Athabasca (22 page)

"At this time of year?"

"Your true enthusiast goes hunting any time. At all events, it was seen passing through the streets yesterday afternoon, and we assumed the owner was taking it along for his trip."

"Which argues a fairly intimate local knowledge?"

"Sure, but no help to us." Willoughby smoothed his dark moustache. "Fort McMurray's no longer a village."

"Have you fingerprinted the truck, inside and out?"

"Being done now. It's a long job -- there are hundreds of prints."

"May we see them?"

"Of course. I'll have them Photostatted. But, with respect, Mr. Brady, what do you hope to achieve that we, the police, can't?"

"You never know." Brady smiled enigmatically. "Mr. Dermott here is an international expert in fingerprinting."

"I didn't know!" Willoughby smiled at Dermott, who smiled back. He hadn't known either.

Brady changed his tack. "Any chance of identifying the helicopter from the measurements of the ski marks that Carmody took?"

Willoughby shook his head. "It was a good idea to record them, but no -- the chances of identifying any one machine from its skiprints are extremely remote, because there will almost certainly be dozens of its particular type around. This is helicopter country, Mr. Brady, like Alaska. Here in northern Alberta our communications are still very primitive. We have no divided highways -- freeways -- in this part of the world. In fact, north of Edmonton there are only two paved roads that reach up north. Between them -- nothing. Apart from ourselves, and Peace River and Fort Chipewyan, there are no commercial airports in an area of two hundred thousand square miles."

"So," Brady nodded. "You use choppers."

"The preferred form of transport at all times. In winter, the only form."

"It's a good bet that an intensive air search wouldn't have a hope in hell of locating the getaway machine?"

"None. I've made a bit of a study of kidnapping, and I can answer you best by a comparison. The world's most kidnap-happy place is Sardinia. It's a kind of national pastime there. Whenever a millionaire is snatched, all the resources of the law and the Italian armed forces are brought into play. The Navy blockades harbors and virtually every fishing village on the coast. The Army sets up roadblocks, and specially trained troops sweep the hills. The Air Force carries out exhaustive reconnaissance by plane and helicopter. In all the years these searches have been carried out, they've never yet located a single kidnapper's hideout. Alberta is twenty-seven times larger than Sardinia. Our resources are a fraction of theirs. Answer your question?" -

"One begins to feel the first faint twinges of despair. But tell me, Mr. Willoughby, if you had four kidnapped people on your hands, where would you hide them?"

"Edmonton or Calgary."

"But those are towns. Surely..."

"Cities, yes -- and the population of each must be crowding half a million. The captives wouldn't be hidden -- they'd be lost."

"Well." Brady pulled himself up in his chair. He looked weary. "Okay. I suppose we have to wait word from the kidnappers before we make a move. You two gentlemen" -- he turned to Brinckman and Jorgensen -- "I don't think we need keep you any longer. Thank you for your co-operation."

The two security men said their good nights and left. Brady hoisted himself to his feet. "No sign of Carmody yet? Let's go and make ourselves more comfortable while we wait for him. The desk will no doubt inform us when he arrives. This way, gentlemen."

Once in the privacy of his own room, armed now with a fresh drink, Brady seemed suddenly to shake, off his exhaustion.

"Okay, George," he said briskly. "You've been holding out on us. Why?"

"In what way?"

"Don't pussyfoot. You said you were more concerned about the demands the crooks are going to make than about my family. You love my family. Now what did you mean?"

"The first demand will be that you, Don and I take off for Houston. They must be convinced we're on the verge of a breakthrough.

"The second demand will be a ransom message. To keep things within reasonable bounds they can hardly ask for more than a couple of million dollars. But that would be peanuts compared with the stakes our friends are playing for.

"Third, the greater stakes. Obviously, they'll demand a fortune to cease their harassment of both Prudhoe Bay's and Sanmobil's oil supplies, and the increasing destruction of their equipment. That's where they hold all the aces. As we've seen, both systems are embarrassingly vulnerable to attack. For as long as the criminals' identity remains undiscovered, they can keep on destroying both systems piecemeal.

"Their price will be high. I imagine they'll base it on the development cost of the two systems -- that's ten billion for starters -- plus the daily revenue, which is the cost of over two million barrels a day. Five per cent of the total? Ten? Depends what the market will bear. One thing's for sure -- if they demand too much and price themselves out of the market, the oil companies are going to cut their losses and run, leaving the insurance companies to hold the baby -- and it will surely be the most expensive baby in insurance history."

Brady said querulously, "Why didn't you bring this up downstairs?"

"I have an aversion to talking too much in crowded hotel foyers." Dermott leaned toward Jay Shore. "Did your Edmonton office send the fingerprints we asked for?"

"I have them in the safe at home."

"Good." Dermott nodded approval, but Willoughby was curious, "What prints?"

Shore hesitated until he received an all-but-imperceptible nod from Dermott, and said, "Mr. Brady and his men seem pretty well convinced that we have at Sanmobil one or more subversives actively aiding and abetting the men trying to destroy us. Mr. Dermott particularly suspects our security staff and all those who have access to our safe."

Willoughby shot Dermott a cool, quizzical look. It was clear that he considered the matter one for the Canadian police and not for foreign amateurs. "Would you mind explaining why?" he asked coldly.

"They're the only suspects we have -- especially the men in charge of the security shifts. Not only do they have access to the key of the armory from which the explosives were stolen, they actually carry the damn thing around with them on duty. More, I have good reason to suspect the security staff on the Alaskan pipeline. Further, it appears more than likely that both security staffs are working hand-in-glove under the same boss or bosses. How else can you explain how the terrorists here know the Sohio/BP code, while the criminals there know Sanmobil's?"

