The Shadow Agent

by Daniel Judson

  Tom looked at the passengers, those already seated and those still boarding, making a quick study of every face visible to him. He also made a point of seeking out the faces he couldn’t see, watching them as casually as possible till those looking away turned in his direction or those staring down at devices finally lifted their heads.

  By the time the doors were closed and the train was moving, Tom had gotten a good enough look at nearly every passenger in the car.

  The last faces he glanced at were Torres’s and Garrick’s. Torres was watching the passengers, but Garrick’s eyes were fixed on him.

  Tom recalled what Garrick had said during his final job interview.

  You keep me alive, and I’ll keep you alive.

  Turning forward, Tom settled in for the trip. Within minutes, the train exited the darkness of the terminal’s long underground tunnel and proceeded to pick up speed.

  It was raining again by the time they approached the first stop—125th Street.

  Tom remembered the journey into the city that he and Stella had taken together two years ago. To keep her from the certain danger he was heading into, he had exited the train at this very stop, slipping through the doors at the last possible second, leaving her behind and in the care of a man named Hammerton—one of the few men Tom knew he could trust.

  This was the night of Tom’s first kill, and he was remembering that, too, as the train came to a stop at the Harlem platform.

  Two passengers had risen and stepped toward the doors. After a brief delay, the doors opened, and those passengers exited.

  Tom watched as three people entered the car and sought out seats. Not one of them looked at him or took a seat anywhere near him.

  As he was watching them, he sensed someone in motion behind him.

  A person two seats back had risen and was moving quickly up the aisle.

  As the person reached Tom, he saw that it was a woman.

  But he couldn’t see her face.

  Dressed in jeans, boots, and a white Oxford shirt, a leather jacket over that, she had dark hair that was as closely cropped as a soldier’s.

  As she hurried past Tom toward the still-open doors, she dropped something onto the empty seat beside him.

  It was a small plastic bag, and by the way it landed, it was obvious that it contained something with a degree of weight to it.

  The woman didn’t once look down at Tom, simply continued toward the doors at the same brisk pace. She moved through them and onto the elevated platform just as the doors closed.

  Tom looked for her as the train pulled out, spotting her as she was making her way toward the stairs that led down to 125th Street.

  She turned and began down the stairs, and at last her face was visible.

  He recognized her.

  Her name was Durand, and two years ago she had been one of Raveis’s drivers, assigned to a woman named Alexa Savelle—an NSA analyst who Raveis had enlisted to help find Charlie Cahill.

  Tom had saved both Savelle and Durand when the vehicle they were in came under attack from a Chechen hit team.

  They had barely escaped with their lives.

  Watching Durand as she descended the stairs, Tom noted that she raised her eyes just long enough to look at him before casting her gaze downward again.

  And then the train pulled away, and she was gone from his sight.

  Tom glanced back at Torres and Garrick to get a read on his teammates. There was nothing about Garrick’s manner that indicated he had observed the woman making the discreet drop.

  But Torres was looking at Tom in a way that told him she had seen it.

  Turning forward again, Tom opened the plastic bag and saw exactly what he was expecting to see—a smartphone.

  He took it out and powered it up, watching the display and waiting.

  The train was crossing over the Harlem River when the first of several text messages came through.

  At 11:12 p.m., the New Haven–bound train pulled into the Bridgeport station.

  It was here that passengers traveling north were required to exit and wait for the train that would take them up the Waterbury line.

  That train was due to arrive at 11:17.

  The Bridgeport platform was elevated and open, making it a security risk.

  Tom was out of New York, and out in the open with the sprawling city below, offering any potential assassin multiple avenues of both approach and escape.

  I’d consider taking you out there, Torres had said back at the hotel.

  For the five minutes that the team needed to wait, Torres and Garrick would maintain their distance while keeping their eyes on Tom, as well as on the dozen or so passengers standing near him.

  They were only a minute into that wait when a male in his late twenties appeared on the empty platform across the tracks.

  He was dressed in work boots, jeans, and a flannel barn coat.

  Standing still, with his hands in the pockets of his coat, he simply watched the people across from him, studying each person one by one.

  The only person he never looked at was Tom.

  His presence caused Torres to slowly and casually move through the small crowd of people till she was within only a few feet of Tom.

  As she did that, Garrick took off his backpack and set it at his feet.

  Tom noted that the man in the barn coat paid little attention to Torres and Garrick as well.

  It was when the train finally appeared on the long, curving track to the west that the phone in Tom’s pocket vibrated, indicating the arrival of another text.

  But he didn’t dare look at it.

  Only when he was on board, and his team had settled into their seats several rows behind him, did Tom remove the phone and open the message.

  It was a photograph of a glass door embedded with security mesh, below which were two words.

  ENTER HERE.

  He pocketed the phone as the train lurched forward.

  Seven

  Tom was one of three people to disembark at the Ansonia station.

  The other two passengers were females, both in their twenties. One headed for a row of parked cars directly in front of the station, the other walked south toward a municipal parking lot that was empty save for a few vehicles.

  With the countdown running and no time to waste, Tom proceeded to follow the instructions he had received via the drop phone.

