Page 89 of The Forest of Lost Souls

“Thank you. I’m determined he won’t have died for nothing.”

Sun Spirit unfolds the paper and reads. “Two Moon. Sun Spirit. Below the smoking river.”

Her husband joins her to read what, only yesterday, had been a cryptic message. He is tall and strong and has a face that might at times seem fierce, but his hand on his wife’s shoulder rests with an unmistakable tenderness.

Vida says, “Someone must have given that to José before he addressed the crowd. Someone who thought maybe you could help him.”

“Addressing a crowd? Was your fiancé a politician?”

“No. Quite the opposite. A teacher, a coach, a lover of nature. He was speaking against the Grand Plateau project.”

“Project?”

“You don’t know about it?”

“We seek to know as little of the world beyond this forest as possible. It is a world gone mad, and such madness as that can be infectious.”

Although Vida’s opinion of the world, in its present condition, is not as dark as theirs, she understands their viewpoint and must admit that their grim assessment might be right, her optimism wrong.

She indicates the note. “Do you recognize the handwriting?”

“I’m afraid I do not.” Sun Spirit returns the slip of paper. “But come in the house. We’ll have coffee. You can tell us about this project, and we might see why someone thought we could help your Mr. Nochelobo.”

The wolves settle in the yard to sun themselves.

The dogs lie to one side of the front door, in the shade of the loggia.

Entering the house behind Sun Spirit, Vida takes only two steps before she halts in surprise. On the wall hangs an exquisite pencil portrait of a Cheyenne elder, rendered in such detail and with such power that it’s apparent the artist captured not just how the old man looked but also the quality of his character and the condition of his heart. In the bottom right corner of the image, where the creator’s signature should be, there is only a small, stylized image of a deer.

“Eternal Fawn,” says Vida.

Sun Spirit turns, as surprised as her visitor. “You know her work?”

“I have one of her drawings.”

“She never sold them.”

“I didn’t buy it. It was a gift to my uncle. My great-uncle. His portrait. In fact, I have it with me. How do you know her?”

“She was my grandmother.”

73

BOSCHVARK FOREVER

Boschvark overcomes insomnia by escaping the Earth. Anger is usually the cause of his sleeplessness—exasperation with the idiocy of an employee, impatience with members of the media who report what they’re told but do it incompetently, rage at tactics of competitors who skin him out of another hundred million dollars that should have been his, fury at the processes of nature resulting in less than an ideal human physiology that isn’t just mortal but also allows for inconveniences such as headaches and hangnails and constipation. However, when ensconced in a jet, high above the planet, he is—if only for a few hours—able to feel disconnected from humanity, as though he’s an entity unto himself, a glorious species of one, which is a status for which he’s yearned all his life. And then he sleeps.

He is still sleeping when his Gulfstream V lands on his private paved airstrip at Rancho del Culebra Furioso, his nine-thousand-acre property in Kettleton County. He purchased this land in order to have a home within a half hour’s drive of the Grand Plateau when work there finally begins. Currently he also raises llamas on the ranch for tax purposes. Eventually, using major defense contractors who can construct facilities with the greatest secrecy, he intends to install level-4 biological labs deep underground and staff them with dedicated scientists who will live here while they create new deadlypathogens and the vaccines to guard against the pandemics such microbes could cause. He has neither evil nor humanitarian motivations for funding this research; he is committed to it only because it’s his belief that all multibillionaires have similar facilities and that, to preserve his lofty position in the social order, he must maintain parity with others of his kind.

Whenever Boschvark sleeps through a landing, as he does in this case because of exhaustion from chronic insomnia, Heath Granger and Shepherd Eagle, his pilots, are under orders not to wake him. The property manager and head housekeeper of Rancho del Culebra Furioso, Mr. and Mrs. Danvers, assist in the disembarkation of the sleeper and transport him to the primary bedroom in the main residence.

In spite of the comfort money can buy and the power over others that it provides, the sad truth is that even a multibillionaire has no guarantee of a smooth journey through life. For one thing, no amount of wealth can purchase good dreams. With a throttled scream, Boschvark wakes from a half-remembered nightmare in which he was so poor that he owned only three homes and flew commercial. He sits on the edge of the bed, sweating and trembling. When he discovers Mrs. Danvers has forgotten to leave a small plate of Belgian chocolate-covered mint patties on his nightstand, as is absolutely required, he is displeased. His displeasure quickly escalates into resentment, a bitter brooding over past failures of the housekeeper to serve him as diligently as she should. Now he is ready for the day.

After a scalding shower so hot that it has sensitized him to the many physical indignities the day will impress on him, he takes a late breakfast in the large conservatory at the north end of the house, among palms and ferns and orchids that aren’t native tothis territory. The food is excellent except for one detail. He is quite certain that the three mandarin orange segments arranged around a cherry atop the small serving of flan, which comes at the end of the meal, are not from a fresh fruit, but from a can. After finishing the flan, he sips his coffee and considers confronting Mrs. Danvers regarding her use of an inadequate choice of decorative citrus in violation of his standards. Instead, alert to the need to extinguish the Vida woman in a timely manner, he decides to tuck this culinary offense away in memory and let it fester for another occasion.

At the center of his office in this residence stands an immense black-granite-and-steel desk that some on the staff refer to as the “Darth Vader command center,” though they are not aware that he has recordings of them making this amused reference. He isn’t angered and calls no one to account for impertinence, because he likes the implications of their joke. Sitting in a black-leather steel-studded pneumatic office chair that looks as though it doubles as a personal aircraft for jaunts around the ranch, he uses the intercom to summon Mack Yataghan, the head of security for the Grand Plateau project.

Yataghan, a former CIA agent, has made a fortune sharing useful national secrets with Boschvark. To prove that his loyalty to his boss is forever and isn’t as transient as that to his country, he has received an implanted molar containing a capsule of arsenic that can be detonated by remote control, though only by Boschvark. There is something psychologically wrong with Yataghan, but it’s the kind of wrong that makes him just right for Boschvark’s purposes. Anyway, even if the security chief were normal, he’d most likely still be holding this job. It always amazesBoschvark what people will do for a salary of a mere two million a year.

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