by Basil Sands
“Do you speak English?” he asked the two men.
“I do,” said Leka with a heavy accent. “Cousin Kreshnik not speak English. He come from old country not far ago. We come with Steven for job.”
“Okay,” said the officer. “In the event we need to get hold of you, what is your number?”
“We sharing Steven’s mobile,” Leka said.
“I see.” The officer noted that on his pad. “Okay, you too.” He gestured to Kharzai.
The fuzzy-haired man, still keeping his back to the camera, patted his trouser pockets, his breast pocket, and then felt his pants pockets again.
“Ruh, roh,” he said with an innocent grin. “Looks like I left my wallet behind. Sorry, officer.”
“What is your name, then?”
“Samuel McGee,” Kharzai replied.
***
Lonnie watched the three men walk back to the Audi. She turned to the officer beside her. “Give me an evidence bag.”
“Excuse me, ma'am?”
“I need an evidence bag, now.”
She pulled her left hand from behind her back. A thin line of blood seeped between her fingers. The officer, a shocked look on his young face, quickly produced a plastic Ziploc bag from his utility belt and she dropped in the wedding ring that hugged tight to the knuckle. It glittered back, a reflected flash of sunlight against the blood smeared appendage.
Chapter 6
Hood Lake Float Plane Port
Anchorage
Monday June 20th
3 p.m.
After three days surrounded by the most stunning natural beauty she had ever seen, breathing air cleaner than she had ever imagined possible, Hildegard Farris’s face glowed. She had never believed scenery like that was real. She'd always assumed that what she'd seen in paintings was from the artist’s imagination or that online pictures had been Photo-Shopped. Living her entire life east of the Mississippi River and never farther north than Cleveland, she had only known hazy, humid summers and cold, wet winters.
The sapphire blue of the skies and the crystalline waters of the lakes and rivers had stunned her. Photographing wild bears, wolves, sheep, coyotes, lynx, and moose took her to a whole new level. Hilde felt as though she had been on another planet. As the plane touched down on Lake Hood, she was excited to see Lonnie again and brimmed over with a desire to share the wonders she had seen.
Lonnie waited for them in Marcus's truck next to the dock. As the plane pulled in, she climbed out and walked across the wood planks to where the plane would be moored. Marcus stepped out onto the pontoon while it coasted into the slip. He tossed the line to his pregnant wife and she squatted to secure it, her round belly forcing her legs apart as she reached for the tie down. As they got off the plane, Hilde and Mike were all smiles. The mood fizzled when they saw Lonnie's expression.
“Hey, baby,” Marcus said, “you okay?”
“Harold and Maureen are dead.”
“Huh?” Marcus's mouth hung open in shock. He stammered, “What are you talking about?”
“Accident Saturday night as they were leaving the wedding for their honeymoon. Some idiot T-boned their car and ruined their happily ever after.”
“Dear Jesus,” Marcus said.
“That's horrible,” Hilde said.
“Are you all right?” Mike asked.
“Yeah. It’s just...” She trailed off.
“Let's get unloaded and back to the hotel,” Marcus said. “We can talk about it there after everyone gets cleaned up.”
The trio was covered in three days’ of camp grime. Their excitement doused, they suddenly felt exhausted. They unloaded the plane and packed the bags into the truck. Lonnie drove back to the Captain Cook, where a bellman helped take the bags up. Inside their room, Lonnie lay on the bed while Marcus showered. When he came out, she stared at him from the bed where she lay on her side. Wearing nothing but a thick white terry cloth towel around his waist, he crossed the room, slid onto the bed, and lay next to her.
She gently stroked his brown skin with the tips of her fingers, running over the network of scars that crisscrossed his washboard abdomen like a sheet of lace sewn by a drunken weaver—the artwork of war left by an Iraqi roadside bomb. Tears welled in her eyes. He pulled her to him, as close as her belly allowed. She buried her head in his muscular chest and the emotional dam burst, her sorrow taking its natural course unfettered. Several minutes passed before the sobbing slowed and she was able to speak.
