‘Oh, shit,’ Templeton said. ‘So now we’ve got a hostage situation as well.’
‘Doubt it,’ Harris said. ‘I don’t think these two are into that. I think they’ll dump her pretty soon, somewhere out in the wilds. But this guy overheard the two perps talking after they’d beaten him, and thanks to him we do know what they’re going to try to do.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘They’re going to try to get into Groom Lake.’
For a moment, Hunter couldn’t make out what the noise was. Then he realized it was the sound of Templeton’s laughter through the radio speaker. He raised the switchblade and gestured to Harris again.
‘Templeton,’ Harris said.
‘Yeah. Good one. Save us all a job if they try that.’ Templeton was still laughing.
Hunter waggled the switchblade at Harris in encouragement.
‘Listen to me,’ Harris hissed into the radio microphone. ‘So far these two guys have taken out two of my team back in Beaver Creek, abducted the Director of the FBI, and flown out of Washington D.C. with every cop, FBI, CIA and Secret Service agent in the place looking for them. What you don’t do is underestimate them. If they say they’re going to get into Groom Lake, I reckon they’ll find a way.’
Hunter smiled bleakly at Harris, and nodded approval.
‘OK,’ Templeton’s voice sounded tired, and entirely unconvinced. ‘So what do we do now?’
‘You and Grant fuel the car and drive up to Rachel. These two guys may be trying to get in by road and that’s the only access to Groom Lake. In any case, we’ll need wheels in the area. They’re driving a dark green Dodge sedan with Montana plates.’
Harris read out a registration number from the piece of paper that Reilly was holding up in front of his face. Reilly was certain they wouldn’t find the car, because it was parked in his garage back at Beaver Creek.
‘OK,’ Templeton said. ‘Got that. What are you and Morgan going to do?’
‘Fly out to Groom Lake,’ Harris said. ‘That’s where the two perps are trying to get to, so we’re going to arrive first and wait for them out there, just in case they do manage to get in.’
Groom Lake Air Force Base, Nevada
The mobile phone rang again in Ketch’s office. It rang six times before the sound penetrated his troubled sleep and dragged him into a sitting position on the camp bed in the corner. Then he stood up, reached the desk in two strides and picked up the phone.
‘Ketch,’ he said, smothering a yawn.
‘Harris.’
‘Harris? And where the fuck have you been?’ Ketch snapped, waking up rapidly.
‘Getting closer to Reilly and Hunter.’ That, Harris thought inconsequentially, was certainly true.
‘OK. What’s the situation?’
‘We just missed them in Vegas, and we believe they’re on they way out to Groom Lake.’
‘They’ll never make it,’ Ketch snapped.
‘I’m not so sure,’ Harris said. ‘They’ve done pretty well so far in getting to places where they shouldn’t be.’
‘Groom Lake is different. You know what the security’s like here.’
‘Yes, but do you want to take a chance?’
There was a brief silence as Ketch mulled this over. ‘No, I guess not. OK, what do you suggest?’
‘Morgan and I should fly out to Groom Lake immediately. That way we’ll be on the spot and we can take these guys out if they do manage to get past the boundary patrols. We’ll have Templeton and Grant on the ground outside the base, in radio contact.’
Ketch looked at the clock on the opposite wall of his office, then swung round and checked the flight schedule on the wall behind his desk.
‘Today’s last scheduled Janet flight leaves Vegas in about ten minutes. I’ll call McCarran and tell them to hold it until you and Morgan arrive.’
‘Right,’ Harris said, ‘we’ll get to McCarran as soon as we can.’
Las Vegas, Nevada
‘You did very well, Harris,’ Hunter said. He’d been holding the mobile phone midway between Harris’s ear and his own, and he’d heard both sides of the conversation. He switched the phone off and put it in the glove box of the Chevrolet.
‘And now I suppose you’re going to kill me anyway?’ Harris said. He knew his usefulness to these two was pretty much at an end, and he had no illusions about what they might do to him.
‘No,’ Hunter said, ‘or at least, not yet. You could still be useful to us. Have you ever visited Groom Lake?’
‘Only once.’ Harris nodded.
