“Captain Westfield is a person of interest and we would like to talk to him. That’s all.” The man turned and went up the steps. The shot cut back to the newscaster in the studio.
“Our field reporter Kate Bledsoe is on the scene in Carlsbad with more.”
Now the video cut to a feed from the motel parking lot. The reporter Kate Bledsoe stood in front of the motel. She wore a tight khaki blouse and blue jeans and her booted foot was on the curb. In the desert behind her, Chris could see the neon sign for the Caverns Motel and below that the plastic letters that spelled out Free Wi-Fi and Vacancy. This story was starting to make sense. Their warning had been too late.
“I’m standing on the scene at the Carlsbad motel where police responded last night to a shooting. They found two unidentified men dead in the parking lot and in one of the rooms. One had a gunshot wound to the throat and the other to the back of the head. Police reported both men were wearing black combat fatigues and were armed with illegally modified sub-machineguns.”
She pointed, and the camera panned across the desert and focused on a low, boulder-strewn hill.
“Police say the shots were fired from this hill. Investigators found a sniper’s nest and recovered cartridges from a 30.06 rifle.”
The camera zoomed on the hill and Chris could see a low rock wall built between two boulders. He imagined Westfield crouched behind it. Then the camera turned and focused on Kate Bledsoe again.
“One of the victims was found halfway inside room 109, which was registered to Aaron David Westfield. Investigators recovered Westfield’s blue 1982 Ford van from the hotel parking lot. According to the clerk, Westfield checked into the hotel that afternoon and paid in cash. Westfield was an officer in the U.S. Navy and retired with the rank of captain. Investigators are looking for any leads as to Westfield’s current whereabouts. They believe he’s from Washington State, but have no information on recent employment or activities, and no information on why he was involved with the men who were gunned down. Back to you, Dave.”
The video cut back to the newscaster in the studio. Kate Bledsoe was reduced to a little square over the newscaster’s shoulder.
“Kate, have the local police gotten any fingerprints off the shell casings they found?”
“No. They said that would be unusual. Firing the shell burns the prints off.”
“Does anything connect Captain Westfield to the murders?”
“Only that one of the bodies was found in his motel room, and his van and all his things were left at the scene, and the 30.06 rifle in the parking lot was sold in Carlsbad yesterday to a man using Westfield’s ID.”
“What’re the local authorities saying about the FBI’s sudden involvement?”
“The local sheriff’s office never asked the FBI to step in. According to the sheriff’s office, two FBI agents arrived in the morgue without warning and took both victims’ bodies into Federal custody.”
“What happened to the bodies?”
“They were loaded onto a plane and flown to Quantico, Virginia.”
“Does the FBI have a theory about who these men were, or why they were gunned down in Carlsbad?”
“No, Dave. The FBI hasn’t released any statement at all. Local police tell me they’re looking for answers and would appreciate any information from the public.”
Kate Bledsoe’s image disappeared from the screen and was replaced by the same picture of Westfield that Chris had first seen in Galveston: Westfield as a younger man, in his Navy dress whites.
“Police say this man, Aaron David Westfield, is a person of interest in the Carlsbad killings. Anyone with information on Captain Westfield is encouraged to call Crime Stoppers, or you can submit a tip online at www.tipsubmit.com.” The image of Westfield expanded to take up the full screen, while the website and phone number scrolled across the bottom in yellow lettering.
The video ended and Chris closed his laptop. Julissa had gone pale and was holding her coffee in her lap at an angle. Chris took it from her and put it on the table before it spilled on her legs.
“Maybe he got them both and switched vehicles?” Julissa said.
Chris shook his head. “He wouldn’t have left all his stuff.”
“When they came for Mike, they killed him and left him there. If Aaron’s body isn’t in the hotel, where’d it go?”
“Maybe they wanted him for something,” Chris said. “If they took him, he’s probably still alive. Otherwise, why bother?”
“Jesus. They want to use him to find us.”
“Yeah.”
They sat in silence for a minute.
“That guy said something about the State Department’s biometric database,” Chris said. “Any idea what that is?”
“Imagine a giant database full of photographs of people’s faces, with each photograph broken down into twenty or thirty unique reference points.”
“Like a fingerprint?”
“Yeah. A video camera with an infrared illuminator can scan people’s faces and compare them against a biometric database to ID people in real time.”
“They do that?” Chris asked.
“More than you’d probably want to think. The algorithms can tell the difference between identical twins. If you’re looking for terrorists or known criminals, one way to find them is to put biometric ID cameras in high traffic areas—airports, subway systems, toll booths on a turnpike—you get the idea. Anyway, the State Department started the database. It uses it to check entry visa applications, but it’s an open secret they share the database all over the intelligence community.”
“You’ve done work on it?”
“Not directly. But biometrics is a hot thing, so it’s something I ran into a lot.”
Chris stared at the tabletop and thought about Westfield, alone in the desert and waiting for the killer’s men. He must have been a good shot. Chris tried to picture what would have happened after Westfield was gone and the police were on the scene.
