Wildfire (4 page)

But what?

Henry Lightstone was very much aware that only six months ago he and the surviving members of his covert team had accidentally tripped across an illicit conspiracy—code-named Operation Counter Wrench— between government and big business to destroy the environmental movement, using as their primary weapon a lethal band of twelve international counterterrorist experts. The fact that he and his fellow agents had survived and persevered, in the face of overwhelming odds, Lightstone knew, had far more to do with luck, happenstance, and comradery than anything else.

But the Counter Wrench gang had been taken out, Lightstone reminded himself. Gerd Maas, Alex Chareaux, and Roy Parker were in custody. Buddy and Sonny Chareaux were dead. And so were the bureaucratic ringleaders, Reston Wolfe and Lisa Abercombie.

A clean sweep.

And now the team was working a brand-new covert operation, in a completely different part of the country, so there shouldn't have been anyone hanging around that they needed to worry about.

Or
at least nobody that we know anything about,
Lightstone corrected, remembering that there were still some loose ends regarding Abercombie and Wolfe's foiled conspiracy plans to ransack Greenpeace and Earth First!—not to mention several of the other major environmental activist groups—that he and his fellow agents hadn't managed to unravel yet. Such as the source of the millions of dollars that the two had used to fund their illicit operation. And the possibility that there were other conspirators still out there, waiting for a chance to renew their assault on the environmental movement or to take their revenge upon a small team of conspiracy-foiling agents.

But even taking all those issues into account, the fact that he was being followed while walking thorough the middle of Boston Common, in the state of Massachusetts, at the onset of a new covert investigation, was still extremely disturbing to Special Agent Henry Lightstone.

The reason being that as far as he and his fellow agents of Bravo Team were concerned, they had managed to pull off a classically clean penetration. After two months of preparatory groundwork, and five weeks of hands-on construction to link up the warehouse and safe house, not a single person had displayed anything more than a casual interest in their activities.

Or at least not until now,
Lightstone reminded himself as he continued to stroll slowly along the narrow asphalt pathway that wove through the historic Boston Common.

He could have stopped at one of the public phone booths and called for backup, but he didn't want to do that. Not until he got some answers.

He had already tried to expose the tag on the main streets in downtown Boston. But within minutes the streets had suddenly been filled with hundreds of people leaving work early, hurrying to their car or bus or train before the unexpected storm tied everything up. Everyone was walking fast, and hunching forward, and using hoods and scarves and umbrellas to protect themselves from the ice-cold gusts of wind and flurries of wet, sticky snowflakes, which meant he wouldn't be able to see their faces.

Lightstone quickly realized that his chances of exposing and identifying the pair on the basis of a spontaneous reaction to another one of his unexpected moves were minimal at best. They were alert now, and they wouldn't make that same mistake again. Not if they were as professional as they appeared so far.

So instead Henry Lightstone had begun working his way in the direction of the historic Boston Common, where there would be fewer innocent people around and better opportunities for both sides, if that was how it was going to go down.

Out in the open now and away from the protective buildings, Lightstone found himself exposed to the full force of the intensifying storm. Like the rapidly fleeing city work force, he too was forced to hunch forward and use the hood of his jacket in order to protect his head and face from the freezing wind and numbing cold. Which, in turn, made it difficult to keep an eye out for any precipitous movements by his supposed adversaries.

He was coming up on the statue that had been constructed in memory of the Boston soldiers and sailors who had died during the Civil War when he was suddenly aware that he was being stared at by a solitary figure, who had been standing in front of the statue, with his back to the asphalt pathway, before he suddenly turned around. A young man who, from all outward appearances, hadn't expected to encounter a raging snowstorm either when he decided to stand around in a light jacket, on an exposed hilltop, out in the middle of Boston Common.

Henry Lightstone watched the solitary figure carefully as he maintained his steady pace. And, in doing so, he noticed that the expression in the youthful face suddenly changed from hopeful expectation to visible and almost stricken disappointment.

