It was as if I were back in that room, looking at those two young people bloodied and dead on the floor, their power cords still plugged to the wall.
Joe said, “Chrissy and Bud hadn’t overheard any information about the defector’s travel plans. I was on the way up to check in with them, maybe wrap it up for the day— but the elevator took a long time to get down to the lobby floor. When it arrived, everyone standing around piled in. That car must have stopped on every floor.”
Joe ran a hand over his face and seemed to be back in the moment when his operation had come crashing down.
“It was all over by the time I got to the fourteenth floor. The kids were dead in 1418. Alison didn’t answer the door to 1420. I must’ve missed her by minutes, or seconds. Otherwise, she probably would have killed me, too. I learned later that Chan was dead. If my theory is right, she was shutting down her undercover job for us and cauterizing loose ends.”
“But why would she have changed sides, Joe?”
He shrugged. “I can think of a dozen maybes: payback for some long-held grudge, or she got an offer she couldn’t refuse. She’s crazy enough to have done it for the thrill.”
“She might have killed Shirley Chan,” I said.
“OK, yeah. It makes sense if she was mopping up. She wouldn’t take the chance that Chan was playing her and telling everything to his wife. Another sickening theory.”
Joe stopped talking. He turned up the heat, adjusted the airflow, and took a pull from his bottle of water.
My head was throbbing from all this information. I was trying to process it all, thinking that if Muller was a double agent—if it was true—then Joe felt responsible for everything Muller had done. Or maybe Joe, too, was readying himself to cauterize loose ends of his own.
Christ. No one knew where I was. Was I putting my trust in a man I didn’t really know? I shook my head, trying to dislodge that terrifying thought.
Joe said, “I know. It’s unbelievable, and I haven’t confronted her. Maybe I’ve got her all wrong.”
I said, “So why did she come all the way out here?”
“If she’s gone over to the Chinese, BC is not a bad jumping-off point to China. And that’s all I’ve got.”
Joe’s theory had the ring of truth, but was it true?
I asked him—actually, I blurted it out.
“Joe, are you trying to catch Muller, or save her?”
“What do you think?” he said.
CHAPTER 89
THE SIGN AT the side of the road read SQUAMISH.
What little I knew about this town came from an article I’d read in the Chron’s travel section a few years ago about the annual Bald Eagle Festival. I remembered that the area was spread out over a grid of mini-malls and woodsy homes with gorgeous scenery tucked between mountains. Heavily wooded roads connected neighborhoods, and tumbling rivers bisected them, but right now, the scenery was beside the point.
It was lights out in Squamish and there was near zero visibility at oh-dark-hundred.
As we sped through the town, I glanced at Joe’s face, lit by the dashboard lights. I wished I could read his mind, but going by what he’d said, at the center of the crisscrossing facts, suppositions, and violent deaths was Alison Muller. She was clever, manipulative, and, in my opinion, psychopathic.
Was I was finally going to see her for myself? What would happen? Who would still be standing when the sun came up in three hours? Would I see my daughter again?
I had to. I had to stay alive for Julie.
Joe drove the Audi along a two-lane road flanked by forests of black evergreens. There was a bit of a clearing up ahead on our right, and as we approached, he dropped his high beams down to parking lights. I saw a wood-shingled house with a sagging roof and the flash of our lights reflecting off taillights at the end of the driveway.
Joe said, “She’s staying there.”
He continued past the house, and fifty yards down the road, I glimpsed two vehicles parked on either side in deep shadow: a metallic Japanese two-door and a rusty Ford pickup.
“Those are ours,” he said.
Joe tapped the GPS and a new address popped up on the screen. He took a right turn down a dirt road and another right onto a highway through Brackendale. A half mile later, a lighted VACANCY sign flashed outside a Best Western to our right.
Joe turned into the motor court, pulled the car around to the back, and parked between two cars in front of the rooms.
He switched the engine off and used his phone.
