The Winter Man

by Perry Bhandal

  A part of Kamal shuddered at the cost to the department, to the team, to the old man himself. He had unleashed his dogs and in doing so had left himself unprotected. Already there were murmurings that Rainer had lost it. That the old man had finally flipped. In Kamal’s mind Rainer had done the chess equivalent of swiping his players off the board in a game that he had dominated for all his career.

  His opponents, so compromised, held back, manipulating into being at each other’s throats for such a long time suddenly found themselves with the clear shot at the king. For the first time in Kamal’s living memory the old man was vulnerable.

  The footage was grainy black and white and shot from high up. The unknown assassin limped out and stumbled out of view. Josie blurred out. The MPV appeared. The man behind her. Simmonds’ face. Caldwell’s unmistakable face. Rainer zoomed in on Simmonds, he tilted down and zoomed into his ring finger and closed his eyes briefly.

  Kamal stepped in the room. Rainer looked up at his bruised and battered lieutenant.

  ‘Anything from Michael?’

  Kamal shook his head. Rainer reversed the footage back to the unknown assassin. He jabbed a finger at the screen.

  ‘You find out who this is?’

  Kamal held up a very thin file.

  ‘Yeah, you’re not gonna like it.’

  Rainer gestured to the seat opposite. Kamal handed him the file.

  ‘Is this it?’ asked Rainer surprised at the thinness.

  ‘Yeah. His name’s Blake Mandel. A computer tech. Used to work for the DOJ, some kind of profiling system. Anyway, his daughter gets taken. This guy hacks the DOJ database, gets a list of suspects and has been slowly working his way through them. The DOJ corroborated Simmonds and three others William Straw, J-Mac and Horowitz all in the database. Plus, it looks like he also offed the trafficker Chicken Jack and took a local cop Fallon and a couple of others with him.’ Rainer shook his head.

  ‘A tech guy? Did this? Are you kidding? This guy moves like a trained assassin.’

  ‘There’s more. Since then he’s gone off grid and he’s been systematically destroying every electronic trace of himself. Most of what’s in the file is from a woman Stephanie he had a relationship with while he was working at the DOJ.’

  ‘What happened to his daughter?’

  ‘Kidnapped by Straw. Presumed killed in a fire at the house.’

  Rainer turned the pages.

  ‘Horowitz was in prison. How did he get to him?’

  ‘Still trying to piece that together. But it looks like he hacked their system, inserted a fake file, and got himself onto a prisoner transfer. Even got psych assessed by the prison shrink, before he took out five guards, killed Horowitz and blew out of there.’

  ‘You don’t get to do that and still be an average Joe. This isn’t the movies. He’s had specialist training. Find out where and who. And get me that shrink. Looks like he’s the only one to come in contact with him and survive. I want a copy of that file he inserted into the prison system.’

  ‘Sure. though I don’t think there’ll be anything in it that we don’t already have.’

  ‘Indulge me,’ replied Rainer.

  ‘Just one more thing. The DOJ, when they did their background...There’s no record of this guy prior to being found around the age of fifteen.’

  ‘Maybe he was training to be a ninja.’

  Kamal got up.

  ‘What about that list of names?’

  ‘That’s another problem. The DOJ contractor he was working for, Raanstaad, killed his access when he pulled the first record. But he’d already run his program. All we know is he searched around a half million records. Which ones he linked to Straw and his daughter they have no idea. Raanstaad are still trying to work it out. They can only confirm that J-Mac, Horowitz, Simmonds and Chicken Jack were in that half million.’

  Rainer shook his head.

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  ‘We need to know who’s on that list. Put pressure on Raanstaad. Get that list. I’ll pay this Stephanie a visit.’

  O’Riley stepped onto the floor. Rainer gestured to Kamal to leave.

  ‘You don’t want to be here for this.’

  ‘Sure boss.’

  Kamal got up and stepped out of the office. The imposing bulk of Charlie O’Riley greeted him in the middle of the office floor.

  ‘Kamal,’ said Charlie quietly.

