Target America

20

Trooper Trent Logan was a badge-heavy cop, no two ways about it, and Montana wasn’t exactly a crime-saturated state, so he treated every traffic infraction, no matter how minor, like the Lufthansa heist of 1978. Post command received at least five complaints a month from motorists traveling the stretch of I-90 between Billings and Bozeman, and Logan had taken a lot of ribbing during his first year on the job for being such a gung-ho rookie. But after hitting the mother lode one Sunday afternoon, he received what he considered to be the ultimate vindication.

He stopped a seventy-year-old woman driving a yellow, near-mint-condition 1985 Cadillac Eldorado for a simple “lines and lanes” violation just outside of Big Timber. No other state trooper in the nation would have stopped her that day for swerving to miss a chunk of splintered two-by-four on the highway, but Trooper Logan was no other state trooper. He lived by a code, and that code meant there was no room on his interstate for road raging old ladies, no matter what their excuses. So he pulled her over and cited her for the lines and lanes violation, brusquely admonishing her to abide by the traffic laws of the sovereign state of Montana. Then, as he was giving back her license, he noticed for the first time that she was supposed to be wearing corrective lenses while driving, and he asked where her glasses were.

“Oh, I broke them a few days ago,” the lady said. “The new ones will be ready next week. Here, see?” She dug the LensCrafters receipt from her purse and offered it to him.

But Trooper Logan had no interest in receipts. A crime had been committed.

“Ma’am, you’re driving while impaired. Please step out of the vehicle.” He placed her under arrest and cuffed her hands behind her back. Then he put her into the backseat of his cruiser and called for a “hook.” It was during the vehicle inventory, which he conducted during his wait for the tow truck, that he discovered a gym bag containing ten pounds of methamphetamine in the trunk.

The elderly lady was successfully indicted two weeks later on the felony-one charge of transporting with intent to distribute a “super bulk” amount of a controlled substance — a crime that would likely ensure that she spend the rest of her life in prison — and then Logan went on a tear. Convinced that every motorist in Montana was running drugs, no matter how innocent his or her appearance, he began routinely making traffic stops for infractions as petty as one mile an hour over the speed limit, never hesitating to call for the canine unit on the slightest suspicion. His fellow troopers quickly grew tired of this beyond-gung-ho approach, and the friendly ribbing turned into open and often unpleasant criticism. Trooper Logan didn’t pay them much attention, though. As far as he was concerned, he was operating on a whole different level of law enforcement, and if his fellow officers couldn’t appreciate that, screw ’em.

So when he clocked a green SUV traveling in the opposite direction doing seventy-two in a seventy-mile-an-hour zone, Logan didn’t hesitate to hit the strobes and “shoot the median.” The SUV was already pulling over when he cleared the grassy median and got the cruiser back onto the highway, but this didn’t stop him from giving the siren a short burst as he pulled up. He stepped out of the cruiser and adjusted the brim of his Smokey the Bear hat to eyebrow level as he strutted up on the passenger side of the vehicle, the heel of his hand resting on the butt of his Sig Sauer P229 in .357 caliber.

“Good evening, sir,” he said in an impersonal tone of voice. “Driver’s license, registration, and proof of insurance, please.”

The fifty-three-year-old man behind the wheel handed him a German passport, an international driver’s permit, and the rental agreement for the car.

Trooper Logan had never seen a German passport, nor had he seen an IDP. “Do you know why I stopped you, Mr. Jaeger?”

Nikolai Kashkin looked at him with his pale blue eyes and smiled. “I assume I must have been speeding,” he said with a German accent.

“Do you know how fast you were going, sir?”

Kashkin shook his head. “I’m sure you know better than I, officer. I’m not about to argue with you.”

Logan especially distrusted the really cooperative ones, believing that most people hated cops. “You’re a long way from home, Mr. Jaeger. What brings you to the United States?”

“I’m making a tour of your national parks,” Kashkin said enthusiastically. “I’m on my way up to Glacier now.”

“Uh-huh,” Logan said, paging through the passport, attempting to make heads or tails of the many stamps and dates. “How long do you plan to be in the US, sir?”

“A couple of months,” Kashkin said. “Possibly longer. Mount Rushmore was closed when I tried to see it a few days ago, and I would like very much to see that before I return home.” He had actually only just heard of the monument’s closing over the radio the hour before.

“Well, it might be a while,” Logan said. “I’m sure you’ve heard that terrorists have smuggled a nuclear weapon into the country. Rushmore’s been closed as a precaution.”

“Yes, that’s very terrible,” Kashkin said sadly. He thought it insane that anyone could believe he would waste the weapon on a useless rock in the middle of nowhere, but he did enjoy hearing over the radio that thousands of American tourists were being disappointed all across the country due to the closing of so many national monuments.

“Wait here, sir.” Logan returned to his cruiser and sat behind the wheel, digging out a reference manual to foreign passports and identification from the bottom of his gear bag sitting on the passenger seat. So far he had only ever used the manual to look for reasons to hassle Canadian tourists, whom he often referred to as — quite cleverly, in his opinion—“Mexicans who spoke good English.”

