Helms was debating whether to make the hour-long drive to Shiraldi’s temporary site in Cochiti Lake when she did a slow double take in the rearview mirror. A few hundred yards behind her, a car had briefly pulled out into the far lane, then eased back behind the UPS truck ahead of it instead of passing. She’d seen someone execute the same maneuver a couple of times back on the main highway, but she couldn’t tell if it was the same car.
Helms was driving 60 mph in a 55 mph zone. When she passed the next sign posting the speed limit, she used it as a pretense to slow. By the time she reached the La Cuchara intersection, she’d been passed by the delivery truck and could get a better look at the car that had been behind it. It was a late-model Camaro the same color as the one driven by a plainclothes tribal officer who’d nearly run over a couple reporters back at the reservation while racing to set up a search point for the media vehicles.
“Holy shit,” Helms cursed. Suddenly it all made sense. The way the press conference had ended and the subsequent search—it had to have been because she’d been recognized from her ill-fated visit to the reservation earlier in the week.
“Next time try a better disguise, girlfriend,” Helms chastised herself.
Helms was less than three miles from her apartment but there was no way she was about to lead her pursuer to her front door. Instead, she exited two ramps earlier, putting herself on Camino la Tierra. Moments later, as she’d cloverleafed under the relief route, the Camaro was still tailing her.
Helms had a lightweight Kimber Ultra Carry .45 in her purse but wasn’t inclined to provoke a firefight. Nor did she like her chances of outrunning the Camaro with her four-cylinder Volkswagen. Her best bet, she decided, was to make her way into the city. If she couldn’t shake the Chevy along the crowded side streets, she knew she’d at least cut down on the risk its driver would decide to take a potshot at her.
Taking a quick left onto Buckman Road, Helms headed north, parallel to the relief route she’d just gotten off. Behind her, the Camaro’s driver followed suit but dropped back, letting a couple cars move in between him and her Jetta.
“It’s a little late for lying low, pal,” Helms said, still eyeing Russell Combs in her rearview mirror. “I’m onto you.”
“SHE LIKES TO TALK to herself a lot, I’ll say that much,” Combs told RTPF Captain Tina Brown as he continued to follow Helms’s bugged Jetta along the road leading into Santa Fe. The chief investigatory officer was using a speakerphone attachment clipped to his windshield visor, leaving both hands free on the steering wheel on the chance he would have to make a sudden turn to stay on Helms’s tail. Brown was still back at Franklin Colt’s property and while she hadn’t come out and said it, Combs suspected the captain was having problems with the BIA agent assigned to investigate the shootout.
“She hasn’t called anyone?” Brown asked.
“Negative.”
“Do you think she’s made you?”
“I doubt it,” Combs lied. He suspected Helms had wised up to him back on the relief road, but he didn’t see any need to get on the wrong side of Brown’s foul mood. “I already ran her plate through DMV and have her address, so if you want I can pull back and set up a stakeout. Her place is here in Santa Fe.”
“You can do that later,” Brown told him. “Stay on her for now. If she’s meeting someone and gets out of the car, I want you to be able to at least see who’s in on this with her.”
“Will do,” Combs responded.
“And remember you’re off the home field,” the captain said. “Use lethal force only as an absolute last resort. I don’t need another fire to have to put out.”
“I hear you, Captain.”
“Get back to me as soon as you have something.”
“Of course.”