“Slade, it’s Molinari. I’m outside.”
The suite was on the ground floor and looked modern and fairly new. Three men were sitting around a TV watching CBC News without sound. They were regular-looking guys of medium height and weight, one balding, another with coarse red hair, the third pale with glasses; he looked like a guy with a desk job.
Christopher Knightly, the big straw-haired man I’d met for the first time in my apartment, was in the kitchenette, popping the tab on a beer can.
He was surprised to see me and not in a good way.
Joe said, “Knightly, you’ve met Lindsay. Everyone else, this is my wife, Sergeant Lindsay Boxer, SFPD, Homicide Squad. I asked her to come because she’s intimately involved in the Four Seasons murders. She was at the crime scene. She’s also the lead investigator in that takedown op on Stockton. So this is her case, too.”
Knightly put the can down hard on the counter and said, “Christ, Joe, talk about breaking protocol. No offense, Sergeant. This isn’t San Francisco and this isn’t your homicide case. Muller’s not just a killer. She could well be a traitor, not just to us, but to the country, for God’s sake.”
“Chris. It’s my decision,” Joe told him, “and my ass if things go wrong.”
The man wearing the glasses got up to shake my hand, introduced himself as Agent Fred Munder, while the redhead got into Joe’s face, saying, “Are you serious? It’s not just about you. Our butts are on the line, too.”
“It’s done, Geary,” Joe snapped. “Let’s get on with it.”
I used the bathroom, and when I came back Agent Munder was saying to the others, “There’s been no activity for three hours. Muller is still at the house. Looks like she’s in for the night.”
“She was always a little too sure of herself,” said Knightly. “Smart, yes, I’ll give her that. But she’s arrogant and, I’m gonna say, twisted. She just loves all the attention she gets from men. Did you ever ask yourself, Joe, why she’s so eager to climb into bed with the enemy?”
It was a dig at Joe, and if he was meant to answer this question, he didn’t get a chance. Knightly’s phone chirped. He grabbed it from his shirt pocket and said, “Yeah?” He listened for a second or two, then said, “Got it. Stay with her.”
He clicked off and announced, “Muller’s on the move. Something’s gone wrong. She’s in one of three cars heading north. Was she tipped off? Who did she get to this time?”
Knightly was looking at Joe, and because I was standing next to Joe, he was also staring at me.
CHAPTER 90
THERE WAS A quick shorthand discussion between Joe and the other men in the team. Routes and a timetable were roughed out. Then the motel room emptied. Knightly and a partner drove out of the lot first. Munder and his wingman took the second car, and Joe and I took the third position out to the Sea to Sky Highway.
I could imagine that this roadway must be gorgeous in daylight, but the empty two-lane highway was unlit, and the impenetrable woods to the left and the steep, treed cliffs rising a hundred feet straight up on our right seemed menacing.
Joe’s phone was in a holder attached to the vents in the dash, and he was in ongoing communication with Knightly. Knightly was also on the phone with the two CIA cars ahead of us, the truck and the sedan that had been following Muller’s convoy from the moment they left her safe house.
Word came down the line that Muller’s three cars had split up. Knightly’s voice crackled over the speaker.
br />
“They made us, goddamn it. We don’t know which god-damned car she’s in.”
New plans were hatched, and Knightly reported to Joe that our team had now also been split, assigned different routes with hopes that someone would locate Alison Muller’s car.
Joe punched coordinates into the GPS and stepped on the gas. The car leapt forward, and Joe drove fearlessly, hugging curves and speeding at eighty through blackness and dark shades of gray.
I was frankly scared out of my mind, watching the needle bounce around the dial as we shot through the wilderness. Joe was gunning it over ninety when our headlights flashed on a sign for Whistler Resort.
Joe spoke over the phone to Knightly. “We’re passing Whistler now. On track to that airfield in Pemberton.”
