Rude Astronauts (29 page)

Frosty the Snowman. You’re cute, Brim. “Frosty One, Tango Station,” he replied between chattering teeth into the tiny mike dangling in front of his mouth. “We copy, over.”

“How are you doing there? Over.”

He was cold as hell, but that was nothing he was going to admit to Brim. “We’re copacetic, Tango. What’s the word? Over.”

“No news, Frosty One. Big Bird report on Geronimo is negatory. Repeat, negatory. We’re still green-for-go with your run. Do you copy? Over.”

Shaw gazed through his yellow-tinted goggles at the line of empty chairs preceding him up Wachusett Mountain. He was almost at the summit now; it was visible as an opaque blur, barely discernable through the snow which sheeted around him. “Big Bird” was the Bell AB47G which had made a couple of fast, low-level passes over the slopes before the nor’easter had forced the helicopter away from the mountain, where the unpredictable wind patterns made flying especially dangerous. He was not surprised that the chopper had not spotted Geronimo. Even if the snow were not so thick, Weyler would have the sense to hide if he spotted the helicopter.

“We copy, Tango,” he said to his headset mike. “Green-for-go. Frosty One over and out.”

The chair dipped lower to the ground, passed a line of trees, and suddenly Shaw was at the summit, passing the lift station on his left. He spotted the red-jacketed lift operator through the window. He swung up the metal safety bar and jumped off, his boots crunching through several inches of new snow before resting on the packed ice beneath. He floundered out of the way of the chairs, dropped his equipment on the ground, and knelt to stick his booted feet into the snap-down bindings of the Rossignol telemark skis. The lift operator ran out to help him.

“I’m okay,” he shouted to the kid, waving him away. “I’m fine.” The lift operator—a college boy with an eager, innocent face—stopped and stared at him. Look, it’s James Bond arriving to save the world. “Clear out!” Shaw yelled over the howling wind.

The kid backed away, then hurried to catch the next chair going down the mountain. Down to the base lodge, where there was a warm fire, Irish coffee, dry socks and perhaps a comely ski bunny with whom to cuddle. From up here, Shaw could not even see the foot of the mountain.

Shaw locked the heels of his boots down against the long, slender skis; now he had the leverage to make good turns on the sharp, steep curves just ahead. He stuck the tips of his poles deep into the packed snow—the wind buffeted against them, but didn’t send them sailing—and unzipped the cover of his weapon: a Heckler and Koch G-11 sniper rifle, complete with an integrated Starlight scope, looking like something from a science fiction movie. Good FBI equipment.

He checked the fifty-round clip, then slung it by its strap over his left shoulder and under his right arm. Standing up, yanking his poles out of the snow, Shaw paused to check his bearings. To his left, at the edge of the treeline, was the top of Summit Loop, leading around the mountaintop to the Administration Road trail which, in turn, led to the North Road cut-off trail connecting to Balance Rock Road. Somewhere along those steep, winding trails was Charles Weyler.

“Okay, Charlie,” he muttered. “Let’s go skiing.”

“Tell me about Charles A. Weyler.”

“You mean it isn’t in your files?”

“I want to hear what you have to say about him, please. For the record.”

“Okay. Charlie Weyler was a Soviet sleeper, employed by the GRU. Your typical Harvard MBA yuppie type, except that he decided on an original approach to making himself a millionaire before age thirty. We first found out about him when he paid a discreet visit to the Soviet consulate in Boston in May, 1984, where he apparently made an offer to sell his services to the Russians. They checked him out, found that he wasn’t doubling for us, and decided to take him up on his offer. They were interested in some work that a company called Biocybe Resources was doing, and they managed to …”

“Back up a step, please. What is Biocybe Resources and what has it been doing?”

“Hey, I know this is in your files already.”

“Please answer the question, Mr. Shaw.”

“Jeez … all right. Biocybe is a small company based at the Worcester Biotech Research Park which has been working in nanotechnology. Essentially, they’ve been developing a biochip. …”

“I don’t understand.”

“Sort of an organic computer chip. That is, a microchip which isn’t manufactured like a printed circuit, but grown in an organic culture, so that it resembles a human brain cell. Very advanced stuff. The point is, if something like this could be perfected and mass-produced, it would make computers smaller, faster, and cheaper to produce, and leave everything that we now call ‘state of the art’ in the dust.”

“Okay. Go on.”

