Page 24 of The Oligarch's Daughter

The two hadn’t spoken in years.

*

The undergrowth was thick in some parts, with hobblebush, a scraggly shrub notorious for tripping hikers, making it difficult to move fast, let alone run. It grew knee-high. Paul waded through it, loped from clearing to clearing, his go-bag slung over one shoulder like a backpack. It was a clear, bright, chilly October day, and the canopy was increasingly dense, which made it cool. He was wearing the steel-toe work boots he always wore, jeans, and a barn coat—his habitual New Hampshire fall outfit.

The trees were mostly spruce and fir, with some hemlock and yellow birch mixed in. Here and there, pale green lichen clung to branches and grew like fur on tree trunks. Hikers called this “old man’s beard.” Paul moved as quickly as he could. Still, he knew that if the hobblebush slowed him down, it would also slow down his pursuers.

From the pine needles to the oak leaves, the forest was green. The fallen leaves were orange and gold. Spruce trees, their branches heavy with cones, gave off a pine fragrance. In places, the light was dappled.

When he was far enough away from his truck that he could no longer see it, he stopped and unzipped his go-bag. Inside, he found several disposable phones, fully charged. He switched one on.

Three bars, a decent signal. He took his iPhone out of his pocket and examined it for a second. He had heard of people being tracked via their phones, though he didn’t know how this worked. The important thing was that his phone could give up his location if it remained on. He switched it off. Can you be tracked by an iPhone that was off? That he wasn’t sure of. Maybe so. He couldn’t remove the battery; that required some kind of proprietary hex screw.

So he picked up a large rock from the ground, placed the iPhone against a rock outcropping, and brought the rock down, smashing the device. Its screen spiderwebbed. He smashed it again, and this time the screen shattered and the phone’s electronic guts spilled out. The thing was dead. They wouldn’t track him this way anymore.

On one of the disposable phones, he dialed the number of a friend, Louis Westing, who lived in Lincoln. The number was written on a scrap of paper in the go-bag on which he’d jotted down possible useful contacts. Lou was a small-town lawyer with his own firm. They’d met at a Christmas party at Sarah’s apartment and got to talking about baseball. Lou had handed “Grant” his business card and told him to call if he ever had any legal questions.

A woman’s voice answered the phone: “Westing and Associates.”

Paul asked for Lou, gave his name as “Grant Anderson.”

Lou picked up a minute later. “Grant, how goes it?” he said in a boisterous voice.

“Lou, I’m sorry to just call you out of the blue, but I really need your help. I’ll be in your neck of the woods soon.”

“You’ll be in Lincoln?”

“I will be,” Paul said. “Tomorrow or the next day. And I’ll explain.”

“Come by the office soon’s you get to town. We can have lunch.”

Paul turned off the phone, to conserve the battery, and continued scrambling through the underbrush. He needed to walk west to reach the town of Lincoln.

From his go-bag, he retrieved a simple button compass. He remembered his father’s chantRed Fred in the shed!—meaning you turned the bezel on the compass until the red needle, “Red Fred,” aligned with the hollow arrow on the body of the compass, the “shed.”

So he had been walking north, he found. The wrong direction. Instead, he wanted to go west, through the forest and to the town of Lincoln. It was a good thing he’d checked. He reoriented, adjusted his direction.

The land was gradually uphill for the first couple of hours, then it dipped down into a valley. After that, the terrain seemed to get steeper and rockier. At one point, he was finding it hard to keep from leaning forward. It’s an instinct to lean into a hill. Instead, you want to stay upright as much as possible—or so he’d been taught by Stanley Brightman. In some of the steeper climbs, he had to make sure he had a good foothold and a good handhold. Once he passed close to Signal Ridge Trail, as it was marked, he turned away from it, heading deeper into the woods.

As he advanced, he listened for the sounds of other humans in the forest. The map told him that the town of Lincoln was some twenty miles away. He could do twenty miles in one day on an established forest path. But there was no trail cut here. Maybe he could do eight miles a day in these dense woods, at the most. That meant two and a half days of hiking, if all went well. He could make it without food, but water was more important. Stan Brightman used to say that you could survive for three minutes without air, three weeks without food, but only three days without water—the Rule of Threes.

After walking for three hours, he grew thirsty and was getting cold. The temperature had been dropping. His steel-toe boots were colder than the afternoon air, and his toes were losing feeling. For climbing in cold weather, steel-toe boots were exactly the wrong thing to wear. The steel transferred the cold to his feet. He shouldn’t have worn these damn boots, but then again, he hadn’t expected to have to run. He was shivering. He needed to stop and warm himself up. Change his damp socks to limit frostbite. Maybe make a fire. He remembered his father’s saying:Fire is the difference between eating lunch and being lunch.

He shivered, but he knew that was a good thing, shivering. As long as you have sugar in your system, you can shiver indefinitely. But once your glucose stores break down, all shivering stops . . . and then you go hypothermic and you die.

He was hungry. And he was parched. He had drained the water bottle he’d packed. He’d passed several slow-trickling, nearly stagnant streams and decided not to risk drinking from them. Slow-moving or standing water was likely to contain parasites like giardia, which could give you a fatal gastrointestinal illness.Eighty or 90 percent of the drinkable water in the world, Stan Brightman liked to declare,is contaminated with giardia.

It was supremely annoying, Paul thought, to have his father in his head after all these years.

After a half hour of intensifying thirst, he saw another slow-moving stream and finally decided he would take the risk. He had to; he was so dehydrated he could barely swallow. If he got sick, he got sick. No water, and he would die. Plus, giardia took two weeks to appear.

Two weeks was a long time from now.

In his bag were some Aquatabs, which would purify water, but they took thirty minutes to work, and he could no longer wait. He took out an aluminum cup from his bag and drank deeply from the stream. The water was clear and cold and tasted slatey.

It was nearly three thirty. The sun would set in a few hours.

He had to keep moving, keep climbing.

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