As George Sexton had done in the previous videos, he spoke the same words of warning to Sam Raveis as Raveis entered the dimly lit office and came within the camera frame.
“My son’s asleep upstairs, so we need to keep our voices down.”
Forty-Three
Esa was hooded but fully conscious as the two thugs lifted her off the bed and carried her from the room.
She heard one of them ask Karl why the hood was necessary if he had sedated her, and Karl answered that it would take a few minutes before the drug would take full effect.
There was, he stressed, no point in taking the risk of her being able to identify their location.
Esa knew that the hood would also serve to spare her having to act as if she were succumbing to the sedation.
Any fault in her performance might raise suspicion in the minds of those two dangerous men, and it was crucial that they had no reason to be wary.
She could feel the painkiller Karl had administered in place of sedation starting to do its work—dulling her nerves and causing a lightness in her chest—but she wasn’t so inured to pain yet that she didn’t flinch whenever the rough way in which she was being carried caused a sharp tugging sensation inside her freshly sewn tissue.
It took a few minutes for them to carry her through the building—a journey that required they move through several doorways and down multiple flights of stairs.
Finally, she was put in a seated position inside a vehicle. A door immediately to her right opened and someone sat beside her, pulling that door closed. This was followed by two doors in front of her opening and the car swaying as two people took their seats.
She knew by this that she was in the seat behind the driver, placing the man beside her, who she believed was Karl, behind the front passenger.
The front doors closed, and the engine was started. By the sharp echo of the exhaust, she concluded that, given the industrial nature of the two rooms she had seen, the vehicle was inside what was likely a loading dock area.
It accelerated forward; within seconds the sound of the exhaust changed, and Esa knew they were outside. After several minutes of turns and stops, the vehicle entered a long straightaway and picked up speed rapidly.
Merging to the left, the vehicle increased its speed, then maintained it.
They were on some highway.
Esa did the only thing she could do: focus on her breathing, the sound of which was the loudest noise in her ears.
She did that until the painkiller took root and she felt adrift, as though she were floating effortlessly in warm, still water.
Regaining consciousness abruptly, Esa at first didn’t understand the complete darkness surrounding her, but she fought back the urge to panic and soon enough remembered that she was hooded.
The next thing she realized was that the vehicle she was in had come to a stop, its engine no longer running.
The two doors in front of her opened.
This was immediately followed by the sound of a pistol fitted with a suppressor being fired.
One of the thugs, the blond, Esa thought, exclaimed, “What the—” but was cut off by a repeat of the same sound.
A quick follow-up, a brief pause, and then a fourth and final shot, and it was done.
Even with the hood still on, Esa understood what those shots had meant—a single round to the man in the passenger seat directly ahead of Karl, then a double-tap to the back, right quarter of the driver’s head, then back to the first man for another round, just to be certain.
The hood was pulled from Esa’s head, and there in front of her were the two dead thugs.
A burst of blood and tissue spatter covered the passenger-side windshield; a similar mosaic was visible on the driver’s door window.
“Let’s go,” Karl said.
They exited the vehicle, an older-model sedan with heavily tinted windows. Esa looked around and saw that they were in an open-air parking garage.
By the look of the buildings beyond, it was obvious they were in New York City. Esa guessed they were on the west side of Midtown and at least seven or eight floors up.
Karl tossed the suppressed subcompact pistol onto the back seat, then peeled off his gloves and tossed them over the rail and into the air.
He closed both his door and the still-open front passenger door. Esa did the same with her door and the driver’s door.
With the four doors closed, the only indication of the carnage inside the sedan was the bloodied front windshield, which faced the rail.
If no one took notice of that, it would be a day or two, maybe more, before the rotting bodies inside would smell enough to catch the attention of a passerby and cause them to alert the authorities.
Karl walked around the rear of the sedan, gesturing to the SUV in the next spot.
Still under the effects of the painkiller, Esa didn’t move, just stared at the sedan.
Karl stopped midstride. “What’s wrong?”
She shrugged and stared at the car for a moment more before turning her head and saying, “Shooting was too good for them.”
Karl nodded in agreement. “We’re on a schedule, Esa,” he said. “We need to move.”
The parking garage was located above the Port Authority Bus Terminal on Eighth Avenue and Forty-Eighth Street.
Ten minutes after leaving the structure, they were driving northbound on the West Side Highway.
Karl opened the compartment between them and removed two baseball caps, handing one to Esa and keeping the other one.
The long bills obscured their faces from the security cameras as they passed through the tollbooth at the Henry Hudson Bridge.
Thirty minutes later, the SUV crossed from New York State into Connecticut, and another thirty minutes after that, Karl steered off I-95 at a city called Bridgeport.
A few turns and they were approaching what looked to be an abandoned garage situated in a small, fenced-in lot.
Rolling through the open gate, Karl parked the vehicle and killed the motor.
