"They haven't been rebuilding the town?"
"It's permanently abandoned."
"So, we can assume the bill for the number is being paid by someone elsewhere. And I wouldn't know how to trace it any further in a place like Montserrat."
"Neither would I."
They went quiet for a moment.
"What's the next move?" Morrison asked.
"There's nothing here in Oregon. Sheffield is long gone. They torched the house."
"Of course."
"There are leads to pursue in Washington, D.C. Killick's condo." Tom Killick had been the DCI director of operations who Arkin and Morrison had figured out was a mole—secretly an operative for Sheffield and the Priest's group. He had disappeared right along with Sheffield as soon as it became apparent that his cover was blown. "I'd like to take a look at Dragoslav Trlajic too."
"Who?"
"Dragoslav Trlajic. He was Killick's senior policy advisor at DCI. Apparently, he's still in D.C. Hasn't fled."
"What kind of heartless parents would name their kid Dragoslav? Might as well name him Lucifer."
"He also happens to be Serbian."
"Another Serb! I love it! Explains the demonic name. So—he's a Serb and he was Killick's high chamberlain. Those are two good reasons to give him a sniff, I suppose. Does he have the crazy Slobodan Milošević hair and bushy eyebrows?"
"I haven't seen him yet."
"But if Trlajic is part of the group, wouldn't he have flown the coop when Sheffield and Killick did?"
"Maybe. But then again, maybe he just doesn't have any reason to think we suspect his involvement. Maybe he thinks he's still in the clear."
"You're going to try to spy on a counterintelligence officer. Should be fun."
"Maybe he's just a POG," Arkin said, using an acronym for the Marine Corps slang expression person other than grunt—meaning someone in a support role as opposed to a frontline combat soldier.
"You going to ride your motorcycle all the way to D.C.?" Morrison asked. "And then, what, ride to Valparaiso, Chile, down the Pan-American Highway?"
"My testicles would fall off. No, I need a new name so that I can be mobile. A name that isn't listed as a federal fugitive in every law enforcement database from here to Timbuktu."
"You know somebody who can get you a new I.D.?"
"Not outside of federal law enforcement."
"What are you going to do? Steal someone's I.D.?"
"Borrow."
"You? Mr. By-the-book?"
"Curiously, I find myself feeling less restrained of late."
"Less restrained by what?"
"By the rules of engagement, to put it vaguely."
"So, the gloves are coming off?"
"Let's just say I'm being pragmatic. Weighing the ends against the means."
"You're starting to sound like Sheffield."
"Screw you."
Morrison didn't respond, but reflected on the fact that Arkin had always been a straight-laced agent. Had always adhered to a strict, self-imposed code of right and wrong. Now, it seemed, he was flashing a new willingness to cross the line—to use any means necessary to hunt down and destroy the group.
"What are you going to do now?" Morrison asked.
"Hunt my twin."
"Huh?"
"Find someone who looks like me. Snag his passport."
"Good luck. Anything I can do on my end?"
"Not at the moment. I might need you to ride shotgun in D.C. in a couple of weeks. Think you can take time off from work?"
"I think I feel a bout of shingles coming on."
"Should have gotten that immunization they advertise in Good Housekeeping magazine."
"Coulda, woulda, shoulda—the loser's lament."
"Anything else?" Arkin asked.
"Unfortunately, yes, there is. A buddy of mine in the U.S. Marshall's Denver office told me that someone put a notation in your fugitive sheet saying that there was a good chance you could be in Eugene."
"Holy shit. How did—I guess they must have surmised that I'd search for Sheffield, or at least search his house."
"A good guess."
As if on cue, Arkin heard sirens. Multiple sirens. He paused to listen. They seemed to be heading in his general direction.
"I hear sirens."
"Coming your way?"
"Maybe," Arkin said, wondering if one of the neighbors was out walking the dog and spotted the beam of his flashlight through the trees.
"Get out of there. Call you in three days."
