by James Thayer
The Accord came to a stop on the gravel shoulder. The trooper pulled up the patrol car forty feet behind the Russian's vehicle, then yanked back on the emergency brake. Bowen was breathing quickly. He silently ran down the procedure for arresting an armed and dangerous suspect. He unsnapped the holster strap over the hammer of his .357 magnum, a Colt Trooper. He opened the door and pulled out the revolver. He crouched behind his open door, the weapon in both hands and braced against the windshield pillar. Christ, he had forgotten his hat on the passenger seat.
His voice was more strident than he would have wished. "Put both hands out your window. Now." Bowen concentrated on the Russian. He would worry about the passenger later.
The window rolled down and both hands came out, fingers spread wide. Bowen could make out the green baseball cap above blond hair. The bile of fear rose in the trooper's throat. The procedure was to immediately control the situation and put fear into the arrestee. He barked, "With one hand, open the door using the outside handle. Do it now."
The Russian's left hand lowered to the Accord's exterior handle. The door cracked open.
Bowen's hand was shaking, and he could see his Colt's barrel wiggle back and forth. He breathed deeply to steady himself, then called, "Now keep both hands in my sight and step out of the car. Do it slowly."
The Accord's door pushed open. The Russian rose from the car, moving with a fluid confidence that was evident to Bowen in even those few seconds. And Trusov rose and rose. He seemed enormous, with a massive chest and a head cut from stone. He filled the road. His face was bony and hard and expressionless, as cold as a carving. He stood motionless next to the Accord's door. The passenger was staring out the Accord's back window, but Bowen could not risk glancing at him.
Trooper Bowen suddenly realized that in climbing out of the car Trusov had put his left hand back into the door. The Russian stood there with one hand not showing.
"Pull your other hand out of the car," Bowen yelled in his best voice. "Do it now."
The Russian remained still. He seemed to be calmly and unhurriedly studying the lawman. Bowen flushed with fear, and the fear played games with him. He heard a clock ticking away, centered in his head behind his eyes, counting down his last seconds on this earth. His life would end on a desolate road.
Nikolai Trusov spoke slowly. "Get back into your car and you will live."
The truth of the words seemed blinding, and struck Trooper Bowen with the force of Biblical revelation. Entirely at odds with the apparent situation—Bowen was holding a fearsome weapon on an unarmed man standing forty feet away—the Russian's warning offered the miraculous hope that Bowen's newborn daughter would not lose her father this day. The clock behind his eyes stopped its ominous ticking.
Moving slowly to make his intentions clear, Trooper Bowen lifted his Colt from the door frame and smoothly re-entered his car. He lowered the weapon to the passenger seat near his hat, turned the ignition, and performed a U-turn on the road. The patrol car picked up speed as it headed east. In Bowen's rearview mirror, the Russian slipped back into the Accord. Bowen lost sight of the stolen car as the road ducked behind a hill.
The trooper reached for the photo of his daughter. He pressed it back onto the dashboard. Then he brought up his radio, about to report that the Russian had somehow shaken him. He smiled. Life offers few clear choices but it had just then. Bowen had made the correct one. His wife and daughter would see him again at the end of his shift.
"I usually don't eat things I can't lift." Adrian Gray poked her dinner.
Baked potatoes filled their plates, hanging over the edges. They had been opened and filled with spiced meat, cheese, olives, sour cream, and topped with a sprinkling of chopped chives. Steam still rose from them. Potatoes were the specialty of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms Saloon. The owner, Ray Miller, hovered behind the bar wearing an expectant smile, waiting for Gray and his guests to begin their meal so he could enjoy the gratification on their faces. He served the best potatoes in the Sawtooths and he knew it.
Coates didn't disappoint Miller. The detective took his first bite, then began an insistent shoveling from plate to mouth. Ray Miller's smile widened. His potatoes never failed.
The detective mumbled, "Don't get between me and this potato. It'd be too dangerous."
