“You want him to stay here with me?” Vic looked at the professor, who seemed a bit disturbed by that idea as well.
“No, Vic. But he might need you to bring him some provisions.”
“Provisions? What’s he going to be, some mountain man trapper?”
Jake smiled. “That’s right. And only you know where he’ll be.”
“Your cabin in the Bitterroots? Jesus, Jake. I don’t even know if I can find that. I haven’t been there since we were kids. There’s got to be ten feet of snow up there right now.”
“That’s right. No phone. No cell service. No internet. No television.”
“No electricity,” Vic reminded his brother.
“It has a generator with enough gas to run for a month, which powers up the battery packs. But I need you to know he’s there in case anything happens to me.”
The congresswoman’s eyes suddenly shot toward Jake and she said, “What do you have planned, Jake?”
“I need to find the people who want…our friend dead.”
“But you already…” She stopped herself and bit her lower lip.
Vic chimed in. “Why can’t you leave this to law enforcement?”
“Listen,” Jake said, “I have all the respect in the world for the police. But they can’t be everywhere at all times. That’s why we need armed citizens. We have to use our God-given right to self protection.” He was preaching to the choir here. His brother was well known in the state of Montana for defending an individual’s right to carry concealed firearms. Same was true of the congresswoman, who had an A-plus rating by the National Rifle Association. The only one he wasn’t sure about was the good professor, who hailed from one of the most liberal states in America.
His brother Vic raised his hands as if in surrender. “I agree, Jake. I understand the concept in the abstract. I’m just trying to discern how this matters to our current situation.”
He didn’t really have time for this discussion. Jake needed to stash the professor, along with enough provisions to last him a couple of weeks. And that wouldn’t be easy with the amount of snow on the ground. He also didn’t know how long those who were after them would take to realize they were not following him.
Eventually he convinced his brother to quit asking questions and just do as his big brother asked. Vic would drive up to Jake’s cabin in the Bitterroot Mountains in one week to check on the professor and bring him supplies. Jake gave his brother the GPS coordinates.
With that behind them, Jake said goodbye to his brother and thanked him for the coffee and conversation.
Driving down the hill toward downtown Missoula, Jake asked Lori, “Where do you want me to drop you off?”
She looked somewhat hurt. “I thought I would go with you up into the mountains.”
“No, that’s not a good idea,” Jake said. “It’s better if you have plausible deniability from now on.”
“And what about the man you shot up in Whitefish? I was with you there.”
He wasn’t sure what she was getting at. Was she trying to use leverage against him? Or was she simply trying to say she was already involved? “That was self defense,” Jake assured her.
“Yeah, but we still left the scene. We should have called it in immediately.”
“Exigent circumstances,” he said.
She laughed. “Now you’re trying to explain the law to me? Exigent circumstances is what cops use to kick in doors when they don’t have a warrant and they think they hear someone scream inside.”
“That sounds like a liberal interpretation.”
“Hey,” came a voice from the back seat. The good professor. “Would you two just have sex and get it over with?”
That shut the both of them up. Jake tightened his grip on the steering wheel. He had to admit that he was quite attracted to the congresswoman from Montana. Who wouldn’t be? But he also didn’t want to place her in any more danger.
“What?” Lori finally said. “We’re just discussing the finer points of the law.”
“Right,” Tramil said, leaning forward in his seat. “And the bad guys are just chasing me because I have a new Lego design.”
Silence all around.
Jake gave in first. After all, he was just bringing this man to a safe location before he regrouped to search for those who wanted to do him harm — or at least steal his work. “All right,” Jake said. “But those clothes won’t work up in the snowy high country.”
“Are you taking me shopping, Mister Jake Adams?” Lori asked enthusiastically.
“No. I’m guessing everyone in town knows you. I’ll shop for you and the professor. But first I need to make a stop at my storage unit.” He turned and headed toward the south side of town. There was a big outdoors store on the way out of town, and his storage locker a mile down the road from that. He had set this locker up years ago, but he also had similar storage units in Austria and a couple other countries, along with bank accounts in safe havens in four countries.
16
Alex Yaroslav handed the driver cash and then stepped out of the taxi in front of Union Station, a large stone structure in the city’s Old Town Chinatown section along the Willamette River. Glancing up at the clock tower, he saw it was a couple minutes after ten, and he had only a few minutes until the Amtrak train, the Empire Builder, would arrive at the station. Assuming the train was on time, which he knew from experience was rarely the case.
He and his associate, Danko Boskovic, had decided to travel from the airport to the train station in different taxis. Alex suspected Danko was already inside somewhere, setting up the perfect intercept point. But he didn’t like this one bit. Neither of them had a weapon, having depended on airlines for their travel. Eventually Alex knew he would need to find a few guns, or at least a knife. For now, though, they would have to depend on their own strength and their training to fight by hand. This could be a problem, considering what they knew about Jake Adams. Based on their intel, Adams was a dangerous man. Their young friend Bogden had found that out himself in Montana.
Inside the terminal only a few people wandered about the structure, which would be considered old in this country but a new building in his own. To Alex it looked like the perfect place for Portland’s homeless to find warmth and get out of the frequent cold rains of winter.
It wasn’t hard to find Danko. His bald head lumped over the top of an Oregonian newspaper, which he lowered slightly to reveal his eyes. These little black orbs shifted to his left at a Portland Police Bureau officer talking with a disheveled man in dirty clothes with a backpack over both shoulders. The scruffy homeless man was being summarily escorted out of the building before the tourists could disembark and get an immediate negative impression of their city.
Alex found a rack of brochures against one wall and watched the policeman in the reflection of a window as he pretended to read a pamphlet on the nearby Chinese Gardens. In a few moments the area was clear of miscreants and available for passengers to disembark without panhandling.
Alex’s phone buzzed in his pocket and he checked the incoming text message. It was from Milena telling him that the train should be sliding into the terminal at this time. It was also at that very moment he heard the train and then saw it slowly slide by the windows outside.
He turned and saw Danko still behind his newspaper. Alex nodded his head at him, meaning get up and pretend to look for a friend or relative getting off the train. Danko did just that, leaving the paper behind on the wooden bench.