by J. B. Turner
The corporations were grateful for the most senior people within the military-industrial complex, whose departments were in charge of multibillion-dollar contracts. But they also knew their way around Capitol Hill. They had political links. They knew people. They knew the judges. The powerbrokers in New York. DC.
The more he thought about it all, the more depressing Nathan found it.
He bought Mahoney and himself some sandwiches, snacks, bottles of water, and coffee.
“Tell me about your sister,” Mahoney said.
Nathan cleared his throat, never comfortable opening up. “She’s my big sister. I love her. She’s got no one apart from me. And I do everything in my power to make sure she has what she needs.”
“You said she was in a hospital. Do you mind me asking more about that?”
Nathan did mind. He was quiet as he wondered whether to talk to Mahoney. But he figured he needed to keep the reporter on his side for as long as he could. “My father was not a good man.”
Mahoney listened. “In what way?”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean in what way was he not a good man?”
Nathan shrugged. “You know how it is.”
“No, I don’t.”
“My father was a violent alcoholic.”
“I’m sorry . . . Shit.”
“You wanna know about my life? He beat me. He beat my sister. We were tiny. Scrawny little things. Malnourished. He spent whatever cash we had on liquor. And women. We scavenged. Like feral dogs.”
Mahoney closed his eyes.
“She protected me by killing him. So they put her away.”
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“How did you get involved in . . . um . . . your line of work?”
Nathan stared out at the rolling hills and tiny hamlets of upstate New York passing by. “My line of work . . . Nicely put.”
“So how did you get into whatever it is you do?”
“I was first and foremost a good fit from the outset, I think.”
“How?”
“I had the right psychological profile. Ruthless, cold-blooded, a certain moral ambiguity.”
Mahoney stared at him. “I’m sorry.”
“What about you? Your life?”
“What do you want to know?”
“How did you get into journalism?”
“My father was a journalist. I followed in his footsteps after Yale.”
“Yale? Wow. Smart boy.”
“Not really. Went to a good prep school, and from there Ivy League was the next step. Great teachers.”
Nathan nodded. He felt envious of such a privileged childhood. His own brutalized upbringing had prepared him to fight, if nothing else. He remembered street fights with toughs from Alphabet City. Nasty little Puerto Ricans who were quick with knives. He had gotten cut too many times to count. He’d been beaten up. Slashed. On his back. Arms. Hands. Neck. It was bad shit. He’d been kicked unconscious. A skinny little white kid fighting for his life in an urban jungle. But fought he did. And he survived. And learned. Slowly, he learned.
He learned how to fight back. He learned not to show fear. The fear might have been gnawing away at him when he confronted some street thugs. But his face didn’t betray his emotions. Poker-faced as he approached them. Sometimes he smiled. That always unnerved them. And he had stood his ground to protect himself and his friends. Eventually, they stayed the fuck away from him.
Nathan’s mind flashed to his youth. The stinking streets and alleys he knew around his neighborhood. The smells of burgers and puke and hot dogs and booze and smoke. He saw things. Things that were ingrained on his soul. His mind. He saw terrible things. Sometimes he dreamed of those days.
The rats emerged from storm drains and ate the remnants of sodden, moldy old pizza slices cast aside the previous night by drunken stragglers. Nathan saw it all. The dark side of the city. Living in the shadows, his sister gone.
They didn’t tell him where she was. Not then. Not ever. He’d had to find her.
He retreated into himself, day by day consumed by rage and a black anger that was eating him alive.
Nathan was tested in the military. Then he was retested by the CIA. They seemed pleased with his profile.
Within months, Nathan was in Iraq. He realized he could handle the mayhem. The undiluted horror. A lot of the other tough kids in his unit were scared shitless. He never was. To him it was an adrenaline rush. It was out of control. There were no rules. No right and no wrong.
The war never ended for Nathan. It lived on in him. Each and every day.
Thirty
Berenger was sitting behind his desk, waiting for Stone’s handler to call. He’d been told to expect a call an hour earlier. But still nothing.
He got up from his seat and stared out at the ashen skies over Toronto, the skyscrapers in the distance, wondering if the handler had other issues he was dealing with. He knew the handler would be overseeing Stone’s actions and couldn’t be disturbed for any reason. It was possible the man had other, more pressing matters to attend to.
Berenger reflected on his role in such shadowy operations. The confidant of the assassin. The man who analyzed Stone to see that he was psychologically prepared. Attuned. Ready. Nathan was his patient.
He thought back to the Scottish facility, where Stone had been taken after his reconstructive facial surgery. Stone looked different, but he was still wired the same. The same raw power and visceral anger boiling over. Strangling a perfect stranger on request. That had shocked even Berenger. He’d thought that since Stone had been away from killing and maiming and assassination for years between his near drowning in the Everglades and getting to Scotland, he would have turned away from his former life. Sickened by it perhaps. But nothing was further from the truth. If anything, Stone had returned more focused, and utterly terrifying.
Berenger was lucky not to have been at the Scottish facility after Stone’s assassination of Senator Crichton. But the blowback had been unbelievable. His response cold, calculating, and beyond anyone’s powers of understanding.
