Montana Read Free

finished over there. You can drop off your laptop and satellite phone with the clerk. You won’t need them anymore. As of the minute you walked through this door, we no longer have any more foreign bureaus.”
    “I left the sat phone in Kabul, along with my body armor and all the rest of my stuff. I should go back and get it.”
    “Nice try,” he said. “Just have those French freaks you live with—the ones who think it’s so funny to answer your phone and hang up on me when I try to call—ship your stuff. You’re not going back. We’ve already canceled your company credit card and the travel account.”
    He kept talking but Lola’s focus shifted to a panel truck, the perfect size to hold a dozen oil drums packed with a sludgy mix of fertilizer and racing fuel, moving slowly past the building. Lola stared hard at the driver, watching for the quick yank at the wheel that would send the truck into the lobby, the thumb to the detonator that would follow. The concussive force would bend the newsroom windows outward, the panes bubbling like a soapy mass across the face of the building, then suck them back in with such speed and intensity that the glass would burst, shards rocketing across the office, razoring through furniture, paper, flesh. Lola blew out a breath, slammed the door behind her and strode the length of the underpopulated newsroom, the stupid expensive paperweight in her pocket banging against her thigh with each step.

CHAPTER TWO
    B aggage Claim stopped Lola dead in her tracks.
    She was used to all manner of haphazard Third World arrangements—places where airport workers held Kalashnikovs in one hand and flung the luggage onto a dirt runway with the other, places where bags arrived slit open and regurgitating what remained of their contents, places where would-be porters mobbed her with bags not her own. But she had also forgotten that not every American airport was like JFK or LAX, with acres of briskly revolving carousels forested with identical black roller bags. There was but a single carousel in Helena, Montana, and it emptied fast. Lola walked past with only a small duffel in her hand and her book bag, stuffed with her sleeping bag and her laptop, slung over her shoulder. She cast sidelong glances at her fellow passengers, retrieving an array of towering backpacks and cylindrical cases that looked as though they could contain grenade launchers. Fly rods, she decided after some consideration.
    Within minutes it was just Lola and a gum-chewing young woman lounging behind a rental-car counter, idly blowing pink bubbles that she inhaled with audible retorts. An elk head with shiny startled eyes hung on the wall above her, antlers stretching toward a skylight. A grizzly bear stood on its hind legs within a glass case, lips lifted away from incisors that looked capable of punching holes through steel. It was taller than the rental-car clerk, taller even than Lola. Lola walked over to the case and pressed her palm against the cool glass. Claws as long as her fingers curved like scimitars from the bear’s raised forepaws.
    “Need a car?” the woman called.
    “No. I’m waiting for a friend.”
    Another bubble vanished with a crack. “Your friend’s late.”
    The airport’s main door sighed its slow revolutions. Lola headed for it, feeling the woman’s gaze at her back, and stutter-stepped through. Beyond the low-slung city, mountains prodded an infinite sky that drew her gaze and held it hard. Lola took a deep breath of crystalline air and scanned a parking lot sardined with pickup trucks. None met the description of the saucy red number that apparently had claimed whatever was left of Mary Alice’s buyout money after she’d bought the cabin in Montana. Lola went back into the airport and looked for an electrical outlet. She’d postponed recharging her cell phone, avoiding as long as possible the inevitable outraged calls from her editor when he realized she’d failed to turn in the laptop.