“So, someone in the morgue took photographs of these guys Westfield killed and uploaded them to the Internet, probably by putting them onto some kind of law enforcement missing-persons database. And that raised a red flag on the FBI computers because the faces matched people they were looking for.”
“That sounds right,” Julissa said.
“If the FBI has an interest in these guys, there must be a file on them somewhere. Think you can find it?”
Julissa nodded. “If it’s on the FBI server, I can get it.”
She went back to the other side of the table and started to work on her laptop. Chris sipped at his coffee and turned around to watch the crowd in the terminal. There was no sign of the American in the Hawaiian shirt. Were any of the cameras in this airport actually biometric scanners? That seemed unlikely in the Philippines, but he supposed the U.S. might pay to install them in foreign airports too. They had been so safe in their bungalows on the beach in Boracay. Safe, but too far removed to stay in the chase. In San Francisco they would be leaving tracks everywhere, no matter how hard they tried to stay unseen. And the killer might not be the only one looking for them; by now he could be wanted for murder in Hawaii. Then he had an even more troubling thought. He turned to Julissa.
“If he took Westfield alive, we have to consider the possibility he knows what you and I are up to.”
Julissa looked up from her computer.
“You mean if Aaron talked because he was tortured.”
“Yes.”
“You want to change the plan?”
“No.”
“Good, because neither do I. We don’t have a fallback position and I won’t sit and do nothing while Aaron gets killed.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chris had insisted on buying first-class tickets from Manila to San Francisco, reasoning they would want the privacy. They had seats next to each other at the front of the plane, and Julissa discovered he had been right. In the three hours before their flight, she had worked her way into the FBI comput
ers and downloaded three gigabytes of files from a network that could only be accessed by FBI station chiefs or higher. Now they sat in their first-class seats, thirty-nine thousand feet over the Pacific, reading the dossiers she’d stolen. She would lose her job, her security clearance and serve time in a Federal prison if half the things she’d done in the last four or five days came to light. And they were barely getting started. Their goal was simple: to kill an animal. But to get there they would almost certainly kill half a dozen other people; forty-five minutes with the documents made that clear. It was also clear there was no going back. She dimmed her screen, so no one behind her would see the document, and went on reading. She found Chris’s hand in the darkness and held it.
The files she’d stolen consisted of nine dossiers on foreign spies and criminals, one top-secret memo from something called the National Biometric Counterintelligence Joint Task Force, and a redacted list of intercepted communications that were so secret not even the FBI had access to the files it referenced. She had scanned everything quickly and now went back to the memo, because it ran a thread through everything else.
“See if I’ve got this straight,” Chris said. His computer was open on the tray table, its glow lighting his face. “The FBI and the CIA set up a joint task force because five guys who shouldn’t even know each other were having secret meetings.”
Julissa nodded.
“Looks like it was pure chance,” she said. “They had biometric cameras in the Port of Copenhagen and ID’d five guys going past the checkpoint in fifteen-minute intervals. Three of them were retired GRU or SVR agents from Russia, one of them was German BND.”
“Disgraced German BND,” Chris said.
“Yeah. The last one in was a British MI6 officer who went AWOL in Basra and hadn’t been seen since 2006.”
Chris looked at the memo, then switched files to look at one of the dossiers.
“They knew they were on to something. They just didn’t know what. So they started watching. They programmed the database to pick up any meetings between any of these men.”
“It makes sense,” Julissa whispered. “I mean, guys like that, meeting in shipping ports in the middle of the night? The FBI must’ve thought they’d stumbled on to a terrorist cell or an ultra-secret foreign intelligence operation.”
“Or a trafficking ring,” Chris said. He pointed at the other four dossiers, the German, British and Italian smugglers who were somehow caught up with the ex-intelligence agents.
“Then two of these guys turn up dead in New Mexico and the FBI is scratching its head, trying to figure out what’s going on and why someone like Westfield is caught up in it,” Julissa said.
She looked across at Chris’s laptop. He’d opened the file of one of the Russian GRU agents, Anatoli Shurikov. Three photos lined the top of the screen. Two were cropped closeups of Shurikov’s face, taken from security cameras, and one was a blowup that was probably taken upon his graduation from the Spetsnaz officer training school.
“It’s him,” Chris whispered. “The man I shot.”
Julissa nodded.
Chris went on in a low voice. “Between us and Westfield, we got four of them. We got Anatoli Shurikov. Ilya Vishnyakov must be the one who came for Westfield in Galveston. Westfield must’ve gotten rid of him like we did with Shurikov, which explains why the joint task force memo says there was a .22 at the New Mexico scene with both their prints. Then he got these other guys—”
“Strasser and Voinovich.”
“—yeah—he got them in Carlsbad. So maybe we’ve cut their core group down to five.”
“The core group of what?” Julissa asked.
Chris shook his head. “It doesn’t look like this joint task force has any idea either—we might even know more than them. If they know about the connection to the killer, it isn’t in these documents.”
“No. It looks like just dumb luck,” Julissa said. “I think this creature needs help to do what it does. Help crossing borders maybe, or help cleaning up and hiding its tracks.”
