Relentless (11 page)

You could tell one by looking at him, always. The Bureau prescribed their standards of dress and stamped them like print-outs from a computer. Hair short, but not crew cut. Clean-shaven, short sideburns, exactly a quarter inch of white shirt cuff showing below the jacket sleeve. Side-vented jacket to allow quick access to the high-belted .38 in its stubby canted holster.

He had a rigid coin-slot mouth in repose but when he smiled he showed a double row of white teeth; the Bureau took them out of universities—all accountants and lawyers—and taught them to “look and act like gentlemen.” This one looked young and vinegary, as if he was up to date in his field: confident, almost jaunty.

“I'm Paul Vickers. Special Agent.” He had his I.D. wallet open in his left hand.

“Sam Watchman.”

Vickers' handshake was perfunctory; perhaps he disliked being touched.

“This is Jace Cunningham, Chief Constable here.”

Cunningham said, “Mighty nice to meet you.”

Watchman turned. “And Trooper Stevens. My partner.”

“Is he?” Vickers asked, and shook hands with Stevens. “That's fine—that's fine.” He turned, brisk, putting the wallet in his pocket and rubbing his hands together rapidly. “That your car over there? Maybe we can get inside out of this wind and then you can bring me up to date.”

Walking to the car Jace Cunningham said, “We wasn't sure if you'd want to check out the bank first or go on out to where they took off from in their airplane.”

They climbed in and the four doors chunked shut. Stevens started the car and put it in low, crunching slowly down the steep gravel trail. The Special Agent asked a few questions to get things started. Watchman had not looked forward to a long-winded rehash of events but Vickers' questions were compelling and logical; he knew his job. He listened expressionlessly, skeptically, with stony unimpressed eyes. It seemed to disconcert Cunningham: the Chief Constable enjoyed exposition and kept beginning his pronouncements with the words, “Well, sir, I'll tell you,” but Vickers kept cutting him off and hurrying him up and Cunningham muttered, “Yes, sir, uh-huh,” to everything Vickers said. Finally Vickers turned to Watchman and got the story from him. By the time they reached the main street the high spots had been covered and Vickers said, “Let's skip the bank for the moment. The important thing is to try and nail the fugitives before they've had time to go to ground. Where's your communications center?”

“That's over to my office,” Cunningham said.

Stevens turned the corner. Vickers said, “It's important that we get these fugitives and get them fast. In this kind of case you've got to do that—give the public an object lesson in quick justice, remind them that crime doesn't pay.”

It had been an unnecessary speech and it made Watchman swallow a smile. How an FBI agent who presumably had spent a few years at his job could still believe crime didn't pay was almost beyond belief but actually Vickers was only conforming to type: these fellows had all been Melvin Purvis Junior G-men when they were kids.

The cruiser slid in at the curb behind Cunningham's parked traffic-cop car and they filed inside. On his way through the door Vickers said, “I want to try and get the search coordinated. I take it you've got contact with the Civil Air people and the enforcement agencies in Utah and Nevada.”

“More or less.” Cunningham showed his discomfort. “We ain't exactly got what you'd call a sophisticated communications network up here.”

Vickers swept the room with his eyes. The old transceivers were stacked in the corner on an old table and microphone cords trailed over to the desk. The deputy constable at the radio table nodded to them and said, “Ain't nothing come in since you left, Chief.”

But the phone was ringing and Buck Stevens, closest to it, picked up. “Police.”

Then Stevens went stiff and his eyes whipped around toward Watchman. They all swung to face the rookie. Stevens listened hard and spoke two or three times and finally said into the mouthpiece, “Hold on a second.” He lowered the receiver and cupped his palm over it. “Civil Air Patrol in Kanab. One of their scout planes reports a wrecked plane near the foothills about eighty miles west of here. Could be them.”