Arkin hung up as he ran for the forest at the back of the lot. He'd leave the way he came, down through the woods that flanked the hillside. Down to where he'd left his motorcycle lying on its side, hidden beneath the fronds of a cluster of giant sword ferns. The sirens might not have been for him. But he wasn't going to wait around to find out if they were.
FOUR
Late the next morning, 270 miles north of Eugene, Arkin pulled to the gravel shoulder of a forest-flanked road close to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. He rolled the motorcycle into the trees and hid it in a thicket of salal bushes, then marched deeper into the woods. Soon enough, he found a soft, clear patch of ground under a dense canopy of firs beyond sight of the road and made camp. Within the hour, he located a nearby grocery where he spent some of his precious remaining cash—the use of a credit or ATM card was out of the question since they were easy to trace—on propane canisters, 50-cent bags of quick-cook Cajun beans and rice that were on a clearance sale, a lighter, and some basic toiletries. Back at camp that evening, he built a crude blind out of sticks and ferns to obscure the firelight of the stove, then cooked himself a simple dinner. As he finished, it began to pour rain. He withdrew to the shelter of the tent and was soon falling asleep to the pitter-patter of large droplets that consolidated in the fir needles above and fell onto the taught waterproof rainfly protecting his tent.
He woke once in the night, certain that he smelled Hannah's hair. The scent of plumeria, from a shampoo she'd used ever since discovering it on their first trip to Kauai. The sensation was so strong that he was sure he'd open his eyes to see her lying there next to him. But as he regained his wits, he remembered that she was gone. Still, he reached out into the chilly air and felt around in the darkness just to be sure. There was no one, nothing there. He ached to see Hannah's face. To feel the warmth of her arm lying against his as she slept. To just hear her breathing. Smell her hair. Things he once took for granted.
*****
The next morning, he set off for the airport on foot—knowing there'd be no free parking, and he wanted to conserve his cash—donning a baseball cap and pulling his hooded sweatshirt up around his face as best he could. It took him just about an hour to reach the terminal. Scanning the flight information screens, he took note of every international arrival that day. He found a table in a brightly-lit reception hall where he had a clear view of where passengers from international arrivals were disgorged from an escalator after leaving U.S. Customs. Taking stock of the positions of the various security cameras, he grabbed a discarded Seattle Times, kicked back, and did his best to look like somebody waiting to meet an arriving passenger, all the while keeping his face obscured by pages of the paper or turned away from the probing lenses.
As he waited, it occurred to him that it would be a good time to warn Ted Wright, the First Nations activist from Alberta, that he'd been targeted for assassination by the Priest's group. Warn him that he should run and hide, and take his beautiful little 5-year-old daughter with him. The first thing Arkin did was Google the man's name along with the words "first nations," looking for any sort of phone number or other contact information he could use to track the guy down. But within seconds, he learned his efforts were futile. The online version of the Calgary Herald newspaper had an article titled "RCMP to Investigate Killing of First Nations Activist." The accompanying photo was an old mugshot of Wright.
Arkin's heart pounded in his chest and his face grew hot as
he pictured Wright's little girl, her smiling face turned up to look at her dad as they walked with their ice cream cones. Such helpless innocence. What would become of her? Did she have any relatives who might step forward to take care of her? Would she be taken away to live with a foster family of total strangers? Would she be handed over to the government foster care system? Would she fall prey to the neglect and abuse so common to such situations? It made Arkin furious. What could possibly justify such a killing? A killing with such consequences, such collateral damage for the innocent? The Priest's group had to be stopped. And stopped soon, before they could orphan any more innocent children.
Two hours later, a gleaming Air France 777 pulled into a gate across the tarmac. Twenty minutes after that, haggard and bleary-eyed passengers began pouring from the top of the escalator. Arkin scanned each male face. The people came in waves as they were dropped by subways arriving from U.S. Customs every few minutes. After the eighth or ninth such wave, the flow petered out. He hadn’t seen what he was looking for.
