by Robert Greer
Rolling down his window, Silas stuck his head out of the cab and yelled, “I’m not moving this rig any further till I know if you’re Mantew.”
Nodding, the man said, “I am,” jogged up to the cab, and handed Silas an envelope.
Silas tore the envelope open and took his time counting the five thousand dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills inside. “You got equipment to off-load your shipment?” he asked, stuffing the envelope into a jacket pocket.
“A Bobcat.”
Puzzled by Mantew’s clipped, two-word responses, Silas shrugged and looked around for the Bobcat.
When Mantew said, “This way,” pointing toward the Jeep trail, Silas gripped the steering wheel with one hand, patted the crowbar with the other, and inched the truck forward. Thinking as he moved deeper into the woods that he should have seen the Bobcat by now, Silas watched Mantew suddenly sprint for the rear of his truck. Grabbing the crowbar and the .32, Silas swung his door open and jumped out of the cab. He’d barely reached the rear bumper when Mantew, now just feet from him, pulled a World War II–era Japanese sword from beneath his duster, whirled in a half circle to gain momentum, and buried the razor-sharp edge in Silas’s neck.
His right carotid artery severed, Silas dropped to one knee. The look on his face begged for explanation as blood streamed down his neck.
Aware that he’d delivered a fatal blow, Mantew walked away, blind to Silas’s struggle to breathe. Flopping in the dirt like a pithed frog, Silas tried for the better part of a minute to stand as Rikia Takata, no longer in need of an alias, stood, oblivious to him, looking back in the direction of the exit ramp. Silas curled into the fetal position and gurgled a final breath.
Moving 290 pounds of dead weight into the cargo bay of a truck turned out to be more of a struggle than Rikia had expected. But in just under twelve minutes he’d wedged Silas Breen’s body between two wooden crates and tied it down. He’d washed away most of the blood that he’d gotten on himself with water from the two sixty-four-ounce bottles he’d earlier stuffed in his range duster, changed clothes, and slipped into a shirt and the jeans he’d brought along.
There was still blood splatter on his shoes, and as he sat behind the wheel of Breen’s truck, inspecting his face for blood in the rearview mirror, he could see that tiny blood droplets still peppered his forehead and cheeks. Wiping away the droplets with a shirtsleeve and feeling a sense of relief, he sighed. He’d executed a critical part of his plan, and even though Breen’s two thirty a.m. fax had forced him to resort to what had always been an alternate piece of the plan, he now had the most important piece of what he needed to complete his task. The twenty dollars he’d nervously paid a cab driver for his eight a.m. cab ride to the motel outside Amarillo was a fading memory now, as was his red-eye bus ride from El Paso to Amarillo late the previous evening.
He glanced in the sideview mirror before backing slowly toward the highway. Thirty yards from the frontage road, he saw a lone car come off the interstate and move slowly down the exit ramp. He stopped so as to not risk being seen by the driver, then smiled as the vehicle turned left onto the frontage road and quickly disappeared. Laughing now, he found himself thinking about the imperfectness of science. His experiments to determine how frequently he could expect a vehicle to access the critical I-40 exit ramp had proven to be wrong, off by more than half. The vehicle he’d just seen was the first one to take the exit ramp during the entire forty-five minutes he’d been there.
Easing Breen’s truck onto the pavement and telling himself as the truck jiggled from front to back that all too often the most intricately designed experiments simply didn’t pan out, he headed down the frontage road for an I-40 on-ramp, aware more than most that those kinds of variations happened when it came to math and science.
The bushy-headed, overweight FBI agent searching Silas Breen’s Oklahoma City motel room hadn’t found anything out of the ordinary in the fifteen minutes he’d been there except a half-smoked joint and a six-month-old crumpled page from an over-the-road trucker’s time-and-distance log that had obviously been doctored.
Shaking his head and feeling a little put out, the agent slipped his cell phone out of a shirt pocket and dialed his longtime colleague, Thaddeus Richter. When the veteran FBI agent answered, “Richter here,” his friend said disappointedly, “Thad, it’s Ken, and I’ve got nada. A motel room full of nothing. No Breen, and nothing that looks suspicious for foul play. Are you sure the info that reporter and the OSI major gave you on Breen is correct?”
