by Roland Smith
“I’ll let him tell you himself. But the reason I’m calling is that I need you to vouch for us. Apparently, he doesn’t trust me.”
Al laughed. “Occupational hazard. He’s a cop just like me. We don’t trust anyone. Let me talk to him.”
Wolfe gave Crow the Gizmo. Crow looked at the cell-phone-like device curiously, but didn’t say anything.
“You’ve lost some weight, Steve,” Al said.
“A little,” Agent Crow said. “You still with the company?”
“Yeah. Special assignment. I’m running protection for Travis Wolfe and Ted Bronson.”
“Why?”
“Sorry,” Al said. “National security. Need-to-know only. I thought you’d retired from the bureau.”
“They put me back on the payroll.”
“After you found that money?” Al asked.
“Something like that.”
“That was quite a coup.”
“Got lucky.”
“What brings you down to Brazil?”
“Need-to-know only,” Agent Crow said.
Al laughed. “Fair enough. What does Dr. Wolfe have to do with whatever you’ve got going on down there?”
“I need a ride upriver. Simple as that. He won’t take me on his helicopter but says he’ll give me a lift in his boat, which is allegedly coming along in a few hours.”
“If Wolfe says he’ll get you upriver in the boat, you can take it to the bank,” Al assured him. “But I need you to do a favor for me.”
“What’s the favor?”
“You need to keep quiet, and I mean completely quiet, about whatever you see aboard the boat, and at the jaguar preserve. Travis and Ted have come up with several gadgets the U.S. government is very interested in. You’re holding one in your hand right now. It’s all top secret stuff, which is one of the reasons he doesn’t want you on his helicopter.”
“I know how to keep my mouth shut,” Agent Crow said. “But in fact, it isn’t his ride. I ran the tail number and it belongs to a Noah Blackwood.”
“I’m aware of that,” Al said. “It’s a complicated and fluid situation. I’ll let you go, but I have to ask one more time. What are you doing down there, Steve?”
Agent Crow shook his head. “Sorry, Al.”
“Okay. Hand me back to Wolfe.”
Crow gave Wolfe the phone. “I’ll tell the captain to start the refuel.”
“Thanks.”
“And the boat will be here in a few hours?” Crow said.
Wolfe nodded. “I’ll give Ted Bronson a call as soon as I finish with Al. Do you have a sat phone?”
Crow nodded.
“Give me your number and I’ll tell him where you’ll be.”
Crow scribbled the number on a card, then walked over to the refueling crew. Wolfe waited for him to get out of hearing range, then looked back at the Gizmo screen. “So, what’s Crow’s story?”
“Good agent. Been around forever. In fact, I’m surprised he’s still around. His claim to fame is the recovery of the money in the D. B. Cooper hijacking case. I heard he’d retired after that. Are his creds current?”
“They look to be,” Wolfe answered. “Did he actually find D. B. Cooper?”
“Nope, which I’m sure annoyed him to no end. He spent a good part of his career trying to run D.B. down. I’ll make some inquiries, see if anyone knows what he’s doing down there.”
Grace looked over at Crow. He was saying good-bye to the policemen as they boarded their boat.
“What’s going on with Blackwood?” Wolfe asked.
Grace looked back at Wolfe.
“He’s still here conducting media interviews at the Ark,” Al said. “And he seems to be making some headway. The talking heads are sympathetic. ‘Poor Dr. Blackwood is the victim of an elaborate hoax…. The perpetrators are said to be a radical hunting group….’ Blah. Blah. Blah. I’ll upload the so-called doctored Wildlife First episode. The only thing you have to watch is the last thirty seconds. Blackwood has really thrown down the gauntlet this time. He’s committed.”
Grace closed her eyes. She had seen the original video Al was talking about. She could hear every word — every lie — of those last thirty seconds.
