Trade-Off

by Trade-Off (retail) (epub)

  In an ideal world, Hunter thought, he would simply be the man at the top of the stairs, the man leading the assault team. He’d be wearing a bullet-proof vest, and carrying an assault rifle or combat shotgun. In an ideal world, he wouldn’t be crouching by himself on a stairway wearing no protection at all, clutching a Glock nine-millimetre pistol and facing two armed and highly dangerous men.

  Hunter was a good shot, and he undoubtedly had the element of surprise in his favour, but he doubted he could take them both. In the dimly-lit corridor, he might not even hit one of them. Especially not if he followed the correct procedure, and warned them he was an armed FBI agent – or at least the next best thing – before he fired. Not that he would bother.

  He crouched on the stairs for over a minute – it seemed much longer to him – weighing the options. Then he eased up into a standing position and crept back down the stairs to the second floor. The beginnings of a plan were forming in his mind.

  If he could split the two men, get one over to the elevator, he could probably take him from behind, from the slight protection offered by the darkened stairwell. Then it would be one against one, odds which Hunter greatly preferred. And he figured that if he sent the elevator up to the third floor, one of the men would certainly go over and check it out. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was the best he could come up with.

  He walked silently across to the elevator and reached out his hand to the call button. But a split second before his finger could press it, the ‘in use’ light illuminated. Hunter stepped back, startled, and watched as the elevator passed the second floor and continued upwards.

  He walked back to the stairwell and started to climb the stairs, conscious all the time of the sounds coming from the elevator shaft. He heard the elevator motor stop and the doors open, and from the suddenly increased illumination ahead of him he realized it had stopped on the third floor. It looked as if somebody else was providing him with the distraction he needed.

  He climbed more quickly, but the doors had already closed before he reached the third floor. The motor started again, and the elevator began to descend.

  Hunter cautiously peered around the corner of the stairwell, towards the elevator doors, but there was nobody in sight. Then he looked to the right, but that corridor was deserted as well.

  Hunter suddenly realized that the clean-up team had failed to get in. Christy-Lee had two locks on her apartment door, he remembered, a self-locking Yale and a deadbolt, and this combination had obviously defeated them. Once they’d realized they couldn’t get in, the assassins had simply walked over to the elevator and left the building.

  Despite his mental reconstruction of what had happened, Hunter was still cautious. He checked the corridor twice, then walked across to Christy-Lee’s door, Glock held ready. He pulled the keys out of his pocket, turned the deadbolt back, then opened the door with the Yale key.

  He backed into the apartment, covering the corridor with the Glock, and pulled the door closed behind him.

  It was the smell that hit him first. Faint, but undeniably there. He sniffed the air. Chloroform or maybe ether. A hospital smell.

  And then Hunter knew that he’d read the situation completely the wrong way. The realization hit him like a hammer-blow. He’d thought the two men were trying to pick the lock on Christy-Lee’s door to get inside. They hadn’t been. They’d been using her keys to re-lock the deadbolt behind them on their way out. The bulky shape he’d seen outside her door had actually been three figures – and one of them had been Christy-Lee.

  ‘Christy?’ Hunter called out, his voice urgent and loud in the silent building.

  He snapped on the lights and ran across the living room to the bedroom. He knocked on the door – his subconscious mind was already telling him that was a fruitless, pointless gesture – and then opened it.

  Hunter spun around, ran to the bathroom and kicked open the door. Empty. He knew she’d been taken, but he had to check, had to make absolutely sure.

  He ran back into the living room, heading for the door to the corridor. If he ran down the stairs, perhaps he could catch them. Pointless, he knew, because they had far too big a lead over him, but he had to do something.

  Then he remembered that the windows over-looked the street. He stopped dead, switched off the overhead lights, ran to the window and tore back the drapes.

  He looked both ways, then saw what he was expecting. On the other side of the road, seventy or eighty yards away, a car’s lights came on. After a few seconds the vehicle pulled away from the curb and moved quickly off down the street. The distance was too far for Hunter to make out the license plate, but he could identify the make. A Buick, dark in colour, maybe black.

