Prey (43 page)

"That ought to do it," Lightstone nodded.

"You really think they're going to be watching the parking lot at five in the morning?"

Lightstone paused before answering.

"What I think is that Grynard's going to have three or four guys on us twenty-four hours a day, working eight-hour rotating shifts."

"Christ! I thought he said he was short on agents."

"He is," Lightstone replied knowingly, remembering the intense and skeptical look in the FBI agent's light gray eyes. "Otherwise, he'd be using six or eight."

"Yes?"

"This is Maas."

"Where are you?"

"Do we have a clear line?"

"Just a moment."

Dr. Reston Wolfe punched a series of three buttons on his phone, then waited until the green light at the lower right corner of the receiver began to blink.

"Okay," he said, "go ahead."

"We are in Soldotna. Phase One and Phase Two were completed successfully, but we ran into complications with Phase Three."

"What happened?" Dr. Reston Wolfe asked quickly. He could feel his chest starting to constrict.

"We lost a man."

"What?"

"A small group of Fish and Wildlife law-enforcement officers happened to be fishing on the lake," Maas said in his distinctively calm and chilling voice. "They heard the shots and came over to investigate. They had access to a floatplane, and one of them turned out to be very proficient with weapons."

"Who did we lose?" Wolfe whispered.

"Bolin got careless and was killed. Parker was wounded in the left leg, below the knee, and in the right arm. We have sent him back to the base for treatment. Watanabe received superficial wounds in the buttocks and lower legs, but indicated that he is perfectly capable of continuing on with the mission. I sent him down to assist Günter and Felix."

"My God, what about the scene?" Wolfe asked, numbed and horrified by the thought that Operation Counter Wrench could possibly start to come apart
now
.

"We were able to cause their plane to crash, which gave us time to retrieve Bolin and clean up."

"And the other, ah . . . bodies?"

"They were left in place, precisely as we planned."

"Then we're okay?" Wolfe whispered, hardly daring to hope.

"Yes, I believe so," Maas replied. "The survivors of the crash saw our plane, but we were able to land quickly on Tustumena Lake, dispose of the plane and Bolin, then leave in the backup plane without being observed."

"How deep is the water?"

"Approximately three hundred meters, and the water is very cold and murky. He will not be found."

"What about the investigation?"

"The FBI is on the scene, as we expected. They will be intrigued by the physical evidence, and confused by the statements of the survivors. In the end, they will have no choice but to believe that the Chareaux brothers are seeking their revenge on these federal agents."

"Then all we have to do is wait until it's over," Wolfe said, almost limp with nervous relief.

"No," Maas said coldly. "First we go and kill the last three, as planned.
Then
we wait for it to be over."

Chapter Thirty-Seven

"Jennifer?"

"Yes?" the voice mumbled sleepily.

"This is Henry Lightstone. Sorry to call you this late, but I need to ask you a question about airplane cargo inspections."

"Ah,
yes sir, go ahead," the young wildlife inspector said, blinking herself awake.

"The question is, would you normally inspect the cargo shipments coming into Anchorage on Alaska Flight Ninety- nine, the one that lands at eleven-fifty this evening?"

"Uh, no sir, not normally. That flight comes in through SEA-TAC, so there usually aren't any foreign import declarations. Those would have been checked at Seattle."

"But you would inspect occasionally if you thought there was something illegal in one of the shipments?"

"Oh, yes, certainly, especially if we got some kind of tip."

"Such as a single passenger trying to bring three untagged trophy grizzlies in from British Columbia, listing Anchorage as his final destination?"

"We would definitely search on something like that," Jennifer Alik said emphatically. "Of course it would help if that tip came from a reliable source."

"Then I guess the next question is, do you think I'm reliable enough?"

"Yes sir, of course," the young wildlife inspector laughed. "Do you have any idea of when this passenger might be coming in?"

Lightstone looked at his watch. "Far as I know, in about an hour and twenty minutes."

"Tonight?"

"I'm afraid so."

"Okay," Jennifer Alik sighed. "I'll be there, but it'll take me a couple of minutes to get dressed."

"Ah, listen," Lightstone said, "I'm staying here at the Captain Cook. Do you think you could pick me up on the way?"

Making full use of her connections with the operations staff at the Anchorage airport, it took Jennifer Alik less than twenty minutes to get Lightstone's bag checked onto Flight 394 and then return to her small, shared office at Alaska Air Cargo, where Henry Lightstone was waiting.

"Any problems?" he asked as she handed him the ticket packet with the red "Checked Firearms" tag stapled to the front.

"I had to verify that the gun in the locked case was unloaded," the cheerfully smiling wildlife inspector nodded. "McNulty's been saying some nice things about you the last couple of weeks, so I assumed it was."

"Yep, all safe and sound," Lightstone nodded, wishing that he had the heart to tell her about MeNulty, and wishing also that he could have carried the new 10mm Smith & Wesson semiautomatic pistol—the one he'd checked out of the Anchorage property room—with him on the plane. But he knew that it wasn't beyond A1 Grynad to have his agents monitoring the issuance of weapons passes by the airlines. And there was no way to avoid having to show his real credentials if he tried to go through the checkpoint armed.

Something about that whole weapons check-through procedure was tugging at the back of Lightstone's brain, but he didn't know why, and then Jennifer Alik interrupted his thoughts before he could figure it out.

"Anything else I can help you with?" the young Eskimo woman asked.

"Well, for the next twenty minutes or so," Lightstone said, "why don't you show me how you really
would
have inspected a shipment from Flight Ninety-nine had that tip come from a more reliable source."

