The Alaska Escape

by K. B. Spangler

  There were loopholes, of course. It fell within the limits of our bet that I could rent a plane and have them circle around Anchorage’s airspace until the deadline. Or I could hire several Lyfts in succession and go street by street across the city. Basically, I had a devil’s dozen of avoidance strategies to pursue.

  That is, I could do those things if I was a cheating cheater who hated fun.

  “Tell me,” I said, as I leaned on Theodore’s shoulder. “What’s the club scene like in Anchorage?”

  As it turns out? The early morning weekday club scene is mostly illegal.

  Now, “mostly” is a big word for me. OACET Agents pride themselves on following the letter of the law. Legal, legal, legal, up and down the straight edges of society, every single action and reaction justifiable in a court of law. I do my best to keep to this, but if my two brand-new friends want to bring me to a club and if I don’t know that it’s illegal to hold a party in an abandoned ice skating rink and if I don’t ask any specific questions about “What’s the maximum occupancy here?” and “Should that be on fire?” then I’m not going to beat myself up over the details.

  Besides, it was a hell of a party.

  As we stepped into the club and the lights and the music poured over us, I reached out to Mare. “You didn’t tell me that Alaska is banging.”

  I could feel her laugh through the link. “You wouldn’t have believed me if I did, Chicago boy.”

  “True. How’s it coming?”

  She updated me on Pappy and Brenda, and chuckled sadly. “He loves this dumb bear, baby.”

  “We’ll save her,” I promised. “Have you figured out who Raven is?”

  “Yup.” Mare told me what OACET’s research team had done with the data I’d sent them. It wasn’t anything I hadn’t already guessed. Raven was a self-made woman. Rich, powerful, aggressive in the business community. She had several expensive hobbies, of which game hunting was one, and she had been caught poaching in other national parks twice before. More leverage for us: if she got caught poaching again, the fees would be astronomical, and she would also be eligible for some decent time in prison.

  We had already won this round. Brenda was safe, probably as long as Pappy was able to keep tabs on her. The trick was to convince Raven to move Brenda to that nice sheltered game preserve so Pappy would be able to stop worrying…and to convince her to keep Brenda alive though the length of her natural lifespan. Avoid those awkward and unprovable conversations—oh, what a shame the bear fell into the bag of poison, better not let the body go to waste!—and all that.

  So we needed to get on Raven’s good side and stay there.

  Easy as smiling.

  Deeper into the club, the party people of Alaska swarming us. Beautiful people in their fancy clothes, big bottles of alcohol, the heady pulse of dance music. A brunette and three bottle blonds attached themselves to us; I moved two ladies to each member of my temporary entourage, and went to go get us some drinks.

  The woman behind the bar was wearing a black catsuit, rhinestones in the shape of stars studding her shoulders and…I peered over the bar to check…along the length of her thighs. Oh my.

  “Like what you see, Agent Glassman?” The bartender’s hair was as black as Raven’s and three times as long, and one eyebrow was arched in the sexy way that always elevates a man’s…gratuity.

  “I love bartenders,” I said. “Smartest people in the room.”

  “Ah.” She shooed away her assistant to take drink orders, and leaned on the counter to talk to me. Lovely cleavage, showing off deliciously smooth skin the color of creamy coffee. “Don’t know if I can help you. I just started working here a week ago.”

  “Every time I talk to a bartender, they’ve just started their jobs. Coincidence, I’m sure,” I replied, grinning. “But I’m looking for general information. Where would a fellow go to get a good bite to eat at this hour, and all that.”

  “A fellow?” She grinned back, a fingertip moving through a small pool of condensation on the polished bar top. “Don’t get many fellows in Anchorage.”

  “A gentleman, then. One who’s been eating airplane food and trail mix for two days.”

  She reached under the bar and pulled out a chilled tumbler, and began to put together a cocktail. “Do gentlemen eat at diners?”

  “Sure,” I answered. “But this gentleman in particular was hoping for a restaurant with a view.”