Once Brown clicked off, Combs glowered out at the world around him, in far less than a pleasant mood himself. He’d known Cecil Farris as well as the other three tribal officers killed during the previous night’s shootout and it weighed on him that they’d wound up as collateral damage in what had become an increasingly desperate effort to conceal the extent to which members of the RTPF, including himself and the captain, had fallen into collusion with the man he knew as Freddy McHale. It infuriated Combs to realize how readily he’d allowed himself be led astray, not only by McHale but also countless others who over the years had tempted him to step outside the law. Succumbing to corruption, after all, had been the last thing on his mind when he’d first joined the department. And yet now here he was, years after accepting what he’d told himself would be a one-time-only bribe, compromised into becoming little more than part of a badged goon squad at the beck and call of Global Holdings Corporation. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
Combs followed Helms past the vast sprawl of Frank S. Ortiz Park to where Buckman Road merged with Camino de las Crucitas. The speed limit dropped to 30 mph, and the officer began to feel as if he were part of a slow parade as he tried to keep three cars back from the Jetta. After passing through a couple of subdivisions, the charade finally came to an end when Helms pulled into a drive-through car wash and fed her credit card to the automated pay caddy. Combs drove past the facility and pulled over to the curb, then glanced back, just in time to see the Jetta roll into the enclosed wash building. There was nothing coming over the bug’s FM frequency in terms of Helms speaking to anyone about her sudden need to clean her car.
“What the hell is she up to?” he wondered.
ONCE THE SPRAY JETS began to noisily pelt the Jetta with soapy water, Helms unclicked her seat belt and leaned across the front passenger seat. The far door had been opened back at the reservation when it had been her turn to be searched and she recalled that the man who was now following her had made a point to tilt the passenger seat forward to get a better look into the back. It had seemed a pointless gesture at the time, as he could have merely glanced through the windows and seen there was nothing in the backseat other than some dry cleaning Helms had picked up on the way to the press conference. The Jetta wobbled in place as mechanical arms dragged a series of rumbling, soft-bristled rollers across the car’s exterior, further masking Helms’s movements as she crawled over the seat to more thoroughly search for the dime-size bug she finally found stuck to the base of the post separating the front door from the back.
Nice try, she thought to herself, prying the small microphone loose and setting it on the dashboard.
She wasn’t finished.
Her trunk had been searched, as well, and once the washing cycle was completed, Helms quietly exited the vehicle and braved the blasts of hot air drying the Jetta from all sides. Squatting behind the car, she ran her hand along the underside of the rear bumper and came across a homing device twice the size of the bug. As with the bug, the backside of the homing transmitter was embedded in a soft, puttylike adhesive. Helms pried the device free, along with the adhesive, then stood, smirking to herself. Behind her, a Jeep Wrangler with a roof rack had pulled up to the payout caddy. Helms ventured out of the washing enclosure, patting down her mussed hair as she approached the Jeep’s driver, a man in his forties wearing a Sante Fe Opera T-shirt. Helms got him to roll down his window and pretended she was lost.
“I’m not sure how to get back to the freeway,” she told the man, nonchalantly placing one hand on the Jeep’s roof. By the time the man had given her directions, Helms had planted the homing device onto one of the roof rack’s brackets.
She thanked the man and hurried back to her car, slipping behind the wheel and quietly drawing the door closed. A green light flashed above the opening that led out of the wash building. Helms drove out and immediately pulled over and parked. Off to her left she could see the Camaro parked by the curb, some fifty yards away. The driver was looking away from her, but Helms suspected he’d probably tilted the side-view mirror to keep her car in sight.
You want to hear something juicy, do you? Leslie thought to herself. I’ve got just the thing.
While she waited for
the Wrangler to go through the car wash, the private eye fished through her purse for both her cell phone and her gun. She slipped the gun in her coat pocket, then punched in the number for her Aunt Marge in Los Alamos. All Helms had to do was ask how the older woman was doing, and Marge launched into an uninterrupted litany of her various physical ailments and her dissatisfaction with the medical attention she was receiving for them. It was the same spiel, more or less, that Helms had been hearing for the past twenty years and she was able to easily tune it out. She doubted that the man eavesdropping would be able to do the same. Hopefully, he was hanging on every word, trying to decipher some possible code Marge was imparting.
When she heard the Jeep going through its drying cycle, Helms quickly wrapped up the call, promising to come visit her aunt sometime soon. She then opened the dashboard’s swing-down ashtray and pressed the cigarette lighter. By the time the lighter popped up, she’d retrieved the bug from the top of the dash. As she’d hoped, its diameter was slightly smaller than the glowing orange tip of the lighter. Holding the bug by its adhesive backing, she pressed it against the lighter and smiled as she heard the popping of blown circuits. The bug gave off a smell of burned plastic as she dumped it in the ashtray.