  Chapter Nine

  Thursday

  Helena, Western Montana

  Hunter turned on every light in the apartment and went through it as carefully as he could, looking for anything that the clean-up team might have dropped. He didn’t expect to find a damn thing, and wasn’t surprised when his prediction turned out to be absolutely correct. Whoever they were, they were professional, beyond any doubt.

  The signs of a struggle were obvious. Chairs over-turned, ornaments scattered like autumn leaves, the desk slammed against the wall hard enough to dig a half-inch gouge in the plaster. The telephone was lying on the floor, the handset under a chair, emitting a faint buzzing sound. Almost without thinking, Hunter picked up the handset and replaced it on the base unit.

  But there was no blood, Hunter noted, and Christy-Lee’s Colt revolver was still in its belt holster on the sideboard, unfired. He guessed that the intruders had picked the lock on the door and Christy-Lee, expecting only Hunter, had either ignored the noise or perhaps even opened the door for them.

  He walked across to the window and looked out at the street below, his eyes sightless, his mind in turmoil. What puzzled him was not why this group had been tasked with killing people involved in the investigation of Billy Dole’s murder – that was a larger issue that he would have to address later – but why they’d taken Christy-Lee. If Dick Reilly had got it right, and Hunter had no reason to doubt what the Montana sheriff had said, then he and Christy-Lee were both on a hit list, so why wasn’t she lying dead in her bed?

  Taking her out of the building, even unconscious and in the early hours of the morning, seemed to Hunter to be a stupid and unnecessary risk, when they could simply have killed her right there and walked away. So there had to be a reason. The trouble was, Hunter had no idea what that reason might be, or how the hell he could find out.

  He would have to talk to Reilly again, find out exactly what the bogus FBI agent had told him. But in the meantime? What could he do, if anything? Hunter turned and looked around the apartment again, seeing everything, but noticing nothing.

  Something was missing. There was some other part of the puzzle that wasn’t registering with him. What he was certain about was that Christy-Lee was, at least in the short term, alive. Otherwise kidnapping her made no sense at all. What he had to do was find her. Or find the clean-up squad. It didn’t much matter which, because one would inevitably lead to the other.

  Hunter was good at prioritizing. There were three situations he had to deal with. First, and most important, the kidnapping of Christy-Lee; second, the actions of the clean-up squad in Beaver Creek and Helena, and finally, and by far the least important to Hunter, the apparent disappearance of Kaufmann’s sister, Maria Slade. He didn’t even spare a thought for the other cases he was supposed to be working on at the Helena Resident Agency.

  Maria Slade, Hunter thought, rationalizing without any data to back him up, was probably fine. Maybe there had been some kind of a fault on her line, or with her home telephone. Maybe the hospital had got it wrong, maybe they’d looked up the wrong name or something. There could have been some kind of screw-up in the administration section.

  He could get the local cops to visit her house and run a check on her, just in case, but for the moment he pushed her to the
back of his mind.

  The most pressing problem was Christy-Lee, and linked to that the clean-up squad. Hunter toyed with the idea of returning to his own apartment to wait for the killers to call on him, but rejected it. They might have been there already, before they snatched Christy-Lee, or they might be taking her somewhere out of state. Either way, going back to his place might mean waiting for hours or even days before they appeared, and even then he might be out-gunned or surprised. That was no good.

  Hunter came to a decision. He snapped off the apartment lights and headed for the stairs and the street at the rear of the building where he’d parked the Bureau Ford.

  The case had started in Beaver Creek, and Hunter thought it might well end in Beaver Creek. But whatever the outcome, Sheriff Dick Reilly obviously knew far more than he did about what the hell was going on, so Beaver Creek was where Hunter was going.

  Beaver Creek, Western Montana

  Reilly waited at his house with two of his deputies until the ambulance men had bagged the bodies and taken them away. Then the three of them tried to clear up the worst of the mess. It took them nearly two hours, and at the end of it the living room still looked like a slaughterhouse.

