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  Both sides of Diaz’s nostrils pushed up in a sneer as she peered down at the cup of greenish liquid. “What the hell is it?”

  “You don’t want to know,” I injected. “It’s basically a witch’s brew of Native American and southwest ingredients. Some kind of man-making concoction.”

  “He may be a Christian and talk white; but he’s still an Indian and his rules is his rules.”

  I could see the confusion on Diaz’s face as she looked a question my way, tilting her head to the side.

  “Same movie,” I explained.

  “Right,” she said, raising her head in a nod that relayed she didn’t quite understand.

  “So what did you find in West Yellowstone?” I asked, steering the conversation back to the task at hand. I could judge by his appearance he must have traveled straight through to get here, meaning whatever he uncovered was important.

  “He’s connected,” Hutch said, shifting to face both of us, his customary position with toes pointed out and hands shoved deep in his pockets. For a moment it was like déjà vu, standing in that office, looking at him there, that awful stench in the air.

  “How much or to whom, I don’t know,” Hutch said, raising his eyebrows in resignation. “He’s got airtight papers and a back story to fit them, but it was complete bullshit. Guy couldn’t answer the most basic of questions about his supposed livelihood.”

  “So what makes you think he’s connected?” Diaz asked, leaning against the wall and crossing her arms in front of her.

  “Because the moment I started asking him about Mateo Perez, the Juarez’s, whoever, he shut down. Almost catatonic. No looks of confusion, no searching his memory, nothing.”

  “Subtle,” I said.

  “More than you can imagine,” Hutch said, glancing at me through heavily-lidded eyes.

  “So what’s that mean?” Diaz asked. “We’ve got somebody out looking to pick off the Juarez’s?”

  “Apparently. Maybe,” Hutch said. “Hell, I don’t know.”

  I leaned forward and rested my palms across the top of the chair in front of me. I ran the various players through my mind, the different affiliations they had.

  “Alright,” I said, thinking out loud. “We’ve got the Juarez’s, with Mateo Perez. Two weeks ago he goes off the reservation and shows up in West Yellowstone, being tracked by someone with a forged background that isn’t in our system.

  “A week after that, someone claiming the same fake story shows up looking for her.”

  “I don’t know that he was looking for her,” Hutch said. “My guess is he was a cleanup guy. He was there to check on Mateo.”

  “Maybe you, too,” Diaz added, jutting her chin towards me.

  I nodded, having already considered that angle as well. I wasn’t sure how or why I had been lumped in with Mateo, especially after five years away. In that time I had had no contact with any of my former cases, had barely spoken to the people I worked with.

  I wanted, needed, a clean break from it all. I had made promises, to my wife, myself, every single deity I had called on that night, that I would walk away and never return if given the chance. Until two weeks ago, when a woman I had never met showed up and put a bullet into my chest, I had kept those promises.

  The question though was why? Why had it happened? Why had they sought me out?

  “I’m guessing the guy up there wasn’t in the system either?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” Hutch said. “The Park has an FBI agent on site for investigations. He put him through their system and came back empty. Whoever these people are, they’re ghosts.”

  I considered the statement, thinking back to my time on the FAST team. In our experience, nobody was ever a ghost, not entirely. They might be beyond our sightline, but people like this were never completely invisible.

  “Maybe just here,” I said, putting the idea out to let the group chew on it. “Lita claimed to be from New Mexico, but I swear her accent was Eastern Bloc, maybe even Russian.”

  “Same with the other guy, Pavel,” Hutch said.

  “And those names,” Diaz added, “Lita and Pavel? Not exactly Jim and Jane.”

  “So maybe they just aren’t in our system,” I said. “Do we know anybody at Langley? Somebody that might have lines back to the old KGB files or something?”

  A long, weary sigh slid out of Hutch. He raised a hand to his chin and rubbed it over his two day whiskers, shaking his head. “Not really, at least none come to mind. Tensions between the different agencies have reached an all-time high under this new administration, with them squeezing on the funding like they have. Nobody works together anymore, we all see each other as competition.”

  “Christ,” Diaz muttered, shaking her head.

  I bobbed my head in agreement with her, but didn’t vocalize it. Hutch had heard my gripes with bureaucratic machinations a thousand times before. Once more wasn’t going to add anything new to the narrative.

  “What about Pally?” I asked. “Can he get around a few firewalls? Maybe take a look?”

  “I’ll give it a try,” Hutch said. “I need to circle back with him and see if he’s found anything on the money trail anyway.”

  “Okay,” I said, my mind racing, trying to fit the pieces together. “What else does that leave us with?”

  A twist of a smile curled up on Diaz’s face. She glanced over at me, my mind picking up on her insinuation within a moment. The same look stretched across my features as I stared back, neither of us saying anything.

  “What?” Hutch asked, glancing from one to the other.

  “Carlos,” Diaz said, her gaze locked on me, her body twisting towards Hutch. “I’m guessing he should be good and ready to talk here soon.”

  I coughed out a laugh as Hutch looked from one of us to the other.

  “Oh yeah? Why’s that?”

  “Because the last time we saw him, he was walking alone on a dusty stretch of California highway,” I said.