“I’m recording this from somewhere deep in the Congo, and it very well may be the last time you see me …” Noah Blackwood had flashed his trademark grin, tinged with a little sadness and regret. “… but don’t despair. I’ve had a good run, and I’ve managed to save some animals along the way, for which I’m grateful. I came out here to rescue a dear colleague and I may have killed myself in the attempt, but looking back on my life I have no regrets — except one: that I won’t be alive to see the impact of this, my greatest discovery ever….” The camera moved jerkily to his right. A close-up of the two Mokélé-mbembé hatchlings appeared. “Dinosaurs exist!” The camera returned to Noah’s feverish face. “Two of them, anyway. The last of their breed. I will try to get them to safety, but if I can’t, the last thing I will do before I die will be to let them go….” The scene switched to a close-up of a now well-groomed and healthy-looking Noah Blackwood. “To quote Mark Twain, the reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated. But what has not been exaggerated are the dinosaur hatchlings I showed you while I was lost in the Congo. I managed to get my friend and the hatchlings to safety. Right now, for security reasons, we are keeping the hatchlings at an undisclosed location. They are thriving, but they need a little more time to adjust to their new circumstances. I will have more information for you on next week’s show. Until then … Wildlife first!”
“What about Butch and Yvonne?” Wolfe asked, snapping Grace out of the terrible replay in her head.
“No sign of those two, which can’t be good,” Al answered. “They got a little banged up at the Ark, but not enough to keep them down. And I can’t think of any reason why Blackwood would keep them under wraps. They’re not implicated in his current woes.”
“What about his jet?”
“Parked in Blackwood’s hangar along with his two pilots, but that’s not to say Butch and Yvonne aren’t on the move in another private jet we don’t know about. There’s something strange going on.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not sure. I’ve had some of my people looking into Blackwood and Butch’s recent travels. They kind of appear and disappear from places without any official record of their arrival or departure. My point is that Butch and Yvonne could be anywhere, so you need to stay diligent. There’s a chance Blackwood has figured out where you are, and they are either on their way or they are already there.”
“We’ll keep our eyes open.” Wolfe signed off.
“Who’s D. B. Cooper?” Grace asked.
“A hijacker from a long time ago. He boarded a passenger jet in Portland and announced that he had a bomb. When they got to Seattle, he let the passengers go but kept the pilot, copilot, and a flight attendant. Cooper demanded a couple hundred thousand dollars in cash and four parachutes, which the FBI gave him, thinking that he just might have the hostages bail. This assured him of getting four working parachutes. The plane then took off from Seattle and headed for Nevada. Cooper locked the crew in the cockpit and gave the pilots the exact route and elevation he wanted them to fly. Somewhere over Mt. Saint Helens, he opened the back door and jumped with the cash strapped to his body, but no one realized it until they landed in Nevada and found he wasn’t on the jet. D. B. Cooper, not his real name of course, was never heard from again.”
“You know a lot about it,” Grace said.
“Everyone who lives in the Pacific Northwest knows a lot about it.” Wolfe looked over at the helicopter. “Looks like we’re ready to go.” He paid the bargemen and climbed into the pilot’s seat.
Grace got into the right-hand seat. She looked back at Luther. He had done a good job of hiding the hatchlings. He was literally buried under supplies in the backseat.
“Hey, where’s Crow?” Luther asked. “What going on?”
&
nbsp; Grace smiled. “Shotgun!” she said.
Wolfe started the engine.
Butch walked out to the pool to check in with Noah one more time before he left. Noah was sitting under a patio umbrella watching himself being interviewed at the Seattle Ark.
“Is this live?” Butch asked.
“Yes,” Noah said impatiently. “Quiet! It’s almost over.”
“So the whole thing was a hoax,” the reporter was saying.
“An elaborate and very well-executed hoax,” a smiling TV Noah said. “It’s sad really to see this much money being spent on efforts to undermine what we’re trying to do for wildlife. Think of what that time and money and effort could have done to actually help animals.”
“The YouTube video has over five million hits. Have you seen it?”
“I haven’t looked at the so-called outtakes. I never will. And I’m confident that our millions and millions of supporters have not been taken in by this malicious slander. They are smarter than that.” The TV Noah looked at his watch. “I’m afraid that I have animals to tend to. If you’ll excuse me. But please come back anytime. I promise that the next time you do, we will have bigger and better things to discuss.”
