Time to Hunt (56 page)

“No. It didn’t work that way. We were together.”

“Who was there?”

“Call your wife. Find out.”

He pushed the phone toward Bob, who took out the small piece of paper on which he had written the number of the ranch house in Custer County.

He dialed, listened as the phone rang. It was midafternoon out there.

After three rings, he heard, “Hello?”

“Sally?”

“Oh, the husband. The missing husband. Where the hell have you
been?
She is in great discomfort and you have not called in days.”

“I’m sorry, I’ve been involved in some stuff.”

“Bob, this is your
family
. Don’t you understand that?”

“I understand that. I’m just about to come home and spell you and everything will be happy. She did separate from me, you remember.”

“You still have responsibilities,” she said. “You are not on vacation.”

“I am trying to take care of things. How’s Nikki?”

“She’s fine. It’s snowing. They say there’s going to be a bad snowfall, one of those late spring things.”

“It’s June, for God’s sake.”

“They do things by their own rules in Idaho.”

“I guess so. Is Julie able to come to the phone? It’s important.”

“I’ll see if she’s awake.”

He waited and the minutes passed.

At last another extension clicked on, and his wife said, “Bob?”

“Yes. How are you?”

“I’m all right. I’m still in a cast, but at least I’m out of that awful traction.”

“Traction sucks.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m in Washington right now, working on this thing.”

“God, Bob. No wonder my lawyer couldn’t find you.”

“I’ll be home soon. I just have this thing to deal with.”

She was silent.

“I had to ask you something.”

“What?”

“You told me that when you and Donny left that farm, you were photographed, right? Some guys were in the hills, monitoring the situation, and they got a photo.”

“Yes.”

“You’re sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. Why would I make something like that up?”

“Well, you might have it mixed up with something else.”

“It was very straightforward. Donny knew where the farm was; we drove out there. We found Trig and some big blond guy he said was Irish. We left after Donny talked to Trig. We got to our car, got in, and this guy came out of nowhere and took our picture. That’s it.”

“Hmmm,” he said. He put the phone down. “She says yes, definitely, there was a picture taken.”

“What did the guy look like?”

Bob asked her.

“Guy in a suit. Heavy-set, blunt, I guess. I didn’t get a good look. It was dark, remember? Cops. FBI agents.”

“Just cops,” Bob said.

“Don’t you see,” said Bonson. “Some kind of Soviet security team. Covering for Fitzpatrick.”

Yes, Bob thought. That made sense.

“And that was everybody that was out there?” he asked.

“Well … Peter, Peter Farris.”

“Peter?” Bob asked.
Peter?
Something rang in his head from far away.

“I don’t know that he was there.”

“Who was Peter?” he asked, struggling to remember. He thought he could recall Donny mentioning a Peter somewhere some time or other and had a bad feeling.

“He was one of my friends in the movement. He thought he was in love with me. He may have followed us out there.”

“You don’t know?”

“He disappeared that night. His body was found several months later. I wrote Donny about it.”

“Okay,” said Bob, “I’ll call you as soon as I get back, and we can work this out however you want. You’re safe in all this snow?”

“We may be snowed in for a few days, it’s so isolated. But that’s okay; we have plenty of food and fuel. Sally’s here. It’s not a problem. I feel very safe.”

“Okay,” he said.

“Good-bye,” she said.

“That was a dead end,” he said, after hanging up.

Peter, he thought. Peter is dead. Peter disappeared that night. Yet something taunted him. He remembered other words, spoken directly to him:
It’s not about you this time
.

“Well, it’s another good bit of circumstantial that the Russians had committed to a major operation, and they were running high-level security on it.”

Then a thought just sort of fluttered through Bob’s mind.

“It is odd,” he noted, “that of all the people that went to that farm—Trig, a kid named Peter Farris, Donny—they’re all dead. In fact, they all died within a few months of that night.”

“Everybody except your wife.”

“Yeah. And—”

Except my wife, he thought.

Except my wife
.

