by Kirk Russell
‘OK, so I’m James Bond with fur and chasing him around, with what goal?’
‘Build a wildlife trafficking case or help bring him down for poaching a black rhino in Africa. If it’s in the right place, the locals will help.’
‘No one will hold him. He’ll pay and go.’
‘I think we can slow him down and if he shoots the wrong animal or traffics in animals and you can prove it, I think we can lean on police in some of these countries to hold him. If he pays and goes and gets tried in absentia, that’s still a score for the good guys. At that point he’s a fugitive. That’s how we’re going to get him. We’ll bleed him out one small cut at a time. But, look, we’ve studied him. Hunting is a passion for Stoval. He’s less careful there and he’ll make mistakes you’ll be able to work with. I’ve got the money, Marquez. I can send you anyplace he hunts or traffics in animals.’
Even after all this time it reached Marquez. He went years looking to the day he caught up with Stoval. He looked down at the wind-riffled water of Mono as Desault continued.
‘I want your expertise, your grit, your ability to get it done. No one else has your resume. I’ll pay for translators, guides, vehicles, equipment, whatever you need. Anywhere the US flag flies you’ve got jurisdiction. In most foreign countries we’ll have to work through the State Department, but once things are in place I can bring agents in to back you up. That’s a sketch but you’ll have all the latitude you want. I’m looking to you to figure it out. I’m your backstop. I’m resource when you need it. I’ll get you new creds and a passport, and you’ll travel on behalf of the US Department of Justice. You’ll go anywhere in the world you think it’s going to help us take him down.’
‘You’ve said that. I get it. I’m just wondering if it could work.’
‘Look, I’ve got people trying to unravel bank accounts, people tracing the arms trading, drugs, counterfeiting, money laundering, you name it. I’ve got an army trying to smoke this guy’s operations and I tell my guys all the time, we are not as bright as Stoval, but we can wear him down.’ His voice rose a notch. ‘We can bring this guy down, Marquez. We can finally bring him down. I’m giving you a chance to go after a major player in the black market for animal parts who killed friends of yours.’
‘No, it’s like you said, you’re looking for a new angle for your task force and when you started looking at poaching, my name made the list.’
Desault shook his head. ‘Shit, I thought you’d jump at this.’ Marquez didn’t answer that and Desault misread his silence.
‘All right, at least I offered it to you.’
‘Hey, thanks for thinking of me.’
That was everything about the Bureau and task forces Marquez didn’t like. Look around for who would be useful and call them up and tell them how lucky they are to be chosen. He poured his coffee into the gray sand and said, ‘I’ll take you back to your car.’
After they crossed the highway and Desault got out, he didn’t shut the passenger door, instead held on to it and leaned in to talk at Marquez.
‘Not everybody agrees with me, Marquez, but I think the same person who got him the Fifty-twos he gave you in the bull ring is still active. They went dormant for a long time and then started up quietly again. In the last year they’ve been very active. Information is going out and some of it is getting sold to the wrong people. There’s so much suspicion my task force isn’t even in the real loop. That’s what this is about. We’re back to the wall with this guy. That’s why we’re looking for any legal means, including animal trafficking and his bullshit trophy hunting. I talked with a couple of US Fish and Wildlife agents before you. I wasn’t eager to dig up the past with you, anymore than you were eager to see me. But, you know what, those guys over at Fish and Wildlife do a lot of administrative stuff. They sit in on too many meetings and I started thinking that if I send one of them after Stoval, I may as well send them out with body bags so they can be mailed home.
‘Then I really began to ask around and that’s when your name kept coming up. So now I’m saying to you, tell me what you need and I’ll get whatever it is you want. You’ll have autonomy. We’ll work together, but you’re the animal guy.’
Marquez reached around and grabbed his logbook. He opened it to a blank page and handed the book to Desault.
‘Give me the best numbers to reach you at and several more days and I’ll call you.’
He watched him write and fold the book shut and lay it on the passenger seat. He leaned in before shutting the door and said, ‘Call my cell. I don’t care what time of day. I keep my phone with me always. I’ll be waiting for your call. I’ve got a feeling about this. We need you.’
‘Enough.’
Desault pointed a finger and said, ‘Call me.’ Then he let the door fall shut.
THIRTY-THREE
Adrian Muller kept his head buzzed and stood about six foot, two hundred pounds with little fat. He ran every other day and cycled or mountain-biked in between. After three tours in Iraq he also flinched at a car door slamming and had a jumpy restlessness that the mountains might eventually take care of. Or it might stay with him for life, hard to say. Marquez knew several Vietnam vets who never got over it.
Muller returned home to Bishop in the Owens Valley within sight of the high peaks of the Sierra Nevada. He’d gone through warden school in Santa Rosa a couple of years ago. He was new to warden work but not to the mountains. He was ambitious, smart, and confident. His wife, Jen, was a minor celebrity as a climber, and moved here for the rock before Muller met her. Eight months ago, barely a year and change into being a warden, Muller had applied to join the SOU and Marquez had met him then. He left it with Muller that he needed to work as an area warden longer first. That was not the answer Muller wanted, so there was some tension this morning as they shook hands.
