by James Carol
Sobek was standing in the doorway, his eyes fixed on Gifford. There was a Glock 17 in his hand and he was wearing a Kevlar vest. He looked every bit as relaxed as Gifford had done earlier, every bit as in control. There was even the ghost of a smile playing at the edges of his lips. This was the moment that he’d been waiting for, the one he’d been dreaming about all these years. Sobek strode across the room and pointed the gun at Gifford’s head. His left hand was curled around the right to support and steady it. Not that he needed to. There was no way he’d miss from this range. And if by some miracle he did, there were another sixteen bullets in the clip. Winter drew his gun and aimed at Sobek’s head.
‘Put the gun down.’
Sobek’s full attention was still on Gifford. His gun hand was steady, his finger on the trigger. A little more pressure and Gifford would be a dead man. Anderton came up alongside Winter. Her gun was trained on Sobek, too.
‘The police are on their way,’ she said. ‘If you kill him, you’ll be the one who ends up in prison. He’s not worth it, Sobek.’
‘Who said anything about killing him? All I want to do is talk.’
Winter didn’t trust a word he was hearing. Sobek’s voice was too quiet and too even. He had means and motive, and now he had the opportunity. ‘Put the gun down and step back.’
‘Or what? You’re going to shoot me?’ Sobek shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’
He knelt down and ran the tip of the Glock along Gifford’s upper arm. He stopped when he got to the bullet wound, paused for a second, then dug the end of the gun into it. Gifford screamed and his eyes sprang open. Both Winter and Anderton started moving. Winter was aiming his gun at the back of Sobek’s head, just above his ponytail.
‘Take another step and I will kill him,’ Sobek said quietly.
They stopped moving.
‘All I want is to talk,’ he added. ‘After everything he’s done, I don’t think that’s too much to ask.’
‘In which case, drop the gun,’ Winter said. ‘You don’t need a gun to talk.’
Sobek ignored him and pushed the barrel of his gun into Gifford’s wounded arm again, harder this time. Gifford let out another scream.
‘Have I got your attention?’ Sobek asked pleasantly.
Gifford nodded.
‘And you know who I am?’
Another weak nod.
‘Do you believe that I’m capable of killing you?’
Another nod.
‘Do you know why I’m letting you live?’
Gifford shook his head.
‘Because I want you to remember this face. I want it to be the last thing you see before you go to sleep, and the first thing you see when you wake up. I want you to understand that the reason you’re wasting your life away in a prison cell is because I let you live. I want you to suffer through each and every one of your remaining days. When you take your final breath, I want you to remember me.’
Sobek dug the gun barrel into Gifford’s arm once more. This time he didn’t stop when the screaming started. He just kept going, piling on the pain. Winter covered the distance between them in five strides and pushed his Glock into the back of Sobek’s head.
‘Drop the gun! Now!’
Sobek ignored him and carried on digging with the gun barrel. Gifford was thrashing weakly, trying to get away. His screams had turned into sobs that were getting quieter with each passing second. Winter flipped the Glock over then smashed the butt into the side of Sobek’s head. There was a dull thud as it connected and Sobek dropped to the ground. Anderton walked over and looked down at the two bodies.
‘Did you have to hit him so hard?’ she asked.
‘I had to make sure he was going to stay down.’ He nodded toward Gifford’s unconscious body. ‘So was it all worth it?’
Anderton’s smile lit up her whole face. ‘Totally worth it.’
Epilogue
Atlanta has the busiest airport in the world. More than a quarter of a million people use it every single day, catching a thousand flights to all points of the globe. Today Winter was just passing through, waiting for a connecting flight. Three hours from now he’d be in the air and on his way to Madrid. Another day, another killer to hunt down. The bar he was sitting in was loud, everyone talking at once. One wall was made entirely from glass and looked out over the runways.
The TV screen was tuned to a news channel, the sound muted. Even so, it was a fairly straightforward process to work out what was going on. The script was pretty much the same as it had been yesterday, the same as it would be tomorrow. Winter had one eye on the TV screen, and one eye on the planes taking off and landing on the other side of the window. Killing time, because that’s what you did in airports. The whisky was overpriced, but it was going down easily enough. Too easily. One more and he’d call it quits. His plan was to anaesthetise himself to the point where he slept the whole way to Spain.
The story onscreen changed to a new one that made him immediately sit up and take notice. More than five months had passed since he’d been in Vancouver, long enough for the whole episode to get buried in his memory. He’d been halfway around the world since then, worked another half a dozen cases. The face on the screen sent him tumbling back in time. They were using Gifford’s police mugshot. The board he was holding up gave his number as 325-676-21. The top of his head was level with the line for five foot four. His face was completely expressionless. No joy, no sorrow, and nothing in between. He still managed to look guilty of all the sins of mankind, though. According to the ticker at the bottom of the screen he’d just been murdered.