More conversation ensued, Knightly saying, “I’ve notified the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. If we don’t catch up with her shortly, we’ll see you at the airfield.”
Joe slowed to a steady seventy miles per hour, and when an intersection came up on our right, he whipped around to make the turn too fast. The car fishtailed on the empty roadway, then regained traction, and we headed east and picked up speed. Starlight and a sliver of a crescent moon revealed the ghostly shapes of trees looming alongside the road and a glimpse of the Lillooet River.
Joe glanced at the GPS map, said to me, “Hold on,” and took the turnoff to Airport Road at near sixty.
I was holding on, but the Audi’s wheels hit a rut. The steering wheel bucked under Joe’s hands and the car slewed hard to one side, then the other. I may have screamed.
Knightly was on speaker and he was saying, “We’ve lost her.”
The word her was just out of his mouth when the connection shattered into squawks and static hissing.
Joe yelled, “Knightly! Knightly, can you hear me?”
No, he couldn’t. We had lost our connection with our lead car and had no idea where in the world Alison Muller was.
“Well, this is just perfect,” said Joe.
And then, just ahead of us, another turn branched out under overhead lines. Joe took the turn at way too fast and our tires slid on gravel. The car rocked onto two wheels; then, as before, the tires grabbed and we shot on ahead under an endless, gunmetal-gray sky.
CHAPTER 91
AS WE TURNED onto the airport road, the Coast Mountains, which had formed a forested and impenetrable wall off to our right, were now dead ahead. In front of us and as far as we could see was flat meadowland, rectangular in shape, like five football fields placed side by side and divided by a ten-foot-wide rut of a road.
As we took that dirt road, our headlights hit a cluster of lightweight aluminum sailplane trailers parked haphazardly up ahead and to our left. Peering into the dark, I could just see a small airplane hangar at the far end of the road and off to the right. I could make out several cars to the right side of that hangar, their headlights illuminating a pair of small, stationary airplanes on a landing strip. The runway appeared to be at an angle to the hangar, heading east-west and parallel to the mountains.
Joe doused our lights, eased his foot off the gas, and slowed the car to a crawl.
“That’s got to be her,” he said. “See if you can raise Knightly.”
I reached over to the phone and pressed the Redial button, but as before, there was only static.
I clicked off, then tried again.
I heard bursts of Knightly’s voice, and I shouted, “We’re at the airfield. They’re here.”
Only crackling came over the speaker.
“You’re breaking up. Please repeat,” I said, but the connection failed again.
Joe muttered, “It wasn’t supposed to go down like this.”
As I understood it, the original plan was to surround Muller’s safe house, call her out, and bring her in. This situation had no boundaries. Not even the sky was the limit.
Joe slowed the Audi, and a handful of people exited the cars parked by the hangar. For a moment, they were frozen in our high beams: four Asian men, a hulking white man, and the woman who had to be Alison Muller. She and the hulk ran toward one of the planes, which looked to be a de Havilland Beaver. I knew it to be a sturdy bush plane.
At the same time, the Asians, now positioned behind their vehicles, opened fire.
Joe wrenched the wheel hard to the left and stepped on the brakes, and the Audi skidded in the grass before coming to a stop in the midst of the small trailers. I had my 9mm Glock in my hand, a solid and dependable service gun but no match for the automatic-weapon fire ripping across the meadow, pinging like a hailstorm into the trailers’ aluminum hulls.
It was riskier to turn and run than it was to stand our ground and fight. I’m a good shot, even under pressure.
I was ready.
CHAPTER 92
I FELT UNREASONABLY invincible.
Even then, I knew that what felt like courage was an adrenaline surge fueled by present danger and all of the fear, confusion, and rage I’d repressed over the last weeks.
Joe yelled at me, “Stay in the car!”
Too late for that. My loaded gun was in my hand and my feet were on the ground. I crouched behind a trailer, which was all that stood between me and the people who were strafing us with automatic-weapon fire.