Willoughby said, "This is just conjecture..."

"Sure. But it's conjecture shading into probability. Isn't it a basic police philosophy to set up a theory and examine it from all sides before discarding it? Well, we've set up our theory, examined it from all sides, and don't feel like discarding it."

Willoughby frowned, then said, "You don't trust the security men?"

"Let me amplify that. The majority are straight, no doubt; but until I know for sure, they're all under suspicion."

"Including Brinckman and Jorgensen?"

"'Including' is not the word. 'Especially'."

"Jesus! You're talking crazy, Dermott. After what they went through?"

"Tell me what they went through."

"They told you already." Willoughby had become incredulous.

Dermott was unmoved. "I've only got their word for that -- and I'm pretty sure in both cases that word's worthless."

"Carmody corroborated their story -- or rather, Johnson did. Maybe you don't trust him either?"

"I'll decide that when I meet him. But the point is, Johnson didn't corroborate the story. All he said -- correct me if I'm wrong -- was that when he arrived on the scene he found Brinckman unconscious and Jorgensen staggering around. That's all he said. He had no more idea what went on before that than you or I do."

"Then how d'you account for their injuries?"

"Injuries?" Dermott smiled sarcastically. "Jorgensen didn't have a mark on him. Brinckman did, but if you'd been watching him, you'd have seen him jump when I told him he'd been struck by a lead-filled club. That didn't fit. There was something wrong with the scenario.

"I suggest both men were in perfectly good health until they saw the lights of Johnson's minibus approaching, whereupon Jorgensen, acting on instructions, tapped Brinckman on the head just hard enough to lay him out briefly."

"What do you mean, 'on instructions'?" Willoughby demanded doggedly. "Whose?"

"That remains to be discovered. But you might like to know that these aren't the first peculiar injuries we've come across. A doctor in Prudhoe Bay, for one, has discovered that we have highly suspicious minds on this subject. Donald and I had to examine a murdered engineer whose finger had sustained a curious fracture. The good doctor explained it away to his own apparent satisfaction, but not to ours. He probably gave orders that if any other such -- ah -- marginal incidents happened, any security agents in the vicinity were to display proof of injuries sustained in the loyal execution of their duties -- such as, in this case, their attempts to protect those whom they were supposed to be protecting." ,

Willoughby stared at him and muttered, "You have to be fantacizing."

Dermott answered, "We'll see." But his reply was cut short by the sudden arrival of Carmody and Johnson. Both men looked pale and exhausted -- a condition Brady sought to remedy by providing them with very large scotches.

After a suitable pause for congratulation on his night's work, Carmody was taken through his account, step by step. The exercise proved disappointing until, when he came to describe the scene of the helicopter ski marks, he suddenly became tongue-tied. He broke off in mid-sentence and stammered, "Say, Mr. Brady, could I -- er -- could I talk with you privately?"

"Well!" Brady was somewhat taken aback. "By all means -- but what purpose would it serve? These gentlemen enjoy my fullest confidence. Say what you want in their hearing."

"Okay, then. It's about the girl -- Corinne..." Whereupon he told them the story of the rescue. Amazement swiftly and thoroughly woke up his audience. They crowded forward, listening intently.

"Maybe I was wrong," Carmody-ended up, "but I just figured that if news of her survival didn't get out, it might be a card up our sleeve."

"You figured correctly," Jim Brady said.

"Where is she, then?" asked Dermott sharply.

"Right now she's in the isolation unit at the plant. She went a bit hysterical,-with the reaction, but she's all right."

Dermott let out a whoosh of air and said, "My, oh my!"

"A very original observation, George," Brady remarked wryly. "Do I detect a certain... pleasure on your part that the young lady is alive and well and in safe hands?"

"You do," said Dermott. Then he added quickly, as if feeling he had been over enthusiastic, "And why not?"

"Point is, I took a statement from her," Carmody went on. "Want to hear it?"

"Certainly," Brady said. "Fire away."

The statement still existed only in Carmody's notebook, and so took some time to read. The beginning of it merely confirmed what had been established already -- but then came a revelation. After the hold-up, the girl reported, "One man came staggering toward us along the road."

"One man?" snapped Dermott, half-rising out of his chair. "Did she say one man?"

"That's what she said." Carmody resumed his recitation, backtracking a sentence to emphasize her account. "'I saw two men lying in the road, like they were hurt. One was dead still. The other could move a bit. Then one other man came limping back toward us. He had a hand up in front of his eyes. Mr. Brinckman was sitting on my right. He jumped out and grabbed the first-aid box from under the seat. I think he slipped and fell over. Then he got up again. Then I saw the other man straighten up and hit him. He went down -- Mr. Brinckman, that is. The other man had a stocking mask on -- I could see that by now. He opened the door where Mr. Reynolds was sitting and threw something into the bus..."

"That's it!" cried Dermott, smiting his fist on the coffee table. "We got them!"

Brady glowered at him. "Would you favor us slower brethren with an explanation?"

'The whole thing was a frame-up. They told us a load of garbage. They said two men came at them, to make it seem more realistic that they hadn't put up any resistance. Now it's obvious they didn't try to resist. They were part of the act. Jorgensen just sat there watching his partner get slugged."

"How come he wasn't much affected by the tear gas?" Brady asked.

"He was prepared for it, of course," Dermott replied instantly. "If you screw your eyes shut and hold your breath, tear gas has very little effect on you. Jorgensen only had to hold out for a couple of seconds before opening his own door and getting into the fresh air. Listen to what the girl said. There were no bodies left on the road when she was dragged away. Every damn one of them had got up, right as rain, to help get the captives aboard the chopper. It was only when they saw Johnson's headlights coming that Brinckman and Jorgensen resumed their artistic poses on the road."