"They won't."
"So how do we do it?"
"Your truck has tinted windows all around, right?"
"Yeah, sure."
"You and I are going to eat dinner about eight o'clock tonight at the Hilton. Afterward we go over to the bar, have a couple of beers, and reminisce about Paul until about ten. Then you're going to leave me at the hotel, go home, go to bed, and come back with your truck at precisely five in the morning. You'll pick me up in the back parking lot."
"Except that it'll be Joe I pick up, because by then you're already halfway down to San Diego on the one-twenty flight, right?"
"That's right."
"So how do we make the switch?"
"Joe's going to be in the bar, too, but he'll stay completely away from us. Around ten, when we get ready to pay the tab, Joe gets up and leaves ahead of us, takes the elevator to the sixth floor and waits for me in the hallway outside Room Six-seventy-two. I give him the key, the hat, and the sunglasses. He goes in, turns on the lights and calls down to the front desk for a four-thirty wake-up call. He turns on a pay-TV movie because he can't sleep. You can figure the Feds will be monitoring all that with hotel security. Around midnight, he turns everything off, goes to sleep, and then gets up at four-thirty, takes the stairs down to the back entrance, and meets you in the parking lot at five."
"Remembering to put the hat and shades on before he leaves the room."
"Right."
"How long do you want us to keep it going?"
"My plane lands in Seattle at five-thirty in the morning, and I've got an hour layover until the next flight," Lightstone said. "If you guys keep them from getting suspicious until at least five-thirty, ideally six-thirty, then I'm home free."
"No problem," Woeshack smiled. "I'll have Joe drop me off at the main terminal and drive around while I go in and pay for the tickets. No luggage, just carry-ons. Then I'll go back out to the truck and we'll drive around for a while, make it look like we're going to hold back, and then make a dash for the gate at the last minute."
"That ought to do it," Lightstone nodded.
"You really think they're going to be watching the parking lot at five in the morning?"
Lightstone paused before answering.
"What I think is that Grynard's going to have three or four guys on us twenty-four hours a day, working eight-hour rotating shifts."
"Christ! I thought he said he was short on agents."
"He is," Lightstone replied knowingly, remembering the intense and skeptical look in the FBI agent's light gray eyes. "Otherwise, he'd be using six or eight."
"Yes?"
"This is Maas."
"Where are you?"
"Do we have a clear line?"
"Just a moment."
Dr. Reston Wolfe punched a series of three buttons on his phone, then waited until the green light at the lower right corner of the receiver began to blink.
"Okay," he said, "go ahead."
"We are in Soldotna. Phase One and Phase Two were completed successfully, but we ran into complications with Phase Three."
"What happened?" Dr. Reston Wolfe asked quickly. He could feel his chest starting to constrict.
"We lost a man."
"What?"
"A small group of Fish and Wildlife law-enforcement officers happened to be fishing on the lake," Maas said in his distinctively calm and chilling voice. "They heard the shots and came over to investigate. They had access to a floatplane, and one of them turned out to be very proficient with weapons."
"Who did we lose?" Wolfe whispered.
"Bolin got careless and was killed. Parker was wounded in the left leg, below the knee, and in the right arm. We have sent him back to the base for treatment. Watanabe received superficial wounds in the buttocks and lower legs, but indicated that he is perfectly capable of continuing on with the mission. I sent him down to assist Gunter and Felix."
"My God, what about the scene?" Wolfe asked, numbed and horrified by the thought that Operation Counter Wrench could possibly start to come apart now.
"We were able to cause their plane to crash, which gave us time to retrieve Bolin and clean up."
"And the other, ah… bodies?"
"They were left in place, precisely as we planned."
"Then we're okay?" Wolfe whispered, hardly daring to hope.
"Yes, I believe so," Maas replied. "The survivors of the crash saw our plane, but we were able to land quickly on Tustumena Lake, dispose of the plane and Bolin, then leave in the backup plane without being observed."
"How deep is the water?"
"Approximately three hundred meters, and the water is very cold and murky. He will not be found."
"What about the investigation?"
"The FBI is on the scene, as we expected. They will be intrigued by the physical evidence, and confused by the statements of the survivors. In the end, they will have no choice but to believe that the Chareaux brothers are seeking their revenge on these federal agents."
"Then all we have to do is wait until it's over," Wolfe said, almost limp with nervous relief.
"No," Maas said coldly. "First we go and kill the last three, as planned. Then we wait for it to be over."
Chapter Thirty-Seven
"Jennifer?"
"Yes?" the voice mumbled sleepily.
"This is Henry Lightstone. Sorry to call you this late, but I need to ask you a question about airplane cargo inspections."
"Ah, yes sir, go ahead," the young wildlife inspector said, blinking herself awake.
"The question is, would you normally inspect the cargo shipments coming into Anchorage on Alaska Flight Ninety- nine, the one that lands at eleven-fifty this evening?"
"Uh, no sir, not normally. That flight comes in through SEA-TAC, so there usually aren't any foreign import declarations. Those would have been checked at Seattle."
"But you would inspect occasionally if you thought there was something illegal in one of the shipments?"
"Oh, yes, certainly, especially if we got some kind of tip."
"Such as a single passenger trying to bring three untagged trophy grizzlies in from British Columbia, listing Anchorage as his final destination?"
"We would definitely search on something like that," Jennifer Alik said emphatically. "Of course it would help if that tip came from a reliable source."
"Then I guess the next question is, do you think I'm reliable enough?"
"Yes sir, of course," the young wildlife inspector laughed. "Do you have any idea of when this passenger might be coming in?"
Lightstone looked at his watch. "Far as I know, in about an hour and twenty minutes."
"Tonight?"
"I'm afraid so."
"Okay," Jennifer Alik sighed. "I'll be there, but it'll take me a couple of minutes to get dressed."
"Ah, listen," Lightstone said, "I'm staying here at the Captain Cook. Do you think you could pick me up on the way?"
Making full use of her connections with the operations staff at the Anchorage airport, it took Jennifer Alik less than twenty minutes to get Lightstone's bag checked onto Flight 394 and then return to her small, shared office at Alaska Air Cargo, where Henry Lightstone was waiting.
"Any problems?" he asked as she handed him the ticket packet with the red "Checked Firearms" tag stapled to the front.
"I had to verify that the gun in the locked case was unloaded," the cheerfully smiling wildlife inspector nodded. "McNulty's been saying some nice things about you the last couple of weeks, so I assumed it was."
"Yep, all safe and sound," Lightstone nodded, wishing that he had the heart to tell her about MeNulty, and wishing also that he could have carried the new 10mm Smith amp; Wesson semiautomatic pistol-the one he'd checked out of the Anchorage property room-with him on the plane. But he knew that it wasn't beyond A1 Grynad to have his agents monitoring the issuance of weapons passes by the airlines. And there was no way to avoid having to show his real credentials if he tried to go through the checkpoint armed.