Double blind

Chapter Thirty-four

At a little after one that Friday afternoon, Larry Paxton, Dwight Stoner, Mike Takahara, and Thomas Woeshack stood in the hallway as the assistant manager opened the door to a three-bedroom suite located at the far end of the top floor of their hotel.

"I think you'll find our executive suites to your liking, Mr. Stanley," the assistant manager assured Dwight Stoner as he motioned for the four men to enter the suite, then followed with the luggage cart.

"Actually, I kind of liked our old rooms," Stoner remarked wistfully as he examined the luxurious furnishings, not at all surprised to discover a set of upright wooden chairs of some indeterminate European vintage instead of the less formal overstuffed chairs that had decorated their previous, more comfortable but much less elegant rooms. "Unfortunately, though, our corporate director has developed more refined tastes in his declining years."

"Damned right he has," Larry Paxton muttered under his breath.

"I beg your pardon?" the assistant manager turned to Paxton.

"I said I can't wait to see how the boss likes these rooms," the covert team leader replied cheerfully.

"Ah, yes. Well, I think he'll be pleased. And your suite, of course, connects through this doorway." The hotel executive banged his knuckles lightly on a dead-bolted door. "Almost an exact duplicate, and just as nice, really."

"I'm sure we'll all be very happy here. Think you could rustle up a half dozen barbecued beef sandwiches and some chips from that little slow-cook place down the street?" Dwight Stoner asked. He slipped four twenties to the assistant manager, who scanned, folded, and pocketed the money in an admirable show of one-handed dexterity.

"Would a half hour be soon enough?"

"Perfect." Stoner nodded agreeably as he gently guided the young man toward the door.

They waited until the assistant manager's footsteps died away. Then, while Stoner and Woeshack searched the adjoining suite and Paxton watched out the window, Mike Takahara reached for the phone, punched in a local number, and spoke into the mouthpiece.

"Room 1012, top floor, end of the hallway to your right."

Fifteen minutes later, there was a knock at the door.

Mike Takahara checked the peephole, opened the door, stepped aside to let Henry Lightstone enter, then bolted the door behind him.

"You clear?" Larry Paxton asked as Lightstone pulled a bottle of cold beer out of the open ice chest, briefly examined the high-backed wooden chairs, and then sat down on the floor with his back against the wall.

"Far as I know." Lightstone took a deep, satisfying swallow of the cold beer, then looked around. "I see we're spending Halahan's money with our normal indifference to government rules and regulations."

"You have any idea how hard it was to find two adjoining rooms at the end of a hallway in this place?" Paxton asked irritably. "Considering all the shit we've gone through on this operation so far, the government auditors can kiss my ragged butt."

"Spoken like a true bureaucrat." Lightstone nodded approvingly as he turned his attention to the team's tech agent. "Did you check the place out anyway, just to be sure?"

"Absolutely." Mike Takahara nodded. "Telephones, lamps, outlets, switches, and electrical lines are all clear. Nothing in the overhead that I can spot. The walls are solid, the room below us is occupied by a sales rep for a pharmaceutical company, and I disconnected the radio and TV. Add what I hope was a random move on our part to the picture, and we're as clean as we're ever going to get in a public hotel… unless, of course, we've got a seriously professional technical type on our ass, in which case all bets are off," he added thoughtfully.

"I'll settle for that." Lightstone accepted the tech agent's assessment of the situation. "Sorry if I sounded overly paranoid in the message, but the last twenty-four hours have been pretty bizarre." His eyes swept the room again. "You guys got anything to eat around here?"

"Sandwiches are on their way," Stoner informed him, but studied Lightstone's bandaged forearm. "What the hell happened to your arm?"

"Never mind his arm. We'll get to all that later." Larry Paxton surveyed the team with a no-nonsense look in his eyes. "First thing I want to know is what the hell's going on with Charlie Team."

Between sips of beer, Henry Lightstone described his initial contact with the two apparent soldiers at the Dogsfire Inn and the subsequent military-like surveillance of Charlie Team at the restaurant, leaving out only his personal involvement with the cat woman.

He paused when someone knocked at the door, waited for Stoner and Takahara to collect the sandwiches from the well-tipped assistant manager, and finished with a description of the devices he'd found under his truck.

