Steven James - The Queen

“The religious leader.”

“Yes. As a matter of fact, in many ways, he has more influence than the president.”

“I know that,” she said impatiently. “I’m not completely in the dark about the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East.”

“Oh. Right.” Yeah, this is Tessa, remember? “Anyway, I suggested Nielson remind him that doing this would give Iran credibility on the world stage, a seat at the table, so to speak. And they could save face in the Muslim world by portraying the US as a rogue nation with nuclear weapons that it couldn’t control-”

“But that they could,” Tessa said, completing my thought.

“Precisely.”

“And they come out looking more powerful than America.” She nodded. “Nice, so you appealed to Iran’s self-interest and pride.”

“In a sense, I suppose.”

“So, motives.”

“Motives?”

“Right. You had to accurately assess their motives, then-”

“No, it was just logic.”

She put both of her hands on my shoulders, looked me squarely in the eye. “Patrick, you helped stave off war in the Middle East only because you thought like a profiler. Lien-hua is gonna be so proud of you when I tell-wait.” Tessa dropped her hands. “Is she okay? Where is she?”

“She’s fine. She’s still at the top secret underground military base helping round up the eco-terrorists.”

Tessa blinked. “Oh.”

I thought again of Valkyrie, who it might be-Cassandra? Becker? Manoji? Rusk? We could sort that through soon enough.

In the hallway beyond Tessa, I noticed the elevator doors glide open. “You should know that I told Lien-hua tonight I was going to marry her.”

“You what?”

“I told her I was going to marry her.”

“No, I mean you didn’t ask her if she’d marry you?” Tessa said incredulously. “You told her you were gonna marry her?”

“Um…”

Jake Vanderveld left the elevator and came striding toward us.

“Oh.” Tessa shook her head. “You screwed that one up big time.”

“How’s Amber?” Jake asked, eyeing the door behind us.

“Recovering.” I was surprised to see him here. “Did you go to the base?”

“Without a snowmobile there wasn’t any good way to get out there; I couldn’t reach you by phone, and when I spoke with Lien-hua, she said I’d find you here. I decided to come and check on everyone.”

His marked concern surprised me and made me wonder if maybe I’d misjudged him all these years.

“Tessa,” I said, “can you give us a couple seconds?”

“Sure.”

She knocked on the door to Amber’s room, and Sean invited her in. As soon as she was gone I asked Jake, “What do we know about the base?”

“Torres and his men disarmed the explosives, and it looks like they caught all the Eco-Tech militants, but Chekov is missing.”

“What!”

“Somehow he overpowered the MA who was guarding him. The guy’ll survive, but by the time SWAT got to the control room, Chekov was already gone. Listen, we’ll get him, though, right? Lien-hua told me you put a GPS ankle bracelet on him, so as soon as he surfaces we should be able to nail him.”

Don’t bet on it.

He saw the skepticism in my eyes. “Those things are a bear to get off, Pat.”

“Yes, they are.”

“You think he’s still in the base?”

I shook my head. “He has a gunshot wound in his shoulder that needs to be treated. Also, he’d anticipate that the longer he waited, the more backup would arrive.”

I doubted Chekov would use the Schoenberg tunnel to escape, since, after leaving a kidnapped victim at the Inn, he would know there’d be a heightened law enforcement presence there.

He could possibly be hiding in one of the other tunnels, but since they lacked rail tracks, there was no indication that they surfaced anywhere. Also, after his disappearance he would know law enforcement would search them eventually and he’d be trapped.

That left the tunnel to the sawmill, and what better place to cut off a tamper-proof, steel mesh GPS ankle bracelet than a sawmill?

“Jake, are you up for a drive?”

“To where?”

“Let’s go catch us an assassin.”

I drove.

Jake sat beside me, his iPad 2 on his lap, a tracking application for the GPS ankle bracelet open on the screen.

Before we left the hospital, Amber had assured me that she was fine, that I didn’t need to worry about her; and Sean had been glad to let me borrow the pickup: “As long as it doesn’t end up like my sled.”

“Gotcha.”

Now, Jake and I were about ten minutes from the sawmill, but so far, nothing had come up on the iPad’s tracking program. Nothing at all.

So maybe this was a fool’s errand. Another dead end.

Maybe.

Maybe not.

I’d spent the first part of the drive giving Jake my account of what happened at the base. In the end, he suggested that Rusk was probably Valkyrie. “He’s a hacker,” Jake said. “He’s got a Carnegie Mellon computer science degree.”

“But it doesn’t fit. He’s a hacktivist, that’s all. There’s nothing else in his background that matches Lien-hua’s preliminary profile for Valkyrie.”

“And what profile is that?”

“She believed Valkyrie would have law enforcement or covert operative training, be highly intelligent, well-traveled, midforties, linguistically skilled. Male.”

“That’s not much, Pat, hardly anything. Maybe Valkyrie is just a code name Manoji was using, or it could’ve been Cassandra after all.”

“That doesn’t explain how Valkyrie showed up in Russia last May. Terry was in a coma and Cassandra was in prison at the time.”

Jake quietly monitored the iPad, and I had the sense he didn’t want to discuss Valkyrie’s identity anymore just then.

Wait.

The mind has to deal with guilt somehow. When it’s overwhelming, escaping reality is sometimes the only choice.

Alexei might still be in the tunnel and offline. Or, he might not be.

Yes. Bait.

“Send me an email,” I said, “asking me to confirm that I know Valkyrie’s identity. Make it seem like I’m about to reveal to the Bureau who Valkyrie is.”

“Send you an email?”

“To my Bureau account. Go ahead. Let’s see how often Alexei checks my messages.”

I found my thoughts flitting through the events of the night, and I remembered that earlier I’d made a mental note to follow up on any videos that might’ve been found of people in the Midwest being killed while Basque was in prison.

“When you’re done with the email, pull up the Federal Digital Database. There are a few things I’d like you to check.”

A couple moments later he finger-scrolled to a browser. “What do you need?”

I gave him the search terms I had in mind-the dates, the locations, the types of weapons, the victimology.

“What are we looking for, exactly?”

“Reiser’s killer.”

We tried a variety of searches but in the end didn’t find anything helpful. If there were more victims, more videos, they hadn’t been found.

Dead end.

“Think this through with me, Jake. Fourteen years ago we discover two sets of DNA at the scene of Basque’s murders but aren’t able to identify the second set until the homicide last June when you matched it to Reiser. Lien-hua and I were wondering if the records could have been falsified.”

“But how?”

“Once Basque got out of prison, if he reconnected with his old partner and that person had access to the records, they could’ve set up Reiser by faking or switching the DNA analysis.”

Jake considered that. “We could pull up a list of people who’ve accessed the case files or DNA records. See if there are any red flags.”