Checkmate

by Steven James

Higher. You need to jump higher and hold on to that beam.

  With every second, he was lengthening the distance between us.

  I readied myself and then leapt as high as I could.

  This time, despite the friction burns on my hand, I managed to hold on. Gripping the beam, I kicked off the wall and pulled myself up. Even more focused now, adrenaline erasing the pain in my side, my hands, my ankle, I climbed one beam after another. But I could see that I was falling farther behind him.

  He was going to make it to the surface.

  He was going to get away.

  48

  Kurt Mason reached the top of the shaft and clambered out of the hole.

  No SWAT.

  No police.

  Sirens, though.

  Law enforcement was on its way.

  He didn’t have much time.

  No matter how good your grip strength is, it’s incredibly difficult to pull yourself up a standard-diameter rock-climbing rope without an ascender; it’s simply too narrow.

  However, just to make sure and to slow Patrick down, before he headed for the door of the warehouse, Kurt confirmed that Pat wasn’t holding on to the rope, then he drew his blade across it.

  + + +

  The rope snaked past me on its way to the bottom of the shaft.

  Still ten meters to go.

  I climbed.

  Come on!

  Five.

  Then three.

  And then I ran out of beams.

  With the loose dirt near the top of the shaft I expected that getting out would be a problem, but as I made my way over the edge, I found the soil firmer than I thought it would be and it only took me a few moments to get to ground level, where I grabbed one of the angled slabs of concrete and swung myself out of the hole.

  “Kurt!”

  Nothing.

  I spun, studying the ragged ground, the shadows, the abandoned equipment, for any sign of Mason.

  Out of instinct I reached for my gun, but of course it was at the bottom of the mine.

  Sprinting out the door, I burst into the day.

  For some reason my sense of time was warped and it seemed like it should have been night out here, but it wasn’t.

  Still early afternoon.

  Hot.

  Summer in the South.

  He was nowhere to be seen.

  I sped toward the place where Mason had parked his van. The gate was open, the vehicle gone.

  He can’t be far.

  Sirens were approaching from a nearby road, but without my phone I had no way to contact the responding officers, no way to tell them about Mason’s van.

  I ran to the road and looked up and down the street.

  Nothing.

  Which way? Would he hop on the highway or disappear into the web of residential streets in this neighborhood?

  I didn’t know.

  He knows how you think. He won’t do what you’d expect.

  Even if I could have guessed his plans, my rental car’s keys lay at the bottom of the mine shaft, so I couldn’t drive anywhere to look for him.

  He killed Corrine right in front of your eyes!

  In anger, I smacked a street sign beside me, then raced toward Summit Street, where the sound of the sirens was coming from.

  + + +

  Kurt pulled into a circular driveway in a residential neighborhood about a mile from the textile plant and parked next to an older-model Buick LeSabre.

  He shut off the engine.

  A small strip of woods helped isolate this home from the others just down the street. And the house had what he needed: a garage.

  As a former police lieutenant, he knew that law enforcement would be looking for his vehicle on the nearby streets but wouldn’t immediately search for it in driveways. And they wouldn’t be able to search in the garages of people’s homes, not without warrants.

  So, he could buy some valuable time if he could get his van in this garage.

  He exited the vehicle and started toward the porch of the house.

  A few moments after he rang the doorbell an elderly man appeared in the doorway. “Yes?” There was guarded suspicion in his voice. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m going to need you to back up.”

  “What?”

  “Please. Take a couple of steps backward.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t want to get any blood on your porch. It might attract attention when the police go door-to-door.”

  Confused, the man retreated a step, if only to close the door—but it was just what Kurt needed. He went at the man and cut him swiftly, mercifully, in a way that he would bleed out quickly.

  Once inside, Kurt stepped over the man’s twitching body and went looking for the car keys to the LeSabre parked out front so he could borrow the vehicle after hiding his own in the garage.

  + + +

  I flagged down the first cruiser.

  When the driver saw the blood on my shirt, he leapt out. “Sir, are you alright?”

  “I’m fine.” I approached them. “I need you to—”

  “Stop.” He seemed suddenly anxious, wary. “Stay where you are.”

  My wallet and my creds were at the bottom of the shaft so I couldn’t prove who I was, but I rattled off my federal ID number. His partner was out of the vehicle now too. He radioed it in.

  “How many units are en route?” I asked.

  “Three,” the first officer replied, somewhat hesitantly.

  “SWAT?”

  “He’s good,” his partner announced. “It’s Agent Bowers.”

  “With SWAT,” I went on urgently, “how many units do we have?”

  “Well, three is counting SWAT.”

  “We need more. Let me use your radio.” I called dispatch, gave them a description of Mason and his van, and told them its plate numbers. “This guy is armed, dangerous, and must be approached with extreme caution. He’s responsible for more than a dozen deaths. I repeat: Tell your officers to use extreme caution.”