‘Tell us about it, and quickly,’ Hunter said.
‘What do you want to know?’
‘We want to get into the building which houses the guy who pulls your strings – the one who runs Roland Oliver. Have you been there?’
‘Yes,’ Harris said. ‘It’s called Rolver Systems, and it’s down at the southern end of the base, on the west side of the main runway. The building looks kind of like a small hangar.’
‘And what’s the name of the man we need to see?’
‘Ketch,’ Harris said. ‘Roger Ketch.’
‘Right. What about security out there? There’ll be armed guards, I guess.’
‘No,’ Harris replied, ‘the whole point about Groom Lake is that it’s in the middle of an area that unauthorized people simply can’t get into, so the actual base security presence is pretty light, except around some of the hangars.’
‘Hangars? What’s in the hangars?’
‘I don’t know,’ Harris said, realizing that as long as he kept talking, he’d stay alive. ‘And I mean I really don’t know, so there’s no point in trying to beat it out of me. Hundreds of people, maybe thousands, work at Groom Lake, but they’re all doing very specific jobs. The whole system is compartmentalized, and workers are not allowed to talk to people from different sections. If you work there and you need to know something, they’ll tell you. If you don’t, they won’t. I didn’t need to know what was in the hangars.’
‘OK. What about the Rolver Systems’ building?’
‘It’s in a secure compound, which means it’s got solid access doors with electric locks and it’s surrounded by a high steel mesh fence which is electrified. To get in, you ring the bell. The guard will tell you to insert your ID card in the slot below the bell, and if the card checks out, the gate will open automatically to let you into the compound. You do the same thing at the building door.’
‘No cameras, retinal scans, voice checks or fingerprint comparisons?’
‘Nope. I told you: the whole area is protected, so there’s no need for high security actually at Groom Lake.’ Harris paused and looked at Hunter. ‘You mind if I ask you something?’
‘You can ask,’ Hunter said.
‘What’s driving you? Ever since Beaver Creek you and Sheriff Reilly have taken on most of American law enforcement, and you’re still doing it. You’re both either real lucky or real good at this kind of thing. And if you’re real good at it, what the hell were you doing counting paperclips in the FBI and why was Reilly working as a sheriff at some no-account town in the middle of Montana?’
‘It’s a bit of both, I suppose,’ Hunter said, ‘but there is one very good reason why we’re still running and we’re still fighting. Somebody we care about was snatched and fed into this programme being run out at Groom Lake.’
‘That’d be Kaufmann, right?’ Harris said, then stopped, realizing what he’d said.
Hunter nodded slowly. ‘I wondered if you’d pick up on that. Yes, Christy-Lee Kaufmann is exactly who I mean. And the fact that you know her name means it was probably you and Morgan who snatched her and organized her transport out here. Do you know what they do to these girls out at Groom Lake?’
Harris nodded. ‘Yup. It’s a medical research program.’
‘Nope,’ Hunter said. ‘It’s a kind of human abattoir. You snatched Christy-Lee Kaufmann and had her put in a box to be shipped out to Nevada and then killed and dismembere
d, for God only knows what reason, and the fact that we think she’s still alive right now is why we’re going to Groom Lake.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ Harris said, his face visibly pale in the dim glow of the Chevrolet’s interior light.
‘Maybe you did, and maybe you didn’t,’ Hunter said, ‘but where I come from, ignorance is no excuse.’
He climbed out of the front seat of the Chevrolet, reached into the back and pulled Harris to his feet. Hunter stood in front of him, and stared straight into his eyes.
‘I won’t say I’m sorry about this, because I’m not. You and your buddies killed the pathologist we summoned to Beaver Creek. You tried to kill Dick here in his home. You sent Christy-Lee to be slaughtered like some kind of animal, and you’ve been doing your best to kill me as well.’
Harris shook his head. ‘I was just doing the job I was paid to do,’ he said.
‘So were the Nazis who ran the concentration camps,’ Hunter said. ‘The only thing you’ve done right, as far as I can see, is that you’ve given us information about Groom Lake that might be useful. Even then, we don’t know if you were just making it up as you went along.’
