Montana Read Free Page A

Now that there were two thousand miles between them, she plugged it in, settled into a plastic chair and tried to compose an adequate explanation for Mary Alice as to why her summer vacation would amount only to a long weekend.
    She’d gone straight from the newsroom in Baltimore to a bank and raided what was left of her dwindling retirement account. Part of it went toward a ticket back to Kabul. She asked for ten thousand dollars in hundreds—old ones, with no telltale crackle to make things even chancier at checkpoints—and took the brick-like packet immediately into a restroom. With quick, experienced movements, she’d lined the cups of her bra, the soles of her boots, the zippered compartment inside her belt and all the pockets of her cargo pants with cash. She reversed the process at the airport, stashing the money in her backpack with the bank receipt rubber-banded around it just before she went through the body scanner, then found another ladies’ room and transferred it back to its earlier hiding places.
    Over the next few days, the rasp of cash against skin would lessen as warmth and sweat oiled the bills and they molded themselves to the contours of her body, a reassuring shield of plenty in Afghanistan’s cash economy. She had enough, she hoped, to pay her share of the rent on the Kabul house and to travel back to the highlands before chaos consumed the region so completely that even inexperienced fixers would refuse the outrageous bribes she was prepared to offer. She’d prepaid the satellite phone’s SIM card for the next three months so that it would work when she returned, and acquired a new Internet provider against the inevitability of the paper shutting down her account.
    As a last resort, she carried the second passport that she’d obtained some years earlier in the deceptively somnolent riverside town of Gujrat in Pakistan, where forgers—their eyes red and watery and their fingertips brilliant with colored inks—plied their trade. Maria diBianco was an Italian woman with Lola’s cropped chestnut curls and a full upper lip at odds with her angular features. Her narrowed grey eyes stared a challenge from the document littered with blurred stamps for exotic-but-plausible destinations such as Thailand and Bali and Mexico. Maria apparently enjoyed beaches. Lola had delayed her trip back to the United States to make a quick visit to Gujrat so that Maria could obtain a new passport stamp showing that she’d gone through customs at Baltimore Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport on the day of Lola’s arrival. The fake passport, for use only in the direst emergency, was as likely to create problems as solve them, but it made Lola feel safer to have it. She was ready.
    “Vacation, my ass,” she said to herself. She opened her newly juiced phone and, as expected, saw her editor’s number stacked repeatedly in her voicemail list. She held her finger to the delete key. Once he saw the stories she’d file when she got back to Kabul, he’d realize it was a mistake to close the bureau. Sandwiched among his messages was a single one from Mary Alice. Lola skipped directly to it.
    “Hey, you. I might be late. I’ve got to take care of something here. I’ll call when I’m on my way. You sit tight ’til I get there.” A pause. “Love you.”
    Lola stared at the phone. “Love you?” Theirs had been a spiky friendship based on outward cynicism and the one-upmanship of fast-paced insults. In all the years she’d known Mary Alice, Lola could recall only a single hug, Mary Alice clutching her fiercely before waving goodbye as Lola walked down the jetway to the first in the series of planes that would eventually deposit her in Kabul. A year later, Lola had been on assignment in Jalalabad, unable to return the favor when Mary Alice surprised her with the news of her own unlikely move to Montana. Lola checked the message’s time stamp. Mary Alice had sounded rushed, breathless, as though she