  “Looking like he might piss his pants after Hawk pointed a gun at his head,” Diaz said, suppressing laughter.

  “Aw, hell,” Hutch said, letting out a small groan, raising both his hands up to rub them over his face.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, “there wasn’t a round in the gun, and a second team came by ten minutes after us to grab him. We just needed to soften him up a little.”

  “You’ve dealt with Carlos before,” Diaz said. “You know how he can be.”

  A look somewhere between exhausted and exasperated stretched across Hutch’s face. He looked at each of us in turn before shrugging and saying, “Yeah.”

  “So there it is,” I said, pushing myself back up away from the chair. “Let’s get Pally on the phone and see what he’s got, then go pay Carlos a visit.”

  “Okay,” Hutch said, “but not right now. I need to sleep, at least four or five hours or I’m not going to be worth a damn.”

  I nodded, considering the proposal. I hadn’t slept much in the last few days either, my system spurring itself along on pure adrenaline and the promise of finally giving myself a bit of closure that I’d been denied for so long.

  “That’s not a bad idea,” I said, nodding. “I might rack out too. We’ll give Carlos a little time to settle down, get past being angry, then go pay him a visit. He has to know a lot more right now than he’s letting on.”

  “I’d love to know what he and Manny were talking about in that visiting room this morning,” Diaz said, her eyes glazing as she stared down at the desk.

  The three of us stood in silence for a long moment. We had a random amalgam of information and evidence, none of it seeming to fit together worth a damn. There were competing interests, unknown cohorts, and the dredging of matters that we’d long ago stowed away.

  It had to all be connected, we just didn’t have the faintest idea how yet.

  Diaz was the first to break the silence, motioning with the top of her head towards the door. “Cots are still in the back. You know where to find them.
”

  Part III

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Icy crystals whipped up off the concrete lot, spraying across the face of Sergey Blok as he stepped out of the rear seat of his restored 1938 Buick Town Car. Oversized and boxy, it wasn’t the most beautiful automobile on the road, but it was far and away the most unique, which was exactly the impression he was hoping to imprint. There would be little doubt from anybody that saw the car who was seated in the backseat, a gesture of power and prestige without the flashy arrogance his nephew now seemed to favor.

  “Leave the car running, the heater on,” Sergey said to the driver as he passed, receiving a nod of understanding before the window between them was rolled back up. This stop would take no more than five minutes, a surprise drop-in to make sure everything was still on schedule.

  A second gust of wind pulled at the lapels of Sergey’s overcoat as he walked across the open asphalt parking lot towards the front entrance. Once a large manufacturing hub for automobile tires, the warehouse before him stretched out nearly as wide as a city block, a square grey structure that rose a uniform three stories in height. Underfoot, the parking lot was marked off to accommodate several hundred cars at a time, though today, as it usually did, there were no more than a dozen present.

  While having more staff on hand might expedite the operation, it would also involve bringing in a lot more people. Those people tended to have eyes, and mouths, both things that Sergey frowned upon. On sight he could name the owner of every auto in the lot, each of them having a minimum of five years of dealing with the Blok family.

  None of them needed to be reminded what would happen if they breathed a word of what went on inside to anybody. They had all seen it play out in front of them before.

  Sergey pushed through the front door and unbuttoned his coat in quick order, dropping the heavy wool garment onto the floor and leaving it lie. Compared to the velour track suits he favored wearing every day, the article was heavy and bulky, cumbersome to a fault.

  Using both hands, Sergey smoothed out the rumpled front of his bright orange ensemble for the day and stepped through a second set of double doors into the main hold of the warehouse. Stretched before him was an enormous open space, the entire place one continuous room.

  The right half of the building was filled with wooden crates piled high, arranged in tidy rows. A pair of forklifts zipped between them, their engines whining with acceleration, packages fitted onto their metal tongs being delivered. A series of black skid marks smudged the concrete beneath them, but otherwise not a single thing was out of place.

  On the opposite end of the room were stacks of white plastic reservoirs, each one standing five feet in height and measuring more than two feet in diameter. The raw materials needed to produce the products now stacked on the far end, they were arranged in perfect queues, enough on hand to keep the place busy for the foreseeable future.

  Amongst them moved a single clamp truck, identical to the forklifts on the other end save the oversized vertical tongs on the front acting in place of the metal forks. Sergey watched as its driver squeezed tight on a barrel and lifted it from a stack before pivoting and lowering it to just a few inches above the ground. With a jerk of a few levers he sat off at a speedy clip, disappearing behind the far side of the makeshift structure that filled the remaining interior of the warehouse.

  A series of metal tracks had been installed upon the purchase of the building, hanging down fifteen feet from the ceiling. Shaped into an elongated oval, the tracks were designed to cover an area thirty feet across on the short end and over three times that on the long end. Heavy plastic sheeting hung down from the track, enclosing the entire area, a flurry of activity visible inside.

  Almost a dozen men in total could be seen, all of them dressed in white from head to foot save the yellow and blue breathing apparatuses covering the lower half of their faces and heavy goggles protecting their eyes. Arranged throughout the space, they went about a bevy of tasks ranging from testing product composition to wrapping and loading the end result into crates.

