But the man seemed to be fading out. His head started to swirl from side to side as the blood flowed from his body. He would pass out soon from the lack of oxygen to his brain. And then his heart would stop pumping blood. The steady spurt of blood from his leg would then ooze out until he was truly dead.
Damn it. Jake knew there was nothing he could do to change the man’s fate. As the man sunk down onto the carpet farther, the hand that had held his wound let go and the blood flowed quicker into the puddle that had formed.
Jake checked his watch and saw that he needed to get going or his ride would be gone. He checked the man’s pulse. He was dead. Then he patted him down and found two extra magazines inside his pockets, along with a set of keys. But no identification. Not that Jake expected any. This man had been a professional. He picked up the dead man’s Glock 19, also in 9mm, and shoved that and the magazines into his pockets.
Then Jake rushed through the house to find the scientist. He remembered the thermal image had one man in the basement. Finding the stairs, Jake clicked on a light and hurried down there. Chained to a metal post was a scared man huddled into a ball, his eyes piercing into Jake as he tightened his grip across his own chest.
“Professor James Tramil?” Jake asked.
The man simply nodded his head. Then his teeth started to chatter uncontrollably.
Jake found his cell phone and hit the button for Lori’s phone. As her familiar chime went off, he swiveled around toward the staircase with his gun.
Standing there was Congresswoman Lori Freeman, a shocked look on her face. “Don’t shoot me,” she yelled.
“I told you to stay in the vehicle,” Jake said as he moved his finger off the trigger and shoved the gun into the holster on his right hip.
“Well,” she said, making her way down into the basement. “I’m not used to taking orders.” She turned to the man chained to the post. “James Tramil?”
The man finally said, “Yes, that’s me.”
“We’ve been looking for you,” Lori said.
Jake pulled out the keys he’d found on the man upstairs and quickly unlocked the padlock to release the chains holding the man.
Lori circled around Jake and said, “Are you all right?”
“Better than the guy upstairs.”
“I saw that. Did he tell you anything?”
Jake shook his head. “Maybe our friend here has some insight.”
“You guys wouldn’t happen to have something to eat,” Tramil said. He squinted his eyes at Lori and said, “Hey, you’re that hot congresswoman from Montana. I see you all the time on the news. What are you doing here?”
Jake helped the man to his feet. “That will have to wait. We need to get out of here.”
“What about the men who are tracking you?” Lori asked.
But Jake was already ahead of her. He pulled out his second cell phone and removed the battery. He found the tracking device and thought for a moment. Leave it here to be found or play with them a little more. Play with them. They would have to call in the shooting eventually, and he didn’t want the local cops to find the device. Instead, he slipped the tracker into his pocket. He had a better idea.
“Let’s get out of here,” Jake said.
Tramil said, “Any way we could drive through McDonald’s? I could really use a Big Mac about now.”
“We’ll see,” Jake said, like a father does to his son.
13
The three of them made it to the Whitefish train terminal by eight forty-five p.m., the professor in the back seat of the Ford SUV complaining about his hunger. But that would have to wait a few minutes.
Jake parked outside the train station and walked casually toward the terminal. Passengers were sprawled in uncomfortable chairs, their carry-on bags at their side, while others paced across the floor, checking their wrist watches against the large clock on the wall. He knew that the westbound Empire Builder would arrive at 8:56 p.m. and depart for Spokane at 9:16 p.m.
Finding what he needed on the schedule board, Jake’s eyes shifted about the room to find the perfect mark. He smiled slightly when he saw the young man sleeping in his chair with white ear buds dangling down to an MP3 player in his pocket. Jake shuffled over and sat next to the man’s small backpack, which took up a chair of its own. The bag was open about six inches at the top. He glanced about the room looking for cameras. Two were aimed at the ticket counter and another couple pointed toward the terminal door that led to the train platform. He guessed the platform would also have video coverage. It wouldn’t matter if he was on film, though.
He yawned and stretched his arms out to his side, his right hand right above the open backpack, and with the sleight of hand that would make a magician proud, he dropped the small GPS tracker into the young man’s backpack.
Then Jake leaned back in this chair and put his arms over his chest. He sat for a few more minutes until the overhead speaker announced that the train would arrive in five minutes. Checking his watch, Jake rose and wandered around the terminal before finally leaving and returning to the SUV outside.
“Hey, what the hell?” the professor said from the back seat. “I’m starving here.”
Jake sat in the driver’s seat and said to Lori next to him, “Was he like this the whole time I was in there?”
“Afraid so,” she said. “What was that all about?”
“Shifting tactics,” Jake said. “The train that’s pulling in right now is the Empire Builder.”
“That’s the train I took from Oregon,” Tramil said.
“That’s right.” Jake looked at the man in the back seat in the rearview mirror as he pulled out of the terminal parking lot. Then he looked back at Lori for a second and continued, “I’m sending the bad guys after that train, while we go in the opposite direction.”
Tramil said, “That’s brilliant. But I thought you wanted to talk to one of the men? Find out what they know.”
That was exactly what Jake wanted. But he had a feeling he wouldn’t get much from any of them. “The guy I shot in the leg didn’t tell me a thing. I don’t think the others would either. Instead of finding out why they want what you’ve discovered, I’ll need to know the significance of your discovery.” His eyes shifted again to the professor, who seemed to sink somewhat into the leather seats. Food first, Jake thought.
They drove through McDonalds and got enough food for five people, most of which went into the gut of the professor in the back. While they ate Jake drove south toward Kalispell. The roads were still snow covered, but the tires on the Ford Explorer dug in with the all-wheel-drive.
When they got a couple miles out of town, they came upon a road block. As the cop shone his flashlight inside their vehicle, Jake simply pulled out a leather folder, flipped it open, and the police patrol officer, eyes wide, waved them through.
Congresswoman Lori Freeman gave Jake a strange look and said, “What was that?”
“What?”
“Your ID.”
Jake smiled. “My old Central Intelligence Agency identification. Something I never carried when I was in the Agency, for obvious reasons. If they looked carefully, they’d see I was retired.”
“That’s like a get out of jail free card,” Tramil said, a full mouth of fries in his mouth.
By the time they got to Kalispell the professor was done eating, a big burp from the soda disturbing the silence. Jake had a plan but he was still trying his best to decide on tactics. There were many ways to get information from someone, from outright beating it out of them with torture, which did work sometimes, to simply having a seemingly innocuous conversation, where the subject has no idea that the purpose was extraction of information. That was Jake’s favorite method, and over the years he had become quite good at it. First, he waited until they got out of the city of Kalispell, on the lonely, dark road, US Highway 93, that skirted the western shore of Flathead Lake. Under normal circumstances that drive was beautiful, but in the darkness with snow blowing across the lake, the trip could be quite dangerous. So, to make matters worse, Jake slowly turned up the music, classic heavy metal.