Prey

Chapter Forty

After all of the certificates were verified, the gas tanks filled, the credit-card slip signed, and a couple of wildlife law-enforcement war stories exchanged, the retired special agent-pilot and his mechanic at the Reno Sky Ranch Airport finally got around to estimating that it would take them another fifteen minutes to remove two of the six seats from the cabin of the Cessna Golden Eagle.

Which was cutting it awfully close as far as Henry Lightstone was concerned.

But Homicide Sergeant Clinton Hardwell reassured him that during that time, his detectives were perfectly capable of keeping a team of FBI agents busy with questions of jurisdiction and procedure. The extra room in the cabin would make it possible for Dwight Stoner to stretch his injured knee out into a halfway comfortable position, so Lightstone just nodded and said sure, go ahead.

Twenty minutes later, he and Stoner were strapping themselves into a pair of spacious cabin seats while Special Agent-Pilot Larry Paxton taxied the Cessna down to the end of the runway, with Trainee Pilot Mike Takahara in the copilot's seat.

After bringing the twin-prop plane around to face the runway, Paxton turned and looked back into the cabin.

"We're set to go. Next stop Ashland?"

"Yeah, I'd like to drop the evidence off at the lab," Lightstone said. "But what about those teletypes? Isn't that going to raise a flag if we show up there when you three are supposed to be dead?"

"No problem," Mike Takahara said over his shoulder. "I know the chief electronics guru out there. Guy named Ed Rhodes. He'll help us keep everything low-key."

"He know we're coming?"

"I sent him an e-mail message from the house before we left, asked him to pick us up at the airport. Figured we didn't want to alert anyone else yet, just in case."

"Okay, Ashland it is," Henry Lightstone nodded agreeably. Finding himself able to relax for the first time in many hours, he closed his eyes for a few moments, and then opened them up to find Dwight Stoner staring at him.

"You know, Henry," Stoner said over the muted roar of the twin engines, "if anybody had tried to stick you in a plane a few months ago where you knew that the pilot had a messed-up arm, a torn-up leg, and probably a concussion to boot, and the copilot didn't even have a license, you'd have gone ape-shit."

"Yeah, I probably would have," Lightstone conceded. "But that was before I flew with a guy named Woeshack."

"Woeshack? You mean that new guy up in Anchorage? Eskimo kid, looks like he's about sixteen?"

"That's the one."

"So what's the matter with him?"

"As a rookie agent, not much," Lightstone shrugged. "In fact, from what I've seen so far, I'd say he's smart, aggressive, and has a hell of a lot of guts. On the other hand, as a pilot, he's pretty much an air crash waiting to happen."

"Yeah? How so?"

"Well, I can give you three reasons right off. First of all, his idea of a takeoff is to go like hell to the end of the runway and then pull up at the last second before he hits something. Second, I don't think he has any idea of what a compass is for. And third, he acts like he doesn't know how to land the goddamn plane once he's up there."

"Sounds like a government pilot to me," Stoner observed. "But isn't he also the guy that buzzed those bastards who were shooting at you, and then hauled your ass out of the plane after he dumped it into the trees?"

"That's Woeshack all right," Lightstone nodded.

"Sounds like good covert agent material to me," Stoner said.

"Yeah, I know." Lightstone smiled as Larry Paxton received clearance from the tower and began to roll the twin-engine airplane down the runway. "I've been thinking the same thing myself."

Senior Electronics Specialist Ed Rhodes stood inside the small Ashland Airport terminal building and watched through the window until the twin props of the Cessna Golden Eagle stopped turning, the door opened, and one by one, the four men made their way down the stairs.

Sighing in relief as the last man stepped down onto the asphalt, Rhodes walked outside and strolled across the tie-down area. Two of the men were standing around on crutches, while the other two were busy removing from the small plane what luggage they had.

"Hey, buddy, you aren't going to believe the LEMIS messages we got just after you called," the bearded scientist said as he came up behind Takahara and slapped him on the shoulder. "For a minute there, I thought-"

Then Rhodes blinked in shock when Mike Takahara turned around and showed his badly damaged face. "Jesus! What the hell happened to you?"

"Long story," Takahara shrugged. "Tell you all about it after we've had a couple of beers. These are the guys I told you about. Ed Rhodes, meet Henry Lightstone, Larry Paxton, and Dwight Stoner."

Rhodes tried to hide his shock when he looked at the badly bruised and swollen faces of the three men as he shook hands.

"Did you say Stoner and Paxton?"

"That's right," Takahara nodded.

