Page 20 of Exit Strategy

She was also nearly unbeatable in hand-to-hand. She had tremendous reach with her kicks, and top marks on the firing range, and in handling hot situations.

That was who was going to be leading the hunt for us.

And she lived and breathed New Eden.

But, being something of a religious zealot, and a by-the-book soldier and police officer made her one specific thing – predictable. She would assume that I would act like she would and move as quickly and efficiently away from Hollywood as possible. That was where she would look, and the areas where she would send the resources allocated to her.

LAX and any of the local municipal airfields would be scouted and watched. Calls would be made to various law enforcement agencies to come as close to an all-points bulletin out for us, and for the lame-ass car Rex had me driving. Maddy didn’t know about my truck, or how much I had lived for Americana as a kid.

The last thing she would expect me to do was to pick the old path of Route 66, the Will Rogers Highway, as my getaway route. If she did somehow come up with that, she would certainly not expect me to detour off of the highway to cut north through Monument Valley. I knew this place; I had seen it dozens of times, hundreds of times. Of course, it had been on a theatre screen, or on my television. Gods of American cinema had ridden horses, slinging pistols, chasing desperados, Indians, Mexicans, other cowboys. John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, all the spaghetti westerns with the bad soundtracks. It was something my old captain and I had bonded over to begin with – a love of old American cinema.

Callie was distracted, or bored, or she drowsed through the drive. The truck didn’t have the amenities of a new car. There was no satellite anything, no touch screens, nothing streaming or internet, no distractions except for an AM/FM radio and an 8-track player. The player technically worked, but I had never gotten around to finding any of the blocky tapes it played, or doing the infinite wanker move of trashing the vintage equipment and replacing it with a cutting-edge Bluetooth streaming radio system capable of syncing with my phone.

No. My perfect truck was as dumb as I was.

So, the radio popped and crackled as we moved away from civilization, the bright hubs fading away as we plunged into the desert. There were the familiar mounts and buttes – the ones that I had seen so many times. They were even larger in person than they seemed on the screen. The desert was so much vaster than I could comprehend and it was beautiful in its alien starkness.

Everything I had experienced could vanish into this expanse of rock and sunbaked badlands. Really, the only thing I could imagine being larger than this land of fantastic vistas was the Pacific, which was really a vast and trackless waste of salt water, rolling blues and grays for thousands of miles. Both had their own beauty, in their extremes.

Afghanistan had been similar in its starkness, and closer to what I was feeling emotionally. The westerns had been a distraction, a happy figment from my childhood. This – being pursued, violence, bad decisions – felt more like the fights in the ‘stan.

I both hated it and felt an appreciation for its sense of purpose. When I looked at Callie, I knew that there was a reason for this, a good reason. I was rescuing her, saving her from unspeakable horrors. There was no doubt about that.

There were plenty of people I had failed to rescue.

Some I had failed to protect.

Fuck, this was never easy.

It was also rough sitting next to Callie. She seemed so frail, and her bruises so livid against her pale skin. She hid it under her mane of red hair and thick sunglasses. There were very definite signs of post-concussion syndrome, the most notable ones being lapses in memory and concentration. I knew soldiers who had been like that. They would pick up that thousand-yard stare or drop off mid-sentence because their mind just quit putting words together.

You couldn’t let them get lost. You could see them when they started to fade out, and that’s when you’d give them something to bring them back into the moment – toss a rock at them, grab them and give them a hard shake; anything to break that mental blue screen. I saw Callie’s eyes take on that look, and that was when I would do something to get her attention – ask her a question, offer her a drink. If I couldn’t think of something, I would let the truck wander over the wake-up bars on the side of the highway, or aim for a rough spot, bumping her chin off of her hand.

The one thing I didn’t do was engage physically. I didn’t know how gun-shy she was and didn’t want to give her a reason to be even more traumatized.

She did seem to be hanging together, at least functionally.

There would be time to put her back together, and there was a place that we could do that. I would have to make a few calls, and that would be dicey. I couldn’t use a regular phone, and I didn’t have one of those fancy encrypted phones. It was a bane of the modern world that almost every phone call made could be tethered back to its GPS coordinates, and there were people I didn’t want to know about my plans, and people who didn’t take unsecured phone calls.

And all this had to go on inside my head in silence. I couldn’t discuss it with Callie. She was still hazy from the knock to the head, and God knew how much untreated head trauma. There was no reason that she should be burdened with the things I knew.

It was near nightfall when I pulled into the parking lot of the Grosjean Hotel, a large block of a building designed to look like a rustic ski chalet. The curtain wall of mountains that flanked around the hotel gave it a majestic look, reminiscent of what an American castle would have looked like if they had ever had need of building them. In stark contrast to Arizona and Nevada before, everything was draped in snow, and the air was brisk, our breath steaming in the night.

The lighting made it easier for Callie to get through the lobby without too much attention being drawn to her. The few people who were there were more interested in drinking in the bar, looking at the mountains and snow, flirting – the usual oblivious pretense of tourists. The staff was likewise morose, the sort of glazed and disinterested expression from young people and retirees who worked the late shifts. As long as no one was on fire or screaming, they didn’t care.

Callie’s thick glasses and bruises didn’t raise the first eyebrow.

Her nipples poking through the thin material of her shirt drew no attention.

Well, a very small amount of attention, and I felt a stab of disappointment in myself for noticing something so petty.

“So here is the plan,” I said, as I shut and bolted the door of the suite on the second floor. “Hot baths, showers, whatever, room service, and a full rest. Maybe a couple of days.”

“A couple of days?” Callie sounded incredulous, but also relief tinted her voice.

“Yes, we’re nearly in the middle of nowhere. This place is nice, but its ultimately a fourth-tier ski and mountain resort in Mormon country. We can rest. No one is going to look here for either of us.”

“How can you be certain?”

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