“Yes. Now what about Breen’s truck?”
“Couldn’t locate it, and the desk clerk on duty doesn’t remember seeing one. I can ask the employees who are here now if they saw a truck that matches the description of Breen’s, but I’m thinking I’ll need to talk to someone from the previous shift to cover all my bases.”
“Do that for me, Ken, okay?”
“You got it. So, what’s up next?”
“I’ll get Breen’s father on the horn and see if I can’t squeeze some answers out of him. After that I just might head down your way.”
“Sort of ugly and gray here right now. Think I should call in the locals?”
“No. They’d just get in the way. But you can do one thing for me. Call the bureau office in Lubbock and see if they have anything on either Breen or his truck.”
“Will do. And Thad, if you do head this way, how about bringing me a box of Rocky Mountain oysters from the Buckhorn Exchange there in Denver? The ones they sell down here always turn out as hard as rocks when you fry ’em up.”
“Damn it, Ken. You’re the only person I know in the world who actually likes the taste of bull nuts. What’s with the obsession anyway?”
“Guess I like my food chewy, that’s all.”
Richter shook his head. “I’ll round you up some of the little nuggets if I head your way.”
“You’re the man, Thad.”
“Yeah,” Richter said, snapping his cell phone shut and wondering how on earth a man and a twenty-six-foot-long, shamrock-green truck could so easily have vanished into thin air.
Barefoot, as usual, listening to the second of the Gulfstream’s engines power up, and staring at a cockpit computer screen, Bernadette flipped a toggle switch to her right and said to Cozy, “I still don’t fully understand why we’re flying to Albuquerque instead of Amarillo.”
“Like I’ve been trying to explain since before we left the hotel, because of your maps.”
Concentrating on the task at hand, Bernadette said, “I’m afraid you’ll have to explain your reasoning a little better once we’re in the air, and this time, no baseball analogies, okay?” Staring at the plane’s instrument panel and looking for all the world like a kid in a candy store, she reached up, flipped several additional overhead toggle switches, adjusted her seat, and smiled.
“If I didn’t know better, Major Cameron, I’d think you were more interested in playing with this here aeroplane of Freddy’s than in what I’m saying,” said Cozy.
“Sorry.”
Staring at the serious-faced woman next to him and thinking that she seemed nothing like the playful, perhaps even a little vulnerable, woman he’d made love to and held in his arms the previous night, Cozy smiled. When Bernadette slipped on her headphones and motioned for him to follow suit, he had the sense that he was looking at someone whose birthright had somehow been taken away.
Feeling Cozy’s stare, Bernadette said, “Can’t talk until this bird’s in the air, okay?”
“You’re the captain,” he said, flashing her a thumbs-up as she turned the plane in a broad half arc toward a taxiway. The contagiousness of the back-in-the-saddle look on her face had him smiling and suddenly thinking about fastballs, pickoffs, and headfirst slides into home.
They’d cleared the cloud layer and leveled off at eighteen thousand feet when Bernadette, who’d barely said a word during their climb, adjusted her headset and, staring out at the azure sky, said, “Feels good.”
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��Looks like you’re back on your bicycle,” Cozy said, squeezing her thigh affectionately before placing several of her silo-site maps on the console between them.
“Don’t get fresh, Mr. Coseia,” Bernadette said, trying to keep a straight face and playfully slapping his hand. “I can have you escorted off this ship, in handcuffs if necessary, when we land.” Turning to face him, she gave Cozy a sensual, openmouthed kiss. The second their lips parted, she was all business again. “We’ve got a fifty-knot tailwind. That’ll put us into Albuquerque a good fifteen minutes ahead of schedule. Let me take this bird on up to our final cruising altitude, and then I’ll let the computers Freddy overpaid for do the flying for a while.”
Four minutes later, after leveling off again, she turned to Cozy and said, “Now, would you like to explain, so it makes some kind of sense to me, why on earth we’re headed for New Mexico instead of Texas, Mr. Baseball Hotshot?”
“Do I have to?” Cozy asked, toying with her earlobe.
