Prey (48 page)

"What he's saying is that he wants you to bring him more evidence so he can justify stealing another one of my computers," Rhodes interpreted as they thanked the serologist and continued on.

"And over here," Rhodes said as he stopped at the far end of the long room, "is probably the most important piece of equipment in the serology lab." He stood next to what looked like a large freezer, with temperature gauges on the front and a stainless-steel tank of liquid nitrogen hooked up to the side.

"A freezer?" Dwight Stoner asked dubiously.

"Yes, but not just any freezer," Rhodes smiled. "This one can keep blood and tissue samples down to minus eighty degrees Celsius. Which is cold enough that if you stuck your hand inside and kept it there for, oh, maybe about a minute or so, you could take it out, smack it against the wall, and then pick the pieces up off the floor."

"No shit?" Stoner whispered, moving in cautiously to take a closer look at the apparently lethal machine.

"Actually, what it
is
is their library of tissue samples from all over the world," Rhodes explained. "For example, if these guys are going to try to figure out the genetic code of a wolf, they're going to have to start out with samples from a pure wolf, not eighty-percent wolf and twenty-percent dog. The question, of course, is how do they know?"

"Because one looks like a wolf and the other—" Paxton started to guess.

"What did you say?" Lightstone interrupted, puzzled, because something in the scientist's comments had triggered his memory. Something about . . .

At that moment a woman's voice came over the loudspeaker.

"Ed Rhodes, can you come to morphology, right away please?"

Rhodes walked over to a nearby wall phone, picked up the handset, and punched in a three-digit code.

"Hi, Margaret. What have you got? Oh, yeah?
Really?
We'll be right there."

The morphology section of the lab consisted of three semicircular workbench areas and two freestanding layout tables, both of which were situated under wide skylights. When they got there, they found Margaret Kuo sitting in front of a comparison microscope that was equipped with a ten-inch-square split-view screen.

"Well, what do you think?" the Korean-born mammalogist asked as she moved aside to make room for Rhodes and the four agents.

"Looks good to me," the electronics engineer commented as he glanced casually at the two pieces of hide that had been magnified several times and then brought together side by side in the split screen. "What are we looking at?"

"You know, you computer guys are really pretty useless if you can't recognize a classic match of
Ceratotherium simum
hide when you see it," the white-coated mammalogist grinned as she reached into one of the nearby drawers and brought out a pair of boots made of dark gray leather with a rough, grainy texture.

"Here's an example. Got this pair out of a shipment going to West Germany," Margaret Kuo said, unaware that Henry Lightstone, standing right beside her, was staring down at the boots as though seeing a ghost for the second time.

"Cera-
what?" Ed Rhodes started to ask, but Henry Lightstone already knew the answer.

"White rhino," he rasped, blinking in confusion as his mind flashed on an identical pair of boots, and the white hair, and the white beard and . . . that same white-bearded face as it flashed beneath the plane.

"Oh, Jesus." he whispered in pure disbelief.

"Hey, that's right—" the white-coated mammalogist started to say, but Lightstone wasn't listening because he'd already turned to Mike Takahara.

"SEA-TAC Security," he said insistently, grabbing at the agent's muscular arm. "We've got to get ahold of them,
right now!"

Exactly twenty-three minutes later, Ed Rhodes was working quickly to connect cables from the back of a multifunction VCR to the back of one of the overhead monitors in his electronics lab, while Mike Takahara was talking on the phone to the technical coordinator for the Seattle Tacoma International Airport's security office.

"Yes, that's right, Monday the twentieth, 'C' terminal," Takahara said, and then looked over at Lightstone. "What time?"

"Umm
..."
Lightstone had to stop and think. "About ten o'clock in the morning. Maybe a little after."

"Ten o'clock," Takahara repeated, and then turned to Rhodes. "You ready?"

"Just a second," Rhodes said as he reached over and set three switches on the jury-rigged communications board and then watched the computer screen as he punched in a series of command codes on the keyboard.

"How are you doing this?" Lightstone asked, not sure that he'd understand, but wanting to ask anyway.

"Two land-line connections with a satellite uplink at Bellevue," Rhodes said as he continued to work at the computer.

"You mean telephone lines?"

"Yeah, exactly," the intent electronics engineer nodded.

"So why not use the phones all the way down instead of screwing around with the satellite?" Paxton asked.

"Need a fiber-optic line for the quality. Haven't managed to get one run down to Ashland yet," Rhodes replied, and then suddenly smiled brightly.
"All right,
we're locked onto the satellite, transponder eighteen, and we
are
recording. Tell them to go ahead and transmit."

"We were pretty damn lucky on this," Mike Takahara said to Lightstone as he and Rhodes and the other two agents watched the flickering screen. "They're required to maintain the tapes for only seventy-two hours. Probably would have reused this tape sometime this evening."

"Far as I'm concerned, it's about time we had some luck on this deal," Paxton growled.

"Yeah, no shit," Stoner said in agreement.

"Come
on,
guys, where are you?" Rhodes muttered as he glanced down at his watch. "We've only got this transponder for . . .
there!"

The monitor suddenly flickered to life, displaying a montage of four smaller screens—two screens showing people walking through metal detectors, the other two displaying the same images as viewed by the X-ray units.

"Christ! They've got those things focused right on the metal detectors." Lightstone shook his head in frustration.

"Yeah, so?" Rhodes asked.

"These guys didn't go through the detectors. They were carrying, so they walked around."

"That's okay. We can see about eighteen inches on the left-hand side of each one," Rhodes said as they watched progressive sets of travelers walking slowly through the detectors, several of whom had to back up, empty their pockets, and try again.

