The Alberta Connection (33 page)

“We both know how to use these, so I don’t
think it is a good idea for your buddies to try to break in here.
Use whatever communication devices you have to tell your friends we
want the laptops.”

Ramona slowly reached for her walkie-talkie,
unlocked the send button, looked over at Mable, and sat on the edge
of the bed.

“I think they already know.”

Mable spun to look at Ramona and frowned. “We
don’t have much time. Tell your friends to bring us the laptops in
the next ten minutes.”

Ramona tossed the walkie-talkie to the center
of the bed. “Tell them yourself.”

Mable carefully picked up the device and
pressed the send button. She then began a rambling discourse on how
she would exchange the two women for the three laptops and safe
passage to the Canadian border. She shakily declared that if the
transfer was not completed in ten minutes, the two charming women
were going to die.

When Mable released the send button, all she
got was silence. She sat for a few minutes getting more and more
irritated and then grabbed the walkie-talkie. She screamed into the
device and placed it on the bed once more. Ramona quietly remarked
that Mable needed to press the send button to get the device to
operate. Mable grabbed the walkie-talkie again. She found the send
button, pressed it, and screamed into the device that they now had
eight minutes to give up the laptops.

When Mable released the send button, they all
heard the calm voice of Ryce coming from the walkie-talkie.

“Ma’am, I have personally looked into the
packs. I found no laptops. Perhaps you are mistaken.”

Mable was becoming more unhinged. She grabbed
the walkie-talkie again and screamed that she would show whoever
was talking to her which packs she wanted.

She stood and pointed her pistol at
Ramona.

“OK, sweetie, you and I are going to go get
the packs. Stand up.”

Ramona slowly stood and started toward the
door of the suite. When she got near the table where her Glock had
been placed, she appeared to slip and fall. As she went down, she
palmed her Glock.

Mable screamed at Ramona to get up. Ramona
slowly stood. She had managed to slide the Glock under her
shirt.

Mable instructed Ramona to walk to the
entrance door of the motor home, and no tricks. Ramona stepped
down, pushed the door open and then dived to the right. Mable
screamed again and tried to turn to return to the master suite, but
was hit by a taser. Ryce carefully entered the motor home, pulled
another taser from one of his cargo pockets, and silently walked
down the hallway to the master suite.

He carefully set up his mirror to get a look
inside the bedroom. When he was convinced he had seen everything in
the room, he looked in. Tanya was sitting with the AK-47 in her
lap, pointed toward the door where Ryce was standing. She smiled
and waved at Ryce.

When Ryce stepped into the room, Tanya stood
and threw her arms around him. He called down the hallway that
Tanya was OK. Ramona hurried to the master suite.

Tanya looked over at George Haskins.

“He died a couple minutes before Ramona
busted out. I think it was self-inflicted. He was chewing on
something right before he went limp. Mable was just trying to buy
some time to figure out what she was going to do. Check the pistol
she was carrying. It wasn’t cocked, and she didn’t even have a
cartridge under the hammer.”

Chapter 38

Several agents
began a complete inspection of the motor home. Tanya discovered a
composition notebook under the utensil tray. She held up one of the
forks from the tray. Food was still embedded between two of the
tines.

“Mable didn’t keep a tidy home.”

The composition book contained a record of
every time the Haskins had crossed the border. He included the
date, who or what had been taken across, where they had crossed,
and the money involved. Ryce quickly scanned the pages of the
notebook. The Haskins had used every border crossing from North
Dakota to Seattle.

It was soon clear that the Haskins motor home
was a vehicle used to move things across the border. However, was
it the only vehicle transporting secrets?

The rug on the kitchen floor covered a trap
door that led to a compartment between the motor home storage bins.
Only when the width of the vehicle was compared to the depth of the
bins could the difference be detected.

The hidden compartment was seventeen feet
long, thirty inches wide, and twenty inches deep. The sides and
bottom had been lined with foam. When Ryce crawled into the
compartment and the trap door was closed, it was very
claustrophobic. Ryce could only imagine the terror that was felt by
anyone being transported into or out of Canada.