Bob stopped, caught up suddenly. Something snapped into perfect focus. It wasn’t there, then it was; there was no coming into being, no sense of emergence: it was just indisputably there, big as life.

“You know—” started Bonson.

“Shut up,” said Bob.

He was silent another second.

“I get it,” he said. “The picture, the timing, the target.”

“What are you talking about?”

“They killed everyone except Julie. They didn’t know who Julie was but they had a picture of her. The picture they got that night. But Donny never officially recorded his marriage with the Marine Corps. So there were no records of who she was. She was a mystery to them. Then, when my picture was on
Time’s
cover over that business in New Orleans, it didn’t matter, it meant nothing. I didn’t even know Julie yet. But two months ago, my picture runs again in
Time
. And the
National Star
, when I’m famous again for a weekend. It was snapped by a tabloid photographer as we were coming out of church, Julie and I. It’s not my picture they’re interested in, or even me. That story told how I had married the widow of my spotter in Vietnam.”

He turned to Bonson.

“It’s Julie. They’re trying to kill Julie. They have to kill everyone who was at that farm and saw Fitzpatrick with Trig loading that truck. This whole thing isn’t about killing me. It’s about killing Julie. He fired at what he thought was me first in the mountains because I was armed. He had to take the armed man first. But
she
was the target.”

Bonson nodded.

Bob picked up the phone, dialed quickly. But the line was out.

T
he snow didn’t scare Solaratov. He had seen snow before. He had lived and hunted in snow. He had trekked the mountains of Afghanistan above the snowline with a SPETSNAZ team hunting for mujahideen leadership cadres. The snow was the sniper’s ally. It drove security forces under cover, it grounded air cover and, best of all, it covered tracks. The sniper loved snow.

It fell in huge, lofty feathers, a wet, lush snow from a dark mountain sky. It adhered and quickly covered the earth and drove most people to shelter. The weatherman said it would snow all night, a last blast of winter, unusual but not unheard of. Twelve, maybe twenty inches of it, endless and silent.

He drove through already thinning traffic and had no trouble finding the Idaho Bell outstation that had been the F-1—primary distribution point—for the phone calls from remote rural Custer County to Nick Memphis’s New Orleans address. It was a low, bleak building, built to modern American standards without windows. The happy Bell sign stood outside; inside, it was dark, presumably working entirely by robotics. To one side stood a phalanx of transformers, fenced off and marked with fierce
DANGER
signs, which produced a nexus of wires that rose to poles to shunt the miracle of communication around Custer County. A small parking lot was empty. Out back, a cyclone fence sealed off what appeared to be a sort of motor pool, where six vans with
IDAHO BELL
emblazoned on them were parked next to what looked like a sheet-metal maintenance garage. But it was dark too. Even better, the building was far from downtown, such as “downtown” was, along a country road that would now not be much traveled.

Still, he did not dare park in the lot, for that lone car
on a dark night could attract some attention. He drove several hundred yards into a small development of houses, where some cars were parked along the street, and pulled in, turning the engine off. He waited in darkness, as the snow fell silently on the hood of the car, soon veiling the windshield. He opened the door, got out, slipped it shut without a slam, for the noise would have seemed even louder in the quiet.

It was an easy walk, between two dark houses, across a field, and then next to the Cyclone fence. He looked for sign of an alarm or electrification or notice of a dog. There was none. Taking a pair of wire cutters from the pocket of his parka, he used the massive strength in his forearms to cut the cyclone and bend back an entrance to the wire. He slithered through. He slipped between vans, around the garage, and felt his way along the back of the phone building until he found a metal door. He looked about for signs of an alarm and, finding none, took from his pocket a leather envelope of lock picks. The lock was a simple but solid pin tumbler; he took the two tools he would need, the tension tool and the feeler pick, and set to work. He inserted the tension tool. It was a matter of delicate feel, the tension tool holding the pins down, the feeler tool locating them one by one along the shear line of the cylinder and pushing them back until he felt a slight thump, signifying that he’d gotten all the pins aligned. The cylinder turned; the door sprang open.

