02 Avalanche Pass (32 page)

Dent nodded. “She’s our contact with Parker.” He waved a hand in the general direction of Canyon Lodge. “The guy who’s on the loose up there. He’s one of her deputies. What does she want?”

Assuming she was on the phone, he held out a hand for it, but Lawson shook his head. “She’s down at the roadblock. Wants to come on up. That okay with you?”

Dent thought for a second, then nodded consent. “Why not? Could be a handy person to have around.”

Lawson raised the cell to his mouth again. “Bring her up, Connie,” he told his deputy, then snapped the phone closed.

They waited, watching as a sheriff’s department cruiser weaved slowly through the staggered vehicles that were blocking the road below them and headed uphill to the control center. It stopped some twenty yards away and the passenger side door opened. Lee stepped out, blond hair blowing in the wind, long-legged and athletic. Even the heavy sheriff’s department parka couldn’t conceal the fact that she was a very attractive woman.

“How come I got you instead of her?” Dent said quietly to Lawson. The Utah sheriff grinned in consolation.

“Luck of the draw, son.” He stepped forward as Lee approached. “Sheriff Torrens? I’m Cale Lawson, Wasatch County sheriff. This here’s Special Agent Dent Colby, from the FBI.”

Lee shook hands with the two men. Her keen eyes measured them, evaluating them. Lawson was a typical northwest sheriff. An outdoors man, his face tanned and the corners of his eyes creased from years spent behind the wheel of a cruiser looking into the snow and sunglare on the backroads of Utah. Colby was something else. She took in the massive shoulders and chest. He was a powerful-looking
man, not at all the type she’d expect to see as a negotiator. Somehow, Lee thought of negotiators as academics. Colby looked like he’d crush a kidnapper with his bare hands sooner than reason with him. She decided she liked the look of both of them.

“Call me Lee,” she said. “Any further word from my deputy?”

“Spoke to him earlier,” Colby told her. “He’s still safe and he’s doing a great job. He’s a good man.”

“He’s the best,” she said firmly. He looked at her a moment, then nodded.

“I guess he is at that. Let’s get in out of the wind and I’ll fill you in on the latest developments.”

He gestured toward the mess tent that had been set up for the marines. There was hot coffee available there all day. As they headed toward the tent, Lawson noticed a figure hurrying toward them, waving a sheaf of papers in his hand.

“Looks like your buddy from Washington wants to talk,” he said.

Colby halted until Emery reached them. He introduced Lee to the professor. She couldn’t help thinking that Emery looked more like a negotiator than Colby did.

They walked into the mess tent. It was virtually empty at this time of morning, and there were petroleum gas–fueled heaters placed at strategic locations between the tables. Dent Colby chose a spot near one and they sat down.

Quickly, Dent brought Lee and Cale Lawson up to speed on Emery’s theory that the entire scenario was revenge for the top secret Operation Powderburn ten years previously, beginning with the connection between the ransom amount and the money Estevez had lost, then going onto the fact that Carling had probably planned the raid and Pell was most likely the pilot of the F-117.

“So this Estevez has a good reason to hate Carling and the pilot who flew the mission. And they both happen to be here,” she said. Emery nodded.

“You can push it a little further,” he said. “He has a good reason to hate anyone associated with stealth aircraft in general, and he has a whole swag of those people here as well. People who build and test them.”

“How’s that, Mr. Emery?” Sheriff Lawson asked. Emery glanced quickly at him.

“That’s why Carling is here. For the past five years or so, he’s organized an annual seminar up here, with representatives from the aerospace industry. They talk some business and tie it in with a ski vacation. This year, they’ve been finalizing contract details and specifications for the next generation stealth bomber.”

“One question,” Lee said. “How would this Estevez have found out about Carling’s involvement with Powderburn?”

Emery smiled at her. “With enough time, money and computer power, you can find out most things. That’s the beauty of the computer age—nothing ever stays completely secret. Of course, all the evidence that points to Carling’s role is circumstantial. But it’s pretty compelling and you can find it if you look hard enough.”

“As you did,” Colby said, and Emery glanced quickly at him.