He waited for one more international arrival—a 747 from Taiwan—but met with similar disappointment. Deciding that if he stayed any longer he might pique the interest of security, he gave up for the day and made his way back to camp.
FIVE
Arkin followed a similar routine—choosing different spots in the airport in which to wait and changing up the combination of clothes and baseball caps he wore—for more than a week, subsisting off Cajun beans and rice. By day six, he never wanted to see another Cajun dish as long as he lived. To keep himself from getting conspicuously rank and filthy, he took to bathing, shaving, and washing his clothes in a relatively clean, clear, but ice-cold pool below a culvert that ran under a road in a heavily-wooded ravine a few hundred yards west of his camp. On one of the days it rained constantly, so he stayed put for fear that his arriving at the airport soaked to the bone would arouse suspicion. Why hadn’t he thought to buy an umbrella?
He was getting sick of sitting on his butt in the woods, sick of sitting at the airport, sick of bathing in ditch water, sick of the smell of his food. His back hurt from sleeping on the ground night after night. His sleep was fitful, haunted by dreams of his dying wife. Of her terrible fear. Of his uselessness. His utter inability to help her.
Finally, on day eight of his vigil, Arkin saw what he was looking for. An exhausted looking male passenger coming off a British Airways 777 from Heathrow. Six-foot-two. Medium build. Dark hair. Not a dead-ringer for Arkin by any stretch, but close enough.
Arkin tracked the man to the light rail station—glad he wouldn’t have to ask Morrison to trace a license plate—and boarded a train car adjoining the one the man boarded. The train wound its way down into the Duwamish River Valley, over into the Rainier Valley, then into a tunnel under Seattle's Beacon Hill neighborhood. Arkin followed at a discreet distance as the man disembarked at Beacon Hill Station and walked east on McClellan Street, slowed by his rolling suitcase. The man eventually turned south and went another block before ascending a short walkway to the door of a small bungalow. Arkin marked the house, noting its number out of the corner of his eye as he walked past. It sat on a quiet residential side street. It had an old-fashioned stand-alone mailbox out front and an alley behind. Perfect.
By that evening, Arkin had relocated his camp to another area of woods—broad-leaf maple, alder, and Douglas fir sheltering a dense undergrowth of Eurasian blackberry vines and fern—flanking the western slope of Beacon Hill. Judging by the many well-worn footpaths and sheer quantity of debris, Arkin was sure the area often served as a refuge and temporary encampment for vagrants. All the better. He’d be less likely to draw anyone’s attention in an area known as a haven for squatters. Just the same, he did the best he could to locate his tent out of sight of either the nearby homes or anyone who might wander along one of the meandering trails.
That night it rained hard. The wet pavement made Interstate 5, unseen but just below his camp, all the louder. He hardly slept. And he was running out of food. Days of meager, rationed portions of quick-cook Cajun beans and rice had his subconscious preoccupied with nourishment, so that when he did manage to sleep, he dreamt of things like grilled Argentine skirt steak, spaghetti with browned butter and mizithra cheese, pepperoni pizza, and caramel cake.
Up before dawn, Arkin made his way back to the house of the man he’d followed from the airport. Under cover of the predawn darkness, and after a couple of awkward false starts, he managed to hide himself in a 10-foot-high, 4-foot-deep wall of English laurel hedge fronting a yard a half block up and across the street. There, he waited and watched. Just under two hours later, the man emerged from his house and headed north, presumably back toward the light rail station for his morning commute to work. Waiting until the man was well out of sight, Arkin struggled free of the hedge, crossed the street, and circumnavigated the block, eventually entering the alley that ran up its middle. Scanning as he walked, he was reasonably certain nobody had eyes on the alley. He hopped a short chain-link fence behind the target house, strolled up to the back of it, and found an unlatched old double-hung bathroom window. He lifted it and crawled in.
As he’d hoped, the man hadn’t unpacked, but had left his open suitcase on the floor of his bedroom. On a small desk in the adjoining room, he found the man’s passport. William Cassady, born a mere three months after Arkin. And the photo could hardly have been better. He pocketed it, then scanned the desk for credit card applications. No dice. But to his happy surprise, he found the man’s Social Security card among a rubber-banded stack of business and grocery store club cards. Perfect.