"Uh, did anybody mention to you guys that you're supposed to be dead?" the scientist asked. "Though I don't recall seeing anything in either of the messages about an agent named Lightstone."

"Henry's one of our deep-cover agents in Special Ops," Takahara explained. "In fact, the only people so far who actually know he's a Fish and Wildlife agent are the director, the chief, a U.S. Attorney, the four of us, and now you."

"I see," Rhodes nodded thoughtfully. "Uh, you want to be introduced by some other name when we take you through the lab?"

"How about Lightner? Henry Allen Lightner," Lightstone said.

"Henry Lightner it is," Rhodes said easily. "Man, you guys must be into something heavy."

"Well, we're hoping that the people who caused us all this grief will continue to think that Mike and Larry and Dwight are dead," Lightstone explained carefully. "For the moment, they may think I'm still alive, which we're planning to use to our advantage."

"That's an interesting twist," Rhodes said.

"Yeah, we think so. Is that going to cause any problems if I give you some evidence using the name Lightner?"

"No, no reason why it should." The bearded scientist shook his head as he led the three men over to the white government-plated Suburban. "We get a lot of evidence in from agents and game wardens working undercover, so we're used to keeping our mouths shut about what we see and hear. Whatever name they give us is what we put down on the chain."

"Good," Lightstone nodded approvingly.

"I guess the thing is," Rhodes added, his jaw tightening as he unlocked the back doors of the Suburban and began to stow away their luggage, "everybody at the lab knew Paul and Carl pretty well. So as far as we're concerned," he added as he closed the doors, "it really doesn't matter who or what you guys are. All we want to know is how we can help."

"Fair enough," Lightstone nodded, "because help's exactly what we came here for."

During the five minutes it took Rhodes to drive them to the new four-and-a-half-million-dollar wildlife crime laboratory securely nestled in the Rogue Valley of Southern Oregon, it became obvious to Lightstone, Paxton, and Stoner that they had an interesting new ally in the bearded scientist.

"The boss is out of town, but he told me you guys could have anything here you want, including his desk," Rhodes said as he led them into an amazingly clean and shiny evidence-control area of the lab, where a lab technician and another scientist were working around a bar-code scanning computer disassembling packages of evidence.

"This is Tim, one of our lab techs, who's helping Joe log in some evidence for Serology," Rhodes said. "Henry, Mike, Larry, and Dwight, from Special Ops. You guys about done there?"

"Yeah, just got some stuff in from the Army Crime Lab over in Georgia," Joe Biggs, the serologist, said and then looked at Lightstone more closely. "Hey, aren't you that guy who was involved in the bear case we got from Yellowstone a few months ago?"

"That's right," Lightstone nodded cautiously. "How'd you know that?"

"They sent us some photos taken at the hospital. Somebody had the bright idea of trying to match the claw marks on your arms and shoulder against one of the bears claws to tie you to the scene."

"Were you able to do it?" Lightstone asked, curious.

"Naw. That's the kind of thing these guys get from watching too much television. What we were able to do, though, was work up the blood on your clothes. Basically proved that you were covered with bear blood, which I guess you already knew," the serologist smiled. "Then we used our computerized DNA system to match up the stains on your clothes with the two bears in that guy's truck. No big deal, but it might help corroborate your testimony if it ever goes to trial."

"Don't count on it," Lightstone said grimly. "That case is just about over with."

"Yeah, that's what I heard," the serologist said, sounding vaguely disappointed. "Oh well, guess I'd better get back at it."

"Okay, Henry," Rhodes said, waiting until Tim and Joe left with their evidence and closed the door, "so what have you got for us?"

"This," Lightstone said as he handed the forensic scientist a small plastic bag containing the strip of hide he'd removed from the claw of the mother Kodiak.

Rhodes held the plastic bag up to the light and began to write notes in a new case folder as Lightstone explained the significance of the collected material, verified the seal on the package, and then signed the chain-of-custody forms.

"Not sure how much we're going to be able to tell you on something that small," Rhodes said as he reached for a nearby phone, "but we'll give it a try. Hey, Margaret? This is Ed. Yeah, listen, can you come down to Evidence and Property? Yeah, right now. I've got something interesting for you."

Two minutes later, after listening to Ed Rhodes' concise summary of the information Lightstone had provided, the white-coated mammalogist disappeared down the long hallway in the direction of her lab section with the evidence in hand.

"Want to see the rest of the lab while we're waiting?" Rhodes asked.

"Sure," Lightstone said agreeably.

"Okay, why don't we first go see what Joe's doing," Rhodes suggested as he led the four agents down the narrow hallway and into the main door on the right. "Then I'll take you around to morphology, criminalistics, the photo-video lab, graphic arts, and save the best part of the lab for last."

