Darius Cole.
“Is this my Garden of Gethsemane?” Cole asked him. “I don’t see the Centurions.”
That’s the moment Burke chose to stand up and hit the switch. He stepped forward into the dim light.
Cole didn’t say a word, but Mason could see the change in body language as he shifted on the stool. He folded his arms, protecting his chest. For a man who’d spent years surrounded by some of the worst, most violent felons in the world, this was the first time Mason had ever seen the calm, composed façade start to slip away.
“Mason, you’re a man of your word,” Burke said. “Rare thing, these days. And Mr. Cole …”
He bowed to the man. “It’s good to see you out.”
“Can’t say the same.”
“How many men did you send to kill me?” Burke said. “Ten? Twenty?”
“Whatever the number is,” Cole said, “it obviously wasn’t enough.”
“Burke,” Mason said, “you don’t let him die until he tells me where Diana is.”
Cole shifted his gaze from Mason to Burke and back again. “I don’t think it’s going to matter one way or another, gentlemen.”
“There’s all manner of ways to kill a man,” Burke said. “You should know better than most. So give Mason what he wants.”
Cole didn’t say anything. He didn’t move.
Burke smiled. “I was hoping you’d choose the hard way.”
But then Cole drew Mason closer and whispered in his ear: “Are you sure you want to know, Nick?”
Mason swallowed hard. “Tell me.”
“Check your apartment.”
Mason put his hands on Cole’s neck, then felt a sudden, sharp pain as Burke grabbed him by the right biceps.
“Leave him be,” Burke said.
Mason opened his mouth but no words came out. The war raged inside him, between staying here, hurting Cole, killing him. Or running.
Burke let go of Mason’s arm. “Go on now, boyo.”
Mason hit the door. A few seconds later, his car was speeding away from the parking lot.
That left Burke and Cole alone together in the quiet near darkness of the bar.
Burke smiled again and picked up his toolbox.
• • •
HARPER ROLLED TO A SLOW STOP a block away from the bar, got out, and approached on foot. When he saw the slight glow burning in the windows, he drew his Glock and went to the back door. It was unlocked.
He held the gun in front of him, slowly moving through the dark kitchen. A dim light came from the barroom. As he neared the door, he heard noises from inside. A sharp intake of breath. A muffled gasp. The sound of a man in pain.
He pushed against the door with the barrel of the gun and through the slim opening saw Sean Burke sitting on the edge of the pool table. A man was stretched out on the floor in front of him. Darius Cole, with blood on his face.
Burke was holding a power drill in one hand. A long pointed knife in the other. He was sitting hunched over, looking down at Cole with intense concentration. A serious man doing serious work.
Harper stepped through the door and pointed the gun at Burke’s chest. When Burke looked up, he slid off the edge of the table until he was standing on the floor.
“I could have killed you in that bunker,” Burke said.
“Maybe you should have.”
The two men stood facing each other. There was nothing between them but silence and dust, and the inert body of Darius Cole on the floor.
Burke opened his mouth to say something and Harper squeezed the trigger, putting five quick shots in Burke’s chest. Then he raised the sight and put a sixth in the center of Burke’s forehead.
Burke’s head snapped back, the rest of his body hitting the table and sliding to the floor next to Cole. Harper stepped forward, the gun still extended. Cole looked up at him, his eyes open now and blood coming from his mouth. Otherwise, he didn’t look seriously injured. A few minutes later, Harper realized, it would have been a much different story.
And then the second thought hit him:
This is Darius Cole, the man who’d ordered the murder of two witnesses he’d been protecting.
I could shoot him right now. Nobody would know. Few people would care.
Cole seemed to know exactly what Harper was thinking. He looked in Harper’s eyes as he sat up.
“You know who I am,” Cole said.
“Yes,” Harper said.
“Think carefully about what you do next, Marshal.”
I can’t do it again, he said to himself. A marshal gets one of these in a lifetime. Any more and he’s no better than the men he’s hunting.
Harper put his gun away and said, “I’ll call you an ambulance.”
• • •
MASON WENT UP the stairs two at a time. He couldn’t breathe anymore but he kept going, slipping and falling, grabbing for the rail, pulling himself up and taking the next step.
Be alive, he said in his mind over and over again.
Be alive.
When he got to the seventh floor, he stumbled down the hallway, taking out his key. He opened the door and slammed his way inside.
“Diana!” he said, knowing even as he saw her that this was exactly what he had been expecting. Exactly what he had known he would find.
She was lying on the floor as if staring up at the ceiling. Her hands were folded over her stomach as if arranged for a funeral. As if the man who killed her had kept one last measure of respect for her and had composed her this way before leaving.
Mason went down to one knee, saw the red marks around her neck. Saw the lifeless eyes staring at nothing.
He stayed with her for several minutes, not moving. Until his cell phone rang. On the third ring, he looked at it. It was the cell phone he’d given Burke.
He answered it.
“Is he dead?”
“Not yet.” That deep, unmistakable voice.
Darius Cole.
“Like I said, Nick … Do you really think it’s that easy?”