Vickers strode past Cunningham and took the phone from him. “This is Special Agent Vickers, FBI. Is your scout plane still in the area? Are you in contact with him?… Ask him if there's any sign of survivors. I'll hang on.… Yes?… I see. Well how bad a wreck is it? Did they crash or does it look more like a forced landing?… Fine. Now if you don't mind, ask him if he thinks they could have walked away from it.… Yes, I'm still holding. What's that?… Good, good. Ask him to fly a tight search pattern over the immediate area and try to spot any movement on the ground. Now can you give me an. exact fix on the location?” Vickers lifted his head and turned, lifting his eyebrows at Cunningham, and said sotto voce, “Get me a map.” Then he turned his shoulder to them and pulled out a pen to jot coordinates on the brass-frame calendar pad by the phone. Cunningham went around him and rummaged in desk drawers.

Watchman glanced at Buck Stevens and surprised a look of anxious impatience on his face: Stevens was closing and opening his fists.

Vickers said into the phone, “That's fine—that's fine. Now I want to get as many airplanes and choppers into that sector as we can get launched before dark. I want to blanket the area with searchers. Can you get on through to Las Vegas and Nellis and Kingman and pass on those instructions on my authority?… Now, look, the storm can't be all that bad over there if this scout plane of yours is still in the sector.… I see. All right, do your best. What's your phone number up there?”

When Vickers hung up Cunningham was spreading a Texaco road map out on the desk. Watchman had a look at the compass coordinates Vickers had scribbled on the pad. He put his finger on the map: “Right about there.” He felt a surge of purpose.
All light—all right: now I've got a crack at them
. For old Jasper.

The map showed no useful detail and Vickers said almost immediately, “Is that the best you've got?”

Cunningham swallowed. “Well, sir, I …”

Watchman said, “We've got a county topographical in the car. Buck …”

“Wait up,” Vickers said. “We may as well all go—get started rolling. I'll use your car radio on the way. Let's not waste time.”

Watchman flicked imaginary moisture from his mouth corners with thumb and forefinger and waited until Vickers had crossed half the length of the room. “You'll want a few things first.”

Vickers stopped. His voice was metallic: “What?”

“You can't just head up in that back country with what's in your pockets.”

“Trooper, you're wasting my time. Say what's on your mind.”

“You'll want a jeep. And a pack of food and some heavy clothes. Rifles. Three or four walkie-talkies.” He glanced at the Special Agent's feet. “A pair of mud boots wouldn't hurt.” Turned to Jace Cunningham: “This is no time to play cute on this one so give me a straight answer. There must be plenty of night poachers in a town like this and you've probably seen them come and go. A few of them likely have snooperscopes—infrared. I want one.”

Cunningham scraped a hand across the abrasive stubble on his jaw. It sounded like sandpaper. “I reckon I could scare one up.”

The look in the FBI agent's eyes was unreadable.

3

Cunningham and his deputies had gone out to assemble equipment. Watchman started taking rifles down from the locked gun rack and inspecting them and finding ammunition. Vickers had gone to the telephone and was talking, arranging relay contacts through the Highway Patrol dispatcher and the FBI District Director in Phoenix so he could keep in touch with CAP coordinators in three towns and sheriffs' offices in two Nevada counties and one in Utah. Vickers had a brisk command voice and there was no faulting the efficient precision of his maneuvers to coordinate the search and start drawing up a tight net. “I want State Highway 793 sealed off at interval points and I want the roadblocks maintained until further notice.… Keep every plane you can up there. I want every inch of ground air-searched before it gets too dark out there. They're on foot if they got out of the wreck at all—I'm going out there myself but it'll take at least an hour to get there. This damned copter pilot of mine won't take me out there, he says the storm's too close to that area. I can't force the son of a bitch to do it.”

Buck Stevens came in with an armload of coats and gloves and boots. “Bummed these from the deputies. See if you can find stuff that fits.”

