All Eco-Tech activists, none with military experience.
No one spoke.
Alexei placed the duffel bag on a poker table that had been shoved against the wall.
“The money’s in the bag?” Becker said.
Alexei reached for the zipper, but Becker held up his hand. “Hold on.” He nodded toward Ted, who opened the bag and pulled out a thick stack of one hundred dollar bills. Slowly, he flipped through them.
“Don’t worry, they’re unmarked,” Alexei said to Becker.
“Count it,” Becker told Ted.
Three dozen more stacks lay in the bag.
Counting the money at a time like this was another sign of inexperience. It showed a lack of trust, and in these types of transactions, telegraphing a lack of trust was the kind of thing that breaks down relationships.
Amateurs were unpredictable.
“My name is Alexei Chekov.” He gazed around the room. “What do you want me to call you?”
“Call me Cane,” the ponytailed man replied.
Strike three. Always assume the person with whom you are doing business is a professional. Honesty is a form of respect. And respect is essential.
So, time for a little honesty. “How about I call you Becker?”
Alexei watched as Becker froze.
He pointed to each person in turn as he addressed them: “And I’ll call you Ted, and you Millicent. I already met Mr. White in the hall.”
Becker stared at Clifton. “You told him our names?”
Clifton’s face reddened. “No.”
“How do you know our names?”
“Research,” Alexei said simply.
But the mood of the room had gone sour. Instinct told him that things were spinning off badly.
And they were.
He saw an almost imperceptible nod from Becker to Clifton, and Alexei prepared himself. Clifton made the first move, but as the huge man reached for him, Alexei stepped deftly aside, then grabbed Clifton’s right wrist and, twisting it smoothly behind the man’s back, drove him to his knees. He had the bone gun out of Clifton’s pocket and pressed against his shoulder blade before the ex-football player could even throw a punch.
Clifton tried to wrestle free, but Alexei cranked his arm almost to the breaking point, and he cringed and submitted. Alexei took in the room. No one had moved. It appeared that they weren’t prepared for this.
The whole thing might be a setup.
“I wanted this meeting to be civil,” Alexei said.
They didn’t reply.
“Can we kindly move things in that direction?”
Becker glanced across the shadows in the corner of the room. At last he nodded. “Okay. Of course. Yes.”
Clifton was still straining to be free. Alexei said to him, “I’m going to let you go, Clifton, but I need you to behave.”
He wasn’t surprised when Clifton cussed at him, threatened him. It showed just how little self-control the man had.
Then Alexei felt tension in the man’s arm and correctly anticipated that he was going to make a move.
Clifton lurched sideways, trying to break free, and reached for a knife that Alexei now saw was hidden in a sheath strapped to his leg just above his ankle.
Alexei depressed the bone gun before Clifton could raise the weapon. With a moist but solid crunch, Clifton White’s left clavicle shattered and his arm went limp and useless by his side. His blade pinged to the floor.
Alexei let go of Clifton’s wrist and the man collapsed, moaning.
He’d used his bone gun in this way before, and he knew that in the six weeks it would take the clavicle to heal, Clifton would be able to move his arm but not without a bundle of tight pain.
Earlier, when Clifton had frisked him, Alexei had noticed that his dominant hand was his right one. Now he said, “You still have your good arm, but if you stand up before I leave this room I’ll need to shatter your other clavicle too.”
Clifton cursed at him again but made no offensive move, just placed his right hand tenderly on his injured shoulder.
Alexei carefully surveyed the room again. No one else had gone for a weapon. He wasn’t even sure why Clifton had made a move on him, but now he was wary.
And displeased.
He retrieved the knife, and then brought it down hard, blade first, embedding it into the table, burying it more than an inch into the wood. From all appearances Clifton was the only one in the room strong enough to wrench it free, and it wouldn’t be an easy task even for him.
“Now, Mr. Hahn,” Alexei said to Becker, slipping the bone gun into his jacket pocket, “could we kindly continue?”
Becker remained silent. Ted, who’d stopped counting the money in order to watch the confrontation between Clifton and Alexei, quietly and somewhat nervously resumed his task.
“The person financing this operation,” Alexei said, “would like my reassurance that everything is in order and on schedule.”
“Tell Valkyrie it’s all on schedule.” Becker emphasized Valkyrie’s name, perhaps to prove he was better informed than Alexei might have guessed. For a moment he observed his associate finishing his cash count. “Do you have the access codes?”
Alexei told them what they needed to know.
Ted set down the last stack of bills, backed away from Alexei. “It’s all here.”
Alexei thought of Kirk Tyler and the mess he’d had to clean up. “My employer is not happy when people let him down.”
“You just let Valkyrie know there’s no need to worry,” Becker said. “It’ll all be taken care of. My team has stopped logging efforts in Oregon, long-line shark fishermen in the Galapagos Islands…”
As he listened, Alexei kept a close eye on the room.
Millicent still hadn’t spoken.
Clifton was staring viciously at Alexei.
Ted looked troubled, his submissive body language telegraphing his unease.
None of them seemed interested in making a move on him, and Alexei was glad, especially with Millicent present. He was not at all keen on the idea of injuring a woman.
Alexei waited while Becker recounted his achievements of thwarting whaling efforts by the Japanese, disrupting mountaintop removal projects in West Virginia, and blocking a proposed nuclear waste dump site in Nevada, but none of these victories seemed overly impressive to Alexei, and he wondered again why Valkyrie had chosen to do business with this group.
What was Valkyrie’s ultimate agenda here? Alexei was usually pretty good at discerning things like that, but so far, in this case, the reasons behind the reasons eluded him.
When Becker finally finished listing Eco-Tech’s accomplishments, he said, “Give us until 9:00 tomorrow night. Be ready for my call. The timing matters. Not a minute before, not a minute after.”
“I’ll deliver the rest of the money when I have confirmation from my employer.”
And then the meeting was over.
Alexei studied the group one more time to make sure no one was going to pull a gun, planned how he would deal with that eventuality if it occurred, then silently headed for the door.
But as he left, he noticed someone else, someone he had not seen earlier, standing in the deep shadows recessed at the far end of the room. No doors had opened during their meeting, so somehow this person had managed to slip from view earlier when he’d scanned the room upon his arrival.
Considering frame and posture, he guessed a woman, though in the halted light it was impossible to be certain. He could just make out that she wasn’t wearing a ski mask like the other three people who’d been waiting for him, and that told him she was more confident and more experienced than they were.
He hadn’t seen anyone with her build arrive last night, and that intrigued him. Either she’d been here already or had managed to enter this morning.
Maybe she was really the one in charge rather than Becker. It’s how he would have played it.