"Electronics and computers, the critical stuff," Mike Takahara nodded with a cheerful smile as Paxton and Stoner rolled their eyes.

"Christ, is this place all ours?" Lightstone asked in disbelief as they entered the modern serology lab, where he could see at least a dozen white-coated figures working in and around the red oak cabinets and black epoxy countertops.

"Yours, and about seven thousand other state and federal wildlife officers, not to mention a hundred and thirteen countries that signed the CITES treaty," Rhodes said. "Only lab of its kind in the world. Here we basically look at blood and tissue samples, and try to figure out what species is involved." Rhodes led them over to the serologist he had introduced earlier. "Maybe Joe here can explain what he's working on."

Joe nodded. "This is some bloodstain evidence that the Army Crime Lab guys sent over to us." Two sets of bloodstained, camouflaged clothing were laid out on a low examination table. "They're trained to work up human crimes, and these samples had both human and animal specificity. They sent them to us to see if we could work it out a little further. There are at least twenty or thirty separate stains on that one pair of pants alone. But with our new micro-separation system, the tagged probes, and one of Ed's computers hooked up to the scanners, we can work this kind of stuff ten times as fast as we used to."

"What he's saying is that he wants you to bring him more evidence so he can justify stealing another one of my computers," Rhodes interpreted as they thanked the serologist and continued on.

"And over here," Rhodes said as he stopped at the far end of the long room, "is probably the most important piece of equipment in the serology lab." He stood next to what looked like a large freezer, with temperature gauges on the front and a stainless-steel tank of liquid nitrogen hooked up to the side.

"A freezer?" Dwight Stoner asked dubiously.

"Yes, but not just any freezer," Rhodes smiled. "This one can keep blood and tissue samples down to minus eighty degrees Celsius. Which is cold enough that if you stuck your hand inside and kept it there for, oh, maybe about a minute or so, you could take it out, smack it against the wall, and then pick the pieces up off the floor."

"No shit?" Stoner whispered, moving in cautiously to take a closer look at the apparently lethal machine.

"Actually, what it is is their library of tissue samples from all over the world," Rhodes explained. "For example, if these guys are going to try to figure out the genetic code of a wolf, they're going to have to start out with samples from a pure wolf, not eighty-percent wolf and twenty-percent dog. The question, of course, is how do they know?"

"Because one looks like a wolf and the other-" Paxton started to guess.

"What did you say?" Lightstone interrupted, puzzled, because something in the scientist's comments had triggered his memory. Something about…

At that moment a woman's voice came over the loudspeaker.

"Ed Rhodes, can you come to morphology, right away please?"

Rhodes walked over to a nearby wall phone, picked up the handset, and punched in a three-digit code.

"Hi, Margaret. What have you got? Oh, yeah? Really? We'll be right there."

The morphology section of the lab consisted of three semicircular workbench areas and two freestanding layout tables, both of which were situated under wide skylights. When they got there, they found Margaret Kuo sitting in front of a comparison microscope that was equipped with a ten-inch-square split-view screen.

"Well, what do you think?" the Korean-born mammalogist asked as she moved aside to make room for Rhodes and the four agents.

"Looks good to me," the electronics engineer commented as he glanced casually at the two pieces of hide that had been magnified several times and then brought together side by side in the split screen. "What are we looking at?"

"You know, you computer guys are really pretty useless if you can't recognize a classic match of Ceratotherium simum hide when you see it," the white-coated mammalogist grinned as she reached into one of the nearby drawers and brought out a pair of boots made of dark gray leather with a rough, grainy texture.

"Here's an example. Got this pair out of a shipment going to West Germany," Margaret Kuo said, unaware that Henry Lightstone, standing right beside her, was staring down at the boots as though seeing a ghost for the second time.

"Cera- what?" Ed Rhodes started to ask, but Henry Lightstone already knew the answer.

"White rhino," he rasped, blinking in confusion as his mind flashed on an identical pair of boots, and the white hair, and the white beard and… that same white-bearded face as it flashed beneath the plane.

"Oh, Jesus." he whispered in pure disbelief.

"Hey, that's right-" the white-coated mammalogist started to say, but Lightstone wasn't listening because he'd already turned to Mike Takahara.

"SEA-TAC Security," he said insistently, grabbing at the agent's muscular arm. "We've got to get ahold of them, right now!"

Exactly twenty-three minutes later, Ed Rhodes was working quickly to connect cables from the back of a multifunction VCR to the back of one of the overhead monitors in his electronics lab, while Mike Takahara was talking on the phone to the technical coordinator for the Seattle Tacoma International Airport's security office.

