Prey (12 page)

"Come on, guys. Let's get the show on the road," Len Ruebottom muttered, anxious to be up in the air, where he felt he truly belonged. "Any last questions?" he asked, turning to look at his copilot passenger.

"No, just get us there in one piece, and hurry it up," Lightstone instructed.

"Okay. Then how about one last set of instructions? See those pedals down by your feet?"

"Yeah."

"You want to try to keep your feet away from them."

"Why?"

"Well, because if you don't, I could lose control of the plane at a very bad moment," Ruebottom explained.

Lightstone quickly brought his feet as far away from the pedals as possible, which resulted in his knees being jammed up against the copilot's set of controls.

"And while you're at it, you're going to want to keep your knees away from the controls, too," Ruebottom advised. "Makes it a whole lot easier for me to steer this thing."

"Anything else?" Lightstone muttered as he tried with reasonable success to find a neutral position for both his feet and his knees.

"Barf bags and life vest are under your seat," Ruebottom smiled. "No parachutes, so you're stuck in here for the duration. Just try to keep the backseat driving down to a minimum, and enjoy the flight."

"Yeah, well, now that you brought it up, and since we don't have an honest-to-God copilot in this thing, what am I supposed to do if something happens to you up there?"

"Well, I'll tell you," the young pilot said with a serious expression on his young face. "You see this big gauge here?" He tapped at the glass-faced dial with a gloved finger.

"Yeah, I see it."

"That gauge tells you how much gas you've got left in the fuel tanks. If I happen to go unconscious, or have a heart attack or something like that, and you can manage to keep this thing up high enough so that the wind resistance is pretty much at a minimum, then you're probably looking at, oh, maybe six hours of flying time."

"Yeah, and just what the hell good does that do me?"

"There's an instruction manual in the compartment to the right of your seat," Ruebottom said, pointing with his right hand. "It's a pretty good read. Explains everything you've ever wanted to know about how to fly a Lear jet. If you work at it, you can probably get through the whole thing in, oh, I'd say about five or six hours. Although, if I were in your position," he added thoughtfully, "I think I'd probably skip the beginning stuff and go right on ahead to chapter thirty-six."

"Lear Three-Three-Five," the control tower interrupted, "you are cleared for takeoff. Have a good flight."

Len Ruebottom acknowledged the clearance, scanned the instrument panel for any last-minute reds, and the sky for any incoming planes that the controller might have forgotten to mention, and then keyed his internal mike again.

"You say something?"

"I was asking why the hell I should read chapter thirty-six first," Lightstone muttered through a clenched jaw, gripping his seat tightly.

Len Ruebottom looked over at his passenger and smiled. "Because by the time that fuel gauge starts to read empty . . ." he said, pausing to set the brakes, throttle each of the engines up to a high-pitched shriek, make a final instrument check, and then release the brakes.

"Lear Three-Three-Five," Ruebottom keyed his mike, "we're on the roll."

As the Lear jet began to accelerate down the long runway, Ruebottom switched over to his internal mike one more time.

". . . you're probably going to want to have at least a general idea of how to land a Lear jet without putting too much of a dent in the runway."

Then he pushed the throttles to full-forward and sent the sleek-nosed jet screaming up into the gray-clouded sky.

Chapter Ten

Given the proximity of Bozeman to several first-class Montana ski resorts, the arrival of a Lear jet at Bozeman Airport wasn't exactly a media event. Still there were at least a dozen people in the terminal who turned to watch Len Ruebottom bring the incredibly agile aircraft in for a near-perfect touchdown landing.

Two of those people were Butch and Sonny Chareaux.

As the Lear taxied to a stop about fifty yards from the main terminal building, Butch Chareaux focused a pair of camouflaged binoculars on the jet's small windshield.

Chareaux, who was dressed in hunting clothes and looked as though he had spent every day of his life in the woods, waited patiently for the man in the copilot's seat to remove the headset so that he could see his face clearly.

After a few moments, he muttered something to his brother, who immediately walked to a nearby telephone and dialed a long-distance number.

"Yes?"

"He's here."

"What type of plane?"

"A Lear jet."

At the other end of the line, Alex Chareaux tapped his index finger on the table as he considered this new bit of information.

"What is the registration number?"

Sonny Chareaux, the largest of the Chareaux brothers at six-five and two hundred and fifty-five pounds, looked out across the terminal through the large, sound-absorbing plate glass. He saw the side door of the Lear pop open and then drop down as he noted the number painted on the base of the airplane's horizontal stabilizer.

"There's an 'N,' a dash, the numbers three, three, five, and then a 'C' and a 'P,'" he said as Alex Chareaux quickly scribbled in his notebook. "They are getting out of the plane now."

"Can you see the pilot?"

"Yes."

"Do you recognize him? Is he one of the charter pilots on your list?"

"No."

Alex Chareaux frowned.

Sometime within the next few hours, he was going to have to make a decision that might easily destroy his business and put his brothers and himself back on the run; or, if all went well, make their illegal enterprise many times more profitable.

What it amounted to was one magnificent, yet ominous, roll of the dice.

And Chareaux couldn't do anything more about it now because there wasn't enough time to make any other arrangements. All he could do was either say yes, or say no.

"Is there any sign of surveillance outside the terminal?"

"No, we have seen nothing."

"You've checked the parking lot?"

"Yes, many times."

"What about inside?"

"Only a few travelers, people with luggage and tickets, and the ones who are always here," Sonny Chareaux said. "It is not very busy today."

"What about the rental-car people? The porters? The people at the airline counters? Do you seg anyone you do not recognize? Anyone who is not on your list?"