The Fish and Game office was on West Line Street in a building that looked like a converted motel. A sign on a window read California Department of Fish and Game. Out front was a small lawn, hedges, and a place to park Marquez’s truck. They drove south toward Independence in Muller’s Fish and Game rig.
‘It’s going to be a steep climb up to Anvil Camp,’ Muller said. ‘How are you with altitude?’
‘I’m usually fine.’
‘If you think it’s a problem at all, I don’t mind going up alone.’
Marquez smiled.
‘I think they spent a night there,’ Muller said. ‘I found a backpacker who may have seen them.’
‘You found a backpacker after you talked to me?’
‘I called a friend who works at the ranger station in Lone Pine and she checked permits for me. Three backcountry permits got pulled for Anvil Camp, none in the name you gave me. What is it again?’
‘Maitland. Patrick Maitland.’
‘Right, and there aren’t any in that name, but I’ve got names and numbers on the other backpackers. Do you want them?’
Marquez copied those numbers down as they drove. In Independence they went west toward the mountains on Onion Valley Road until they reached the dirt track that broke off toward the Mount Williamson trailhead. Few peaks in the lower forty-eight were bigger than Williamson. Only Whitney and White Mountain Peak were taller. California bighorn summered above ten thousand feet and in the winter, if mountain lion didn’t force them to stay high, they dropped out of the preserve to around five thousand feet for better grazing. Right now, after the unusually light winter’s snow, they were moving back into the high country. But Muller and Marquez weren’t chasing the bighorn. They shouldered backpacks and hiked toward the stationary radio collars.
The trail followed Symmes Creek, crossing it several times before making a long switchbacking climb up through trees and rock, rising twenty-four hundred feet to a saddle that looked across at the big granite face of Mount Williamson. Many of the chutes had already melted off and the rock was dark. It was the earliest melt Marquez could remember, but he was glad it was as warm as it was this morning and after
the climb up from Symmes Creek, it felt good to sit in the sun and take a break.
They slept at Anvil Camp that night and at first light Muller spread a topo map and marked the route he thought they should follow. Half a mile along that route they stowed their gear and hiked five miles through loose talus and the occasional stand of limber pine, both climbing and descending as they followed sheep trails. On the steep talus slopes they sent loose rock sliding with each footstep as Muller worked off a hand-held GPS unit and they moved toward the coordinates the biologist had given.
When they got closer they smelled the carcasses. It happened just as they crossed under a small outcropping of rock. The wind carried up the mountain and on it the dead. Then it was easy to find them, two male bighorn, both decapitated, and not just horns but the heads gone as well. Not easy to carry a head out from here and Marquez stopped and thought about that. The body of one lay with its hind legs in the flow of a small snowmelt stream, the other in the sparse brush. Coyote and birds had fed on both.
‘Let’s look around for the heads,’ Marquez said.
‘They took them.’
‘Let’s look anyway.’
As they searched they found the radio collars lying side-by-side on a flat piece of granite and as Muller reached to pick one up, Marquez stopped him.
‘Let’s videotape first.’
The collars weren’t thrown down; they were displayed on the rock. Someone making a statement. They videotaped and then collected the collars before returning to the carcasses and studying the bullet wounds that had killed them and decapitating cuts that must have been made with a surgical saw. They were that clean.
Terri Delgado warned of a trophy hunt, but Marquez hadn’t accepted that. These horns sold for fifty to sixty thousand a pair on the black market, yet the fact that the shooter or shooters may have carried the heavy heads out suggested Delgado’s tip was right.
He took a last long look before leaving. Bighorn herds had once roamed much of the west. He remembered reading an account by John Muir of bighorn following each other one after another off a one hundred fifty foot cliff, skipping off tiny ledges to slow their fall, and then bounding away. That they existed or didn’t hardly mattered anymore. That fluidity and grace Muir witnessed had no context in our urban world. At best they that might make an entertaining YouTube to forward to friends. But they once had been common in the American west. But that was before they were ever described as elusive and shy. That was before they had run into us.
On the hike out they pushed hard, Marquez and a young man half his age who was determined to upbraid Marquez for not recommending him for the SOU. They came fast down a trail together in the late afternoon, and if you were coming up you might not have heard them coming, but your instinct would have been to step out of their way as they passed, though going by you they wouldn’t have made much noise.
When they got back to Bishop they had a beer together and Muller said, ‘I had sniper training before my first tour. I learned enough. I’ll hike back up there and try to figure out where they shot from.’
‘Good. Call me if you learn anything.’
Muller nodded and asked, ‘What’s going on with the SOU?’
‘There’s an investigation under way.’
They walked outside, shook hands, and Marquez got in his truck. He lowered the window and asked, ‘If the guide was a local, do you have anyone in mind?’
‘I might.’
They left it there and that night Marquez stayed in Bishop. He checked into the Creekside Best Western and called home before remembering that Katherine was in a meeting in San Francisco until later tonight. He turned the TV in the motel room on but the conversation with Desault weighed on him and he couldn’t relax. The room felt too small.
