Midnight come again (7 page)

Gamble wasn't much over forty-five, but he worked at projecting the benign air of an elder statesman. Jim decided that if Gamble patted him on the shoulder, he would bite Gamble's hand off at the wrist. In the meantime, he continued enumerating his objections in a pleasant voice.

"--all because some informer who once helped you catch a Russian smuggling nesting dolls--big bust, that, by the way, really help the climb up the old promotional ladder--anyway, a Russian smuggling nesting dolls into the country tripped over his own feet in the Anchorage International Airport and says he saw some Russian bad guy getting on a plane for Bering?"

"And we don't know how long he'll be there," Gamble said, pouncing. "He won't leave until the money dries up, that's for sure, and that means he stays until the last dog is up the river. That gives us what, five, six weeks?"

"More like eight or ten, the run's later on the Yukon and the Kuskokwim.

And you don't even know what this alleged bad guy is up to, by the way.

If anything. For all you know, he might have gone straight."

This was the lamest of Jim's arguments against and they both knew it.

The Fibbie was tactful enough not to point it out, but then he wanted something and it behooved him to be diplomatic.

They were sitting in Jim's office at the trooper post in Tok, a sleepy little town of twelve hundred hardy souls whose only reason for being was that it sat at the crossroads of the Glenn and Alaskacanada Highways. It was the last stop out of Alaska, sitting sixty-odd miles from the Canadian border as the crow flies, longer by road. Jim had been stationed there for the last ten years, and he knew his posting better than the back of his own hand; every little town, village and homestead, every mayor and village elder and all the girls most likely to. He was on a first-name basis with every bootlegger, every dope dealer, dope grower and dope peddler. He knew who leaned toward fishing behind the markers or up a closed creek, or toward commercial fishing a subsistence site and selling the catch to an Outside buyer on the side. He knew who took bear in season and out, and who flouted the wanton waste law by harvesting only the gall bladder for sale to Asian smugglers.

The Park rangers were assured of backup when they called him in to arrest some guide who, after twenty years of holding a license, still couldn't manage to follow the game laws. Village elders knew he would fly in at the first call when trouble got too big in the villages for the village public safety officer to handle, and that he could and would shoulder the weight when the family and friends of the arrested gathered to boo and hiss, in a way their local police never could. The Pipeline operators knew he would be there when some welder got drunk and hijacked a Cat with intent to bulldoze an entire pump station, or took off in the pump station manager's Suburban on a trajectory for the Calgary Stampede. He was on call, twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, and they knew that, too. Fixed wing or rotor, whatever it took, First Sergeant Jim Chopin would have it in the air within fifteen minutes, partly because it was his sworn duty, partly because he was paid very well, partly because, deep down, he revered the oath he had taken the day he graduated from the trooper academy, and mostly because, hell, let's face it, he felt like Zorro every time he responded to a call. Zorro minus the mask.

It was a far cry from San Jose, where the air was too thick to breathe, the roads were too crowded to drive, and a cop's chance of being shot by a gangbanger was infinitely higher than was his chance of being stomped by a moose. Jim would take the moose any day.

The Park was his home, and now they wanted him to leave it, detached duty, temporarily assigned as liaison to the goddamn FBI, which, to Jim's jaundiced eye, was a less than stellar supplement to the law enforcement community, being as how they spent most of their time in Alaska arresting people cutting down the wrong trees in the Tsongas National Park and killing the wrong walruses off Round Island. Not to mention getting caught doing the lap dance with hookers on Fourth Avenue in Anchorage and shooting caribou out of season on the Glenn Highway.

He knew the Park, every rill and rivulet, every glacier and game trail, every village and town. But all he knew about Bering could be fit into one of Katya's shoes. He vaguely remembered a case where a bootlegger, Armenian by birth, got caught shipping one hundred and two cases of cheap whiskey into the still, last time he looked, damp town. When brought to court, the guy claimed it was provisions for his daughter's wedding. Upon investigation, it was revealed that the wedding was five months off. The jury, three members of which were related to the accused by way of a providential marriage into a local Yupik family, came back with an acquittal in less than ten minutes. The prosecuting attorney later allowed as how he should have petitioned for a change of venue. No shit, Jim had thought at the time.

Now he said, "If there are only five thousand people in the whole goddamn town, most of whom are each other's first cousins once removed, how is it I am not going to stick out like a sore thumb?"

"You'll be a seasonal worker," Gamble said. "There are a ton of them around this time of year."

"Something to do with fish, no doubt," Jim observed in a deceptively pleasant tone.

"It is salmon season," Gamble pointed out reasonably. "And one of the trawlers contracted to the Bering IFQ is Russian, so it's reasonable to expect that our boy is somewhere close by."

"What the hell do you think he's getting up to on a goddamn fish trawler? And if he's as hot as you say, why don't you just waltz in and arrest the bastard?"

Gamble's smile vanished. He leaned forward and tapped one finger on the desk, like a college professor making the point that would justify his whole seminar and screw you on the exam. "We want to know what he's up to, Jim. If even half of what his file reads is true, this Ivanov is a very, very bad boy. Drugs, prostitution, weapons smuggling, money laundering, industrial espionage, military weapons thefts, you name it, he's in it up to his eyebrows. Which is why we don't want just to catch him, we want to catch him in the act."

"In the act of what?"

"We don't know. That's what we want you to find out. He's too smart and too successful for whatever he's doing in Bering to be penny-ante. And there is a strong Russian presence in the Bering Sea lately. Lots of trawlers catching lots of fish, and delivering them, and who knows what else, who knows where, who knows to whom? Plenty of opportunity out there for those criminally inclined to take advantage of the slackening of tensions between East and West."

