Page 160 of The Oligarch's Daughter

“Where was this?”

“Where Hammersley Fork meets Bunnell Ridge Trail,” the guy said. “It’s where the two mountain streams converge. This guy was filling his water bottle.”

“But as soon as he saw us, he scurried off,” his partner added.

“Thank you,” Paul said. He waved goodbye and resumed walking through the woods. Forty-five minutes later, he found the intersection with Bunnell Ridge Trail, saw a campsite with a few tents pitched. Nearby, two streams converged. No one else was there. The Deacon had told him to build a cairn at a prominent landmark, and since the couple had described a bearded guy getting water here, Paul hoped he was in a fairly good location.

He put down his backpack and started collecting stones. It was painful, lifting stones with his shoulder in such agony. But he persisted, and after fifteen minutes, he’d assembled a stack of stones about three feet high. Sort of a New Age-y thing to build. Very Sedona. A prayer stone stack: a marker that told others you’d been there. But he was following the Deacon’s strange instructions.

Then, not knowing what else to do, he waited. He sat on the ground on a tarp and waited.

After a while—an hour? Two?—someone emerged from the woods, a young-looking guy with a full beard and long hair, like his fellow off-gridders, in a dirty, ripped jacket. He was holding a CB radio handset.

The young guy approached, and Paul said what he’d been told to say. “Catch any muskie?”

“Got some frying up right now,” the bearded guy promptly replied.

And that was the coded exchange, confirmation that this guy had been in touch with the Deacon.

“Thank you,” Paul said.

The bearded young man pulled out the radio’s long black antenna. “You want to see the Professor?”

Is that what they call him?Paul smiled. “Yes. The Professor.”

The younger guy clicked a button on his handheld and then disappeared back into the trees.

Ten minutes later, an old man with stooped shoulders, long gray hair, and a full gray beard emerged from the forest.

Stanley Brightman stood for a minute and looked at Paul.

Paul looked back. Saw the bags under his father’s eyes, the deep lines that scored his forehead and cheeks.

“You look like shit,” his father said.

“Just about to say the same to you,” Paul replied.

104

“First thing we’re doing is fixing up that wound,” his father said. “Before I look at that flash drive. What did you do? Tape it up without removing the bullet?”

Paul followed his father through the woods to a lean-to where he said he’d been living for the last month or more. It was a modest shelter made of branches and sticks with one tarp for the ceiling and another for the floor. It squeezed Paul’s heart to see his father living this way. That someone who lurked so big in his imagination—whatever he thought of him—could fit into a space so small. He was undone by the stooped, creaky gait and unwashed countenance of a man who had once seemed so powerful, so important.

The space inside the lean-to was just big enough for Stan to lie down, with room left over, just barely, for a few items. Stan picked up one of them. It was his old M3 medic kit from Vietnam, which he used to refill and update when Paul was a kid. A CB radio on a charger base. Paul wondered how it was charged.

“Are you in pain?” his father asked him.

“A hell of a lot, actually.”

“But you’re breathing and talking, which is a good sign. Rules out a lot.”

“Like?”

“You weren’t shot through the lung. And you weren’t hit in a major artery, obviously. You wouldn’t be here.”

He reached into a pocket and handed Paul a couple of capsules, which he said were ibuprofen. “Take these,” he said. They sat down on the tarp, the ground hard beneath them. Paul figured his father must have gotten used to it by now. He was startled to notice a pistol lying on the tarp. What was his father doing with this Vietnam War–era weapon?

Father and son hadn’t hugged each other, hadn’t even shaken hands. Nor did either of them mention their long separation. His father asked him to tell him what he’d been up to; his tone was matter-of-fact, even brusque. Paul gave his father a quick account of the last six years of his life, starting with meeting Tatyana, how he’d changed his identity and disappeared, and ending with Horgan, the fired CIA officer. His Deep Throat. Stan barely showed any reaction. “How do you know they haven’t followed you here?” he asked when Paul was finished.

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