Adrian lifted a measure of potato. As always with the first bite of anything, she touched it quickly with her tongue before putting it into her mouth. Gray stirred in his seat. She chewed a moment, then beamed at Ray Miller, who seemed to grow three or four inches with the smile. When Gray had entered the saloon with Adrian Wade, Miller had gleefully whispered to him, "And to think I worried about you." Miller had been only slightly dampened when Pete Coates followed them. Adrian's coat hung on the back of her chair. Pete Coates was wearing a pea coat over a plaid shirt, and jeans above hiking boots. Gray had loaned him the outfit, which had belong to Gray's father. The clothes were stretched to their limit over Coates's bulk.
The detective said, "Chief Durant was as good as his word. Hobart is crawling with sheriffs' deputies and State Patrol, even some police personnel from Boise and Twin Falls. I've got their duty rosters ready. And the FBI will start arriving soon. Flights into Hailey will be full of them."
Gray cut into his potato. He had eaten dozens and dozens of Miller's famous potatoes over the years.
"Adrian, you're all set up?" Coates asked around a mouthful of potato.
"All in one corner of Owen's living room. I've got the communication capacity of the Manhattan FBI office. I'm already talking with General Kulikov and Colonel Rokossosky. And it's easier to get hold of them in Moscow from Idaho than if I were in Moscow. The telephone system there is that unreliable."
Ray Miller held up the telephone behind the counter. He called, "Detective Coates, it's for you."
Coates dropped his napkin on his seat and walked to the bar.
Gray said quietly, "I suppose you've mentioned to Pete about my ninety-seventh shot."
"He's your best friend, isn't he? He should know."
"My best friend?" Gray laughed. "I haven't thought in those terms since I was in grade school."
"Well, then you can be the last to realize it. Of course I told him, because he's your friend and because he's trying to figure out what's going on. Do you mind?"
Gray shook his head noncommittally.
Coates returned and said bleakly, "Nikolai Trusov was spotted in Butte by a policeman there an hour ago. Trusov was driving a pickup truck, a red Dodge Ram, heading the opposite direction as the cop. He had a passenger with him."
"The policeman is positive it was Trusov?"
"No question. He yanked his patrol car around and tried to give pursuit but the pickup disappeared. He alerted his department and the Montana Highway Patrol. They found the truck in the western outskirts of Butte, abandoned. They can't find Trusov anywhere, and speculate he has found another vehicle and is continuing west." Coates lifted his beer glass. "I'd like to know how Trusov determined you are in Hobart, which it sure looks like he has figured out, coming in a beeline here."
"Do you want to tell him?" Adrian asked, bringing her gaze around to Gray.
"Tell him what?"
"How Nikolai Trusov knows where you are."
"You tell me," Gray challenged.
Adrian said, "You left him a message, Owen."
The detective stared at Gray.
She went on. "I called your home telephone number in Brooklyn. On your recorder is the message 'No one is home right now. If you are looking for Owen Gray, he is at his father's place on Black Bear Creek near Hobart, Idaho.'"
"Son of a bitch." Pete Coates's voice rose and he pointed his fork at Gray. "You guessed Trusov would call your number, and you've deliberately told him where you are."
Gray was silent.
Coates fairly shouted, "Owen, you are intentionally setting up a duel between you and Trusov, is that it?"
Again Gray said nothing.
Coates put down
his fork. "Trusov wants you to meet him in the field, and you've decided to oblige him. Am I right?"
"I came to Idaho," Gray said lamely. "If he is following me, so be it."
"Owen, this isn't the goddamn OK Corral. Nikolai Trusov is a killer, and he is superb at it. And now you've decided to play a game with him, to go mano a mano with him? I thought you and I were working for the same thing, but I guess we no longer are."
"I guess not," Gray said quietly.
"I ought to throw you in jail for your own protection.' Coates's voice was lower. He was settling down. He lifted his beer. "Goddamnit."
"Pete, you might be the most skilled detective at the NYPD," Gray said, "but I don't believe you'll be able to stop Nikolai Trusov before he finds me."
PART THREE
MYSTICAL JEWELS
Sometimes the fish devour the ants, and sometimes the ants devour the fish.
—Vietnamese proverb
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Few entered Idaho's Big Wood River Valley unnoticed and unremarked.