For a long moment, the five Special Agents looked at each other.

Mike Takahara broke the silence.

"Can you draw me a rough sketch of that second device?" He tossed Lightstone a pencil and pad of paper.

Bravo Team's wild-card agent made a few quick passes with the pencil, thought for a minute, added a few more details, then handed the pad back to Takahara.

"You sure about these holes at the base?" the tech agent asked after studying the sketch.

"Yeah, they were definitely there. I'm pretty sure four on each side."

"How big?"

"Maybe a quarter of an inch in diameter."

"What about this rectangle above the holes?"

"It looked like some kind of cutout. There was one on each of the two long-dimension sides, about one inch by three inches, with some kind of seal that definitely attached from the inside. Based on the slightly irregular surface, I'm guessing the seal was foil or some kind of metallic-coated paper. I didn't want to poke it to find out."

"Good thinking." Takahara nodded approvingly. "What about the base? Magnetic?"

"I don't think so. As best I could tell, some kind of adhesive pad, maybe an eighth of an inch thick, held the device in place. Looked like one of those peel-off-strip kinds of systems, but I didn't find any of the strips in the immediate area."

"Only the really dumb ones leave their trash around. Unfortunately, these guys don't sound like dummies," Mike Takahara commented dryly. "How was the device camouflaged? Standard military green?"

"Right."

"Any insignia, markings, numbers?"

"No. Or at least none that I remember."

The tech agent nodded and looked around the room at his companions.

"Okay, what I think Henry found is an MTEAR-42 device. Military, training, explosive, arm-switch, remote." He rattled off the military terms. "The crucial word is 'training.' The military uses a lot of these for their war games. What they do is mount these things under all the tanks, armored personnel carriers, trucks, Humvees, then the referees set them off whenever they want to indicate a hit or disabled vehicle. A small charge blows out those foil seals to create a decent concussion and a nice loud bang, then red smoke pours out of those quarter-inch holes, basically to let the crew know they're either on fire or dead… or both. It's a very instructional little device."

"So these things aren't real explosives?" A look of relief crossed Henry Lightstone's tanned face.

"Depends on your definition of 'real,'" Mike Takahara responded. "There's certainly enough of a charge in an MTEAR-42 to give that little truck of yours a good bounce, and all that red smoke pouring out of the engine compartment probably wouldn't have done much for your nerves, especially if you didn't know what it meant. But it wouldn't spread pieces of you and your truck over a couple of acres.. assuming, of course, that what you saw wasn't a modified MTEAR," the tech agent added after a moment.

"What would they modify it with?" Thomas Woeshack asked.

Mike Takahara shrugged. "I don't know. Probably a standard detonator and a half pound of C-4."

Another long moment of silence ensued.

"Is there any way to tell if the one I saw had been modified?" Lightstone asked.

"One good way, if you don't mind the obvious drawbacks." The tech agent grinned wryly. "Just drive your truck over to the warehouse, and I'll take a look… after maybe an hour or two."

"Ah."

Yet another moment of silence filled the elegantly furnished room, this one finally interrupted by Larry Paxton's barely audible voice.

"It's a game. It's gotta be a game."

"What?" Lightstone and the other three agents all turned to stare at the Bravo Team supervisor.

"Think about it," Paxton insisted. "First, there's the obvious factor: Charlie Team isn't ready to work anything serious yet. They know it, Halahan knows it, and we certainly proved it beyond a shadow of a doubt. So how likely is it that Halahan would send a rookie team that isn't ready out on something serious — not just somewhere in Oregon, but in the exact same Jasper County, Oregon, we're assigned to — without putting us on standby just in case they run into some kind of trouble?"

"Not very likely." Lightstone admitted, and the other three agents nodded in agreement.

"Okay, so stay with me on this," Paxton went on patiently. "We know that Halahan and Moore went to a lot of work to set up that series of training exercises for Charlie Team — using us as the crash dummies — and what did we do?"

"We won." Dwight Stoner smiled pleasantly.

"But we cheated," Thomas Woeshack added.

"Okay, we won and we cheated," Mike Takahara compromised. "Both fair and square, more or less."