  ‘Chief,’ nodded Kamal.

  ‘What happened to your face?’

  ‘The old man said turn up the heat.’

  ‘And?’ asked Charlie.

  Kamal debated how much to tell O’Riley. Loyalty hardening, he settled on as little as possible. Kamal shook his head. ‘We got nothing chief.’

  Charlie took a deep breath, nodding slowly as he let it out.

  Kamal took one last look at the figure in the office.

  ‘I’ve never seen him like this. They’re after his head, sir.’

  Charlie watched the still form of Rainer. ‘I don’t think he gives a shit.’

  The four minute segment was set to loop and it began again as Rainer seemed intent on examining every pixel for any clue.

  The man, Blake, limped out, shut the door and stumbled across the alley out of view. She blurred out. Good form. The MPV appeared, false plates. She covered it well. There was no sound, but he felt he could hear her shouts.

  Then the man behind her. She didn’t see him. Had she been a foot either side of her position she would have seen him in the mirror shine of the MPV’s windows. Bad luck. Her hands go up. Simmonds’ face appeared and then she was taken. Bundled unconscious at the feet of the men inside. The door slid shut and it turned down into the alley and out of shot.

  The playback paused and then restarted.

  O’Riley’s formidable form stepped into the room. Rainer looked up for the first time in hours.

  ‘How are you doing, Rain?’

  Rainer didn’t answer, just looked back at the rolling footage.

  ‘I told Kamal to go home. I should tell you the same thing.’

  ‘What the fuck am I going to do at home, Charlie?’

  ‘Get some rest, come back fresh in the morning, ready to go. Isn’t that the advice you dish out.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he replied quietly, rubbing the tiredness from his forehead.

  ‘What are you doing here anyway? Last time we spoke you slammed the phone down on me.’

  ‘Yeah, well it’s been a while since anyone called me an ass-covering prick.’

  ‘Yeah, sorry. I’d just got the run around from SIS. It sounded like you were giving me the same.’

  ‘Look, you’ve done everything you can. You’ve pulled in every favor, squeezed every informant. Jesus, half the city’s snitches have gone dark, thinking if they don’t have the answers you’ll put them in the ground. Tell me, what more can you do?’

  ‘I haven’t even started yet.’

  ‘SIS are winding down. We’re twelve hours past the 48 hour window. This is straight from the fifth floor.’

  ‘She’s one of us, company man,’ he said between gritted teeth. ‘One of mine. And you’re going to abandon her. I told you I didn’t want her on my team. But you forced me and it’s happened again.’

  ‘Rainer, look at me. We’re going to find her.’

  ‘Get out,’ said Rainer, shaking his head.

  Charlie felt a flutter in his chest and a tightness at his throat at the state of his old friend before him.

  He knew all about Dina, so did everybody else. They all thought that was what was driving him. But Charlie knew different. Charlie was the only one that knew of the real ghost that was driving this battered man.

  ‘GET OUT!’ screamed Rainer.

  Charlie got up. He eyed him for a moment. Then turned and left. Rainer watched him go and then swiped the laptop from his desk.

  The wet, bitter Shanghai wind thrashed at the trees around him, sending down wave upon wave of sodden leaves, seed-pods and twigs. He lay covered wit
h them on the ground, a thin waterproof sheet between him and the sod beneath. Before him lay a sniper’s rifle almost three-quarters his length. He sighted along its night vision scope tracking the open ground in front of the mansion.

  For the umpteenth time he brushed the leaves from the rifle stock and barrel. Picking at the ones that had managed to get stuck in the gaps between scope and reload chamber. He tried his best but bits of mud and leaves still clung to it. He wiped a chill induced tear from his eye and managed to get mud into it. He pulled a glove off and flicked at tiny bits of grit with one finger.

  He tracked across the mansion again. He was used to the inverted green-washed luminescence of night vision. He liked it. It made everything unreal, artificial…easier to kill. It transformed a face into something else. It made the dark light and the light dark. It made ghosts out of everyone.

