Time to Hunt (57 page)

He went across the field, the pistol still hot in his hand. He had no sense of shame or doubt or pain; he was the professional and he did what was necessary, (he hard thing always, and kept going. But it shook him nevertheless: the look on the poor man’s face in the second before the bullet blew through his cheekbone; and the woman who could only scream “No, no, no, no” as she rushed along the corridor.

It seemed to put a curse on his enterprise. He was not superstitious and he was too experienced by far to consider such nontechnical elements as having any meaning; still, it didn’t feel right.

B
onson had promised Bob that he could surprise him with how much he could do and how quickly, and now he made good on that statement.

He picked up the phone and dialed a certain number and said, very calmly, “Duty officer, this is Deputy Director Bonson, authenticating code Alpha-Actual-Two-Five-Nine, do you acknowledge?”

When the man on the other end did so, Bonson said, “I am hearby declaring a Code Blue Critical Incident. Please notify the Fifth Floor and set up a Domestic Crisis Team. I want two senior analysts—Wigler and Marbella. I want my senior analysts from Team Cowboy. I want some people from computer division. I want to lay on air ASAP; I’m at 2854 Arlington Avenue, in Rosslyn. We will make our way to the
USA Today
building for pickup. I’d like that in the next five minutes.”

He waited, got the reply he wanted.

“I also want an FBI HRT unit put on alert and ready to coordinate with our liaison ASAP. This may involve a shooting situation and I want the best guys. Do you copy?”

Getting his last acknowledgment, he hung up.

“Okay,” he said, turning to Bob, “we have to get a ride to the newspaper building, and the chopper will pick us up. We’ll be in Langley inside fifteen minutes and put our best people to work in twenty. I can have a security team on-site in four hours.”

“Not if it’s snowing,” said Bob.

“What?”

“She said it was snowing. That’s going to close the whole thing down.”

“Shit,” said Bonson.

“It won’t shut him down,” said Bob. “Not this boy.
He’s been in the mountains. He hunted the mountains for years.”

“It may be premature to worry,” said Bonson.

“No, he’ll go as soon as he can. He won’t wait or goof around or take a break. He’s got a job to do. It’s the way his mind works. He’s very thorough, very committed, very gifted, very patient, but when he sees it, he’ll go for it instantly. He’s been hunting her as I’ve been hunting him. And he’s much closer.”

“Shit,” said Bonson again.

“Call them back and get them working the area. We’re going to need maps, weather, satellite tracking, maybe. It’s Custer County, about five miles outside of Mackay, Idaho, in the center of the state, in the Lost River Range. It’s north of Mackay, off Route Ninety-three, in the foothills of the Lost River, as I understand it.”

“That’s good,” said Bonson, and turned to make the call.

A
half hour later they got the bad news.

“Sir,” said a staff assistant with the grave face of a junior officer carrying the news no one wanted to hear, “we got some real problems out there.”

“Go ahead,” said Bonson, trailing along in Bob’s wake into a room that could have been any meeting room in any office building in America but just happened to be in the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia.

“There’s a freak front moving in from Canada across central Idaho. The weather service people say it’ll dump sixteen, eighteen inches on the place. Nothing’s moving there; the roads will be closed until they can be plowed, and they can’t be plowed until morning. Nothing’s flying either. That area is totally sealed off. Nobody’s going anywhere.”

“Shit,” said Bonson. “Notify FBI. Tell them to stand down.”

“Yes, sir, but there’s more.”

“Go ahead.”

“We have been in contact with Idaho State Police authorities. Just to make things worse, there’s been a double homicide at the phone company. A supervisor and his secretary, coming on to run the snow emergency shift, were shot and killed. Whoever did it got completely away. Nothing was stolen, nothing taken. Maybe it was domestic, but they say it looked like a professional hit.”

“It’s him,” said Bob. “He’s there. He probably had to get the final location out of the phone company files or something. He got surprised by these two people and he did what he had to do.”

“Cold,” said Bonson. “Very cold.”