Stone had brought the facility to its knees, burned it to the ground, and made it out unscathed. No one had foreseen that, least of all him.
Berenger reflected on what the handler had previously said. Stone shouldn’t have been chosen after that incident. He had been surprised by the handler’s candor. The more he thought about the man’s opinions of Stone, the more he wondered if the Commission had gotten it wrong. Horribly wrong. But he also knew there were two parts to the operation. First, Stone deleting Mahoney. That was the minor part. Then the main act. Once Stone was back in Florida, or wherever he wanted to go, the second stage would commence. A second stage that Stone didn’t know anything about. Classic compartmentalization.
Berenger’s thoughts again turned to the professional killer. Stone was not only dangerous. He was brilliant. Lethal. And almost certainly the perfect assassin. But his response during the operation in Scotland, coupled with his sister’s kidnapping to exert leverage on him as payback, did give Berenger pause for thought.
Interestingly, his own views on the matter hadn’t been sought.
Berenger wondered why that was. He was already consulting within the secret facility, no more than ten miles away. And he understood protocol was essential to curtail any leakage.
He knew more about the psychological makeup of Nathan Stone than anyone. But occasionally, very rarely, he detected signs of humanity in his brown eyes.
Usually it was when they talked about his sister. That was it. His love for his sister. His eyes softened, or at least they appeared to.
What was so interesting about him were his mood changes. He might appear to be in a docile mood one minute, answering questions pleasantly and occasionally with humor. But unpredictably, a switch seemed to flick in his mind. Sometimes the wrong word, phrase, or tone, and Stone’s icy gaze would be on him. Like he had been triggered.
&
nbsp; He knew Stone could kill him with his bare hands. He sensed it. He saw the way his eyes stared longer than was comfortable, lingering just enough to instill fear and uneasiness.
Truth be told, Berenger was fascinated by Stone. Other psychologists and psychiatrists dreamed of having such a complex, fascinating, multifaceted character with unimaginable layers to analyze and interact with.
Berenger closed his eyes. His mind drifted back to the secret room in his Toronto apartment. The door he always kept locked. Three walls plastered with pictures of Nathan Stone and newspaper clippings. New York Post reports the day after Stone’s father was murdered by his sister. Forensic photos from inside the bloody crime scene in the one-room apartment on the Bowery. Photos of detectives scouring the scene. Photos of Helen Stone, the sister, wild-eyed, in a police mug shot. But mostly photos of Nathan. As a child. As a boy. As a teenage delinquent. As a young man. As a soldier. As a CIA operative. And now.
He would often touch the photos and imagine the horrors Nathan had seen. The nightmares he had endured. What was inside his head? Really inside his head? He sometimes dreamed of Nathan. He had imagined Nathan’s silhouetted figure at his bedroom door, standing, watching him. In the dream, he was lying alone, frozen in terror, not daring to breathe. The dream had become recurring. And it always ended the same way. Nathan would walk toward him. Step-by-step. Closer and closer to him. He felt he was being suffocated by his spectral presence. Invariably, he would wake in a cold sweat, gasping for air, shaking like a leaf.
His secret room was his sacred space. The place where Berenger went to think about Nathan. To wallow in his world. To get closer to him. He had begun to fantasize more and more about Nathan. About his actions. About his needs and desires. No one knew. No one could ever know. It was his secret.
The more he thought about Nathan, the happier he got. He realized only too well that he had slipped under Stone’s spell. Had become fixated on him. Fascinated by him. He felt a frisson of excitement in his presence. Knowing Nathan would soon be killing another human being.
Berenger had begun to visit New York. He wanted to see where Nathan had grown up. He wanted to see the tenement where he was born. He wondered about Nathan as a child. He visited his old school. He took photographs. He hadn’t uploaded them to his laptop. But he would. They would add to his collection. Even his wife didn’t know about his fixation. He sometimes snapped in a blind fury if she asked why she couldn’t clean his study at home. No one entered that space. They hadn’t for years. It was his area. The same as the room in Toronto. A shrine to Nathan Stone.
He often wondered why Nathan taunted him. Mocked him. Berenger felt angry with himself that Nathan could see the fear in his eyes. It often felt to Berenger as if Nathan was turning the tables on him. But it also felt as if Nathan was controlling him.
Berenger’s thoughts turned to the operation as he wondered if Nathan would soon be closing in on his prey.
Thirty-One
The train had just left Poughkeepsie, about eighty miles north of New York City, and took on new passengers as they headed south to Manhattan. Nathan figured they were about ninety minutes away.
He stared out at the bleak surroundings, then fixed his gaze on Mahoney. “I’ve been thinking,” he said.
“About what?”
“About you.”
“What about me?”
“Where do you live?”
“That is not going to happen . . . So forget that.”
“What did you think I was going to say?”
“That you wanted to stay with me. Well, no.”
Nathan shrugged. “It was just an idea.”
“‘Just an idea’? My family are lovely, innocent, beautiful people. You’re . . . Well, you know, you’re a bit different.”