“They were just married. Not even one day,” she convulsed with more sobs. “They waited so long to find each other. They were so happy. Then that man had to ruin everything.”
Marcus held her close and let her cry. Lonnie seldom let herself take things to heart regardless of the gore she saw on a fairly regular basis. Before becoming a lieutenant, she had spent more than six years on patrol as a regular trooper and then four as an investigator. Bloody murders, suicides, and scores of fatal motor vehicle accidents were part of the job. Her promotion two years earlier had taken her off patrols and into a supervisory role, and the last few months of the pregnancy further relegated her to mostly desk work. Between the hormones of pregnancy and the genuine stress of seeing a good friend killed before her eyes, the load had become too much to carry. She cried in his arms until they both drifted into an exhausted sleep.
***
At five o'clock they awoke, still cuddled together. They got up, he dressed and she fixed her hair. Blessed with naturally smooth skin, Lonnie wore very little, if any, makeup, so getting ready to go out was a fairly quick process for her most of the time. They made their way down to the lobby, where they met with Mike and Hilde. The group walked out the front of the hotel onto Fourth Avenue and made their way one block west to Simon & Seafort’s restaurant. They had not made reservations, and the hostess told them it would be a thirty-minute wait unless they were willing to dine in the bar area. The restaurant was smoke free, and at the early hour, the bar was quieter than the dining room. Most of the noise in there came from two large flat-screen TVs hanging above the bar, the sound background murmurs of a baseball game and the local news channel.
They chose a table near a window that framed Mt. Susitna across the inlet. The mountain is locally known as Sleeping Lady, due to the fact that from certain angles, it looks like a long-haired woman lying on her back. They ordered and made small talk over drinks as they waited for their food. The conversation drifted from the photo hunt to babies and the Farris's decision to try having children. Hilde was thirty-nine years old, and felt like it was now or never. Lonnie was about the same age and encouraged her to go for it; she would not get many more chances.
Dessert and coffee came. Hilde held a spoon of rich chocolate mousse in front of her mouth and smiled as she imagined cradling an infant in her arms. She knew Lonnie was right—this might be her only chance. Menopause was not far in the future, and if she waited too long, she'd be in her sixties, looking like a grandparent, when her child graduated high school. Mike had a child of his own with his first marriage, but that wife and their toddler son were both killed in a drive-by shooting two years earlier. While she never felt that she was a replacement for his former family, Hilde did feel that it would be good therapy for Mike to have another child. She leaned back against her seat and absentmindedly glanced up at one of the massive plasma TVs above the bar. The local evening news was playing, the sound barely audible above the din of the crowd which had grown significantly since they had sat down.
Video of a car accident played across the screen. As the announcer described the event, Lonnie's pregnant form suddenly came into view on the screen. Hilde tapped Mike on the arm and he looked up. Marcus and Lonnie looked as well, but Lonnie turned away once she realized what it was. She glanced toward Hilde and saw the FBI analyst’s face morph into a shocked expression as she stared at the screen.
“I know that man,” Hilde said in a harsh whisper.
Lonnie looked up just in time to see Steven Farrah flash
past the edge of the screen.
“Him?” she asked.
Hilde's face colored.
“How do you know him?” Mike asked.
She leaned closer to the table, lowering her voice. The others bent toward the center and focused on what she said.
“He's on the watch list,” she whispered. “Added just a few weeks ago. Sokol Albajani.”
“You sure?” Mike asked.
“You know I never forget their faces,” she said, pursing her lips. “That is Sokol Albajani.”
“Who is he?” Marcus asked.
“A mid-ranking officer in the Sons of the Sword, an al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group.”
Lonnie looked back at the screen as the video sequence played a second time. Farrah's face crossed the screen as he spoke with her. The words were not audible, but she remembered it all.
“He spoke with a British accent,” she said.
“He is British,” Hilde replied. “I don't remember if he was born there or naturalized as an infant, but he grew up there. He changed his name to Steven Farrah as a teen in school to stand out less. There was a lot of racial violence in Manchester at the time. Since he was Caucasian, the simple name change worked to relieve him of the torture a lot of immigrants kids are put through.”
