictures of some people and a Jeep, and he does not care, because he is looking for elk.” He turned and looked at her. “Break it and he cares. A broken camera is a story he tells in a bar in Leadville.”
Marcus said, “Is there even service up here?”
“No.”
“So it can’t send.”
“Not from here.”
Samantha stood in front of the lens with her hands at her sides. She wanted to put the multi-tool through it.
“We leave it,” she said.
“We leave it,” Vlad said.
“Vlad,” she said.
He stopped and turned toward her.
“Three years on Marcus,” she said. “Every channel he ever used.”
“Yes.”
“Only Marcus?”
It was dark enough under the trees that she couldn’t see his face.
“Yes,” he said.
“Say it looking at me.”
“You cannot see me.”
She waited.
“I am not watching you, Sam.” The pause was long enough that she heard the second thrush again. “If I decided that I needed to, I would. I would not ask you first.”
He walked over and put a tablet in her hands. She knew it ran Mirage and could only connect through his antenna.
She took it and put it in her pack without turning it on.
Marcus was already moving, the heavy pack riding badly on him. Vlad followed without a word.
Samantha went last, where she could see both of them.
Marcus had said so it can’t send. What Vlad said was not from here. In October a man would climb up, unstrap it, and carry it down to his truck, and it would find a bar of service before he reached the highway.
She didn’t tell Marcus either.