‘Look, I’ve told you the truth. I’ve told you what I know. As for the rest, it was just business. It wasn’t anything personal,’ Harris said.
‘Neither is this,’ Hunter replied. He lifted the Glock to Harris’s forehead, but it was Reilly who pulled the trigger of Morgan’s Smith and Wesson. The bullet hit the left side of Harris’s head, and exited in a spray of blood and brain matter. Harris tumbled to the ground but was dead before he hit it.
‘Shoulda thought you’d know better than to use an FBI-issue pistol to waste someone, Mr. Hunter,’ Reilly said. ‘Don’t you know nothin’ ’bout forensics?’
Hunter looked down at Harris’s body, then grinned at Reilly as he holstered the Glock.
‘I was just waiting for you to finish the job, Dick,’ he said. ‘I figured that if Harris was standing there looking at me, you’d have a shot that even you couldn’t possibly miss.’
Reilly grunted, carefully unloaded the Smith and Wesson, wiped it for fingerprints, then wrapped it in a shirt taken from his overnight bag.
Hunter dragged Harris’s body to the edge of the parking lot and tumbled it down the shallow incline abutting the tarmac. Then the two men climbed back into the Chevrolet, drove out of the mall parking lot and headed uptown, back towards McCarran. Half a dozen blocks away from the mall, Hunter stopped the car near some grey, plastic garbage bins. He took the shirt with the Smith and Wesson wrapped inside it, checked to see that nobody was taking any interest in what he was doing, opened the lid of one of the bins and pushed it deep down into the garbage. Reilly’s bloodstained shirt went into another garbage bin two blocks further on.
Six minutes later, Hunter drew the Chevrolet to a halt beside the gate guard at the main entrance to McCarran Air Base.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Saturday
McCarran Air Force Base, Las Vegas, Nevada
Hunter pulled the car to a halt but ignored the notice on the front of the guard house and kept the headlights of the Chevrolet switched on. As the guard leaned out of his booth, Hunter wound his window down and passed up the Omega cards he’d taken from the two dead men.
‘We’re Harris and Morgan,’ he said. ‘You should be expecting us, and can you make in snappy – they’re holding a Janet flight for us.’
The guard took his time looking down at the list on his clipboard, but eventually appeared satisfied and handed the cards back to Hunter.
‘Know where the Janet Terminal is?’ he asked.
‘Nope,’ Hunter said, quite truthfully. ‘I’ve never been here before.’
‘OK,’ the guard said, reached into a drawer on the desk in front of him and handed down a simple photocopied map of McCarran Air Base. ‘Just follow the route marked in red,’ he said, pointing at a section of the map with a pencil. ‘I’ll tell the Terminal staff you’re on the base and on your way.’
Las Vegas, Nevada
Templeton pulled the Lincoln into an all-night gas station, stuck the pump nozzle in the tank filler and squeezed the lever. Grant climbed out of the passenger seat and walked slowly round the car, finally stopping next to Templeton.
‘Something on your mind?’
‘Yup,’ Grant said, ‘I dunno, but to me there’s something about all this that doesn’t smell right.’
‘Like what?’
Grant shrugged. ‘Like, well, like Harris and Morgan taking the guy they’d found to the hospital. That sound like Harris to you? I’d have figured he’d just question him and leave him where he was. The most I’d expect him to do is maybe call for a paramedic unit. Harris just ain’t the compassionate type.’
The flow of fuel stopped as the safety valve cut in. Templeton glanced at the figures on the pump, squeezed the lever again to get an extra half gallon into the tank, then replaced the pump nozzle. He bent down and put the cap back on the Lincoln’s fuel tank.
‘No, maybe he isn’t,’ Templeton conceded.
‘And why send us up to Rachel?’ Grant continued. ‘Why would the two perps pick there to start from? I know the access road from Route 375 begins near the town, but they could try to cross the boundary anywhere.’
‘So what do you think?’ Templeton asked, opening his wallet and selecting a credit card to pay for the fuel.
‘I think Harris was telling us what the perps wanted him to tell us, because they were sitting looking at him over the barrels of their pistols. I think we’re being sent out into the desert to get us out of the way, and I think Reilly and Hunter are calling the shots.’