After a short search, the team found a
movable wall in the master closet, accessible when someone rotated
a picture on the wall. The wall around the picture was severely
scratched. Ryce remembered the marks made by the china closet at
the cabin. Several AK-47s and three cans of ammo were found in the
cavity.

The carpet near the passenger seat was dirty
and crumpled. When Ramona lifted the carpet, she found a second
trap door. This was where Mr. Haskins had hidden all of the money
he had collected. It also contained two spiral bookkeeper’s
ledgers. They contained names, addresses, payouts, detailed
descriptions of the items that had been targeted, and the amount
Haskins had received. If Haskins was not the ringleader, he at
least knew who was running the show.

Everything that the team discovered, except
for weapons and ammo, was placed on the dining table. The collected
weapons were placed in a locked gun case John had obtained
somewhere. No one discovered where John had gotten the gun
case.

Ryce looked over the table. It was now
stacked with seven composition books, three spiral notebooks, two
ledgers, and the three back packs brought from the Suburban. Ryce
chuckled as he read one of the ledgers. Haskins was keeping his
people on a short leash. When an assignment was completed, only
half of the contract was paid. When the next assignment was
completed, the holdback from the previous assignment was paid, plus
half of the new assignment. Ryce totaled up the holdbacks. Haskins
had a slush fund of almost nine million dollars. Ryce wondered
aloud if Haskins had a decent interest rate.

Tanya laid out the contents of the backpacks
on the kitchen counter. There were no tags on the packs and no
identification contained in any of them. Among the three packs,
Tanya found only a side arm, two boxes of shells for an AK-47, a
pair of gloves, three MREs, and a bag of tortilla strips. O2
suggested it was sinful to have a bag of strips and no salsa.
Obviously, the three men had not intended to be on the trail for
long.

The agents who had flown with Phil to the
trailhead to pick up the bodies reported no identification on the
bodies they had picked up. Photos taken of the three had been
submitted to both Mark and Doug. Neither had reported any success
after four hours. Ryce smiled. Perhaps his expectations were a
little too high.

Ryce flipped through the border crossing
record book. If the page numbering was correct, there were
fifty-three pages in this notebook. Ryce did a quick mental
calculation. With twenty entries per page, Haskins could have
crossed the border one thousand and sixty times. Was that really
possible?

Ryce returned to the first page of the
notebook. Haskins’ initial border crossing had occurred in 2002.
Ryce did a quick calculation on his smart phone. Perhaps it was not
unreasonable for Haskins to cross the border sixty to eighty times
a year. Ryce made a mental note to see if he could obtain access to
a database of border crossings, if there was one.

As Ryce scanned the first four pages of the
crossing book, he noticed that many of the names were duplicates.
Ryce pulled a red pen from his pocket, considered the notebook for
a moment, and replaced the pen in his pocket.

He looked over at Tanya, who was stretched
out near the front passenger seat of the motor home checking under
the dash with an LED flashlight. “Do you know where my laptop ended
up? I know I brought it with me.”

Tanya laughed. “I thought you had your laptop
on one of those wrist chains. I have never seen you without your
laptop.”

She stood, and walked out of the motor home.
Three minutes later, she returned, carrying two laptop cases.

As she opened her laptop, she smiled. “I have
been thinking that there is a camera on my laptop, and maybe some
pictures of this stuff would be good. Thank you for the idea.”

Ryce walked over to where she had deposited
his laptop and pulled the laptop from the case. As soon as he had
the computer running, he frowned.

“I must have been running this thing too long
on the battery. I hope this motor home has a generator, or we run
an extension cord from John’s party Hummer.”

After an hour of fiddling with the motor
home’s generator, it magically started running.

Ryce began to build a master spreadsheet of
the names of who crossed the border and how many times they
crossed. Within an hour, Ryce had an answer to his question.