Winter grabbed his carryon bag and pushed his way to the bar, ignoring the protests and shouts. One guy went to grab his arm and he shook him away. The guy must have seen something in his expression because he backed off immediately, hands held high to pacify. On screen, Gifford’s photograph had been swapped for Nicholas Sobek’s. This picture dated back to the days when he’d been a mover and a shaker. They’d had to use this one because they didn’t have anything more recent. His hair had been short and tidy back then. No beard. He looked a totally different person. Until you saw the eyes. Then there was no doubt that this was the same person.
‘Turn up the TV,’ Winter called out.
The barman ignored him and carried on serving a customer.
‘Hey!’ he hollered.
The barman stopped and turned. Some of the other travellers had turned as well, everyone staring like he was a dozen different kinds of crazy. An empty space had suddenly opened up all around him.
‘I said, turn up the volume!’
‘You need to calm down, sir, or I’m going to call security.’
‘No, what I need is for you to turn the volume up on the TV.’
The barman kept on staring, working through his options. Winter took a twenty from his billfold and slapped it down on the bar. Which added a new option into the mix, one that was hopefully more appealing than calling security.
‘I’ll give you twenty bucks to turn up the volume. So long as you do it now.’
The barman looked at him for a second longer, then picked up the twenty and went to find the remote. By the time he got the sound going, the story had finished. It took a couple of minutes for Winter to find somewhere quiet enough to make a call. He was in some sort of service corridor, away from the noise and bustle. He scrolled through the contacts list on his phone, looking for Anderton’s number. She might be retired, but he was betting that her winged monkeys were as efficient as ever. She answered on the seventh ring. There was no preamble, she just jumped straight in with, ‘You’ve heard the news then?’
‘It was Sobek, wasn’t it? He killed Gifford.’
‘Sobek has an alibi,’ she replied. ‘Gifford was in prison at the time of the murder. Sobek wasn’t.’
‘He was involved, though. He’s got to be. We’re back to those quacking ducks again, Anderton.’
‘Of course he was involved. The police know that, too. That’s why they�
��re so keen to talk to him.’
‘Which shouldn’t be too difficult. All they’ve got to do is rock up to his house and knock on the basement door.’
‘That was the first place they looked. The house was deserted. Jefferies reckons that he hasn’t been there in the last forty-eight hours.’
‘You better run me through what happened,’ Winter said.
‘Okay, Gifford was enjoying a nice relaxing shower when someone slashed his femoral artery. Despite the fact that there were six other people in the shower at the time, nobody saw a thing. Jack Datt says that the wound was consistent with an improvised shiv, possibly a toothbrush. It wouldn’t have taken Gifford long to bleed out. The warm water would have sped things up even further.’
‘It should be easy enough to work out who did it. All you’ve got to do is talk to the wives and relatives of the guys who were in the shower with him. If any of them are driving brand-new cars or booking exotic holidays then you’ve found your man. Sobek had the means and motive. The only thing missing was opportunity, and it sounds like he solved that particular problem. So where is he if he’s not at home?’
‘Right now that’s the million-dollar question.’
‘The Cessna?’ Winter suggested.
‘Still at Boundary Bay. And both cars are still in his garage. That’s one of the things that make this so weird. It’s like one second he was there, the next he’d disappeared.
‘And like that, he’s gone.’
‘Yeah, I saw that movie, too.’
‘Not that the cars would have been a whole lot of use,’ he continued. ‘If he’d driven up to a border checkpoint in an Aston Martin or a top-of-the-range Mercedes, people would look twice. Right now, he’s going to want to exist below the radar.’
‘Way below,’ Anderton agreed.
‘Heading to the US makes sense, though. Sea-Tac is only a couple of hours from Vancouver. From there he could fly anywhere in the world. If he’s worried about Seattle being too close he could keep going south to Portland. There’s an international airport there. Or maybe he’ll do the tourist thing and drive down the Pacific Highway and catch a plane from LAX. Whatever he decides to do, he’s got plenty of options.’
‘That’s the theory the police are currently working on. They’ve been talking to the car rental agencies, but no joy so far.’
‘It’s unlikely he’d go down that route. He wouldn’t want to risk the car being fitted with a tracking device. It’s more likely that he picked up something cheap and anonymous from a dealership, somewhere happy to deal in cash and not too concerned about paperwork.’
Anderton sighed. ‘And that’s the theory I’m working on.’