“Precisely.” He tapped the sheaf of papers he had laid on the mess table. “Now, speaking about information, I’ve got something more for you. I think we have a reasonably good take on our friend Roger,” he said and turned the first page over. Dent looked at the face staring off the page at him. It fitted the description Jesse had given them—nondescript in every way except for the eyes—a piercing, intense blue.

“Raymond Kavel,” he read softly, seeing the name under the photo. Emery nodded.

“Or Roger Kormann. The initials are the same. Sometimes makes life easier if you spend a lot of time under assumed names. He’s the closest match to any of the ones the computer threw up at us.”

“What do we know about him?” Cale Lawson chipped in. Emery’s face showed a trace of chagrin.

“Not a lot. But that goes with this territory. He was born in Rhodesia. He’s around thirty-eight or thirty-nine and served in the Rhodesian army before Mugabe and his thugs took over. Kavel got out at the last moment and spent a few years in South Africa—he got himself a commission in their army quickly enough. Then he drifted into the mercenary business. The Congo, Angola, even Eritrea—the usual round. Not a lot of detail but there were rumors
that he was involved in the Sierra Leone war a couple of years back. Nothing definite, mind you. People like him try to keep their names out of the headlines.

“Again, unconfirmed reports placed him in Fiji during the rebellion there. Some of the white expatriates, Australians and New Zealanders, were offered the services of a ‘professional protection force’ and our boy Raymond may well have been at the head of it.”

Colby held up a finger to stop Emery’s flow, thought for a moment and then said: “Let’s cut to the chase here, Truscott. This guy doesn’t sound like a terrorist.”

Emery shook his head definitely. “Nor a radical. He’s a mercenary straight and simple. And, unlike a lot of mercenaries, he doesn’t even have a basic code of honor or sense of loyalty to one side or another. He’s strictly a pro. He’ll work for anyone if the money’s right.”

“Okay,” Emery continued. “So here’s what we’ve got. We have a hostage situation up there where the kidnappers are demanding a ransom and the release of Irish terrorists. Yet we know their leader isn’t a terrorist, doesn’t have any political connections and is a long way from being a suicidal radical. You’ve said that something rings false in the way he’s been behaving, Dent.”

Colby shrugged. “It seems a little too pat,” he said. Emery nodded agreement as he went on. “He’s given you a deadline of next Sunday. Yet your friend, Parker,” he glanced at Lee, “has told us that something is going to happen on Friday.”

Lawson looked up at that. Like Lee, he was hearing this information for the first time. “Friday? What’s supposed to happen Friday?” he asked quickly. Emery shrugged.

“We don’t know. This guy Kavel, or Kormann as he’s calling himself, was overheard saying ‘Friday’s the day.’”

“He also said something about George playing his part… or ‘if George is on time,’” Colby added.

“My guess is—” Emery paused momentarily, as if unwilling to commit himself fully, then plunged on—“that Kormann is working for Estevez. He’s been hired to kill the hostages, including the Carling group who are the real targets. I think he’s set us up with this
elaborate ransom plan for Sunday when in reality he’s planning to blow those charges on Friday, and get the hell out of Dodge before we realize what’s happened.”

There was a long pause. Dent finally broke it. “You think he’ll blow the charges with his own men still there?” he asked, and Emery nodded.

“It’d be too hard to get them out. I think he’s planning to double cross them. He’ll blow those charges and bring the mountain down on the hostages and his own men, then get out. Maybe he’s got a chopper coming in low over the back country. The most likely time would be in darkness and the fact that there’s bad weather forecasted for Friday night only makes it seem more likely. The whole thing will look like a terrible accident—as if the kidnappers suddenly lost it and blew the charges. It’s just the sort of thing we all fear in a hostage situation. The media will go mad with it, which will suit Estevez’s purposes. He wants a circus like this. And we could never prove any different. Hell,” he added as they considered his words, “we wouldn’t know any different if it weren’t for your guy up there, Sheriff Torrens.”

“But how will he collect the ransom?” Lawson asked and Emery shook his head impatiently.