  The bartender passed me the tumbler. The liquid in it was cold golden amber, and went down like a glad song. “Another?” she asked.

  Yes, of course, and then a few turns around the dance floor with her, since she was on her break and all. I made sure to hold her close and whisper in her ear at least a couple of times; I didn’t have any cash money on me, so she’d have to get her tips from gossips who’d open their wallets to learn why OACET was in town. I told her it was because there was a poacher killing bears in a nearby national park, and we took that shit seriously.

  We returned to the table where my new friends Theodore and Saunders had been entertaining their new friends. I checked my internal clock. It had been nearly two hours since the helicopter had touched down on the roof.

  “Hey.” I tapped Theodore on the shoulder and nodded to the bartender. “I’m going to use the little cyborgs’ room. Would you mind?”

  The bartender was gorgeous; he did not mind. I made sure the two of them were back on the dance floor, and found my way to the rear exit. No, I wasn’t slipping out, and yes, I had already paid the check. Cyborg, remember? But it had taken me ninety minutes to get here, and if Raven was as good as I thought she was, she couldn’t be too far behind. I needed to get under cover and let my body double catch the tag.

  And the most important thing was that I needed to spot her before she spotted me.

  Raven was no fool. She would know that I could track her cell phone, her Fitbit, her digital anything. She had nothing digital on her in the woods, but she was in the city now, and that’s a different kind of naked in the city. She’d be sure to leave her devices with the people on her team when she came in to tag me, but she’d still have a phone somewhere nearby. So I needed to find their group before they split up, and that way I could at least have a general idea of where Raven was in the city.

  Across from the bathrooms was an employees’ lounge. It was empty, so I poked around the back wall until I found the access stairs. These took me up to the catwalk, which was mostly rust held together by muscle memory. I followed the catwalk around the curve of the rink’s circular roof until I found a skylight, and I popped the latch on this to let myself out onto the roof.

  It was a great view. The sky was going pink along the tops of the mountains, with a glorious rosy glow starting to twine its way through an indescribably perfect deep blue. I took a moment to drink in the…the perfect lushness of the moment, with the colors of the sky above and the chill of the night against my face.

  Then, the waiting.

  It didn’t take long. The roof had a gentle curve across its high points, and then dropped sharply towards the ground. This gave me clear sightlines of the two roads leading to the skating rink. Barely ten minutes after I had set up shop, a black SUV which practically shouted Hired Goons Onboard! pulled up to the curb. Three of the people I had met in her hunting party emerged and entered the building. A few minutes later, one of them stepped outside to make a phone call.

  Perfect.

  I grabbed the cell’s frequency and committed it to memory, and then dipped a toe into the conversation.

  “He’s here.” That was Raven’s employee. I remembered him from the woods; he had offered me the energy bars. Nice guy.

  “Good,” said Raven. “I’m fifteen minutes away.”

  “Oh, are you now?” I muttered to myself, as I let my implant follow the call from the employee’s cell phone to Raven’s phone.

  Oh.

  Oh!

  I raced over the roof in time to see a woman with black hair cut into a ti
ght bob toss a burner phone into the bushes as she let herself in through the rear entrance.

  Oh, she was good.

  Well, time to get off the roof. I figured I’d use the skylight, and take the catwalk around to the rear entrance which Raven had just used. She’d be moving forward in the club, covering ground from back to front, while her team went from front to back. They’d waste some time questioning Saunders, and then—

  A reflection saved me. A flash of movement off of the skylight which showed a body settling into the shadows on the catwalk below.

  Oh, Raven was so good!

  I still don’t know how she did it. A decoy holding the phone below, maybe, playing a recording of Raven’s voice? However she pulled off that trick, she knew who she was dealing with, and she hadn’t underestimated me.

  On the other hand, I had underestimated her, and had nearly gotten myself caught. She would have tagged me going down the ladder, and that would have been game over.

