Exile Endgame (Kamas Trilogy Book 4), page 28
“I’ve decided to make the crossing after all,” he told the younger man in a low voice. “And I’ve written a letter to my wife, to be opened only if I fail to return. Would you do me a favor and keep it in a safe place till I come back? And if I don’t return on Sunday, would you wait a day or two before delivering it to Annabel at our hotel?”
“Certainly,” Cowen answered, glancing over Linder’s shoulder to see if anyone might be listening. He put out his hand where it wouldn’t easily be seen and discreetly accepted the envelope. “I’ll lock it away in my office safe and give it back to you when we meet on Sunday.”
Though Linder couldn’t be sure, something about Cowen’s demeanor made him believe that the young man was sincere. But even if he weren’t, it was a risk Linder was prepared to take.
It was half past midnight when the group finally gathered downstairs. Quist’s first action there was to take Linder aside and ask him to leave behind his wallet, cell phone and any other identifying objects, like an engraved watch or ring.
“You’ll be traveling under an alias for your own protection,” Quist explained. Cowen collected the items and promised to hand them back on his return.
“What alias will I be using?” Linder asked.
“We took the liberty to create a alias travel document for you on the chance that you might be coming with us. A U.S. passport under the name of Vincent Stephens is waiting for you on the other side.”
It was a clever stroke and Linder couldn’t help wondering what made the League so confident that he’d go along. He hadn’t agreed to make the crossing until the last moment. What if he’d refused?
“How did you put the document together so quickly,” he challenged. “I never even gave you a photo.”
“Our document techs do this sort of thing all the time. They can grab images off the internet and create a passport photo in a flash.”
“How about border security?” Linder went on. “What if we’re stopped and questioned on the water?”
“That’s not going to happen,” Quist replied with a sly smile. “Here on the northern frontier, the U.S. Border Patrol is far more interested in capturing Americans trying to escape than in stopping illegal entries from Canada. That’s why Canadian cannabis growers use the lake to smuggle in their hydroponically grown weed into the U.S. rather than brave the cameras, ground sensors and armed patrols installed along the land routes.”
“How about after we make landfall?” Linder persisted. “What’s our chance of being stopped on the road to Boston?”
The smile returned to Quist’s face. To Linder, who had crossed many a border in his time, the man’s confidence appeared excessive. But Quist had a ready answer for this, too.
“Don’t worry,” the League official answered. “If you knew the government’s security setup the way we do, you’d laugh. Their national ID system is a joke. First off, the database is offline half the time. And the new biometric ID cards are so easily hacked or corrupted that, outside the big cities, DHS has gone back to issuing old-fashioned paper IDs. Out here in the boonies, nothing at all is digital any more and there’s a thriving black market in forged documents. In the unlikely event that we’re stopped on the road to Boston, your Vincent Stephens passport will do the job just fine.”
The temperature was scarcely above freezing when at last Quist led Linder and Poirier out the back door of the house onto a gravel path leading toward the dock. By now the moon was barely above the horizon, behind low clouds. Nothing but stars lit the earth, reflecting dimly on the water. The men walked slowly in the dark, their ears attuned to every little noise over the crunch of the gravel. Linder pulled his fedora down on his head against the cold.
Then, through the clatter of shoes on the dock, they heard the whoosh of a vessel closing in at short range. It was a low-silhouette motorboat, about twenty-five feet in length, its charcoal-hued carbon-fiber hull scarcely visible in the darkness. The driver circled around and pulled alongside the dock, pointing the craft’s bow out toward open water.
The crewman tossed the bowline to Quist, who cleated it quickly and helped Linder and Poirier climb aboard. The crewman then handed each passenger a blue foul weather jacket and a life preserver.
“Put the jacket on first and then the life preserver over it. It’s cold out there on the water,” the man said in a lilting Canadian accent before reaching out to retrieve the bowline.
Only then did Linder remember the image that Caroline had drawn of him in a foul weather jacket and fedora hat, stepping off the wooden dock into the motorboat. His heart sank.
The moment the three passengers took their rear-facing seats behind the two-man crew, the boat took off, slowly at first, then accelerating rapidly, but with scarcely a sound from the inboard engines.
“What kind of boat is this, anyway?” Linder asked Quist over the noise of water rushing against the hull.
“It’s all-electric. Stealth design. And faster than anything else on the lake. Can you smell the cannabis resin on the deck?”
“Not in wind like this,” Linder replied, zipping his jacket up to his chin over his overcoat to keep from shivering.
The passage from Magog to the outskirts of Newport took scarcely over an hour. The entire way, Linder saw no other boats on the water. Toward the end of the crossing, the craft veered left, slowed to half speed, and skirted the shoreline for several minutes. At one point, they passed an illuminated buoy with a sign that read, “United States Boundary. Illegal to Enter U.S.” with pictographs showing firearms and illegal drugs. Further ahead was another illuminated sign with the word “Warning!” written in bold letters and the words “If you are entering the United States without presenting yourself to an Immigration Officer, you may be arrested and prosecuted for violating U.S. Immigration and Customs Laws.” Linder recalled having come across a similar sign a decade earlier upon entering the Montana wilderness just south of the Alberta border.