He stepped inside, pulled out a pair of glasses with a small, powerful flashlight mounted to them and began to explore the building.

It didn’t take long. He found a map on the wall in what appeared to be the bullpen for the Bell linemen and took it down. It seemed to be Custer County as broken down into phone zones. Indeed, as he searched it in the illumination of the flashlight, he quickly noted small circles denoted along the roads that were numbered in integer sequences similar to the one he’d uncovered in New Orleans.
These would be the secondary distribution points for the calls, the F-2s.

He had a powerful impulse just to flee with the map, but it was stiff and large, and carrying it across the field back to the car would be very difficult. Instead, he began a patient search, zone by zone, of the chart, searching for the magic numbers 459912. Again, it took some time, but at last, along a mountain road high in the Lost River range, he found the pole; it stood in a valley near a rectangle that clearly denoted a ranch house. From the crush of elevation contours close by, he understood that it stood under the mountains, giving him a perfect angle for a killing shot. He carefully copied the map onto a sheet of paper, which he would later compare with the exhaustive maps he had already acquired as he set up his approach to the target area.

He had the map hung on the wall again when he heard sounds. He fought the urge to panic and slipped down the wall until he found a desk behind which he could hide. He switched off his light, and took a Glock 19 out of his shoulder holster under the heavy parka.

The lights came on at that moment, and he heard the sound of a man walking to a desk, sitting down and fiddling with papers, sighing with the approach of a night’s duty. The man picked up the phone and dialed a number.

“Bobby? Yeah, I want the guys in. Grace is already on the way. The state cops told me they got downed lines near Sunbeam Dam and I want somebody to check the meadow there at Arco; those suckers
always
go down. I’ll start calling the A-line, you start calling the B’s. Yeah, I know, I’m pissed too. This late. Oh, well, buddy, you wanted to be in management, that means long nights and no overtime. But free coffee, Bobby.”

The man hung up.

Solaratov faced reality. In minutes the room would fill up with linemen come in to work the unexpected weather emergency. He was in a tenuous situation as it was, only undiscovered because the supervisor was so focused on
his labors. When the others arrived, he would soon be discovered; even if he could hide, he’d be pinned for hours as the long night’s repair effort was coordinated and executed.

“Mrs. Bellamy? This is Walter Fish at work. Is Gene there? Yes, ma’am, we’re recalling the workforce; please wake him. That’s right, ma’am. Thanks very much.”

Walter Fish bent over his phones and was making another call when the shadow of Solaratov fell across him. He looked up; a bafflement fell across his features that transfigured almost instantaneously into a reflexive Western smile, and then became a mask of panic.

Solaratov shot him in the face, below the left eye, with a 147-grain Federal Hydra-Shock. The gun popped in his hand, cycled, spitting a shell across the room. Fish jerked backward as if in a different, a faster, time sequence. His brain tissue sprayed the wall behind him, and a small gouge of plaster blew out where the bullet exited the skull and plunked into the wall.

Solaratov turned and looked for the ejected shell; he spied it across the room, under a desk, and went quickly to pick it up. When he arose, he faced a woman in the doorway, with a thermos in one hand, still wrapped up babushkalike against the weather. Her features became unglued at the horror she saw and her eyes opened like quarters. Solaratov shot her in the chest but missed the heart. She staggered backward, spun and began to stagger down the hall, screaming, “No, no, no, no, no, no!”

He stepped into the hall, locked the Glock in both hands, acquired the nightlit front sight and shot her in the base of the spine. She went down, her hand reaching convulsively back to touch the wound itself. Why did they do that? They always did that. He walked to her; she still moved. He bent, put the muzzle to the back of her head and fired again. The muzzle flash ignited her hair. It blazed with an acrid, chemical stench, then extinguished itself, producing a vapor of smoke, and Solaratov realized she’d been wearing a wig of some artificial substance.

Now there was no time to pick up shells. He walked swiftly down the corridor, found the door and slipped out the back. Thank God it was still snowing heavily; in seconds, minutes at the most, his tracks would be gone.