  I backed away from the skylight as quietly as I could, scouting for another way off the roof. If Raven knew I was up here, and if she knew I couldn’t get down, then that would be game over, too. There didn’t appear to be many other escapes. The other skylights dotting the roof were either locked from the inside, or didn’t open. The curve of the roof made it difficult to see the ground directly below the rink. There was a flagpole on the other side of the rink, but it was too far to jump.

  (At least, too far to jump for the good of a bear. Let’s not lose perspective here. I’d try it in a heartbeat for Mare, but Brenda and I had just met.)

  A speck of red caught my attention: a sporty convertible was zooming towards the rink. Excellent. Now I just needed to get down—

  The squeak of the skylight.

  I glanced over my shoulder to see Raven climbing onto the roof. “Honestly, I expected more,” she said, frowning.

  I pointed towards the sunrise. “Day’s just getting started.”

  She started to reply: I don’t know what she said, as I had started to run.

  The curve of the roof fell away beneath my feet, gently at first, then sloping quickly towards the ground. The roof was slick along the curve, and it turned into a ski slope, arcing down, down…

  …towards a fire escape.

  If I ever testify under oath, I won’t swear I knew what I was doing. But that’s life, right? Besides, I had a great feeling about that side of the building. My friend Rachel Peng had taught me a little of how she can use her implant to see through objects, and I might have subconsciously been using some of her techniques. Whatever the case, that fire escape was welcome.

  Except it was as rusty and broken as the rest of the building.

  My feet hit the ancient iron, my momentum transferring to the metal, and the hellish scream of metal in pain tore across the morning. I looked up in time to see Raven staring down at me from the top of the curve, not willing to commit to the part of the chase which included a potential fall to the death. Then, the fire escape began to slowly pull away from the side of the building, the metal squealing as it bent. It was an agonizing sound, and went on forever, as the fire escape took its time to bend away from the building and lower itself—and me—to the ground.

  The red convertible pulled up at the same moment the fire escape finally touched down on the old asphalt. Mare, her red hair knotted behind her in complex braids, leaned over from the driver’s seat and opened the door for me. “Nice timing,” she said.

  “Back at you, babe.” I blew a kiss at Raven, and then fastened my seatbelt. Mare drives like a maniac. “Want to get some breakfast?”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The steak was seared on the outside and pink on the inside. Really pink. Almost bloody. You couldn’t get a steak this rare in Washington, not without someone from the health department showing up and raising holy hell.

  It was delicious.

  “Early for steak,” Pappy stated, as he tucked into his own flapjacks and eggs. “Respect.”

  “A bear.” Mare’s father hadn’t touched his own food. Douglas also hadn’t said anything coherent since he had learned about Brenda. It looked like he was starting to make progress. “We thought you had been murdered because of a bear?!” Excellent progress.

  “To be fair,” Mare said, “we never really thought Pappy was the one who had been murdered.”

  “Damn straight,” Pappy said.

  “That’s not a good thing, dad! That’s a scary thing! A very scary thing!”

  I ignored the family chaos as best as I was able. I was watching for Raven. There weren’t too many places open at this time of the day, so we had gone to an old family restaurant near the airport. The place was renowned for its seafood, even during its breakfast hours, but the waitress confessed they had a porterhouse special left over from the night before and the cook might be persuaded to fire up the grill for me.

  I didn’t like how we were close to the airport. Raven knew that prey tended to stay in familiar territory. Mare had returned the convertible to her friends at the rental agency and picked up a drab late-model sedan, but Raven had a lot of hired help, and phone calls were cheap. All she needed to do was pretend she was a local reporter following up on a hot tip, and the helpful waitress would be happy to tell her that OACET was seated in her section.

  The conversation was starting to get loud, so I swung my attention back to the Murphy clan. Pappy had taken out that giant knife, while his son was shouting at him to put it away, and Mare was very calmly but very emphatically telling her grandfather that he should not draw a weapon in public and also asking where is Brenda now?