"No, they are all the same."

It was an extremely difficult decision. Alex Chareaux cursed the one who had caused him this problem: the wealthy client who always talked with so much courage on the phone, boasting of his ability to stand his ground in the face of a charging record trophy animal, and eager to spend his money freely for the privilege. And yet also the one who might freeze at the critical moment when the huge bear turned in his direction, Chareaux reminded himself.

Which was why they would need the extra set of skilled hands. Someone with the nerve, and the resources, and the underlying greed to do whatever it took. Someone they could trust. Perhaps Henry Lightner could function as that extra set of hands. But Lightner's trustworthiness had to be proven beyond a doubt.

And that, of course, was the essence of his problem.

"What about the plane? Can you see anyone else in there with them?"

"One moment. We will look again to be sure."

Impatient to set it all into motion, but yet still uneasy for reasons that he didn't clearly understand, Alex Chareaux continued to shake his head slowly and tap his finger on the tabletop.

He realized that his instincts were telling him to play it safe and call the hunt off, and he was sorely tempted to do just that because the risks on this one were significant.

But in this particular case, the payoff—and the potential for future payoffs—was even greater.

Alex Chareaux understood as well as anyone that successful conquests were almost invariably based on opportunity and risk. He had always despised the cowards who played it safe. The timid ones who could only look forward to dying peacefully in their beds once their hands became too feeble to work the remote controls of their TV sets. Alex Chareaux, the oldest of the three brothers and their natural leader, knew with absolute certainty that he would never die that way. But he had also sworn a blood oath that neither of his brothers would ever die in prison, no matter who or what stood in their way. Because to rot away slowly in a cage like a trapped animal was the worst thing that could happen to men like Alex Chareaux and his brothers.

"There are only two of them on the plane," Sonny Chareaux said, finally coming back on the line.

"Has anyone gone out to meet them?"

"No, not so far."

He needed more. Something that he could dig his fingers into, and analyze. Something that he could examine, pull apart, and finally use for the crucial decision.

"What about a rental car?"

"We think he has a reservation with Hertz. There's a packet on the wall with the name 'Lightner' on it."

"Get a photograph of the pilot," Alex Chareaux said. "Find out who he is, and do it quickly. See what you can discover from the rental agency, too."

Sonny Chareaux motioned to his brother, who immediately exchanged his binoculars for a medium-format camera with a Polaroid back and telephoto lens.

After double-checking the settings, Butch Chareaux braced himself against the window frame and waited until Len Ruebottom stepped out onto the Lear's small stairway.

The loud click of the shutter was audible fifteen feet away in the small, uncrowded airport terminal.

Still at the phone, Sonny Chareaux watched as his brother quickly pulled the undeveloped photo out of the camera, set it aside, and then brought the heavy camera up again for a second shot.

Butch was the smallest, and the youngest, of the three Chareaux brothers; he was five-nine, one-eighty-five, and twenty-nine years of age. He was also the most technically adept of the brothers, with a knack and a feel for fine machinery like cameras and video recorders. But his true love was the 7mm Winchester Model 70 rifle with the adjustable Zeiss scope that his brother Alex had given him for his thirteenth birthday. The one he'd used to kill his first human being two weeks later, and the eleven others since.

Unlike his brothers, who preferred to be in close when they killed, Butch Chareaux liked to work from a distance, using hand-cast sabot rounds—projectiles with a thick coating of plastic that isolated the solid-core slug from the constraining grip of the barrel rifling but then split away in mid-flight to give the bullet additional velocity and stability. He liked the precision and the quickness of the kills, and the fact that there would never be a land or a groove on the bullets that could be matched back to his treasured rifle. But he really didn't need to worry about that, because his preferred target was the neck—actually, the larynx and one of the carotid arteries; the shock left the victim mute and rapidly dying, while the mostly unaltered bullet continued on its ballistic path to disappear into the forest.

"It's done," Sonny Chareaux said. "We have the photograph."

"Good. Check him out then, quickly, and use the radio to contact me as soon as you know."

"But if I can find out nothing about him easily, how far should I go?" Sonny Chareaux asked. "Or perhaps I should say, what are the limits? How hard should I push?"

Alex Chareaux hesitated for a brief moment. "There are no limits on this one," he answered finally. "Do whatever you have to do. We need to know before sunset."

"I understand."

After hanging up, Sonny Chareaux walked over to his brother and waited the remaining seconds until both Polaroids were ready. He examined each of them, taking extra time with the one that showed the pilot and the man they knew as Henry Lightner coming down the ramp.

"Do we get to kill them?" Butch Chareaux asked hopefully.

"I think so," his older brother said, looking out the terminal window at the two men who were unloading duffel bags and a rifle case out of the Lear's storage compartment. "We shall see."

"So what do you think?" Len Ruebottom asked in a low voice as they walked in through the wide terminal door, causing Henry Lightstone to wince. Fortunately, of the ten or eleven people that he could see inside the Bozeman Airport terminal, none of them were within earshot.

Lightstone had given Ruebottom the rifle case and one of the duffel bags to carry in the hope that the task would be sufficiently distracting. But the young rookie agent-pilot had already forgotten one of his primary directives.

"You've seen one small airport, you've seen them all," Lightstone observed as he paused to take in the entire waiting area in one long, appraising glance.

Of those ten or eleven people, he noted, at least a couple of the men looked big, mean, sinister, or vicious enough to be Alex Chareaux's brothers. Which meant that he had to get rid of Len Ruebottom as quickly as possible. "No, I
mean ..."