The German passport was three years old and appeared valid when compared with the example in the manual. The IDP, however, was another matter. There were a number of different examples of these in the manual, and the example of the German-issued IDP didn’t match the one that Mr. Hans Hartmann Jaeger was carrying. Most US law enforcement officers would have taken into account that the manual was three years old and therefore outdated by current anticounterfeiting technology, but, here again, very few US law enforcement officers operated at Trooper Logan’s level of professionalism.

Since hitting the mother lode back in April, he’d succeeded in convincing himself that he had a sixth sense about people, and this evening he believed that sixth sense was telling him there was something wrong about this kraut tourist. He wanted to search the German’s vehicle and find out what he was hiding, but he didn’t have probable cause, so he decided to ask for permission, knowing from his extended experience with harassing Canadians that many tourists didn’t realize — as many Americans didn’t realize — they had the right to refuse a search request in the absence of probable cause or reasonable suspicion.

He left Kashkin’s ersatz identification on the seat and walked up on the driver’s side of the SUV. “Mr. Jaeger, do you mind if I search your vehicle? It’s just routine, sir; a service we like to perform on all traffic stops after sundown.”

Kashkin went on alert, seeing the veiled suspicion on the trooper’s face. He knew there was nothing wrong with his passport or his IDP, both of them issued legitimately by the German government under the name of a dead German citizen whose identity he had managed to assume with the help of a fellow RSMB member working inside the Federal Ministry of the Interior. The SUV was rented with a legitimate credit card and the vehicle properly insured. So what was making this young cowboy so distrustful? Had there been a leak somewhere? Was the US government onto him specifically? Or was this something else? He would have to find out one way or another before continuing with his mission.

“I don’t understand,” he said with a confused smile.

“It’s just a service we like to perform, sir. The same service we like to perform for everyone after sundown.”

A service? That made no sense at all to Kashkin. “May I get out of the car while you perform this service, officer?”

“Yes. That makes it a lot safer for everyone, sir.” Logan opened the door for the older man. “I’ll give you a seat in the back of my cruiser, so you don’t get hit by a car. It won’t take long at all, sir.”

They walked back toward the cruiser with its strobes flashing in the failing light, and Kashkin began to feel the tightening in his chest again over his heart. He couldn’t allow himself to be locked in the back of the police car. When the trooper found the guns in the back, he would be trapped with no hope of escape.

When they reached the front of the cruiser, the trooper took him by the arm. “First, I’m going to need to pat you down, sir, for your safety as well as mine. Do you have anything sharp or otherwise dangerous anywhere on your person, sir?”

Kashkin patted the breast pocket of his shirt. “Only this mechanical pencil.”

“That’s fine, sir. Go ahead and place that on the hood for me.”

“Certainly.” Kashkin took the pencil from his pocket, and with blinding speed jabbed Logan in the eye with it.

Logan reeled away, grabbing his eye with both hands. Kashkin lunged forward, delivering him a right-hand blow to the side of the neck. Logan landed heavily on his knees, severely stunned by the abrupt interruption of blood and oxygen to his brain, and crashed over onto his side, crushing his Smokey the Bear hat.

Kashkin kicked him in the side of the head to send the hat flying and dragged him by the gun belt around the blind side of the cruiser, where he slugged him in the temple. Then he used the trooper’s own handcuffs to secure his hands behind his back and took the pistol from its holster, concealing it beneath his shirt as he returned to the SUV. He snatched the keys from the ignition and opened the back, taking out a folding fighting knife and returning to where Trooper Logan was struggling to sit up, bleeding from his left eye.

“Stop right there!” Logan ordered, seeing the open black blade in Kashkin’s hand, and scrabbling to get his feet beneath him. “You just stop right there! Keep the fuck away from me!”

Kashkin had seen men in the trooper’s situation many times before, completely helpless, completely doomed, and completely refusing to accept it. He pounced on Logan and jammed the blade deep into his inner right thigh, hitting bone and twisting the blade.

Logan shrieked and writhed around beneath Kashkin’s weight, unable to throw him off.

“Tell me what you know about me!” Kashkin demanded. “Tell me everything!”

“I don’t know anything about you!” Logan screamed. “Nothing! Get the fuck off of me!”

Kashkin ripped the blade up through the muscle toward Logan’s groin, and Logan let out another horrible shriek. “Tell me what you know,” Kashkin said lustily, “or I will skin you alive.”

The interrogation went on for three loud and bloody minutes before Kashkin was finally satisfied that Logan was nothing more than a nosy American lawman with nothing better to do than pester people out minding their own business. He cut one of the whimpering cop’s carotid arteries and left him to bleed out in the dark. Then he retrieved his passport from the cruiser, ripping the dash cam from its mount and switching off the strobes. Within a minute, Kashkin was gone up the interstate.

In his final seconds of life, it never occurred to Logan that he’d brought this incident upon himself. It did occur to him, however, that the vicious man who had just carved up both of his legs and his groin would probably never be caught. He would never be caught because Logan had long stopped calling in most of his petty traffic stops, wanting to cut down on being ridiculed by his fellow officers. This meant the dispatch center had received no information about Kashkin or his vehicle, and without the dashboard camera, there would be no evidence as to who had committed the murder.

Logan’s last thoughts were of self-pity and under appreciation.