"What did you say these assholes looked like?" Larry Paxton asked as they watched one overweight man make four successive trips back and forth through the scanner.

"Three Caucasian males, one Oriental male, and one Oriental female," Lightstone recited, his eyes fixed to the flickering quarter-screen on the right. "Guy with the boots had white hair and white beard, both closely trimmed. The woman—"

"There!" Mike Takahara yelled. "Left screen, guy with white hair and a white beard just went through. Is that him?"

"I don't know, went by too fast." Lightstone shook his head. "Have them run it back."

"No, that's okay. Let it run, we've got it recorded," Rhodes said as they watched a young-looking Oriental man and then a very attractive Oriental woman walk around the scanner.

"What about him?" Lightstone asked Mike Takahara.

"Yeah, that could have been him," the Japanese-American agent said hesitantly, "but he had his head turned, saying something to the girl."

"It has to be . . .
oh, yeah,"
Lightstone whispered as he watched the tall Caucasian male with the close-cropped, curly dark hair and mustache walk past. He remembered the startled look on Arturo Bolin's distinctive face when the three .357 hollow-point bullets had caught him in the head and throat and caused him to drop onto the rocky base of the shale outcropping.

"You sure?" Mike Takahara asked, covering up the mouthpiece of the phone.

"Yeah, I'm absolutely sure," Lightstone nodded. "Now let's see if we can find out who they are."

Forty-five minutes later, Ed Rhodes dropped five blurry but still legible eight-by-ten color photographs in front of Lightstone.

"There're your bad guys," the electronics specialist said, watching over Lightstone's shoulder as the agent spread the five head and upper-torso photos out on the table.

"A1 Grynard doesn't believe it, but that one's dead," Lightstone said, pointing to the blurred image of Arturo Bolin. "The other one there," he pointed to the profile shot of Roy Parker, "could be the one I hit first. The guy with the H&K. Looks right, but they were wearing cammo-grease and I never got that close to him."

"What about this one?" Larry Paxton asked, pointing to the photo of the Oriental man who had his head turned away from the camera.

Lightstone stared at the side view of Shoshin Watanabe for several seconds. "He could have been the one who got nailed next to the boulder, up at Skilak Lake, but I can't tell. We were too far away. I don't think I ever saw
her,"
he shrugged, pushing aside the photo of Kimiko Osan.

"But this one," Lightstone whispered as he held up the photo of Gerd Maas and stared at the man's cold, pale eyes, "this is the guy I want to find."

"Looks like a real freak, doesn't he?" Larry Paxton commented appraisingly.

"Yeah. Now all we need is a name," Lightstone said as he looked around. "Hey, where's Mike? He should have gotten the scoop on their credentials by now."

"Right here," Mike Takahara said as he came into the small conference room.

"Well?"

"Negative," the Japanese-American agent shook his head. "The two Caucasian males were carrying Federal Protective Service badges and credentials, but there's no record of their ever being issued to anybody."

"Federal
Protective
Service?" Lightstone blinked. "Shit, these people don't need any protection."

"Hey, I'm just relaying the message," Takahara shrugged. "Security people at the airport confirmed the IDs."

"They could have been faked."

"Yeah, maybe, but that'd be rough to do," the Japanese- American agent said. "They'd have to get a hold of that new Treasury paper, which is real easy to confirm under a crossed-polar light."

"Did those security guys at the airport check?"

"They said they did."

"But if these guys had legitimate federal credentials, then
somebody
with authority had to sign them," Paxton said.

Takahara shrugged his muscular shoulders. "No way you can expect anybody to remember three days later what a scrawled signature looked like, especially when he sees dozens of those things every day."

"Shit," Lightstone cursed.

"Come on, guys, there's
got
to be a link here," Mike Takahara said insistently. "What is it that we know for sure? That we got shut down on an investigation and then scattered all over the country. And now a bunch of assholes are trying to hunt us down, and the Chareaux brothers are involved somehow, only maybe these guys have had a falling out, because we also know that Alex killed at least two of them."

"And we know for sure that
these
guys here went after Paul," Lightstone said, nodding at the photos, "and that Butch Chareaux was killed in the process."

"Paul shoot him? Takahara asked.

"It looked that way at the scene," Lightstone shrugged, "but who the hell knows?"

"And then I got a call from that female informant," Stoner offered.

"Just like Carl did," Lightstone reminded.

"Yeah, and then the little broad lures me into this barn, where Sonny and some karate asshole try to bust my knee," Stoner finished.

"Only Sonny ends up getting killed, which would sure as hell piss Alex off if he knew about it," Mike Takahara added.

"Which he obviously didn't, or he wouldn't have walked away when he had you hanging there," Lightstone said. "And which also means that he probably didn't know about Butch, either."

"Maybe he isn't after you guys at all," Ed Rhodes suggested. "Like you said, he had Mike right there. No reason to walk away."

"Well, if
he
isn't after us, then who the hell is?" Lightstone demanded.

"I don't know, man, but every time we try to figure this thing out, I keep coming back to that hunt you went on with Alex and Butch," Paxton said. "That and the fact that everywhere we look, some Oriental guy is popping up into the picture."

"You mean those three idiots with the hundred-thousand- dollar guns?"

"One of whom you described as Japanese," Paxton reminded.

"Whoever's been doing this had enough influence with the Department of Interior to get us reassigned," Lightstone nodded. "And they had to have
some
connection with the Chareaux brothers if they were willing to spend that much money to pop them loose."

"Three hunters, filthy rich, lots of influence, who think that they're about to get in serious trouble with the law," Paxton smiled.