“That’s her story at any rate.”
“What else did you turn up at Colt’s place?” Grimaldi wanted to know.
“Not much, really,” Fisk confessed, “though we’re pretty sure there was a carjacking at the main gate. We’ve got an ABP out for the car. It’s a 2006 Camry.”
Detective Lowe had made his way back to the group in time to overhear the last exchange.
“Speaking of APBs,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the drone of the Skycrane, which was lifting off for the return flight back to Albuquerque, “we might’ve just caught a break on Orson’s pickup.”
“It’s turned up?” Bolan asked.
“Right down the road, provided it’s the right truck.” Lowe quickly related the dispatch call that had come in while he was handling the copter switch, concluding, “The license number the guy gave us doesn’t match up with Orson’s, but you gotta figure if they went to the trouble of repainting the thing they probably swapped plates, too.”
“They haven’t been taken in yet?” Grimaldi said.
Lowe shook his head. “SFPD has all units on alert and they’re looking to set up checkpoints at all the highway ramps. Unless you guys have other plans, I figured we’d take the bird up and do a little aerial surveillance.”
“Let’s do it,” Bolan said.
He turned to Fisk. “We’ve got a guy taking care of some business across the street. Any chance you can fill him in when he gets back?’
“As long as he shows up before I finish the report I need to send out,” Fisk said. “Once that’s done I still have that mess up in Taos to deal with.”
“He should be here any minute,” Bolan said. “Just have him wait for us.”
“Done.”
Bolan and Grimaldi followed Lowe to the JetRanger. The other cop had already caught a ride back on the Skycrane.
“I take it you’ve flown one of these before,” Lowe said to Grimaldi.
“If it has wings, I’ve flown it,” Grimaldi replied.
As the men piled into the chopper, Bolan asked, “Did the guy who called nine-one-one give a description of the men in the truck?”
“Sure did,” Lowe replied, taking a seat in back so Bolan could ride alongside Grimaldi. Once he’d described the suspect who’d tipped the auto parts employee for installing the camper shell, the two Stony Men exchanged a look. Grimaldi said what they were both thinking.
“Sounds like our boy Cherkow.”
Santa Fe, New Mexico
MELIDO DIAZ WAS STILL beaming as he entered the terminal after disembarking from Dmitri Vishnevsky’s company jet at Santa Fe Municipal Airport. Gone was his usual hunch-shouldered tentativeness and his face was plastered with the sort of sly, confident smile he found befitting of a world-class secret agent. To his left, through the tall windows of the terminal, he could see the airfield he’d just departed, and as he watched the Citation X loft itself from the runway, Diaz’s smile widened at the memory of his mile-high romp with the lovely Vanya, whose perfume still clung to him like some magical talisman. So lost was the Bolivian in his rapture that he paid little heed to the pair of uniformed officers striding briskly past him with an air of decided urgency. As they headed toward the gate through which he’d just entered the terminal, Diaz resumed sauntering the other way.
There were two people already lined up at the rental counter, a situation that would have normally filled Diaz with impatience and frustration. But the inventor’s ebullient mood carried the day and he calmly waited his turn, reflecting on an advertising poster for eye surgery taking up much of the wall to his immediate right. The procedure was one he’d long frowned upon as vain and gratuitous, but he now found it to be an inviting prospect. Yes, he thought to himself, getting rid of his glasses would be a good thing. And exercise. Yes, he would have to definitely make exercise a part of his daily regimen once he settled into his new life as a valued consultant for Russia’s SVR. It would be yet another part of his anticipated makeover, a transformation that he felt would ensure that the next time he chose to visit a casino and try his luck at roulette, beautiful women would flock to his side, just like they did with James Bond.
Having unleashed these and other fantasies of his bygone adolescence, it was little wonder that when the Bolivian finally made his way to the counter he found reason to take issue with the Honda Civic that had been reserved for him by Vishnevsky’s personal secretary.
“This won’t do,” Diaz said calmly, eyeing the young woman across the counter as if considering her as a possible consort. “What do you have in the way of sports cars?”