  The other squads were arriving now. Mentally reviewing the road layout of this Ward from having studied the 3-D map and driven around with Guido, I took into account the typical patterns for fleeing suspects and Mason’s obvious familiarity with this city; then I told the officers how I wanted them to fan out and search the area until we could get more officers here to go door-to-door.

  “And we need eyes in the air,” I said to the ranking officer. “How many helicopters does your department have?”

  “Only one, but state patrol can help us out. They have some—I mean, they’re not all here in Charlotte, of course.”

  I’d seen a landing pad beside the FBI’s Field Office. “Call it in. And get the Bureau’s chopper on it as well. I want all major highways covered. Mass transit and airports too. Mason’s been using the alias Danny Everhart, but he’s smart and he might have another identity package. I want facial rec at the Charlotte airport.”

  “Are you sure we need to do all that?”

  “Listen to me: This guy killed six federal agents earlier this week, and a woman just now in that shaft. From what we know, he has nearly two hundred pounds of Semtex and he’s planning something big. He told me the climax would be tomorrow. We need to find him and we need to find him now.”

  By the look on his face I could tell that the gravity of the situation was finally hitting him. “Alright.”

  I doubted Mason would return to his apartment, but I radioed in the address and told dispatch to get a SWAT team over there. “He has hundreds of pounds of explosives at his disposal so the place might be booby-trapped. Do not rush in. Take it slow and evacuate the apartment building before you make a move.”

  I turned to the officer closest to me. “Do you have a cell phone?”


  “Yes, sir.” He produced it from his pocket.

  “I’m going to be needing that until I can get a new one.” I waited for him to hand it over. “Thank you.”

  “Um . . . yeah.”

  I contacted Cyber to see if they could get any satellite footage of the area from the Defense Department’s Routine Orbital Satellite Database, or ROSD, and also to get them looking into what “seven gods use thirty-eight” might mean; then I called Gonzalez and updated him on the search.

  When I was done he told me, “We need to release Everhart’s—well, Mason’s—DMV photo to the press.”

  Normally I don’t like working with the media, but in this case it was the right call. “Agreed,” I said. “We should set up a tip line. And get a photo of that model van out as well.”

  + + +

  FBI Director Margaret Wellington sat in the conference room at HQ and listened as JTTF Director René Gonzalez quickly brought her up to speed on the status of the search for Kurt Mason in Charlotte, North Carolina.

  “We need the Hostage Rescue Team down there,” she told Gonzalez. “They should be able to make it in just over an hour if they take one of our jets. I want them rather than local SWAT to clear Mason’s apartment. They’re better trained, and this guy has explosives and he knows how to use them. “

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Send Ingersoll and his men. I don’t want to take any chances.”

  + + +

  After leaving his van in the dead man’s garage, Kurt Mason drove Uptown to a parking garage where he left the LeSabre and hot-wired another car. Taking that car, he went to Fourth Ward to regroup in the house he’d rented under another name as part of his contingency plan.

  Patrick was smart, but Kurt couldn’t think of any way he would track him to this location.

  Now he parked that vehicle around back, out of sight behind the house and under a tree to hide it from satellites and choppers.

  He grabbed his computer bag and hip pack containing the sensor for checking the Semtex detonator, and went into the kitchen.

  When he’d been looking to rent a house, he’d wanted one that was furnished and he’d stumbled onto this gem here in this quiet, relatively crime-free neighborhood.

  A perfect fit.

  Based on his experience, he knew that law enforcement would initially assume he would try to flee, to leave the area. They wouldn’t start with the hypothesis that he was going to stay here in Uptown Charlotte, but even though it might put him at more of a risk, he had things to do in the city and he wasn’t about to leave until they were completed.

  He’d told Patrick that the climax would be tomorrow night, but he hadn’t told him where it would be.

  Timing and location again.

  It was always about how the two of them came together.

  Kurt assessed things: If the authorities hadn’t done so yet, they would be searching the neighborhood surrounding the textile mill he’d used, house by house.

  They would release his DMV photo.

  His face was going to be all over the news.

  They would probably already be at his apartment as well. He hadn’t left anything there that would reveal what was going to happen tomorrow, but still it was a setback—especially if they were somehow able to look at the photos he’d left in his bedroom.

  But with the trip wire that he’d set by the door, if SWAT did try to access the place that wasn’t going to turn out very well for them.

  He figured that watching the news would give him nearly real-time status on the search for him. But the big question was: Would the FBI send a team into the mine, thinking that there might be more victims down there?

  He wasn’t sure. They would eventually do so, but they would probably know about the Semtex by now, and, if so, they would take the search through the tunnels slowly and, without any evidence, they wouldn’t cancel Fan Celebration Day at the stadium tomorrow.

  There were a lot of unmapped tunnels down there. However, he’d lied to Bowers about one thing: There weren’t any other open shafts. Just that one. But deceit in the service of utility was always justifiable.

