Trade-Off
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Author's Note
Also by James Becker
Copyright
Prologue
Friday
When Kathy Morrell woke up, she was eight days short of her twenty-seventh birthday and had exactly seventeen minutes of life remaining.
At first she thought it was the glare that had awoken her, but she was wrong. Her first waking sensation had been the lights, banks of them located high above her recumbent body, so brilliant that looking up at them quite literally hurt her eyes. But although the lights were all she could see and all she was aware of for the first few seconds after consciousness returned, they weren’t what had interrupted her sleep.
Her return to wakefulness was due simply to chemistry, to a change in the relative concentrations of the gases she was breathing, and had been breathing continuously for just over four days. The oxygen and nitrous oxide mixture had been carefully regulated by the automatic monitoring systems to keep her deeply unconscious during her transportation to this, her final destination. Around thirty minutes earlier, the system had begun to reduce the concentration of nitrous oxide, with a corresponding increase in the proportion of nitrogen, and her drugged brain had slowly returned to life.
For several minutes Kathy just lay still, tentatively exploring her memory and wondering why on earth she felt so ravenously hungry. The nitrous oxide had left her with a blinding headache which showed no immediate signs of abating, and she guessed that if she tried to sit up or stand the pain would probably knock her back down again. So she lay still, collected her thoughts and tried to work out the answer to a single, very simple, but very important question – just where the hell was she?
She dug back through her memories. She remembered dining alone in the hotel restaurant, and the dark-haired man, also unaccompanied, sitting at the adjoining table. She remembered his polite request, and her casual acceptance of his company for coffee and liqueurs. They had talked, exploring each other’s lives as her eyes studied his face, and the coffee cups and the liqueur glasses were filled and refilled, and the restaurant emptied around them.
Kathy remembered Richard’s tentative, almost shy, offer to walk her up to her suite on the tenth floor, and the lingering embrace at the door which had led them, with an inevitability which they had obviously both recognized, through the doorway and straight into the bedroom, shedding clothes and inhibitions on the way.
Richard had been good, very good, and she felt herself moistening with the recollection. But that, she realized with a puzzled frown, was the last thing she could recall. She had no memory of him leaving her suite, and no memory of what she had done after they had lain close together in the afterglow, no memory of anything after that.
Well, that wasn’t precisely correct, she realized. She remembered snuggling up to him, remembered him stroking her long blonde hair, remembered the cigarette he had offered her, and which she had taken.
She was going to give up, she’d told him, but there were times – and without question that moment on that evening qualified as one of them – when smoking a cigarette was simply the only possible thing to do.
The cigarette. Kathy remembered that Richard hadn’t joined her, hadn’t taken one for himself, which had struck her as odd. Yes, she realized. The absolute last thing she had any recollection of was lying back in her bed, smoking the stranger’s cigarette.
At that moment, Kathy Morrell had a little over eight minutes left to live.
She glanced carefully around her, moving her eyes only and taking care to keep her head as immobile as possible. The one place she wasn’t, she was absolutely certain, was in the queen-sized bed in her tenth-floor hotel suite.
She was lying in what appeared to be a casket or box, almost coffin-shaped. The inside was padded, the cover had a large glass faceplate through which the lights above her still blazed, and she was lying on a thin mattress or pad.
She noted without any real surprise that she was quite naked. She had no recollection of dressing after her love-making with the dark-haired stranger, so her nakedness was probably what she would have expected. But where on earth was she?
She wondered if she had been taken ill, and was in a hospital or clinic somewhere but, she rationalized, if that were the case her surroundings would be quite different. She would have been on a gurney or in a bed, surrounded by nurses and doctors and other medical staff. And, she added to herself, she would be wearing something – a gown or nightdress or some other garment – or maybe just covered with a sheet for modesty. She certainly wouldn’t have been left lying naked in some kind of a box.
For the first time Kathy felt unease, and began the slow process of sitting upright. But she discovered immediately that she couldn’t, because of restraints – padded fabric bands or straps – positioned around her wrists and forehead. A few seconds of exploration revealed other bands around her hips and ankles. She was locked in the box, pinned to the base.
The box jerked suddenly and Kathy sensed movement. She also became aware, almost subliminally, of a faint but definite vibration through the floor of the casket. And then she relaxed, because she knew she must be in a hospital. She’d seen patients being fed into CAT scanners and other equipment before, on TV, and she was suddenly sure that she was undergoing some form of test. She couldn’t imagine what for – she was almost never ill – and as soon as they’d finished the examination she’d get the whole situation straightened out.
A couple of minutes later the box jerked again, and she felt the vibration increase in intensity. Obviously they were getting ready to position her in the scanner, or whatever the hell the machine was. Then she noticed that the lid of the casket was lifting off, hoisted into the air by a type of mechanical arm.