“I’m sorry, sir,” the woman told him, “but your reservation is for only a compact.”
“Then I guess we’ll just have to change the reservation, won’t we?” Diaz replied. “It’s a nice day for a convertible, don’t you think?”
Before the woman could respond, Diaz felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned to find the two officers standing before him. One of them was hovering his hand just above the pistol dangling from his waist holster.
“We need to have a word with you, sir,” one of the men told him. With a jerk of his head he indicated the hallway branching off from the terminal’s main walkway. “If you’ll come with us, please?”
“What’s the meaning of this?” Diaz asked. Already his elaborate facade was beginning to crumble.
“Just come along, if you would,” the other officer replied. “And I’d advise against any sudden moves.”
With each wavering step Diaz took away from the rental counter, his illusions of grandeur diminished exponentially. By the time he’d been led to the hallway and asked to spread-eagle himself against the nearest wall, gone was any pretense of bravado. In its place, the Bolivian found himself trembling with fear and a wariness that he was about to void his bladder.
“The jet you just got off,” the first officer asked. “According to its manifest, it’s bound for Colorado Springs. Is that really where it’s headed?”
Diaz tried to rally himself and think of some snappy comeback, but even as he was grasping for lies he found himself blurting, “No, he’s heading for Taos.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Taos, New Mexico
Carl Lyons was wrapping up the first leg of his tour of the crime scenes he’d viewed earlier from the air while flying in to Taos’s Municipal Airport. Conferring with the investigatory team at Alan Orson’s estate, the Able Team leader had just been apprised that there were no new developments at the site and that everything continued to support the notion that Donny Upshaw, either alone or with help, had killed both Orson and his dog and stolen the bulk of the inventor’s work. As far as both the Taos police and county sheriff’s department were concerned, at this point the only thing in need of verification was the sequence of events. The hope was that an autopsy would be able to establish that the terrier had been killed during the time that, according to Orson’s blog, he’d been off running errands. If Orson’s own death could be pinpointed as having occurred more than twelve minutes later, after the time of the blog entry, the authorities figured it would refute the idea that the blog had been forged by someone attempting to frame the inventor’s groundskeeper.
“You can’t be serious,” Lyons told county sheriff’s Officer Eric Gibson, a dimple-chinned, beefy man with retro sideburns. The two men were standing in Orson’s driveway between Gibson’s police cruiser and Lyons’s rental Impala. “Narrow down a time of death to within twelve minutes? Hell, without witnesses you’re lucky if you can pin it down to within a few hours.”
“You’re probably right,” Gibson conceded, “but if you ask me, it’s still pretty open-shut that Donny’s our guy.”
“What about the computer?” Lyons said, launching into the alternative theory the cyberteam back at the Farm was working on. “If Donny cleaned out the place of everything worthwhile, why’d he leave behind the computer?”
“Beats me,” Gibson said. “The guy was on smack, right? Who knows, maybe he wasn’t thi
nking straight. Maybe he had a one-track mind and was only thinking about the inventions. If that’s what he was pawning for the heroin, it kinda makes sense, don’t you think?”
“I’ve heard better,” Lyons said. “And speaking of witnesses, have you talked to all the shop owners within a ten-minute drive of here? Did any of them see Orson out running errands like the blog says?”
“We’re working on it,” Gibson said. “Canvassing can take a while.”
“Good luck with that,” Lyons said.
“Look, don’t get me wrong here,” Gibson said. “It’s not like we’re trying to railroad the guy or anything. It’s just that we cops have a saying—if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and sounds like a duck, it’s probably a duck.”
“Actually, I used to be a cop myself in L.A.,” Lyons replied. “We had the same saying. The thing is, we dealt with enough cases in Hollywood to know that sometimes what passes for a duck is either a prop or special effects, so it pays to look beyond the obvious.”
“Tell ya what, then,” Gibson countered. “Give us another suspect and we’ll start looking for him.”