  ‘Certainly gonna need a new carpet here, Dick,’ one of the deputies said, finally, ‘and it’s gonna take a while to pick all the shot and bits of bone outta that there wall.’

  ‘Yup,’ Reilly agreed. ‘Planned to decorate it next spring anyway. Just get it done a bit sooner, I guess.’

  Thirty minutes later Dick Reilly sat at his office desk looking through the multiplicity of identity cards in front of him. Rogers had duplicates of those he had taken from Wilson’s pocket, and as far as Reilly could tell, they were all completely genuine.

  That worried him, because it meant that Wilson might have been telling the truth. Maybe Reilly had stumbled upon part of a classified government operation, and maybe it hadn’t been such a good idea for him to have killed the two of them. On the other had, Reilly shrugged, they had certainly been going to kill him, so what the hell. He’d just have to watch his back, that was all.

  The desk phone rang and Reilly picked it up. ‘Beaver Creek Sheriff’s Office,’ he said.

  The line was scratchy and at first Reilly couldn’t tell who was calling.

  ‘It’s Hunter,’ the distant voice said. ‘I’m calling from the Interstate, heading your way. We have to talk.’

  Something in the tone of his voice made Reilly pause before replying. ‘How’d it go?’ he said, finally.

  ‘Not good,’ Hunter replied. ‘They’ve snatched Christy-Lee.’

  Helena, Western Montana

  Harris didn’t like it, but he had no choice. The operating regulations for the program were absolutely rigid. All subjects had to be collected by one of the dozen or so specially-equipped ambulances operated by Roland Oliver, and the closest one was over four hours away, doing a pick-up at Pocatello in Idaho.

  If they wanted the bounty for handing over Christy-Lee Kaufmann as a Roland Oliver subject, they had to follow the rules.

  ‘We could just forget about the bounty,’ Morgan suggested. ‘Just pop her and dump the body somewhere.’

  Harris shook his head. ‘She’s an FBI agent. We could have knifed her and trashed her apartment, made it look like a burglary or sex killing, but now we’ve snatched her we’ve got to carry it through. We’re committed. If her body gets found by a roadside somewhere, there’d be an FBI and police investigation, and Roland Oliver wouldn’t like that at all. This is the best way.’

  Morgan grunted, and turned his attention back to the road. They were making the best of it, and had arranged to meet the ambulance at a rest area on the interstate just north of the Idaho/Montana border. That way they would get rid of their passenger as soon as possible. The sooner they could off-load the unconscious woman, the sooner they could get back to Helena to take out Hunter, and wrap up the last part of the operation.

  Highway US91/Interstate 15, Western Montana

  ‘Tell you what, Mr. Hunter,’ Reilly said. ‘I guess you could maybe use some back-up?’

  Hunter shifted the phone slightly under his chin as he accelerated past an eighteen-wheel rig that was cruising at a steady sixty.

  ‘Right now, sheriff, I reckon I need all the help I can get.’

  ‘OK,’ Reilly said. ‘I can’t think of any good reason for sittin’ here in Beaver Creek and waiting for the other guys from that squad to come lookin’ for me, so how’s about we team up?’

  Hunter was silent for a moment or two, but it wasn’t a difficult decision. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘That’s a good idea.’ He looked at the dashboard clock. ‘I’ll be with you in about half an hour,’ he said, then ended the call.

  McCarran Air Force Base, Las Vegas, Nevada

  The man in the white coat moved silently around the main open area in the building, clipboard in hand, checking the instruments and gauges that were fitted to the ends of the aluminium caskets.

  There wasn’t much need for any kind of physical inspection, because each casket was connected to a central monitoring system that would have sounded an alarm and shown an alert on the central display in the office if any of the gas concentrations or vital signs had exceeded their specified parameters. The monitoring system would also have made any necessary changes to keep the subjects alive, but deeply sedated and unconscious.