“Are we there yet?” Linder asked Quist after passing the signs. “I don’t see any lights onshore.”
“No, we have another ten minutes to go. Right now we’re taking advantage of a surveillance blind spot.”
Ten minutes after crossing the international border, with the town lights of Newport in the distance, the boat drew up silently onto a sandy beach. Quist lowered himself from the bow first and pulled the lightened boat forward so that Poirier and Linder could step ashore without soaking their feet. Then he gave the bow a shove and the boat rotated slowly before peeling away at high speed to the south.
Without a word, Quist motioned for his two companions to follow him off the beach onto a dirt path that climbed a gradual slope for a hundred yards before joining a two-lane blacktop road. At the junction, shielded from view by a dense grove of pines, stood a silver Chevy SUV. Quist opened the rear door for Linder and Poirier to climb in before opening the front passenger door to seat himself. An instant later, the driver pressed the ignition button and switched on the headlights. In the glow of the dashboard display, Linder could see that the driver was Gordon Mook. So much for Silva’s claim that her husband had urgent business in Montreal. Had she intended then to lie about Mook’s whereabouts, or was he on a mission kept secret even from her?
“Thanks for coming to fetch us,” Quist told Mook once they were on their way. “I apologize for the last-minute change in plans.”
“Not a problem,” Mook replied without turning his head to look at Quist.
“Mr. Linder, this is for you,” the driver said next, holding up a manila envelope for Linder to take.
Linder accepted the envelope. Inside was a U.S. passport prepared in the name of Vincent Stephens. The photo was his, but who had snapped it?
Poirier then handed him a pocket LED flashlight.
“Study the passport closely and memorize its details,” he said. Then Poirier described the route they would take to Boston. First, Mook would drive south on I-91 to the outskirts of St. Johnsbury, Vermont, where they would stop for coffee and Mook would separate from them to return to Montreal. From St. Johnsbury, Quist and Poirier would take turns driving along I-93 all the way into downtown Boston.
The three travelers left Mook behind at the coffee shop and resumed their drive to Boston with Quist at the wheel. Despite several attempts, Linder was unable to sleep. Seeds of doubt kept sprouting in his head. Would Kreutzer show up as promised? Was it all an elaborate trap? To distract himself from these negative thoughts, Linder took advantage of the opportunity to question Quist and Poirier on several matters not covered during dinner the night before. One was the death of Leonard Fury.
“As you might expect,” Linder began, “I have a hard time swallowing the official narrative about Leonard’s end. So tell me, what does the League think happened to him?”
“Well, I can’t claim to know all that Charles or Simon might know,” Quist replied, turning around in his seat to face his questioner. “But, from what I’ve heard, Fury really did take his own life. Our people were monitoring his prison conditions closely. And I honestly believe that we could have gotten him out if given a little more time. But we had no idea how badly depressed Leonard had become over being sentenced to hard labor. He seems to have lost hope that he’d ever be free again.”
Linder nodded but he didn’t believe a word of it. Fury had been captured by the enemy before and had never despaired. His cardinal trait was defiance. While he might have looked depressed to an outsider, suicide was simply not in Fury’s DNA.
“I don’t get it,” Linder objected. “Leonard had to know all along that, once he turned himself in, they’d demand that he make a public confession. It was a key element of the original deal the League offered him in the note the two Canadians delivered to Paris. So why would his show trial throw him into such a tailspin?”
This time Poirier fielded the question.
“It’s impossible to know Leonard’s true motives for jumping to his death. But it seems clear to me that he was no longer of sound mind when he did it. Perhaps it was a combination of factors. I was as shocked as anyone that he let himself be so shamefully abused in his trial. All I can say is that he must have had a lot on his mind after leading the kind of life he did.”
Inwardly, Linder bristled at the disdain implicit in Poirier’s remarks. The man had worked for Fury for years, had been entrusted with many sensitive missions, and was rewarded handsomely for carrying them out. Who was Jack Poirier to judge his late boss? But this was not the time and place for Linder to defend Fury’s character. Rather, the occasion called for the opposite.
“For years I’d been one of Leonard’s greatest admirers,” Linder replied. “But I believe what you say makes sense. You see, Leonard was a conspirator par excellence. He couldn’t get through a single day without plotting some dark scheme. And he was quite unscrupulous in his pursuit of power, money, women, and the means to a cushy life. In the end, it seems to me, Leonard’s motives were not as principled as he led people to believe. Maybe that’s why he lacked the inner resolve to keep going at the end. Perhaps if he’d had an organization like the League to back him up a year or two ago, things might have turned out differently.”
The statement was intended to show respect for the League, if perhaps at Fury’s expense. The ploy seemed to have worked, because both Quist and Poirier looked relieved that Linder hadn’t doggedly defended Fury. To sustain that impression, during the next hour Linder confined his questions to more innocuous topics.
As they crossed the border from Maine to New Hampshire with Poirier in the driver’s seat, Linder voiced surprise that the tollbooths were unmanned. Even the EZ Pass scanners seemed inoperable, as cars zipped through in every lane without so much as slowing down.
