15th Affair (25 page)

THERE WAS A
quick shorthand discussion between Joe and the other men in the team. Routes and a timetable were roughed out. Then the motel room emptied. Knightly and a partner drove out of the lot first. Munder and his wingman took the second car, and Joe and I took the third position out to the Sea to Sky Highway.

I could imagine that this roadway must be gorgeous in daylight, but the empty two-lane highway was unlit, and the impenetrable woods to the left and the steep, treed cliffs rising a hundred feet straight up on our right seemed menacing.

Joe’s phone was in a holder attached to the vents in the dash, and he was in ongoing communication with Knightly. Knightly was also on the phone with the two CIA cars ahead of us, the truck and the sedan that had been following Muller’s convoy from the moment they left her safe house.

Word came down the line that Muller’s three cars had split up. Knightly’s voice crackled over the speaker.

“They made us, goddamn it. We don’t know which god-damned car she’s in.”

New plans were hatched, and Knightly reported to Joe that our team had now also been split, assigned different routes with hopes that someone would locate Alison Muller’s car.

Joe punched coordinates into the GPS and stepped on the gas. The car leapt forward, and Joe drove fearlessly, hugging curves and speeding at eighty through blackness and dark shades of gray.

I was frankly scared out of my mind, watching the needle bounce around the dial as we shot through the wilderness. Joe was gunning it over ninety when our headlights flashed on a sign for Whistler Resort.

Joe spoke over the phone to Knightly. “We’re passing Whistler now. On track to that airfield in Pemberton.”

More conversation ensued, Knightly saying, “I’ve notified the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. If we don’t catch up with her shortly, we’ll see you at the airfield.”

Joe slowed to a steady seventy miles per hour, and when an intersection came up on our right, he whipped around to make the turn too fast. The car fishtailed on the empty roadway, then regained traction, and we headed east and picked up speed. Starlight and a sliver of a crescent moon revealed the ghostly shapes of trees looming alongside the road and a glimpse of the Lillooet River.

Joe glanced at the GPS map, said to me, “Hold on,” and took the turnoff to Airport Road at near sixty.

I
was
holding on, but the Audi’s wheels hit a rut. The steering wheel bucked under Joe’s hands and the car slewed hard to one side, then the other. I may have screamed.

Knightly was on speaker and he was saying, “We’ve lost her.”

The word
her
was just out of his mouth when the connection shattered into squawks and static hissing.

Joe yelled, “Knightly!
Knightly
, can you hear me?”

No, he couldn’t. We had lost our connection with our lead car and had no idea where in the world Alison Muller was.

“Well, this is just perfect,” said Joe.

And then, just ahead of us, another turn branched out under overhead lines. Joe took the turn at way too fast and our tires slid on gravel. The car rocked onto two wheels; then, as before, the tires grabbed and we shot on ahead under an endless, gunmetal-gray sky.

AS WE TURNED
onto the airport road, the Coast Mountains, which had formed a forested and impenetrable wall off to our right, were now dead ahead. In front of us and as far as we could see was flat meadowland, rectangular in shape, like five football fields placed side by side and divided by a ten-foot-wide rut of a road.

As we took that dirt road, our headlights hit a cluster of lightweight aluminum sailplane trailers parked haphazardly up ahead and to our left. Peering into the dark, I could just see a small airplane hangar at the far end of the road and off to the right. I could make out several cars to the right side of that hangar, their headlights illuminating a pair of small, stationary airplanes on a landing strip. The runway appeared to be at an angle to the hangar, heading east-west and parallel to the mountains.

Joe doused our lights, eased his foot off the gas, and slowed the car to a crawl.

“That’s got to be her,” he said. “See if you can raise Knightly.”

I reached over to the phone and pressed the Redial button, but as before, there was only static.

I clicked off, then tried again.

I heard bursts of Knightly’s voice, and I shouted, “We’re at the
airfield
. They’re
here
.”