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Thursday September 15th

At exactly one o'clock that Thursday morning, Special Agent Henry Lightstone went through the motions of suddenly remembering that he had a flight to catch. The assistant manager at the Alaska Cargo office—who was apparently willing to do just about anything for Jennifer Alik—stepped in and offered to drive him out on his baggage cart to the loading ramp for Alaska Flight 394.

Entering the plane via the emergency access stairway, Lightstone managed to bypass the surveillance teams that FBI Agent A1 Grynard
had
placed at the security checkpoints.

Eight hours and twenty minutes later, at precisely 10:20
a.m
.,
after passing through one time zone, and two more security checks without incident, Lightstone approached the Budget rental-car counter at San Diego International Airport. He signed for a small sedan in the name of Henry Allen Lightner, using one of his undercover credit cards that he hadn't gotten around to canceling.

Forty-five minutes later, Lightstone entered the Federal Building on "C" street, took the elevator up to the seventh floor, and walked into Dwight Stoner's office . . . completely unaware that he had been followed all the way from the Budget parking lot.

"Henry Lightstone. I'm here to see Dwight Stoner," he said, holding out his badge and credentials for inspection by the young blond receptionist.

"I'm sorry, sir," the young woman smiled apologetically, "but Agent Stoner left the office a little while ago. Was he expecting you?"

"Uh, no, not really. Do you know when he'll be back?"

"No, I don't. He received a call from an informant, and then he left right away."

"An informant?" Lightstone blinked. "Are you sure?"

"Well, uh, yes, I guess so. I mean—"

"When exactly did he get the call?"

"Oh, uh, earlier this morning," the receptionist said, looking flustered.

"I mean, what
time?"
Lightstone said impatiently.

"Oh, sure, let's see here," she said as she turned back the top page in her telephone memo book. "Yes, here it is. The call came in at exactly nine forty-six, a little over an hour ago."

"Did you happen to get the name of the informant?" Lightstone asked as he tried to read the barely legible script upside down.

"No, I didn't. She wouldn't give me her name. I asked her twice, but she said that—"

"She?" Lightstone's head came up. "Are you sure it was a woman?"

"Oh, yes, it was definitely a woman's voice," the young woman nodded. "She had a real strong accent. Sort of Germanic, I think."

Lightstone forced himself to remain calm. "Do you remember what was it,
exactly,
that she said to you?" he asked, feeling his blood pressure starting to rise as he remembered A1 Grynard's words:
And Scoby hasn't checked back in from a routine contact with a female informant somewhere in southern Arizona.

"Well, let me think. Humm, first of all, when I asked who she was, she said that she didn't want to give me her name because it was not a big deal and she didn't think—"

"Listen, uh, Tracy," Lightstone interrupted as he quickly read the nameplate on the front of the desk, "this is very important. Do you have any idea of where Agent Stoner was to meet this informant?"

"No, he didn't say, but he might have written it down in the notebook on his desk. He usually—" she started to add, but Lightstone was already sprinting to Stoner's small office, where he rummaged around the top of the cluttered desk and then in the lower file drawer.

"Uh, sir, I'm really not supposed to let you do that," the young woman said as she came in through the doorway with a determined look on her face. But Lightstone already had the spiral-bound notebook opened to the last entry. A moment later he was out the door and running down the wide corridor to the elevator.

At six-foot-nine, and three hundred and ten pounds, Special Agent Dwight Stoner had long since become accustomed to the fact that his presence tended to intimidate people.

And while that sort of thing was perfectly okay when facing down defensive linebackers like Lawrence Taylor and Carl Banks, or malicious biker punks like Brendon Kleinfelter, it was often a disadvantage when the formidable special agent tried to interact with the general public.

Thus, when Dwight Stoner saw the momentary look of fear in the very attractive young woman's eyes, he immediately tried to compensate by relaxing his guard.

"I didn't mean to frighten you, ma'am," Stoner said with what he hoped was a reassuring smile as he held out his badge and credentials. "I'm Special Agent Dwight Stoner with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. I believe you called me this morning about an illegal rack?"

"Oh yes, Officer. Please come in." Carine Mueller said in a shaky voice, genuinely startled by the immense size of the federal agent. She decided immediately that she wouldn't let Sonny Chareaux draw the game out with this man the way he wanted to. "I was afraid that you might have changed your mind."

"Had to stop for gas, and then I made a wrong turn back at the junction." Stoner shrugged his massive shoulders apologetically. "Took me a while to find somebody who knew this part of the country well enough to give me directions."

"It was very kind of you to drive all the way out here," Mueller said as she led him in through the kitchen and out the back door, then started walking toward a large, decrepit barn at the far corner of her acre-sized lot. "My neighbor was so frightened."

"Is that Mr. Nakamura?" Stoner asked, observing the slender, nervous-looking Oriental man who stood next to the partially opened side door of the barn.

"Yes," Carine Mueller nodded. "He's such a nice man, and he and his wife are wonderful neighbors. But they haven't been in this country very long, and he was afraid that he'd be arrested if he kept it at his house. And he didn't know what to do, so I told him that he could keep it in our barn until you got here."

"Mr. Nakamura, I'm Special Agent Stoner, from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service," Stoner said as he walked up and slowly extended his large hand.

"Yes, I thank you very much that you come to help me," Kiro Nakamura—a Shotokan fourth-degree black belt—said in broken English, taking professional note of Dwight Stoner's limp as he returned the agent's handshake with his deliberately relaxed right hand.