by Steven James
Solstice calculated the necessity of having this man on the team. Jobs and resources could always be reallocated.
She waited until all the eyes in the room had gravitated back to her. “The plan has always been to take out the landlines first, then the sat comm, then jam the radio signals. Do you have an alternate proposal?”
“If the base loses communication with the outside world, won’t that alert the Navy something is wrong?”
“I’ve got that covered.”
He eyed her. “I think we should take out the sat comm first.” There was a clear challenge in his voice.
Solstice rubbed her fingers together. She couldn’t have one of her team members questioning her decisions. This man had to go. She stood. “Most people think that when you attack your enemy, you should take out his strongest defenses first.”
“And you’re saying we should attack where he’s weakest?”
“No. We attack where he doesn’t know he’s being attacked. In this storm, people won’t question the landlines going down. It buys us time.”
“I see.” He looked around the room. “One last thing, then. You still haven’t told us when we get our money.”
“Are you concerned that you might not get your share, Roderick?” She stepped toward him, and he watched her insouciantly.
“I’m just trying to get things clarified.” He smiled out of the corner of his mouth, looked around the room. “I mean, we’re talking about a quarter of a million dollars here. I need to let my accountant know when the funds are coming in.”
Solstice positioned herself behind him, placed a hand on his shoulder, and then stroked his cheek with the back of her other hand. “I promise I’ll let your accountant know you were concerned about him.”
“What do you mean ‘that I was concerned about him’?”
“In the moments before you no longer served a useful purpose.”
And then with well-honed quickness and before he could pull away, she grasped his head firmly in both hands and in one swift, smooth motion, snapped his neck as easily as if she were unscrewing a bottle cap.
She let go of his head, and it landed with a dull thud onto the table. “It looks like the rest of you just received a raise.”
She tapped the remote control, turned off the hologram. “Tempest, Eclipse, Typhoon, get your skis. I want those telephone lines down. The rest of us will leave as soon as Donnie has the authentication codes.”
54
12:32 p.m.
I had Lien-hua’s cell on my desk beside my laptop in anticipation of Alexei’s text.
She sat on the bed, typing on her laptop.
We still hadn’t had a chance to sort through everything from last night, but just like my near-drowning incident yesterday, Amber’s visit to my motel room seemed to have become buried, at least for the time being, beneath the forward movement of the case and the pile of new problems that the passage of time inevitably brings.
As for Amber, I’d seen her briefly when I was searching the motel for Alexei and Kayla. I hadn’t said anything and neither had she, but she looked subdued. Sad.
It was hard being this close to Lien-hua and yet feeling so distant from her. However, the fact that she’d chosen to work here in my room while Natasha and Jake had gone to their own respective rooms felt like at least a small reprieve. I had the sense that Lien-hua did believe me when I assured her that nothing had happened last night with Amber, or at least she was willing to look for a reason to trust what I said.
Regarding the ELF site, Windwalker was bringing the trail groomer over, but he’d been at home when Jake called and first had to ride his snowmobile to the sawmill to pick up the groomer before coming here. It didn’t look like he’d arrive for another forty minutes or so.
I went online to see if we had a solution yet to the puzzling snowmobile tracks leading to the open stretch of water on Tomahawk Lake.
Lately, I’d been dabbling with the use of wiki-based approaches to gathering nonsensitive case information. It seems to me that it’s going to be the next step in the evolution of criminology, and, if I’m right, it’ll revolutionize law-enforcement and intelligence-based policing in the near future.
Rather than do all the research yourself, let the experts and enthusiasts do it.
When I pulled up the site, I saw that not only was it possible to get a Ski-Doo 800 XL to travel over one hundred meters without a rider, apparently it wasn’t that difficult.
Since I’d posted my offer on the website forum for Ski-Doo fanatics at just past 11:30, offering $500 to the first person who could figure out a way to do it and send me a video of the process as well as of the sled traveling the distance, I had six replies.
Within thirty minutes of my posting, a snowmobiler in Marquette, Michigan, had figured out a way to crimp the throttle closed and jam the sleds straight by altering the support plates and readjusting the spindle calibration to the skis. On his video, the Ski-Doo went nearly two hundred meters, and I figured that on a smooth lake and without obstructions, it would have traveled in a relatively straight line pretty much until it ran out of gas.
Five other solutions from five other Ski-Doo lovers followed.
If, within one hour, six people could figure out a way to keep the snowmobile straight just in the hopes of earning $500, certainly a group of eco-terrorists framing someone for murder could come up with a way as well.
My friend Ralph was the head of NCAVC, so I sent him an invoice for $500 for “consultation fees,” emailed my winner a note of congratulations, thanked the others for participating, removed the posting, and then returned to evaluating the map of our area. I was studying the most likely areas Alexei might be using as his home base-i.e., where he was keeping Kayla-when an email from Angela arrived detailing what we knew about him.
“I’m still investigating Valkyrie,” she wrote at the top of her report. “Looks like some arrows point toward a specialty in communication technology and hacking. That’s about it for now.”
That would fit with Eco-Tech.
