The Emerald Scepter Page 22

  Professor Saleem was neither a coward nor a hero. Like most men, if sufficiently pressed, he had the potential to earn either title, but extremes of behavior were not part of his character. He preferred to occupy a safe middle ground that placed no demands on his ego or his well-being. Now, to his dismay, for the first time in his life he was having moral qualms that could not be rationalized away with clever intellectual argument.

  He knew that Amir Kahn’s village would have women and children. The thought of these innocents facing the same awful force as the inhabitants of the so-called abandoned village had knocked him from his precarious perch of neutrality, leaving him in a position where he was seriously entertaining the thought of doing something that would place him in danger.

  There was only one problem. He hadn’t quite decided what to do.

  Or even if there were anything he could do.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Tombstone, Arizona

  The man leaning against the wooden building next to the site of the OK Corral gunfight could have been one of Tombstone’s desperado re-enactors, except for a major difference. Tyler Lee Clayton was a real killer.

  Clayton was from Alabama where he’d knifed a man in a gambling brawl. The trial judge was a friend of the Clayton family, and said he would suspend the jail sentence if Tyler joined the army. Clayton signed up. At the time, the army was scraping the bottom of the barrel for people to send to Iraq and Clayton’s anti-social behavior was seen as a boon rather than a barrier.

  A thin cigar drooped from his lips as he surveyed the streets of Tombstone. He was around five feet nine, rangy in build, with stringy muscles packed on his slender frame. He had a lean face with high tight cheekbones and flat gray eyes that suggested the coiled violence of a rattlesnake.

  He wore a black T-shirt and his bare arms were covered with death-themed tattoos. Without the pull-down cap, gloves and belt-knife, he bore little resemblance to the Ninja-leader who had destroyed the house in the Tubac hills a few hours earlier.

  The expression of simmering anger contorting his hard features was stoked by the burning pain in his rib-cage. The handle-bar of the motorcycle had slammed into his mid-section like a steer’s horn and inflicted a long, dark bruise on his pale skin. Back in the day, he never would have allowed himself to be ambushed so easily. He had been under the impression that he and his men were disposing of a defenseless young woman, not the crazed road warrior who had roared out of the outbuilding and tried to run him over. He had taken a lot of crap from his comrades before he’d silenced them with a dangerous stare.

  A man was strolling toward him along the boardwalk. He was dressed in black pants and T-shirt, too. Although he was shorter and broader-shouldered than Clayton, and his complexion was olive rather than fish-belly white, he had a similar dead-eye expression on his face. His name was Vinnie Tartaglia, and he had gotten into trouble of his own in Staten Island before becoming another bottom-of-the barrel army recruit. He was not as smart as Clayton, but he was equally as violent. Vinnie said. “Talked to a guy in that restaurant. A woman came in on a Harley a few hours ago and had breakfast. She was pretty quiet, he said.”

  “She’s going to be quiet for a long time after I catch up with her.”

  Vinnie snickered. “You hear from Tech?”

  “Yeah. They say she left town headed southwest from here. They tracked her phone before it went dead a few miles from Fort Huachuca.”

  “She could have gone toward Bisbee, maybe, or doubled back to Nogales and crossed the border. Maybe even slipped by us on the way to Tucson. She’s probably hundreds of miles from here by now.”

  “Maybe not. I talked to our psych department. They’ve got the whole file on her. Crazier than a bedbug, but watch out when she’s cornered!” He patted his sore ribs for emphasis. “Some people will run for as long as they can when they get scared, but she’s a hunker-downer, they said. Looks for someplace she’s been before where she can hide instead of run.”

  “This is big country. Lots of hiding spaces.”

  “Tech’s running a check of her finances. Credit cards. Stuff like that. They’ll know where she’s been before. Maybe a motel or hotel. Or even a campground.”

  “What do you want me and the rest of the guys to do?”

  “Hang out for now. Grab some lunch while we call in back up to establish a perimeter.”

