02 Avalanche Pass (31 page)

“That was it. Mean anything to you guys?”

Again, Colby and Emery exchanged puzzled looks. “Not so far, Jess,” Colby said finally. “We’ll think on it some. You got anything else for us?”

“That’s about it for the moment. I’d better call it a day. I want to get back down the mountain while this storm’s still blowing, and the chairlifts shut down at four thirty. Anything else you need to know?”

“Just a few things,” Colby said dryly. “Starting with what the fuck this is all about. But for the moment, that’s it. Good work, Jesse, and stay safe.”

“I’ll work on it,” Jesse told him. “I’ll try to get back to you tomorrow or Thursday. I’ll see if Tina has heard any mention of something happening Friday, okay?”

“Okay, Jess. Stay in touch.”

There was a brief beep as the cell phone disconnected. Colby shook his head, trying to make sense of all the disparate pieces of the puzzle. Already, Truscott Emery was typing the description of Kormann into his laptop, to send back to the research team at Quantico. At least that was somewhere they could start.

K
ormann wiped a crust of bread around the rim of his plate, soaking up the last of the gravy. The veal had been excellent and he had to admit there were side benefits to hijacking a luxury hotel. Ralph had excelled himself tonight, he thought, pushing away the separate plate of French fries that he always insisted on and never ate.

He glanced up at Pallisani sitting opposite him in the gymnasium office. The other man had finished his meal several minutes before Kormann. He bolted his food, wolfing it down without taking time to appreciate it. Still, he thought, what could you expect? Regretfully, his mind dwelled for a few moments on the excellent wine cellar maintained by the hotel restaurant. He would have appreciated one of the fine reds that were stored there to go with the meal. But he’d set the no drinking rule from the start and he felt it was only right for him to adhere to it if he expected his men to.

Pallisani belched softly. Kormann wrinkled his nose in distaste. He wished the Italian had chosen to wait until he’d finished his meal. Pallisani didn’t notice the fleeting expression. He wasn’t big on subtlety, Kormann thought, either giving or receiving.

“So, looks like they’re going with the plan on Sunday?” Pallisani said now, and Kormann nodded.

“Not much else they could do,” he agreed. “They can’t take the chance that we’ll kill the hostages.”

“You think they bought that Irish thing?” Pallisani asked and Kormann shrugged.

“Maybe. Doesn’t matter if they didn’t buy it completely. They can’t totally ignore it and it keeps them looking in another direction.
If they think we’re terrorists or political fanatics, it’ll make it that much harder to find us after it’s all over.”

“The news tonight said they were talking to the Brits about it. I guess that means they believed it,” Pallisani said thoughtfully. Kormann studied him for a few moments.

“That could have been a snow job. Maybe they believed it. Maybe not. As I say, it’s not too important. They’ve got to give it some credence at least and the doubt in their mind is what matters most.”

Pallisani nodded several times, although Kormann was willing to bet that the Italian had no real idea why the doubt was the important thing. As Kormann had observed before, Pallisani was no genius. He was a good operative and good at carrying out instructions. But the concept of mind games, of keeping the other side off balance and denying them any hard knowledge of who they were dealing with, was beyond him. Original thought was not his strong point. He was content to play his part and take the money at the end of it.

Which, after all, was why Kormann had recruited him in the first place. The last thing he wanted was a second in command who might guess what he really had in mind.

“So, what are you planning to do with your three million bucks?” Pallisani asked now. He was in an expansive mood and he wanted to discuss the prospect of the money that was coming to him. As Kormann had explained it to him, there was two hundred thousand for each of their eighteen accomplices and three million each for him and Pallisani. Leaving one hundred grand for incidental expenses, that totalled nine point seven million dollars. It was a perfectly logical reason for the odd amount and that was why Kormann had recruited eighteen men, along with Pallisani.

