'It has to be… oh, yeah,' Lightstone whispered as he watched the tall Caucasian male with the close-cropped, curly dark hair and mustache walk past. He remembered the startled look on Arturo Bolin's distinctive face when the three. 357 hollow-point bullets had caught him in the head and throat and caused him to drop onto the rocky base of the shale outcropping.
'You sure?' Mike Takahara asked, covering up the mouthpiece of the phone.
'Yeah, I'm absolutely sure,' Lightstone nodded. 'Now let's see if we can find out who they are.'
Forty-five minutes later, Ed Rhodes dropped five blurry but still legible eight-by-ten color photographs in front of Lightstone.
'There're your bad guys,' the electronics specialist said, watching over Lightstone's shoulder as the agent spread the five head and upper-torso photos out on the table.
'A1 Grynard doesn't believe it, but that one's dead,' Lightstone said, pointing to the blurred image of Arturo Bolin. 'The other one there,' he pointed to the profile shot of Roy Parker, 'could be the one I hit first. The guy with the H amp;K. Looks right, but they were wearing cammo-grease and I never got that close to him.'
'What about this one?' Larry Paxton asked, pointing to the photo of the Oriental man who had his head turned away from the camera.
Lightstone stared at the side view of Shoshin Watanabe for several seconds. 'He could have been the one who got nailed next to the boulder, up at Skilak Lake, but I can't tell. We were too far away. I don't think I ever saw her,' he shrugged, pushing aside the photo of Kimiko Osan.
'But this one,' Lightstone whispered as he held up the photo of Gerd Maas and stared at the man's cold, pale eyes, 'this is the guy I want to find.'
'Looks like a real freak, doesn't he?' Larry Paxton commented appraisingly.
'Yeah. Now all we need is a name,' Lightstone said as he looked around. 'Hey, where's Mike? He should have gotten the scoop on their credentials by now.'
'Right here,' Mike Takahara said as he came into the small conference room.
'Well?'
'Negative,' the Japanese-American agent shook his head. 'The two Caucasian males were carrying Federal Protective Service badges and credentials, but there's no record of their ever being issued to anybody.'
'Federal Protective Service?' Lightstone blinked. 'Shit, these people don't need any protection.'
'Hey, I'm just relaying the message,' Takahara shrugged. 'Security people at the airport confirmed the IDs.'
'They could have been faked.'
'Yeah, maybe, but that'd be rough to do,' the Japanese- American agent said. 'They'd have to get a hold of that new Treasury paper, which is real easy to confirm under a crossed-polar light.'
'Did those security guys at the airport check?'
'They said they did.'
'But if these guys had legitimate federal credentials, then somebody with authority had to sign them,' Paxton said.
Takahara shrugged his muscular shoulders. 'No way you can expect anybody to remember three days later what a scrawled signature looked like, especially when he sees dozens of those things every day.'
'Shit,' Lightstone cursed.
'Come on, guys, there's got to be a link here,' Mike Takahara said insistently. 'What is it that we know for sure? That we got shut down on an investigation and then scattered all over the country. And now a bunch of assholes are trying to hunt us down, and the Chareaux brothers are involved somehow, only maybe these guys have had a falling out, because we also know that Alex killed at least two of them.'
'And we know for sure that these guys here went after Paul,' Lightstone said, nodding at the photos, 'and that Butch Chareaux was killed in the process.'
'Paul shoot him? Takahara asked.
'It looked that way at the scene,' Lightstone shrugged, 'but who the hell knows?'
'And then I got a call from that female informant,' Stoner offered.
'Just like Carl did,' Lightstone reminded.
'Yeah, and then the little broad lures me into this barn, where Sonny and some karate asshole try to bust my knee,' Stoner finished.
'Only Sonny ends up getting killed, which would sure as hell piss Alex off if he knew about it,' Mike Takahara added.
'Which he obviously didn't, or he wouldn't have walked away when he had you hanging there,' Lightstone said. 'And which also means that he probably didn't know about Butch, either.'
'Maybe he isn't after you guys at all,' Ed Rhodes suggested. 'Like you said, he had Mike right there. No reason to walk away.'
'Well, if he isn't after us, then who the hell is?' Lightstone demanded.
'I don't know, man, but every time we try to figure this thing out, I keep coming back to that hunt you went on with Alex and Butch,' Paxton said. 'That and the fact that everywhere we look, some Oriental guy is popping up into the picture.'
'You mean those three idiots with the hundred-thousand- dollar guns?'
'One of whom you described as Japanese,' Paxton reminded.
'Whoever's been doing this had enough influence with the Department of Interior to get us reassigned,' Lightstone nodded. 'And they had to have some connection with the Chareaux brothers if they were willing to spend that much money to pop them loose.'
'Three hunters, filthy rich, lots of influence, who think that they're about to get in serious trouble with the law,' Paxton smiled.
'Or maybe worse, worried that they might get embarrassed?' Lightstone suggested.
'How could we possibly embarrass them if we don't even know who they are?' Stoner asked.
'Henry could ID them, they know that,' Paxton reminded.
'Yeah, and I know somebody who could help me find them,' Lightstone said with a slight smile.
'Alex,' Stoner whispered in a soft voice.
'Jesus Christ! Paul was right,' Lightstone said quietly. 'We tripped over something big, and the Chareaux brothers were involved.'
'And it's big enough to make it worth sending a bunch of multinational commandos out after us. The Chareaux brothers were supposed to be left behind to throw everybody off,' Paxton said.
'Except that one of their commandos was dumb enough to give Alex a knife, and now he's on the loose, too,' Mike Takahara added.
'Tell you what,' Paxton said, looking at the picture of Gerd Maas. 'I think we better find those three hunters of yours before this white-haired bastard finds us.'
'Or A1 Grynard,' Lightstone reminded as he looked around the room. 'Anybody have any ideas?'
'You're looking for three wolves in sheep's clothing,' Ed Rhodes said to no one in particular. 'How the hell are you going to find them?'
Henry Lightstone sat motionless as an image exploded in his mind. 'Guns,' he rasped as he turned to Ed Rhodes, his eyes blazing with intensity.
'What?'
'Who knows about guns around here?'
'Uh, Gary. He's our firearms examiner.'
'I want to talk to him, now.'
Chapter Forty-One
Thursday September 23rd
At precisely sixteen minutes after midnight that Thursday morning, the phone in the firearms examination area of the National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory in Ashland, Oregon, rang loudly.