“Well, Biocybe managed to produce a prototype of a biochip which it dubbed Ozymandias 88-F, or the Oz Chip for short. Since the Soviets have been lagging behind the West in computer technology for decades now, this is something they could really use. Charlie Weyler was its point man. He had been planted in the company as its marketing director and, when everyone was sure that the Oz Chip had been perfected to a certain point, they directed Weyler to steal the prototype and the plans.”

“And you were there to stop him.”

“I had been waiting for Weyler to make his move, yes.”

“As the field agent handling the case.”

“Yes. Of course.”

Shaw had been sitting in his Ford Escort just long enough to start getting bored when he spotted Charles Weyler leaving through the side exit of One Biotech Park and begin walking through the near-empty garage. The problem was, when Shaw got bored during stakeouts, he started to smoke again. Usually it didn’t matter, but this time it was a serious mistake.

He had found some stale Merits squirreled away in the glovebox and was fumbling with the lighter—again wondering how GM could put a microprocessor in the ignition system and still fail to make a dependable, half-decent cigarette lighter—when he glanced up and saw Weyler heading for the silver BMW CSi parked a few slots away. The BMW was virtually the only other car in the lot this Saturday afternoon; it had cross-country skis and poles fitted into the roof rack and an old Bush/Quayle sticker on the rear bumper. At that moment, as Shaw was looking up from behind the wheel with his stupid cigarette hanging out of his stupid mouth, Charlie Weyler turned his head and looked directly at him.

Weyler quickly looked away. He walked a few more steps, then abruptly he broke stride and bolted for his car.

“Aw, shit!” Shaw yelled. The unlit cigarette fell into his mouth as he scrambled to unbuckle his seat belt and throw open his door. By the time he was out of his car, Weyler had revved the BMW’s engine and was peeling out of his slot, sliding briefly on a patch of ice as he ripped out of the garage, heading for the industrial park’s exit and, beyond, the safety of the weekend traffic on Route 9.

Shaw ducked back into his Ford, wrenched the key forward in the ignition and slammed his foot down on the gas pedal to hot-start the engine, and grabbed the radio mike from under the dashboard. “Station Baker to all units!” he shouted into the mike. “Geronimo is on warpath nine! Repeat, Geronimo is on warpath nine!”

“And then you lost him. How did that happen?”

“The net we put up wasn’t right for the situation. There was a lot of weekend traffic on Route 9 … Spag’s traffic, we call it here … and the two units were in the wrong places. Tango, the car across the highway from One Biotech in a convenience store parking lot, couldn’t get across the four lanes in time. The other car, Delta, was in the breakdown lane up the street from the park. It was in the right place, but the timing was all wrong. Weyler spotted ’em, I guess, and swerved over into the passing lane. When those guys tried to cut him off, they got in a collision with a civilian who came barreling up the right lane. So Weyler managed to dry clean us and get away.”

“I guess you weren’t pleased.”

“Hell, no, I wasn’t pleased. If he hadn’t spotted me in the garage, we could have nailed him before he made the highway.”

“Then you admit fault for his escape?”

“That’s what it sounds like, doesn’t it? He pegged me. I could have had a bumper sticker which read ‘FBI Special Agent’ and it wouldn’t have been more obvious.”

“Take it easy, Mr. Shaw. This isn’t a formal case review. What made you think he was heading for Wachusett Mountain?”

“Well, it was a process of elimination. Weyler must have known that his cover had been blown. He was smart enough to know that we must have covered his drop zone at the Galleria, where he was to meet his handler that afternoon, and his condo in Holden …”

“You were trying to outguess him.”

“Uh-huh. I figured that he needed to somehow get rid of the Oz Chip prototype which he had swiped from the Biocybe lab. We didn’t know it then, but he also had copied onto a computer diskette the project notes for Ozymandias 88-F. He had to dump that stuff somewhere, which meant that he had to arrange an alternate drop with his handler. We knew also that he had a cellular telephone in his car, so he could get in touch with his handler.”

“Go on.”

“It was sort of dumb luck. I had spotted his cross-country skis on the roof-rack of his car. His dossier had already established that he was an expert skier, and we already knew that he had gone cross-country skiing in Rutland State Park that morning. What better way to drop the Oz Chip than to arrange a zone that he could reach by skiing to it? Some place his handler could reach as well, where they could make the hand-off with only a few people around? Well, there was only one place that he could get to in a hurry which met that description. …”

“Wachusett Mountain.”

