The Gates of Babylon Read Free Page B

Bryce, during a quick trip with his brother and their boys, Daniel and Diego, when Jacob needed a break from the pressures of running Blister Creek in the wake of his father’s death and in the face of opposition from the church graybeards. That was before the climate crisis.
    At the time, the place was packed. German and French hikers, scruffy backpackers unloading cars with Colorado and California plates. Young men with huge packs and backcountry permits hiking from the rim down into the otherworldly red rock landscape of the canyon. At the overlooks Jacob met families from New Jersey and trim, strong-backed seniors with walking sticks and plenty of sunblock. Cars, campers, motor homes, and tour buses with Japanese lettering on the side.
    Nothing like that now. No cars on the road, no shops or motels open on their approach to the park. The wind carried smoky wisps of snow across the road. So far it was only a dusting across the high plateau, but the first serious storm would isolate this place in a way it hadn’t been for a hundred and fifty years.
    “You still think we’ll pull out of this?” Stephen Paul said.
    “I’m having doubts,” Jacob admitted.
    “You get people starving and the very idea of a national park sounds kind of silly.”
    “Nobody in this country is starving,” Jacob countered. “It’s gas at ten bucks a gallon and lawless roads that shut this place down. Anyway, we pulled out of the Great Depression—we’ll pull out of this, too.”
    “Did Ruby’s shut down in the Depression?” David said. “Far as I know, it didn’t.”
    Jacob didn’t have an answer to that.
    The closer they got, the more ominous it seemed. The village itself had become a ghost town, the shops boarded over, the gas stations dark and quiet. Ruby’s Inn, which had sat at the mouth of the park for nearly a century, didn’t have a single light on. Stephen Paul turned on his headlights when he pulled into the empty parking lot. When the lights raked the big glass windows on the side of the main building, they illuminated the enormous hotel gift shop, once filled with Native American jewelry, racks of T-shirts, bins filled with trilobites, quartz crystals, and fake arrowheads, but now empty.
    Jacob lifted his eyes to the upper floors of the hotel, looking for a flashlight or a face in a window, but saw nothing. So far as one could see from the parking lot or the road, the place looked 100 percent unpopulated. That was good. If he couldn’t see the watchers, he assumed Scorpion couldn’t either.
    And that was their insurance policy.

CHAPTER THREE
    They parked the tanker truck and the flatbed truck in the huge, empty lot behind Ruby’s, and sat in the cabs while sleet hit the windshield and ran down in icy rivulets. After a few minutes, Miriam came over from the tanker truck and squeezed in next to David, who took her hands and rubbed them. All four of them crammed into the front seat now, practically on each other’s laps.
    “I don’t like that guy,” she said.
    “In what way?” Jacob asked.
    “He was nervous as hell. Sweaty hands on the wheel, looking in the rearview mirror.”
    “We’re all on edge,” Jacob said. “I wouldn’t read too much into it.”
    “You should have seen him jump when I pulled out my Beretta to check the clip.”
    “I’m sure that helped his nerves,” David said.
    “Needed him to see that I could take care of myself,” she said. “And if he tried anything funny, he’d end up with a bullet in his head.”
    Jacob gave Miriam a hard look. What had gotten into her tonight? Was she freaking out about the pregnancy again, and trying to prove it wasn’t turning her soft?
    “Did you show him the back way out of here?” he asked.
    “I did. Didn’t make much of a difference. He seems to be afraid of us as much as the other guys.”
    “Who cares what he thinks?” David said. “We’re here to do this deal on our terms. And if he thinks we’re going to rob him, that’s his