Midnight come again (29 page)

"If I wanted to know who the names of the board of directors of a corporation were, how would I find out?"

Heidi gnawed her lip. "That depends. I'm guessing you don't have a copy of their latest annual report."

Kate was smiling back before she realized it. "You're guessing right."

"Are they publicly or privately owned?"

"I don't know." Kate reflected. "But if I had to guess, I'd say privately." A privately held company was probably less subject to public disclosure laws. Christopher Over more et al had been prosecuted over the failure of Great Land Savings and Loan because it was publicly owned, and had to answer to shareholders. Picky people, shareholders.

Nosy, too.

Heidi made a face. "That makes it tougher. We've got the Directory of Corporate Affiliations and Standard & Poor's Register of Corporations, but they are both for public corporations."

"Well, if the corporation isn't in them, at least I'll know they aren't public."

Heidi brought out the volumes, and Kate looked up High Seas Investments, Ltd., Northern Consolidated Seafood Distributors, Inc., and just for the hell of it, Alaska First Bank of Bering.

The bank was the only one listed, in Standard & Poor, and the only officer listed was the chairman and chief executive officer, one Michael Sullivan. It very helpfully included his address, which amounted to a post office box and a zip code.

"Hey," Carroll said. She was looking out the window of Zarr's office.

"What?" Casanare said, coming to stand behind her.

They watched Kate come down the steps and turn right toward the airport, Mutt trotting ahead of her, nose to the ground.

"What's she doing in the library?"

"Maybe she's checking out a book," Casanare suggested.

"Which book?"

"Max--"

She glared at him. "Al, I don't care if First Sergeant Jim Chopin thinks Kate Shugak sits at the right hand of God. She's been consorting on a regular basis over a period of at least two months with a known member of a group of foreign criminals we are currently investigating for the smuggling of weapons into this country. I want to know what she's up to."

"She went into a library, for crissake, she's not robbing a bank."

"Al, she fits the profile. She's a loner, she has a problem with authority, she's got enough cause to hold one hell of a grudge against the system. She has to be reminded of it every time she looks in the mirror."

"She's a woman."

"So because all domestic terrorists so far have been men, that means there will never be a woman who likes to blow people up?" Casanare was silent, reluctant to endorse Carroll's theory of sexual equality in serial bombers, and Carroll pushed her advantage. "She's got a hundred and sixty acres out in the middle of nowhere to do whatever the hell she wants to on. You've seen the pictures, you've read the reports. She could hide a factory out there if she wanted to. She could hide an army out there if she wanted to." "You just said she was a loner."

"Quit playing devil's advocate and look at the facts. We've got an incoming shipment of material crucial to the manufacture of an explosive nuclear device, ten of them, for all we know a hundred. It's sitting on a boat on board which Kate Shugak was cordially invited two days ago, from which she was escorted by none other than the man we believe is Ivanov, a point man for the Russian Mafia and a known smuggler of illegal weapons. And she fits the profile."

"What's she using for money? Who's backing her? She can't be going into this alone, not financially, anyway." Carroll smiled, knowing she had him. "We've got any number of extremist groups with a toehold in Alaska.

Could be one of them, or a consortium, maybe with groups in Montana or Idaho or both. Crazy loves company." She looked over his shoulder and purred, "Well, well, well. Look who I see."

Casanare turned and saw the former General Armin Glukhov, late of the sovereign nation of Russia, trot down the steps of the library and head in the direction of the docks.

Carroll looked at Casanare, eyebrow raised. "Any more objections?" "Not hardly," he said.

She went to the door and said over her shoulder, "Leave Zarr a note to come find us when she checks in." Heidi looked up as the two agents entered the library, which was empty by then of everyone except her.

"Hello. May I help you find something?"

Casanare spoke first. "I'm Al Gonzalez, Miss.--" He smiled.

Heidi blushed. "Call me Heidi."

"Hi, Heidi. This is my friend, Maxine Casey."

"Hi, Maxine." "Hello." Carroll's eyes warned Al to get on with it.

"You're not from Bering, are you?"

"No," Casanare said regretfully. "We sure aren't. Nice little town, though. Different than anything I've ever seen."

"Really? Where are you from?" Casanare grinned and said in an exaggerated southern accent, '-us." "Really?" Heidi said again. "I've never been there." She sighed. "Never been much of anywhere Outside, except Seattle."

"Now there's a great town."

"Any town that puts a troll under a bridge can't be all bad," Heidi agreed, and they laughed together.

By this time Carroll had sidled into the reference area. To her acute disappointment, everything was neat and tidy. She prowled over to the fiction area. A copy of a novel was lying on the table. Carroll picked it up. Harold Robbins. She seemed to remember that this particular book was supposed to be a broad fictionalization of the life of Howard Hughes. Who cared? She put the book back down. ' you the truth, Heidi, we were supposed to meet a friend here." Casanare made a show of looking around.

"Oh? Who?" He smiled at her again. "Her name's Kate. Kate Shugak. You seen her?"

"Yeah, you just missed her, she was working in the reference section."

"Alone?" Heidi raised her eyebrows, and Casanare said hastily, "We were going to meet another friend. All of us were going to meet here. To work on our project together."

"Well, he must have forgotten, because she was here alone."

"Really. Darn, I thought I saw him coming down the steps. Too far away to catch him."

"No, Ms. Shugak was here alone. Oh."

"What?" Casanare said hopefully.

"You must have seen the Russian gentleman."

"Yes?"

"He was reading in the fiction section, at the same time she was in the research section."

"Oh. They weren't together."

Her brows knit. She was getting suspicious. "No. They never spoke."