“Are you sure about this guy?” Marcus asked. “Maybe it’s just someone who looks like him.”
“No. It is him.” Hilde shook her head as if expelling doubt. “It's my job to remember people like him. I look at that list every day and supervise groups that compare the images to those picked up on surveillance cameras. I know the faces of all the current top fifty most wanted terrorists out there, and that man is one of them.”
“What's he doing here?” Mike asked.
“The president,” Marcus said. “Your friend the other day said the president was coming for the pipeline opening this week.”
“I've got to get hold of Tonia and let her know.” Hilde pulled out her cell phone and thumbed through the contacts list until she found Tonia's number and pressed the dial button. It rang four times, and then went to voice mail. She tried again and got the same.
“Let's go back to the hotel,” she said. “Maybe we can find her or her partner there.”
They paid the bill and left the restaurant. At nearly nine p.m., it was still as bright as it would be at five in the rest of the country. Darkness would not return to the Alaskan nights until mid-August. As they walked the two blocks back to the hotel, Hilde's phone rang. She pulled it from her purse and answered.
“Hello?”
“It's Tonia.” Loud rock music pumped in the background. “You finally calling for that drink, girlfriend?”
“No, we've got a situation. We just saw a watch list suspect here in town.”
“You what?” Tonia shouted into the phone.
“We just saw a man I recognized from the watch list.” Hilde cupped the receiver.
“Hilde, this connection is crap. I can't make out what you're saying. You're watching a band?”
“No, a terrorist!”
The others gave her a look. Hilde remembered she was on the sidewalk and lowered her voice. The sound of a crowded night club filled the background on Tonia’s end of the line, and a burst of laughter exploded in the phone speaker.
“I'll call you when I get to the hotel,” Tonia shouted over the noise. “Or you can meet me here at Humpy's Bar. Bring your man. I've got Lurch as a date.”
“I'll come to you,” Hilde said.
“Love you too!” Tonia replied.
Hilde gave an odd look as the phone went silent. “I don’t think she heard a word I said.”
Marcus's truck was parked a few stalls into the Captain Cook's parking garage. They climbed in, and a moment later they were heading east on Sixth Avenue. The modern architecture of the Performing Arts Center loomed ahead, seeming massive amidst the scattering of building styles ranging from present state-of-the-art to post-World War I salt-box cottages that had been turned into tourist shops and fine-dining establishments. Just beyond the PAC, a small crowd milled beneath the cloth-covered awning of Humpy's Alehouse that jutted from above the sixties-style glass storefront near the corner of Sixth and F. The thump of electric jazz echoed through the canyon of tall buildings, booming into the open windows of Marcus’s truck when they stopped for the light at G Street nearly a block away. As they waited, an engine revved and a white Audi screeched around the corner just as the light changed from yellow to red.
Lonnie reached up and tapped Marcus on the shoulder. “It's Farrah,” she said. “That's the car Farrah was driving when I saw him before. Follow him!”
Marcus pulled ahead when the light turned green. Hilde tried to phone Tonia as they passed the bar, but only got the Secret Service agent's voicemail message. She said for Tonia to call her when she got the message.
“We'll get hold of her later,” she said.
The car turned left at A Street and Marcus continued after it. The Audi traveled at the posted speed limit as they crossed the Ship Creek Bridge heading toward the Port of Anchorage shipping terminal. The road was empty except for their vehicle and Farrah’s. Marcus slowed the truck. They were nearly a hundred yards behind the Audi when it continued past the last turnoff before the port. Farrah was locked in with only one road out. Marcus turned right at the Loop Road exit as the Audi 's taillights disappeared behind the hill that obscured the port’s guard post. Once out of sight, he pulled to the side of the road.
“Lonnie, take the wheel. Park over there somewhere.” He pointed to a row of rail yard warehouses about two hundred yards away.
“Mike and I will go in on foot and see if we can ID your man, and maybe figure out what he's up to.” Marcus reached into the pocket in the door and grabbed a set of compact Steiner Predator® binoculars, then realized he was getting ahead of himself. “Uh, assuming that's okay with you, Mike.”