Once the Wrangler drove past, Helms waved to the driver, then began to follow him. As she’d anticipated, the Camaro was quick to follow suit. After another four blocks, Helms got the opportunity she was looking for and gunned her accelerator to race through the next intersection just as the light was changing to red. Behind her, cross traffic lurched forward, preventing the Camaro from continuing its pursuit. Helms had nearly rear-ended the Jeep but the ploy had worked and she quickly turned down the nearest side street while the Wrangler kept going straight. If the Camaro’s driver relied on the homing device, by the time he caught up and realized he was following the wrong car, Helms would be long gone in the other direction. Just to be safe, she planned to ditch her Jetta at the nearest mall and switch to a rental car. It was an expense she planned to put on the tab she figured she would soon be presenting to the Justice Department agent who’d left his phone number on the cocktail napkin tucked in her wallet. Once she got the other car, she would call the man. Maybe she hadn’t secured any new information from Christopher Shiraldi, but she was hoping that her revelation about being followed from the reservation would count as proof that she was still on the case with the meter running.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Carl Lyons had the rearmost window seat on the Dassault Falcon 7X Barbara Price had secured for his trip from Seattle to New Mexico. One of the fastest private jets on the market, the Falcon was due to reach Santa Fe in less than a half hour. The blond-haired, square-jawed Able Team leader wasn’t the only passenger. To get Lyons in the air as quickly as possible, Price had gone down Hal Brognola’s master list of Seattle businesses the Justice Department had ongoing relationships with and pulled strings to delay the takeoff of the St. Louis–bound Falcon, which belonged to a giant in the software industry. The four sales executives already booked on the flight had been amenable to the delay as well as the detour to New Mexico. They could use the time to fine-tune their presentation to their client.
Lyons dozed off an hour into the flight only to be awakened soon after by a call routed to the custom-installed in-flight telephone nestled in a compartment next to his leather arm-rest. Lyons knew it had to be the Farm calling, and he hoped it was news that Bolan had turned up alive and well.
“No word on that front yet,” Barbara Price informed him once he’d picked up, “but we’re wondering if you can wrangle your way into being dropped in Taos instead of Santa Fe.”
“I can try,” Lyons said. “What’s the latest there?”
“They just found Donny Upshaw’s body.”
Once Price had filled him in on the details, Lyons clicked off and ventured to the front of the cabin. There was no objection to switching his drop-off point, and the head of the sales team passed along instructions to the pilot while Lyons went to the galley and poured himself some coffee. He was still stiff from the beating his body had taken during the Takoma takedown, and between sips he paced the rear of the cabin to loosen up. It wasn’t long before the jet began its descent and the pilot advised all passengers to be buckle up in preparation for landing. Once back in his seat, Lyons peered out the window. As the jet closed in on Taos Municipal Airport, he got a bird’s-eye view of the police activity he would soon be monitoring.
Within a radius of less than two miles, Lyons detected no fewer than eight black-and-white units at three different locations. Two of the cruisers were parked at Alan Orson’s estate, where officers and a forensics team were continuing to investigate the inventor’s murder and the theft of valuables from the converted horse stables. A mile to the north, another two squad cars were parked at the entrance gate where Walter Upshaw had been gunned down. A tow truck was in the process of readying Upshaw’s car for transport to the police impound yard. The rest of the vehicles were at the third site, just up Route 64, where Donny Upshaw’s Buick LeSabre had been found parked beneath a cottonwood less than fifty yards from the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge, a canti-lever truss structure rising more than six hundred feet above the river. Since the bridge’s construction in 1965 several hundred lost souls had chosen to end their lives by plunging over the waist-high railing and, by all appearances, Donny Upshaw had just joined their ranks.