As far as the men themselves were concerned, the price of the ransom was determined by the number sharing in the proceeds and that was what he kept them believing. Kormann couldn’t help a small flicker of a smile as he wondered what Pallisani would say if he realized that he, Kormann, never planned to collect the ransom money. By Sunday, everyone still in the hotel would be dead.

“I guess I might get out of this business,” he said now, in reply
to the question. He had no intention of getting out of the business. He loved the buzz, loved the power, loved the challenge of living by his wits. But Pallisani believed him and was nodding in agreement.

“Me too,” he replied. “Maybe settle down, get a little ranch somewhere. Somewhere warm,” he added, “not some ass-freezing dump like this.”

“Yeah,” said Kormann, bored to tears by the other man’s conversation. “That’d be the life all right.”

Suddenly, he couldn’t wait for Friday to come. He glanced at his watch, then shoved his chair back from the desk he had been using as a table and rose to his feet.

“Time to check on the roof,” he said. “Keep an eye on things here.”

Pallisani nodded. There had been no need to tell him that but it made it easier for Kormann to leave alone. In his present expansive mood, Pallisani might have suggested keeping him company. As Kormann walked through the outer reception room for the gymnasium, he noticed that five of the guards were taking their meal break. That would mean three were on patrol in the gymnasium itself, where the hostages were finishing their meal. He smiled to himself again. Another variation on stew. The girl doing their cooking certainly didn’t have Ralph’s touch in the kitchen, he thought.

He went through the outer room, a kind of reception room where guests would have waited for their turn on the complex exercise machinery, and several of the men nodded to him. He acknowledged their greetings and headed for the elevator bank.

Tina Bowden saw him leave. The outer room was separated from the gymnasium proper by two heavy glass sliding doors. Tina knew the glass was almost half an inch thick and was shatterproof. That meant it was pretty well bulletproof—particularly if you were using one of those 9 millimeter machine carbines or pistols that the guards all carried. Maybe a 30-06 or a Magnum might crash its way through, she reflected. But she hadn’t seen any of them around.

Except for the one she now had secreted under her bedroll on the floor. She’d collected the gun earlier, when she and Ralph had prepared the evening meal, tucking it into the waistband of her skirt
under the white blouse. At the same time, she’d stashed a dozen of the shiny brass magnum slugs into her boots, carefully concealing them when she returned to her bedspace against the wall.

Eighteen slugs in all, counting the six that she’d loaded in the pistol. It wasn’t a lot to be taking on ten armed men. But she hoped to supplement her weapon with one or two of the Ingrams that the guards carried, if push came to shove.

Casually now, she let her gaze roam around the room, watching the movement of the guards, mentally rehearsing the movements she would make and forcing the thought of the third man from her mind. When the time came, she knew, she would have to blot him out of her consciousness and trust Pell to take care of him. She wouldn’t be able to let any thought of him distract her from the task in hand. No matter how tempted she would be, she mustn’t glance in his direction until the first two men were down. And by then it would be too late, one way or the other. She figured that in the confusion of it all, after she’d taken out the first guard, she’d get one free shot at the second. But by the time she’d taken it, the third man would have her well and truly located. She wished she knew a little more about Pell. She would be putting a hell of a lot of trust in him.

She now turned to see where the third guard was and located him at the back of the room. Her eyes rested on him for a few moments, then looked to where Pell sat beside his companions, just a few yards away. The pilot had been watching her and as her gaze fell on him, he met it and nodded, almost imperceptibly.

Deep in the basement of the FBI building, research technician Brady Temple watched the names and photos of known terrorists, mercenaries and political activists as they scrolled across his computer screen in a flickering blur, faster than the eye could follow. The
computer was on a probability search, into which he’d fed the parameters, such as they were, that had been emailed to them from Utah by Truscott Emery.

