Robert Adams - The Clan of the Cats

He paused, then asked, “You really think someone was trying to kidnap me for ransom?”

The senator shrugged, rubbed his forehead furiously with the heels of both hands, then shook his mane back into place before answering with another shrug. “Oh, hell, boy, it’s possible, you know that as well as I do. But probable? No. In some backwater of another country, maybe, just maybe, but not smack in the middle of D.C., not in this day and time, no way.

“What did the man say, James, can you recall that?”

The younger Bedford closed his eyes, thought, then said slowly, “ ‘Mr. Bedford, your car may be as much as an hour getting here and it looks as if … no, it looks like it may rain. Please share my car as far as your hotel.’ Or something like that. I think.”

The senator nodded, grim-faced. “Clearly, then, the bastard was completely aware that I had rung up Sloan to come for you, knew what you looked like and knew that you would be bound for a hotel at which you had already booked a room. As I told you earlier, upstairs in my so-called private office, boy, every place in the whole district and beyond has become a fishbowl, a goddam sieve, every place except the few rooms like this one … and it is always just a matter of time before technology advances another notch or two and compromises even them. It—”

There was a knock on the outer door. The senator unlocked and opened the inner door, then unlocked the outer. There was a whisper that James could not hear, and without a word, his uncle went out, closing the outer door behind him, When he came back in, after four or five minutes absence, he carefully closed and locked both doors before saying a word.

“James, immediately I heard about this business. I rang up some people, and that was them, calling on one of the guardroom’s scrambler phones. James, your room and effects had been very professionally searched before they got there. Your room had had at least four surveillance devices recently installed in it, your luggage had been bugged and, as well, had been fined with devices by which its movements could be tracked by anyone with compatible equipment. They removed everything,of course, but … but, boy, just what the hell have you gotten yourself into?”

“Have you had time to go over the files I left you, Uncle Taylor?” asked James, trying to ignore the cold chills racing up and down his back.

“No.” The senator shook his leonine head. “I’ve got it stowed away in one of the few relatively safe places I know of around here—one of several special pockets I have my tailor put here and there inside my clothing.”

“Okay, then,” said James, “here’s the gist of it.” And once more he told the salient features of the story.

The senator just regarded his nephew over steepled fingers for a while after the conclusion of the tale, facing him across the card-sized table in the safe room. At length he said, slowly, “Boy, you should go back to Idaho or wherever and just stay them until we get all this sorted out, you know. Will you? If I arrange for you to fly out tonight, will you do that. for me?”

James shook his head. “I can’t, Uncle Taylor. I’ve some very important appointments in Dade County and other places. If you’re able to get us funding and if the Japanese investors come through, fine, but we need money now. We’ve somewhat less than four million, as it sits, and that’s simply not enough to tide us over until you or they can infuse bigger chunks of cash.

“That damned Harel/Markov is still costing us money, whether up there in the body or not. His precious yaks somehow knocked down enough Cyclone fencing to get loose on the higher end of the plateau, the whole pack of wisents followed them, and they all managed to make it down an almost vertical rock face into the woods down below without so much as a scratch, it would seem. Don’t ask me or anybody else just how they all did it—maybe the bastard taught them how to levitate.”

The senator chuckled. “Animals can do some truly remarkable things when they put their minds to it James, you of all people should be aware of that. Don’t you recall the story of Grandad’s—your great-grandfather’s—bay hunter? Of how he not only knew when the old man was near death, but got out of his paddock, into the house, up the stairs and into Granddad’s bedroom, all sixteen-plus hands of him through a yard and house crowded with servants, relatives and nurses on a twenty-four-hour basis … and no single soul could later recall having seen him do any of it?

“Now I don’t know spit about those wisents, other than that they look and act a lot like our native buffalo … bison, if you will … but I do recall having read somewhere that yaks are a mountain animal, even live high up in the Himalayan massif, so a puny little Rocky Mountain plateau was probably no obstacle—actually, more of a lighthearted romp to them.”

James grimaced and remarked, “Well, that lighthearted romp of those bovids has already taken a sizable chunk out of what little the group had of existing funds and will take more before it’s over and done. See, not only did they damage the fencing, they wandered around for a while near the plateau and then just seemingly disappeared from off the face of the earth. I had to hire on half a tribe of local Indians and actually put up cash bounties for their safe return before any of them turned up.”

“They were found, though, I take it?” asked the senator.

James grimaced again. “In a way, I wish they had really just disappeared from off the face of the globe, all things considered. Yes, they were found, but not by the Indians. Twenty-odd crow-flight miles away, some state rangers who were on the lookout for poachers saw buzzards and rode into some very rugged country to find a dead bison bull—one of the forest bison, rare and so valuable, worse luck for our group.

“The beast was breathing his last and his wounds were acrawl with maggots, but even so it was easy for the rangers to see that be hadn’t been done in by the hand of man but rather by another horned animal. They put him down with a bullet, took off his ID tag to turn in to the proper authority and set out to backtrack him, but had to turn back before they found what had been his herd.

“That night it started to rain, and it alternately rained, drizzled and threatened for three days, then came a weekend, so it was a total of five days before a larger number of men, with jeeps, horses and a chopper, went back up there to find what little the scavengers had left of the bull’s carcass. The chopper it was finally located the herd—five bison cows, two calves, three wisent cows and a calf, one bull wisent that had been in a recent fight, and one yak cow.

“The wisent bull apparently had driven off the smaller, lighter yak bull while they all still were fairly close to the plateau area, because the yak Look off in another direction, chanced across a pasture of a small dairy operation and decided this must be his new home and harem laid out for him. You can imagine the shock of the gentleman-rancher on finding a long-haired, long-horned and rather cantankerous wild bull among his prize cows; it’s a wonder he didn’t shoot the bastard out of hand, but he didn’t.

“When we were passed word of where the escapee was, we went down there with the big truck and brought him back. But now the owner of the cows is rumbling about suing the group for probable damages to his purebred, prize-winning cows … and if he does, he’ll probably win, be awarded a hefty settlement by any jury of locals, and we will be faced with the unhappy choice of either paying it or of paying more in the long run by going through the appeals process and, if we choose the latter, making local enemies we do not either need or want.”