"Really. Darn." Casanare scratched his cheek thoughtfully. "We have kind of a project going on--"

"Oh, you were working on that, too?" Heidi said, too affably.

"Yeah, that report on--" He paused hopefully.

Instead, she gave him a considering look. "Which project did you mean?

Ms. Shugak was working on two."

"I'm not sure." Again, he paused.

"Take a guess." She waited. He filled in no blanks for her. "You know, you're too old to be a college student."

"So is Kate," he pointed out.

"Yeah, but I know her, or at least I know of her. I don't know you.

What, specifically, can I help you with?"

Casanare looked at Carroll and shrugged. Busted.

The Super Cub had broken a seal on the way back from Atmaukluak, much to Baird's loud and profane annoyance, and when Kate got back to the airport they were just loading the engine onto the Here. Also on board were a Kwethluk cop, his wife and three children who were moving back to Nebraska, the mosquitoes and the muktuk too much for them, and two thousand pounds of smoked king salmon, produced by a local Native cooperative sponsored by the Native association and destined for Anchorage, where it would be packaged and resold at quadruple the price.

It was the real stuff, too; long, dark red strips of hard, smelly fillet. Kate's mouth watered. The sharp end of one piece had broken through the plastic wrap-Baird's bellow made her jump. "Oh yeah, fine, now you show up, after all the goddamn work is done! Where the hell have you been?" "Out," Kate said. "What are you bellyaching about? My shift doesn't start until midnight."

"But you've always been here before!" Baird sounded aggrieved.

It was true. Since her arrival in March, she had always been there, ready to be rousted out to turn a hand to anything that needed doing.

She had been wounded when she arrived, almost mortally. The only way to subdue her own pain had been to work, morning, noon and night. She'd objected to the hiring of another roustabout, for fear it would leave her more time to feel.

What had changed?

She met Jim Chopin's eyes over Baird's shoulder, and repeated, "My shift doesn't start until midnight. I'm going to grab a few hours sleep before then. ', all."

At midnight she loitered deliberately in the bunkhouse, waiting for Jim.

The hands crept round on the clock, five after, ten after, and for a while she thought he wasn't coming. He'd probably apologized to Zarr, who certainly deserved one, and had been rewarded for his pains. Chopper Jim, reverting to form.

I should feel relieved, she thought. Everything's back to normal.

The door opened and normal eluded her once again.

"You're late for work," he said.

"I've got something to show you," she replied, and held out the envelope Stephanie had brought.

"What?" He opened the envelope. "What are these?" He walked to his bunk and turned on the light.

To his back, she said, "They are printouts of processor accounts from the records of Alaska First Bank of Bering. You'll see their names at the top of each sheet."

She could tell the exact moment when he came to the account of the Kosygin.

The room went very still.

"If you look at those for a while, you start to see some interesting differences in the numbers."

He turned and with one sweep of his arm shoved everything on the table up against the wall. Kate caught the jar of peanut butter just in time.

He flicked on the overhead light and spread out the sheets of paper.

"Show me."

She showed him. "What it boils down to is that large sums of money are coming in from High Seas Investments, Inc., and being run through the Kosygin's account in the Alaska First Bank of Bering on their way to Northern Consolidated Seafood Distributors, Inc. I don't think I have to point out, but I will anyway just for the hell of it, that the sums of money involved represent larger amounts than can be accounted for by the purchase and resale of Kuskokwim reds. Especially this season. And especially if you see how few fishermen have delivered how often and how repeatedly." "They're laundering money," he said.

"Give the man a cigar." He leaned forward again to scrutinize the Kosygin's account. "The fishermen have to be in on it."

She confined her response to a mild, "Why?"

"The Kosygin writes them checks for fish not delivered."

"I don't think so."

"What do you mean?"

She held up the Y-K Delta phone book filched from the hangar office. "I looked for the names of the fishermen listed as receiving checks. None of them are in this."

"They could be fishermen from Outside. Plenty are."

"Not one, Jim."

He considered. "So it's all the bank."

"I think so."

"They're in it up to their ears if they're phonying up a record of nonexistent checks."

"Yes."

He looked at her directly for the first time. "Where did you get these printouts, Kate?" She set her teeth and said, "Alice Chevak. She was the head teller at Alaska First Bank of Bering. We went to school together in Fairbanks. I asked her for a favor."

He nodded, eyes on her face. "I see."

A brief silence. "You want to tell me why you're here, now?" He thought about it. "I've told you all I can."

She examined her fingernails, clipped short, filed smooth and scrupulously clean for all that she'd spent the last four months messing around with and in airplanes. "You show up in Bering under an assumed name, you're shot within twenty-four hours of your arrival, the first and last thing you say when I visit you at the hospital are two Russian words, dasvidanya and spasibo, good-bye and thank you." She stood up and began to pace. He folded his arms and watched her walk back and forth.

It wasn't a long walk, three paces one way, turn, three paces the other.

"I, being a naturally observant person, notice that there are two visitors ahead of me. They're trying awfully hard to look like day laborers, but they've got that stink, you know, how to describe it--"

She paused and sniffed the air. "--that whiff of Ruby Ridge in the morning, that evening stench of Leonard Peltier." She looked at him. "In short, if I had one, I'd bet my left nut they're FBI."

When he didn't clutch his heart with shocked surprise, she resumed pacing. "So I wander on down to the docks, and I see a lot of processors, and lo and behold, one of them is Russian. I go on board, where I don't see a hell of a lot of fish, but I do see a young crew dressed for success and not wanting for much in the way of liquor, cigarettes or food. They're a little lonely," she allowed, "which led them to invite me to a party, but they weren't worrying about getting back to work anytime soon."