  “Sounds good,” Vinnie said. He noticed the sign on the wall. “Hey, they’re doing a reenactment of the OK shoot-out in twenty minutes. Want to go see the good guys kill the bad guys?”

  Clayton glanced at the sign.

  “Naw,” he said, flashing a gap-toothed grin. “Too violent.”

  After about an hour on the highway, Sutherland had pulled over and ditched her phone. She wasn’t taking any chances that someone would triangulate her position using her cell phone signal, and she still had her back up phone registered under a different name and number. Then she had headed south, where she had a place in mind that might be a good hiding spot.

  Sometime later, she arrived on the outskirts of Fort Huachuca, where the U.S. cavalry had set up shop in 1877 to intercept Geronimo’s escape routes into Mexico. She turned off the highway south of Sierra Vista, away from the strip development along Route 92, and followed a winding narrow road into the quiet precincts of Ramsey Canyon.

  At the end of the road, she parked near a low-slung building. The sign out front identified it as an inn. She had stayed at the B and B on one of her painting trips. It was a few hundred yards from a nature preserve where she had found many avian subjects for her canvas.

  The middle-aged innkeeper was on her way into town, but she said no one was staying at the inn and there was plenty of room available. The hummingbirds that attracted the usual bird-watchers hadn’t arrived in the canyon yet. She told Sutherland to make herself at home and to enjoy a slice of fresh-baked apple pie.

  Sutherland took her up on the offer then went for a quick hike in the preserve. She was famished when she returned and polished off, not without some guilt, around half of the newly-baked pie. Then she settled into a Western print sofa opposite the stone fire place, opened her laptop and wrote a message to Hawkins, asking him again to contact her. She waited a few minutes, but there was no answer. After chewing over a few more what ifs, she consoled herself with the fact that he and Calvin were very good at what they did.

  Besides, she had to watch out for her own butt.

  It was clear what had happened. Lulled by the peaceful setting of her desert home, she had forgotten that the cyber network she used to detect threats was a two-way street to her front door. She had blundered in trying to get at the Arrowhead Foundation’s tax status. She had set off alarms when she made the amateurish call to the Foundation, then compounded her error when she got too nosy about Trask.

  She had placed filters on her phone number and email address, but anyone with a brain could have followed the trail back to her. Especially an outfit like Arrowhead which specialized in security.

  Still, the speed and fury of the response surprised her.

  The men who burned down her house had come to kill her; she was convinced of that. The intruder who had removed his mask before destroying her paintings was the same man who had led his fellow soldiers to attack her back in Iraq. A jerk named Clayton. She thought she had dealt with him when she salted his record with child pornography and couldn’t believe he had come into her life again.

  She started to shiver.

  Get a grip, she told herself. They know who you are, but you know who they are, too.

  Rather than look for new data, with its inherent risks, she called up the Trask file.

  Trask had been born in a small town in Oklahoma. He had graduated from a run-of-the-mill university with average grades. His private practice floundered within months. No surprise. You’d have to be crazy to go to a faker like Trask. He h
ad gone to work for the military training soldiers how to survive as prisoners. He might have disappeared into obscurity if not for 9/11 and The New York Times, which had published a report on the CIA use of water-boarding and sexual humiliation in interrogating terror suspects.

  Trask’s work became public because of a complaint filed against him with the Oklahoma State Board of Psychologists. The complaint came from another Oklahoma shrink, working with a lawyer and law professor. It documented in detail Trask’s role in the harsh interrogation techniques, asking that his license to practice be pulled. It said he had misrepresented his qualifications and that his torture techniques, in addition to being immoral and illegal, lacked a scientific basis.

  He was described as working as a private consultant, never replied in public to the charges, and a funny thing happened to the complaint. The state board tabled the accusation after the three filers failed to pursue the case. She looked into the background of the complainers. The professor had retired, the lawyer moved to another state and the psychologist who instigated the complaint was dead.