Vickers was still talking—evidently to his superior in Phoenix. “Yes, sir. I think we ought to take all these bits and pieces of information we've got up to this point and run them through the I. D. classifications on the computer in Washington. It may help to get a make on these people. We can try all the usual openings—modus operandi, identity of possible twin-engine airplane pilots, access to military stores of chemical Mace, tracer on that abandoned Lincoln up in Fredonia where they stole the Buick—that was a last-minute switch, the Lincoln broke down on them. It's probably stolen too, but it's worth a try. And I'd like some assistance up here as soon as you can provide it. We'll need to go over the witnesses' stories and run checks on recently discharged employees—whoever planned this operation had to know a great deal about the situation here and you often find an ex-insider in on these jobs. I'd appreciate getting a good lab crew up here as fast as possible; they seem to have dusted everything for prints but the local equipment is pretty shoddy and they haven't got any real technicians up here.… Yes, sir, I realize it's expensive and possibly redundant but there's a good deal of cash involved.… Traceable? I don't think so. Not easily. According to the Chief Constable here they only had a list of serial numbers on the big bills, the hundred-dollar bills, and we all know how easily those can be passed in foreign countries.…”

Watchman stopped listening. Vickers was touching all the correct bases. He knew the regulation methods, had a command of the situation and a willingness to make decisions and set things in motion. But there was a weakness in it: the weakness a regular army met when it tried to close with guerrilla terrorists. Computerized organization and modern technology were fine for sealing off elaborate superhighway networks or city streets, or closing in on clues and identities, but Watchman was dubious about how well the technocrats' methods were going to work in the desert with a high-country blizzard ramming down toward them.

4

The storm was ugly and black and they were driving straight toward it. The cruiser was convoyed by the mining company jeep, Cunningham driving; their speed was limited by the jeep's but even so the tires snickered on the sharp bends. Watchman's arms felt constricted by the bulk of the borrowed sheepskin-lined mackinaw. When he judged the spot right he pulled over on the shoulder of the highway. “End of the line. We swap here.”

A truck snored by, heavy laden. The jeep waited behind the cruiser, its engine idling roughly. Cunningham stepped out, letting the canvas door flap behind him, and stood with a bland incurious expression on his freckled cheeks.

Vickers took charge. “Constable, you'll stay here in the Highway Patrol car with one hand on the car radio and the other hand on your walkie-talkie. You're going to be my only contact with the rest of this search so I'll want you on your toes. You can handle it.”

Watchman looked on with the amusement compressed inside him. Vickers must have read somewhere in a Bureau manual that it was a good idea to compliment local officers and persuade them to give utmost cooperation: but it didn't come naturally to him, he had a heavy hand with the butter-knife and old Jace wasn't fooled; he just stood there with his glance fixed on Vickers as if he was waiting for Vickers to serve a subpoena on him.

It unsettled Vickers; finally he said in a different voice, “You know how to work these radios, don't you?”

“I reckon.”

“Fine—fine. Well, then, let's get on.”

They got into the jeep, Stevens in back with the knapsack and the walkie-talkies. Watchman handed the folded map to Vickers. “You'll have to navigate. Watch the compass.”

It hung in a black plastic shell from the windshield divider, below the mirror. Watchman put the floor stick in low gear and went grinding up over the hump of ground beside the highway shoulder; turned north, away from the highway, and went up through the gears fast, bumping across the brush-studded hardpan at a speed that made everything rattle.

“You don't need to shake us to pieces, Trooper.”

“Maybe you'd rather get there after we run out of daylight.”

Vickers cleared his throat.

The dust lifted high and the jeep's passage exploded gray wrens out of the bushes. After a little while Vickers said, “I think you want to head a few more points to the left—more over that way.” He pointed and Watchman adjusted the course, weaving among brush clumps and a spindle tracery of cactus and catclaw. In the half light the mountains were vague and hazy out ahead. Vickers kept his finger on the map in his lap and watched the compass; his finger moved a fraction forward every now and then, marking what he thought was their present position. “It shows a ranch back here in the foothills. What's that supposed to be?”

“Monument Rock Ranch. It's a tourist outfit—they run horseback pack trips and hunting safaris back into the mountains.”

“Safaris?”

“Mountain elk, antelope, mountain lions.”

“I gather you don't approve.”

“Hunting a near-extinct animal with a telescope-sighted high-power rifle isn't what I call a sport.”

“I see. What do you call it?”