The professor looked down at his right shoe and then removed it. With great difficulty he pried open the heel and removed something, holding it up for Jake and Lori to view. “It’s been with me the whole time,” Tramil said.
Jesus, Jake thought. “That’s good to know. I’m guessing you’ve made copies.”
Tramil shook his head and pointed to his skull. “Only up here.”
“All right. Now we know what we’re dealing with. We need to get you somewhere safe, make a copy of your work, and store it in a secure location.”
Now Jake did his best to not screw around with the snowy roads. He couldn’t let his scenario come true, killing this man’s dream. That’s what the practical Jake kept telling himself. The realist within him said he should take the scientist out into the mountains, shoot him, and bury him in a shallow grave. He wasn’t sure if this discovery would render nuclear weapons obsolete, or just make it more likely that politicians would actually use the weapons at some time in the near future. And it could save the government billions of dollars with no need for forward deployment of troops. A moral quandary, Jake thought.
14
The two men had traveled all day from Washington DC to Montana, touching down at Glacier Park International Airport in Kalispell just before midnight in a lull from the snow squalls earlier in the evening. From there they had rented a huge black Chevy Suburban and driven north to Whitefish, noticed the road block on the southbound lane, and found the rural farmhouse around one a.m.
Neither of them had guns. Those would be provided by their comrade who was babysitting the scientist. Problem was, they had tried to call their friend after landing and he wasn’t answering his cell.
Now they sat out front of the farmhouse, their lights on and engine running, a light snow falling across their path. Both of them were prepared for this cold weather, both from their upbringing in Eastern Europe, and from the weather reports they had read before departing.
The driver grasped the steering wheel with his leather gloves. He had taken off his black watch cap, exposing his completely bald head. He didn’t shave it. He had started losing his hair in his early twenties and in twenty years it was all gone for good.
The passenger, on the other hand, had a full head of thick, black hair, and it flowed out from his watch cap nearly to his shoulders. Most guessed he grew it long to cover up the scar on the left side of his face that ran from his forehead to below his left ear, the result of a car accident in his youth after too much drinking.
“What do you think, Alex?” the driver asked.
The long-haired passenger shook his head. “I don’t know. Try calling him again, Danko. I don’t want that idiot shooting us thinking we’re someone else. Like he did with that scientist in Oregon.”
Danko did as he was told, but flipped his phone shut after four or five rings. “Still no answer.”
“I don’t like this,” Alex said. “Call Milena.”
“It’s the middle of the night in Washington,” Danko said.
Alex checked his watch. “So what. We are awake, she can be awake. We need her to check the tracker.”
Danko punched in her number from memory and waited.
“Put her on speaker,” Alex demanded.
After a few rings, a woman’s voice came from the phone, “This better be good, Danko,” Milena said.
Alex pulled his friend’s hand closer to him. “It is important.”
“Sorry, Alex. I thought it was Danko.”
“You have us both on speaker phone,” Alex said. “Check the tracker.”
“Certainly.” The sounds of a computer clicking came through the speaker. “Where are you?”
“Not our position,” Alex yelled and shook his head. “The tracker for Jake Adams.”
“I know that, Alex. I was just saying…never mind. Okay, I have the two of you in Montana at Bogdan’s last location with the scientist.” She hesitated and then said, “I have Mister Adams traveling at about sixty miles an hour east of Spokane, Washington. Wait.” She clicked on her computer again. “There are no roads there. They must be on a train.”
Alex let loose a string of swear words in his native tongue. “All right,” he finally said. “Find out the train, where it stops again, and check the passenger list for Jake Adams.”
Milena cleared her throat. “That might be difficult. I will try. But would he travel with his own name?”
She had a point. “Do what you can. Keep track of the location and let us know if it deviates from the train tracks.”
“Will do.”
They clicked off.
“Now what?” Danko asked.
“Now we go see what that idiot Bogdan has done.” Alex reached inside his jacket to where is gun normally sat, but it wasn’t there. He knew this could be a trap, yet he had no choice but to go inside the farmhouse. Defiant and unreasonably confident, he got out into the cold mountain air, the light breeze throwing snow into his face.
As he got to the front door, his partner Danko had caught up with him.
“You want me to go around back?” Danko asked.
“No.” He checked the front door. It was unlocked, so they simply walked inside and Alex shifted his eyes around the room. Lying on the floor near the entrance to the kitchen was their junior associate, Bogdan, blood crusted out from his thigh and soaked into a dried pool beneath him. The air had already started to smell of death, with blood iron, gun powder and human excrement wrapped up into one fragrance.
“Who did this?” Danko asked.
“Who do you think?” Alex shook his head. Maybe he should have conducted an intelligence test before getting this group together. No, if they were too smart they would not follow orders as readily. “Maybe we should not have let Jake Adams escape in Washington.”
“We needed to know what he knew when he knew it,” Danko reminded his friend. “And to see where he would go.”
That was part of it, Alex knew. But their employer also wanted Adams alive for some reason. “But how did he find Bogdan and the scientist?”
That question brought a blank stare from Danko. Finally he said, “We will ask him that just before we kill him.”
But first they needed to track down Jake Adams and capture the scientist once again. Alex only hoped Milena could do her magic again with her computer.
Milena sat on her red satin sheets wearing only her black lace boy-leg panties and a matching, overflowing half-cup demi-bra, as she typed away on her laptop computer, doing her best to find out anything she could about the train traveling across the Pacific Northwest. She knew it was the westbound Empire Builder. That had been easy to discover. But she was having no luck with the passenger list. Well, not entirely true. She knew those who had purchased tickets with charge cards and debit accounts. However, based on the location of the tracker signal in the standard seating car, and not a sleeper, she had narrowed the possibles down to a dozen or so passengers. All of them had purchased tickets with cash. Only a few of those had gotten on the train in Whitefish, Montana. Unfortunately she had no clue about their age or gender.
She was sad to hear about her young friend Bogdan getting killed in Montana. Alex had given her that news just minutes ago, and she had told him he could catch the train in Portland, Oregon if he could get to the train station by ten a.m. To help him, she had found the two men a flight from Kalispell, Montana to Portland departing at 6:00 a.m. and arriving at 8:20 a.m. That would give them plenty of time to get from the airport to the train station.
In the meantime, Milena would keep track of the movement to make sure they didn’t get off the train somewhere between Spokane and Portland. She had that working in the background while she surfed the net for any information she could find on Jake Adams. He had requited himself nicely so far. They already knew he had worked for the CIA until his eventual retirement years ago. And she had read about a few of the cases he had working since leaving the Agency, including that whole Berlin affair. She had to smile every time she watched the recent video of Adams testifying before congress. He was a handsome man, which made her glad that they had not killed him recently. Maybe she could get some of that. If she wasn’t so occupied with the tracking, she would pleasure herself thinking about Jake Adams. Well, maybe just a quick one. She smiled.