The reporter smiled. “Dinosaurs?”
The TV Noah returned the smile and walked away.
Butch stifled a shudder. The smiling man walking away from the reporter was not Noah Blackwood. He was known as Mr. Zwilling, and he was exactly like Noah Blackwood in every way. Mr. Zwilling gave Butch the creeps.
“Perfect!” Noah said, taking a sip of his iced, freshly squeezed mango juice. “I told him to be cagey if asked about the dinosaurs. That smile he gave the reporter was sublime.” He switched the television off with the remote and stared at Butch with cold blue eyes for a full minute.
Butch hated it when he did this.
“You still look a little banged up,” Noah finally said.
Butch felt banged up. It had only been a couple of days since Ted Bronson had beaten the crap out of him at the Ark. Even so, Butch wanted to go another round with Ted. A fair round. One where he wasn’t blindsided on a dark path.
“I’m fine,” Butch said, and changed the subject. “So you showed the footage of the hatchlings on the Wildlife First episode?”
“Of course I did,” Noah said. “We’re all in on this. And as soon as you get them back for me, you’re headed to China to pick up three new panda cubs. All will be as it was except that we will no longer have to worry about Travis Wolfe and his Cryptos Island crew sticking their noses in our affairs. Is everyone in place?”
“Just about,” Butch answered. Noah had given him very detailed instructions about where to send their teams. “How do you know where the Cryptos crew and Lansa’s staff from the jaguar preserve are?”
“This,” Noah said. He reached into his starched safari coat pocket and pulled out a device that was a little bigger than a smartphone.
Butch had seen firsthand how much the Cryptos crew depended on those things when he was aboard the Coelacanth.
“Dear old Mitch.” Noah smiled. “At least he was good for something. I think you said they call it a Gizmo? A beautiful piece of technology.”
Mitch Merton, or Mitch the Snitch, as Butch liked to call him, had been working on Cryptos for years, feeding them information, but he’d blown his cover aboard the Coelacanth. He had taken refuge beneath the Ark to become Noah’s next personal taxidermist, but the job hadn’t worked out. The last time Butch had seen Mitch, Dr. Strand, Noah’s creepy geneticist, had been spiking his drink. Noah had planned to put the same brain implant they’d used on the chupacabra into Mitch’s brain. There had been no love lost between Butch and Mitch, but Butch had almost felt sorry for him.
“How’s Mitch doing?”
“He died on the operating table,” Noah said, with no more emotion than if he were informing Butch that he had stepped on an ant.
Butch realized he was really looking forward to going to China on his own to poach more panda cubs.
“But back to this Gizmo thing,” Noah said. “It took a while for my technicians to figure out exactly how it worked, but they did. And, more important, they’ve figured out a back door into the entire eWolfe network. I can hack into everything they have with this tiny unit. Remarkable.” He began swiping his finger through the menus.
“Do they know we still have it?” Butch asked.
“I don’t think so,” Noah answered happily. “Or else they would have tried to take it offline. Of course that’s not possible now. My techs have put up an impregnable firewall. They can’t touch this one.” He smiled. “But we can touch them. I can shut down all of their communications, including their ability to track each other, with a swipe of the finger, which I will do at the appropriate moment.”
“After we have all of them in hand,” Butch said.
Noah gave him a sour look and shook his head. “What would be the point of shutting down their communications after we have them all in hand? This is a divide-and-conquer operation, Butch. We’ll take them down in ones and twos. The first two have already been cut from the herd. Is the team in place?”
“We have an eye on them,” Butch said.
“It’s time to move,” Noah said. “Take them. They’ll be wearing tags around their necks like this.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a plastic tag that had been broken in two. “This was Mitch’s. Destroy their tags before the team brings them here.”
“And if they resist?”
“Have them killed.”
“What about the others?” Butch asked.
“I’ll let you know.” Noah’s blue eyes narrowed. “And keep your two-way radio on.”
