For a brief moment, Abercombie allowed her gaze to fall on each of the men individually. "Can any one of you please tell me," she asked in a glacial voice that matched the cold fury in her eyes, "how we could possibly have gotten ourselves into such a position?"
For approximately ten seconds, all three men simply stared back at her with varying degrees of casual indifference. Then, out of no apparent sense of intimidation or urgency, Paul Saltmann spoke up again.
"I can explain it very simply," he said. "You and your bureaucrat buddy tried to make it too cute."
"Cute?" Lisa Abercombie rasped, her eyes almost bulging with rage. "You call the endangerment of a hundred-million-dollar operation cute?"
"We could have taken every one of them out with long-range weapons," Saltmann responded with icy calm. "We told you that. And if you had allowed us to handle it that way, we would have left appropriate evidence at the scenes and then disposed of the Chareauxs separately, without the slightest difficulty. It was only when we tried to integrate the Chareaux brothers directly into the situation that we ran into complications."
"However," Dr. Morito Asai reminded, "five of these agents are now dead. Also, we are following the sixth agent right now, and we may have located Chareaux."
"You know where Alex is, right now?" Lisa Abercombie asked quickly.
"We believe so, yes."
"Where?"
"In a remote cabin approximately three miles northeast of us," Paul Saltmann said. "We recognized this location as a possible jump point for an intruder, so we had it wired into our security system. The sensors detected one individual moving in there last night."
"You mean he's here, close by?" she asked with undisguised panic in her voice.
"Not so close, but not so far away either," the Japanese technical specialist said. "From our point of view, he is accessible."
Abercombie hesitated, trying to maintain her icy demeanor. But the thread of fear was there, and they could sense it now.
"Do you anticipate that he will be coming after us?" she finally asked.
"Alex Chareaux is a proud and vengeful man, and we have sacrificed his two brothers for our purposes," Asai shrugged. "Why would he not?"
"How did he know to come here?" she asked.
"Probably because Felix told him," Paul Saltmann said.
"What do you mean, Felix told him?" Abercombie demanded. "Why in the world would he do that?"
"An individual under torture can be made to say almost anything," the curly-haired intelligence specialist said coldly. "Even someone like Felix is not immune. Read the Reno sheriffs report. It's fairly descriptive."
Abercombie looked at Saltmann quizzically, then quickly flipped through the sheath of papers until she came to the report filed by Homicide Sergeant Clinton Hardwell. One third of the way through the report, her tanned face turned pale.
"My God, he-" Then she blinked in sudden realization and turned her attention to Gerd Maas, who was seemingly bored by the drift of the conversation. "Why haven't you gone out there and killed this bastard?" she demanded, her voice harsh and unforgiving.
"Because it is essential that we dispose of the sixth agent first," Gerd Maas responded, his deep and foreboding voice causing Lisa Abercombie to pull back from her aggressive posture. "It must look like Chareaux is determined to complete his mission."
"But… but the risk," Abercombie started to argue as she stared down at the report, seemingly unable to take her eyes away from the descriptive paragraphs.
"Chareaux is emotional, and therefore does not represent a significant risk to this operation," Maas said with cold indifference. "The cabin is under constant surveillance, and he will not be allowed to approach this facility until we are ready for him to do so."
"But what if he eludes all of you again?"
"Mistakes were made when we had him in our possession at Reno," Maas said coldly. "Such mistakes will not be made in the future."
"Mistakes? What do mean by that?"
"For example," Maas replied, "it was a foolish mistake to send Gunter away and leave Alex in the hands of Felix and the others. Felix was a tactician whose primary concern would have been to carry out his assignment, whereas Gunter would have killed Alex the moment he tried to escape, and not given him the opportunity to harm the others."
"But you were in charge-" Abercombie started to protest.
"Gerd was monitoring the situation in the Kenai," Paul Saltmann interrupted. "He left orders for all of us to maintain our positions until he returned. However, your bureaucratic buddy, who didn't have the balls to stick around, decided to change the program."
"Dr. Wolfe had two appointments in Washington that he couldn't reschedule," Lisa Abercombie retorted. "But what do you mean, he changed the program?"
"The sixth agent had disappeared, and we didn't want to finish off Chareaux until we had located him," Saltmann explained. "Wolfe found a lead through the Fish and Wildlife Service personnel records that turned out to be useful; but instead of waiting for one of us, he ordered Gunter to follow up on the lead, leaving Felix, Shoshin, and Corrie in Reno to monitor Chareaux and Takahara."
"And I might add that Dr. Wolfe issued those orders knowing that Shoshin had been injured, and therefore was certain to be less effective," Asai said accusingly.
"Wolfe did that?" Lisa Abercombie blinked in astonishment.
"That's right," Saltmann said grimly, "which is why Felix, Shoshin, and Corrie are now dead."
The Bronx-raised politician muttered a curse under her breath.
"All right," she whispered. "I will deal with Wolfe when he returns. Now, what about Nakamura?"
"I was there on that one," Saltmann nodded. "Everything was going according to plan until Paxton and his buddy showed up."
"Larry Paxton, the black agent whom you and Felix and Gunter supposedly killed in Florida?"
"That's right," Saltmann conceded. "The plan was to go down and confirm the body, but the lake was filled with alligators that were acting aggressive, like they were down there chewing on fresh meat. There was blood in the water, so we decided it wasn't worth the risk."
"But obviously it would have been."
The chilling voice of Gerd Maas stopped Abercombie.
"Other than Wolfe's mistake, the decisions in the field have been correctly made," the assault-group leader said. "In this kind of operation, casualties are to be expected."
Lisa Abercombie started to interrupt, but Maas waved her off.
"These six agents have had some luck," he said. "But we can replace our losses, they cannot. This Paxton was clever enough to avoid death in Florida, but then he died in the explosion along with Stoner. And Chareaux was helpful enough to kill Takahara before he escaped, so now there is only one left to deal with-one agent, and then Chareaux- before we have resolved our problem."
Lisa Abercombie considered this; then, her cold bureaucratic facade back in place, she turned to face Dr. Morito Asai. "You said that you know the location of this sixth agent right now?"
"Yes."
"Where is he?"
"At the moment, he is on board a small, private, twin-engine airplane enroute to Washington, D.C."
"You are certain of that?"
Dr. Morito Asai maintained a stony expression as he absorbed the insult. "He is on that plane, along with several others. Yes, I am certain."
Lisa Abercombie glanced down at her watch. "It's twelve-thirty now. In approximately five and a half hours, the Committee is expecting me to call in with a full report on our progress. When I do so, I would like very much to be able to tell them that-in spite of the horrible cost-the entire situation has been completely resolved. Is that possible?"