“That’s right. Right off I-290, which he could reach from Route 9 and I-190.”

“Not a bad guess.”

“It didn’t suck, no.”

“But you didn’t take the weather into consideration, did you?”

“To tell you the truth, I didn’t even notice that it had started to snow.”

The young woman behind the counter of the ticket booth stared at the photograph of Charles Weyler for a moment, absently adjusting her wire-rimmed glasses. “Yes, I’ve seen him. He was here … um, about an hour ago.”

“Where did he go?” Shaw asked impatiently, his hands shoved in the pockets of his parka. “Did he buy a lift pass?”

“Yeah … wait a minute, no.” She thought it over. “No, I sold him a trail pass.”

“A trail pass? For the cross-country trails?”

“Yes, sir. I remember because he was carrying his own skis and poles.” Her eyes squinted as she sought to recall the memory. “And a blue gym bag, too. He looked like he was in a hurry. He went that way.” Leaning over the counter, she pointed to the beginning of the cross-country trail, just beyond the rental shop. “About an hour ago,” she repeated. “I’m not in any trouble, am I?”

“No, ma’am. Thanks for your help.” Shaw took the photo back and slipped it into his pocket, then turned and hurried back to the parking lot of the ski area. A cold wind snapped snow into his face, and icy slush was filling his shoes. He muttered obscenities under his breath and zipped his jacket up to his neck.

Brim, the Boston field office agent who had been in the Tango car which had been hung up in traffic during the botched interception on Route 9, was standing next to Weyler’s BMW, talking to one of the state police officers from the Holden barracks who had arrived at the scene. Two more FBI agents were working over the sleeper’s car: the doors, the trunk hatch, the hood, and even the gas tank cover were wide open as the cleaning crew methodically searched the vehicle. Under normal circumstances the BMW would have been hauled to the Springfield field office to be torn apart, with every loose piece of lint inspected and catalogued, but there simply wasn’t time for such painstaking work.

Men and women in multicolored ski tights and carrying downhill equipment sauntered past the BMW, transfixed by the activity until they were each shooed away by another state trooper. Brim saw Shaw trudging towards them, excused himself from the trooper, and shuffled over past the police cruiser parked behind Weyler’s car. “Good hunch, buddy. You got a cigarette?”

“Naw, I just quit.” Shaw stamped his feet in the snow to keep warm. “We’re still in a mess. The girl at the ticket booth …”

“Hey, Shaw! C’mere!” One of the cleaning crew, Kadrey, was crawling out of the BMW as they turned around. As Shaw hurried over, Kadrey held out a small plastic bag over the roof of the car. Shaw took the bag from his hand and peered inside. Within the bag was a bullet.

“Under the front passenger seat,” Kadrey said. “Forty-five. There’s some little scrapes on the sides that say it was loaded into a loose clip.”

Shaw gazed at the round. There were a number of different firearms which used clip-loaded .45 caliber ammo, from Saturday night specials to submachine guns, but the absence of a gun in the presence of a bullet meant one thing for certain. Charlie Weyler was armed.

“Things just got tougher,” Brim murmured, looking at the bullet. “Weyler must have gone to the summit. Either he’s up there, or he’s gone by now.”

Shaw gave back the baggie to Kadrey, turned around and walked off, Brim following him. “No. He got here about an hour ago and bought a trail pass,” he said, thinking aloud. “Maybe … perhaps Charlie was going to meet his GRU contact at the summit for the drop.”

Brim looked at him. “Then if Charlie’s on the trails …” He stopped and grinned. “That’s a big mountain. He couldn’t have gotten to the summit in an hour. And if no one is being let on the lifts, then we’ve got him. He can’t meet his handler, right?”

Shaw had stopped and was gazing up at the mountain. The light snowfall which had started when he was in Worcester was rapidly turning into a nor’easter. The last radio weather forecast he had heard had stated that massive storm fronts from both the Great Lakes and the Atlantic seaboard were converging over New England; already the storm was being predicted as being the worst since the blizzard of ’78. Low, sullen grey clouds were scudding across the sky, and already the summit was beginning to white out. Although the ski lifts were still running, to keep the cables from freezing solid and snapping, the runs were being closed. The ascending chairs were empty, and the red-jacketed ski patrollers were herding the last downhillers off the mountain.