For years the hit men came from Italy, know-nothing rural toughs called zips, who spoke no English, came in only to do the job and collect their low pay, and then flew back out again. But that system soon began to break down. Some of the zips refused to go home, some of them got caught and didn't know how to take care of themselves inside the American system, some of them had loyalties in Europe that conflicted with their one-time- only employers in the United States.
It's still better, all in all, to have a contract killer whose home base is far away, in some other land. But it pays to have somebody reliable, educated, useful over the long term. Viktor Charov could come and go as he pleased, cloaked by his 'job' at Cosmopolitan Beverages. He could take on whatever private work he wanted, and from time to time the people who'd given him his cover would ask him to do a little something for them.
But the mob wasn't behind the run at Parker. That had been a civilian, that nervous voice on the answering machine in Chicago. It was one of his independent contractor jobs that had run out Charov's string.
No one had been in the house. Parker went through it, slowly, room by room, and all the little signals he'd set there were unsprung.
The civilian employer of Charov would react slowly to the Russian's disappearance. There was time to see if the Montana job was worth the effort. Time to find out what those two names in Cyrillic looked like when they were at home.
Parker phoned the hotel in Manhattan, but Claire was out, as he'd expected. He left a message: 'See you in a week or two.'
6
The Big Sky Airlines commuter plane took Parker the last leg from Great Falls, Montana, up to Havre, twenty- five miles from Canada. Elkins met him in a rental Jeep Cherokee. 'Get your other stuff taken care of?'
'It's waiting for me,' Parker said.
They had to go through Havre, small and neat and flat, still a railroad town, surrounded by the mountains. Three peaks of the Bear Paw Mountains, Baldy and Bates and Otis, six to seven thousand feet high, were all within twenty minutes of the center of town.
Route 2, the east-west road, ran along beside the Milk River from here almost a hundred miles to Malta, but their motel, a non-chain operation called Thibadeau View, was just a couple miles east of town, toward Chinook. The motel, a long white one-story wood clapboard building dwarfed by its Indian-motif sign, stood on the left, the north side of the road, with the quick-tumbling Milk River behind it.
It was seven in the evening, local time. The motel didn't have a restaurant, so after Parker put his bag in his room the four of them drove to a place that called itself a family restaurant. They weren't the family the owners had in mind.
Over the meal, Elkins said, 'We figure to go up there tonight, take a look at the place. Also, Larry's gotta head back to Massachusetts tomorrow.'
Parker looked at Lloyd. 'You're gonna commute? Massachusetts to Montana?'
'No, I won't come back after this,' Lloyd told him. 'I have to get physically close just this once, to find my access, since it isn't a normal site with normal ways in. But after that, I can deal with it from home.'
Wiss continued to take an almost paternal pride in Lloyd, saying, 'Do you like that, Parker? He's gonna pick the lock over the Web.'
'If he misses,' Parker said, 'we're the ones on the scene. And he's the one with the electronic alibi.'
Wiss shook his head. 'Larry won't miss,' he said.
'I'll be in touch with Ralph through the whole thing,' Lloyd explained. 'He'll have a portable with him. Whatever's happening there, I'll know about it as soon as you do.'
'I'm told there's nothing secure on the Web,' Parker said. 'Everybody hears everything.'
'We're talkin about a chess game,' Wiss explained.
'We got it all worked out, openings, gambits, sacrifices. Larry and me both play chess anyway, so it'll be easy.'
Parker could imagine circumstances that could make it less than easy. If they had a listener, and if the listener knew chess, and if the listener heard moves that didn't make sense. But it didn't seem to be enough of a problem that he'd want them to look for some other way to talk, back and forth, some different way that might be even less easy and, more risky. Having a member of the string that meant to phone in his part was strange, but everybody seemed to think they could make it work, so Parker shrugged and said, 'Fine.'
'You folks want dessert?' the waitress asked.
They didn't.
In the woods, close to or maybe over the Canadian border, they traveled without lights. Wiss and Elkins both wore infrared goggles, Wiss behind the wheel, Elkins walking out front. Elkins carried a geological survey map and a compass, and kept looking for vehicle-friendly terrain in the direction they wanted to go. Wiss watched Elkins and drove where he walked.
In the backseat, Parker and Lloyd couldn't see a thing, only feel the slow sway and jounce of the Cherokee as it eased forward. There were high clouds, a thin sliver of moon, not enough starshine to make much difference. Here under the trees, without the goggles, everything was black.
After they'd driven awhile in the darkness, Parker said, 'Tell me why you were in.'
Lloyd's voice, to his left, sounded pained but tired: 'I'm trying to forget all that.'
'I need you to remember it,' Parker told him, 'or you can forget me.'