23
Mason stood across the street from the town house. A home that had never felt like home to him. An expensive container for the cars, the clothes, the entire life that someone else had provided.
Now all of those things had been taken back.
And Diana, the woman who lived there with him. The woman he’d just come to know, after months as intimate strangers. She had been taken, too.
Even the protection he had worked so hard to provide for Gina and Adriana, the protection that would come from an unlikely deal with the cop who had dedicated his life to sending him back to prison. That cop was gone now, along with the protection that came with his promises.
What were a man’s promises worth in death?
That meant that Mason had nothing else to lose.
Which made him the most dangerous man in the world.
He took the tablet computer from his back pocket, brought up the application that Eddie had installed on it. The explanation behind it was still a blur to him—wireless signals and secure IP addresses—but it all added up to one thing: using this device, Mason could see the live feed from every surveillance camera in the town house.
He had one other thing: the Nighthawk Custom 1911 he’d taken from Quintero, with nine .45 ACP shells in the clip and a tenth in the chamber. At that moment, Quintero was probably hooked up to an IV somewhere, with serious facial reconstruction in his near future. He wouldn’t be shooting anything anytime soon.
Beyond these tools, Mason had one more thing working in his favor: an intimate knowledge of the building. Every room, every angle. And as he looked at each video feed, he was quickly able to count four men standing guard. Two of them had assault rifles, the other two were most likely carrying semiautomatics.
One other important fact he gathered from the last two surveillance shots he brought up: the master bedroom, as painful as it was for Mason to look at the bed that Diana slept in, was empty. Then the office: Cole was si
tting behind the desk, staring intently at something on the screen of a laptop.
Five men total, at least four of them armed.
It was time to move.
Mason didn’t bother with the front door. He knew the lock had probably been changed. Or, even if it hadn’t, the security code on the panel inside would have been reset. That would give him only a matter of seconds before the alarm went off. Instead, he went to the farthest of the three garage doors, just beyond the range of the surveillance camera. He’d already studied the movements of the man who was stationed on the terrace. He leaned over the railing, looking, listening, for someone or something to come out of the darkness. Mason figured he had twenty seconds to get into the building.
Even though the town house had the most expensive digital security system on the market, Mason needed only two things to defeat it, two standbys that had helped him into countless cars during his early career: a small piece of wood and a straightened coat hanger. He jammed the wood into the rubber trim running along the top of the door, then inserted the coat hanger through the small gap he’d just created. The quick-release latch on the drive chain was about two feet away from the top of the door. As soon as he pulled the release with the hook of the coat hanger, the garage door was open. He pushed it up slowly, careful not to make any noise, slipped underneath, and closed it again behind him. Start to finish, the entry took twelve seconds.
He came to one knee and checked the Nighthawk. Rehearsed his movements one more time. He felt that same heightened focus he’d developed more and more with each recent assignment—hunting a man up and down the towering floors of the Aqua, stalking a man through the mountains of Georgia, infiltrating an underground bunker—these were the final steps in the pure distillation of Mason’s skills.
The machine was complete.
He closed his eyes for ten seconds, took one deep breath and let it out. Now he was in motion.
Mason opened the door from the garage leading into the downstairs foyer. The first guard was standing at the top of the stairs, exactly as expected. Not just the top but slightly off-center to the right. He had stopped being a man at that point. There was no such thing as innocence anymore. No distinction to make between nonlethal and lethal force. He was now simply a target.
The target had barely looked up when Mason hit him twice, center mass and head. The target went down and Mason moved up the stairs.
Reaction time, proximity. It was an equation now. Pure mathematics. Second target directly ahead, on the couch with the television on, his gun being tucked into his belt putting him at a disadvantage. Mason was already firing as he emerged from the stairway, moving against the left-hand wall, already setting up the third target like a pool player thinking two shots ahead. Mason put two shots just above the line of the furniture, catching the second target right after his first reaction—standing up—and before his second reaction—diving to the floor.
Movement on the right, the terrace, but first the hallway, on the left, Mason already pressed against that wall. The third target was outside the office door. Mason listening for the footsteps. Hearing them. Waiting to see the barrel come first—an amateur’s mistake, letting the shooter see you a tenth of a second before you see him. Mason had his own weapon ready, holding it perfectly steady with two hands. One beat, two, flash of barrel, fire. Mason already ducking into the hallway as he fired the follow-up shot, ripping through center mass just as the incoming shots from the fourth target riddled the walls around him.
Mason had planned for this. He knew he wasn’t going to surprise all four of them.
He watched the office door for a few beats, waiting to see if Cole would come out. No sign of him. He refocused on the man who’d been stationed on the terrace and was inside the town house now but didn’t pursue him down the hallway. Still in a defensive state of mind, the natural reaction after seeing three other men killed. Mason knew the man’s heart was pounding. Adrenaline coursing through his bloodstream. He was carrying an assault rifle and he’d fire off a dozen shots at the slightest movement.
Mason ducked into the billiards room, grabbed the cue ball from the table, and edged his way back down the hallway. He didn’t think the fourth target had moved yet—he placed him behind the island in the kitchen, ducked down behind it for cover.