  The northwestern corner of the factory was visible at the top of a short incline one block to the east. Tom started up a narrow one-way street toward it, turned right onto Main Street and followed that for one block south, then turned left onto Kingston Avenue and crested one more incline before finally reaching East Main.

  That brief journey had been completed in a little over a minute.

  As he had covered that ground, he’d noted that Slattery’s assessment of this city was accurate—the streets were so empty that any watch team, either parked or patrolling in an unmarked vehicle, would have been easily spotted by a knowledgeable party on the lookout.

  He had noted, too, the absence of street cameras mounted on the traffic lights or lampposts.

  The stores were closed, and of the three restaurants he had passed, only one was open, though by the sparse few souls inside it was likely that it, too, would be shutting down for the night soon.

  Tom also noticed that Raveis’s assessment had been correct as well: there were countless fixed positions in which a shooter could roost unseen.

  Apartments and office spaces above the businesses lining the streets; another seemingly closed-down factory to the north, its brick face a checkerboard of windows; a four-story storage facility farther to the east—from any of these, someone with even marginal abilities would be able to easily zero a target moving at a walking pace.

  The condition of the factory was pretty much what Tom had anticipated. Each of the five floors had large multipane windows, more than half of which were shattered, and those that had yet to be broken had been painted over with
a thick coat of whitewash. The fact that the paint was both faded and peeling was an indication that this had been done long ago.

  Some of the doors he had passed on his way to the building’s southeast corner had been covered with sheets of bare plywood, while others had heavy padlocked chains wound through their pull-handles.

  Tom’s destination was the door he’d been sent a photo of—the only entrance he had seen that hadn’t been sealed in any manner.

  Pausing first to check his surroundings, he removed a pair of Mechanix gloves from his raincoat pocket and put them on as he approached the door.

  He gave the handle a test pull to make sure the door was unlocked before pulling it open just enough for him to quietly and quickly slip through.

  The numerous broken windows made the football-field-size interior space nearly as bright as the city streets outside.

  Still, there were four corners of utter blackness in the open floor plan that Tom’s eyes immediately went to and searched.

  Though he sensed that he was alone, he remained ready to immediately begin the well-drilled process of drawing his sidearm from concealment while moving.

  The next steps Tom was to take were simple—upon entering, he was to cross diagonally to the door leading to the open courtyard. He did that, and taking Torres’s concerns into account, he looked through that door’s cracked window and determined that the area beyond it was clear.

  Right away he saw the item that was waiting for him.

  On the cracked concrete floor, through which grass and weeds had grown, was a hard plastic case roughly twelve inches wide, fourteen inches long, and only a few inches deep.

  Tom opened the door and entered the courtyard, pausing a moment before starting toward its center, where the case had been placed.

  Looking up, he scanned the four floors of windows above him. Unlike the others, these large windows were all made of single sheets of glass, though some of them, too, were broken.

  Tom saw no one in any of these windows, broken or intact.

  The cement floor of the courtyard was blanketed with shattered glass—a mix of shards and smaller cube-shaped bits.

  There was no avoiding the sound that was made as that glass was ground beneath the rubber soles of his tactical boots.

  Reaching the case, Tom crouched down and located its four-digit combination lock.

  Combo is the alphanumeric version of your given name, the final text had informed him.

  The alphanumeric value of T-H-O-M, the first four letters in Thomas, would have been 8-4-6-6.

  But Tom was short for Tomas, not Thomas, and only a handful of people knew that.

  He spun the chrome-plated dials to 8-6-6-2—T-O-M-A—then moved the lock’s release button to one side with his thumb.

  The two lever-locking latches sprang up, and Tom opened the case.

  Inside was a tablet. Tom removed it and stood, taking another look up at the dozens of windows above him.

  The tablet in his hand emitted a chiming sound. Looking at the display, he saw an alert indicating an incoming video chat.

  Tom could accept the call or deny it. He accepted it, and a chat window opened on the display.

  Framed within that window was the face of James Carrington.

  Like Tom, Carrington had a full beard and long hair—a far cry from the well-groomed navy captain Tom had served under for eight years.

  Carrington’s face filled the borders of the video chat window, which meant he was holding his device close. Tom suspected that this was intentional, to prevent him from seeing whatever was behind Carrington, which could give away his former CO’s location.

  “It’s good to see you, Tom,” Carrington said.

  “Where are you, sir?”

  “Not too far away. You’re a hard man to reach these days.”

  “Is Grunn okay?”

  “She’s not in danger—well, no more so than any of us are.”

  “I’d like to see her.”

  “If you’re lucky, you won’t, not for a while, anyway.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “First things first, Tom, okay? I know it’s a lot to ask, but I’m going to need you to trust me right now. I’m thinking you owe me at least that much.”

  “Telling me why I’m here might help get me there.”

  “We don’t have a lot of time. I’m guessing, what, ten minutes? Raveis has men waiting for your team at the next station, right? Seven minutes for the train to get there, another ten minutes or so for them to drive back here, taking into account the two traffic lights and the forty-mile-an-hour speed limit. It took you close to five minutes to get to where you are now, so that leaves ten, give or take.” Carrington paused. “That’s the plan, right? You keep me talking till they get here. And if you hadn’t already killed me by then, they would.”