“Yes, Cozy, you do. I Googled you and Freddy last night, after we had dinner, by the way. Division II college baseball championship co-MVPs, career batting averages of .338 and .333, five Gold Glove awards between the two of you. Gadzooks, Batman, you two were bigger than big.”
Looking reflective, Cozy said, “All things pass,” eased forward in his seat, and pointed to the top map in his stack. “So here’s the deal on Albuquerque.” He eyed Bernadette’s maps. “Nothing clicked with your maps here until I started thinking in baseball-diamond, shortest-distance-between-two-points terms. When I realized that if I drew lines connecting Amarillo, Lubbock, and Albuquerque, I had myself that triangle we talked about, I knew I had something. My imperfect triangle was squeezed down and flattened out a bit, but it was a triangle nonetheless. One with I-25 as a side, U.S. 60 and U.S. 84 as another, and I-40 as an almost perfect straight line from Amarillo to Albuquerque as the base.”
“Makes baseball-diamond sense, I guess, but what’s the take-home message?”
“The message, my sexy major, is time, distance, and Howard Colbain. Lubbock and Amarillo are each four-, maybe five-hour drives from Albuquerque. Which means you could drive from any one of the points of the triangle to the next in a hurry if you had to. Especially if you needed to pick up an important shipment of something. And since Albuquerque’s the only city of the three with a known Tango-11 connection, we’re back to Howard Colbain.”
Nodding, Bernadette said, “So, if you’re having some trucker deliver goods to a location you don’t really want anyone else to know about, changing the destination from Amarillo to Lubbock would keep anyone intent on any kind of intervention guessing. And you’d still be within striking distance of your real target: Albuquerque.” Winking at Cozy, she smiled and said, “By the way, air force fighter pilots and the army field artillery boys prefer to call your baseball-diamond analogy ‘target triangulation.’ So, what on earth would Silas Breen be delivering to Colbain?”
Feigning upset, Cozy said, “What’s in a name? As for what Breen’s delivering, I don’t know. What I am certain of is that Colbain’s absolutely in the Tango-11 mix and that Breen’s more than likely delivering something related to the Giles murder to Colbain.”
Looking puzzled, Bernadette slipped her headset off and down around her neck. “Wait a minute, Cozy. I think we could be moving too quickly to a conclusion here. We just might be asking ourselves the wrong question.”
“How’s that?”
“First off, I’ve spent way too much time looking for a possible connection between Tango-11 and the 999 other missile sites out there when what I probably should’ve been looking for is not any kind of connection but what on earth made Tango-11 the odd man out. Maybe it’s related to your time-and-distance thing. Suppose that while Silas Breen may indeed have been hired to deliver something to Amarillo or Lubbock, or perhaps even Albuquerque—let’s consider them geographic equivalents of my 999 silo sites—someone was planning all along to intercept him along the way, providing us with a nice little outlier just like Tango-11.”
“Damn. You know, you might be right. I knew you were more than just another pretty face,” Cozy said, smiling.
“And I fly jets, too,” Bernadette added coyly. “So given that possibility, what’s our game plan?”
“We get Sugar to Albuquerque as fast as we can, and then we head for Colbain’s place. In the meantime, I’ll think a little more about your odd-man-out theory. There’s something about it that’s mighty appealing.”
Wrapping a bare foot around Cozy’s spindly ankle, Bernadette said, “Sort of like you, Mr. Coseia.” They didn’t say anything to one another until Bernadette announced several minutes later, “I’m about to begin our initial approach into Albuquerque.”
Feeling relaxed and content and convinced that for the first time in years, the nearly constant tingling in his leg had at least temporarily all but disappeared, Cozy looked at her and said, “Aye, aye, Captain.”
Rikia Takata was on schedule and feeling confident that he’d left nothing behind that could derail his mission or that could be specifically traced to him. He’d paid cash for his bus ticket from El Paso to Amarillo and for his taxi ride from the bus station to a motel just off I-40 that had been within walking distance of the woods where he’d killed Silas Breen. There’d been cash payments for the World War II–era Japanese sword and the two dozen untraceable cans of spray paint he’d spent months purchasing from various stores across Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. He’d mailed the sword and the spray paint to himself at his hotel in El Paso. The paint had been exhausted when he’d spray painted the sides of Silas Breen’s truck ruby red forty-five minutes earlier. There were no credit-card paper trails whatsoever, and although it was possible that the cab driver or bus ticket agent might remember him, it was unlikely. His one concern was that Howard Colbain had refused to help him deal with Breen or Breen’s truck when he’d called to ask for assistance. His amateurish paint job was therefore going to have to suffice.
