Page 146 of The Oligarch's Daughter

“You okay in there?” Lucas said.

“I’m good.”

“I gotta move,” Lucas said, “but I’ll be back. We’ve got our own shelters. Gotta hide, too.”

“Okay. And—uh, thank you.”

Paul listened for the FBI SWAT team, who would not be able to move silently through the forest. The Pemigewasset Wilderness was immense, nearly fifty thousand acres in the heart of the White Mountains. But that didn’t mean the FBI team wouldn’t be able to find him in this vast forest.

The Deacon and his men were obviously some kind of anarchists who rejected the government and its laws and modern society and lived in the woods, off the grid, in their own society. He remembered seeing a couple of bearded men in the woods a few days before who didn’t look like hikers, and now he wondered if they were part of this clan.

Paul stuck his head out of the shelter and looked around, but saw nobody. Nor did he hear anybody. He clambered out of the shelter, relieved himself, went back inside. He listened, heard only the sounds of the forest. The sky was dimming, and the sun hung low over an orange and pink sky.

A little while later, he was startled by a voice, which he quickly recognized as the Deacon’s.

“You okay in there?”

“I’m good,” Paul replied, poking his head out.

Stephen Lucas, aka the Deacon, was standing there, the cheeks above his beard deeply tanned and deeply wrinkled. Paul had no idea how old he was.

“Hey. What did you mean, you thought I was Paul Brightman?”

“Well, I thought you wereaBrightman. You look like your father. And you talk like him.”

“Youknowhim?”

“Long time ago. Served together in ’Nam. Then I got caught up in the Weather Underground, and a couple of explosions went sideways, and I found myself a wanted man.”

“So you’re a fugitive.”

“Call me whatever, I don’t care.”

“You live here in the woods?”

“Not here. Not anywhere. We’re always on the move. Like the Indians—the American Indians, the tribal nations. We don’t build pyramids, and we don’t keep slaves.”

Astonished, Paul said, “Are you in touch with my father?”

“I know he lives in Quadrant Twenty-Eight.”

“Where’s that?”

“Northern Pennsylvania. The Hammersley Wild Area in the Susquehannock State Forest. Closest town is Austin.”

“Austin . . . Pennsylvania?”

“Right. Not Texas.”

Paul scrabbled out of the shelter. “How do you know that?”

“How do I know that? We have means of communication. Like the tribes, like the French Underground in World War Two. Only, we’ve got walkie-talkies.”

“They work in the woods?”

“Not far. A mile, half a mile. Uses FRS.”

“Which is . . . ?”

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