The Sword of God - John Milton #5 (John Milton Thrillers) Page 9

  When he was done, the fire was crackling with a healthy zeal.

  “You’ve done this before,” Ellie said.

  He smiled. “A few times.”

  When he was finished, he lashed three sticks together to form a tripod, took a small saucepan from his pack, and rested it over the flames. He took a packet of franks, sliced them, and fried them in the pan. He opened two cans of beans and emptied those into the pan, too, stirring until the mixture was hot. The smell was appetising, and Ellie found her stomach grumbling.

  He brought the pan across to the tents. “Here. Sausage and beans.”

  “Not over here, English,” Ellie said. “Dogs and beans.”

  “You want some or not?”

  “Give it here.”

  “I don’t think so.” He smiled, took out a folding fork, handed it and the food to Mallory and then sheltered in his tent. The openings faced each other.

  “Mmm,” she said after she had taken the first mouthful. “This is good.”

  Milton shuffled back until he was sheltered from the rain. “Sausage and beans. I’ve been living off that for the last few weeks.”

  “There’s something else in here, too, though.”

  “Wild onions. I picked a few on the way. You snap off the stems and cook the bulbs. Wild garlic, too.”

  “How do you know all this?” Ellie asked him.

  “Just picked it up on the way.”

  “Come on…”

  He shrugged. “I used to be a soldier. I’ve been trained to live off the land.”

  Ellie raised an eyebrow. “What kind of soldier?”

  “Just a soldier. Infantry. A bullet catcher.”

  Ellie’s curiosity was piqued, and she wondered whether she should press for more information, but he was gazing out at the fire with an abstracted look on his face, and she decided against it.

  Ellie took the pan after Mallory and, when she had eaten her fill, she passed it across to Milton to finish off. When they were all done, Mallory opened her pack and took out a bag of marshmallows.

  “When did you get those?” Milton asked.

  “At the store.”

  “I don’t remember buying them.”

  “So you don’t want one?”

  He smiled widely enough so that his white teeth shone, the first proper smile that Ellie had seen from him. “I didn’t say that.”

  She skewered three of the marshmallows on a stick, hurried out into the rain, and held them in the flames.

  “This the kind of thing you thought you’d be doing when you joined the bureau?” he asked her.

  “It’s what I hoped it might be like.”

  “Riding a desk more than you expected?”

  “I guess. I was naïve when I signed up. I knew there’d be some, but it’s more than I expected. Sometimes it feels like all I’m doing is pushing paper from one place to another.”

  Ellie started to feel comfortable in his presence. There was something about him that said he could be trusted. He was gruff and severe, and there was a restlessness that he did a poor job of hiding, but at the same time he projected a sense of complete proficiency. She would not have described him as reliable, for that was too staid a word, but she believed that if she invested a little faith in him, she would not be disappointed.

  She thought back to what he had said earlier. “What kind of soldier were you?”

  A moment of unease passed across his face. It would have been easy to miss, but Ellie was good at reading people. “All sorts,” he said.

  “Did you fight?”

  He smiled thinly. “I did.”

  “Where?”

  “Can’t really say,” he said, closing the conversation.

  Special Forces, she wondered? She had met men from Delta in the bureau, and they had been reticent about what they had done before they joined. But those men wore suits and had jobs. They weren’t trekking across America on their own, spending weeks in their own company, with no obvious plan for the time ahead. Milton was different. There was something else with him.

  He gazed over at her, maybe saw the inquisitive glint in her eyes, and changed the subject. “What about you? What’s your background?”

  “Bachelor’s in Law and then a master’s in Criminology at Emory in Atlanta.”

  “And why the bureau?”

  “Why not?”

  “You could make more money as a lawyer, right?”

  “It’s not all about money.”

  “So what is it about?”

  “My father was an agent,” she said. “Down in the Tampa office.”

  “Following in his footsteps?”

  “Something like that.”

  “What does he think about it?”

  “I couldn’t tell you. He’s dead. He died fifteen years ago. Shot by a suspect as he came out of a bank in Jupiter.”

  “Oh,” Milton said.

  “I remember the stories he told me. Bank robbers, kidnappings, criminals that made the news before terrorists and cybercrime changed it all into something else. He wouldn’t have recognised it today.”

  “If you don’t like it—”

  “It’s not that I don’t like it. It’s all right. But I’ve been thinking about it lately, why I did what I did. You’re right. I could’ve earned a hell of a lot more if I’d taken a job as a prosecutor.”

  “So?”

  “That felt like selling out to me. And my father always said to me that I should do what I wanted to do. And I wanted to do this. I was just a little naïve, is all.”

  The rain kept coming down, rattling against the canvas. Mallory came back with the marshmallows.

  “What about your partner?” Milton asked her.

  It was her turn to feel a little defensive. “What about him?”

  “Well, he’s not out here with us, is he? Why? He didn’t think this was a good idea?”

  “He wouldn’t even listen to me,” Mallory interjected bitterly.