Chris scrolled to look at a collection of nine photographs—a mix of surveillance photos and mug shots—that comprised the nine men who were being tracked by the U.S. joint task force. “So he hires the kind of people who can do that—smugglers and intelligence agents.”
“Not just agents,” Julissa said. “These guys were all killers, too. The Spetsnaz is the Russian equivalent of the SEALS. Strasser came to BND from GSG 9, the German federal tactical SWAT team. You’ve heard of the British SAS, and that’s where Kent started. When the creature hired them, it was probably just looking for their skills without realizing all nine had faces that would register on intelligence radars and raise some eyebrows if anyone noticed they were hanging out together.”
“Makes sense,” Chris said.
“Maybe the FBI overlooked something because they didn’t understand the big picture the way we do. And we should consider there’s probably a tenth employee involved the FBI doesn’t know about,” she said.
“The hacker.”
“Yeah. I haven’t seen any mention of him. But that makes sense. They’ve only been monitoring camera feeds, and those photos would mainly be of people in transit. Hackers don’t get out much. He probably does all his communication online, so he may have never met any of the people he works for.”
“We’ll have to check all the files. See if we can figure out when these guys were spotted in which cities. If the dates match up to any of the killings, that may tell something,” Chris said.
They sat in silence for a while in the darkened plane. Around them the passengers were either sleeping or watching movies on private seat-back screens. Chris was looking at the photograph of Shurikov, and Julissa recalled how quickly and easily Chris had gotten behind him and taken him down with a shot to the head. Chris must have picked up on that thought.
“They underestimated us the first time,” he said.
She squeezed his hand and knew he was right. Would Chris really have been able to do that if Shurikov had been paying attention?
Probably not.
“We must’ve looked like soft targets. An ex-lawyer, a computer programmer, a washed up Navy captain, and a retired Hawaii cop? Jesus, they probably thought it was a joke,” Chris said. “Next time we won’t have that advantage.”
“True,” Julissa said. “They might also lay low a while.”
“Why’s that?”
“That news clip is on the Internet and wasn’t hard to find. If they’ve seen it, they know the FBI’s interested. They know they’ve been tracked for over a year. They’re probably holed up somewhere right now, trying to figure out how big a breach they’ve got. Also,” Julissa said, liking this thought more as she whispered it quietly to Chris, “I’m guessing their employer is not a nice thing to work for. And I would guess it’s extremely pissed.”
Chris turned now so that he could whisper into her ear. What he said gave her no comfort.
“That’s true,” he said. “Which makes me very scared for Aaron Westfield right now.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Westfield had woken in the stifling darkness of the body bag and had immediately understood from the sound and sense of motion that he was in a helicopter. He couldn’t say how long he’d been unconscious but the dryness in his mouth and the hazy pain calling in from all over his body told him he’d been drugged, and heavily. He could think of no advantage to letting anyone near him know he was awake, so he lay still and listened. The pilot was flying in radio silence and there was no conversation or sound of other passengers. But there was a person next to him. Of that he was sure. He could feel the distinct press of an arm against his arm, a hip against his hip.
Some ache in his heart felt that touch and sounded out a question: Tara?
Of course not. But there it was: he knew he was next to a woman.
He tried to recall anything after the SUV’s window shattered, but he could not. There was the whirlwind of the thing coming at hi
m, its yellow eyes, its teeth ripping into him. But afterwards there were only snatches of nightmares and bright bursts of pain. He tried to stay absolutely still, and sent his mind to remember anything he could. Whatever drugs he’d been given were clearly still with him, but they weren’t as bad as things he’d poured into his body willingly. He went all the way back to meeting Chris, Julissa and Mike in Galveston and then went forward from that point to the night in the desert and the thing’s explosion from the pane of tinted glass, and it was all there. So he was just missing a matter of hours. He thought about it and admitted it could have been days.
Then the helicopter had started its descent. He felt it first in his ears and then in his stomach as they dropped altitude like an elevator. They slowed, and just before the hard touchdown, he heard the sliding door open, and he was able to smell the ocean. That hint came through the small air hole over his nose, faint but clear, the smell of a breeze that has blown for countless unbroken miles over a clean sea. He caught it over the smell of the helicopter’s fuel and the smell of the rubberized plastic bag, and for an instant he expected to be thrown out the door and into the ocean. But then he felt the skids hit a metal deck and he knew it wasn’t over for him yet. He fell into a daze of pain when they carried him into the ship and dropped him in front of the throbbing engine, then fought his way out of it when he heard the young woman’s voice.
“Please let me out. I can’t breathe.”
She was right next to him; he could hear her struggling just inches away, probably inside her own bag. And then he heard the tapping. His heart sped up and his skin tightened. His body knew what it was before his mind placed it. Claws on steel, pacing. He lay still but the girl still fought. She didn’t know.
“Please, I’ll do anything!”
The pacing stopped, next to his head. Westfield could actually feel the creature’s body heat through the vinyl wall of the bag. He heard the long, slow pull of a zipper.
It went on for a minute. The thing was taking its time opening the girl’s bag. When it finally stopped, the screaming started.
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