“I’ll tell you what we need real fast,” said Swagger. “We need an extremely good workup on the terrain there. Let’s figure out, given the time of the shootings, if he’d have a chance at making it on foot to a shooting position. Where would he dump his car, how far would he have to go, what kind of speed could an experienced mountain operator be expected to make? Then double that, and you’ll know what this guy is doing. What time will he make it there? Where would he likely set up? He’d want the sun behind him, that I know.”

“Get cracking,” said Bonson.

N
ikki watched the snow.

“It’s pretty,” she said. “But I never knew it could snow in
June.”

“That’s the mountains,” said Aunt Sally. “It snows when it
wants
to.”

“When we get back to Arizona,” said her mother from the sofa, “you’ll never see snow again, I promise.”

“I think I like snow,” said Nikki, “even if you can’t ride in it.”

She watched in the fading light as the world whitened. Outside, she could see a corral and beyond that the barn. There were no animals way up here, so there was nothing to worry about. The highway was about a half mile away,
and it was her job to follow the long dirt road each day and check the solitary mailbox that stood where Upper Cedar Road, that high, lonely ribbon of dirt which connected them to Route 93, passed by.

But the mountains dominated what she could see. The house was in a high meadow, surrounded by them. Mount McCaleb was the closest, a huge brute of a mountain; it loomed above them, now unseen in the driving snow. Farther to the north was Leatherman Peak; farther to the south, Invisible Mountain. These were the peaks of the Lost River Range, dominated farther toward Challis by Mount Borah, the highest in Idaho. There was the sense of their presence, even though they were invisible. On an evening like this, it was much darker; you could feel them through your bones, dark and solid, just beyond the veil of the seen.

“Brrrr,” Nikki said. “It looks so cold out.”

“This snow’ll be gone by the end of the week,” Aunt Sally said. “That’s what they said on the radio. Unseasonable cold front from Canada, but it’ll be in the seventies by Monday. It’ll melt away. Maybe it’ll cause some flooding. It does feel like midwinter, doesn’t it?”

“It does,” said Nikki’s mommy, who was at least ambulatory now. Her left arm and collarbone were secured in a half-body cast, but the abrasions and cuts had healed enough so that she could move about. She wore a bathrobe over jeans. She looked thin, Nikki thought.

“You know what?” said Aunt Sally, who with her spunky personality and Southern accent had quickly become Nikki’s favorite person in the whole wide world, “I think it’s a soup night. Don’t you girls? I mean, snow, soup, what else goes together better? We’ll do up some nice Campbell’s tomato with crackers, and then we’ll settle down and watch a video. Not
Born Free
, though. I cannot sit through that again.”

“I love
Born Free,”
said Nikki.

“Nikki, honey, let’s let Aunt Sally pick the movie tonight. She’s a little tired of
Born Free
. So am I.”

“Welllllll…,” Nikki considered.

“What about
Singin’ in the Rain?”

“That’s a good one.”

“What is it?” said Nikki.

“A musical. About these people who worked in old-time movies and how much fun they had. There’s a lot of great singing and dancing.”

“A man dances in the rain,” said Sally.

“Ew,” said Nikki. “Why would he do
that
? It’s
stupid.”

S
olaratov worked the maps by comparing his crude drawing with the U.S. Geologic Survey maps he had back in his motel room just north of Mackay. He tried to work quickly because he knew it would be a matter of time before the police began checking motels for strangers, and who knew if anybody had seen him come in half an hour after the murders? But at the same time, too much haste was no help at all. He tried to find the zone: that smooth place in his mind where his reflexes were at their best, his brain most efficient, his nerves calmest. He pushed his brain against the whirling topographic patterns of the map, located Route 93 and traced the path from his drawing to the map. He saw that the ranch house site was farther out 93, at the Mackay Reservoir. But there you turned right, drove across the flats and began to climb up FR 127, an “unimproved road,” by the map symbol, which mounted the Lost Rivers and penetrated them, following Upper Cedar Creek. There was a natural fold in the rise of the mountains as the road went deeper, and at the end of that stood the ranch, surrounded on three sides by Mount McCaleb, Massacre Mountain and Leatherman Peak. The mountains were represented on the map by dizzying twirls of elevation lines, and the denser they were the more sheer the rise. He saw that the fast way in would be along Route 93, but that would not work, for the road was now officially closed, barely passable, and probably being monitored by the police. Who else would be driving
through such a storm on such a night except a murderer fleeing the scene of his crime?