Age, height, build, hair color and, of course, the most salient detail of all, those piercing blue eyes that Jesse had mentioned, were all fed into the computer as it tested and rejected hundreds of names and profiles every minute. Temple had even programmed in the initial letter of the surname Kormann. All too often, he knew, when people assumed false names, they stayed with the same initials. It seemed to make things easier to remember. Or maybe it gave them a link with some kind of reality in the shadow world they inhabited.

Temple wasn’t really interested in the motivation. All he knew was that it occasionally gave him an edge on a search like this one.

At irregular intervals the computer would beep softly and pause as it found a candidate whose specifications matched the search parameters. The search would stop momentarily and a face and dossier would appear on screen. The dossiers, more often than not, were nearly as scant as the parameters that Temple had to work with. People on these files spent a lot of time keeping their details from being too widely known—particularly by organizations such as the FBI.

As the computer paused at each suggestion, Temple would hit a command key to transfer that dossier and that photo to another, smaller file. He yawned, wondering whether it was worth going to the canteen for a cup of coffee, then decided not. He checked the indicator on the side of the screen and could see that the program was almost finished. There couldn’t be more than a couple of hundred names left to sort through. The computer chimed once more and he glanced curiously at the latest suggestion.

“Kavel, Raymond,” he muttered, reading the name under the picture. It was a completely nondescript face, with no outstanding feature. Pleasant, certainly, but not so good-looking that an observer might remember it from one moment to the next. Even features, brown hair, mouth not too wide, not too narrow, nose neither too long nor too wide, a face that was totally, irrevocably, average in every way—except for one.

The eyes seemed to blaze out of the screen at him, brilliant blue,
with a burning intensity. For a moment, Temple was taken a little aback by those eyes. After all, in feeding the search parameters into the computer, he had only been able to specify eye color—there was no way the computer could make a subjective judgment as to the intensity of the eyes. To a computer, blue eyes were blue eyes.

But these were something different, and as Temple copied Kavel’s details to the other file, he couldn’t help feeling that this was the man they were looking for.

He glanced at his watch, realizing for the first time that a new day was already more than an hour old. As he did so, the computer emitted a series of short beeps, telling him that it had finished the sorting process. Temple yawned again and stretched, easing the cramped shoulder muscles that were the result of too many hours sitting hunched forward at the computer screen. There was time to email the compiled list to Emery tonight, he decided, then he was going home.

C
olby walked with Cale Lawson along the side of the road, their boots crunching in the gravel. The FBI agent looked up at the broken cloud overhead, where patches of blue sky showed through. After the storm weather of the previous two days, this was a welcome change. The wind was still blowing keenly, of course, but it was nowhere near the speeds it had reached during the storm.

“At least the weather has improved,” he said to the sheriff. Lawson raised his eyes to the skies, squinted and frowned.

“Enjoy it while you can,” he said, with a local’s eye for the weather. “Ain’t going to last much more than another day. There’s another storm front coming in from the west, should hit us tomorrow night sometime.”

“Just what I need,” Dent said gloomily. “More wind and snow. I’d kind of hoped that was it for a while.”

Lawson smiled at him as they stopped to watch a squad of Maloney’s men abseiling down the cliff face on the upper side of the road.

“What’s the matter, son,” he asked. “Don’t you ever watch the Weather Channel? They’ve been predicting this pattern for days. All thanks to some hurricane in the North Pacific, so they tell me.”

“Is that right?” Colby asked absently, still watching the marines as they moved forward, flanking their practice target—one of the trailers set up for accommodation. The colonel, he noticed, was in the lead group. He kept his men training day and night, and wasn’t afraid to mix in with them.

A cell phone shrilled its ring tone and Dent automatically
reached for his pocket, then realized it was the sheriff’s phone. Lawson answered it. As the caller spoke to him he glanced curiously at Dent.

“Hold on, Connie,” he said into the phone. Then, lowering it, he asked Dent: “You know some woman called Torrens? Sheriff from out Colorado? Says she was speaking to you a day or two ago,” he added.