twisting it smoothly behind the man’s back, drove him to his knees. He had the bone gun out of Clifton’s pocket and pressed against his shoulder blade before the ex-football player could even throw a punch.
Clifton tried to wrestle free, but Alexei cranked his arm almost to the breaking point, and he cringed and submitted. Alexei took in the room. No one had moved. It appeared that they weren’t prepared for this.
The whole thing might be a setup.
“I wanted this meeting to be civil,” Alexei said.
They didn’t reply.
“Can we kindly move things in that direction?”
Becker glanced across the shadows in the corner of the room. At last he nodded. “Okay. Of course. Yes.”
Clifton was still straining to be free. Alexei said to him, “I’m going to let you go, Clifton, but I need you to behave.”
He wasn’t surprised when Clifton cussed at him, threatened him. It showed just how little self-control the man had.
Then Alexei felt tension in the man’s arm and correctly anticipated that he was going to make a move.
Clifton lurched sideways, trying to break free, and reached for a knife that Alexei now saw was hidden in a sheath strapped to his leg just above his ankle.
Alexei depressed the bone gun before Clifton could raise the weapon. With a moist but solid crunch, Clifton White’s left clavicle shattered and his arm went limp and useless by his side. His blade pinged to the floor.
Alexei let go of Clifton’s wrist and the man collapsed, moaning.
He’d used his bone gun in this way before, and he knew that in the six weeks it would take the clavicle to heal, Clifton would be able to move his arm but not without a bundle of tight pain.
Earlier, when Clifton had frisked him, Alexei had noticed that his dominant hand was his right one. Now he said, “You still have your good arm, but if you stand up before I leave this room I’ll need to shatter your other clavicle too.”
Clifton cursed at him again but made no offensive move, just placed his right hand tenderly on his injured shoulder.
Alexei carefully surveyed the room again. No one else had gone for a weapon. He wasn’t even sure why Clifton had made a move on him, but now he was wary.
And displeased.
He retrieved the knife, and then brought it down hard, blade first, embedding it into the table, burying it more than an inch into the wood. From all appearances Clifton was the only one in the room strong enough to wrench it free, and it wouldn’t be an easy task even for him.
“Now, Mr. Hahn,” Alexei said to Becker, slipping the bone gun into his jacket pocket, “could we kindly continue?”
Becker remained silent. Ted, who’d stopped counting the money in order to watch the confrontation between Clifton and Alexei, quietly and somewhat nervously resumed his task.
“The person financing this operation,” Alexei said, “would like my reassurance that everything is in order and on schedule.”
“Tell Valkyrie it’s all on schedule.” Becker emphasized Valkyrie’s name, perhaps to prove he was better informed than Alexei might have guessed. For a moment he observed his associate finishing his cash count. “Do you have the access codes?”
Alexei told them what they needed to know.
Ted set down the last stack of bills, backed away from Alexei. “It’s all here.”
Alexei thought of Kirk Tyler and the mess he’d had to clean up. “My employer is not happy when people let him down.”
“You just let Valkyrie know there’s no need to worry,” Becker said. “It’ll all be taken care of. My team has stopped logging efforts in Oregon, long-line shark fishermen in the Galapagos Islands…”
As he listened, Alexei kept a close eye on the room.
Millicent still hadn’t spoken.
Clifton was staring viciously at Alexei.
Ted looked troubled, his submissive body language telegraphing his unease.
None of them seemed interested in making a move on him, and Alexei was glad, especially with Millicent present. He was not at all keen on the idea of injuring a woman.
Alexei waited while Becker recounted his achievements of thwarting whaling efforts by the Japanese, disrupting mountaintop removal projects in West Virginia, and blocking a proposed nuclear waste dump site in Nevada, but none of these victories seemed overly impressive to Alexei, and he wondered again why Valkyrie had chosen to do business with this group.
What was Valkyrie’s ultimate agenda here? Alexei was usually pretty good at discerning things like that, but so far, in this case, the reasons behind the reasons eluded him.
When Becker finally finished listing Eco-Tech’s accomplishments, he said, “Give us until 9:00 tomorrow night. Be ready for my call. The timing matters. Not a minute before, not a minute after.”
“I’ll deliver the rest of the money when I have confirmation from my employer.”
And then the meeting was over.
Alexei studied the group one more time to make sure no one was going to pull a gun, planned how he would deal with that eventuality if it occurred, then silently headed for the door.
But as he left, he noticed someone else, someone he had not seen earlier, standing in the deep shadows recessed at the far end of the room. No doors had opened during their meeting, so somehow this person had managed to slip from view earlier when he’d scanned the room upon his arrival.
Considering frame and posture, he guessed a woman, though in the halted light it was impossible to be certain. He could just make out that she wasn’t wearing a ski mask like the other three people who’d been waiting for him, and that told him she was more confident and more experienced than they were.
He hadn’t seen anyone with her build arrive last night, and that intrigued him. Either she’d been here already or had managed to enter this morning.
Maybe she was really the one in charge rather than Becker. It’s how he would have played it.
Becker had looked toward that corner of the room before he agreed to proceed with the meeting.
Had this all been a ruse? A ploy?
Is that why these four were careless last night, allowing their faces to be illuminated by the Inn’s entrance lights?
Evaluate, adapt, and respond.
Alexei arrived at the door. From now on he would be careful not to underestimate this group.
As he left, out of the corner of his eye he saw the woman step back as the darkness swallowed her.
Silent.
And whole.
And thirty seconds later, had he remained near the door, he would have heard the brief sound of a strangled cry coming from inside the room as the man who’d been on the business end of the bone gun fought uselessly to draw in a breath, and then dropped into a heavy, motionless mound on the floor.
24
The line at the pump took forever.
“Everyone’s getting ready for the storm,” Sean said, one eye on the cloud-blanketed sky. Flakes swirled around us.
Finally, after we paid for the gas, I asked Sean if he minded if I drove the sled.
“You still remember how to handle one of these things?”
“Let’s find out.”
As I took my seat I reviewed where everything on the snowmobile was located: the choke, the kill switch,
