Athabasca (12 page)

"I went around them a couple of times, but by jeep only. But I had this funny feeling that we might have been guarding the wrong places. Don't ask me why."

"Your funny feeling didn't turn out to be so funny after all. Anything off-beat? Anything to arouse suspicion?"

"Nothing. I know everybody on the night shift and I know where they work. Nobody there that shouldn't have been there, nobody in any place that he hadn't any right to be."

"You've got a key to the blasting shed. Where do you keep it?"

"Terry Brinckman mentioned this. I have it only during my tour of duty and then I hand it over. I always carry it in the same button-down pocket on my shirt."

"Could anybody get at it?"

"Nobody except a professional pickpocket, and even then I'd know."

The two security men left and Corinne came in with a sheet of paper. Reynolds said, "That was quick."

"Not really. They were typed out ages ago."

Brady said to the girl, "You must come and meet my daughter, Stella. I'm sure you'd get on. Both the same age. Stella is very like you, actually."

"Thank you, Mr. Brady. I think I'd like that."

"I'll have her call you."

When she had gone, Dermott said, "What do you mean, like your daughter? I've never seen anyone less like Stella."

"Dancing eyes, my boy, dancing eyes. One must learn to probe beneath the surface." Brady heaved himself to his feet. "The years creep on. Breakfast and bed. I'm through detecting for the day. It's tougher than capping fires."

Dermott drove the rented car back to the hotel, Mackenzie sitting beside him. Brady took his ease across the entire width of the back seat. He said, "I'm afraid I wasn't quite leveling with Reynolds there. Breakfast, yes. But it'll be some hours before I -- we -- retire. I have come up with a plan." He paused.

Dermott said courteously, "We're listening."

"I think I'll do some listening first. Why do you think I employ you?"

"That's a fair question," Mackenzie said. "Why?"

"To investigate, to detect, to think, to plot, to scheme, to plan."

"All at once?" Mackenzie said.

Brady ignored him. "I don't want to come up with a proposal and then, if it goes wrong, have to spend the rest of my days listening to your carping reproaches. I'd like you two to come up with an idea and then if it's a lemon we can all share the blame. Incidentally, Donald, I take it you have your bug-box with you?"

"The electronic eavesdropping locator-detector?"

"That's what I said." • "Yes."

"Splendid. Now, George, let's have your reading of the situation."

"My reading of the situation is that for all the good we're doing we haven't a hope in hell of stopping the bad guys from doing exactly what they want and when they want. There is no way to forestall attacks on Sanmobil or the Alaska pipeline. They're calling the shots and we're the sitting ducks, if you'll pardon the mixing of the metaphors. They call the tune and we dance to it. They're active, we're passive. They're offensive, we're defensive. If we have any tactics, I'd say it's time we changed them."

"Go on," his leader urged him from behind.

"If that's meant to sound encouraging," Dermott said, "I don't know why. But how's this for a positive thought? Instead of letting them keep us off-balance, why don't we keep them off-balance? Instead of their harassing us, let us harass them.".

"Go on, go on," the back seat exhorted.

"Let's attack them and put them on the defensive. Let them start worrying, instead of us." He paused. "I see things as through a glass darkly, but I say plant a light at the end of the tunnel. What we'll do is, we'll provoke them. Provoke a reaction. Provoke the hell out of them. We'll hang it on this one factor: Our own pasts, our backgrounds, can be probed until the cows come home, and nothing will be turned up. But you can say that about how many people in a hundred?"

Dermott twisted his head briefly to locate a peculiar noise from the back of the car. Brady was actually rubbing his hands together. "Well, Donald, what's your reading of it?"

"Simple enough when you see it," Mackenzie said. "All you have to do is to antagonize anywhere between sixty and eighty people to hell and back again. Investigate them as openly as possible. Deploy maximum indiscretion."

Brady beamed. "What sixty to eighty people do . we investigate?"

"In Alaska all the security agents. Here, the security agents again, plus everybody who's had access to Reynolds' safe in the past few days. Going to include Reynolds himself?"

"Good heavens, no."

Mackenzie said inconsequentially, "She is a lovely girl."

Brady looked aloof. Mackenzie asked him, "Do you really expect to find your panjandrum among that lot?"

"Panjandrum?"

"The prime mover. Mr. Big. Messrs. Big."

"Not for a moment. But if there's a rotten apple in the barrel, he may well find him for us."

Mackenzie said, "Right. So we get all their names and past histories. Later on -- sooner rather than later -- we'll have the lot fingerprinted. Sure, they're going to stand on their civic rights and yell blue murder, and that will please you no end -- refusal to co-operate will point the finger of suspicion at the refusee, if that's the word I want. Then you feed the information to your investigators in Houston, Washington and New York. Cost no object, urgency desperate. Not that you'll care a damn whether the investigators come up with anything or not. All that matters is that the suspects get to hear such inquiries are under way. That's all the provocation they'll need."

"What kind of reactions do we expect to provoke?" Dermott asked.

"Unpleasant ones, I should hope. For the villains, I mean."

"The first thing I'd do," Dermott told Brady, "is send your family back to Houston. Jean and Stella could really become a liability. The scheme might rebound on you. Can't you see the word coming through -- lay off, Brady, or something unpleasant's going to happen to your family? These people are playing for high stakes. They've killed once, they won't hesitate to kill again. They can't be hung twice."

"Same thought occurred to me." Mackenzie turned to face the back seat. "Either get the girls right back home, or have the RCMP protect them."

"Hell -- I need them!" Brady sat forward with indignation. "Number one, I have to be looked after. Number two, Stella's handling the Ekofisk business for me."

"Ekofisk?" Dermott almost turned backward. "What's that?"