  Cold fingers clutched at her heart. The psychologist had died in an accidental house fire.

  She forced herself to keep reading.

  According to the Arrowhead website, he was involved with the children’s project after his work with the CIA. But in the years in between, when he supposedly worked as a consultant, he did the psychiatric evaluations of Sutherland and Hawkins that led to their discharges.

  Arrowhead was a private foundation, but Sutherland was aware from her Iraqi experience that contractors occupied a twilight zone, neither civilian nor military, but something in between.

  She went back to the website where she had discovered the link between Trask and Murphy. She called up the photo of Trask and the teddy bear, with Murphy guarding him from the little girl. There was another man standing in the field behind Murphy, also wearing a flak jacket.

  She enhanced the photo using computer software. His mustachioed face came into focus. It looked vaguely familiar.

  Hell, it couldn’t be.

  She opened the folder for the Newport Group. She had given each member of the group his or her own file and established preliminary bios with photos.

  She clicked on the bio for Captain Michael McCormick. Hawkins had said the guy had acted like a jerk. The photo showed him wearing a navy officer uniform and his lip was clean-shaven. Instead of dark sunglasses he wore heavy-rimmed spectacles. His mouth was spread wide in the same wolfish grin he wore on the Arrowhead site.

  Sutherland placed the two pictures side by side, and then looked at them upside down. They showed the same man; she was sure of it now.

  Captain McCormick had worked for Arrowhead.

  Trask had worked for Arrowhead.

  Murphy had worked for Arrowhead.

  McCormick worked for Arrowhead and the Newport group.

  She started to sift in earnest through the lives of everyone in the group, following links to look for other connections to Arrowhead or to each other. It would take hours of tedious work, and she was aware her queries could be traced back to their source, but tip-toeing in and out was the kind of thing she was good at. She looked forward to the challenge. She would need to prepare herself for the task ahead, though.

  She set the laptop aside, got off the sofa, went into the kitchen and cut herself another piece of apple pie.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  The odd-looking convoy wound its way through a series of linked valleys, snaking between scraggly hills, eventually breaking out into countryside that was open and relatively flat. The antique Cadillac was in the lead, its convertible top down. Amir was behind the steering wheel. He had insisted that Hawkins ride beside him. Cait sat in the back seat. Next in line was the DPV, and then came the troop carrier and the Russian jeep.

  Amir had quizzed Hawkins about his stiffness of leg.

  “Got too close to an IED,” Hawkins said. “Crude but effective. The crew at Walter Reed patched my leg back together, more or less.”

  “We may have had the same doctors at Reed. They reassembled my body parts after I failed to outrun a Russian rocket.”

  “You must have been in the hospital a long time to pick up that American accent,” Hawkins observed.

  “Several months, but I also spent a year studying at Georgetown University while I recuperated.”

  “Is Georgetown your connection with Dr. Everson?”

  “Indirectly, yes,” said Cait, who had been listening to the conversation.

  Amir glanced in the rear-view mirror. “I’ve been looking at the vehicle your friend is driving. It looks very utilitarian.”

  “It is. Fast, too.”

  “This car too is fast. I’ve replaced the original V-8 engine with a much more powerful one. The suspension and wheels have been strengthened and the tires customized to allow for higher speeds, especially on rough terrain.”

  “I’ll bet you it still isn’t as fast as the DPV, even with the load the buggy is carrying,” Hawkins said. He regretted the comment the second it left his lips. Amir didn’t seem to be the type who would turn down a challenge, even one that was only a figure of speech. He was right.

  “The wager is accepted,” the warlord said.

  Hawkins stalled. “We haven’t agreed to the stakes.”

  “We’ll talk about that later,” Amir said. “Please hold tight, Dr. Cait.”

  Then he nailed the gas pedal.

