“Run this one down, Chuck.”
“You bet, Dan. This one’s getting pretty deep.”
Thirty minutes later, a pair of FBI agents arrived at the office of the charter company at the Teterboro, New Jersey, airport. There they soon ascertained that the aircraft had been chartered by one Joseph Serov, who’d paid for the charter with a certified check drawn on an account at Citibank that was in his name. No, they didn’t have a photo of the client. The flight crew was elsewhere on another flight, but as soon as they came back they would cooperate with the FBI, of course.
From there the agents, plus some photocopied documents, went to the bank branch where Serov kept his account, and there learned that nobody at the branch had ever met the man. His address, they found, was the same damned post-office box that had dead-ended the search for his credit card records.
By this time, the FBI had a copy of Serov’s passport photo-but those were often valueless for the purposes of identification, intended more, Director Murray thought, to identify the body of a plane-crash victim than to facilitate the search for a living human being.
But the case file was growing, and for the first time Murray felt optimistic. They were gradually turning up data on this subject, and sooner or later they’d find where he’d slipped up-trained KGB officer or not-because everyone did, and once you appeared on the FBI’s collective radarscope, nine thousand skilled investigators started looking, and they wouldn’t stop looking until told to stop. Photo, bank account, credit card records . . . the next step would be to find out how the money had gotten into his account. He had to have an employer and/or sponsor, and that person or entity could be squeezed for additional information. It was now just a matter of time, and Murray thought they had all the time they needed to run this mutt down. It wasn’t often that they bagged a trained spook. They were the most elusive of game, and for that reason all the more pleasing when you could hang the head of one over the mantelpiece. Terrorism and drug trafficking. This would be a juicy case to give to a United States Attorney.
“Hello,” Popov said.
“Howdy,” the man replied. “You’re not from here.”
“Dmitriy Popov,” the Russian said, extending his hand.
“Foster Hunnicutt,” the American said, taking it. “What do you do here?”
Popov smiled. “Here, I do nothing at all, though I am learning to ride a horse. I work directly for Dr. Brightling.”
“Who–oh, the big boss of this place?”
“Yes, that is correct. And you?”
“I’m a hunter and guide,” the man from Montana replied.
“Good, and you are not a vegan?”
Hunnicutt thought that was pretty good. “Not exactly. I like red meat as much as the next man. But I prefer elk to this mystery meat,” he went on, looking down with some distaste for what was on his plate.
“Elk?”
“Wapiti, biggest damned deer you’re ever gonna see. A good one’s got maybe four, five hundred pounds of good meat in him. Nice rack, too.”
“Rack?”
“The antlers, horns on the head. I’m partial to bear meat, too.”
“That’ll piss off a lot of the folks here,” Dr. Killgore observed, working into his pasta salad.
“Look, man, hunting is the first form of conservation. If somebody don’t take care of the critters, there ain’t nothing to hunt. You know, like Teddy Roosevelt and Yellowstone National Park. If you want to understand game, I mean really understand them, you better be a hunter.”
“No arguments here,” the epidemiologist said.
“Maybe I’m not a bunny-hugger. Maybe I kill game, but, goddamnit, I eat what I kill. I don’t kill things just to watch ’em die-well,” he added, “not game animals anyway. But there’s a lot of ignorant-ass people I wouldn’t mind popping.”
“That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?” Maclean asked with a smile.
“You bet. Too many people fucking up the place with electric toothbrushes and cars and ugly-ass houses.”
“I brought Foster into the Project,” Mark Waterhouse replied. He’d known Maclean for years.
“All briefed in?” Killgore asked. “Yes, sir, and it’s all fine with me. You know, I always wondered what it was like to be Jim Bridger or Jedediah Smith. Maybe now I can find out, give it a few years.”
“About five,” Maclean said, “according to our computer projections.”
“Bridger? Smith?” Popov asked.
“They were Mountain Men,” Hunnicutt told the Russian. “They were the first white men to see the West, and they were legends, explorers, hunters, Indian fighters.”
