CHAPTER FORTY

 

 

May 16, 2015

8:30 P.M.

McCall, Idaho

 

Julia could not believe how much better she felt after a shower, some hot chocolate, a doughnut, and fresh, warm clothes. She couldn’t remember being that cold in a very, very long time. There was a reason she liked Las Vegas so much. It was warm.

She sat next to Lott on the couch in the large suite. Annie sat in a cloth overstuffed chair and Doc had pulled up a chair from the small table and sat beside her.

Fleet sat at the small table near one wall, his laptop in front of him, his fingers seeming to not stop moving.

Agent Munn and Ben sat facing Lott and Annie. All of them had hot drinks and Julia was working on her second doughnut. Doc had ordered in pizza and it would be here shortly.

“So how come we’re not all panicked to catch Williams now?” Julia asked, looking around at the fairly relaxed group drinking hot beverages.

“Because he’s going to believe we think him dead and is heading out of the area,” Agent Munn said.

“And that’s the problem Williams has,” Doc said, smiling. “There are just very few ways out of this area.”

“Only three,” Fleet said, “and two I am convinced he would never take.”

“Three?” Julia said, surprised.

“Besides flying,” Fleet said, not looking up from his keyboard, “which we have covered, yes only three. The major highway outside the hotel here is the only north-south road in the state. It’s only two lanes, so that is two of the three ways. And about twenty miles to the east of here there is another road that leaves the highway and goes back toward Boise and Oregon.”

“He wouldn’t go that way,” Ben said, “and he wouldn’t go back toward Boise because too many people have the chance of recognizing him.”

“So he’s headed north,” Julia said.

“How long until he can actually get off that road in any real fashion?” Lott asked.

“The road merges into the highway coming in from Missoula, Montana,” Ben said. “About three hours from here.”

“If he left right after the explosion,” Fleet said, “He would be just over an hour along the road.”

“He would know he was putting himself into that bottleneck,” Annie said.

“He flat does not think we survived the explosion, or that he has anything to worry about,” Lott said. “He has steered us like cattle in chutes and believes there is no way we could ever be ahead of him.”

“So before we talk about how we find him,” Agent Munn said, “I think Ben needs to leave us.”

Ben nodded. “I completely understand, Agent Munn.”

She nodded and stood and Ben stood while Julia and everyone watched. She knew this was the right thing, but from the looks on Lott’s and Fleet’s face, it hurt them.

Agent Munn opened the door to the hallway where two of her agents stood. She indicated that Ben turn around. She was handed cuffs by one agent and she put Ben in cuffs, then nodded to the two men. “Watch him closely until this clears.”

Both men nodded.

Ben glanced back at the room. Julia could see the hurt in his eyes, but the strength as well. “I’m sorry for the part I played in this.”

“All of us were duped up to this point,” Lott said.

“You’ll be fine,” Fleet said, “and your family is in a safe place, so no worries there. This will be over soon.”

Ben went out the door and let the two agents take him down the hallway.

Agent Munn closed the door and came back and sat down. To break the silence she asked, “So how do we find Williams? That’s some stretch of road and even at this time of the evening there are going to be cars all along it.”

“We got him,” Fleet said, looking up from his computer and smiling. “He’s just passing through the little town of Riggins driving a pretty standard dark blue Ford sedan. And unless he really wants to trap himself up in dead-end roads along the River of No Return, he’s continuing on the main highway.”

“There is no real way off that road there,” Doc said, laughing. “River of No Return on one side, Hell’s Canyon on the other.”

“How did you do that?” Lott asked Fleet a half second before Julia could. “How did you find him?”

She was stunned that Fleet had been able to find Williams so easily, even with the limits on the road.

“Once I turned my people on Williams’ finances to look for money he was funneling away from his businesses, the trails went cold quick. We could find nothing,” Fleet said, smiling. “Everything looked as if he was going to kill himself in that building.”

“I’m not following you?” Julia said.

“Williams had his fingers and ownership in hundreds and hundreds of companies all over the world,” Fleet said. “And many, many of the companies were almost impossible to track back to him. He had many good people working for him who knew how to cover ownership tracks through offshore accounts and such.”

“But when you have a large web,” Lott said, sitting forward on the couch, “and suddenly there is a very black hole in the middle of the web, you know something is there, but not able to be seen.”

“Exactly,” Fleet said. “And in many of his shell companies, money tended to vanish into official and then not-so-official offshore accounts and then vanish completely.”

“I don’t want to know how you did any of this tracking,” Agent Munn said, shaking her head.

“No worry,” Doc said. “None of us but Fleet and his people understand any of it anyway.

Fleet laughed. “Not even so sure I do, to be honest. But we found a way to trace just one of those accounts and discovered another web, almost as large as the first web, with hundreds of companies, some standard, some shell, some holding companies, but with a different named spider at the core.”

“And all working with no contact at all with the other web?” Julia asked.

“Nothing but the money trails,” Fleet said. Then he hit a key on his computer and turned the laptop around.

Meet Jefferson Last.”

Lott was stunned. The image on the screen could be identified as Williams, maybe. The same eyes, the same basic smirk, but this man had silver hair combed back, and his cheekbones were higher and more pronounced and his nose was smaller.

“Oh, my,” Julia said.

“Williams after some surgery I’m sure,” Fleet said. “This picture was clearly Photoshopped. And there is no evidence anyone has ever seen Mr. Last. But one of his companies rented the car he is driving. And since it is a rental, there is a tracking signal on it. That’s how I know where he’s at exactly.”

“So how are we going to get him?” Julia asked.

Doc smiled at her. “I have just the plan.”

“As long as it doesn’t include a cold dive into a freezing lake,” Julia said, “I’m in.”

Annie and Agent Munn and Lott all completely agreed to that.