Big Ed Gatwick cruised in from Lewiston on his 1950 Harley Panhead. The motorcycle's frame-off restoration had taken him two years, and he had installed the best: S&S rods and pistons, Sifton lifters and cam, and a Screaming Eagle carb. The fenders and frame were painted black-cherry pearl, and everything else was either black leather or gleaming chrome. Big Ed blew through Hailey and headed north toward Ketchum and Hobart in a reclining position, his gloved hands on the handlebars above the Springer fork, his black boots high on rests, and his bulk low in the curved seat. Seventy-four cubic inches filled the valley with an echoing rumble, a throbbing balls-grabbing pulse that for Big Ed Gatwick was proof God existed, for only He could have created such a sound, with apologies to the Harley Davidson Company.
Gatwick's club was the Lewiston Death Deacons, and he was leading six Deacons to the Galena Lodge near Galena Summit, north of Hobart. Going to do some drinking, toking, joking, bust a head or two, it was all on the agenda. Once in a while he and the others would push around an overwhelmed small-town sheriff, and you couldn't have more fun than that. The club liked to show up in some jerkwater town unannounced and uninvited, party hard, then clear out before the law could rally its forces. The biker wore a black leather jacket with the Deacons' colors, a hooded grim reaper carrying a scythe. Gatwick's gray beard was blown over his shoulder by the rush of wind. He wore a pill helmet, and on his nose were green-tinted granny glasses.
In Gatwick's rearview mirror—a glass sliver put there only to appease hard-ass state patrolmen—Jig Lawrence piloted his Harley. The others trailed behind, weaving side to side, filling the highway and turning some heads, and that's what it was all about.
Gatwick rounded a corner and squinted through the sunglasses. A cop car was ahead on the side of the road, and some orange barricades. Gatwick slowed the Harley, drawing near to the roadblock. A copse of pine trees bordered the highway, where a dirt road trailed away into the hills. The cop was an old gummer, his belly over his ammo belt and jowls over his shirt collar. A soft touch, looked like. The biker squeezed the brake. A lone old man wearing a gun, and all the hicks in this valley depending on him for law and order. Gatwick laughed as he brought the Harley to a stop in front of the cop.
"Everything's legal, Officer." The biker called, grinning contemptuously. He revved the engine once for punctuation.
Roy Durant could move faster than he looked. He took three steps and pressed the kill button on the Harley's handlebar. The motorcycle sputtered and died.
Big Ed rose over his seat. "Hey, you got no right—"
Jig Lawrence pulled up next to Gatwick. Then the others came, roaring their engines, a threatening, demanding sound, and they circled the police chief.
Durant held out his hand to Gatwick. "Your license, quick."
Big Ed insolently leaned back on his seat and was about to say something when the air was split with a hammering bellow that drowned out the motorcycles, a gut-thumping percussion that made the bikes and their riders seem puny and irrelevant, drowned in the blare.
Gatwick's head jerked to the sound.
"Sorry," Idaho National Guard Sergeant Ralph Neal yelled, smiling. "Just clearing my barrel."
The sergeant's fists were gripping the handles of an M2 heavy machine gun pintle-mounted on the back of a hummer. His thumb was on the butterfly trigger. The 100-round disintegrating-link shell belt rose from the sergeant's feet to enter the breech, and was still swaying. Slight wisps of gray smoke rose from the barrel as bits and pieces of a pine tree drifted to the ground. The sergeant's driver, Private John Goode, also grinned malevolently, the stock of an M16 resting against his thigh, the barrel poking above the windshield. Arrayed in the trees behind the jeep were a dozen other members of the Guard, all dressed in desert camouflage, all on loan to Pete Coates. They had been assigned to help man the checkpoint. A troop truck was parked farther into the trees.
Big Ed swallowed so hard his Adam's apple bounced against his leather jacket's lapel. He said nothing. It took only a moment for Chief Durant to look at each Deacon's license and stare into each face, matching it with the features of the Russian he had memorized. The Deacons were silent and docile, refusing to meet Durant's gaze.
Then Big Ed Gatwick kicked his Harley into life, leaned it over to turn south, and sped away, back down the road he had just come up. Jig Lawrence and the rest of the Deacons followed, a swift and ignoble retreat.
Chief Durant gave the sergeant a thumbs-up and hollered gleefully, "That's about as much fun as this old man is ever going to have."