“I think that’s an accurate description. Aren’t you curious? Don’t you want to get to know me better?”
“I’m curious about a lot of things. I’m curious about how the world operates. Geopolitical currents and undercurrents. The state of our country. Public schools. The environment. The lack of investment in people. Gimme a break. You’re killing me.”
Nathan grinned. “You’re making light of your situation.”
Mahoney seemed to find the funny side of things for the first time in twenty-four hours. “I agree with what you said. I am, my own fears and neuroses aside, rather curious about you.”
“That’s good. We’re making progress.”
Mahoney glanced at his watch. “I haven’t been home for months. I can’t remember the last time.”
“This is good then, isn’t it?”
Mahoney looked away.
“What do you do for fun, Mark?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I’m curious. I thought all journalists had to be curious.”
“You’re not a journalist. And I don’t believe you’re asking because you’re interested.”
“So why am I asking, Mark?”
Mahoney shrugged. “I don’t know. It gives you a thrill knowing you can scare me. Then you can worm your way into my world.”
“I’ve already done that, Mark.”
Mahoney sighed. “I like football. Happy?”
“Giants?”
“Yeah, who else?”
“Love the Giants.”
Mahoney closed his eyes. “This is weird. You do know that, right?”
“I’m aware this is slightly unusual. But hey, it’s life, right? We take the rough with the smooth, the ups with the downs.”
The train was powering through the rural surroundings of upstate New York. Fields. Rivers. Space to breathe.
“I like it here,” Nathan said. “Nice and quiet. I like quiet.”
Mahoney forced a smile.
“New York City is constant noise, isn’t it?”
“I guess,” Mahoney said.
“I used to like that. But as you get older, it’s awful. You wonder, What the fuck am I doing here? At least, that’s what I thought before I joined the army.”
“So you volunteered for Iraq?”
“Out of the frying pan and into the fire.”
Mahoney got quiet for a few moments. “I don’t want to go with you once we get to New York. I don’t want to know what you’re going to do. I don’t want to be an accomplice.”
“Don’t worry, I’ve got it under control.”
Mahoney bit his lower lip, as if thinking hard. “You’re going to ask them where your sister is.”
“You ever heard of an asymmetric response?”
“Yes, I have.”
“That’s basically what I’ll be doing.”
“This is a surreal conversation.”
Nathan leaned closer. “I know. Crazy, right?”
“You’re going to kill these men?”
“I don’t know. It depends.”
“On what?”
“I have to roll with whatever scenario I’m faced with. I might not be able to get close to them. They might be surrounded by people. So I’ll have to improvise.”
“Is that a metaphor?”
“I like to call it neutralize, Mark. Far more antiseptic and pleasant to the ear.”
Mahoney cleared his throat. “I don’t want to be around you . . . when you do whatever it is you’re thinking of doing.”
“Where do you live, Mark?”
“Please . . . I can’t tell you.”
“Mark, here’s how it’s going to work. I hold the aces, and you have to take it on the chin. So, I’m going to ask again: Where do you live?”
“Chelsea.”
“I already know that. And your address?”
“Shit.”
“Chelsea’s nice these days, I’ve heard.” Nathan sighed. “So what’s going to happen is, I’m going to let you return to your family, while I attend to a couple of bits of business.”
“Then what?”
“Then I’ll spend the night at your place.”
“Never in a million years.
”
“Mark, I will not harm you or your family. I’m figuring out a way to save them.”
Mahoney leaned in close, finger pointed. “Don’t even think about it.”
“Mark, be quiet and listen. Once I sort out my business, I will head over to your place, and you will say, ‘Here’s a friend of mine from Canada. He’s originally from New York, and he’s going to be visiting his sister, but she’s out of town until tomorrow.’ What do you say?”
“Just for one night?”
“I don’t know. We’ll see what transpires.”
Mahoney just stared at him, color draining from his face.
Thirty-Two
Clayton Wilson was shown to a discreet table at Cafe Milano, in Georgetown. The rheumy-eyed man he’d met at the Army and Navy Club, wearing an expensive gray suit, white shirt, and tightly knotted black tie, was waiting. The man nodded and sipped from a glass of white wine as Wilson sat down.
The waiter smiled. “Something to drink, sir?”
“Talisker. Neat. And a great bottle of French red for the table, two glasses.”
The waiter gave a deep bow. “Very good, sir.”
The man opposite him was smiling. “I like a man that drinks, don’t you?”
“Indeed.”
“Good to see you again, Clayton.”
Wilson smiled. “And you.” He looked around the restaurant. “Nice place.”
“Haven’t been here in years.”
Wilson smiled. He’d known the man for decades, since Wilson had joined the CIA. John Fisk Jr. was a reclusive financier. A billionaire many times over. And he had been one of the first to approach Wilson about his plans for the Commission.
The waiter returned with the glass of single malt and a bottle of red. He poured out two large glasses of the wine, took their dinner order, then left them to it.
The man’s eyes bored into Wilson’s, as if he was trying to determine what kind of man he really was. Was he a steady man? A man to be trusted? “So gimme where we’re at. I believe we’re still not over the line.”