In addition to police cars, an ambulance and a handful of other vehicles were parked on the shoulder on either side of the bridge, which had been temporarily closed. Two small groups of curiosity-seekers were mingling as close as they could get to the crime-scene tape, hoping for a glimpse of the body, which a local Search and Rescue team had climbed down to a few minutes before. The media was on hand, as well, represented by teams from three different camera trucks as well as four news choppers hovering high above the gorge like so many circling vultures. A fifth chopper, belonging to the Taos Police Department, was holding a steady position deeper into the ravine, a cable extended downward from its underbelly to the SRT crew, which was carefully placing Upshaw’s body onto a gurney so that it could be airlifted to the ambulance. Price had told Lyons that a Raven Arms MP-25 found near the body was missing three bullets from its 6-round magazine.
The grim three-site tableau lingered in Lyons’s mind even after the jet had touched down and begun to taxi its way closer to the terminal. From his vantage point he’d gotten a clear idea of how the police would likely view the course of events that had rocked the small tourist town over the past few hours. Everything pointed to Upshaw having killed Orson at the inventor’s estate, then driven up the road to lie in wait for his father before continuing on to the bridge and committing suicide. It would be a hard scenario to dismiss, especially if Donny’s prints were on the gun and an autopsy were to turn up signs of heroin in the man’s bloodstream. The only thing left unexplained was the whereabouts of Orson’s pickup truck and the missing items taken from his workplace. Price had told Lyons that despite the mounting evidence, she and the Farm’s cyberteam were still looking into the possibility that a third party was behind the killings and had framed Donny. If that was the case, Lyons felt they were up against a formidable enemy indeed.
Once the jet came to a stop, Lyons thanked the salesmen and disembarked to the tarmac. As he made his way into the terminal and tracked down the car rental facility where Price had already lined him up a Chevy Impala, Lyons couldn’t shake the image of Upshaw’s body being placed on the gurney. The image left him unsettled, but the discomfort had little to do with the assignment that lay ahead for him. Rather, Lyons was still troubled by the notion that an hour’s drive south of Taos a similar recovery might soon be taking place should it come to light that his longtime friend and colleague Mack Bolan had, like Donny Upshaw, met an untimely end.
Glorieta, New Mexico
“IT’S MY DAY OFF!” Frederik Mikhaylov barked into his cell phone. “None of that is a casino matter, and it has noth
ing to do with the treatment plant, so there’s no reason for me to drive all the way there just to hold hands with you!”
The Russian was on the phone with Charles Stuart, the short-tempered seventy-year-old governor of Rosqui Pueblo. Stuart was up in arms about the previous night’s shootout at Franklin Colt’s place as well as the subsequent encounter involving his tribal police at Healer’s Ravine. The governor had already given Captain Brown a thorough tongue-lashing but was clearly not through venting his displeasure over the negative publicity the reservation was receiving. He’d rung Mikhaylov on his private number just as the Russian was about to leave his quarters at the javelina farm’s converted milk shed to interrogate Franklin Colt. Stuart, of course, assumed the Russian was at his condominium in Santa Fe, only a twenty-minute drive from the reservation.
“If we start to lose customers because of all this, that falls under casino business,” Stuart countered. “I want some help coming up with a way to spin this that doesn’t make us look like Crime Central.”
“Then contact Penbrooks at Public Relations!” Mikhaylov said. “I still say this is none of our concern, but I can tell her to expect your call and offer our full cooperation. That should give you what you want.”
“What I want is this whole mess swept under the rug as quickly as possible so things around here can get back to normal.”
“Trust me, Governor, I know the feeling,” Mikhaylov replied, thinking of his own dire predicament. He softened his tone slightly before he went on, figuring it would be better to defuse Stuart’s wrath than antagonize him further. “Let me do this. I’ll call Penbrooks and tell her to look over the situation with her people, then get back to you with some ideas.”
There was a pause on the line, then Stuart grumbled, “I suppose that might help.”
“She’s a wizard at this,” Mikhaylov assured the governor. “It’s just a matter of putting the focus elsewhere until everything blows over. Spin control, just like you were saying.”
Blood Play (Don Pendleton's Mack Bolan) Page 15