“Hey, guys,” Jake said. “Could we take a little break? I really need the bathroom.” He hesitated with a serious look on his face. “Never mind. So, you know all kinds of good things about me.” Actually, they only knew the misinformation that the Agency’s counterintelligence operations wanted foreign sources to know about him, most of which was total nonsense. “We could be here all night.”
“Do you have a dinner date with your favorite congresswoman?” the ghoul asked him.
Finally, they had slipped up. They had seen him with Congresswoman Freeman. And, as suspected, that’s what they really wanted to know. What was a former Agency officer doing hanging out with a member of the subcommittee that had just finished grilling him on Capitol Hill? Damn it. That meant that his fellow Montanan had not covered her tracks entirely. It also meant that he had not watched his own back like he should have, either. Well, his current situation in a metal tub of water, fuel and dead rodents pretty much confirmed that. Even an old pro could slip up.
“Have you seen the congresswoman?” Jake asked. “They don’t get much hotter than that?”
The ghoul shoved Jake’s head under water again. This time Jake lowered himself further into the tub as he released his hands and quickly untied his feet, all the while struggling against the man’s firm hand. Just as he felt the man release him to rise, Jake thrust his feet against the bottom of the tank and raised himself out.
Water flew in all directions, but Jake was able to grasp the man with the ghoul mask behind the neck and shove his face into Jake’s knee, which knocked the guy out and gave Jake time to jump from the tub of filthy water.
The second man backed away and considered his options.
Jake didn’t give him a chance to run. With a flurry of punches and a final roundhouse kick to the head, the man also dropped to the cement floor.
Now Jake assessed his escape. Before leaving he saw a small table that contained his wallet, passport and cell phone. He scooped those up and hurried out the room as fast as his cold body would take him. But his synthetic left knee made him limp in pain.
He had to believe there were others involved with his capture and interrogation. As he got to an outer door, he could hear voices outside. He needed to hurry. Those two men he had knocked out wouldn’t stay down for long.
Then he saw a narrow stream of light off in the distance at the other end of the warehouse. He quietly ran toward that. It turned out to be a wide loading dock door lit by a street light in the distance. He skirted through that, barely glancing back at the two men down the street next to a dark van.
It wasn’t until he got safely away from the warehouse that the chill of winter started to set into his body. He needed to get somewhere warm in a hurry.
7
Professor James Tramil couldn’t sleep. After leaving Portland, he had traveled east along the Columbia River before heading north toward Spokane, where the train had stopped briefly, crossed the dense forests of Idaho’s panhandle, and was now somewhere east of Libby, Montana. The constant movement and clicking should have let him sleep, he knew, but since he had not gotten a sleeper cabin, he was trying to make the most of a partially-reclined chair. Not exactly sleep worthy.
Yet, all around him most of the others were doing just that, with some snoring and a few still reading on lit eBooks or with the annoying personal overhead lights.
Tramil checked his watch, which was synchronized to the atomic clock in Boulder, Colorado. It was six forty-four a.m., less than an hour before their next stop in Whitefish, Montana at seven twenty-six. He had been in that region of Montana a few times on trips to Glacier National Park, but it had been a couple of years.
The sun was trying to break through heavy clouds toward the front of the train, while snow started to fall like fluffs of cotton.
He knew that his inability to sleep had everything to do with the murder of his good friend and colleague Professor Stephan Zursk. That and the constant throbbing in his right butt cheek from where the bullet had grazed him. He had been forced to change the four-inch dressing in the middle of the night. The dermabond was holding fine, but with the shifting in the train seat the bandage had curled. It might help if he changed it again, he thought. Bandages were cheap and available and he still had a stack of them left in his backpack.
Getting up as quietly as possible, he slung his backpack over his shoulder, stepped around the person in the aisle seat, a young woman who had said no more than a dozen words to him since she got on the train in Spokane, and moved down the aisle toward the back of the train, shifting his feet as the train moved somewhat.
Inside the small bathroom he pulled his pants down and looked at the curled bandage. It too had shifted from the train chair. He knew it would be a constant battle. But he was thankful to be alive. The bullet could have just as easily struck him in the side of the head or his chest or stomach. That was now the least of his worries. He knew someone was still after him. This train ride was only going to give him time to think out a more permanent plan.
He slapped a new bandage onto his butt and pulled up his pants. Then he splashed some water on his face and headed out the door.
As the door collapsed another man stood there ready to enter, startling Tramil. The guy had a buzz cut and birth control glasses.
“Sorry,” the professor whispered.
The man said nothing. Instead, he thrust his right fist into Tramil’s gut, taking his breath away and hunching him over. Then the man pushed into the bathroom with him and locked them inside.
“You can live,” the man said with an accent, as he pulled a folding knife from his pocket, “but only if you keep your mouth shut.” He shoved the knife under Tramil’s chin.
“Who are you?” Tramil forced out, still trying to catch his breath. “What do you want from me?”
The man grinned through cigarette-stained, yellow, crooked teeth and said, “You know what I want. You run from me. But now I catch you.”
How had this man found him? Could it be the man who had killed his friend, Stephan?
“You killed Stephan,” Tramil said, his body stiffening but retreating once he felt the knife dig into the soft tissue under his jaw.
“That’s right, professor. And I will kill you if you don’t give me exactly what I ask for.”
“Can you put the knife away? It’s not like I can go anywhere.”
The man considered this and took the knife away from his chin, but kept it alongside his leg. One quick thrust and Tramil would be dead.
“Thanks,” Tramil said. “Now, you should have gotten all my research when you stole our computers from our lab at Oregon State.” He was testing the man.
“There was nothing there, but you know that. You’re too smart to leave your work on university computers.”
Something was bothering Tramil. “Why did you kill my friend before we could give you the research?”
“He was playing with us for months,” the man said, his jaw tight with anger. “Stringing us along. Taking money and giving us useless garbage. In the end he didn’t have what we wanted. That became abundantly clear. So, we knew we had to get it from you.”
“But then why did you try to kill me?” That was a problem with the man’s logic.
He said nothing for a long minute. Finally, he said, “That was a mistake. I didn’t realize it was you when you came to the door.”
That was a lie. This guy had forced Stephan to call him to his house that night. Who else would he be expecting? It was more likely that this guy had jumped the gun, literally, and tried to kill him before getting the research and now his boss was having him make up for his screw up. That gave Tramil some leverage.