I read on: “Nothing on the back trace of the email Chekov sent you, but here’s what Alyssa dug up on him.”
Apparently, Ellory had been right yesterday when he told me that Chekov was a ghost-Prague, Johannesburg, Rome, Hong Kong-Alexei would materialize out of nowhere, do his work, and then disappear. But at least now, thanks to the video surveillance cameras at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, we had a photo of him.
I studied it.
Dark hair, knowing eyes, a haunted intensity about him.
It wasn’t confirmed, but it was believed that he was a former member of the Russian Air Force. According to the dossier Alyssa had worked up, if he was the same man, he’d flown experimental aircraft for twelve years and then began working for the GRU, Russia’s foreign military intelligence directorate, four years ago.
The GRU has always been responsible for many more assassinations than the KGB ever was, so I found the scenario believable. Their psych profile listed him as “of volatile and irregular temperament,” in other words, slightly unstable. He seemed remarkably self-controlled to me so I was a little surprised to see that. But on the other hand, you probably would need to be a little disturbed to be an assassin. He’d disappeared unexpectedly in May after returning from an assignment in Dubai.
I clicked the chat icon at the bottom of the email, and Angela’s picture popped up.
“Did he ever kill women or children?” I typed.
“Not as far as I can see,” came the reply.
“Any affiliations? Accomplices? Causes?”
“He’s a freelancer. Seems to prefer taking care of problems no one else wants to touch. His wife was killed last spring in Moscow. A head shot. Point-blank range. It looks like it might have been another assassin, unless he did it himself. After that he dropped off the radar screen.”
I wondered if his wife’s murder might help explain why he was so insistent that he didn’t kill women or chil
dren.
That is, if he loved her. If he’s ever really loved anyone.
I wrote, “Look closer for any connections he has with law enforcement or with our government. He has a source somewhere.”
“Got it,” she typed. Then, “Lacey’s analyzing the Queen 27:21:9 alphanumeric sequence as well as the phone number you gave me.” Lacey was the name Angela had lovingly given to her computer. To say they were close would be an understatement.
Despite the fact that Lacey was much more qualified to decode the cipher than I was, I found myself analyzing the numbers. All divisible by 3, also, 27 is 6 higher than 21, which is 12 higher than 9-also all divisible by 3.
But what does that mean?
I had no idea. Maybe it was just a random series of numbers.
I trusted that Angela and Lacey would figure it out.
“Thx,” I typed.
At the end of the email, Angela had also included background on the Eco-Tech members whose photos I’d forwarded to her. Ted Rusk had the most extensive hacking experience of the group and had earned a Carnegie Mellon undergrad computer science degree. Other than that, two of the others were ideologues who’d participated in various protests and civil demonstrations, and one, Clifton White, was a felon who, based on his record, might have been working for Eco-Tech as security or maybe as a bodyguard.
After the chat, I recalled my conversation with Alexei and found myself staring into space, thinking of Eco-Tech’s connection, the ROSD hack. After a moment I noticed Lien-hua looking my way. “Yes?” I said.
“Something’s going on in that head of yours.”
“What motivates professional hackers?”
“Professional hackers? Well, the same thing that motivates mountain climbers.”
“Challenge. Wait…” It took me a moment to see where she was going with that. “Maybe telling them it’s unclimbable. Newbies will walk away, but the pros will be more committed than ever to be the first one to scale it.”
“You understand motives better than you like to admit.”
“You must be rubbing off on me.”
She accepted that with a kind nod. “Besides challenge, add in the rewards that come from accomplishing what no one else has. Why do you ask? What are you thinking?”
I tapped my computer knowingly. “There’s more going on here than meets the eye.”
“Really.” There was a friendly touch of sarcasm in her voice. “And let me guess, Captain Cliche-you’re going to find out what it is.”
“Bingo.”
“I think you’ve been reading too many pulp fiction novels.”
“Nope. Thrillers. My favorites are the stories that have a good twist at the end.”
“You mean like when someone who seems innocent for the whole book turns out to be the killer?”
“Sure. Or when everything you thought was true turns out to be an artifice, a giant house of cards.”
“And the truth”-now she gave me a diminutive smile, and it lifted me more than anything else had in the last two days-“was something you never even saw coming.”
“Exactly.”
For a moment I thought of darker twists, those in the other direction, in which innocent people you think will survive don’t, or hope that seemed guaranteed disappears in a final dramatic plunge, but I pushed those thoughts aside.
Lien-hua went back to work but a minute later rested her chin in her hands; it was her turn to be deep in thought. “The Reiser case, Pat. Some of the things Jake told me don’t seem to fit.”
“Those are?”
“If the autopsy is correct, Reiser would have already been dead when the eyewitness said she saw him enter his trailer. The date of the unopened mail in his trailer supports that.” She leaned forward. “But if Basque did kill Reiser because we were getting too close, why linger in the area another day after killing Reiser? Or more specifically, why chance getting caught entering his trailer disguised as Reiser when that’s not even where Reiser was killed?”
