“Why’s that?”
“The evidence points in another direction.”
“Oh, I get it.” His tone had turned snide. “Keeping an open mind, huh?”
“Would you suggest we do the opposite?”
“’Course not. It’s just… what Burlman told me before he headed to the hospital, and Chekov… well, there are two sides to every story, Dr. Bowers.”
“Yes. But there’s only one truth.”
And sometimes neither of the two sides is telling it.
He took a somewhat strained breath. “I’ll make sure nothing happens to him.”
Behind him I saw Alexei sitting placidly on his cot, examining the walls of his cell, his cuffed hands resting on his lap. I wished I could climb inside his head, unravel his thoughts, and study them one by one, not just to find out what he was pondering at the moment but to find out where Kayla was, to discover if she really was okay.
I checked Alexei’s spring-loaded bone injection gun into evidence, then pulled over a chair and took a seat beside his cell.
62
Solstice drew her skis to a stop at the edge of the woods and scanned the barren field stretching before her.
Though not yet dusk, with the thick cloud cover, daylight was already beginning to fade. A bitter wind shrieked around her.
She’d heard the rolling whine of a motor as she approached the field, and now, at last, saw a snowmobile trail groomer about a quarter mile away. She had no idea how long it had been in the area, but it was pressing forward along one of the trails that skirted directly around the old ELF site.
Taking a trail groomer out in weather like this wouldn’t be entirely unheard of, but the all-too-convenient fact that someone was doing it here, today, disturbed her.
At the moment, she and her team were still hidden in the forest, as well as dressed in Marine Corps Disruptive Overwhite snow camouflage so they wouldn’t be visible to the people in the trail groomer, and she took a moment to orient herself and see if there might have been more than one machine out.
To her left, two wide swathes of forest were missing, lonely for the ELF lines that had been removed back in 2004. A few intermittent scraggly grass blades fingered through the snow, breaking up the otherwise pristine snowscape. Only one structure was visible: a windowless thirty-foot-tall sheet-metal maintenance building with six reinforced sliding garage doors.
That was her destination.
No other trail groomers or snowmobiles were visible.
Solstice knew that the forest rangers occasionally used the building to store old vehicles and trail upkeep equipment, but, though the rangers wouldn’t have been privy to it, that wasn’t the only purpose the building served.
Three power lines stretched from a telephone pole to the top of the building. One provided electricity to the building, another was the now-useless phone landline, the third served as the sat comm antennae for the base.
The trail groomer turned south, toward Solstice’s team.
She borrowed Tempest’s semiautomatic AR-15 and sighted through the scope. It took a few moments for her to get it dialed in, but at last she was able to identify three people in the cab. An Asian woman, a Native American man, and a male Cauca Wait.
She knew that Asian lady from a previous encounter, the same one in which she’d met Agent Bowers last year. Jiang. She was an FBI agent as well.
Solstice took a moment to let things sink in.
Agent Bowers is here. So is Jiang.
She peered through the scope again.
Solstice couldn’t identify the two men with Jiang. One might be a civilian operator, but FBI agents usually work in teams so she went with the most likely assumption that at least one of them was a federal agent as well.
Somehow the FBI knew.
But why only send three or four agents? If they really had intel about what she was up to, they would have certainly sent a larger team-at least a second trail groomer.
They’re just on a fishing expedition.
Immediately, she thought of Chekov. The Bureau had to be getting their information from somewhere, and he was the most likely link.
Perhaps she hadn’t made the right choice in allowing him to live after all.
The only way she was going to get her money or see Terry again was if the mission was successful. This was not the time to make a misstep.
She considered aggressive action, but if these three went missing, it would only draw more attention to the site at a delicate time in her operation. Definitely not something she needed.
Option one: press forward, get her team to the building, deal decisively with the people in the trail groomer.
Option two: retreat to a safe location, monitor the situation, and move in as soon as night fell. Only respond with force if necessary.
Waiting it out in the cold wouldn’t be ideal, but it would be manageable.
So, option two.
Solstice spoke into her mic, ordered everyone over the ridge to the west: “There’s an old hiker’s shelter. We’ll wait there until they’re gone.”
“What about the MA patrol routes?” Cane asked through her earpiece. “The timing?”
“We still have forty minutes or so. If these people aren’t gone by then, we’ll put ’em down and make our move on the base.”
The team skied over the ridge, and as they did the wind pursued them, sending snow quickly scurrying across their path, obscuring their tracks.
Forty minutes max.
Then, move on the base.
63
4:06 p.m.
Alexei Chekov still hadn’t told me anything about Kayla Tatum’s location.
From my regular updates with Tait, I knew we still had no idea where she was. Jake and the officer with him had found no sign of Kayla at the hospital or in any of the surrounding homes. However, one of the cars in the hospital parking lot belonged to a nurse who they found tied up in her basement. Kayla’s car was in the woman’s garage, so at least we knew how Alexei had gotten to the hospital.
But that was about all we had.
Alexei still hadn’t asked for a lawyer or made a phone call.
Over the years I’ve learned that during interrogations the best thing is usually just to get people talking, really about anything, and then move to the specific matter at hand. And almost always, the best way to get them to open up is to find out what they’re interested in and then simply ask them about it.
So, over the last half hour, hoping to spark Alexei’s interest, I’d tried mentioning some of the locations where he’d done his work. It hadn’t been especially fruitful, and now, in my search for interests and commonalities, I said, “I heard that during the Cold War, Russians had a saying that the Kremlin was the tallest building in the world.”
“Because you could see Siberia from the basement,” he said, quoting the rest of the axiom. He gave me a wry smile. “Yes. Thankfully, I never had that experience.”
I remembered his wife had been murdered last spring. “I lost my wife about two years ago,” I said. “Breast cancer.”
He told me a little about Tatiana, about arguing with her the day she was murdered and how he had regretted it ever since. After a moment he said, “I have someone to take out my vengeance on; you have only God to blame.”
His words caught me a little off guard. I’d done just what he said for a long time and wasn’t sure how to respond to his comment.
The conversation broke off, and I tried something a little less personal. “One of my friends in the US Air Force used to test our experimental planes. The new designs.”
Alexei looked at me inquisitively. “Do you remember which planes he flew?”
“He wasn’t allowed to tell me. But he mentioned something about aerostatic wing design.”
“Active aeroelastic wing,” Alexei corrected me. “Yes, for smoother roll maneuvering. Which years was he flying?”
“2006 to 2010.”
“Probably the Boeing X-53. NASA worked with your Air Force and private contractors on that one.”