  Really, the tunnel from the Rudisill Mine to Saint Catherine, the mine that really mattered, was only one of many. And there was no reason law enforcement would think about the significance of the railroad tracks that crossed above the capped-off Saint Catherine mine shafts.

  It would almost certainly take them a couple of days to search all the tunnels and that was more than enough time to see everything through to the end.

  But it wasn’t just the revelation about him and their search for his location that was going to be foremost in the news—the media would also highlight Corrine’s death.

  And that would undoubtedly bring Richard out of the woodwork.

  Kurt hadn’t expected that to happen until tomorrow, after things had played out with M343.

  So now he also had to be vigilant and keep an eye out for Basque.

  Lie low.

  Be smart.

  Patrick had interrupted him before he could check the Semtex in the mine, but he could walk the tracks and do it externally through the pressure-sensor mechanism tonight.

  Not ideal, but workable.

  So, for right now, monitor the news, and wait things out. Once it got dark he would walk the tracks to verify that the pressure sensors beneath that overpass were calibrated properly and set to the right time to become operational tomorrow afternoon.

  49

  Based on a tip called in about a van in the neighborhood, we found Kurt Mason’s vehicle in the garage of a residence just over a mile from the mine.

  The owner was dead, his throat slit. The 2005 Buick LeSabre registered in his name was missing. We looked it up, but his vehicle didn’t have GPS.

  Our defense-satellite footage over Charlotte wasn’t in real time and was spottier than it should have been. So even though we had footage indicating that the LeSabre had been driven Uptown, we lost it in the network of streets shielded by the city’s skyscrapers.

  Local SWAT had evacuated Mason’s apartment building but were waiting for Ingersoll’s HRT unit to arrive from Quantico before attempting to access his place.

  ETA: thirty minutes.

  The CMPD and North Carolina State Highway Patrol choppers were looking for the LeSabre, but I guessed that Mason would have switched vehicles again by now.

  Based on what Voss had told Ralph and me about his difficulties working with the CMPD, I thought our joint work with them might be a hassle. However, they were as professional and on top of things as any law enforcement agency I’d ever worked with, which made me wonder if maybe Voss was the problem here rather than the Charlotte police.

  The media had a photo of Mason that we’d pulled off footage from the NVDS security cameras. We released that along with his DMV photo. A team was tracking down his associates from work and people from his apartment complex whom he might have contacted since he fled the mine shaft, as well as those who’d written to him or visited him in prison.

  Calls went out to his relatives and his ex-wife.

  Angela and Lacey were looking for any credit cards or phone bills in Mason’s name or with the name of Danny Everhart, but the last I heard they hadn’t located any.

  Through it all, one image kept coming back to me: Corrine tipping backward into the shaft with that rope cinched around her neck.

  The look on her face.

  Terror.

  “He’ll come,” she’d told me right before she died.

  “Who?” I’d asked.

  “My brother.”

  And then Mason had said, “Let’s hope you’re right.”

  Is all this a setup to draw Basque out? Is that where all this is leading? Does that have to do with the climax Mason told you is coming?

  I could almost hear the
unspoken cry of Corrine’s heart as Mason jerked her back into the shaft, words that she might have said to me if she’d had a chance: “You said you’d help me. Why didn’t you help me?”

  And I had no satisfying answer.

  In that tunnel, right before he killed her, Mason had taken Corrine’s photograph.

  I had Cyber search to see if he’d posted it anywhere online.

  So far, nothing.

  Find him, Pat. For Corrine, for Jerome, for the others, for everyone he’s ever killed.

  I was antsy. I wanted to be in on the search so I joined one of the teams in the air, riding in the Bureau’s helicopter.

  * * *

  We circled Uptown and I analyzed the street layout while staying in radio contact with Voss and Ralph.

  My ankle throbbed, my right palm was blistered with rope burns, and my side hadn’t stopped bleeding. I needed stitches again, so my pilot arranged for us to land on the pad of one of the hospitals so I could get that taken care of.

  Five minutes until we were scheduled to land.

  Until then, I held my left hand against my side to stem the bleeding as I scoured the area below us and considered where things were at.

  Mason hadn’t confirmed that it was Jerome who’d given him the camera locations, but he had told me something about seven gods using thirty-eight—whatever that might mean.

  The team was looking into it.

  I liked the feeling of the chase and, for me, anger always played a role in it. But now the rage I felt over what Mason had done unsettled even me.

  To catch these guys you have to meet them where they’re at, and that often means going to a very dark place. You have to ask yourself how far you’re willing to go in this job.

  And you need to be careful not to lose your way in the process.

  I’ve seen it happen with other agents, other cops.

  We want to remain pure, but darkness always sticks to you when you venture into it to find the people who traffic in causing pain to others.

  Your soul does not come away unscathed.

  Lien-hua and Tessa knew the darkness was there, but they didn’t know how far I’ve let myself be drawn into it while trying to catch the people I track.