I didn’t have a death wish. I just didn’t expect to die. I was rationalizing. We were thirty yards from the shooters. Everyone was firing into the dark.
Joe said, “I don’t like our odds.”
Then he bounded out of his side of the car and took a position at the butt end of the trailer I was using as a barrier at the front. We aimed and fired on the shooters and reloaded.
When there was a momentary break in the gunfire, Joe yelled, “Alison, give it up! The cops are on the way. No one needs to die. Put down your gun.”
Muller laughed. It was a lovely laugh, both throaty and merry.
“You’re too funny,” she called back.
I saw the flash of Muller’s blond hair as she sprang out from behind a car in a crouch. Her bodyguard followed, the two of them running for the open hatch of the closest plane. My attention was on Muller, but there was something about that bodyguard that rang a tinny bell. I knew him, but I couldn’t place him at all.
And I didn’t have time to think about it.
We had to stop Muller from boarding that plane.
Joe fired into the narrowing space between Muller and the aircraft, and her bodyguard pulled her back into cover behind a car. Joe yelled, “This is a mistake, Alison!”
And then the leading character in this long-running nightmare leaned over the top of her vehicle and fired a long burst of bullets, spraying left, then right across the trailers.
There was a split-second pause in the gunfire, and Muller and the big man made another dash toward the plane. Sighting her, I took aim, followed her with my muzzle, and fired.
Muller jerked and flailed before she fell to the ground.
Her bodyguard called her name and went to her, frantically trying to help her up. But she got to her knees and shook him off as she struggled to her feet.
My shot had gotten her in the back. She could only be alive if she was wearing a vest, and even then, given the angle of my shot, she was lucky to have survived.
Part of me was relieved that I hadn’t killed her.
I wanted to talk to her, and I wanted to throw her in jail. But at the moment, Muller was armed and at large and bullets were flying at us again from her direction.
CHAPTER 93
JOE WAS RELOADING his gun when I saw four sets of headlights bumping over the rutted road toward the hangar. The cars drove past us and formed into a rough semicircle twenty-five yards away from the building and Muller’s crew. I heard Knightly shouting, ordering people to drop their weapons, and he had plenty of gunpower to back him up.
And then Alison Muller stepped out from between two cars with her hands in the air.
“Hold your fire. I’m unarmed!” she shouted.
&nb
sp; She was walking toward the headlights in surrender pose, her bodyguard beside her, when one of the Asian men in Muller’s crew aimed his gun—at her. Her bodyguard yelled, shoved, and threw himself between Muller and the shooter in one movement. They both dropped to the ground.
In that moment, I recognized the bodyguard. But I didn’t have even a second to process the thought because the man who had fired on Muller and missed aimed at her again.
Before he could get off his second shot, Knightly fired and dropped him, and in the same moment, Muller got up off the ground.
Seeing Joe, she called, “Joe, Joe! Don’t shoot!”
She ran toward him and he lowered his gun.
Just then, I became aware of the waffling sound of helicopters coming in from under the lee of the mountain range, flying across the meadow toward the hangar, two choppers beaming light down on the airfield.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police had arrived. The odds had decidedly shifted in our favor. My heart lifted as one of the choppers hovered near the de Havilland and landed in front of it, blocking the runway. There was more engine racket as the second helicopter cut off the Cessna’s escape path as well.
The din was deafening and the rotor wash swept the field, blowing up dust. I turned away from the choppers, and when I opened my eyes, I saw Joe and Alison in a stunning tableau.
I hadn’t heard what Joe had said to her, but clearly Muller had gotten the message. His gun was aimed at her head. And Alison, her blond hair whipping across her face, stood absolutely still with her hands in the air.
CHAPTER 94
DAWN WAS CASTING a cinematic glow over the remains of the firefight. Airplane and chopper pilots were getting out of their aircraft. Munder and Knightly took the three men left standing into custody and stepped around the dead bodyguard. But all of that was in the background.