He freed his right hand, inched forward just enough to see half of the kitchen. There was a door on the far side, with an ornate Art Deco window like something out of a Parisian bistro, leading into the pantry and wine cellar. Mason took a step back, kicked forward, and threw the cue ball. The glass shattered, and the first shots came back a tenth of a second later.
Mason stood tall for the best possible angle, cleared the corner edge with the Nighthawk, and focused on the kitchen island. The target had come up just enough and had swung his weapon to ten o’clock. He spotted Mason and was already swinging back, but it was too late. Reaction time plus muscle movement, no match for the speed of a .45 ACP bullet. The target’s head snapped back from the impact. No need for a second shot.
Mason immediately swung the barrel back to his rear—he had left himself exposed, and Cole could have come out of the office and killed him. But the door was still closed.
Mason didn’t have to check his weapon—he knew that he’d fired exactly seven times. He had three left.
He took out the tablet from his back pocket, checked the live surveillance feed from the office. Cole hadn’t moved, was still seated behind the desk. It occurred to Mason that he might already be dead. But then he saw him blink and rub the swelling around his mouth. Both hands looked empty, but Cole was the smartest man Mason had ever known. He wouldn’t sit there, defenseless, just waiting for him.
Mason went to the door, paused at the side where the doorknob was for one second, then quickly switched to the other side. If Cole was going to fire through the wall, that’s the side he’d pick. Mason reached across the door, tried the knob, moved it a quarter of an inch. It was unlocked. He turned it all the way and pushed the door open, ducking back out of the doorway.
No shots came.
He got down on one knee, peeked around the doorway from a low angle. Cole would have to come up over the desk to shoot him now. There was no motion. Mason stood quickly, the Nighthawk aimed squarely at Cole’s chest.
This time, Mason wasn’t just aiming at a target. He was aiming at a man.
“I knew you’d come here,” Cole said. Mason could see the red band running along the left side of his jawline. A bruise under his left eye that would look worse the next morning.
But there would be no next morning for Darius Cole.
“Maybe you were right,” Mason said. “Maybe you didn’t change who I am. You just made me better at it.”
“Before you do anything else,” Cole said, “there’s someone here who’d like to speak with you.”
Mason froze, waiting for a movement behind him. But Cole simply reached out to the laptop in front of him and turned it around so that it was facing Mason.
There was a face on the screen. A white man in his mid-fifties. Dark hair cut close, with gray on the sides. The face radiated intelligence and self-assurance.
It was the face of a man in charge.
“Mr. Mason,” the man said with the careful pronunciation of a man speaking a second language, with a vague yet indiscernible accent. “I’ve been waiting to meet you.”
“Who are you?”
“Your employer.”
Mason looked up at Cole. “What’s he talking about?”
“Mr. Cole works for me,” the man said. “Which means that you work for me, too. You have from the beginning.”
Mason stood still, the Nighthawk still pointed at Cole’s chest.
“I don’t know who the fuck this is,” he said, nodding to the screen, “but he’s not going to help you.”
“Mr. Mason,” the man said, irritation creeping into his voice, “I need you to listen very carefully.”
Mason looked at the tiny cam
era lens just above the screen. Wherever this man was, he was watching him. It made Mason want to pick up the laptop and destroy it.
“You compromised our Chicago operations,” the man said. “It’s going to cost me an enormous sum of money to fix it.”
“Bill me,” Mason said.
“I will. You’re going to be working for me for quite some time repaying that debt. In fact, if we hadn’t already invested so much—”
“I’m not doing anything for you.”
Mason saw the man bristle at the interruption. He nodded to someone out of view of the camera, and then, in the very next moment, Mason was surprised to see another window appear on the screen. It took him another few seconds to understand what he was seeing: a man and a woman walking through an open house, looking at a vent above a gourmet stove, behind them a young girl entering the frame a beat later.
It was Brad and Gina.
And Adriana.
Mason couldn’t speak. He kept staring at the image on the screen as the two people who were most important to him, and the man who had promised to protect them, moved to another room.
“This is the house that Mr. Parks put a down payment on today,” the man’s voice said. “As you can see, the surveillance cameras are already installed.”
“No,” Mason said, finally finding his voice.
When the window disappeared, Mason had the urge to reach into the screen to bring the image back so he could warn them, so he could yell to them to run away. The image was replaced by the original: the man sitting calmly in front of a camera. Mason noticed now that there was a large window behind him overlooking office buildings that could have been in any city. But it was daytime now, wherever he was. Somewhere thousands of miles away. Untouchable.
“You will continue to do exactly what I say,” the man said. “You will execute the targets I give you. Mr. Cole has the details for your next assignment, along with a passport with your new identity.”
Cole opened a desk drawer, took out a large manila envelope, and put it down on the desk in front of Mason.
“You’ll be contacted again when you reach your destination. If you deviate from my instructions in any way, your ex-wife, her husband, and your daughter will be taken from their home. For the first twelve hours, they’ll be bound and blindfolded on a concrete floor, close enough to hear each other but not to touch. Would you like me to describe the second twelve hours?”
Exit Strategy Page 24