"Yeah, but wait a minute." Henry Lightstone didn't look at all convinced. "Do you really think Halahan would go to all the effort to set up something — a game, exercise, whatever — this complicated, just because he's pissed at us?"

"Hey, look at the assignment he gave us," Larry Paxton argued. "You tell me that the brilliant idea of shipping us thirty deadly poisonous snakes, a dozen crocodiles, and 750 giant spiders didn't come from the twisted mind of a supervisor bent on revenge."

"That is pretty convincing, Henry," Dwight Stoner conceded.

"Damned right it is. And keep in mind, not only did we seriously piss off Halahan and Moore, but we also embarrassed the hell out of Charlie Team in the process," Larry Paxton went on, "which specifically includes that little wildcat, Marashenko, who, if you ask me, is definitely the type to hold a serious grudge."

"'Destroyed their team spirit, set them back at least a month in their training,' was the way Halahan put it," Mike Takahara reminded them.

"Right." Larry Paxton looked around at his agent team. "So what better way of rebuilding that team spirit, and putting them right back on track…?"

"… than by setting Charlie Team up in a position to embarrass the shit out of us?" Thomas Woeshack finished.

"Exactly. See, even Woeshack recognizes a case of pure treachery when he sees it." Larry Paxton smiled approvingly at the young agent. "Halahan puts us in a godforsaken warehouse in the middle of Oregon with seventy-two shipping crates from hell, knowing we'll be too busy watching out for our own asses to look around and see what's going on

…

"… and then works it out so that Henry makes contact with that blind soothsayer…" Dwight Stoner added.

"… who links him up to some crazy woman post-office worker who's really a fortune-telling witch in disguise. Wow, that really is devious planning." Thomas Woeshack's eyes widened in amazement.

"And speaking of curious events, that reminds me," Larry Paxton interrupted after briefly staring at Woeshack in dismay, "just what did happen to your arm, Henry?"

"Uh… nothing, just a little scratch."

"You're trying to tell us you bandaged your whole damned arm because you got a little scratch? Come on, give me a break." Stoner glared at Lightstone skeptically and reached for his arm. "Let me see that thing."

"Hey, wait… AGGHHH!" Henry Lightstone's eyes bulged as Stoner trapped his wrist in an inescapable grip and yanked up one side of the taped bandage loose, ripping out several hundred of his fellow agent's forearm hairs in the process.

"Jesus Christ, Henry," Stoner whispered reverently as he and the others stared at the exposed wounds.

"You trying to tell us a woman did that?" Larry Paxton demanded, his eyes widening with disbelief as he inspected the deep, encrusted wounds on Lightstone's forearm.

"No, her cat did," Lightstone muttered as he hurriedly pressed the taped bandage — now covered with dozens of pulled hairs — back in place.

"Must be one hell of a cat," Mike Takahara offered dubiously.

"She's pretty good-sized," Lightstone acknowledged as he glared at his fellow agents.

"You know," Larry Paxton remarked thoughtfully to Stoner, "something about this whole deal just doesn't smell right."

"I know what you mean." The huge agent nodded. Then, before Henry could react, the huge agent reached behind Lightstone and yanked up his shirt, pinning the lanky agent's long, muscular arms over his head and exposing his bare back.

"Bingo." Stoner smiled and turned his futilely struggling partner so the other agents in the room could see the evidence.

"Now those look like they were done by a woman," Larry Paxton announced approvingly. "'Less, of course, you'd like to try to convince us that the lady's cat climbed all over your body and tore it up like that," the Bravo Team leader added with a pleasant smile on his face when Stoner returned Lightstone to his place on the floor, released his arms, and handed him a cold bottle of beer.

"I was lucky to survive the night," Henry muttered as he struggled to straighten his shirt, "and that's the unvarnished truth."

"You all do realize what this means, don't you?" Mike Takahara asked.

"Henry spent the last two days getting laid while the rest of us froze our nuts off in that warehouse collecting a lifetime supply of nightmares?" Dwight Stoner suggested.

"Well, yeah; that, too," the tech agent agreed, "but don't you think Bobby must be involved in Halahan's scam, too?"

Larry Paxton's brows furrowed. "How do you figure that?" he demanded.