"Yes, that's right, Monday the twentieth, 'C' terminal," Takahara said, and then looked over at Lightstone. "What time?"

"Umm…" Lightstone had to stop and think. "About ten o'clock in the morning. Maybe a little after."

"Ten o'clock," Takahara repeated, and then turned to Rhodes. "You ready?"

"Just a second," Rhodes said as he reached over and set three switches on the jury-rigged communications board and then watched the computer screen as he punched in a series of command codes on the keyboard.

"How are you doing this?" Lightstone asked, not sure that he'd understand, but wanting to ask anyway.

"Two land-line connections with a satellite uplink at Bellevue," Rhodes said as he continued to work at the computer.

"You mean telephone lines?"

"Yeah, exactly," the intent electronics engineer nodded.

"So why not use the phones all the way down instead of screwing around with the satellite?" Paxton asked.

"Need a fiber-optic line for the quality. Haven't managed to get one run down to Ashland yet," Rhodes replied, and then suddenly smiled brightly. "All right, we're locked onto the satellite, transponder eighteen, and we are recording. Tell them to go ahead and transmit."

"We were pretty damn lucky on this," Mike Takahara said to Lightstone as he and Rhodes and the other two agents watched the flickering screen. "They're required to maintain the tapes for only seventy-two hours. Probably would have reused this tape sometime this evening."

"Far as I'm concerned, it's about time we had some luck on this deal," Paxton growled.

"Yeah, no shit," Stoner said in agreement.

"Come on, guys, where are you?" Rhodes muttered as he glanced down at his watch. "We've only got this transponder for… there!"

The monitor suddenly flickered to life, displaying a montage of four smaller screens-two screens showing people walking through metal detectors, the other two displaying the same images as viewed by the X-ray units.

"Christ! They've got those things focused right on the metal detectors." Lightstone shook his head in frustration.

"Yeah, so?" Rhodes asked.

"These guys didn't go through the detectors. They were carrying, so they walked around."

"That's okay. We can see about eighteen inches on the left-hand side of each one," Rhodes said as they watched progressive sets of travelers walking slowly through the detectors, several of whom had to back up, empty their pockets, and try again.

"What did you say these assholes looked like?" Larry Paxton asked as they watched one overweight man make four successive trips back and forth through the scanner.

"Three Caucasian males, one Oriental male, and one Oriental female," Lightstone recited, his eyes fixed to the flickering quarter-screen on the right. "Guy with the boots had white hair and white beard, both closely trimmed. The woman-"

"There!" Mike Takahara yelled. "Left screen, guy with white hair and a white beard just went through. Is that him?"

"I don't know, went by too fast." Lightstone shook his head. "Have them run it back."

"No, that's okay. Let it run, we've got it recorded," Rhodes said as they watched a young-looking Oriental man and then a very attractive Oriental woman walk around the scanner.

"What about him?" Lightstone asked Mike Takahara.

"Yeah, that could have been him," the Japanese-American agent said hesitantly, "but he had his head turned, saying something to the girl."

"It has to be… oh, yeah," Lightstone whispered as he watched the tall Caucasian male with the close-cropped, curly dark hair and mustache walk past. He remembered the startled look on Arturo Bolin's distinctive face when the three. 357 hollow-point bullets had caught him in the head and throat and caused him to drop onto the rocky base of the shale outcropping.

"You sure?" Mike Takahara asked, covering up the mouthpiece of the phone.

"Yeah, I'm absolutely sure," Lightstone nodded. "Now let's see if we can find out who they are."

Forty-five minutes later, Ed Rhodes dropped five blurry but still legible eight-by-ten color photographs in front of Lightstone.

"There're your bad guys," the electronics specialist said, watching over Lightstone's shoulder as the agent spread the five head and upper-torso photos out on the table.

"A1 Grynard doesn't believe it, but that one's dead," Lightstone said, pointing to the blurred image of Arturo Bolin. "The other one there," he pointed to the profile shot of Roy Parker, "could be the one I hit first. The guy with the H amp;K. Looks right, but they were wearing cammo-grease and I never got that close to him."

"What about this one?" Larry Paxton asked, pointing to the photo of the Oriental man who had his head turned away from the camera.

Lightstone stared at the side view of Shoshin Watanabe for several seconds. "He could have been the one who got nailed next to the boulder, up at Skilak Lake, but I can't tell. We were too far away. I don't think I ever saw her," he shrugged, pushing aside the photo of Kimiko Osan.