  Every last one moved with brutal efficiency as Sergey stood and watched, nobody pausing to talk, not a single one slowing their pace of work.

  Sergey nodded in approval at what he saw and walked forward towards the enclosure. Despite the matching uniforms of everyone present he picked out the man he was looking for on sight, his diminutive stature easily visible, and slapped at the heavy plastic.

  The sound reverberated through the building, audible even over the whine of forklifts, drawing the stares of everybody inside. Just as fast all but one of the men returned to their work, the intended target dropping the pipette he was holding and walking in exaggerated strides towards the overlap that served as a door into the facility.

  Sergey took his time walking to the far corner, allowing the man to remove his hood and goggles before sliding his breather down around his neck. He reached as if to shake Sergey’s hand as he approached, pulling back as he realized his body was still encased in white plastic.

  “Mr. Blok, what a pleasant surprise,” the man said, offering a cracked-tooth smile that stretched across much of his face. His voice was a bit higher than expected, his chin and nose both pointed.

  More than once Sergey had thought that if not for his undersized ears and thick fuzz of hair atop his head, he would have all the trappings of an elf.

  “Anatoly,” Sergey said, leaning forward an inch or two at the waist in lieu of a handshake, “how are you, my friend?”

  A hint of red appeared on Anatoly’s cheeks as he matched the pose and said, “I am well, Mr. Blok. Very, very well.”

  “Good,” Sergey said, casting a glance around the room. “Things here also appear to be going very well.”

  The words came out like a statement, but both men recognized that it was a question. Sergey’s management style was one predicated on delegation. Only if those selected seemed to be failing in their duties, as with his nephew, did he feel the need to insert himself.

  In the seven years that Sergey and Dr. Anatoly Bishkin had been working together, there had been no such incident, no reason for a loss of trust. It was a fact acknowledged, but never spoken, by both sides.

  If Sergey was stopping by, it was because he wanted a status report, not that he was snooping on his employee.

  “It is,” Anatoly said, dipping his head for emphasis. “If you look over there,” he extended a stubby arm out towards the wooden crates on the far side of the room, “you can see a section cordoned off with red tape.”

  Sergey took two small steps to move his body perpendicular to the enclosure beside him and peered down the bridge of his nose, loose skin collecting in a heap by his temples. “Yes?”

  “That is the requested product for the first shipment.”

  A long, soft whistle pushed itself out between Sergey’s lips. An optimistic expectation upon arrival was that the first shipment would be ready within a week, two at the most.

  “And the rest of it there?” Sergey asked.

  “That’s most of the second shipment,” Anatoly replied. “As you know, it can be stored for years if necessary.”

  Sergey nodded, his smooth head rocking several inches forward and back. The gesture was in agreement with what Anatoly said and in recognition of the fine work being done.

  “Very good, Doctor. Very, very good.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Anatoly said, the red deepening across his cheeks.

  Sergey shifted back towards the enclosure and gave it a once over, running his gaze from the tracks hanging above to the plastic scraping against the floor just a few feet away. “Is there anything you need here? Anything we are running short on at the moment?”

  Anatoly took in a deep breath, a bit of apprehension flooding from his features, the realization that the tough part was behind them. “No, sir. We’re doing well here, and have plenty of product to keep going.”

  “Good,” Sergey said. “This is good news, seeing you so far ah
ead of schedule. We’ve got one last hiccup that’s being worked out as we speak, and then we’ll be ready to start getting some of this out of your way.”

  The oversized smile returned to Anatoly’s face. “You keep taking it away, we’ll keep making more, sir.”

  A hint of a smile crept across Sergey’s features as well. His previous statement was meant as a bit of a curious challenge, wondering if Anatoly would inquire to the holdup he mentioned across the ocean. There was no doubt he had heard the statement, but the fact that he knew better than to ask spoke volumes of the man and their relationship.

  “Well then,” Sergey said, “don’t let me keep you. Just stopped by to see how things were coming.”

  “Thank you, sir. Anytime, sir,” Anatoly said, dipping his upper body into two quick bows, already backing away to return inside the plastic.

  Sergey watched him go for just a moment before turning and heading towards the door, his coat a misshapen black blob visible beyond the glass.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The oversized face of Mike Palinksy filled the back wall of the conference room, the section from his chest to the top of his head stretched almost five feet in height. It was difficult to tell if the ghostly pallor that seemed to encase his features was a result of the flat screen television he was on washing him out, or if he had just failed to see sunlight since leaving the unit a few years before.

  Given his predilection to stay squirrelled away in the office when he worked here with us, I was prone to assume the latter.

  The previous five years had lent themselves to a bit of aging, though nothing as pronounced as Hutch. Given that he was just a handful of years older than I it was to be expected, the major changes for both of us still a little ways ahead on the horizon.

  Like me, his hair was longer, his pulled back into a ponytail that ended at an unknown length somewhere behind him. He had lost at least a dozen pounds since I’d last seen him, his cheeks hollowed out, the pockmarks dotting his cheeks accentuated.