"Simple." Takahara smiled. "Halahan needs a twist on Henry, some way to control or direct his movements. So he finds out where Bobby and Susan live, knowing that if Henry ever gets reasonably close, he'll track them down first chance he gets. Then our dear Machiavellian Special Ops chief works out a deal with Bobby for… what? What would it take to get an ex-homicide detective with a warped sense of humor like LaGrange in on this deal?"

All eyes turned to Henry Lightstone.

"Not much," Lightstone conceded, a thoughtful expression appearing on his face as he finished tucking in his shirt. "Bobby and I pulled some serious shit on a few people when we worked together in San Diego. He really gets into that sort of thing."

"Like that time you floated your drunk supervisor — the one who couldn't swim and was deathly afraid of sharks — in San Diego Bay in an open coffin in the middle of the night, and then woke him up with a string of firecrackers?" Larry Paxton reminded in a mildly threatening voice.

Lightstone nodded silently, his eyes taking on a distant look as he began to drum his fingers lightly on the floor.

"And we did pretty much destroy Bobby's boat out there in the Bahamas, Henry," Mike Takahara pointed out. "So Bobby, and probably Susan, too — you have to figure they were in on it together — tag-team you onto this Sage character, who links you up to this post-office seductress with the big cat… or was it a little cat with the big claws?"

"Which, in any case, probably made it real easy to rig a confrontation scene with Henry and this military character, since — knowing our buddy here — he might as well have been wearing the lady's scarf on the end of his lance." Larry Paxton smiled in satisfaction.

"Nicely put," Dwight Stoner commented.

"Thank you."

"I don't understand…" Thomas Woeshack turned to Mike Takahara, looking confused again.

"Knights of the Round Table analogy, Thomas," Mike Takahara explained. "Henry happens to be cursed with a white-knight complex. Can't resist rescuing the fair maiden, no matter how many fire-breathing dragons come popping out of the woodwork. It's a genetic defect. I'll explain it to you later," the tech agent promised.

"You know, we could be stretching ourselves a little too far on this Halahan-scam business," Henry Lightstone cautioned.

"But think about how they'd work it, Henry," Paxton argued. "They set it up so you trip across these military characters at the restaurant, you follow them and spot their surveillance, you warn us, we notify Halahan, he tells us to stand by — let Charlie Team handle things themselves — we ignore him like we usually do, ride to the rescue…"

"Hey, their side even gets a fair maiden too — Natasha!" Thomas Woeshack interrupted, grinning widely. "I'll bet she'll be surprised when Henry rides in wearing the witch's scarf on his lance!"

"Yeah, that's putting it mildly," Stoner chuckled.

"… and we find ourselves surrounded by video cameras and up to our butts in red smoke when the referees — presumably Halahan and Moore — set off all the MTEARs they've probably been tagging us with ever since we landed in Medford," Paxton finished after giving the team's Eskimo agent/pilot a sadly sympathetic look.

"You've got to admit, Henry, the whole thing tracks real nice," Mike Takahara added.

"Yeah, I know… it sounds good, it really does. But for Christ's sake, I broke that guy's wrist!" Lightstone continued to look perplexed in spite of the other's comments. "I know I did. I heard it snap. And the other one — that pale-eyed guy the kid called Sergeant — is definitely a dangerous s.o.b. I can tell you that much for sure, whoever or whatever else he may be."

"Okay, so these particular militants are tougher than the average bear." Larry Paxton shrugged indifferently. "You telling me Halahan couldn't get his hands on a team of marines out of Quantico, or even some Army Rangers out of Fort Bragg? Guys who wouldn't think any more about a broken wrist than you would a sprained toe?"

"The FBI's Hostage Rescue Team trains at Quantico," Mike Takahara reminded Henry. "And I hear they hire a lot of those guys straight out of the military. Halahan would know that… and a training scenario like this would be right down their alley, too."

"There you go." Paxton nodded his head in satisfaction.

"But what if we're wrong?" Lightstone pressed, still not fully convinced.

"You mean what if Charlie Team really is being tagged by a bunch of hard-as-nails characters, for whatever reason, and they don't know it?" Paxton asked.

Lightstone nodded his head.

