"Seal off the mountains? Don't insult me."

"I tell you, they'll find the Zode."

"Let's check it out," Jim said.

First things first. I shaved off my beard. I'd lost twenty pounds, which would also help. Jim scraped up some new clothes for me. The sun was shining, so I had an excuse to wear sunglasses. We borrowed a boat on a trailer and drove down to a small, clear lake. To the southeast it ran into a much bigger lake. From the northwest it was fed by streams falling clean out of the White Mountains. I could have taken the Zodiac a little farther up one of those streams, but they were shallow, and without a hole deep enough for a righteous sinking. So I'd left it in the lake, next to a bent-over scrub pine. Jim found us a boat ramp and we put in and headed for that pine. But there wasn't a damn thing. Not that I could see.

It was only twenty feet deep, and we could almost see the bottom from the boat. Jim went down in a mask and snorkel, looking.

"I wasn't that stoned," I said. "I put it here for a reason. That tree there, that was my landmark. I'd never forget that tree-there can't be two like it."

"I'm telling you there's not a damn thing there," Jim said.

I ended up going down myself. Jim didn't want me to, but by now I was feeling good enough for a short dive. I was nauseous most of the time, but sheer terror has a way of overcoming most anything. And Jim was right. The Zode was gone. I'd just about convinced myself that we were in the wrong place when I noticed a black splotch on the bottom. I went all the way down and checked it out: Roscommon's revolver.

"If the Feds had found it, they'd have brought an armored division to pick it off the bottom, right? We'd see cigarette wrappers and footprints on the shore over there."

There was nothing onshore either. "Except over here, where you tried to hide your footprints," Jim said.

"Okay, give me a fucking break."

Finally Jim convinced me that there just wasn't anything to be seen. "Maybe some of the Winnepesaukees found it. It's pretty valuable. Shit, if I found it, I wouldn't care if the Feds did want it. I'd take the damn thing and use it myself."

"It's some kind of weird mind game. Now I don't even know if we can go back. They're back there waiting for us."

"No way, ST. They're not that subtle. This is more like something you'd do."

He was right. But I hadn't done it, so that didn't help me much. There couldn't be that many environmental direct-action-campaign coordinators running around this neck of the woods.

He persuaded me that I was totally unrecognizable, that it was okay to go into town and get a cup of coffee. Actually I didn't want coffee because my stomach was so jumpy. I had some milk. We sat and watched the traffic coast by. And once, Jim tugged on my sleeve and pointed to the TV set up in the corner.

My Zodiac was on it. Upside down. Washed up on a beach in Nova Scotia. No footprints.

Then they cut to a map entitled "Intended Escape Route." It ran from Boston up the coast, about halfway up Maine, then straight east to Nova Scotia. But three-quarters of the way there, it was cut, severed by a question mark and a storm cloud. And then they had the obligatory footage of coast guard choppers searching the seas, CG boats cruising along the beach looking for bodies, picking discarded fuel tanks off the rocks, examining washed-up flotation cushions.

"There was a big storm the day after we found you," Jim said. "Maybe the Zodiac flipped over in that, and you . drowned."

"Look me in the eyes, Jim, and with a straight face, tell me you don't know anything about this."

He complied. We got back in the truck and headed for the reservation.

"I can only think of one thing," he said when we were almost there. "And if doesn't really lead us anywhere. It's just an anomaly. After we found you, a couple of the guys made a little side hike down to the river to refill our water bottles. They ran into some guys, some backpackers, who were crouching on the riverbank, running their stove, drinking some coffee. Hairy-looking guys, bearded, real granola types.

Maybe with accents. And these people said they wanted to get across the river. They asked where they might be able to find a rubber raft-you know, had we seen any around here recently."

"Kind of funny. Why didn't they find themselves a bridge?"

"Exactly. Kind of funny, since you were in the area, on a raft. But our guys didn't tell them anything."

"Special Forces, man. They can wear their hair any way they like. Shit." I didn't say "shit" because I was worried about them, though I was. I said it because I was getting hit with some stomach cramps.

When we got back to the Singletarys' trailer, I had to sit in the truck a while until they subsided. Then we went inside.

There was a white man sitting at the kitchen table, warming his hands by wrapping them around a hot cup of tea. He had kind of an oblong face, curly red hair piled on top, a close-cropped but dense red beard, shocking blue eyes that always looked wide open. His face was ruddy with the outdoors, and the way he was sitting there with that tea, he looked so calm, so centered, almost like he was in meditation. When I came in, he looked at me and smiled just a trace, without showing his teeth, and I nodded back.

"Who ... you know this guy?" Jim said. .

"Yeah. His name is Hank Boone."

"Nice to finally meet you," Boone said.

"My pleasure. How'd you find my Zodiac?"

"We got a sighting of you, we knew the watersheds and we found it by the oil slick on the water."

"By following my trail of hazardous waste. Nice."

"Oh," Jim said, figuring it out. "That Boone."

Boone gave out kind of a brittle laugh. "Yeah."

WE HAD TO TWEAK IT a little to get the right effect," Boone was explaining. We were sitting around the fire, Boone and Jim and Tom Singletary and I. They were drinking hot chocolate and I was drinking Pepto Bismol. "The tanks he had on there didn't have the range to make Nova Scotia. So we scattered a few extra tanks down the coast, let them wash up at random, as though he'd been using them up and tossing them out." Boone's face suddenly crinkled and he laughed for the first time. "You made a great escape," he said. He was a peculiar guy. I'd never met him, just seen his picture and heard tell of him from the veterans of GEE's early days. They all agreed he was a hothead, out of his mind. Once, when the Mounties came after him on an ice floe, he knocked six of them into the water before they took him down. And I'd seen him on film, doing things that made my blood run cold: sitting right underneath a five-ton container of radioactive waste, getting thrown into the sea when it was dropped on his Zodiac then getting sucked under the vessel, turning up a couple of minutes later in its wake. And he was like that even when he wasn't working-a drunk, a bar fighter. But the guy I was looking at was totally different.

Shit, he was drinking herb tea. He talked in a slow, lilting baritone murmur, he paused in the middle of sentences to make sure the grammar was right, to pick just the right word. But it wasn't a wimpy Boone I was looking at. I had to remember the action he'd just pulled off, on short notice, on my behalf.

"How long you intend to stay," Singletary asked.

"I have a camp," Boone said, "out in the forest."

"No, I don't mean tonight. J mean in the area."

"If you'd like me to leave, I will."

"Not at all."

Boone turned and looked at me with his invisible smile again. "I'm here to talk to S.T. I'd like to see what he wants. That's my only business."

That line turned out to be an instant conversation killer. Jim and Tom took off and left me and Boone sitting there by the fire. We moved to different chairs, so we were facing each other, and the grey autumn twilight glowed in Boone's face, seeming to lift his luminous blue eyes up out of their sockets. We just looked at each other for a minute.