Only crackling came over the speaker.

“You’re breaking up. Please
repeat
,” I said, but the connection failed again.

Joe muttered, “It wasn’t supposed to go down like this.”

As I understood it, the original plan was to surround Muller’s safe house, call her out, and bring her in.
This
situation had no boundaries. Not even the sky was the limit.

Joe slowed the Audi, and a handful of people exited the cars parked by the hangar. For a moment, they were frozen in our high beams: four Asian men, a hulking white man, and the woman who had to be Alison Muller. She and the hulk ran toward one of the planes, which looked to be a de Havilland Beaver. I knew it to be a sturdy bush plane.

At the same time, the Asians, now positioned behind their vehicles, opened fire.

Joe wrenched the wheel hard to the left and stepped on the brakes, and the Audi skidded in the grass before coming to a stop in the midst of the small trailers. I had my 9mm Glock in my hand, a solid and dependable service gun but no match for the automatic-weapon fire ripping across the meadow, pinging like a hailstorm into the trailers’ aluminum hulls.

It was riskier to turn and run than it was to stand our ground and fight. I’m a good shot, even under pressure.

I was ready.

I FELT UNREASONABLY
invincible.

Even then, I knew that what felt like courage was an adrenaline surge fueled by present danger and all of the fear, confusion, and rage I’d repressed over the last weeks.

Joe yelled at me, “
Stay in the car!
”

Too late for that. My loaded gun was in my hand and my feet were on the ground. I crouched behind a trailer, which was all that stood between me and the people who were strafing us with automatic-weapon fire.

I didn’t have a death wish. I just didn’t expect to die. I was rationalizing. We were thirty yards from the shooters. Everyone was firing into the dark.

Joe said, “I don’t like our odds.”

Then he bounded out of his side of the car and took a position at the butt end of the trailer I was using as a barrier at the front. We aimed and fired on the shooters and reloaded.

When there was a momentary break in the gunfire, Joe yelled, “Alison, give it up! The cops are on the way. No one needs to die. Put down your gun.”

Muller laughed. It was a lovely laugh, both throaty and merry.

“You’re too funny,” she called back.

I saw the flash of Muller’s blond hair as she sprang out from behind a car in a crouch. Her bodyguard followed, the two of them running for the open hatch of the closest plane. My attention was on Muller, but there was something about that bodyguard that rang a tinny bell. I knew him, but I couldn’t place him at all.

And I didn’t have time to think about it.

We had to stop Muller from boarding that plane.

Joe fired into the narrowing space between Muller and the aircraft, and her bodyguard pulled her back into cover behind a car. Joe yelled, “This is a mistake, Alison!”

And then the leading character in this long-running nightmare leaned over the top of her vehicle and fired a long burst of bullets, spraying left, then right across the trailers.

There was a split-second pause in the gunfire, and Muller and the big man made another dash toward the plane. Sighting her, I took aim, followed her with my muzzle, and fired.

Muller jerked and flailed before she fell to the ground.

Her bodyguard called her name and went to her, frantically trying to help her up. But she got to her knees and shook him off as she struggled to her feet.

My shot had gotten her in the back. She could only be alive if she was wearing a vest, and even then, given the angle of my shot, she was lucky to have survived.

Part of me was relieved that I hadn’t killed her.

I wanted to talk to her, and I wanted to throw her in jail. But at the moment, Muller was armed and at large and bullets were flying at us again from her direction.

JOE WAS RELOADING
his gun when I saw four sets of headlights bumping over the rutted road toward the hangar. The cars drove past us and formed into a rough semicircle twenty-five yards away from the building and Muller’s crew. I heard Knightly shouting, ordering people to drop their weapons, and he had plenty of gunpower to back him up.

And then Alison Muller stepped out from between two cars with her hands in the air.

“Hold your fire. I’m
unarmed!
” she shouted.