Not the one you were expecting, am I?
Lightstone thought as he continued on past the now desolate figure, noting the youth's fair features, the ice-covered granny glasses, the black portable computer case clutched in one hand, and his thoroughly soaked tennis shoes. Poor
bastard, hope whoever it is you're looking for shows up pretty damn soon.

But then Lightstone immediately forgot about all that because he was coming up on the Park subway station, and he suddenly decided that a quick phone call might not be such a bad idea after all.

Larry Paxton, newly appointed assistant special agent in charge of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's reinstituted Bravo Team, a covert entity of the service's two-hundred-and-twenty-agent Division of Law Enforcement, had been growing increasingly worried by the minute. When the phone rang, he was pacing the bare wooden floor of the second-story loft that he and his fellow agents had converted into temporary living quarters pending their move to the newly created safe house.

Paxton whirled around and started toward the phone, but Mike Takahara was closer to the couch and beat him to it.

"Yeah?" Takahara paused and then smiled. "Henry? Where are you? . . . Oh, yeah? Well, it's about time you checked in. Larry's been wearing a path in the carpet for the last half hour, and he's about ready to drive us . . . what? Yeah, sure, hold on just a second."

"Where the hell is he, and what the hell's he doing?" Paxton demanded as he and Dwight Stoner and Thomas Woeshack stood around the couch, listening intently to the one-sided conversation. But the Japanese-American technical agent waved them off as he grabbed for a pen and paper.

"Okay, go ahead. Tremont to Avery to what? . . . Okay, yeah, I know where that is. Where do you want us?" He paused again. "You sure? How many are there?" Takahara paused again. "Okay, just watch yourself. We're on our way."

Paxton and Stoner were already reaching for their jackets and shoulder-holstered pistols when Mike Takahara, slightly overweight but still visibly muscular under his dark blue golf shirt, stood up from the couch.

"What's going on?" Thomas Woeshack, an Aleut Eskimo agent, and the youngest and least experienced member of the covert team, asked, having failed to recognize the critical words in Takahara's side of the phone conversation.

"Hopefully, nothing too serious," Takahara said as he and Woeshack quickly strapped on their own shoulder-holstered weapons. "Just Henry doing what he seems to do best."

"Yeah, what's that?"

"Acting like a human magnet for every little piece of trouble that happens to cross his path," the tech agent replied.

The alley that Henry Lightstone selected had a number of useful advantages.

First of all, it was entirely surrounded by two-story brick warehouses, most of which looked as if they'd been built in the early fifties. Secondly, about halfway in, the alley made a sharp ninety-degree angle to the left, so that the back half couldn't be seen from the street. And finally, the electrical wiring in the few remaining light fixtures over the few locked doorways had apparently either shorted out or simply rotted away long ago. As a result, the only light available in the rearmost and hidden section of the alley came from the diffuse cloud reflections overhead.

It was, by its very nature, a cold, dark, and foreboding place. And given its immediate proximity to the city of Boston's infamous Combat Zone, it was exactly the kind of place that streetwise residents and innocent tourists alike would have instinctively avoided like the plague.

But being neither a resident of Boston nor a tourist, Henry Lightstone continued walking until he was within fifty feet of the dead end. Then he stopped, turned around, stood in the middle of the alleyway, and waited.

It didn't take them long. And thanks to the echoing effects of the high brick walls, not to mention the decade-long accumulation of dirt, rocks, trash, and other miscellaneous debris scattered about on the cobblestone roadway, Lightstone heard them coming long before they appeared.

To Henry Lightstone's amazement, both men actually seemed to be startled by his sudden appearance, as though it hadn't occurred to either of them that they might actually be confronted in a dark alleyway by the object of their hunt.

Or
more likely, their surveillance,
he thought, deciding that in spite of their scroungy and menacing appearance, neither of these men looked much like a member of an opportunistic mugger team.

So what did you expect, that I was going to run blind into a dark alley and cower in a corner? Or that I was going to lead you right into the back door of the safe house? Christ, what the hell did they tell you guys about this deal? Or more to the point, what didn't they tell you?

But in spite of their visible surprise, both men recovered quickly.

"Well, well, well,
look
what we have here," the Hispanic-featured man said.