“He doesn’t give a damn about the ransom! The ransom was designed to get our attention, with the amount carefully selected as a clue to tell us what this is all about. It’s Estevez telling us,
You pissed me off. Now I’m returning the favor
. But of course, he’s doing it in such a way that we can never prove his involvement. We’ll know it but we can never accuse him without appearing to be paranoid.”

He paused and sat back, spreading his arms in a questioning gesture. “So tell me,” he said, “am I crazy or does this make any sense at all?”

Lee hesitated before speaking. She was a new arrival here and things seemed to be moving a little fast. What the smooth-shaven professor was saying was outlandish in the extreme. But all too often, Lee knew, outlandish was the way things turned out. Plus there was one other small item that Emery seemed to be unaware of—one that added another small piece of credibility to his theory.

“Have you given any thought to who this George might be?” she said, and Emery shrugged.

“That I can’t even guess at. Maybe he’s the chopper pilot who’s going to bring Kormann out.”

He stopped as he realized the Routt County sheriff was shaking her head.

“You said that bad weather Friday night would help this guy get out,” she said. “Well, that’s George’s role. George isn’t a pilot. George isn’t even a person. It’s the typhoon in the North Pacific that’s caused the weather patterns we’ll be getting for the next four days.”

Suddenly, thought Dent Colby, Emery’s wild-sounding scenario was starting to look all too plausible.

T
his time there had been no attempt at subterfuge, no time to try to disguise the fact that the president was meeting with his principal security advisers. If the press got hold of it, Benjamin thought, that was just too bad.

An outline of Truscott Emery’s scenario had been circulated to all present. Now, as President Gorton paced the room, he appealed to them to give him some reason to reject Emery’s findings.

“It’s too fantastic,” he said, a note of frustration obvious in his voice. “It’s all circumstantial. I’ve had Terence digging back through the records and there’s no solid connection between Carling and this Operation… Powderburn. There’s no record of the operation that he can find. It could have happened and Carling could have been involved, but that doesn’t prove he was. It’s all conjecture. There’s not one solid piece of evidence here to sustain his idea.”

Years ago, in his capacity as a district prosecutor, Gorton had built and won many a case on circumstantial evidence. He knew how convincing it could be. But, by the same token, he knew that it never provided one hundred percent doubt-free proof. As a prosecutor, it had been his job to dispel reasonable doubt. As the president facing this dilemma, he had to deal in certainties. Too many lives were in the balance.

He turned to Janet Haddenrich. “Have your people found any inkling, any sign at all, that Al Qaeda might be behind this? Is there anything that can link them to it?” If he could find hard facts confirming even one part of the theory, that might make a difference.

Haddenrich shook her head sadly. “I’m sorry, Mr. President. We’ve
heard nothing. Of course, our human resources in the Middle East are virtually nonexistent these days.”

There was a hint of criticism in the last words. Years before, previous administrations had elected to forego human resources in the troubled area and rely largely on electronic resources—satellites, radio intercepts and the like. Haddenrich knew that these were valuable. But nothing did the job like a pair of eyes and ears on the ground, in the middle of things.

Morris Tildeman shook his head as well, forestalling the president’s next question. “We’re hearing nothing from our international sources,” he said.

“What about the Israelis?” Gorton asked. “The goddamned Mossad have agents everywhere, don’t they?”

Tildeman shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “The Israelis aren’t saying anything, Mr. President. But they’re pissed with us over the whole West Bank business.”

“Jesus,” said Gorton bitterly, “with friends like that, who needs fucking enemies?”

He began pacing again, his frustration growing. Benjamin exchanged glances with the others around the table. He could see no help there. Emery’s theory was plausible. It was possible. But, as Gorton had said, it was built entirely on circumstantial evidence. The strongest argument in its favor was the fact of the multiplying coincidences involved—there seemed to be just too many here. Yet everyone in the room knew that chance was a strange thing. It was possible for someone to toss a coin ten times in a row and toss ten heads. It was possible for a dice player to roll twenty sevens, one after the other. It was unusual. It was even fantastic when it happened. But it did happen.

Gorton stopped abruptly. “I’m sorry,” he said to the room in general. “I can’t go along with it. There are too many uncertain factors here. Too much theory, not enough fact.”