She was walking toward the headlights in surrender pose, her bodyguard beside her, when one of the Asian men in Muller’s crew aimed his gun—at
her
. Her bodyguard yelled, shoved, and threw himself between Muller and the shooter in one movement. They both dropped to the ground.

In that moment, I recognized the bodyguard. But I didn’t have even a second to process the thought because the man who had fired on Muller and missed aimed at her again.

Before he could get off his second shot, Knightly fired and dropped him, and in the same moment, Muller got up off the ground.

Seeing Joe, she called, “Joe, Joe! Don’t shoot!”

She ran toward him and he lowered his gun.

Just then, I became aware of the waffling sound of helicopters coming in from under the lee of the mountain range, flying across the meadow toward the hangar, two choppers beaming light down on the airfield.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police had arrived. The odds had decidedly shifted in our favor. My heart lifted as one of the choppers hovered near the de Havilland and landed in front of it, blocking the runway. There was more engine racket as the second helicopter cut off the Cessna’s escape path as well.

The din was deafening and the rotor wash swept the field, blowing up dust. I turned away from the choppers, and when I opened my eyes, I saw Joe and Alison in a stunning tableau.

I hadn’t heard what Joe had said to her, but clearly Muller had gotten the message. His gun was aimed at her head. And Alison, her blond hair whipping across her face, stood absolutely still with her hands in the air.

DAWN WAS CASTING
a cinematic glow over the remains of the firefight. Airplane and chopper pilots were getting out of their aircraft. Munder and Knightly took the three men left standing into custody and stepped around the dead bodyguard. But all of that was in the background.

I was watching Joe, listening as he said to Muller, “It’s over, Alison. Turn around. Put your hands behind your back.”

She looked at Joe and asked, “How could you do this to me? How in God’s name can you humiliate me like this?”

I was standing only ten feet from Ali Muller, and even though she’d been caught moments away from her great escape and had been shot at by her own people, she looked composed. If there was the slightest trace of vulnerability in her face, it was that of hurt feelings. And the way she looked at Joe made me think she was taking her arrest personally.

She said, “Are you kidding me, Joseph? Do you think I don’t know what you’re doing and why?”

Joseph?

His smile was a grimace. He used Flex-Cuffs to pin her wrists together behind her back, after which he encircled her biceps with his hand. She twisted away, but it was halfhearted. She kept looking up into his face—I have to say, adoringly. I followed them across the grass, between the trailers and toward the shot-up Audi.

I listened as Muller tried to make her point.

“Joseph, have you lost sight of the truth? I’m still working for you. Don’t you get that? This was part of our plan.”

“What plan? You left the country. You were on the run. You’re a traitor, Ali. We’ll have plenty of time to talk about this, but not now.”

“I’m a
traitor
? You knew I was going to work for us once I got to China. I told you. Didn’t you understand that? Weren’t you paying attention?”

Joe scoffed, but what I could see of his face was clouded.

Alison kept selling, working hard. Was she working Joe into giving her an alibi? Or was she telling the truth? How could I possibly know?

“You’ve told me you loved me,” she said. “And now, what? You don’t love me anymore?”

Joe
loved
her? Hearing that hurt worse than the beating I’d taken on Lake Street. Far worse. The left rear door of the Audi creaked as Joe opened it. He put one hand on Muller’s head and angled her into the backseat. He closed the door hard and opened the driver’s side door for me, and I got in.

“I have to talk to Knightly,” he said through the open window. “I’ll only be about ten minutes. Watch her, Lindsay. And don’t believe anything she says. She has an advanced degree in making shit up.”

Muller called out, “
Joseph
. Joseph, don’t leave me with her. She shot at me.” She almost sounded panicky. “She’ll kill me. Is that what you want?”

Joe reached into the car and threw the door locks. He said, “Lindsay, don’t shoot her unless you have to. But if you have to,
do
it. Do
not
let her leave.”

“Copy that.”

Did he
want
me to shoot her?