“Yeah, it’s a shame about the Indians.”
“Maybe so,” Hunnicutt allowed.
“When did you get in?” Maclean asked Waterhouse.
“We drove in today,” Mark replied. “The place is about full up now, isn’t it?” He didn’t like the crowding.
“That it is,” Killgore confirmed. He didn’t, either. “But it’s still nice outside. You ride, Mr. Hunnicutt?”
“How else does a man hunt in the West? I don’t use no SUV, man.”
“So, you’re a hunting guide?”
“Yeah.” Hunnicutt nodded. “I used to be a geologist for the oil companies, but I kissed that off along time ago. I got tired of helping to kill the planet, y’know?”
Another tree-worshiping druid, Popov thought. It wasn’t especially surprising, though this one struck him as verbose and a little bombastic.
“But then,” the hunter went on, “well, I figured out what was important.” He explained for a few minutes about the Brown Smudge. “And I took my money and hung it up, like. Always liked hunting and stuff, and so I built me a cabin in the mountains-bought an old cattle ranch-and took to hunting full-time.”
“Oh, you can do that? Hunt full-time, I mean?” Killgore asked.
“That depends. A fish-and-game cop hassled me about it . . . but, well, he stopped hassling me.”
Popov caught a wink from Waterhouse to Killgore when this primitive said that, and in a second he knew that this Hunnicutt person had killed a police officer and gotten away with it. What sort of people did this “project” recruit?
“Anyway, we all ride in the morning. Want to join us?”
“You bet! I never turn that down.”
“I have learned to enjoy it myself,” Popov put in.
“Dmitriy, you must have some Cossack in you.” Killgore laughed. “Anyway, Foster, show up here for breakfast a little before seven, and we can go out together.”
“Deal,” Hunnicutt confirmed.
Popov stood. “With your permission, the Olympic equestrian events start in ten minutes.”
“Dmitriy, don’t start thinking about jumping fences. You’re not that good yet!” MacLclean told him.
“I can watch it done, can I not?” the Russian said, walking away.
“So, what’s he do here?” Hunnicutt asked, when Popov was gone.
“Like he said, nothing here, exactly, but he helped get the Project going in one important way.”
“Oh?” the hunter asked. “How’s that?”
“All those terrorist incidents in Europe, remember them?”
“Yeah, the counterterror groups really worked good to shut those bastards down. Damned nice shooting, some of it. Dmitriy was part of that?”
“He got the missions started, all of ’em,” Maclean said.
“Damn,” Mark Waterhouse observed. “So, he helped Bill get the contract for the Olympics?”
“Yep, and without that, how the hell would we get the Shiva delivered?”
“Good man,” Waterhouse decided, sipping his California Chardonnay. He’d miss it, he thought, after the Project activated. Well, there were plenty of liquor warehouses around the country. He would not outlive their stocks, he was sure.
CHAPTER 35
MARATHON
It had become so enjoyable that Popov was waking up early, in order to relish it more. This day he woke up just after first light, and admired the orange-rose glow on the eastern horizon that presaged the actual dawn. He’d never ridden a horse before coming to the Kansas facility, and he’d found that there was something fundamentally pleasing and manly about it, to have a large, powerful animal between one’s legs, and to command it with nothing more than a gentle tug on the leather reins, or even the clucking sound one made with one’s tongue. It offered a much better perspective than walking, and was just . . . pleasing to him at a sub-intellectual level.
And so he was in the cafeteria early, picking his breakfast food plus a fresh red apple for Buttermilk just as the kitchen staff set it out. The day promised to be fine and clear again. The wheat farmers were probably as pleased as he was with the weather, the intelligence officer thought. There had been enough rain to water the crops, and plenty of sun to ripen them. The American wheat farmers had to be the most productive in all the world, Popov reflected. With this fine land and their incredible mobile equipment. that was little surprise, he thought, lifting his tray and walking to the accustomed table. He was halfway through his scrambled eggs when Killgore and the new one, Hunnicutt, approached.