  “He did, Mallory,” Ellie said, immediately annoyed with herself for defending him; why did she still feel the urge to do that?

  “He wasn’t interested.”

  “He just doesn’t think that the men are in the woods.”

  “But you do?” Milton asked her.

  “I think it’s worth a look.”

  “Yes,” Milton said, smiling with gentle sarcasm. “And you thought it would be fun to see what a lawman’s job used to be like in the old days.”

  Ellie raised her middle finger, but she wasn’t offended. He was right. There had been an element of that. Even so, the mention of Orville made her feel uncomfortable. She tried, once again, to forget about him.

  Mallory used her fingers to carefully pull the marshmallows off the stick. She handed one to Milton and one to Ellie, and they ate them.

  Milton sucked his fingers. “You bring anything else in that bag you didn’t tell me about?”

  “No,” she said, grinning. “Just that.”

  Milton leaned all the way back, supporting himself on his elbows. He stayed like that for five minutes, just staring out into the rain, and then he sat up and told them to give him their boots. He took off his own, and his socks, collected the two other pairs, and hurried back to the fire. He lashed together a screen of leaves and left them beneath it to dry, not too close to the flames so as not to crack the leather but near enough to warm.

  Ellie breathed out contentedly, enjoying the sensation of a full belly and the residual taste of their meal in her mouth.

  She found that she was pleased that she was here.

  ELLIE ZIPPED her sleeping bag up to her neck and stretched out. The rain had eased off, and Milton had gone outside to build up the fire again. The flames were rising high, crackling as they consumed the wood that he had found. The mouth of her tent was still open and she could see him sitting by the fire on a waterproof sheet, his knees drawn up to his chest, lost in thought as he looked into the orange and red flicker of the flames. He had taken an MP3 player and a p
air of headphones from his pack, and he was listening to music now, the faint beat of a drum audible over the snicker of the flames.

  She was a good judge of people, but there were layers to John Milton’s personality that she could only hazard a guess at. He was quiet and brooding, and obviously most happy in his own company. Something had happened in his life that had made him that way. She wondered if she would ever find out what that was.

  She sighed and arranged herself so that she was more comfortably spread out across her sleeping mat. Mallory was beside her, her eyes closed, maybe asleep already. She looked up at the roof of the tent, the flames casting dancing shadows across it.

  She heard the raucous chatter of coyotes and then the sound of cracking twigs and looked outside as Milton got to his feet. She watched him as he laid more firewood across the fire. He took the pack with the food in it, looped a rope through the straps, tossed the rope over a branch, and then hauled the pack up so that it was fifteen feet above the ground. Bears, she thought. He was putting their food out of reach.

  He tied off the rope around the trunk of another tree and turned back to camp.

  “Milton,” she called out quietly so as not to wake Mallory.

  He crouched down at the entrance to her tent. “Yes?”

  “You think those boys are out here?”

  He looked down at Mallory and mouthed, “Asleep?”

  She nodded.

  “Probably not,” he said quietly. “But she does, and I don’t mind going out to take a look.”

  “Why are you helping her? You never said.”

  “It’s the right thing to do.”

  The fire burned on brightly behind him, casting him in shadow.

  “You warm enough?”

  She felt a surprising burn of attraction for him. It caught her off guard.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “Stay in the tent. I’ve cleaned the camp, but there are bears in the woods. I saw one earlier.”

  “Where?”

  “Just inside the tree line. Half an hour before we stopped.”

  “You didn’t say.”

  “Didn’t want to panic you.”

  “Who said I’d panic?”

  “No, you probably wouldn’t have. But it’s best not to meet one at night.”

  “I’m staying right here.”

  “That would be best,” he said. “Night.”

  “Goodnight, Milton.”

  Chapter 14

  IT TOOK Ellie a moment to remember where she was when she awoke the next morning. She had expected to have a difficult night’s sleep, but she had been wrong about that. She hadn’t stirred once, and now she felt refreshed and reinvigorated. She opened her eyes and turned her head. Mallory was still asleep beside her, breathing gently through her mouth.

  She unzipped the tent and looked out. The rain had stopped overnight. A ghostly fog had rolled in, and now it lay on top of the underbrush, thicker the further away it was from the campsite.

  Milton was already outside. He had built the fire up into a warming blaze, and he was kneeling before it, topless, his shirt warming on a makeshift clothes line that he had fashioned with a length of string. He had boiled water in the saucepan and was washing his face with a small sliver of soap. He had his back to her, and Ellie saw the tattoo of the angel with the wings that stretched across his shoulders and torso that went all the way down his back. He wasn’t big, but he was muscular, without an ounce of fat on his body. Ellie saw scars beneath the ink. She recognised the puckered lips of stab wounds and the circular discolouration where bullets had punched through the skin.

  A soldier?

  No, she thought. Not just.

  There was definitely more to him than just that.

  She made a little extra noise as she clambered out of the tent.

  Milton turned, soapsuds on his face. “Morning,” he said.

  “Morning.”

