Prey

Chapter Thirty-Seven

"Jennifer?"

"Yes?" the voice mumbled sleepily.

"This is Henry Lightstone. Sorry to call you this late, but I need to ask you a question about airplane cargo inspections."

"Ah, yes sir, go ahead," the young wildlife inspector said, blinking herself awake.

"The question is, would you normally inspect the cargo shipments coming into Anchorage on Alaska Flight Ninety- nine, the one that lands at eleven-fifty this evening?"

"Uh, no sir, not normally. That flight comes in through SEA-TAC, so there usually aren't any foreign import declarations. Those would have been checked at Seattle."

"But you would inspect occasionally if you thought there was something illegal in one of the shipments?"

"Oh, yes, certainly, especially if we got some kind of tip."

"Such as a single passenger trying to bring three untagged trophy grizzlies in from British Columbia, listing Anchorage as his final destination?"

"We would definitely search on something like that," Jennifer Alik said emphatically. "Of course it would help if that tip came from a reliable source."

"Then I guess the next question is, do you think I'm reliable enough?"

"Yes sir, of course," the young wildlife inspector laughed. "Do you have any idea of when this passenger might be coming in?"

Lightstone looked at his watch. "Far as I know, in about an hour and twenty minutes."

"Tonight?"

"I'm afraid so."

"Okay," Jennifer Alik sighed. "I'll be there, but it'll take me a couple of minutes to get dressed."

"Ah, listen," Lightstone said, "I'm staying here at the Captain Cook. Do you think you could pick me up on the way?"

Making full use of her connections with the operations staff at the Anchorage airport, it took Jennifer Alik less than twenty minutes to get Lightstone's bag checked onto Flight 394 and then return to her small, shared office at Alaska Air Cargo, where Henry Lightstone was waiting.

"Any problems?" he asked as she handed him the ticket packet with the red "Checked Firearms" tag stapled to the front.

"I had to verify that the gun in the locked case was unloaded," the cheerfully smiling wildlife inspector nodded. "McNulty's been saying some nice things about you the last couple of weeks, so I assumed it was."

"Yep, all safe and sound," Lightstone nodded, wishing that he had the heart to tell her about MeNulty, and wishing also that he could have carried the new 10mm Smith amp; Wesson semiautomatic pistol-the one he'd checked out of the Anchorage property room-with him on the plane. But he knew that it wasn't beyond A1 Grynad to have his agents monitoring the issuance of weapons passes by the airlines. And there was no way to avoid having to show his real credentials if he tried to go through the checkpoint armed.

Something about that whole weapons check-through procedure was tugging at the back of Lightstone's brain, but he didn't know why, and then Jennifer Alik interrupted his thoughts before he could figure it out.

"Anything else I can help you with?" the young Eskimo woman asked.

"Well, for the next twenty minutes or so," Lightstone said, "why don't you show me how you really would have inspected a shipment from Flight Ninety-nine had that tip come from a more reliable source."