  Around him a sudden wind picked up, above him heavy branches creaked and groaned, clouds of leaves, twigs and bits of bark showered down threatening to bury him.

  A crack of light appeared at the main entrance. And then flooded the steps leading down to the waiting car. Ray’s heart quickened at the sight of the man in the doorway.

  He stood facing the main entrance doors, his coat held tightly around him.

  His solid frame, his animal bearing, his hair like a whirling cloud of dark green in his scope. A trick of the light silhouetted his face. The wind seemed to build in response to the appearance of this man. Or perhaps it was just in his mind.

  Ray shifted the crosshairs onto the man’s head. He held his breath and pushed down on the trigger.

  A huge gust slammed into Ray, the freezing wind searing his eyes making them weep from the sheer cold, blurring his vision. Ray pulled back on the trigger, squeezed his eyes of tears and shook his head clear of woodland debris. He jammed his head back onto the scope.

  The man held something in his arms. The wind reached him, blowing his coat open.

  It was a girl.

  The storm died around him. Just like that. The wind disappeared.

  Ray couldn’t take his eyes off the girl. Her thin legs poked out from the folds of the coat. Brittle sticks of brightness in his night vision. He could feel her shivering from the cold or fear or both.

  A distant voice screamed at him.

  Ray tracked up to the man holding the girl.

  The man stepped forward, face in the light.

  Blake.

  He tracked down to the girl in his arms.

  Sara.

  Something broke inside him. A fragile bulb emptied its contents into the void. It made no sound. It was silent.

  Ray woke with a jolt, the dream already retreating.

  In his dream Blake knelt down beside the small gravestone and brushed a mass of autumn leaves from its grey marble surface.

  His breath formed plumes of steam in the cold bright morning light. The graveyard was empty this early.

  Blake stood up. It was like watching a big cat unfold. No spare movements, perfectly balanced. Dangerous grace.

  Despite his efforts, bits of mud and leaves still clung to the tombstone.

  Blake wanted to cry. He desperately wanted to cry. To feel something in his heart other than this awful blankness.

  Julia stood beside him. He wished he could find a way of letting her in at this time. To show her the place where he held himself. The small tiny knot suspended inside a sea of black, where he had retreated to. A place she might recognize. A fragile bulb of life that struggled in the darkness in which he kept the last vestiges of what kept him human.

  But he had no idea how to get there himself or how to breach the walls he had built around it. So how would she?

  He wanted to tell her that inside that small place, he was still the person she loved. That inside that small place he loved her. And inside that small place he cried for his dead daughter as she did.

  But he couldn’t. For it would have meant opening it. And he didn’t know how to.

  ‘I should never have left you,’ he whispered to the grave.

  A raw wind picked up the leaves he had brushed aside and blew them back across the marble.

  Blake felt a tear trickle down his cheek. He wiped it away.

  ‘You shouldn’t have.’

  Blue eyes rimmed with grey turned to him. His wife was so beautiful. Blake held them for a while but whatever they had between them, that essence of what two people held in space between them had become a distant land. He loved her, but she would never forgive him and that crack would expand and engulf them entirely. Blake looked back to his daughter’s grave.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘I told you.’ And he had. But in her eyes he could see she didn’t believe it. She needed someone to blame. And it may as well be him. He could take it.

  ‘I should have come home,’ he whispered.

  She grabbed his coat pulling and pushing until her fury collapsed and she broke into an uncontrolled sobbing.

  ‘Where were you?’ she moaned, burying her face into his chest. Repeating it over and over.

  Blake held her in his arms. He stroked her hair with hands that had since taken many lives. He held her to a body that no longer belonged to him. A tool. A cold hard machine.

  The hotel room ceiling swam into focus as he woke.

  ‘I should never have left you,’ he whispered to the empty room.

  CHAPTER 22

  josie’s fate...blake recovers...winter burns...stephanie snaps rainer...