The Bravo Team leader paused for a moment. "Then they could be in deep shit."

"Exactly."

"So what can we do to make sure… before we go turn things around on Halahan and Moore again?" Stoner asked.

"I think — at a minimum — we have to report what I saw." Lightstone looked over at Paxton for confirmation. "How could we word it? In the process of making contact with subjects linked to suspect Sage, special agent Lightstone observed members of Charlie Team in the area of Jasper County, Oregon, under active surveillance by individuals who appear to have military backgrounds. Request further instructions."

Larry Paxton stared pensively at the floor for a few seconds. Then he nodded his head and consulted his watch. "Henry's right. We've got to be sure. But it's two o'clock now, which makes it five o'clock East Coast time on a Friday night."

"No problem. Halahan and Moore both wear beepers," Mike Takahara reminded.

"Yeah, but for emergency messages only." Paxton scrutinized his troops carefully. "The question is, do we really have an emergency here? Or just a situation?"

"If that surveillance is for real, I sure wouldn't want those guys following me for very long," Lightstone announced firmly, then hesitated. "But as far as an emergency goes, I guess I can't say they did anything especially threatening… outside of leaving that MTEAR device on my truck."

"Which could have been put there by someone from Charlie Team just as easily," Mike Takahara reminded him. "Donato, LiBrandi, and Marashenko are all tech-trained. Fact of the matter is, for all we know, they could've put those things on your truck right after you rented it."

"That's a point," Lightstone agreed.

"So how do we go about reporting all of this to Halahan in a timely manner, without making it sound like we're panicking out here?" Larry Paxton asked his team.

"I can send an e-mail message to Freddy — to the office and to his home computer — along with a couple of 'tell dad to check his e-mail' notes to his son and daughter," Mike Takahara suggested. "I know he spends a lot of time with his kids on the Net. Probably at least one of them will be on-line this evening, and he'll get the message within the next three to four hours. Worst-case scenario is he doesn't get it until he gets to work Monday."

Paxton nodded his head. "Okay, do it, then keep an eye out for any return mail this evening. I really want to see what Freddy has to say about all this."

"No problem. I'll set up an audio alarm so the computer beeps us if we get any incoming messages," the tech agent proposed as he reached for his nearby computer case.

"In the meantime" — Henry Lightstone rubbed his sore arm distractedly — "I've got an idea how we just might be able to find out what's going on around here."

"Yeah? What's that?" Paxton demanded.

"What's the first thing they teach covert agents to do on a new assignment?"

"Check in with the local resident agent," Thomas Woeshack responded immediately.

"You think those characters on Charlie Team would actually do something like that?" Dwight Stoner asked skeptically.

"Oh hell, yes. Rookie agents are like that." Larry Paxton smiled cheerfully and turned to Mike Takahara, who was busy hooking up the modem line to the back of his notebook computer.

"Mike, who's the closest resident agent in southern Oregon?"

"Just a second."

Thirty seconds later, Takahara looked up from his screen. "Looks like Wilbur Boggs."

"Good old Wilbur. The terror of the Chesapeake Bay when he was a young agent. I remember hearing he'd gotten transferred out to Oregon. Pissed off more duck-poaching congressmen than…"

A startled look suddenly appeared on Larry Paxton's face. Then he looked around at his fellow agents. "You guys thinking what I'm thinking?"

"Oh yeah," Henry Lightstone murmured softly, his eyes lighting up with amusement as he and Stoner and Takahara all nodded their heads. "Halahan, Moore, Charlie Team, Glynco, Bobby, Susan, the soothsayer, the witch-lady… and now good old Wilbur. One big happy game-playing family."

"You mean they're all working together to set us up?" Thomas Woeshack asked. "Wilbur Boggs, too?"

"It sure does look that way." Lightstone shook his head slowly, trying to ignore the apprehension that continued to plague him as the pieces of the puzzle apparently fell into place. "One big game, and we're the target."

"You mean we were the target," Dwight Stoner corrected him.

"Exactly." Larry Paxton smiled again. "So where do we find Special Agent Wilbur Boggs these days?"

"You'll love this part," the tech agent predicted.

"What?"

"If I remember my map correctly, we're about twenty minutes from his office right now."