‘Hello,’ she called out. ‘Anyone there?’
There had to be someone in the room. Someone had to be operating the machinery that she could hear.
‘Hey! Anybody there?’ Kathy called again.
The sounds she could hear were much louder. A piercing, howling, almost-human scream suddenly cut through the air, and her body tensed involuntarily, then relaxed slightly. A piece of machinery, she thought, and in need of a good dose of lubrication.
She began to discern other sounds, and tried to fit them all into a scenario that made sense. The hissing of something like a hydraulic system was clear enough, and a strange grinding vibration that she felt through the base of the casket almost more than she heard it. And loudest of all were the screams from what she guessed were inadequately lubricated wheels.
‘Hey!’ she shouted again, but without any real conviction. If there had been anyone there, they would have heard her the first time and responded.
The casket jerked again and mov
ed about six feet forward. Kathy felt the fabric straps tighten about her body, and then the casket tilted upwards, pivoting from the foot until it stopped at an angle of about forty-five degrees to the horizontal. For the first time she had an unobstructed view of the whole of the room in front of her.
Nothing that she saw made sense, not at first. The room was about two storeys high, and as far as she could see lined entirely with steel. Ranged on the ceiling were banks of lights, shining down. About five feet in front of her was another casket, lying horizontal and empty, and beyond that was something else.
Knowing is prerequisite to seeing. The human brain takes a considerable time to identify any object which is totally unfamiliar, and adult humans never expect to see anything that they haven’t seen before. That was why Kathy just lay there staring and squinting into the glare for almost ten seconds before she started to scream.
It looked like a machining table in a carpenter’s shop. A flat bed of steel, about eight feet long and three feet wide, with equipment she didn’t and couldn’t recognize positioned along one side of it. Directly behind the equipment was what looked to Kathy like a booth, pretty much like a cashier’s booth on the turnpike, with small glass windows.
But it wasn’t the table, the equipment or the booth that provoked her scream. It wasn’t even the viscous red splashes and smears that covered most of the machinery and a good section of the floor around the table. It was the pinkish-white object on the table, and what was happening to it. It was the realization of what that object was, and of what was about to happen to her.
That was why she screamed.
Chapter One
Tuesday
Helena, Western Montana
The small black alarm clock beside the bed emitted a series of faint ticking sounds, then four loud and penetrating beeps. The fifth was cut short as Steven Hunter’s hand slapped down on the protruding button, and the room fell silent again. After a few seconds, Hunter squinted his eyes to focus on the digital read-out, groaned softly and switched on the bedside light, then closed his eyes again. Three minutes later, he threw back the covers and climbed out of bed.
Hunter padded silently across the room to the windows, hauled back the drapes and peered out, blinking in the early morning sunlight. The TV forecaster the previous evening had got it right, as usual. It was going to be another hot day in another hot month.
He walked into the bathroom, pulled the cord to switch on the fluorescent overhead light, used the toilet and then turned on the shower. He glanced round the room and shook his head. He’d been in America for nearly eighteen months, and he had still to discover why a room that contained a shower stall, sink, toilet and even a bidet – everything, in short, except a bath – was called a bathroom.
A little under an hour later, having dressed and breakfasted on two cups of instant coffee and three McVitie’s Digestive biscuits – an English habit he stubbornly refused to break – Hunter pulled shut the apartment door and headed for the elevator. The Glock 17 in its belt holster now felt familiar and comfortable, which it certainly hadn’t done the first few times he’d worn it, but he had quickly got used to it.
He was also, Hunter realized, as he pulled the dark grey Ford out into the light early morning traffic in Helena, getting used to American driving. For some reason, that thought depressed him, and reminded him that he wasn’t particularly enjoying life.
It wasn’t the actual work, he thought, though he was getting somewhat bored with the minor narcotics cases that were all that Michaelson, the Helena Senior Resident Agent, seemed to push in his direction. It wasn’t even the mountain of paperwork that the Federal Bureau of Investigation required from him virtually every time he took a crap. It probably wasn’t even the fast food – fast it certainly was, but it wasn’t food in Hunter’s opinion – that he ended up consuming almost every day. And it certainly wasn’t Christy-Lee. She was about the only thing that kept him going.
It was probably, he thought, just being in America. Hunter had decided he didn’t like America, and was actually looking forward to getting back to Britain and Lincolnshire. Now that, he thought, was certainly some kind of a first – he’d never heard of anybody getting homesick for Lincolnshire.
Hunter pulled out and eased the Ford around a taxi that had suddenly stopped, double-parking without warning. The driver of a Chevrolet coming towards him hooted angrily. Hunter grinned and waved. Take it easy, he told himself, only another three or four months to go. He’d said the same thing the previous week. And the week before that, in fact.
In short, whatever sort of time Steven Hunter was having in America, the one word that really couldn’t be applied to it was ‘good’.