He made his way to the kitchen to burgle food. Simple things, dust-covered things—things in the back of cupboards that probably wouldn’t be missed. A big bag of jasmine rice. Cans of corn, beans, and chili. An old, surely stale, half-consumed jar of instant coffee; a small indulgence. He stuffed the food into doubled-up grocery bags he found in Cassady’s pantry, rifled through the bathroom cabinets to find two bars of soap, then headed back to camp.
SIX
Over the next three days, Arkin surveilled the street to ascertain the usual time of mail delivery, and to steal a "pre-approved" credit card application from Cassady’s mailbox. The first one that came offered a ludicrously high interest rate, but also promised a high maximum balance. "Sorry about this, Mr. Cassady," Arkin said aloud as he filled out the application back in his tent.
The next day, Arkin hiked into downtown Seattle and made his way over to the gleaming new central library. He got hold of a computer and did more searching for the Chilean phone and fax numbers he'd recovered in Petrović's macabre Vancouver art gallery. Nothing more useful came up.
Damn.
Six days later, Arkin intercepted the new credit card in Cassady’s mailbox and—once again using the internet-linked computers at the Seattle Central Library—used it to buy a one-way ticket to Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C. the next day. Knowing full well he’d be creating a monster headache for poor Cassady, he selected the cheapest flight he could find, even though it was a red-eye with two plane changes and would take five hours longer than quicker but far more expensive options.
Feeling that he was at last making progress, he took a long celebratory walk around downtown Seattle, admiring its beautiful setting, its views out over Elliot Bay to the distant Olympic Mountains, its eclectic, lively public market where friendly merchants of its many stalls offered him nourishing free samples of hot clam chowder, crepes, sausages, cheeses, and fruits.
The next evening, a dark and dreary Pacific Northwest Monday, Arkin, traveling as Mr. William Cassady of Seattle, Washington, passed through TSA security without so much as a second glance and boarded a Boeing 737 for the first leg of his zig-zagging 10-hour journey to Washington, D.C.
SEVEN
Morrison slumped in his chair, staring down at the Animas River out his office window, unable to work, obsessed with figuring out a way to help Arkin. Given that he had a full-time
job as a Special Agent for ATF, and given that he'd already taken a week off to help Arkin go after Sheffield in Oregon, he couldn't just up and head to the Pacific Northwest to rendezvous with Arkin again—especially if he was going to try to concoct an excuse to meet Arkin in Washington, D.C. But maybe there was something he could do from Durango. Maybe there was a way he could at least obtain some useful information that could help Arkin in his quest. What would Arkin most need? Identities and locations of the Priest group's operatives? Details of its command structure? Information on pending operations? Sure. But how the hell could Morrison get his hands on any of that?
Then an idea occurred to Morrison that made him sit up straight. The group had obviously been monitoring the various cell phones Arkin had used over the past few weeks. And its operatives were so professional and thorough that Morrison had a pretty strong suspicion they were monitoring his phones too. He picked up his phone and dialed the number of a cell phone Arkin had carried up until a week ago when he dumped it after deducing that it was compromised and being tracked. Morrison hung up before it rang. Too obvious. He picked up his phone again and dialed the office line of Detective Cornell, over in Cortez, who he figured had already punched out and gone to the tavern to watch his beloved UNM Lobos basketball team take on Brigham Young. To Morrison's great satisfaction, the call went straight to voicemail.
"Cornell, it's your number one fan, Bill Morrison. Listen, I have a printout with the names and addresses Arkin asked us to find. If you get this message and want me to read them to you, call me after hours because I don't have them at work. Got 'em stashed in my barn in case any of these assassin jokers breaks into our offices." He hung up. Was it still too obvious? Would the group smell a trap? Maybe. But maybe not. A smile broke out across his face. Then he ran for the door.
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