Lethal Force by Trevor Scott Page B

a string of swear words in his native tongue. “All right,” he finally said. “Find out the train, where it stops again, and check the passenger list for Jake Adams.”
    Milena cleared her throat. “That might be difficult. I will try. But would he travel with his own name?”
    She had a point. “Do what you can. Keep track of the location and let us know if it deviates from the train tracks.”
    â€œWill do.”
    They clicked off.
    â€œNow what?” Danko asked.
    â€œNow we go see what that idiot Bogdan has done.” Alex reached inside his jacket to where is gun normally sat, but it wasn’t there. He knew this could be a trap, yet he had no choice but to go inside the farmhouse. Defiant and unreasonably confident, he got out into the cold mountain air, the light breeze throwing snow into his face.
    As he got to the front door, his partner Danko had caught up with him.
    â€œYou want me to go around back?” Danko asked.
    â€œNo.” He checked the front door. It was unlocked, so they simply walked inside and Alex shifted his eyes around the room. Lying on the floor near the entrance to the kitchen was their junior associate, Bogdan, blood crusted out from his thigh and soaked into a dried pool beneath him. The air had already started to smell of death, with blood iron, gun powder and human excrement wrapped up into one fragrance.
    â€œWho did this?” Danko asked.
    â€œWho do you think?” Alex shook his head. Maybe he should have conducted an intelligence test before getting this group together. No, if they were too smart they would not follow orders as readily. “Maybe we should not have let Jake Adams escape in Washington.”
    â€œWe needed to know what he knew when he knew it,” Danko reminded his friend. “And to see where he would go.”
    That was part of it, Alex knew. But their employer also wanted Adams alive for some reason. “But how did he find Bogdan and the scientist?”
    That question brought a blank stare from Danko. Finally he said, “We will ask him that just before we kill him.”
    But first they needed to track down Jake Adams and capture the scientist once again. Alex only hoped Milena could do her magic again with her computer.
    â—
    Milena sat on her red satin sheets wearing only her black lace boy-leg panties and a matching, overflowing half-cup demi-bra, as she typed away on her laptop computer, doing her best to find out anything she could about the train traveling across the Pacific Northwest. She knew it was the westbound Empire Builder. That had been easy to discover. But she was having no luck with the passenger list. Well, not entirely true. She knew those who had purchased tickets with charge cards and debit accounts. However, based on the location of the tracker signal in the standard seating car, and not a sleeper, she had narrowed the possibles down to a dozen or so passengers. All of them had purchased tickets with cash. Only a few of those had gotten on the train in Whitefish, Montana. Unfortunately she had no clue about their age or gender.
    She was sad to hear about her young friend Bogdan getting killed in Montana. Alex had given her that news just minutes ago, and she had told him he could catch the train in Portland, Oregon if he could get to the train station by ten a.m. To help him, she had found the two men a flight from Kalispell, Montana to Portland departing at 6:00 a.m. and arriving at 8:20 a.m. That would give them plenty of time to get from the airport to the train station.
    In the meantime, Milena would keep track of the movement to make sure they didn’t get off the train somewhere between Spokane and Portland. She had that working in the background while she surfed the net for any information she could find on Jake Adams. He had requited himself nicely so far. They already knew he had worked for the CIA until his eventual retirement years ago. And she had read about a