"But this one," Lightstone whispered as he held up the photo of Gerd Maas and stared at the man's cold, pale eyes, "this is the guy I want to find."

"Looks like a real freak, doesn't he?" Larry Paxton commented appraisingly.

"Yeah. Now all we need is a name," Lightstone said as he looked around. "Hey, where's Mike? He should have gotten the scoop on their credentials by now."

"Right here," Mike Takahara said as he came into the small conference room.

"Well?"

"Negative," the Japanese-American agent shook his head. "The two Caucasian males were carrying Federal Protective Service badges and credentials, but there's no record of their ever being issued to anybody."

"Federal Protective Service?" Lightstone blinked. "Shit, these people don't need any protection."

"Hey, I'm just relaying the message," Takahara shrugged. "Security people at the airport confirmed the IDs."

"They could have been faked."

"Yeah, maybe, but that'd be rough to do," the Japanese- American agent said. "They'd have to get a hold of that new Treasury paper, which is real easy to confirm under a crossed-polar light."

"Did those security guys at the airport check?"

"They said they did."

"But if these guys had legitimate federal credentials, then somebody with authority had to sign them," Paxton said.

Takahara shrugged his muscular shoulders. "No way you can expect anybody to remember three days later what a scrawled signature looked like, especially when he sees dozens of those things every day."

"Shit," Lightstone cursed.

"Come on, guys, there's got to be a link here," Mike Takahara said insistently. "What is it that we know for sure? That we got shut down on an investigation and then scattered all over the country. And now a bunch of assholes are trying to hunt us down, and the Chareaux brothers are involved somehow, only maybe these guys have had a falling out, because we also know that Alex killed at least two of them."

"And we know for sure that these guys here went after Paul," Lightstone said, nodding at the photos, "and that Butch Chareaux was killed in the process."

"Paul shoot him? Takahara asked.

"It looked that way at the scene," Lightstone shrugged, "but who the hell knows?"

"And then I got a call from that female informant," Stoner offered.

"Just like Carl did," Lightstone reminded.

"Yeah, and then the little broad lures me into this barn, where Sonny and some karate asshole try to bust my knee," Stoner finished.

"Only Sonny ends up getting killed, which would sure as hell piss Alex off if he knew about it," Mike Takahara added.

"Which he obviously didn't, or he wouldn't have walked away when he had you hanging there," Lightstone said. "And which also means that he probably didn't know about Butch, either."

"Maybe he isn't after you guys at all," Ed Rhodes suggested. "Like you said, he had Mike right there. No reason to walk away."

"Well, if he isn't after us, then who the hell is?" Lightstone demanded.

"I don't know, man, but every time we try to figure this thing out, I keep coming back to that hunt you went on with Alex and Butch," Paxton said. "That and the fact that everywhere we look, some Oriental guy is popping up into the picture."

"You mean those three idiots with the hundred-thousand- dollar guns?"

"One of whom you described as Japanese," Paxton reminded.

"Whoever's been doing this had enough influence with the Department of Interior to get us reassigned," Lightstone nodded. "And they had to have some connection with the Chareaux brothers if they were willing to spend that much money to pop them loose."

"Three hunters, filthy rich, lots of influence, who think that they're about to get in serious trouble with the law," Paxton smiled.

"Or maybe worse, worried that they might get embarrassed?" Lightstone suggested.

"How could we possibly embarrass them if we don't even know who they are?" Stoner asked.

"Henry could ID them, they know that," Paxton reminded.

"Yeah, and I know somebody who could help me find them," Lightstone said with a slight smile.

"Alex," Stoner whispered in a soft voice.

"Jesus Christ! Paul was right," Lightstone said quietly. "We tripped over something big, and the Chareaux brothers were involved."

"And it's big enough to make it worth sending a bunch of multinational commandos out after us. The Chareaux brothers were supposed to be left behind to throw everybody off," Paxton said.

"Except that one of their commandos was dumb enough to give Alex a knife, and now he's on the loose, too," Mike Takahara added.

"Tell you what," Paxton said, looking at the picture of Gerd Maas. "I think we better find those three hunters of yours before this white-haired bastard finds us."

"Or A1 Grynard," Lightstone reminded as he looked around the room. "Anybody have any ideas?"

"You're looking for three wolves in sheep's clothing," Ed Rhodes said to no one in particular. "How the hell are you going to find them?"

Henry Lightstone sat motionless as an image exploded in his mind. "Guns," he rasped as he turned to Ed Rhodes, his eyes blazing with intensity.

"What?"

"Who knows about guns around here?"

"Uh, Gary. He's our firearms examiner."

"I want to talk to him, now."