"You sound like my poly-sci instructor in college," Jim muttered. He changed tactics. "Why me? Why don't you send in some little Fibbie who speaks seven different Russian dialects, and who is probably hardwired in to D.C. through his belly button besides?"

"Because we don't have someone like that who knows the Alaskan Bush, too," Gamble said flatly, "or we would. You were assigned to Dillingham your first year of Bush rotation, you've lived around the Yupik, you aren't going to put your foot in it and offend some tribal law that will get you tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail."

"And using a honeybucket won't throw my sensibilities into an uproar,"

Jim observed sardonically. "How long is this assignment?"

"Depends on how quick you are on the uptake," Gamble said, and smiled when Jim's eyes narrowed.

The voice on the speaker phone jumped in for the first time. "We've got you cleared for a month's TDY, Jim." "Do you actually want me to do this, boss?" Jim demanded.

"It's up to you."

"Who'll look after the post while I'm gone?"

"Janine Shook."

"Well, at least she's had some Bush experience." Plus, she was close enough to retirement that she wouldn't get proprietary about his post.

And though he hated to admit it, this special assignment wasn't a bad career move, especially if, however unlikely it sounded to him now, there turned out to be an actual case and he broke it.

Besides, he was getting damn sick and tired of sitting around wondering where the hell Kate Shugak was. If she'd wanted to be found, she would have been by now. In his memory she had never spent an entire summer out of the Park, except for the five years she'd worked in Anchorage, and even then she'd spent most weekends, every day of her vacation and, truth be told, sick leave on her homestead, or tendering with Old Sam.

Where the hell was she?

Gamble leaned forward. "Look, Jim, we lean on the troopers, I know that.

We just don't have the manpower to reach out to all the Bush communities--" "Oh, and we do," Jim said.

"--especially in a situation like this--"

"Yeah, I can see why you'd come to me. I put down half a dozen Russian gangsters dealing in small automatic arms before breakfast every morning. And I ramrod one of the slower districts, at that."

"They didn't steal a nuclear bomb, they stole something from which someone with the know-how could make a bomb." "Nuclear bombs," Jim said pointedly.

"Yes. Providing they had all the other ingredients to go along with it.

But there's more to the story, Jim."

There was an old Damon Runyon horse player who would listen to any tip on a race if a story went with it. What was his name? Jim couldn't remember, so he leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on his desk. "Talk."

Gamble raised his voice enough to be heard in the outer office.

"Carroll! Casanare!"

The door to Jim's office opened so promptly that a suspicious person might think whoever was on the other side had been standing with their ears pressed against it. It swung wide, revealing a man and a woman, both with that chronic tendency toward blue-suited neatness displayed by all FBI agents. They must teach a class in neat at Quantico, Jim thought. Right after forensics and law.

Gamble waved them forward. "Special Agent Maxine Carroll. Special Agent Alberto Casanare. First Sergeant Jim Chopin of the Alaska State Troopers. Sit."

Carroll had a long, cool stare, and she used it to look Jim over as the silence stretched out.

"Tell him," Gamble said.

Casanare made a business out of dragging two chairs forward, and lounged back in his to examine the ceiling for cracks.

Jim met Carroll's stare head on. She was a looker, all right, a goddess even, tall, blond, blue-eyed, but his response to her challenge was more of a reflex than actual interest. He would have found the realization alarming if he'd allowed himself to think it over.

Gamble fidgeted some more, and finally gave. "Oh, come on, for crissake, he's not exactly a civilian. And we are asking him to go in undercover for us."

Carroll's eyes flickered, looking first at Gamble, then exchanging a long expressionless look with her partner. Casanare raised an eyebrow.

Carroll sat down, and in a calm, even voice that ticked off hijacking, treason and murder the way someone else might call off items on a grocery list, led Jim down the trail that began in St. Petersburg and ended in Anchorage.

"Jesus god," Jim said, when she finished, and cursed himself immediately for betraying how impressed he was.

"Indeed," Gamble said.

Jim eyed him speculatively. "Can we spell promotion?" he said.

Nobody said anything.

"You said you couldn't show me a picture of this Ivanov, because you didn't have one," Jim said. "You said he was very careful about not being photographed."

"As careful as he is about never leaving witnesses behind," Gamble said, and smiled.

There was a brief silence. "You've got a witness," Jim said. "Somebody survived the hijacking. Or the robbery. Didn't they?" Nobody said anything again.

"Yeah, well. Bering's a hell of a long way from Anchorage." Gamble steepled his fingers and smiled over them. "FBI Anchorage contacted the Alaska State Troopers and put in a request to all communities with a Russian presence to be on the lookout for, etcetera.

We got a bite. A trooper in Bering spotted someone whose description leads us to believe is another player, an Alexei Burianovich. Known associate of Ivanov. Probably was in on the hijacking." "Uh-huh," Jim said again, managing to infuse the two syllables with considerable skepticism. "Plus you didn't mention we were taking on the goddamn Russian Army."

"I knew I forgot something," Gamble said.

"Save it. Why don't you just go in and pick them up? It's a small town, they'll be easy to find, and they can't be here legally." Gamble's smile faded. "I told you, Jim. We need a line on that zirconium. If we swoop down and arrest the whole boiling lot of them, we'll never see it again." "And we want Ivanov," Carroll said.

Casanare smiled. It wasn't a nice smile.

"What makes you think they haven't already moved it? They stole it, what, March twenty-eighth? That was three months ago. What makes you think it's still for sale? And why Alaska? For crissake, Gamble, how would they get it all the way across Russia and Siberia and the Bering Strait? There have got to be easier routes, not to mention closer customers. I can think of two or three in the Middle East without even opening up this week's issue of Timer

"To answer your first question, we've been monitoring our sources in the arms-manufacturing markets. There has been no word that it's out there.