Now he would need to contact Milena directly and have her guide them to the transmitter. He called her on his cell phone and waited.
She answered and started talking in their language.
Alex interrupted her. “Speak English,” he said. “We stick out too much otherwise.”
“Fine,” Milena said. “Your transmitter is working fine and on the move. Doesn’t seem to be waiting for the luggage, so they must have only carry-on.”
“That makes sense,” Alex said, his eyes scanning the door for Adams and the scientist. “Adams would have only his pack that he had in Washington. Where are they now?”
“Inside the terminal,” she said. “It says he’s inside the terminal.”
Alex shifted his eyes toward his partner, Danko, who was standing at the edge of the door. His shoulders shrugged slightly. The plan was to have him come up behind the men while Alex confronted them directly. But there was only a young man with a backpack over his shoulders, much like the homeless man only less scruffy. Other than him, there was only a young woman with a backpack almost as big as her and an old man who shuffled quickly toward a real bathroom.
“Where is it now?” Alex asked her.
“Looks like it’s going out the front door,” she answered.
Which is exactly where the young man was going.
Damn it. They had been duped.
Alex said, “Adams dropped it onto someone else.” But where and when did he do so? They would have to wait and watch everyone get off the train to be sure. He hung up with Milena and watched each person depart the train. As each person walked past him, it became clear that Adams had pulled off a grand deception from way back in Montana.
The three of them had traveled for a couple of hours south of Missoula after first picking up some provisions and Jake Adams stopping at his rental storage unit. Snow had crusted over on the road, leaving washboard-like strips of ice, only parallel, which seemed to pull the SUV nearly off the road in one direction or the other. Snow plows had actually made conditions worse. From US Highway 93, which ran from British Columbia to Phoenix, they had gotten off on a county road, then a forest service dirt track, until they reached a dead end, gated with a warning that they were leaving forest service land and entering private property. Of course with two feet of snow covering the road beyond the gate, it wasn’t like anyone without snow shoes, cross country skis or a snowmobile would be traveling beyond Jake’s metal barrier.
This land had been in Jake’s family on his mother’s side since before Montana statehood in 1889. Officially it was still in Jake’s mother’s maiden name, but he was really the only family member still interested in the property. It was just too isolated for his brother or sister. The very reason Jake liked the place. But he had not been there himself in the winter in a number of years. Why? From the gate to the cabin it was two miles, with a rise of over a thousand feet of elevation.
They got out of the SUV and Professor James Tramil took in a deep breath of cold, fresh air. “This is fantastic, Jake. You own this property?”
Opening the back of the SUV, Jake said, “It’s been in my family for more than a hundred years. The Forest Service has been trying to get us to swap land with them for decades. But we’ve been here longer than there’s been a Forest Service.”
Lori zipped up her jacket. “I think a cold front is moving in from Canada.”
Jake handed the professor a pair of new lightweight snowshoes they had just purchased for him in Missoula. “You ever use these?”
“Yeah,” Tramil said. “I grew up in Marquette, Michigan. But the kind we used back then were those long wooden contraptions. I’ll bet I could run with these on.”
“Let’s hope you don’t have to,” Jake said. “We’ll be going well over eight thousand feet by the time we reach the cabin.” Then he turned to Lori. “You might want to wait here.”
“Then why’d you buy me the snowshoes, Jake?” she said, her arms crossed over her chest.
“I forgot how much snow would be up here, Lori. It’s two miles up the road, uphill the whole way.”
“And downhill all the way back,” she said. “I can keep up.”
He looked her up and down and had to admit she was in very good shape. “All right.” He pulled a backpack from the back and threw it at the congresswoman, who caught it and almost fell over. “We can use the extra pack mule.”
“Great. I’ve gone from congresswoman to jackass in just a few days.”
Jake started to say something, but she gave him a wicked glare and he held back his comment.
In a few minutes of putting on snow shoes, backpacks and adjusting clothing, the three of them then headed around the gate and up the narrow road.
It took them two hours to travel the two miles through some of the deepest snow Jake had ever traversed. Tramil had kept up with Jake’s pace, but Lori had fallen behind many times, mostly because her legs were much shorter than either of the men, so she had to blaze her own trail half the time instead of simply falling into Jake’s snowshoe indentions.
Checking his watch as they got to the outside of the cabin, Jake wasn’t pleased with the time. It was already two p.m. It would be nearly dark by the time he and Lori got back to the SUV, and it was never a good idea to get caught out in the dark in the Montana mountains during the winter.
“Let’s go,” Jake said. “We’ve gotta hurry. Lori was right. Looks like a cold front is heading our way. And I’ve got to get the good professor set up before I leave.”
“Just point me in the right direction, Jake,” Tramil said, “and I’ll be fine.” He pointed at the stack of wood under the porch that ran the length of the cabin. Covered with a blue tarp, it was dry and seasoned.
“All right,” Jake said. “Lori, why don’t you head inside with your food pack and then take a rest. It will be easier going on the way down the mountain, but still not like a walk in a DC park.”
Lori walked past Jake with her snowshoes and she punched him in the arm. “Remember, I was born here and grew up here. I haven’t been in Washington that long.”
Jake smiled at Tramil, who said, “She’s been quite the trooper.”
“Yeah, now let’s get moving.” Jake hurried toward the cabin. He was never sure what kind of shape the place would be in each time he came here. He never locked the doors, figuring someone who really wanted in could just break a window. And that would let in the weather and the critters.
But the cabin was in good shape since his last visit. It looked like nobody had been there. The place had hardwood floors everywhere, with a few throw rugs. The fireplace was framed with smooth river rock from floor to ceiling against one wall. Two other walls were adorned with elk and deer antlers. And the fourth wall had a brown-phase black bear rug that took up most of the space. A chill came over Jake, as his mind flashed back to the cabin in Austria where his girlfriend Anna had been shot and killed.
“This is a nice place,” Lori said, setting her bag onto the floor and taking a seat on the cowhide sofa.
“Thanks,” Jake said. “I just added this furniture last fall, along with a new bed.” He glanced around the room and thought about the last time he had been there. He had brought a girlfriend from Germany after his crazy case there, where every hitman and criminal in Europe was trying to kill him and collect on a one million Euro bounty on his head. She had helped him load and off-load the trailer with the furniture, and then the two of them had fly fished a number of local streams — places off the beaten path for most fishermen. They had spent three nights there before she had concluded she needed to get back to Munich to her job with Der Bundesnachrichtendienst, the German Federal Intelligence Service. The BND would only wait so long. He thought about her often, and what their life could be like together. Right now, and for the past months, they were seeing how life was apart from each other. A lot had happened to Jake since the two of them were together, including Jake’s incarceration in a Tunisian prison for killing a terrorist.