  He took a straight razor and started to shave, drawing the blade down his cheeks and throat in a long, even stroke. He flicked the knife to clear away the suds and whiskers and then repeated the action.

  “You sleep well?”

  “Like a baby.”

  He took a double handful of the warm water and dunked his face in it, scrubbing with his fingers until the suds had all been washed away. He stood, revealing yet more scars on his torso.

  “Fresh air,” he said, his chest rising as he took a deep lungful. “I never sleep as well indoors.”

  She looked down at his torso, at the tightly packed abdominal muscles, and quickly looked away, colour flooding her cheeks. Milton noticed her discomfort and smiled at it. He reached up to collect his checkered shirt, and dressed.

  Ellie smelled cooked bacon and saw the frying pan sizzling happily on its tripod, the flames licking beneath it. She was about to comment on it when Mallory put her head outside the tent. She was still bleary eyed, her hand absently rubbing her scalp.

  “Morning,” Ellie said to her.

  “Did you hear it?”

  “Hear what?”

  “Last night. Grunting. There was something out here.”

  “It was a deer,” Milton said. “It was snorting. I heard it, too.”

  “Didn’t sound like a deer.”

  Milton flicked his eyes at Ellie. What? A bear?

  He was completely unperturbed. “Hungry?”

  THEY SAT around the fire and ate the bacon with bread rolls that Milton took out of his pack. It was surprisingly tasty, and Ellie found that she was hungrier than she expected. Milton boiled more water and used it to make coffee, the three of them sharing his tin mug. Ellie held it in her hands before setting it to her lips, letting the warmth permeate her skin. It was a cold, damp start to the day, and the fog that had fallen like a shroud over the woods did not look like it was ready to shift. Mallory was quiet, almost as if she was feeling trepidation at what the day might deliver. She would find her brother, or she would not. There would be issues either way.

  Milton took his map from his pack and unfolded it, spreading it out across his groundsheet so that they could see where they were and where they needed to go.

  “All right,” he said. “We’re here.” He pointed at a spot on the map four miles to the north from the spot where they had entered the woods. He traced his finger up the map and settled on a spot three inches up and to the right. “This is where Mallory thinks they are. That’s a little over fourteen miles. The terrain is level for the first three, and then it’ll be hilly before it levels off again up by the lake. The climb is going to be hard work because I don’t want to follow a settled trail once we start to get closer. If there’s anyone there, we have to assume that they’ll keep an eye on the obvious ways in and out.”

  “They’d be that careful?” Mallory asked.

  “They haven’t been found this far.”

  “We don’t use the trails, then,” Ellie said. “That’s fine.”

  “Once we get within a couple of miles of the lake, we’re going to move more slowly. I’d like to arrive as the sun is going down, so I’m thinking of stopping here”—he indicated a spot halfway between their start and finish points—“for an hour or two in the early afternoon.”

  “Fine.”

  “One other thing. If we come across anyone while we’re out here, we’re a family out on a hike up to Lake Superior. Father, mother and daughter. All okay with that?”

  They nodded that they were.

  Milton started to break camp, packing away the tents and then burning their rubbish. Ellie and Mallory went a little way into the woods to relieve themselves, and when they came back, the clearing had been returned to the state it had been in when they had found it. The only sign that they had been there were the smouldering remains of the fire and the blackening scorch marks on the underside of the fallen trunk that had nurtured and then sheltered the flame.

  Milton was at the highest point of the clearing, his compass in his hand. He double-checked the azimuth that he
had cut last night to the next landmark on the trail north.

  Ellie picked up Mallory’s pack and helped her to settle it on her shoulders. The girl returned the favour, and they waited for Milton to join them. He reached a hand down and heaved up his pack, the heaviest of the three, and slipped his arms through the straps.

  “Ready?” he said.

  They nodded.

  “We’ll stop for lunch at one. But we push hard until then.”

  THEY SET off in the same formation as yesterday: Milton led the way, then came Mallory, with Ellie bringing up the rear. They had only been on the move for ten minutes when they came across what was left of a pine tree. The trunk had been badly clawed; great scrapes covered it from nine feet above the ground all the way down to the bottom. Clumps of black hair were stuck in the gobs of pitch that were still oozing from the tree.

  “See that?” Milton said.

  “Bears?” Mallory said.

  He nodded. “A big one, too.”

  He looked at Ellie and winked.

  They bushwhacked for two hours straight, following the same animal tracks as yesterday. They passed a beaver pond, with two rusting steel leg traps that must have been left behind by a trapper years ago. They forded the main branch of a creek, climbing up an extremely steep razorback ridge that split the two branches of the watercourse. Milton led the way along the top of the ridge. It was precipitous, and Ellie’s boots slipped more than once, sending little avalanches of loose pebbles and scree down into the water below. They were up above the tree line now and the views were clear all the way to the taller peaks of the Porcupine Mountains. Nevertheless, she was pleased when Milton saw a suitable path down below and indicated that they could descend.

  After an hour they came across the remnants of an old railroad grade and spurs.

  “What is this?” Ellie asked.