A couple of days earlier at the Ark, Butch had briefly turned off his two-way, and Noah blamed their loss of the hatchlings and the panda cubs on Butch’s failure of protocol. Clearly, he was still in the doghouse, but he wasn’t alone. Yvonne Zloblinavech was in the doghouse, too.
“Where’s Yvonne?” Butch asked.
“She’s headed upriver,” Noah responded. “More than likely on her way to her death.”
Marty and Dylan were in the fake pilothouse acting like they were piloting the Rivlan up the Amazon. Acting because the Rivlan was in fact piloting itself. It was as if it had eyes — slowing down and speeding up as needed, veering left and right to avoid flotsam and jetsam, shoals, and other boats.
“I think Ted was exaggerating when he said he needed our help,” Marty said. “We could probably be below deck sleeping right now, like he is.”
“You think?” Dylan laughed.
Marty looked out the window. The Amazon was wider than he’d expected. In some places it looked to be a mile across, and there was a lot of boat traffic. The banks were crowded with shantytowns and ramshackle houses that looked like they had been pieced together with junk snagged from the muddy river.
“It’s like a slow-motion interstate freeway,” Dylan commented.
“I’m going down to get my sketchbook,” Marty said. “Might as well start drawing up what happened at the Ark.”
“Can you grab me a bottle of water?” Dylan asked.
“Sure.”
As Marty started out of the pilothouse, his Gizmo buzzed. He pulled it out of his pocket and looked at the screen.
“Wolfe!”
He put it on speakerphone.
“Where’s Ted?” Wolfe asked. “I’ve been trying reach him for a half hour. He isn’t answering.”
“Hello to you, too,” Marty said.
Wolfe gave him a sheepish grin. “Yeah, sorry about that. But I thought something must have happened.”
“We’re fine,” Marty said. “Ted’s asleep. He must have turned his Gizmo off. Where are you?”
“Final leg. We just refueled. We’ll be at the preserve in a couple of hours. You doing okay?”
“Chugging along. At this rate, we should be there sometime next year.”
“Don’t worry, you’ll make up the time after sundown
, but you’ll have a stop to make. Tell Ted he needs to pick up a passenger at the fuel barge. He’s an FBI agent.”
“You’re kidding.”
Wolfe shook his head. “I don’t have time to give you the details right now. Just pick him up and take him to the preserve. His name is Steven Crow.”
“Did you say Steven Crow?” Dylan asked, yanking the Gizmo from Marty’s hand.
“Yeah,” Wolfe said.
“Impossible,” Dylan said.
“What are you talking about?” Wolfe asked.
“What’s he look like?”
“Old guy.”
“Heavy?”
“No, but if I had to guess I’d say he’s lost a lot of weight recently. His clothes were a couple of sizes too big for him. Are you saying you know him?”
“I think so,” Dylan said.
“From where?”
“It’s a long story,” Dylan answered. “Why does he want to go to the preserve?”
“He wouldn’t say,” Wolfe answered. “I guess we’ll find out when he gets there. Just pass it on to Ted when he wakes up. I’ve told Crow to be on the lookout for you. And tell Ted that Al Ikes thinks Butch McCall and Yvonne are either down here or on their way down here. They haven’t been spotted since the night you broke into the Ark. You need to keep your eyes open for them. Also, Blackwood appears to be weaseling his way out of the outtake problem. They ran the real Wildlife First episode. At the end of it, after he repels the pirates that actually work for him, there’s a short scene of him in the Congo supposedly lost and dying while trying to save Butch. It ends with a glimpse of the hatchlings, which he claims to have discovered.”
“Oh, brother,” Marty said.
“Ted has satellite TV on board,” Wolfe said. “So you should be able to catch it. But my point is that he’s going to be coming after us hard. He needs the hatchlings back or he’s ruined. Without them, he’ll be a laughingstock. Don’t let your guard down. I’d better go. See you at the preserve.”
Dylan still looked a little shell-shocked as he passed the Gizmo back to Marty.
Marty pocketed the device. “Want to tell me about it?”
