Cut and Run

Ridley Pearson

Cut and Run

For Marcelle

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special Thanks to Laurel Shaper Walters and David Walters and Marcelle for the multiple reads of the manuscript; to Paul Ke

For helping me with the details: Andy Hamilton, Assistant United States Attorney (retired); Eric Robertson, U.S. Marshal for the Western District of Washington State; and to many who choose to remain anonymous.

PROLOGUE

The forty-first day was their last together.

Roland Larson was holed up in a truck stop’s pay phone, half-mad from guarding her round-the-clock while denied any privacy with her whatsoever. He resorted to calling her on the phone. He’d slipped her his cell phone, and now dialed his own number to find her breathless as she whispered from her hardened bedroom, the aft cabin of the bus, not thirty yards away.

“I can’t stand this,” she said.

He found himself aroused by the hoarse, coarse sound of her. Forty-one days, under every conceivable pressure, and this the first complaint he’d heard from her.

“Us, or the situation?” he asked.

Hope Stevens had been moved on three separate occasions: first, to a wilderness cabin in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the kind of place Larson could see himself retiring to someday, a lethargic life so different from the one he lived; then she’d been moved to a nearly abandoned Air Force base in Montana, the desolation reminding him of a penitentiary, a place he knew well; and finally, into a private coach, a customized diesel bus that Treasury had confiscated from a forgotten rock band, its interior complete with neon-trim lighting and mirrored tables. Painted on three sides as a purple and black sunrise, the coach comfortably slept six and converted to club seating by day. Three deputies, including Larson, two drivers, and the witness traveled together-one of only a handful of times in the U.S. Marshals Service’s long history of witness protection that a “moving target” policy had been adopted. The last had been aboard a sleeper train in the mid-’70s.

Ironically, the more attempts made upon her life, the more importance and significance Hope Stevens gained in the eyes of her government. It wasn’t for her keen understanding of computers that they guarded her, nor for her fine looks or sharp tongue (when she did bother to speak); it was instead for a few cells and chemicals inside her skull and the memory trapped there, living now like a dog under the front porch, cowering with a bone of truth in its jaws.

The problem for Roland Larson was that the longer he guarded her, the more he cared for her-cared intensely-a situation unforgivable and intolerable in the eyes of his superiors and one that, if discovered, could have him transferred to some far outpost of government service, like North Dakota or Buffalo. But the few private moments shared with her overwhelmed any sensibility in Larson.

After just seventeen days of protection, the Michigan cabin had gone up in flames-arson; in the resulting firefight, a shadowy ballet in the flashes of orange light from the mighty blaze, two deputy marshals had been injured.

When, at the Montana Air Force base, mention of “persons unknown” had been intercepted by some geek in an NSA cubicle, the marshals had been instructed to move Hope yet again. Larson wasn’t much for ru

As a former technical consultant to an industry probe of fraudulent insurance practices, Hope had co

Intended perhaps to implicate the Russian mob, these horrific tactics did nothing of the sort. The FBI had immediately placed the Romeros onto their Most Wanted list and their two remaining witnesses, Hope Stevens and an u

The e-mails had been electronically destroyed; they existed now only in Hope’s memory. Government prosecutors believed a jury would convict based primarily on her testimony. And so they sequestered her on the garish bus, never allowing her off, never risking her being seen in public, and never stopping the bus for more than fuel or supplies. The strategy had kept her alive for the past ten days and left everyone on board with a bad case of cabin fever. Discussions had begun to once again relocate her, this time to a “static,” or fixed, location, probably a federal facility, quite possibly a short stint inside an unused wing at a federal penitentiary, or in an ICU at a city hospital. They had myriad tricks up their sleeves if left to their own devices. They seldom were.

“Isn’t there something you can do?” Hope asked. “Order us to stop at a motel, and arrange for you to guard my room? There has to be something.”

“I’m only guessing here,” Larson answered, “but I think a few of the guys might see through that tactic.” He caught his reflection in the polished metal surrounding the pay phone’s keypad. No one was going to call him pretty, although they had as a child. He’d grown into something too big for pretty, too hard for handsome, like a puppy growing into its feet. Pedigree be damned.

She sputtered on the other end, not quite her trademark laugh but a valiant effort.

He said, “You could make like a heart attack, and I could give you mouth-to-mouth.”

A little more authentic this time.

At the cabin, and then again at the Air Force base, they’d managed to find moments together, though not the moment both of them longed for, one he repeatedly daydreamed about. But once onto the bus, they’d barely shared a glance. A phone call was as much as they were going to get.

“It’s probably better this way,” she said. “Right?”

“No. It’s decidedly worse.”

“As soon as I testify… as soon as that’s over with… they’ll put me into the program and that will be that. Right? We should have never started this, Lars.”