But he was a mere few miles from the south slope of Mount McCaleb, and the way was well marked, as it followed Lower Cedar Creek. The creek, protected from drifting snow by the furrow it had cut in the earth, would not be frozen this quickly, but it might be low, and no snow would adhere to it. Therefore, it might be surprisingly easy walking, even in the dark. When he got to McCaleb, he’d climb about two thousand feet—the slope didn’t turn sheer for another five thousand feet—and could then just follow the ridge around and site himself above the ranch house. Again, the drifting snow could make it difficult, but he knew that on promontories, the snow doesn’t drift or collect; in fact, that way might be easy too. He calculated the trip would take about six or seven hours; plenty of time to set up, lase the range, and get to his soft target in the morning, when the sun was due to break through. Then he could fall back, continue around McCaleb toward Massacre Mountain deeper into the Lost River Range, call in his helicopter, and be in another state by noon, leaving nothing but an empty motel room and a truck rented under a pseudonym.

He picked up his cellular and called.

“Yes, hello,” came the answer.

“Yes, I’ve located the target,” he said, and gave them the position. “I am moving out tonight to set up.”

“Isn’t it snowing, old man?”

“That’s good. The snow doesn’t mean a thing to me. I’ve seen snow before.”

“All right. What then?”

“I’ll be completing the deal sometime tomorrow morning whenever the client becomes visible. The husband isn’t around. She’ll be the one whose arm is in the cast. I’ll execute cleanly, then fall back through the mountains about two miles and scale a foothill between McCaleb and Massacre. You have the map? You are following me?”

“Yes, we have it.”

“Your helicopter pilot can navigate to that point?”

“Of course. If the sun is out, he’ll have no problem.”

“I’ll call when the deal is closed. He’ll be flying from… ?”

“You don’t need to know, old man. He’s relocated close to your area. We’re in contact with him.”

“Yes, I’ll call when I reach the area of the pickup. When I see him, I’ll pop smoke. I have smoke. He can come in and take me out—and then it’s done.”

“And then it’s done, yes.”

T
he working party met at 2330 with the best available intelligence. It felt so familiar, like a battalion operations meeting: stern men with dim but focused personalities, a sense of hierarchy and urgency, the maps on the wall, too many Styrofoam cups of coffee on the table. It reminded Bob of a similar meeting twenty-six years earlier, where the CIA and Air Force and S-2 Brophy and CO Feamster had met with him and Donny as they mapped their plans to nail Solaratov then.

“All right,” said the map expert, “assuming he’s located somewhere in the greater Mackay area and the roads are closed and he’s going to go in overland, it’s actually well within an experienced man’s range, if he knows where he’s going, he has good harsh-weather gear and he’s determined.”

“What time?”

“Oh, he can make it well before light. If he finds an exposed ridge, he won’t have much snow accumulation, given a fair amount of wind. If he gets a tailwind, it could actually help him, though we don’t have the wind-tendency dope in yet. He’d almost certainly make it before light. He could set himself up without much difficulty. I don’t know where—”

“He’ll be to the east,” Swagger said. “He’ll want the sun behind him. He won’t want any chance of the light hitting his lens and reflecting down into the target area.”

“How soon can Idaho State Police or park rangers make it in?” asked Bonson, who was running this show with glaring ferocity. He was apparently something of a legend in these precincts, Bob could tell; all the others deferred to him and at the same time were subtly eager for his attention and his approval. Bob had seen it in staff briefings a thousand times.

“Probably not till midmorning. They can’t helicopter in; they can’t navigate with snow mobiles or tracked vehicles at night.”

“Can’t they walk in?” said Bonson. “I mean, if Solaratov can walk, why can’t they?”

“Well, sir,” said the analyst, “don’t forget they have a civil emergency on their hands. They’re going to have people stuck along highways in snowdrifts for fifty miles each way, they’re going to have accidents, frostbite, wires down, messed-up communications, hypothermia, the whole shebang of a public safety emergency. Sir, you could call the governor and get him to divert some people; that might work. But I don’t know how it would play in—”