Beaver Creek, Western Montana
Andy Dermott glanced left and right as he eased the big John Deere tractor through the narrow gateway which led into the top field. The right hand wheel only just cleared the fence post, and Dermott again reminded himself that he would have to get the entrance opened up before the crops ripened if they were going to get the new harvester through.
Dermott had worked the land for nearly thirty years, and had inherited the farm on the death of his father nine years previously. He was proud of his small property, eleven hundred acres of good, productive, arable land that curved protectively around the southeast end of the forest on the western outskirts of Beaver Creek. The town was small, lying not quite midway between Helena and Great Falls, just west of the Missouri river and at the southern end of the Lewis Range, at the very foot of the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains.
Once through the gateway, Dermott looked ahead again, and what he saw made him bring the tractor to a sudden, shuddering halt. At first he couldn’t make out what the black, heaving mass was, then he realized it was birds – crows, in fact – scrambling on and over something lying on the ground.
He pressed the horn button three times, and was rewarded by half a dozen or so of the black birds hopping away and then flapping awkwardly into the air. He climbed down from the cab and walked over to the shape on the ground, clapping his hands to disperse the remaining crows.
Dermott knew something of the law and crime scene investigation, and had served as a temporary deputy to Sheriff Dick Reilly some five years earlier, so he stopped about six feet away and looked down at the figure on the ground.
What he saw sent him running back to the John Deere and the cell phone clipped to the dashboard. But before he made the call to the sheriff’s office, he locked the cab door and looked all around, and made sure that the pump-action twelve-gauge in the rack behind him was loaded.
Dermott stayed in the tractor’s cab for nearly fifty minutes, until he saw Reilly’s white Cherokee Jeep bouncing towards him over the adjacent field. Then he got out, clutching the shotgun, and walked across to meet the sheriff. He didn’t say anything, just nodded in recognition and gestured to his right. The two men walked together across the field towards the body.
They stopped a few feet away, and just looked.
‘Holy shit,’ Reilly muttered. ‘You haven’t touched him?’
‘Nope,’ Dermott replied. ‘I haven’t gotten any closer than we are now.’
‘Those marks on the ground?’
‘Crows,’ Dermott said, economically. He was tall and seemed almost too thin for his height, slow and measured in his speech, but Reilly knew he was by no means slow-witted. ‘Chewed him up pretty good, I guess.’
Reilly nodded.
‘See the bone?’ Dermott asked, pointing.
Reilly nodded again. ‘Difficult to miss.’
‘See the footprints?’
‘I see his prints,’ Reilly replied, looking carefully at the ground around the body. ‘I don’t see no others.’
Dermott nodded. ‘Me neither. That’s the point.’
‘OK,’ Reilly said. ‘Try and keep the birds off of him. I’ll get the wheels turning.’
Helena, Western Montana
The Federal Bureau of Investigation maintains
fifty-six Field Offices scattered across America. These Offices are effectively the Bureau’s regional capitals; unusually, Montana’s Field Office is out of state, at the Towers Building in Salt Lake City in Utah.
In all states, authority for local investigations is deputed to smaller subsidiary offices known as Resident Agencies, each responsible for a specific geographical area, generally comprising two or more counties. Montana is usually, from a criminal activity point of view, quiet, the number of Resident Agencies small, and their areas of responsibility correspondingly large. Beaver Creek is in Lewis and Clark County, and the Resident Agency responsible for that county, as well as Beaverhead, Broadwater, Gallatin, Jefferson, Madison, Meagher, Powell and Silver Bow, is at Helena, the state capital.
The call from Sheriff Reilly was received just as Special Agent Kaufmann was closing up for lunch. Some people would have ignored it, but Kaufmann had never been able to walk past a ringing telephone, so she unlocked the door and picked up the receiver before the answering machine could cut in.
Twenty minutes later she strode briskly across the street and into a fast-food restaurant. She walked straight to a secluded booth at the back, stopped, and looked down at a tall fair-haired man in his early forties, who was studying a menu with a marked lack of enthusiasm. After a moment, the man looked up and stared levelly back at her.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘Lunch is postponed, Hunter,’ she said.
‘That’s the first good news I’ve heard all week. I still can’t believe you eat this stuff from choice,’ Hunter said, pointing at the menu.
Christy-Lee Kaufmann grinned down at him. ‘You’ll get used to it.’
‘That,’ Hunter replied, as he stood up and reached for his coat, ‘is what really worries me. OK, what’s up?’
‘I’ll tell you in the car,’ Kaufmann said. ‘And it’s not all good news – we’ve still got to eat.’
On the way out of the restaurant she picked up a couple of burgers each, to go, and four cans of soda. Ten minutes later the two of them were in the Bureau Ford heading north out of Helena for US91 and Beaver Creek.
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