The line went quiet. The only sound was the gentle static wash created by the signal travelling up to space and back again.
‘What is it?’ Anderton asked. ‘I can hear you thinking.’
‘Sobek’s not going to be happy.’
‘Why not? The person who murdered Isabella is dead. That’s got to be a cause for celebration.’
‘Yes, but he wasn’t the one who did the actual killing.’
‘You think that matters?’
‘I think he would have liked to have done it,’ Winter said. ‘However, I also think that he values his freedom too much to do anything stupid. He proved that much back in Delaney’s kitchen. He could easily have killed Gifford. Believe me, he was tempted. I could see it in his face. It took every ounce of willpower he possessed to stop himself from pulling the trigger.’
‘But if he had done that, it would have been him who ended up in prison.’
‘Exactly. What matters is that Gifford is dead. The fact that he didn’t kill him is something he’ll learn to live with.’
‘Pathologically pragmatic,’ Anderton said.
‘Got it in one.’
They fell into another brief silence. The static being beamed down from outer space sounded louder than before. This time it was Winter who broke it.
‘Sobek’s gone for good. You realise that, don’t you? The only way he’s going to get caught is if he breaks cover, and why would he do that?’
Anderton sighed. ‘Yeah, I know. Killing Gifford was always his end goal, wasn’t it? He used me, Winter.’
‘Only as much as you used him. You’d made it your mission to catch Gifford, and he enabled you to do it. Don’t forget that.’
‘But my intention wasn’t that he should die. That’s the difference. I wanted to see him brought to justice.’
‘And therein lies the problem. Justice means different things to different people. If you ask Sobek, he’ll tell you that justice has now been served.’
‘No, Winter, what Sobek got was revenge, pure and simple.’
‘Is there any real difference?’
There was a long sigh on the other end of the line. ‘Look, I’ve got to go. Take care of yourself.’
‘You too. And keep me in the loop. If you hear anything from Sobek, I want to know.’
‘Sure. Same goes for you.’
Winter killed the call and scrolled through his contact list. Sobek’s cell number went straight through to a recorded voice informing him that it hadn’t been possible to connect the call. Maybe he was out of range. More likely he’d dumped the phone. Not that Winter had expected anything different. There was a good chance that he would never hear from him again. There was every chance that nobody would ever hear from him again.
On the way back to the bar, he kept seeing Sobek in the faces of the people he passed. Heading through Atlanta made sense, though. A quarter of a million passengers a day, and a thousand flights to all four corners of the globe. If you were looking to disappear, it was as good a launch pad as any.
A loved-up couple was sitting at his table. The overpriced whisky was long gone. He ordered another, found a new table and spent the next couple of hours watching the planes. His gate was finally called and thirty minutes later he was getting settled into his seat in business class. Within five minutes of the meal plates being cleared away he had his eyes closed, his seat fully reclined, and the whisky was working its magic. His sleep was as deep and dreamless as the ocean crashing darkly thirty-five thousand feet below.
Acknowledgements
As always, family comes first. Karen, Niamh and Finn, you guys are the best. I couldn’t do this without you.
Camilla Wray is both an agent and a friend. Her support and gentle encouragement through the years has been unwavering, and for that I am truly grateful.
Nick Tubby . . . a good friend is one who stands by you when things get tough, but the best friends are the ones who help you to keep standing. Thanks for everything, buddy. I appreciate it.
Huge thanks to Dan Bailey for answering all my questions regarding Vancouver and flying. Your help and insights were invaluable.
Kate O’Hearn once again helped me to keep my Americanisms straight. If you’ve got kids, check out her books – they’re awesome.
Winter’s theory about the Lindbergh kidnapping was adapted from John Douglas’s book The Cases That Haunt Us. If you want to know how the real-life profilers do it, his books have got to be your start point.
About James Carol
James Carol is the creator of Jefferson Winter, a former FBI profiler who travels the world hunting serial criminals. The Jefferson Winter series includes Broken Dolls, Prey and Watch Me, which was shortlisted for the ITV Specsavers Crime Thriller Book Club Best Read. He has also written three ebook novellas set during Winter’s FBI days: Presumed Guilty, Hush Little Baby and Open Your Eyes. James lives in Hertfordshire with his wife and two children.
For more information please
visit www.james-carol.com
also by James Carol
Broken Dolls
Watch Me
Prey
In the Jefferson Winter Chronicles:
Presumed Guilty
Hush Little Baby
Open Your Eyes
Copyright
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blished in 2017
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This ebook edition first published in 2017
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© James Carol, 2017
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ISBN 978–0–571–32229–9