Читать книгу Tribal Ways - Alex Archer - Страница 13

To Annja’s complete surprise, the car rental agency not only failed to give her a molecule of grief when she called them the next morning to report her mishap, but they insisted she have a replacement without her even asking. They’d come pick her up.

She suspected the jovial and heavy hand of one Lieutenant Tom Ten Bears, OHP. She could imagine him calling the agency to talk over what she had told him and in that self-effacing, aw-shucks, good-old-boy way of his, making it quite clear, in case they didn’t get it up front, what it would mean to them if they were difficult with her.

So almost before she knew it, Annja found herself driving north up I-44 behind the wheel of a shiny new rental car. Then she turned west on Interstate 40 and headed to New Mexico.

The land flattened out as Annja drove through the Texas panhandle. As she entered New Mexico, the terrain gradually became vast wide swoops of tawny land. The occasional lone peak, most likely a volcanic extrusion, showed in the distance. The vegetation ran mostly to short grass, dotted with scrub.

Once, she saw a herd of pronghorn antelope grazing away off to her right.

As she neared her destination the land rose and grew more broken, mounting to what Annja, with all respect to the Wichita Range, considered something closer to real mountains, with ridges and slopes densely furred with straight-boled pines. These, she knew, were the Sandias.

The mountains rose left and right of the highway, then fell steeply in sheer granite walls to foothills that became high desert, sloping gently down to a line of trees that marked the course of the Rio Grande. Before her and to each side stretched the gray and chrome encrustation of an urban concentration—Albuquerque. She stopped there for lunch before continuing west into the desert.

Past the Acoma Reservation and the triangular bulk of Mount Taylor lay the small town of Grants. Following her GPS, confirmed by reference to a Google Earth map she’d summoned in her motel room in Lawton the previous night, a few miles west of Grants Annja turned left down a none-too-obvious dirt road. It wound quickly upward between steep, scrub-covered hills into the Zuni Mountains with their forests of ponderosa pine, along the Continental Divide.

The first attack had taken place at a dig in the Cíbola National Forest, working what was believed to be the remnants of an encampment of Warm Springs Chiricahua Apache led by the great guerrilla master Victorio during his war with the U.S. during the 1870s. The excavation had been protested by Native American groups even though the Mescalero tribe—which incorporated most of the survivors of the various Chiricahua groups except the Mexican Chiricahua, who were still in Mexico—offered no objection. It lay in a steep-sided draw. It had been discovered by a USDA team checking the results of reseeding by air after the area was burned over in a 2004 fire.

The attack had occurred the previous autumn. No signs remained of the dig or the murders. The excavation had been canceled after the incident. Wind and weather had smoothed out the disturbed earth.

Annja found no great mystery as to how the attacker could have struck from ambush there, either. The site lay along one side of a dry streambed, with the tree line beginning barely twenty yards away on one side and a rock outcropping looming twelve feet right above where, from the files, she knew the actual excavation had taken place. It would have taken a very athletic man to have dropped that distance without injuring himself. Then again it also took a very athletic man to kill three able-bodied adults—two men and one woman—and fatally wound a third man.

The sun was falling behind the divide as Annja drove back east. Although she still felt mostly numb about Paul’s death, in between wracking bouts of grief, she’d had a stressful couple of days. Not to denigrate the sheer physical toll long travel and combat took. She pulled off the highway just east of the river and spent the night in the Hotel Albuquerque on Rio Grande Boulevard, just north of Old Town.

AFTER EATING BREAKFAST the next morning at Little Anita’s near the hotel, she walked a few blocks south to the Old Town Plaza. It was a pleasant morning, still crisply cool, although warmer than out on the Plains near Lawton, with the sun just beginning to sting where it touched exposed skin. She sat on a cast-iron bench across from the old cathedral, beneath elm branches starting to turn green, while she used her computer to check her e-mail and confirm some information for her day’s quest. Then she made a few calls on her cell phone and hiked back to the hotel for her car.

The second attack had taken place in early March on land owned by San Ildefonso Pueblo between Santa Fe and Albuquerque. The pueblo itself had invited a state team in to excavate what was believed to have been a temporary settlement by Pueblo Indians sometime predating the great Pueblo Uprising that threw the Spanish out in 1680. Despite that fact, and the fact that both State of New Mexico archaeologists and pueblo experts had confirmed the absence of human remains, the site had once again drawn protestors. There had been an ugly confrontation when pueblo police removed them for trespassing, although there was no record of injuries, nor charges filed.

Apparently there was some sentiment, in the Southwest at least, that any kind of archaeological excavation of potential Indian sites was profane.

Although this massacre was just a few weeks old Annja didn’t learn anything new there, either. As in the other two cases a cautious approach could easily have gotten the killer in range for a final rush without being seen. Especially since nobody would really have been looking.

She got back to Albuquerque about two o’clock and spent the rest of the afternoon as she waited for her next appointment going through local and national news accounts of the murders online at a coffee shop on a fairly rustic-looking section of Rio Grande Boulevard a few miles north of her hotel.

The common threads among the murders, aside from the obvious gross similarities, were that they took place on dig sites that were protested by obscure groups. These had no apparent connection between themselves, other than professed radical pro-Native American sympathies. It wasn’t even clear how many of the protestors were actually Indians themselves.

She sat on the outdoor patio beneath a cottonwood beginning to leaf, drinking tea and pondering a few questions. Was the fact that all three attack sites had been protested significant or purely coincidental? If significant, what was the connection? Even the FBI, notoriously eager to discover terrorist conspiracies even where they weren’t, had either actively cleared the protestors of involvement or at least failed to list them as persons of interest.

Plus, frankly, people who’d go out and picket an archaeological dig struck Annja, who’d encountered a few in her time, as precisely the sort who would not be inclined to carry out impossibly violent blitz attacks ending in multiple murders. Nor, for the most, capable.

The light took on a late-afternoon yellowness. The sun had gotten tangled in the branches of the massive old cottonwoods across the boulevard. Time to go, she told herself, and folded her computer shut.