  Josie awoke. The fuzziness of the chloroform had been replaced by something else. Whatever drugs she had been given she could no longer move anything. She strained her eyes taking in what she could of the concrete cell. She was lying down, stripped naked. Her wrists and ankles cuffed to the bedposts, unnecessary given she could not move but she knew it was not for that, it was to hammer home her complete and utter vulnerability. She was at their mercy, her every intimacy exposed for all to see. Like a trussed animal in an abattoir awaiting the inevitable.

  It was over, she knew it. She awaited the same fate as Dina. And whatever Rainer had unleashed to find her had not been enough.

  The door opened and Simmonds stepped in with Caldwell and an armed guard behind him. Her eyes rolled in her head as she tried to focus on them.

  Simmonds looked her over.

  ‘Not quite so feisty now are we?’

  He stood by the side of the cot she was strapped to and slid a distinctive Gothic ringed finger effeminately between her breasts and down to her pubic area. She could feel the pressure, but no touch.

  ‘What to do? What to do?’ he mused. Josie knew what he had done to Dina. Another voice sounded out.

  ‘May I make a suggestion?

  Simmonds turned to Caldwell. Smiled.

  ‘Oh please. I do so love suggestions.’

  Caldwell leant forward and whispered in his ear.

  ‘Oh, you naughty boy.’

  Caldwell looked her over contemplating.

  ‘That would be a lesson indeed.’

  Simmonds gestured to the guard behind Caldwell.

  ‘Get Laroche.’

  The guard left the room. Simmonds bent down to her.

  ‘You’re going to have so much fun with us you won’t want to leave.’

  Another man entered. Lawrence Laroche. The tall, slim man whose image was visible beside Simmonds on Blake’s phone.

  Simmonds beckoned him over.

  ‘Ah, Lawrence.’

  Simmonds cupped Laroche’s ear and whispered, maintaining eye contact with Josie. Laroche’s eyes widened in alarm at Simmonds’ words.

  ‘And once that’s done, take her to the factory and have her serve our unwanted guests.’

  Laroche nodded. Simmonds returned his attention to Josie.

  ‘And let this be a lesson to you. You can’t just go fucking around in other people’s business without consequences.’

  Josie lay immobile, useless, resigned to whatever atrocit
y they had in mind for her as Simmonds took his leave.

  The steaming bath was almost full. Blake twisted the taps closed and slowly lowered himself in, wincing at his freshly bandaged and already blooded shoulder. He let the water come up to his chin, the ends of his hair submerged. He closed his eyes and slipped under. Then he opened them looking through the water into the burning strip light above.

  Far away, Nathaniel Winter was seated at his steel desk. The only illumination a candle. He held his wrist above the flame. It burned skin already heavily scarred. He whispered as it crackled and split.

  ‘The wound that was rent open in me is the same as the wound that one day will cut through you, the same as the wounds that have cut through the lives of the millions that have lived and died under the will of so called civilised men. For you to accept that wound silently, to acquiesce to a greater authority that had hijacked God himself would no more be possible than for me to heal the wound I have become. They could keep their civilisation; he wanted no part of it. His suffering would not be borne in silence. His suffering would not be borne without action. The hatred that he felt in his heart, the wrong that had been done unto those that he loved, the darkness that writhed and twisted within his soul, would not be silenced or subjugated to another’s notion of civilisation.

  The darkness in me was stronger than them. It would have vengeance. It thought nothing of the laws of men. They existed only in my former life, on the surface of a world on which I had once lived and now looked up at only from below.

  It is not the light of truth that we require, but the fire of retribution. Embrace the flame as you would a brother and together we will burn them. Burn them all.’

  Wisps of smoke rose from the cigarette bright and white in the morning sunlight filtering through the gaps in the drawn curtains. Stephanie turned the cigarette this way and that making the wisps spiral. Beside her the hard-bodied dancer from the previous night slept still. She stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray by the bed. Blake had hated it when she smoked. He said that it was like kissing an ashtray. She felt a familiar tightness build behind her eyes and willed it away. The form beside her stirred, stretched and turned a handsome angular face to her.