Templeton tapped the credit card on his teeth, then came to a decision. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure I agree with what you’re saying, but it’ll do no harm to check it out. We’ll go take another look at that Lincoln, and see what else we can find at the parking lot. Get on the horn to the Las Vegas PD and put the APB back on Harris’s Chevy.’
McCarran Air Force Base, Las Vegas, Nevada
Reilly called the directions as Hunter drove, as quickly as he could, along the almost deserted network of roads inside McCarran Air Base. Within a matter of minutes, Hunter braked the Chevrolet to a stop outside the Janet Terminal and the two men climbed out.
‘I’ll do the talking,’ Reilly said. ‘Don’t want nobody wondering why a Brit’s on his way out to this here Groom Lake place.’
‘Fine by me,’ Hunter replied.
Reilly was moving easier, thanks to the second bandage Hunter had applied, and there were only two or three small red discolorations on the front of his shirt where blood had seeped through. They were both wearing lightweight jackets, and as long as Reilly kept his zipped up, the stains couldn’t be seen.
Reilly couldn’t carry anything because of the torn muscles on his chest, so Hunter took Reilly’s black leather bag from the Chevrolet. They’d already stopped to check the contents, and had removed all the clothes in favour of Reilly’s choice of hardware. This included half a dozen packages wrapped in brown paper, a long bundle wrapped in a blanket, which contained Reilly’s SPAS-12 shotgun and AR-15 assault rifle, and several boxes of ammunition. Hunter had put in the Smith and Wesson pistol he’d taken from Harris, plus a silencer, the spare magazines he and Morgan had been carrying, the two-way radio from the Chevrolet, and Harris’s mobile phone, both of which were switched off.
A bulky man wearing a dark blue suit was waiting at the terminal entrance, and held up a hand as Reilly and Hunter approached.
‘You Harris and Morgan?’ he demanded.
‘Yup,’ Reilly said, and proffered the two Omega cards.
The man barely glanced at them, just turned and led the way through the building. ‘You got any idea how long we’ve been holding this aircraft for you two?’
Attack, Reilly thought, was usually the best form of defence. ‘Nope,’ he said, ‘but it ain’t our problem. Until about an hour ago, we didn’t eve
n know we was supposed to be on the flight. You got a problem with that, mister, you’d better take it up with Groom Lake, not us.’
The man grunted in disapproval, then pulled open one half of a set of double doors and simply pointed out into the night. Hunter looked down a short flight of steps and across a concrete parking area where a white Boeing 737 with a red horizontal stripe running along the fuselage waited, the starboard engine already running.
‘Guess that’s our ride,’ Reilly muttered, as they walked across to the single set of access stairs just behind the cockpit.
Nine minutes later, the 737 taxied past the holding point, swung off the taxiway and straightened up on the main runway at McCarran. The pilot ran the engines up to full power, released the brakes, and the Boeing lifted smoothly off the ground, then swung northwest for Groom Lake.
Las Vegas, Nevada
Templeton had stopped the Lincoln to fill it with fuel on the northeast outskirts of Las Vegas, and the late-evening traffic was heavy and slow-moving. The diner where Hunter had abandoned the Lincoln was only about fifteen miles from the gas station, but it took them nearly fifty minutes to make it back there.
‘Should I call Ketch?’ Grant asked, as they accelerated away from a set of traffic lights.
‘No, not yet,’ Templeton replied. ‘If we find something at the diner, then we’ll set the wheels in motion. I’m not convinced,’ he added, ‘and even if you’re right, Hunter and Reilly have still got to get into Groom Lake, which they won’t find easy. What I don’t want to do is set a hare running and then have Harris draining all over me when it turns out that he was right and you were wrong. OK?’
‘OK,’ Grant agreed, somewhat grudgingly.
Groom Lake Air Force Base, Nevada
In his office, Roger Ketch had consumed almost a pint of strong black coffee, and was feeling more awake. He sat behind his desk, mentally rehearsing the dressing-down he was going to give Harris when he and Morgan eventually arrived.
Trade-Off Page 29