Esa followed him through the open bay door, to the left of which was another bay. Beyond that was the entrance to an office.
Stepping through the next bay, Esa saw a man appear in that doorway.
He was in his sixties but powerfully built. His salt-and-pepper hair was buzzed close to his scalp.
Karl stopped a few feet from the man, waited for Esa to reach his side, then said to him, “I got her.”
Looking at Esa, the man smiled. His expression struck her as both welcoming and fond.
“Do you know who I am?” the man said.
Esa shook her head. “No.”
The man nodded. “Good. I can call you Esa, correct?”
“Yes. And what should I call you?”
“Why don’t you call me what everyone else calls me.”
“And what’s that?”
“Colonel.”
Even in her semiaddled state of mind, Esa understood whom it was she was standing before.
This man was the sworn enemy of the man for whom she had worked for four-plus decades.
As one of the Benefactor’s best, she had hunted and killed numerous operatives of the man now smiling at her.
And it was impossible that this man didn’t know that.
Esa looked at Karl before facing the Colonel again. “You’ve brought me here to see if you can turn me. You want my help killing the Benefactor.”
The Colonel shook his head. “I’m seeking something simpler than that.”
“What?”
“I need you to confess to something, in front of someone.”
Esa once again looked at Karl.
The Colonel gestured toward the office behind him. “C’mon inside, the two of you; we’ll talk.”
Forty-Four
Tom powered down the tablet but remained seated on the edge of the bed.
It had taken nearly an hour for him to view all three videos. The two remaining videos of Raveis talking to Tom’s father in hi
s study were much longer than the previous three had been. Each nearly twenty-five minutes in length, they were more involved than the others, concerned with logistics as well as Raveis’s continuing efforts at manipulation.
The unedited surveillance video of Tom’s father meeting and ultimately fighting with the Algerian and his three men was the shortest of the three videos, running just ten minutes.
That time was broken into roughly eight minutes of tense conversation and two minutes of sudden and shockingly brutal violence.
Tom knew it would take a while before he could do anything more than sit still and relive what he had witnessed.
He knew no other way to process it.
Finally, though, he rose and stepped into the bathroom, running the sink faucet and splashing water on his face with trembling hands.
After that he took a moment to look at his reflection in the mirror.
He’d been exposed to violence many times before—more than he could remember right now, for which he was grateful.
And he’d also been forced to engage in life-and-death, hand-to-hand struggles of his own, the kind of intensely chaotic brawls during which he was close enough to the man who wanted to kill him to feel every one of his exhalations.
But viewing his father killing three men before he himself was killed—that was something else.
Maybe it was the fact that Tom could only watch, rendered helpless by time. Or maybe it was that he was viewing something that up till this point had been left to his imagination, only to discover that the actual events of that long-ago night were far, far worse than anything his mind could have manifested.
The hotel room had been small, that much he’d known, but just how small had stunned him.
At first this confinement had worked to his father’s advantage, putting two of his enemies within easy reach. Making use of the other thing he had going for him—the element of surprise—he’d cut open the throat of the nearest man with a single sweep of the long-bladed knife that he had suddenly, expertly produced.
Then immediately altering the swinging motion, George Sexton had repositioned his hand so he could drive that same blade into the open mouth of the next man just as that man had moved to begin his attack.
Positioned as close as they were, these first two men had been easy kills, but Tom’s father had been unable to remove the knife from the second man’s skull with any semblance of speed, so he’d abandoned that weapon and reached for the small of his back, where a backup weapon—a spring-assisted folding knife with a four-inch serrated blade—had been hidden.
The third man had closed the distance and grabbed the collar of George Sexton’s overcoat, but this had been, it turned out, a mistake, because George Sexton then ducked and spun out of his coat, showing an agility and level of skill that Tom had had no idea his father had possessed.
More than that, his father’s actions had exhibited a cool that bordered on serenity, which was the opposite of what Tom had always seen whenever he imagined that night.
Tainted by the stories of a man driven to madness by grief, Tom had been expecting to see a fighter who reflected that—someone who screamed from the gut as he attacked, and whose reckless violence rose from a deep rage.
But the expression on his father’s face was virtually blank, and his eyes were fixed on each of his targets in the manner of a craftsman carefully eyeing his work.
The third man had been stunned into a sudden halt by an upward slash to the groin, which had been followed by a thrust into the solar plexus.
He had dropped instantly, as though a trapdoor had opened beneath him, the knife still lodged in his heart.
And then it was just George Sexton and the Algerian, who had produced his own knife.
Tom had paused the playback there, to allow himself to prepare for what was to come.
When he was as ready as he was going to be, he resumed watching the two men engage in their fight to the death.
Tom’s father had grabbed a lamp to use as a weapon, but as the struggle progressed, each combatant had effectively disarmed the other.
It was bare hands, then—vicious, close-in fighting.
The two men were evenly matched for a good minute, grappling on their feet before going to the floor.