After clearing his messages he walked out to his truck and drove up the long grade from Bishop to Lake Sabrina where it was empty and the sky bright with stars and the white arch of the Milky Way. He took an old metal thermos cup and a half pint of Scotch over to a rock and sat down. It was cold and his body was tired from the hike. He zipped his coat, turned the collar up, but the cold seemed to come from inside until he poured half an inch and drank it down. Across the valley above the desert floor was the black silhouette of the White Mountains. He looked at the lights of Bishop below and the dark road falling as things that happened eighteen years ago returned to him. He heard the voices of the dead, Brian Hidalgo talking about street food in Saigon and the panic in the last days as the US left. He saw Billy Takado standing drinking a beer at a fish taco stand near the concrete plant in Ensenada, and then flashed on Jim Osiers’ body in the truck and thought about the article on the Zetas and Stoval and Sheryl’s warning.
Desault was right. He was made for this offer, but at what cost? Taking Desault up on the offer would leave Katherine angry and sad, and it was in many ways a betrayal of a future they had many times talked about. He poured another drink into the metal cup. Going after Stoval wasn’t just going after an animal trafficker or illegal trophy hunter. It was wading back into the violence. It meant becoming a Fed again. It meant things he thought he’d left behind forever.
He stood and walked back to the truck. In fifteen minutes he’d be in the motel room. At dawn he’d meet Muller. Tomorrow, he should call Desault and tell him no, but he knew he wouldn’t. The book was still open. It was about honor and a promise made the dead and tonight under these stars in this mountain there was no line between living and dead. He saw their faces so clearly they might as well be here with him.
THIRTY-FOUR
Anderson sounded like a brittle academic lecturer as he said, ‘Stoval prefers to buy, coerce, or use law enforcement officers. He avoids killing law enforcement whenever he can. That’s not to say he won’t. He may have bought or blackmailed his way into the FBI task force.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
That agitated Anderson. He didn’t like that and his voice quickened as he continued.
‘I’ve got other information on my desk this morning that can only be explained by internal leaks. Not at the FBI but within Federal agencies, including my own. I can’t give you specifics but it’s all about Stoval and his influence or possible influence.’
‘You’re making him bigger than life.’
‘He is bigger than life. He’s very dangerous. The cartels did twenty-four billion in business in the US last year. Stoval is continually funding some fraction of that. He has interests to protect. Buying into our law enforcement agencies is a fact of life. The phone intercept with Stoval mentioning you can only be explained that way.’
‘I’m not on the Stoval task force.’
‘Just your name triggered a response. You can read it as respect for you. Maybe you got closer to him years ago than you thought, or it’s because of what happened with Kline.’
‘You told me five years ago that he wanted Kline dead, that he’d had a falling out with him.’
‘John, I’m just trying to give you answers. I do analysis of actions. I keep track of roughly a hundred truly bad guys who are out there operating as we speak. For the right price half of that one hundred would help a terrorist group smuggle nuclear weapons into US cities.’
‘Let’s keep the conversation on Emrahain Stoval.’
There was quiet on the other end and then Anderson said, ‘I have to go. I’m late. I’m sorry.’
‘Before you hang up on me, I want to ask you to send me an updated photo of Stoval. Can you scan me something I can carry?’
‘I don’t know when.’
‘I need it, Kerry. Do this for me.’
After hanging up Marquez didn’t know whether Anderson would send anything or not. He laid his phone down and thought it all over. A few minutes later he took a call from Chief Blakely.
‘I want to read you something I found on the Internet,’ she said. ‘It’s an old LA Times article.’
‘Do you want to forward it to me?’
‘No, I want to read this. It’
ll only take a minute. Here goes, “California is responsible for more than a third of the cannabis harvest in the US.” That’s one stat and then this, “In California, the state’s Campaign Against Marijuana Planting seized nearly one point seven million plants this year – triple the haul in 2005 – with an estimated street value of more than six point seven billion dollars. Based on the seizure rate over the last three years, the study estimates that California grew more than twenty-one million marijuana plants in 2006 – with a production value nearly triple the next closest state, Tennessee.” It also says there were more marijuana plants grown last year than there are citizens in California. This is going to be a continuing problem for wardens. We’re going to need a field policy. I want your help crafting a policy.’
‘You don’t want me to write policy.’
‘We’re going to need an active policy to deal with this.’
‘Probably so.’
But it’s not going to be a role for me. He realized that Blakely was trying to deal with her feelings about Brad’s murder, her own sense of responsibility, and she was also trying to come up with a job for him. She knew what was going to happen.
‘You still there?’ she asked.
‘I’m here.’
‘I want to say something else to you today that I’ve been meaning to say to you for awhile. I want you to stay at Fish and Game. I don’t want you to resign no matter how this comes out. Did the FBI make you an offer?’
‘Yes.’
Blakely had gone up the ladder and he’d stayed a patrol lieutenant, but they understood each other. He’d always felt that. There’d been other chiefs he’d argued with, and then Blakely. He collaborated with her. He trusted her. She’d worked as a warden. She knew the field.
‘But you haven’t accepted, have you?’