  “That was the plan, yes.”

  “Raveis’s trainers, they can change a person. I’ve seen it, firsthand. Have they changed you? Are you here to kill me, Tom?”

  “We’re wasting time,” Tom said. “My guess is you’re in this building somewhere. So why don’t you tell me where, so we can talk face-to-face.”

  “One step at a time. C’mon up to the third floor. Bring the tablet with you, but do me a favor and leave behind the tracking device Raveis gave you. We’re detecting a signal.”

  Tom took note of the plural pronoun. “Where should I leave it?”

  “Where you’re standing is good.”

  Tom ended the video chat, then removed the device from his pocket and laid it on top of the container before exiting the courtyard.

  Glancing at his watch as he climbed the stairs, he determined that another minute had passed.

  Only nine remained.

  He reached the third floor, saw that it was empty—saw, too, the same shadowed corners at its far ends.

  He’d barely taken a few steps into the vast, echoing workspace when the drop phone in his pocket chimed.

  Tom glanced at the number on the display before accepting the call.

  Carrington’s voice said, “Walk over to the fourth window from the right.”

  There was a row of ten windows ahead. The fourth from the right was one of the many broken ones.

  As Tom reached the window, Carrington said, “I’m straight across.”

  On the other side of the courtyard, in the frame of a similarly broken window maybe fifty feet away, stood James Carrington.

  Eight

  Carrington was casually dressed—boots and jeans, work shirt with a black denim jacket over it.

  Despite the distance separating them, Tom recognized a change in Carrington’s build.

  He was bigger than Tom had ever seen him be, obviously fitter, and Tom understood that he was looking at a man who took his survival seriously.

  Tom and Stella had done the same during their time in Vermont, conditioning themselves so they would be ready for the day when they might be required to stay and fight or grab what they could and run.

  In the end, both eventualities had occurred.

  For a year and a half, though, they had lived peacefully, safe within assumed identities that Carrington had helped them establish.

  Looking at him now, Tom wondered whether Carrington’s devotion to the art of surviving had extended to include finding what it took to remain sober.

  Intoxication wasn’t conducive to stealth, among other things.

  Tom slipped the tablet into his raincoat pocket and spoke into the phone. “So now what, skipper?”

  “I was surprised when I learned that you and Stella had signed on full-time. That’s quite a change of heart. I get it, though. You had no choice; the Benefactor wants you dead and has for a long time. When a powerful enemy wants to end you, you need to surround yourself with powerful friends. I get that, too.”

  “That was Durand on the train. She and Grunn are with you.”

  “Yes.”

  “You recruited them, got them to turn on the Colonel.”<
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  “No one has turned, Tom. And Grunn and Durand are with me because they want to help.”

  “Help with what?”

  “Showing you the truth.” Carrington paused. “I won’t waste our time by telling you that everything I’m accused of—and that every piece of evidence they have against me—is a lie. That doesn’t matter. It’s too late for me—I’m a dead man sooner or later—but it’s not too late for you. For you and Stella. That’s what I’ve brought you here to tell you. That’s why Grunn and Durand are with me. They’ve both been through hell, but they each owe you their lives, and they’re ready to pay that debt.”

  “Pay it how?”

  “We won’t have time for everything. First, though, Raveis is going to want to know what it is I’ve told you, so just tell him exactly what he wants to hear. Tell him I pleaded my innocence, begged you to talk to the Colonel on my behalf, that kind of thing. Tell him I was fall-down drunk. That’d be an easy sell, because to him that’s all I am, a pathetic drunk.” Carrington paused again. “I find it interesting that Raveis didn’t have his quick-response team waiting at the station before this one, as opposed to the one after it. His people could have been a minute or two behind you instead of fifteen. It seems that he wants us to have this time to talk.”

  “Why would he want that?”

  “My guess is he wants to know what’s so important that I’d go through the trouble of dragging you all the way up here. He talks big about sending a message by having me executed, that it’s the only kind of justice the world we operate in allows, but the truth is he’s afraid of me.”

  “Why is he afraid of you?”

  “Because for the past few months I’ve been looking for someone, and I’ve finally found him.”

  “Who?”

  “You need to trust me, Tom. You need to meet with this person. You need to hear what he has to say, hear it from him. He’s somewhere safe—for now, at least. He’s been in hiding from them, too, and for a lot longer than I have.”

  “Who?”

  “You think your father was acting as a rogue agent when he hunted down the men who killed your mother and sister. That’s what I thought, too, because that’s what I’ve always been told. But it never made sense to me that your father would walk into that situation alone. Just him and four killers for hire in a tiny hotel room. I mean, he’d have to be crazy to do that, right? And we’ve been told that, too—that he was out of his mind with grief, blinded by his desire for revenge. It seems, however, that’s not the whole truth. He didn’t go to that hotel alone. Someone was with him, there to provide backup if he needed it, but also to set up and monitor the surveillance.”