Lyons had yet to hear that Viktor Cherkow had possibly been spotted in Santa Fe, but he’d already received clearance from the Farm to divulge any findings that might help get to the truth of matters, so he quickly laid out the notion of a possible link between the previous night’s events and clandestine activity taking place at Rosqui Pueblo. Gibson listened intently. By the time Lyons finished, the police officer’s initial skepticism had been overcome by a sense of intrigue.
“It’s all pretty damn convoluted,” he said, “but in a screwy way it all kinda fits.”
“A few more breaks and hopefully it’ll tie up a little neater.”
“Wish I could help,” Gibson said, “but I gotta be honest, if we’ve got some Russian mobsters hiding out in Taos, they’re doing a damn good job of it.”
THE SVR SAFE HOUSE IN Taos was far more inauspicious than the javelina farm serving as Frederik Mikhaylov’s base of operations in Glorieta. Located on a weed-choked quarter acre at the end of a dirt road, the two-story, four-bedroom log cabin was shared by Vladik Barad and the two other agents who’d lent a hand cleaning out Alan Orson’s workshop after the inventor’s murder. Their Dodge Caravan was parked in front of the cabin along with a nondescript Saturn. The surrounding lot was bordered, like many properties throughout the city, with a fence made of seven-foot-high cedar latillas tethered with bailing wire. The original owners had erected the fence to keep out coyotes but Barad and the others found it did an equally good job of keeping their two Rottweilers from getting loose and terrorizing the neighbors.
The three men were in the cabin’s upstairs all-purpose room, smoking cigarettes as they sat around a slab of drywall laid across a snooker table, playing a card game. Two large picture windows flooded the room with light and gave the men a near-panoramic view of the surrounding neighborhood as well as the wide, open field that stretched northward toward the Rio Grande. Told to forgo any attempts to raid the police impound lot and wait for Petenka Tramelik’s return, the men were in the grips of boredom.
“I say we should just close down here and join everyone else down south,” Franz Khartyr complained. “More is bound to be happening there.”
“Like getting killed?” scoffed Bertrand Gustavo. “Me, I can do without being run over by a hundred buffalo.”
“They’re called bison,” Barad said, dispensing with the last of his cards, leaving it to his colleagues to determine who would be left holding a hand.
Gustavo laughed. “That’s America for you. You have to be politically correct even when you talk about their fucking animals!”
“We need to stay here and help this Vishnevsky idiot try to talk the Indians out of their uranium mines,” Barad reminded Khartyr. He glanced at his watch, then went on, “Once Tramelik gets here we’re supposed to head to the airport and pick him up so we can show him the lay of the land. We also need to see if Orson’s helicopter is still being stored there.”
“Why didn’t they just put Tramelik in charge?” Khartyr made a face as he was forced to draw more cards. “He already knows his way around. Why bring in some stranger?”
“Vishnevsky just blew up a casino in Bolivia so suddenly he’s a big shot,” Gustavo guessed. “We only killed a couple guys so that makes us amateurs by comparison. This is how they think back in Moscow.”
“I still don’t see why we need access to the mines here, anyway,” said Khartyr as he replenished his drink. “There’s plenty of uranium in all those fuel rods at the waste plant. Why not just use those?”
“Because the regulatory agencies keep track of the fuel rods,” Barad stated. “You think we can just siphon them off and replace them with colored sticks without them noticing?”
“If we start hauling uranium out of the mines they’ll be regulating that, too, won’t they?”
“Not on-site,” Barad reasoned. “We’d do our own accounting. For every hundred pounds of uranium we take out, we’d only report the fifty pounds that goes straight to the waste plant. The rest gets diverted to the bunkers they’re building.”
“And there it gets processed into plutonium,” Gustavo reminded Khartyr, playing a few cards without having to draw from the pile. “And the plutonium winds up in warheads that we’ll use to blow up more than just some casino. How many vodka gimlets did you drink when we went over all this our first week here?”
Khartyr grinned as he raised his effervescent cocktail. “I take this only for medicinal purposes on orders from my doctor.”
Gustavo laughed. “Would that be Dr. Smirnoff or Dr. Popov?”