He’d made a fifteen-minute stop just outside the town of Santa Rosa at a junkyard ninety-five miles east of Albuquerque to pick up the final two things he needed to complete the mission. The rough-looking, Vandyke-bearded man he’d met there, whom he’d talked to three weeks earlier on a phone he’d stolen from a student, had supplied him with those things, but not without scrutinizing the truck and its poorly done paint job with obvious suspicion. However, since the man, a Mexican illegal and a longtime supplier of stolen heavy-equipment parts to Howard Colbain, spoke English that was barely understandable, dealt only in cash, and had a Quonset hut filled with everything from stolen AK-47s to Mexican porn, Rikia knew he would keep his mouth shut.
He’d loaded the three microwave-sized cardboard boxes the man had packed for him onto the truck’s front seat, hitched a rusted-out beater of a ’72 Volkswagen beetle that the man had sold him to the rear bumper, thanked the man in Spanish, handed him five thousand dollars in cash, and driven off.
Now, as he sat parked on an abandoned stretch of cracking asphalt that had once been old U.S. Highway 40, twenty miles west of where he’d picked up the boxes and the VW, he had the sense that destiny was truly on his side. Stepping from the cab, he walked to the rear of the truck, peered into the more than 115-degree heat of the truck’s cargo hold, and wrinkled his nose. The rank smell of feces and urine emanating from Silas Breen’s body caused him to take a step back. Not having anticipated how overpowering the smell of death could be, he took a deep breath, pinched his nostrils together, and stepped up into the cargo bay. Everything inside was just as it had been in Amarillo. Breen’s body hadn’t moved. When he heard what sounded like a twig snapping outside the truck, he pulled the cargo-bay door closed. Spotting a jackrabbit running through the sage, he let out a sigh.
Satisfied that everything he needed and had been promised by Thurmond Giles was in the truck, he stepped back from the rear bumper and, gagging from the smell, threw up the bananas and cereal he’d had for breakf
ast. Five minutes later, he was back on I-40 headed west for Albuquerque and the U.S. 285 bypass that would skirt him around the city.
The SUV that Cozy rented at the Albuquerque airport had that fresh-off-the-assembly-line new-car smell and less than two hundred miles on the odometer. Cozy was busy adjusting an uncooperative side mirror when Bernadette, who’d been rummaging around in the vehicle’s trunk, got in next to him and casually slipped the lug wrench beneath the front seat. “Just for good measure,” she said, smiling.
Cozy’s response was an understanding nod.
As they sped east on I-40 toward Howard Colbain’s office, Bernadette looked up from the silo-site map of Colorado she’d been studying and glanced at the SUV’s speedometer to realize that they were doing ninety-five. “Would you please slow this thing down, Cozy?”
Cozy eased his foot off the accelerator. “Thought you liked speed.”
“I do. But only when I’m at the controls.” She juggled the order of the maps in her lap and began scrutinizing the silo-site map of Wyoming. Looking both exasperated and puzzled, as if she’d reached the end of the road with her maps, she said, “Remember that wad of paper they found jammed in Sergeant Giles’s mouth along with the head of his penis?”
“Yes,” Cozy said, thinking, Where the heck did that come from?
“Well, it’s a peculiar combination that’s never made a lot of sense to me.”
“It’s a combination that screams revenge, Bernadette.”
“The amputated penis head, yes, but what about the paper?”
“The killer used it to shut Giles up.”
Bernadette teased a tracing of a map from the middle of her stack. “Somehow, I don’t think so. I was there when the coroner found the wad. It was too small to have shut Sergeant Giles up. Bosack faxed me a flattened-out copy of it the day after we found Giles’s body. I made this tracing of it. Want to see?”