Chapter 8
He turned the key, shoved the squealing gate open just wide enough to slip through, and relocked it from the inside.
At the far end of the equipment shed, half-swallowed by darkness and the encroaching weeds, sat the 1994 Land Cruiser.
It was a boxy, brutal machine, coated in faded matte-green paint and thick layers of dried river silt. It had no digital computer, no satellite transceiver, and no electronic telemetry that could ping a cell tower. Its registration belonged to a long-dissolved regional logging outfit that hadn't filed a state tax return since the turn of the century.
Beckett threw the duffel bag onto the passenger floorboards, climbed behind the wheel, and pulled the manual choke.
When he turned the heavy key in the ignition, the six-cylinder engine coughed once, spat a cloud of gray exhaust against the tin wall, and roared to life with a deep, mechanical thrum that vibrated straight through the springs of the vinyl bench seat.
Beckett switched on the headlights. Two dull yellow cones of halogen light sliced through the driving rain, illuminating the puddles churning across the gravel yard.
He glanced at his wristwatch. Ten-fifteen.
*The Gate of Cedar* had shown the brass clock on the mountain lodge mantle frozen at precisely eleven-forty-five.
He had ninety minutes to make the climb.
Beckett shifted the transfer case into four-wheel drive, eased off the heavy clutch, and rolled out of the yard, sliding into the darkness without touching the main boulevard.
***
He avoided Route 9 entirely.
Instead, he steered the Land Cruiser along the forgotten veins of the county—narrow service ribbons, crumbling macadam farm tracks, and unpaved canal embankments where no state trooper would bother sitting with a radar gun in the middle of a deluge.
The storm seemed to intensify with every mile he pushed north toward the mountains. The windshield wipers beat against the glass in a frantic, screaming rhythm, barely clearing the cascading sheets of water before the glass was blinded again. Branches whipped against the steel doors, tearing at the paint with sharp, scraping shrieks.
Beckett didn't flinch. He gripped the hard plastic steering wheel with white-knuckled precision, his foot pressing the accelerator flat against the floorboards.
A profound, narcotic clarity had settled over his mind.
The ordinary fear that might have paralyzed a lesser man—the fear of prison, the fear of public ruin, the terror of having his gilded empire stripped away—had burned off entirely. In its place was the cold, diamond-hard euphoria of divine selection.
He had outsmarted the IRS with a flooded basement. He had outsmarted the FBI with a dead raven in a motel lamp. And tonight, he was outsmarting Detective Vance with a forty-year-old mountain trail and an anonymous masterpiece.
The universe did not allow kings to fall to the petty bookkeeping of regional bureaucrats. The universe gave kings prophecies.
At ten-fifty, the road began to tilt violently upward.
The asphalt gave way to cracked gravel, hugging the jagged edge of the gorge as the truck climbed the eastern flank of Blackwood Ridge. The air through the truck’s rattling floor vents turned bitingly cold, smelling of crushed spruce needles, wet slate, and the sharp, ozone tang of high-altitude sleet.
Ahead, the headlights illuminated a rusted iron slab leaning drunkenly in the drainage ditch.
*Mile 14.*
Beckett felt a brief, involuntary tightening in his chest. His foot twitched on the gas pedal.
He didn't want to look down, but his eyes were drawn to the fractured gap in the rotting timber guardrail by some dark, magnetic force. Ten years ago, the Aston Martin’s hand-hammered iron bumper had splintered that railing like dry kindling. Sixty feet below, hidden in the pitch-black abyss of the creek bed, Arthur and Sarah Miller had drowned in their own crushed station wagon while their eight-year-old boy screamed into the rising water.
*A tragic single-car accident on an icy turn,* Beckett reminded himself, his jaw tightening into a grim, unyielding line. *They were careless. If they had possessed the means, they wouldn't have been driving an ancient station wagon with bald tires on a mountain pass in October.*
The strong survived because they knew when to cut the anchor. The weak drowned because they were born to be ballast.
He pushed past Mile 14 without slowing down.
Two hundred yards beyond the curve, half-hidden behind an overgrown thicket of wild blackberry brambles and dripping hemlocks, the narrow gravel trail branched off from the mountain road.
Standing at the entrance of the trail was the carved cedar post.
And hanging open—precisely as it had been rendered in the fresh oil strokes of *The Gate of Cedar*—was the heavy iron gate.
The padlocked chain that usually kept loggers and off-roaders out had been severed with an industrial bolt cutter. The heavy links lay curled in the red mud, gleaming wetly under his headlights. The rusted iron wings of the gate were swung wide, swallowed by the swaying hemlocks, inviting him in.
Beckett let out a breath he didn't realize he had been holding. A laugh, sharp and breathless, tore from his throat.
"Every line," he whispered into the roaring cabin of the truck. "Every single brushstroke."
He swung the Land Cruiser off the main road, the heavy tires biting into the slick red clay of the logging trail. The truck lurched violently as it hit the deep ruts left by timber haulers decades ago, water splashing up to the window sills as he powered through the flooded washouts.
The trail wound deeper into the dark throat of the gorge, climbing steeply through a corridor of ancient trees that leaned together overhead like vaulted cathedral arches, blocking out what little ambient light remained in the sky.
At eleven-thirty, the trees suddenly broke.
The hunting lodge rose out of the black rain like a monolith.
***
It stood on a natural terrace of gray granite, backed against the sheer vertical cliff of Devil’s Gorge. Built by his grandfather in the early 1950s using local stone and black-hewn cedar logs, the structure had the broad, low-slung crouch of a bunker. Its corrugated iron roof was streaked with green moss, the massive stone chimney leaning slightly against the prevailing mountain winds.
There was no wisp of smoke coming from the chimney tonight. The place was pitch-black, dark as a tomb, the torrential rain hammering against the tin roof with the deafening roar of a thousand drumheads.
Beckett cut the Land Cruiser’s headlights, killed the ignition, and sat in the sudden, suffocating dark.
The heat was instantly sucked out of the truck's cabin. He could hear the wind tearing through the pine canopy high above, the heavy groan of the old timber, and the violent rush of the gorge waterfall half a mile down the ridge.
He reached into the passenger footwell, grabbed his heavy tactical flashlight, and picked up the canvas duffel.
He stepped out into the squall.
The mountain air was viciously cold, biting into his face like broken glass. Mud sucked at the soles of his steel-toed boots as he crossed the gravel turnaround. The wind screamed through the rock face behind the lodge, blowing freezing mist sideways across the terrace.
He reached the front porch, took the three stone steps in two strides, and stood before the heavy oak door.