“What’s with the broken scanners?” he asked. “Weird that the government is giving up all that toll revenue.”
“Welcome to socialism. Nothing works,” Poirier answered. “Besides that, there just aren’t enough privately owned cars and trucks left to make toll collection profitable. And government vehicles are exempt, of course.”
“So where did all the private vehicles go?”
“Sky-high licensing fees and outrageous fuel and electricity prices made the cost of owning a car prohibitive. In the cities, most people use public transit, despite the overcrowding and unreliability. And, in the suburbs, jitney vans have largely filled the gap.”
As if to prove Poirier’s assertion, when they entered Boston’s northern suburbs during the morning rush hour, the highway filled rapidly with ride-sharing vans, panel trucks, rattletrap buses and swarms of noisy, exhaust-spewing motorbikes like those that abound in Third World cities. The closer they came to center city, the more Boston resembled Cairo, Bangkok, or Manila.
Along the waterfront, Linder noticed dozens of identical newly constructed concrete apartment blocks, replacing those that were condemned after the catastrophic New England floods a decade earlier.
“Well, at least the government managed to put up some new apartments for the flood refugees,” he observed. “And they don’t look too shabby, either.”
“Good thing you don’t have to live in one,” Poirier responded in an acid tone. “The city government rations living space based on square footage per occupant. It’s like living in a coat closet.”
As they entered Boston’s downtown commercial district, they passed scores of tent cities, despite the new public housing units. On entering a formerly gentrified area of South Boston, Linder noted with sadness many vacant storefronts, broken windows, and trash heaps that marked the community’s fallen state. Yet, amid the squalor, Poirier pointed out an upscale retail store whose proprietor was just then rolling up its metal security shutter.
“What’s that one?” Linder asked.
“It’s a Progress Store,” Poirier replied with thinly veiled disgust. “Think of it as a Unionist Party commissary, much like a military PX, that sells hard-to-find and luxury goods. But only to people who show a Party membership card or have special government scrip to spend. Ordinary citizens aren’t even allowed inside.”
“So where do the locals shop? I don’t see any supermarkets or bodegas.”
“Oh, there are still a few of those, but unemployment, low wages, and stingy government handouts mean that the average family can’t afford much more than food and rent. For most other things, people haunt the flea markets. Look, there’s one, on the right, in the schoolyard over there. The collapse of manufacturing and the shortage of imports means that people resort to barter or selling off heirlooms to pay for things they can’t do without.”
Nostalgia for the Boston that Linder had known as a young man turned to revulsion as Poirier drove along litter-strewn streets where sullen, listless residents milled about or squatted idly on front stoops. Quist’s SUV passed a bakery where queued-up shoppers swiveled their heads to follow a shiny sedan that stopped further down the street outside a police station. For a few moments, resentment smoldered in their eyes. The shoppers’ faces seemed to question what right the people in the sedan had not to waste their time waiting in queues. Then the flame of resistance flickered out and their eyes swung around again to stare at the backs of heads just before them. Justice was one thing, but at the front of the line was bread.
A few minutes later, Poirier parked the SUV outside a three-story white clapboard townhouse where he claimed his younger brother lived when not on the road for his job. It was a modest dwelling, unmistakably working class, but respectable. Once inside, Poirier suggested that the three men take a short nap before their scheduled afternoon meeting with local League members for an informal walking tour. All agreed, and Poirier led them upstairs, offering each his own bedroom. It had been a long night in the boat and on the road and Linder was eager to sleep despite his senses still being on high alert.
Yet the moment Poirier was out of sight, Linder slipped into Quist’s bedroom and closed the door behind him.
“Have you heard from Kreutzer? When are we going to see him?”
Quist answered with an expression that conveyed an unmistakable sense that something was wrong.
“No word just yet,” he replied, quickly turning away. “His plane may still be in the air. Let’s get some shuteye and check again later.”
Linder didn’t like that at all.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: BOSTON
“The fight ain’t over till you’ve thrown your last punch.”
—Muhammad Ali
SATURDAY, 25 MARCH 2034
Linder awoke shortly after one in the afternoon when he heard loud voices and a door slam downstairs. Upon entering the living room, he found Poirier and Quist seated with two strangers, one of them a moon-faced African American with a coffee-and-cream complexion, rotund figure, and pudgy hands. The latter visitor rose to greet Linder with a benign smile.
Linder returned his smile. Grilling Quist on when he’d be able to meet Kreutzer would have to wait.
“Warren, I’d like you to meet Roy Scovill,” Quist began. “He’s a good friend of my brother’s. Roy was elected to Boston City Council last year after fifteen years with the police union. Now he runs a program similar to the old Oath Keepers, educating police and first responders on the difference between legal and illegal orders, and training them to refuse those that are unconstitutional. You can imagine how much trouble that would have gotten him into even a couple years ago.”
“So why would it be different now?” Linder observed with a skeptical mien. “The Party has been running roughshod over the Constitution from day one.”
“The citizens are what’s changed,” Scovill answered, still smiling. “They want clear rules that apply to everyone, not just the favored few. And they want the police to enforce the law fairly.”
“Fascinating,” Linder replied, pretending to believe what he’d been told.
