behind Lightstone and yanked up his shirt, pinning the lanky agent's long, muscular arms over his head and exposing his bare back.
'Bingo.' Stoner smiled and turned his futilely struggling partner so the other agents in the room could see the evidence.
'Now those look like they were done by a woman,' Larry Paxton announced approvingly. ''Less, of course, you'd like to try to convince us that the lady's cat climbed all over your body and tore it up like that,' the Bravo Team leader added with a pleasant smile on his face when Stoner returned Lightstone to his place on the floor, released his arms, and handed him a cold bottle of beer.
'I was lucky to survive the night,' Henry muttered as he struggled to straighten his shirt, 'and that's the unvarnished truth.'
'You all do realize what this means, don't you?' Mike Takahara asked.
'Henry spent the last two days getting laid while the rest of us froze our nuts off in that warehouse collecting a lifetime supply of nightmares?' Dwight Stoner suggested.
'Well, yeah; that, too,' the tech agent agreed, 'but don't you think Bobby must be involved in Halahan's scam, too?'
Larry Paxton's brows furrowed. 'How do you figure that?' he demanded.
'Simple.' Takahara smiled. 'Halahan needs a twist on Henry, some way to control or direct his movements. So he finds out where Bobby and Susan live, knowing that if Henry ever gets reasonably close, he'll track them down first chance he gets. Then our dear Machiavellian Special Ops chief works out a deal with Bobby for… what? What would it take to get an ex-homicide detective with a warped sense of humor like LaGrange in on this deal?'
All eyes turned to Henry Lightstone.
'Not much,' Lightstone conceded, a thoughtful expression appearing on his face as he finished tucking in his shirt. 'Bobby and I pulled some serious shit on a few people when we worked together in San Diego. He really gets into that sort of thing.'
'Like that time you floated your drunk supervisor — the one who couldn't swim and was deathly afraid of sharks — in San Diego Bay in an open coffin in the middle of the night, and then woke him up with a string of firecrackers?' Larry Paxton reminded in a mildly threatening voice.
Lightstone nodded silently, his eyes taking on a distant look as he began to drum his fingers lightly on the floor.
'And we did pretty much destroy Bobby's boat out there in the Bahamas, Henry,' Mike Takahara pointed out. 'So Bobby, and probably Susan, too — you have to figure they were in on it together — tag-team you onto this Sage character, who links you up to this post-office seductress with the big cat… or was it a little cat with the big claws?'
'Which, in any case, probably made it real easy to rig a confrontation scene with Henry and this military character, since — knowing our buddy here — he might as well have been wearing the lady's scarf on the end of his lance.' Larry Paxton smiled in satisfaction.
'Nicely put,' Dwight Stoner commented.
'Thank you.'
'I don't understand…' Thomas Woeshack turned to Mike Takahara, looking confused again.
'Knights of the Round Table analogy, Thomas,' Mike Takahara explained. 'Henry happens to be cursed with a white-knight complex. Can't resist rescuing the fair maiden, no matter how many fire-breathing dragons come popping out of the woodwork. It's a genetic defect. I'll explain it to you later,' the tech agent promised.
'You know, we could be stretching ourselves a little too far on this Halahan-scam business,' Henry Lightstone cautioned.
'But think about how they'd work it, Henry,' Paxton argued. 'They set it up so you trip across these military characters at the restaurant, you follow them and spot their surveillance, you warn us, we notify Halahan, he tells us to stand by — let Charlie Team handle things themselves — we ignore him like we usually do, ride to the rescue…'
'Hey, their side even gets a fair maiden too — Natasha!' Thomas Woeshack interrupted, grinning widely. 'I'll bet she'll be surprised when Henry rides in wearing the witch's scarf on his lance!'
'Yeah, that's putting it mildly,' Stoner chuckled.
'… and we find ourselves surrounded by video cameras and up to our butts in red smoke when the referees — presumably Halahan and Moore — set off all the MTEARs they've probably been tagging us with ever since we landed in Medford,' Paxton finished after giving the team's Eskimo agent/pilot a sadly sympathetic look.
'You've got to admit, Henry, the whole thing tracks real nice,' Mike Takahara added.
'Yeah, I know… it sounds good, it really does. But for Christ's sake, I broke that guy's wrist!' Lightstone continued to look perplexed in spite of the other's comments. 'I know I did. I heard it snap. And the other one — that pale-eyed guy the kid called Sergeant — is definitely a dangerous s.o.b. I can tell you that much for sure, whoever or whatever else he may be.'
'Okay, so these particular militants are tougher than the average bear.' Larry Paxton shrugged indifferently. 'You telling me Halahan couldn't get his hands on a team of marines out of Quantico, or even some Army Rangers out of Fort Bragg? Guys who wouldn't think any more about a broken wrist than you would a sprained toe?'
'The FBI's Hostage Rescue Team trains at Quantico,' Mike Takahara reminded Henry. 'And I hear they hire a lot of those guys straight out of the military. Halahan would know that… and a training scenario like this would be right down their alley, too.'
'There you go.' Paxton nodded his head in satisfaction.
'But what if we're wrong?' Lightstone pressed, still not fully convinced.
'You mean what if Charlie Team really is being tagged by a bunch of hard-as-nails characters, for whatever reason, and they don't know it?' Paxton asked.
Lightstone nodded his head.
The Bravo Team leader paused for a moment. 'Then they could be in deep shit.'
'Exactly.'
'So what can we do to make sure… before we go turn things around on Halahan and Moore again?' Stoner asked.
'I think — at a minimum — we have to report what I saw.' Lightstone looked over at Paxton for confirmation. 'How could we word it? In the process of making contact with subjects linked to suspect Sage, special agent Lightstone observed members of Charlie Team in the area of Jasper County, Oregon, under active surveillance by individuals who appear to have military backgrounds. Request further instructions.'
Larry Paxton stared pensively at the floor for a few seconds. Then he nodded his head and consulted his watch. 'Henry's right. We've got to be sure. But it's two o'clock now, which makes it five o'clock East Coast time on a Friday night.'
'No problem. Halahan and Moore both wear beepers,' Mike Takahara reminded.
'Yeah, but for emergency messages only.' Paxton scrutinized his troops carefully. 'The question is, do we really have an emergency here? Or just a situation?'
'If that surveillance is for real, I sure wouldn't want those guys following me for very long,' Lightstone announced firmly, then hesitated. 'But as far as an emergency goes, I guess I can't say they did anything especially threatening… outside of leaving that MTEAR device on my truck.'
'Which could have been put there by someone from Charlie Team just as easily,' Mike Takahara reminded him. 'Donato, LiBrandi, and Marashenko are all tech-trained. Fact of the matter is, for all we know, they could've put those things on your truck right after you rented it.'
'That's a point,' Lightstone agreed.
'So how do we go about reporting all of this to Halahan in a timely manner, without making it sound like we're panicking out here?' Larry Paxton asked his team.
'I can send an e-mail message to Freddy — to the office and to his home computer — along with a couple of 'tell dad to check his e-mail' notes to his son and daughter,' Mike Takahara suggested. 'I know he spends a lot of time with his kids on the Net. Probably at least one of them will be on-line this evening, and he'll get the message within the next three to four hours. Worst-case scenario is he doesn't get it until he gets to work Monday.'
Paxton nodded his head. 'Okay, do it, then keep an eye out for any return mail this evening. I really want to see what Freddy has to say about all this.'