  The two-ton touring car didn’t exactly accelerate with a whoosh, like a later model high-performance car would have done. The heavy body seemed to be waiting for the engine to persuade it to pick up speed, which it did gradually, as befitting its dignity, and quickly gained velocity. They were emerging from the valleys and the terrain was changing into an arid, grass-covered plain that allowed for faster driving.

  Hawkins checked the car’s speedometer. The needle was at seventy miles per hour. The Caddy was leaving a thick brown rooster tail a hundred yards behind it.

  “Cal’s not going to like breathing dust,” Hawkins yelled at the sheik.

  In reply, Amir grinned and pushed the car’s speed up to eighty, but the smug smile left his face after a quick glance in the mirror revealed a pair of halogen headlights close on his tail. He gave the touring car another ten miles of speed. The headlights disappeared, only to reappear a second later off to the left as the desert vehicle emerged from the cloud.

  Calvin was hunkered down low behind the wheel. Abby held onto her cap with one hand and the underside of her seat with the other.

  Amir depressed the gas pedal to the floorboards, but Calvin paced them for a moment. Then he gave a wave, and passed as if they were in reverse, enveloping the Caddy in a cloud of dust.

  Amir shouted something that Hawkins didn’t understand. He pointed ahead and stabbed the air with his forefinger.

  “The lake! The lake!”

  Cait bent forward and yelled in Hawkins’ ear. “Make them stop, Matt, for Godsakes! The lake is just ahead.”

  Hawkins knew that Cal would try to put as much distance as he could between him and the touring car just to rub it in. He had no walky-talky or telephone to warn of the impending disaster. He reached over and brought his palm down on the horn pad at the center of the steering wheel.

  There was a loud, clarion beep.

  He slammed the horn again, producing a quick beep, followed by two more, then three long, then three short. He repeated the SOS call again. Amir was slowing, but the dust was still thick and Hawkins had no idea whether he had been successful or not. Amir carefully braked to a complete stop.

  Cait had a shell-shocked expression on her dust-smudged face. Hawkins rose from his seat and looked over the top of the double-glass windshield.

  A slight breeze blew the curtain of dust aside to a point where it was opaque rather than solid. Hawkins could s
ee the outline of a solid shape a few dozen feet ahead.

  He got out of the touring car and strode to the driver’s side of the dune buggy.

  Calvin sat back with his feet up on the dashboard. He and Abby were covered with dust, but they were laughing hilariously.

  “About time you showed up,” Calvin said. “What’s with the Mayday?”

  “Did you need a rescue?” Abby chimed in.

  Hawkins spit out a mouthful of dust.

  “Nope. You did. You were about to pull a Thelma and Louise.” He pointed ahead. The dust was settling and they could see the edge of the cliff around thirty feet from the front bumper of the desert vehicle, and the blue waters of the lake beyond.

  Calvin leaned on the steering wheel.

  “Man-oh-man. The DPV would have sunk right to the bottom.”

  “Along with Fido and months of research.”

  “Uh-oh,” Calvin interrupted, glancing in the rear-view mirror. “Hope your pal isn’t a sore loser.”

  Amir was walking toward the vehicle with an escort of armed guards. Cait had gotten out of the car and tailed behind. Amir had a deep frown on his face as he circled the desert vehicle, tapping the tires with his cane, but when he came back to the driver’s side he flashed a smile.

  “How much do you want for this wonderful chariot?” he said.

  “Sorry, but she’s not for sale.” Calvin figured his answer was too abrupt, so he said, “But I can let you drive her.”

  “It’s a deal. I will hold you to your offer when we have more time. Now let me show you the lake.”

  He hobbled to the ragged edge of the cliff and swept his cane in the air like a tour director for Cook’s. The top of the bluff sloped down at a forty-five degree angle to meet the calm water twenty feet below. The lake was around two miles long and a mile wide, narrowing somewhat near the middle to give it the distinctive figure eight-shape Hawkins had seen in the satellite photos. A line of white cliffs was visible on the opposite shore.