“Good point.” I drummed my fingers on the desk for a moment. “Hang on. We’re already assuming too much. We don’t know that Basque killed Reiser and we don’t know if it was Basque at the trailer. In the search for truth, it’s only by chance that you can find the right answers without asking the right-”
“Questions,” she inserted, then quoted directly what I’d been planning to say: “So it’s always better to begin with inquiries rather than assertions.” A slight smile. “Yes, I know.”
“I’ve said that before.”
“Once or twice.” She stood, paced toward the window. “Okay, let’s back up for a minute. Is it possible that Reiser wasn’t even Basque’s partner at all, that he was set up for the crimes from the beginning? After all, he was a drifter and an ex-con, the perfect kind of person to lay blame on for a series of crimes like this. He lived in half a dozen different places while those crimes were occurring.”
“No,” I said, “that doesn’t work. Last summer his DNA was matched to that found at four of the original Basque crime scenes fourteen years ago. That’s a long time to sustain framing someone.”
“But the very thing that makes that unlikely also makes it unlikely that Reiser has been Basque’s accomplice all along.”
I looked at her curiously. “Why’s that?”
“Time, Pat. Fourteen years? Could Reiser really have made it that long without leaving any DNA at any other crime scene? Even if Basque was the dominant partner, serial killers almost never go that long between crimes.”
“You can’t just turn it off,” I reflected. She was right. Of all the hundreds of serial killers I’ve studied over the last fifteen years, unless they were incarcerated, only a handful had ever managed to stop committing crimes for more than a few years. A murder spree with Basque, then thirteen years of good behavior? It didn’t fit. “It would be almost unheard of.”
“Right. So think about it-all those years, no evidence left, and then suddenly he reconnects with Basque-who’s smart and meticulous-and Reiser starts leaving his DNA behind again?”
And now we only find news clippings and news coverage footage of the crimes with Basque? Why? If he was a scrapbooker, why only follow Basque’s crimes?
I let the implications sink in. Out the window I noticed a snowmobile approaching the motel. Two people on it, but at this distance I couldn’t tell who they might be.
“But if Basque has a different partner,” I observed, “it’s unbelievable they would have planted another individual’s DNA fourteen years ago and then picked up where they left off.”
“But fourteen years ago when the state of Wisconsin first prosecuted the case, the DNA hadn’t been identified. Could Basque or his partner have somehow recently switched the lab samples to point to Reiser now?”
“I don’t see how anyone could have done that. I’m more involved with this case than anyone, and even I couldn’t have pulled off something like that.”
She went on, undeterred. “But what if the unidentified DNA was never entered into the court records? Or, even if it was, those were all digitized two years ago; if a person had access to the online case files, she could-”
Her phone vibrated on the desk.
“I’ll get it,” I said. With a small flutter of apprehension I picked it up.
A text: “One hour. Woodborough hospital. Lower level. Come alone.”
The hospital? Why the hospital?
I noticed Lien-hua eyeing me inquisitively. “Who’s it from?”
Beyond her, outside in the storm, I identified Sean and Tessa on the snowmobile. My stepdaughter wore a pink snowmobile suit that must have been Amber’s. Pink was in no way Tessa’s favorite color, and it might have been comical if everything else going on right now wasn’t so serious.
“Pat?” Lien-hua indicated toward the phone. “What’s up?”
“It’s a source who might know something about the Pickron murders,” I said honestly. I had until 1:45 to get to the basement of the Woodborough h
ospital, but the road in front of the motel hadn’t been plowed in hours, and I didn’t have time to wait around for the trail groomer. “I’m sorry, but that’s all I can tell you right now.”
Before she could follow up with another question, I grabbed my coat and left for the lobby to get the thing I would need if I was going to make it to that meeting with Alexei Chekov.
55
I met Sean and Tessa by the front door. Snowmobile helmet off, my stepdaughter’s midnight-black hair swirled endearingly around her shoulders.
Though I was still a little upset that she’d left the Twin Cities against my will, I was relieved to see her, and when she came toward me, I held out my arm to her. “Tessa, I’m so glad you-”
Instead of an embrace, however, she smacked me hard in the arm. Not a friendly nudge at all.
I blinked. “What was that for?”
“Almost getting killed.”
She could really pack a punch. “Keep that in your repertoire in case you need it for some guy sometime.”
She looked at me incredulously. “I’m seriously upset and you’re making light of everything?”
Sean stepped to the other side of the lobby to give us at least a modicum of privacy.
“Listen,” I said to her. “I haven’t seen you all week, and now you just walk in here and-”
“Hang on.” A hand in the air, palm toward me. A teenage girl’s stop sign. “You almost drown, you almost freeze.” Her voice caught. “I have to drive through a complete blizzard…” As she struggled to get through her sentence, I could tell she truly was upset. It hadn’t struck me so much yesterday, but she must have been terrified when she heard that I almost died. She falteringly picked up her thought where she’d left off, “And then everywhere I go, everybody’s cooking animals.”
She unzipped the pink snowmobile suit, and it looked like she was going to comment about that too, but instead her jaw quivered slightly and a wide tear formed in her right eye. I stepped forward, took her in my arms.
“Hey, it’s okay.”
“You seriously cannot die on me.”