The Third Option

chapter 12

Peter Cameron was having his doubts about calling on Villaume. The man was a little too independent for his liking. He was right about Duser, though. What carpet bombing was to air strikes, Duser was to black ops. The man and his people liked to bring a lot of firepower to the party and weren't afraid to use it. Villaume, although he was very adept at keeping a low profile, presented an entirely different problem. He lacked loyalty, and not just to his adopted country but also to his faithful employer of thirty years  -  the CIA.

Cameron looked out the front window of the rented van and watched the road. It was a quarter to five in the evening, and the afternoon sun was throwing long shadows off the peaks of the mountains. The van was backed into a spot near the office of the Buffalo Bill Motel. It was a quaint twelve-room motel on the outskirts of Evergreen, Colorado. Evergreen was a beautiful town in the mountains forty minutes due west of Denver. It was surrounded on all sides by huge hills that anywhere other than the Rockies would have been referred to as mountains. A half dozen creeks sliced through the hills from all sides and met in the middle of town. In the last decade, Evergreen had fought a battle that towns just like it had fought across the nation. Multimillion-dollar homes were being thrown up and golf courses developed. The place now sported four coffee shops and one of the nicest post offices in the country. The old-time locals were torn between increased wealth, provided by all of the dollars their new neighbors threw into the town, and the loss of their serenity.

Peter Cameron could care less about any of this. He was waiting in the van as Villaume had instructed. Villaume was inside the manager's office taking care of things, and he had told Cameron on no fewer than three occasions that he wasn't to leave the van. Cameron was getting sick of being treated like a neophyte. He had been in the intelligence business for almost as long as the Frog. Granted, he didn't have as much practical field experience, but it wasn't as if this was rocket science.

Villaume had split the group into two upon arriving in Colorado Springs. A van and a Jeep Cherokee had been rented from National Car Rental with the aid of false IDs and credit cards. He and Cameron had driven up in the van, and Mario Lukas and Mary Juarez had taken the Jeep. Lukas and Juarez were up in the mountains right now scouting out the Jansens' A-frame. If they saw anything unusual, they were to report in right away; otherwise, they were to set up the surveillance equipment and go to dinner. At no time did Villaume want anyone to see the four of them together.

The Jansens' flight wasn't due until nine, so they had plenty of time to get things ready. Villaume came back out to the van with keys in hand and moved the vehicle down to the far end of the motel. The two men grabbed some of the equipment and moved it into the room. Cameron dropped his stuff on one of the beds and took a look around. The floor was covered with ugly seventies orange shag carpeting, the bedspreads were a shiny rust color and looked to be made of some highly flammable fabric, and wagon wheels served as headboards for the two twin beds. The room's art consisted of a cheap print of Buffalo Bill and an ashtray shaped like a six-shooter.

Villaume popped one of the case's clasps and said, "It ain't the Ritz, but it'll do." After taking out a detailed map of the area, he unfolded it and stuck it to the wall with four thumb tacks. Next, he popped open two metallic briefcases and readied the equipment. Mario and Mary were to set up four directional parabolic microphones and a digital camera. Mary had also come up with the idea to set up a microwave trip-wire. The Jansens, like most people in their line of work, had chosen their lair carefully. It was near the top of the mountain with only one home above it. Their house sat a good hundred yards off the main road. Mary Juarez was going to set up the invisible tripwire twenty yards in on the Jansens' driveway. If anyone decided to make a visit, they'd know.

Villaume looked back at the map after the equipment was powered up. Pointing to it, he said, "They picked 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 heat- ed 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, Sherlock," 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.

Coleman turned sideways and looked at Hackett questioningly. He had seen a lot of weird stuff in the thirty-nine years he'd been alive. Most of it as a SEAL. Some of it he could explain, but much of it was beyond the realm of proven science. How one warrior could walk through a dense jungle and literally smell an ambush before the team walked into it was inexplicable. Hackett was one such individual. As a leader, Coleman had learned to respect these intuitions.

"Talk to me."

Hackett shrugged his shoulders. "I've been getting the willies... like I've lived through all of this already, but I know I haven't. I've never been to Evergreen, but I know what it looks like. I've never been to the Jansens' house, but I know what it looks like."

"Like it was in a dream?"

"Yeah."

"What else?"

"Something bad is going to happen at that house. I don't know what, but something bad is going to happen."

Stroble grimaced and looked out across the landscape. "Shit." The word was not uttered mockingly but with dread of what lay ahead.

Coleman nodded at Hackett and said, "All right. We'll play this cool. We'll take it real slow and scout things out before we move. If you're still getting your bad vibes in the morning, we'll have to come up with a different plan. Are we all in agreement?" The other two men nodded.