"Big fire in the North Sea, Norwegian half. Started after you'd come north. We have a team going in there today."

"Well, okay," Dermott gave way a little. "So you have to keep in touch. But why not work through the locals? That brunette of Reynolds' -- Corinne. She could field calls for you."

"What happens when we go back to Alaska?"

"Use somebody up there. Finlayson's got a secretary -- must have."

"No substitute for the personal touch," said Brady magisterially. He sank in the seat as though the argument were over.

His two heavyweights turned forward again with an exchange of looks. Having been through all this a hundred times before, they knew that further pressure would be useless for the moment. Wherever he went, Brady maintained the fiction that his wife and daughter were part of his essential life-support system, and he kept them with him regardless of the expense. Or danger.

Seven

Not that Dermott and Mackenzie in the least minded having Jean and Stella around. Like mother, like daughter: whereas Jean was a strikingly handsome woman in her middle-forties, with that lovely, naturally blond hair and intelligent gray eyes, Stella looked the spittin' image of her mother, only younger, and even livelier, with, as her father was so fond of claiming, dancing eyes.

The men found Jean awaiting their return in the lounge bar of the Peter Pond Hotel. Tall and elegant, she advanced to meet them with her usual expression of tolerant, kindly amusement. This look, Dermott knew from experience, reflected her genuine feelings: An equable temperament was no small advantage for someone who had to spend her life humoring Jim Brady.

"Hi, honey!" He reached up slightly to kiss her on the forehead. "Where's Stella?"

"In your room. She's got some messages for you -- been pretty busy on the phone."

"Excuse me, then, gentlemen. Maybe one of you would be so kind as to buy my wife a drink."

He waddled off along the corridor, while Dermott and Mackenzie settled comfortably into the warmth of the bar. In marked contrast to her husband, Jean scarcely drank alcohol at all, and she sipped carefully at a pineapple juice while the two men addressed themselves to the scotch. Nor did she try to talk shop in Brady's absence. Instead, she chatted pleasantly about Fort McMurray and its modest midwinter pleasures until her husband returned.

When he came back, Stella was with him, swinging along with her easy, loose-hipped walk. Dermott -- not normally given to flights of fancy -- was suddenly struck by the absurd disparity between the two figures. Jesus, he thought to himself: a hippo and a gazelle. What a pair!

Scarcely had Brady subsided into an armchair, with an outsize glass of daiquiri in his pudgy hand, than he made a slight sign to Dermott and Mackenzie, who muttered something and slipped off.

Brady seemed in buoyant form, and began to regale his family with an edited account of his movements around the far north. After a while Jean said doubtfully, "It doesn't seem to me you've accomplished very much."

Brady was unruffled. "Ninety per cent of our business is cerebral, my dear. When we move into action, what happens is merely the almost mechanical and inevitable culmination of all the invisible hard work that's gone on before." He tapped his head. "The wise general doesn't fling his troops into battle without reconnoitering beforehand. We've been reconnoitering."

Jean smiled. "Let us know when you've identified the enemy." Suddenly she became serious. "It's a nasty business, isn't it?"

"Murder always is, my dear."

"I don't like it, Jim. I don't like you being in it.

Surely this is for the law. You've never come across murder before in your business."

"So I run away?"

She looked at his ample frame and laughed, "That's one thing you're not built for."

"Run?" Stella said, mock-scornfully. "Dad couldn't jog from here to the John!"

"Please!" Brady beamed. "I trust no such haste will be necessary."

"Where did Donald go?" Jean asked.

"Upstairs, doing a little job for me."

Mackenzie was at that moment moving slowly around Brady's apartment with a calibrated metal box in one hand, a portable antenna in the other and a pair of earphones on his head. He moved purposefully, a man who knew what he was about. He soon found what he was looking for.

When he came back to the bar he headed straight for Brady's family encampment.

"Two," he reported.

"Two what, Uncle Donald?" Stella asked sweetly.

Mackenzie appealed to his boss. "When are you going to start training this incorrigibly nosy daughter of yours?"

"I've stopped. Failed. Mother's job, anyway." He jerked his head upward. "Got them all, did you?"

"Guess so."

Dermott also reappeared to report.

"Ah, George," Brady greeted him. "How did it go?"

"Reynolds' seems very co-operative. Unfortunately, all records are stored at the head office in Edmonton. He says by the time they've been dug out and flown up here, it may be late this evening or even tomorrow morning."

"What records?" Stella asked.

"Affairs of state," Brady told her. "Well, can't be helped. Anything else?"

"Naturally enough he's got no fingerprinting equipment."

"Fix it after lunch."

"He says he'll fix it himself -- the police chief's a pal of his, apparently. Thinks the chief might be a bit stuffy about the delay in reporting the crime." He grinned across at Stella. "And don't ask 'what crime?'"

"No, sir, Mr. Dermott, sir!" She wrinkled her upper lip in a fetching manner. "I never ask questions if I'm just permitted to fetch and carry, mend and clean."

Brady went on, "Reynolds can always claim that at first he thought it was an industrial accident."

"I understand the chief of police has twenty-twenty vision and intelligence to match."

"Well -- Reynolds will have to handle it as best he can. What about Prudhoe Bay?"

"An hour's hold. They'll page me."

"Fair enough." Brady shifted his attention to Stella. "We met an enchanting girl this morning -- didn't we, George? Knock spots off you, any day. Wouldn't she, gentlemen?"

"Unquestionably," said Mackenzie.

Stella looked at Dermott. "Foul, aren't they?"

"Dead heat," said Dermott, "but she's very nice."

"The manager's secretary," Brady said. "Corinne Delorme. I thought maybe you'd like to meet her. She said she'd like to meet you. She must know all the nightclubs, discos and other iniquitous dens in Fort McMurray."