One of them was tall, black, heavyset, dark bearded, and dressed in heavy boots, blue jeans, a military surplus overcoat, and a dark watch cap. The other was of Hispanic origin, Puerto Rican, Lightstone guessed. Shorter by about six inches, lighter by a hundred pounds or so, and dressed almost exactly like his scowling companion, except that his jeans were tight and made from some kind of fake-aged gray-black denim. Both men were wearing tight black gloves, and the taller of the two was now holding what appeared at first to be a heavy bicycle chain in his right hand, except that Lightstone could see small bladelike protrusions poking out along the outer edge of the chain at about two-inch intervals.

For a brief moment it occurred to Henry Lightstone to wonder where a mugger in the city of Boston would have found a chain-saw chain.

The two men had positioned themselves in an angled line across the alley so as to block any escape. And since the taller one had deliberately placed himself in the background, Lightstone decided that the smaller Hispanic was probably going to turn out to be the designated talker.

"Hi," the covert agent responded.

"So wha'cha doin' here, man? You lost or something?"

"Must be." Lightstone shrugged. "I was looking for the subway. Guess I took the wrong turn," he added, staring calmly at the two men.

The Hispanic hesitated, appearing to be confused and uncertain as to what he was supposed to do next.

It was now absolutely clear to Henry Lightstone that these men hadn't been expecting this kind of response from their intended target at all.

So
what do you do now, follow instructions or wing it?
Lightstone thought, suddenly finding himself intrigued by some of the more interesting possibilities.

"Maybe you need some directions, huh?" the Hispanic said.

"Maybe."

The smaller man glanced over at his companion, apparently seeking and receiving some kind of reassurance. Then he continued. "You know what I think, man? I think you need directions real bad."

"You're probably right," Lightstone conceded. "Maybe you guys can help."

The smaller man grinned widely, exposing a significant gap between his front teeth. "Okay, that's more like it. So how much you willing to pay?"

"Oh, I don't know." Lightstone shrugged. "What's the going rate for directions around here? A quarter?"

"A
quarter
?" The Hispanic blinked and turned back to his companion, apparently unable to believe his ears. "You believe that, man? This guy gets himself lost in the Zone, like a friggin' dummy. And we offer to help, like a couple o' nice guys. And all he wants to fork out for all our trouble is two bits. Two lousy bits!"

The smaller man suddenly whipped his head around to face Lightstone again, only this time he held a wide-bladed knife out in his extended hand. Lightstone recognized it as a K-bar fighting knife of the type that had been issued to U.S. Marines in World War II: a well-made, multifunctional, double-edged fighting weapon. And in the hands of a trained killer, an absolutely deadly and frightening tool.

"You see this, man?" the Hispanic tracker snarled, stepping up closer to his seemingly unimpressed victim.

"Looks sharp." Lightstone nodded, watching the other man a little more closely now. "You want to be careful you don't cut yourself."

"What?"

"Go home to your girlfriends, guys," Henry Lightstone said softly, "before you get hurt."

The Hispanic's eyes seemed to bulge outward in a mixture of disbelief and rage. Uttering a savage growl, he lunged forward and slashed at Lightstone's face. Then he gasped in surprise when the federal agent almost casually deflected his attack with a sweeping forearm and locked his wrist into a tight double-handed grip.

Henry Lightstone was still watching the second member of the surveillance team when he twisted his assailant's wrist sharply, causing the Hispanic tracker to scream in agony as the knife clattered on the cobblestone driveway.

Maintaining the hold, Lightstone waited until the taller black man made his move, stepping in fast and whipping the chain-saw chain around in a rapid blur over his head. Then, using the leverage of the wrist-lock, the agent sent his cursing Hispanic assailant staggering backward and right into the downwardly sweeping arc of the lethal chain.

Realizing too late what was happening, the shorter man made a futile effort to protect himself with his broken wrist. But he was much too slow, and his partner's effort to pull back on his swing only made things worse. The chain-saw chain whipped across his face—tearing deep bloody gouges out of his cheek and hand—and he screamed again, dropping to his knees and rolling over on his side in agony.