  “Brenda’s safe,” Pappy said, grinning that evil grin of his. “I’ll put her somewhere they’ll never look for her.”

  Mare slowly pressed her face into her open palms. “She’s in your cabin, isn’t she.”

  Pappy blinked. “How did—”

  “Pappy, if I guessed it in one, then you know—”

  “You put a bear in your house?!”

  “Why not? She’s been there before. I raised her and her brother there when they were cubs.”

  The restaurant’s phone rang. I watched as a different waiter answered it. His eyes darted over to our table, and then he turned away, covering the receiver with a hand.

  I looked down at my half-finished steak and sighed. “Mare, I gotta get going.”

  Mare followed my gaze to the waiter. “Drink some coffee.”

  “You’re leaving?” Pappy sounded almost disappointed.

  “Yeah.” I swallowed my mostly full mug of hot coffee, and then chased it with Mare’s. “Need to keep my part of the bargain.”

  “I’ll make sure she keeps hers,” Mare said.

  “Why do you need to leave?” Douglas was not managing this weirdness at all. I guess that ability skipped a generation. “What’s happening?”

  “I’m doing my job,” I said.

  “Your job?” Oh yes, Douglas was done with all of this. “You’re a con—” He caught himself just in time, but the accusation of “con man” still reached me. “You’re a TV guy!”

  “Grow up, Doug,” Pappy cut in. “He’s a moving target,”

  Well. Save a man’s bear and it changes his opinion of you. Good to know. “Yeah,” I agreed, as I gave Mare a quick kiss goodbye. “I draw live fire so Mare can do her job.”

  “I’m much more effective when a hunter isn’t breathing down my neck,” she said, as she patted me on the butt. “Or a news crew.”

  “Speaking of which…” I nodded towards the waiter.

  “Right,” Mare said, as she tossed me the keys to her rented sedan. “Go draw her off, babe.”

  “Keep me posted,” I replied, touching my forehead. As I left, I heard Douglas say, “What the hell just happened?”

  “The kids are all grown up,” Pappy told him fondly.

  “What the hell just happened?!”

  I fired up the sedan and drove around until Mare pinged me through the link. “Josh? Brenda’s
gone.” Anxiety and anger were mixed into her mental tone.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  Scorn joined the anxiety and anger. “It looks like she broke out of the cabin.”

  “Just like someone made it look like Pappy killed someone and dragged them into the woods?”

  “Yup.”

  I shook my head. I had thought something like this might be coming when Raven or her team hadn’t picked up my trail. “Suggestions?”

  “Regroup at the cabin. I’ve already made a few calls. I’ve got a plan…”

  She told me the details, and I laughed. Only Mare would be able to pull something like that off.

  “On my way,” I promised, and turned the car towards Pappy’s place.

  About a mile away from my destination, police lights flared in my rearview. Great, I thought to myself. I’m too tired for this.

  “Too tired for what?” Mare was still riding tight in my mind.

  “Officer Tamino is back for another round.”

  “Bring him with you,” she said. “If he’s the leak, we’ll deal with him. If not, it’ll look more authentic if it comes from him.”

  “Damn. Yeah, you’re right,” I sighed, and pulled back a little in the link so I could focus on the job.

  I pulled over to the side of the road, window down, hands on the wheel. Tamino stayed in his cruiser, letting the suspense build. And trying to turn off his dashboard camera, which I helpfully kept turning back on, until he yanked it off of the dash and threw it under a jacket. This was followed by his body camera. Lovely.

  “Good morning—” My body chose that moment to indulge in a massive yawn “—Officer Tamino.”

  “Think you’re funny?”

  “Think I’m tired,” I admitted. “Been a long couple of days.”

  “Why don’t you get out of the car, Agent Glassman?”

  “Why don’t you give me a reason?” I snapped. “You know you’ve got no cause, and you know you’re messing with a federal agent who’s recording your every move. There’s a point where harassment turns into stupidity, and I’m no longer in the mood to play nice and let you discover where that point is on your own.”