This was Elsa MacIntire's fifteenth round-trip from Missoula to Jackpot, and her right arm ached as it always did. In fact, everything ached on her right side: knuckles, wrist, elbow, shoulder, even her hip. She once figured that between the time the bus dropped her group off in Jackpot at five in the afternoon until she reboarded the vehicle at nine the next morning, she pulled a slot machine handle over five thousand times, and that included a slight pause every ten minutes to light a new cigarette. She stood at the machine like a sentry at her post, steady and resolute, unfailing in her duty to drop another quarter into the slot the instant the wheels stopped. Her gaze was usually on the middle distance, the cigarette smoke a veil in front of her face. She rarely bothered to look at the bars, bells, and fruit on the wheels, because the spinning red light on top of the machine would announce a win, and she would be rewarded with the nurturing sound of quarters dumping into the payout cup.
Slumped in her bus seat, Elsa MacIntire was exhausted. She came once every other month to the tiny gambling town on the Idaho–Nevada border. On the run home she was always five hundred dollars poorer, she always smelled like an old ashtray, and her right arm always pumped pain into the rest of her. She loved it. At seventy-three years of age, Elsa figured she had done everything worth doing, had had all the fun allowed a person in one life, and these coach trips to Jackpot were an extra she allowed herself, and she would continue to make them as long as her right arm could yank the handle. She didn't mind the money she lost each trip, because the smidgen of character her trollop of a daughter possessed would not be improved in any way by inheriting her money.
The bus was filled with elderly Missoula women. They had an informal club, with its nexus the bus trip to and from their Montana homes. On the way to Jackpot they laughed and told stories and gossiped. On the way back they were quiet, utterly worn out, having stayed awake the entire night to pull the arms. Elsa napped on and off, but she tried to remain awake as the bus passed through the lovely Big Wood River Valley, from Ketchum on north over the Galena Pass. The views of mountains and the river refreshed her, made her feel as if she had taken a bath.
She was hungry, having had no time to eat while playing the slots. She always packed four sandwiches, saving two for the road home. She pulled a roast beef sandwich from her large handbag and unwrapped it. The bus unexpectedly began to slow. She raised herself to her full height in the seat to peer forw
ard over the horizon of blue-gray hair. There was nothing to be seen, so Elsa bit into her sandwich.
The door hissed and a German shepherd climbed into the bus. Behind the dog was a large man wearing a black windbreaker with "FBI" imprinted on its front. A second FBI agent, this one carrying a rifle, followed them up the stairs into the bus. Elsa MacIntire didn't know a rifle from a shotgun, and certainly didn't know that the FBI agent's weapon was a Valmet assault rifle.
The agent spoke for a few seconds with the driver, then announced to the passengers, "The FBI will be conducting a search of this vehicle, looking for a fugitive. The dog will be searching by scent."
One of Elsa's friends shouted, "How's the dog know what the fugitive smells like?"
The handler replied, "We've got a few of his shirts. Found them in his hotel room. It's faster for the dog to vet all of you than for us looking at each ID and face."
"Especially our old wrinkled faces," a passenger cracked.
The agent smiled at the joke. The German shepherd slowly led him down the narrow aisle. The dog's head methodically turned left and right, sniffing at sleeves and dresses and purses. A few of the ladies petted its tan and black flanks as it passed. The German shepherd seemed happy in its work.
When the dog reached Elsa MacIntire, she asked, "Does he like roast beef?"
The FBI agent grinned again. "He's been trained not to eat while he's on duty. And he won't take food from strangers."
Elsa replied, "There's not a dog alive who'll turn down roast beef."
The agent's voice was condescendingly polite. "Go ahead and try. His name is Dooley. He won't even sniff at it."
She opened her sandwich and pulled out the roast beef, three palm-sized slices of Grade A with no fat at the edges. Dooley's ears lifted, and he squared his grand head fully to the old lady. The agent laughed confidently.
"Here you go, poochie." Elsa held out the meat.
The dog instantly grabbed the meat with its teeth, but carefully so as not to catch Elsa's fingers in its gleaming white fangs. Dooley ecstatically gulped the beef down and leaned forward on the leash for more.