The man looked down each hallway, satisfying himself it was safe to venture out. He triggered the microphone again. “I knew he’d be furious, but did you tell him clearly what happened?”
“He called it a bad excuse. When are you coming out of there? We need to disappear fast.”
“Why? What are you seeing?”
“Nothing we can hide behind for long.”
“I’m coming out now and I’ll—” The man emerged and turned directly into the barrel of a cocked handgun.
“Freeze!” the gunman snapped. “FBI! You’re under arrest for—”
The bogus agent slammed a left fist into the belly of the genuine agent and rolled away from his extended gun as he grabbed it and diverted it upward. There was an “oof” and the sound of a body impacting the floor. The FBI agent scrambled to right himself, but the sound of four muffled pops put an end to the effort. The agent slumped to the floor in a growing pool of blood, his vision receding into a distant point as he lost consciousness, completely unaware of the presence of a cold metal barrel to his temple that would conduct the coup de grace.
The shooter moved immediately down the hallway, slipped into the nearest stairwell, and walked calmly past two uniformed airport police officers to the door of the terminal and directly into a waiting van, which pulled away from the curb as soon as he was in.
“Trouble?” one of his companions asked.
“Scratch one fed,” he said, patting the gun beneath his coat for emphasis. “What’re the instructions?”
The driver sighed. “Word for word, you don’t want to hear. Lots of accusations of terminal stupidity, yadda, yadda, yadda. We’re ordered to spare no expense, and use no compassion in tracking down those six people and doing them.”
The single-engine float plane was too familiar a sight to attract much attention as it banked over the verdant alpine valley just north of Lake Chelan. The DeHavilland Beaver she had rented at the south end of the lake was a blunt-nosed thing of beauty to pilots who knew her in the North country, as well as those she supplied. A veteran design from a Canadian company conceived in the 1940s and kept forever young by high demand, what the Beaver lacked in streamlined beauty it made up for in brute reliability. Uncounted times in her history, her large, radial engine and three-bladed propeller had rescued some miscalculating bush pilot from an otherwise fatal mistake. Beavers were slow but forgiving, rugged and accomplished mariners, and Kat had always felt a thrill in watching them touch down on water, the floats kissing the surface with a finger-light touch as they slowed suddenly in a cascade of spray and settled down to float instead of fly.
The half-hour flight just above the glassy blue surface of the fifty-mile-long lake had been spectacular; the small aircraft surrounded the beauty of the sharp snow-covered peaks rising to 7,000 feet on either side of the fjordlike upper end. Much of the beauty, however, had been lost to fatigue and worry and the realization that even here they were a target.
Leaving the purloined minivan had required careful thought on Kat’s part. The car had to be left in a place where no one would tow it, report it, or even notice it for a week, and a commercial storage yard for recreational vehicles had been perfect.
“There! See the roof at the end of that driveway down there?” Kat said, pointing out their destination and feeling relieved that it was still there.
“Where’s Stehekin?” Dallas asked.
“It’s an area, not a town, as such,” Kat replied. “The ranger station and motel and a few shops are by the boat landing, which is where we’re going to dock.”
The pilot throttled back the Beaver and turned toward his usual landing spot on the lake adjacent to the diminutive town dock. Kat’s 2 A.M. phone call to arrange a 7 A.M. departure had irritated him, but a charter was money, and it was November. Two weeks later he’d have the Beaver hauled out for the winter, anyway. He had met the client a bit gruffly, but was warming up, especially since the morning had turned out to be so beautiful.
Strange group, he thought. They looked bedraggled and scared, carried bags of groceries but almost no luggage, and their clothes were a mess. In addition, one of them had some sort of problem with his eyes and was wearing a bandage. The thought of criminal activity had crossed his mind, but he couldn’t fathom what such a disparate collection of exhausted people could be engaged in.
Kat was relieved to find a beat-up car, with its key under the floor mat, parked in a shed near the dock, a sure sign that no one else was occupying the cabin. When all of them had left the plane and squeezed into the car, Kat took the pilot aside and handed him $350 in cash and her FBI credential case.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“Open it,” she directed.
He flipped it open and read the laminated ID card several times before looking up with a worried expression. “Did I… I mean, is there something wrong?”
She put a hand on his shoulder. “No, no, no! But I need your help, and this is very, very critical. This is a federal operation, and the people with me are under the protection of the FBI. They’ve crossed some very dangerous people who, quite literally, are a threat to national security. Now, no one knows we’re anywhere around here except you. If you say anything about this charter to anyone, you could well be responsible for the deaths of all these people. That means to anyone, including anyone else who claims to be from the FBI, whether they have an ID like this or not.”
“I… don’t understand,” he said, looking nervously from the car to the female agent before him.
“You’ve heard of the Witness Protection Program?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said, brightening.
“Good. Then you may know that we don’t even tell other FBI agents about the people under that program.”
“You’re relocating them here?”
“No. Merely keeping them out of sight for a while. Now, I can’t tell you that your pilot’s license depends on your keeping quiet and helping me, but it doesn’t hurt to have friends at the FBI who owe you one. Understand?”
He smiled and nodded. “Yes, Ma’am. I’m very glad I didn’t see you when I was on this solo training flight I decided to make this morning just because it was such a pretty day.”
She smiled back. “That’s the idea. Now, I’ll call you for pickup in a day or two. Will you be all right with that?”
“Absolutely. Don’t worry, no one will know.”
“And no paper trail, okay? No logbook entry, invoice, or company record.”
He nodded, wondering whether the $350 was supposed to be tax-free.
The key to the cabin was exactly where Kat remembered it: hidden inside a small hatch built into one of the logs that formed the stout cabin. She opened the door gingerly, hoping against new alarm systems, and was relieved to find the place clean and ready for guests.
“The caretaker is obviously doing the same good job of keeping this place ready year-round,” Kat said to Dallas, as they turned on lights and fiddled with the thermostat to the floor furnace system. She tried to recall the caretaker’s name. He would undoubtedly drop by at some point to make sure the unexpected guests were legitimate. She would have to plan for that.
There were two hide-a-beds in the main room and two bedrooms that could sleep four apiece in the rustic bunk beds. The kitchen was small but well equipped, and a quick round of sandwich-making preceded a general collapse of everyone, except Kat and Robert, into the various bunks for what they all agreed would be a much-needed sleep through the day and upcoming night.