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“You mean kill them.” Villaume hated the way desk jockeys liked to come up with antiseptic terms like dispose and eliminate. Call a spade a spade.
Cameron shrugged. “I see no other choice.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.” Villaume stared at Cameron. He was really beginning to question his judgment in letting this man come along. “You still haven’t told me what you want to do with the two targets. Are we going to kill them right away, or do you want to talk to them?”
Cameron hadn’t thought that one through yet. “I still haven’t decided. As you’ve repeatedly pointed out, it would be nice to avoid a scene. It would, in fact, be best if they just disappeared forever.”
“Can your person at the airport take them out if need be?”
“I gave him instructions to follow from a very discreet distance, and only as far as the exit to Evergreen.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
Cameron stared back at him, not entirely enthralled with Villaume’s abruptness. “‘No’ is the answer to your question.”
“Well, if that’s the case, I would let them get settled into their house, listen to what they have to say, and then take them just before sunrise.”
Cameron nodded. “That’s what I was thinking.”
Villaume grinned slightly. You are so full of shit, he thought to hiself. You’ve never had an original idea in your life.
Cameron saw the smirk on Villaume’s face, and he didn’t like it. The man needed to learn to respect his employers a little more. When this whole thing was over, he just might have to look into eliminating the Frog and his people. Duser would probably do it for half the normal fee. Duser hated the Frog as much as or more than Cameron did. The Professor grinned back at Villaume and decided a phone call to Duser would tie things up nicely.
AT THE COLORADO Springs airport, Scott Coleman, Kevin Hackett, and Dan Stroble were loading their gear into a rented silver Chevrolet Suburban. Hackett had made arrangements to leave the Learjet overnight and have the tanks topped off. As with the group that had landed two hours before them, everything was paid for with credit cards that did not bear their real names.
Hackett was the detail man and always had been. Back on SEAL Team Six, when Coleman needed to overcome a unique logistical problem, Hackett’s talents were usually called on. He had the patience and the ability to deal with the minutest of details, whereas Coleman was much more suited to deal with the big picture. It was a relationship that had served them very well over the years. There were times, however, when Hackett’s attention to detail bordered on whining.
With everything loaded up, the three former SEALs climbed into the Suburban and left the airport. It took about fifteen minutes to get through the Springs, and then they were on Interstate 25, driving with the rest of the traffic at eighty miles an hour. Stroble, who had spent a lot of time in the area, was driving the SUV. He had explained to the others that it was better to take the Interstate up to Denver and cut over than to take the winding Highway 67 through the foothills.
Hackett was in back pecking away at his four thousand dollar laptop. The computer had a tiny digital phone built in and could access the Internet without a hard line. One of his great assets was his computer skills. Hackett liked to say there was very little you couldn’t find over the Internet. Instead of having to stop at a convenience store to buy a map of the Evergreen area and risk getting caught on video, he could simply go on-line and find all the information they needed. Within five minutes, he had printed out eight pages of information on a tiny portable printer the size of a rolling pin.
Hackett handed the sheets to Coleman and went to work on his next project. As he pecked away at the keys, he asked for the third time since leaving Baltimore, “Why did Stansfield call on us instead of using someone within the Agency?”
Coleman lowered the sheets and stared out the front window of the truck. “You know the answer to that, Kevin.”
Stroble was hunched over the steering wheel, trying to get a good look at the sky. Weather in the mountains was a tricky thing. It could be seventy and sunny one minute and thirty and snowing the next. Glancing at the rearview mirror, he said, “If you’ve got a problem, state it, but you’re starting to get on my nerves, Kevin.”
This is how conversations went between Stroble and Hackett. Coleman barely noticed it anymore, he’d been around them for so long. They were like brothers. One minute, they could be throwing punches, and the next, they could be sharing a beer and laughing. They hadn’t swung at each other in a while, but they still got in some pretty heated arguments. The two had been best friends since entering Basic Underwater Demolition School with the SEALs twelve years earlier. They had been paired up as swim buddies during the grueling sixteen-week course that was designed to weed out all but the most devoted. Sleep deprivation, hazing, torturous runs on sandy beaches, and freezing midnight swims were all part of an elaborate testing process to find the toughest warriors. When the real shooting started, quitting wasn’t an option.
“What’s bothering me”—Hackett pushed his round glasses up on his nose—“is that I don’t think this is just some milk run. I think they were doing something outside official channels and it went wrong.”
“No shit, Sherl
ock,” Stroble replied. “The man wouldn’t have called on us otherwise.” Hackett could really be an old woman sometimes.
“What you’re missing is when things go wrong, they like to cover their tracks. Today we are the people who are sent to fix this problem; tomorrow we might be the problem.”
“What in the hell is that supposed to mean?” asked Stroble.
Hackett kept typing. “We don’t know what the Jansens were doing, but you can bet if it involved Iron Man, it was some serious shit. Some shit that didn’t go off the way they planned it. When that happens, our beloved Culinary Institute of America has a history of making people disappear.”
“You’re paranoid,” scoffed Stroble.
“That’s what you said that time in Libya.”
Libya was a bad memory that none of them liked to conjure up. Stroble clutched the steering wheel and mumbled, “You’re paranoid every time we run an op.”
Hackett hesitated and then replied in an icy tone, “That’s bullshit, and you know it.” It was all he had to say. The two men in the front seat were well aware of Hackett’s sixth sense.