Khartyr shook his head. “Dr. Absolut. He is the Vishnevsky of doctors when it comes to my condition.”
Gustavo and Barad smirked at each other. Khartyr, meanwhile, was forced once again to go to the pile and add to his playing hand. When it was Gustavo’s turn, he quickly played out the last of his cards.
“How appropriate,” he said, ending the game. “You are the Fool, Khartyr. The Fool!”
Khartyr swore and guzzled down his drink. Out in the yard, the two Rottweilers began yelping and charged past the Saturn to where another car had pulled up to the gate blocking the driveway. Barad stood and peered down, barely able to glimpse the man behind the wheel of a familiar-looking Land Rover.
“It’s Tramelik,” he told the others. “Get your things so we can go meet our new czar.”
IT TOOK LYONS LESS THAN ten minutes to drive from Alan Orson’s estate to the gateway where Walter Upshaw had been gunned down while retrieving his mail. Gibson had followed the Able Team leader in his squad car. The county sheriff’s department had a cooperative relationship with the Taos tribal police, and Lyons’s security clearance consisted of little more than being introduced by Gibson, showing his Justice Department ID and shaking hands with PTPD’s Lieutenant Andrew Zimmer, a handsome, well-groomed man in his early forties who, with the help of two fellow officers, was wrapping up his investigation of the site.
“Quick question, Eric,” Zimmer said to Gibson as he handed back Lyons’s ID. “Did you guys happen to find a computer or cell phone in Donny’s car?”
“Not that I know of,” Gibson replied.
“Could you check?” Zimmer asked. “Walt’s place was broken into at some point before we got there, and so far that’s all we can figure is missing.”
“The bridge was going to be my next stop,” Gibson said. “I’ll head out and give you a holler back if need be.”
“That’d be great. Thanks.”
“I’ll catch up with you there,” Lyons told Gibson.
Gibson nodded and headed back to his cruiser, leaving Lyons to trade intel with Zimmer. The lieutenant had known both Upshaws and was still trying to make sense of the men’s deaths. As such, he was relieved to hear that Lyons had doubts about Donny’s guilt.
“I know how it looks,” Zimmer told Lyons, “and everybody knows there were hard feeling
s between him and his old man. But killing him? I don’t know, I just don’t see it. Especially after checking out Walt’s place.”
“Why’s that?” Lyons wondered.
Zimmer pointed at the driveway extending past the gateway. “It’s nearly a mile and a half from here up to the house, and I can tell you for a fact that Walt always had this gate shut and locked when he was off the property. I’m just as sure Donny didn’t have a key card, so there’s no way he could’ve driven up there beforehand. And I don’t see him hopping the gate and hiking all the way up there in the rain, even if it turns out he wasn’t on smack. It’s a hell of a walk.”
“I’m with you,” Lyons said, “but just to play devil’s advocate, could Donny have driven up after he killed his father? The gate was open then.”
“Not likely, I’d say,” Zimmer replied. “The driveway dead-ends at the house. The only way out would’ve been to come back down the same way. With his dad here dead in a wrecked car the whole time, it would’ve been too risky. Anybody driving by could’ve seen the car while he was up there and called us.”
“I’ve been getting a lot of ‘guys on smack don’t think straight,’” Lyons said.
“I wouldn’t argue that, but still, I don’t think Donny did it,” Zimmer said. “Here, let me show you something else.”
Zimmer led Lyons to his black-and-white and reached into the front seat, where several pieces of evidence had been placed in plastic bags. The lieutenant showed Lyons the one containing the mail Upshaw had dropped after being shot.
“A boot print,” Lyons said, noting a muddy tread mark on one of the larger envelopes.
“When Donny went over the bridge he was wearing moccasins,” Zimmer said. “No treads.”
Zimmer nodded. “I know there’s a chance somebody else might’ve left the print, but I’m guessing it’s the perp.”
Lyons shifted his gaze from the evidence to the mailbox and the shrubs that lay beyond it. “Did you check around the bushes for more prints?”
Blood Play (Don Pendleton's Mack Bolan) Page 20