Only twenty-eight names were involved in the
border crossings. A few of the names had crossed as many as fifty
times. Sometimes they went into Canada, sometimes they came out.
Ryce chuckled. He now had a new project. He could write a program
to track the names, and when they crossed. Ryce chuckled. He had so
much free time to fill.

Ryce compared the spreadsheet names with the
nine names he had for the killers at the cabin. He scanned the list
twice. He was astounded that none of the names of the border
crossers corresponded to the names he had compiled for the killers.
How could that be?

Tanya noticed that Ryce was sitting at the
dining table with his doodle pad. She sat next to him and glanced
at the pad. It was empty. She tested his forehead with the back of
her hand.

“Doesn’t feel like a fever.”

The remark elicited a small smile from
Ryce.

“I checked the border crossing records, but
none of the names I had for the cabin killers showed up. And, we
don’t have any identification for the three that killed Dianne.
Yes, I know that four hours isn’t a fair test of Mark’s search
program, but I guess I was hoping I’d get some answers.”

Tanya wrapped her arms around Ryce’s neck.
“John has the bar-b-que fired up at the party Hummer. Let’s go grab
a steak.”

As Ryce and Tanya exited the motor home, he
noticed that several Montana Highway Patrol officers were keeping a
close watch on it. Since the motor home was only two campsites from
John’s party Hummer, Ryce could see more Montana officers were
among those at John’s site.

John had moved several picnic tables to his
campsite. The tables were occupied with agents Ryce recognized from
the pursuit of Dianne. He and Tanya picked up trays, walked to the
serving table, filled their trays, and found two empty seats.

John finished some details at the bar-b-que,
walked over to where Ryce was sitting, sat down, and placed a set
of keys on the table.

“Those keys fit one of the Hummers from O2’s
precinct. Press the alarm fob until you find out which one. Ramona
reserved some of the cabins here at the campground for those who
are staying to investigate the motor home. The request you
submitted to take the motor home to Idaho has been approved. Give
me a call when you are done with the motor home. I have a company
reserved to haul it back to Idaho.”

John paused to speak with one of the Montana
officers and then turned back to Ryce.

“You have done very well. And, I got to play
in my party Hummer for almost a week. I am driving back to
Pendergast City tomorrow morning in a convoy of three. Phil is
flying back in two days, or as soon as he can get the equipment we
brought to Montana back into the BBJ. I think Phil is negotiating
to keep a second Chinook. I hope it isn’t Puff the
Mini-Dragon.”

John smiled at Tanya and then walked back to
Marge near the bar-b-que. Ryce looked at Tanya.

“You’ll like the cabins here. I stayed in one
for three days when they pulled me out after my first insertion at
the cabin.

“That insertion was a nightmare. Matt was
given the reins of the Great Falls office about two days before the
GPS for the cabin showed up on the cell phone. He did not know
anyone in Great Falls, and I had been in Billings only about a
week.

“When I flew into Great Falls, Matt didn’t
have anyone to pick me up at the airport. I was really glad you
showed up at the airport.”

Tanya chuckled. “I was walking down the
corridor and he grabbed me. I was glad to get out of the office for
an hour. I had just had a big fight with Brian.”

Ryce smiled. “That was the first time we met.
But, for less than an hour. And I remember you were really pissed.
I was ultimately dropped off in the forest about five miles from
the cabin. I wasted two days hiking around to get an idea of where
I was. Three weeks later, I was told to terminate the
observation.

“The retrieval team picked me up OK, but the
van broke down about a quarter mile from here. I stayed in a cabin
while Matt decided what assets he had to come get me. He didn’t
have any.”

Ryce chuckled.

“The cabin was nice. The two agents that
picked me up were not so nice. One quit the JBTF when Matt refused
to send something to pick us up the first day. The other agent
sliced two of the tires on the van. I was happy to sit around the
cabin and think about you.”

Tanya looked closely at Ryce. “I didn’t know
you were thinking about me then.”

Ryce pulled her close and kissed her. “I
started thinking about you on the ride from the airport. Let’s go
check into our cabin.”