One applied a hold, and the other escaped from it, applying a counter hold that was itself countered and escaped from.
In the end, though, the Algerian had gained the advantage, pinning Tom’s father in a corner, allowing the man no route of escape.
Pressing his forearm down on the side of George Sexton’s neck and crushing the carotid artery, the Algerian had waited till the lack of oxygenated blood had caused George Sexton to lose consciousness.
Their faces were bloodied, their eyes locked.
Then George Sexton’s eyelids fluttered, his eyes suddenly glassy.
The Algerian had continued pressing his forearm down, holding it in place a long time, ensuring that the man beneath him was dead.
Tom looked down from the bathroom mirror, splashed more water on his face, then reached for a towel and dried himself.
He took one last look in the mirror before leaving the bathroom.
He heard a phone vibrating on his nightstand, where he’d put his few things.
Next to his Colt and burner phone was the smartphone Cahill had given to him.
Tom picked it up and looked at the incoming text message.
ARRIVED LOCATION, ALL SAFE, AWAITING INSTRUCTIONS.
Tom was tempted to instruct Cahill to bring Stella and Krista to Slattery’s place, but that temptation was brief.
As desperate as he was to reunite with Stella, he knew he would need to wait.
He composed a reply and hit “Send.”
HOLD POSITION.
A reply came through a few seconds later. U R SAFE?
Tom knew by the abbreviation and the phrasing—the awkward “you are” instead of the more common “are you”—who was texting him now.
He replied, YES.
This was his and Stella’s first communication, albeit an indirect one, since their emails to each other nearly a week ago, which had been monitored and therefore didn’t qualify as a free and intimate exchange.
They’d had no such exchange since parting ways months ago.
Still, knowing that Stella was standing beside Cahill and reading Tom’s texts as they came in, then dictating her own, gave Tom a much-needed sense of connection, as well as a sliver of hope.
He had come far, but there was still an unknown distance yet to go before the goal they had both set out to accomplish would be complete.
For a moment he allowed himself to envision what it was they both wanted—to live quietly somewhere, free of the looming threat of the Benefactor and any and all obligations to shadowy men, free to make a living in whatever way suited them, spend their nights together, and wake next to each other every morning for the rest of their lives.
This was all that mattered, and Tom was resolved to do whatever it took to get to that world beyond the one in which they now dwelled.
Grunn and Hammerton took turns checking on Tom every hour to make sure he hadn’t fallen into a deep sleep.
As each one entered, they glanced at the tablet but didn’t ask the obvious question.
It was five a.m. when Tom heard the sound of one of the garage doors opening. Looking out his window, he saw Slattery driving off on her BMW motorcycle to await contact from the Colonel.
Tom took note of the time, calculated that she should return within forty minutes—ten minutes, at the most, to get five miles out; thirty minutes for her to wait; then another ten minutes, max, to return.
Barely fifteen minutes had passed when Hammerton came to Tom’s door. “We’ve gotta roll.”
“What’s up?”
“Slattery said the Colonel wants to see us. Right away. She texted me the address where to meet them. You won’t believe it.”
Hammerton held up his cell phone so the display
was facing Tom.
Tom read the address, and then he and Hammerton looked at each other.
“Full circle yet again,” Hammerton said.
Grunn was behind the wheel of the Cherokee, Hammerton was in the passenger seat, and Tom was in the seat behind Grunn.
Once they were a few miles from Slattery’s house, Tom used his burner phone to send another text to Torres, requesting that she check in.
He kept the text open and watched the display as he waited for a reply. After a few seconds an ellipsis appeared directly below his message, indicating that Torres—or someone—was replying to his text.
But almost as soon as the ellipsis had appeared, it disappeared, and when a minute passed without any reply, Tom pocketed the phone.
If it were Torres reading his request, why hadn’t she replied?
It took forty-five minutes to reach their destination—a small farm atop a hill in a town called Watertown.
Tom and Hammerton had made this exact journey two years before, following their jump into the Quinnipiac River.
It was at this farm, owned by Sandy Montrose and her then-husband, a veterinarian, that Tom had found Charlie Cahill.
And it was also here that the Algerian had met his end at Grunn’s hands.
Now the three of them were being brought back to this place for a meeting with the man whose “great experiment,” as Smith had called it, had brought them all together.
Tom understood the likely reason for the Colonel having chosen this location—after the murder of her husband, Sandy Montrose had closed up the place, unable to bear the painful memories that now lived there.
Currently unoccupied, it would provide the privacy they needed, and its isolation atop a hill would make it easy enough for the small army of men with whom the Colonel always traveled to secure it.
As Grunn steered the Cherokee into the driveway, Tom was greeted by more or less the very scene he had been expecting.
The motorcade of four black SUVs—three Chevys and a Mercedes—was parked nose to bumper along the edge of the long dirt driveway, and two-man teams of suited bodyguards were positioned throughout the property.
The Shadow Agent Page 26