  But Evans had qualified as a doctor almost twenty years previously, and the habit of actually looking at his patients, rather than letting a computer system do it for him, died hard. He still thought of them as patients, though he was never allowed to actually treat them.

  In the early days, when he had first begun working in the building, he had been puzzled both by the exceptionally high salary he was paid for such a simple task, and by the raft of secrecy forms and non-disclosure agreements he had been required to sign. Once he had deduced the reality of the operation, he understood the reason for both.

  These days, he just took the money and tried not to think too much about what he was doing. Sometimes that was difficult, especially when he found himself actually looking at the faces of the subjects, rather than just at the monitoring equipment. That personalized the whole thing, and it was that which gave him the sleepless nights that he’d come to dread.

  As he looked down through the clear glass faceplate at the still, peaceful face surrounded by a halo of ash-blonde hair, he knew without any doubt that tonight the nightmares would come again. He glanced once at her tag number – 73418 – and walked slowly back to his office.

  Beaver Creek, Western Montana

  ‘They had all these?’ Hunter asked, almost to himself. He was looking at the identity cards Reilly had liberated from the two intruders he had killed.

  ‘Yup,’ Reilly said, sliding a chipped mug across the desk towards Hunter and sitting down. ‘Wilson – or whatever the hell his real name was – claimed they was all the real thing.’

  Hunter picked up the mug, took a sip of the coffee, and nodded. ‘They certainly look genuine to me.’ He leaned back and looked across at the sheriff. ‘Wilson said we’d got involved with a classified project. Did he say what?’

  ‘Nope,’ Reilly shook his head. ‘He said it was called “Roland Oliver”, and was run by some outfit down in Nevada, but that was about all. I got the feelin’ he knew more than he was tellin’, but I don’t think he knew more than he needed to, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘Yes – need to know. It’s standard procedure in most government agencies. Never tell anyone more than the absolute minimum they need to know to do their job.’

  Hunter spread the ID cards out on the desk in front of him and looked down at them for a couple of minutes.

  ‘I don’t know what the hell this one is,’ he said, picking up a dark blue and white card. The logo in the top left hand corner was the omega, the Greek letter ‘Ω’: to the right was a name – in this case ‘John Wilson’ – and below that a small and indistinct photograph of the
dead man. On the bottom left of the card, directly below the logo, was a large number thirteen. The card was blank on the reverse, apart from a black strip across the centre.

  ‘This looks like a machine-readable card,’ Hunter said. ‘You know, like your bank card for an ATM machine. I’ve never seen anything like it before, though.’

  ‘Me neither,’ Reilly said. ‘They both had them. The only difference on the other one is the name and the number. That says “Mike Rogers” and the number’s eighteen.’

  ‘The question,’ Hunter said, putting the card back on the desk, ‘is where do we go from here?’

  Reilly shrugged his ample shoulders. ‘The way I see it, we only got one choice. We gotta find the clean-up team, and they’ll lead us straight to Agent Kaufmann.’

  Hunter shook his head. ‘That’s going to be difficult,’ he said. ‘How do we find them? We can’t put out an APB to trace their car, because I don’t even know the model or colour, let alone the registration. I think it was a Buick, but even then I could have been mistaken. We don’t know where they’ve taken Christy-Lee, or why, so we can’t intercept them. We could go back to Helena and wait for them to break in through my apartment door, but that could take hours, or maybe even days.’

  ‘OK,’ Reilly said. ‘So what do we do?’

  Hunter smiled for the first time since he’d walked into Reilly’s office. ‘We don’t try to find the people carrying out the orders,’ he said. ‘We go and talk to the people that are giving the orders.’

  Highway US91/Interstate 15, Western Montana

  Harris took the off-ramp into the rest area just south of the Dillon interchange, and slotted the Buick into a space at one side of the parking area. As he switched off the engine, Morgan turned round and lifted the edge of the blanket covering Christy-Lee’s body on the rear seat. Her breathing was deep and regular, and when Morgan lifted her left eyelid he saw that the pupil was still fully dilated.