Under the spell of the adrenaline-laced slow-motion pursuit, no one had spoken as they followed the Audi.
“You don’t even need to ask, bro,” Mike said. “I haven't had a good rush in a long time.”
A blue minivan taxi passed the truck and continued up and around to the Government Hill neighborhood. Once it was out of sight, the two men jumped out of the truck and jogged across the empty highway toward the port's entrance. The women moved to the front seat of the truck and Lonnie drove around the exit ramp, and then pulled into the rail yard. She moved the truck through the rows of long, dark warehouses until they faced A Street again, with a view of the only avenue from which any vehicles could come out of the port.
Chapter 7
Port of Anchorage
Monday, June 20th
9:30 p.m.
The Audi had long since passed through the guard post that protected the entrance from the highway. While the contracted security at the gate was armed, they were not likely to be a formidable deterrent to professionals. Regardless, the two men took the long way around rather than risk surprising a half--awake rent-a-cop with a gun.
Marcus led the way along a wooded escarpment that traced the contour of the port access road below them. The twenty-foot-high ridge had been created by the 1964 Good Friday earthquake when the area presently inhabited by the city port dropped that many feet from its previous height. Nature’s wrath of decades earlier had been rather generous, as it turned out. The destructive forces ended up providing the retired Marines with good concealment for their current movement.
From the top of the escarpment, the view of the port grounds stretched all the way to the cluster of cargo ships docked in shallow water just beyond the land's edge. Laid out in rows like a military formation, bundles of pipe and sheet metal bound in clear plastic wrap reflected beams of angular sunlight like randomly scattered laser flashes. An eight-foot-high fence topped with a triple-layer straight run of barbed wire bounded the port property. Marcus lifted the binoculars to his eyes and scanned. The special design of the Steiner lenses gave him a focused
field of view from twenty yards away to infinity, negating the need to refocus for near and far objects. Within a few seconds, the tail of the Audi came into view, mostly concealed within a cluster of massive white tanks marked as aviation fuel.
Two security cameras stared down from atop the structures. One slowly rotated ninety degrees, stopping before they were in its line of sight, then turned the other direction. The other started to rotate but stopped, jittered in place for a second, then turned back to its starting position.
Marcus pointed the broken camera out to Mike. “Gotta love it when folks rely on technology.”
A few yards from where they stood, the perimeter fence twisted very close to a part of the cliff where a tall spruce tree had collapsed, smashing the barbed wire and bending the fence to half its full height. Using the spruce as a bridge, they crossed into the shipyard, carefully avoiding the sharp edges of the broken branches that jutted randomly around them like jagged claws. To trip and fall on one of those spikes could leave a nasty wound, or worse. Careless loggers or hikers alike have been seriously injured, even killed by such rough appendages when they slipped while using a fallen tree as a bridge. An unlucky father and son had recently lost their lives when the top of a similar tree fell on their campsite as they slept during a windy night. The search and rescue that found them several days later had a very difficult time untangling the bodies from the numerous puncturing branches. Licensed wilderness guides like Marcus had been required to undergo additional annual training to make sure they were aware of the dangers.
Once over the fence, they jumped the five feet to the ground, landing with a whump in the hard-packed dirt. Mike let out a soft grunt.
“That was a lot easier when I was twenty-five,” he whispered, his face tight with a grimace of pain as the shock shot through his knees.
Outside the range of the cameras, they jogged toward the Audi. As they drew near, they saw that it was parked in front of a squat, corrugated-metal building stuffed between the fuel tanks. Its engine ticked softly as it cooled. The building, about twelve by twelve feet, was not big enough to hide many people. A solitary window about a single square foot in size next to a solid door broke up the monotony of horizontal lines in the wall facing the vehicle. Marcus stole forward, Mike right behind him, watching his back. Marcus cautiously peered through the window. The interior space was comprised of bare white walls, a gray concrete floor, and a white acoustic tile ceiling. Opposite the entrance was an opening that led to a staircase which descended into a subterranean level that presumably stretched beneath a portion of the ground for a considerable distance.
