The Time to Kill

by Mason Cross

  Ninety seconds on the portal told me that Kelner had donated the maximum two thousand dollars to the GOP in the run-up to the last election, and that he resided at 1232 Forest Avenue, in the affluent West Mercer Island neighborhood. Twenty minutes and a taxi ride across the Lacey V. Murrow Bridge later, I was standing on the sidewalk outside. I gave the driver twenty bucks and told him to circle the neighborhood for ten minutes. I didn’t think I would need longer than that.

  The rain had eased off, so I waited for the noise of the engine to die away before I turned to look up at Kelner’s place. The three-story home built into the hillside was in darkness except for one window, and water dripped from the eaves and ran in streams down the sloped driveway.

  The door was opened a few inches by a tall woman in her midtwenties with red hair cut in a bob. Not a natural red, more like the color of a London bus. She had obviously decided her natural color wasn’t exciting enough and had opted for something more eye-catching. It was striking in contrast to her very pale, almost pure white skin. She held the door open six or seven inches in a way that categorically did not invite me in, while her gray eyes looked me over in a politely questioning way. I wasn’t anyone she recognized, and it was too late in the day for a Jehovah’s Witness.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry to drop by so late,” I said. “I wondered if Eric was home. It’s kind of important.”

  She held the door in position and kept her eyes on me as she called Kelner’s name. A muffled acknowledgment came from within the house. I couldn’t make out the exact words over the sound of the rain, but I assumed Kelner was asking who it was.

  She widened her eyes, prompting me.

  “Scott Bryant,” I said without hesitation.

  “Scott Bryant,” she yelled, still not taking her eyes from me, or moving her hand from the door.

  I heard hurried footsteps on polished floorboards, and another hand appeared at the edge of the door, pulling it open as the redhead released her grip.

  Kelner was in his fifties: bald, thirty pounds overweight, and wearing a blue shirt over jeans. He was too old for his partner and way beneath her league. His expression was irritated as he started speaking, obviously spouting the line he’d arranged in his head on the way to the door.

  “I told you not to—”

  He stopped dead as he realized I wasn’t who he was expecting. Then his lips started to form into the start of a question. I was guessing it would have been, Who the hell are you? But he stopped himself. I watched him process through the unexpected development with a knowing smile on my face. I wanted him to think I knew absolutely everything. I wanted him to pin his hopes on being able to cooperate with me as fully as possible to extricate himself from this situation.

  “Everything okay, hon?” the redhead asked after glancing from his face to mine and back again.

  “Yes. Yes. Give us a second, okay?”

  She shrugged, gave me another look up and down, and moved back into the house. Kelner stepped out into the night and closed the door behind him.

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to make a deal.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Really? You want to mess around with something like this?”

  He pressed his lips together, clearly deciding he wasn’t going to make this any better by doing more talking.

  “I’m looking for Bryant. As you’ve probably guessed, I’m working for his employers.”

  He took it in, still keeping his mouth tight shut.

  “My instructions are very specific. Mr. Bryant took something and they want it back. They’re only interested in him. If you help me out, this conversation stays entirely between us. I don’t get paid any extra for making trouble for you.”

  He opened his mouth to make some sort of angry denial. I cut in before he could build up a head of steam. “Having said that, if you don’t help me out, I’m going to have to use what I know about you to find him another way. And I know it all, Eric. All about you and Bryant and MeTime.”

  I’d played my hand, and I was relieved to see he stiffened at the mention of MeTime. I probably could make some trouble for him, if it really came to it. If nothing else, I could let Stafford know exactly who had tried to buy his stolen software and let him focus his considerable resources on digging up the proof.

  I kept my face entirely impassive and watched Kelner’s eyes: narrow and seething. I could imagine his brain working feverishly away back there, weighing up the sacrifice of billions of dollars in future income against losing everything he had tomorrow. His jawbone stood out as he gritted his teeth. His whole body was tensed, as though he was barely suppressing the urge to attack me, our physical mismatch notwithstanding.

  But then something clicked into place, and he came to his decision. His jaw unclenched and he seemed to lose a couple of inches in height, nodding after a moment.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, of course. I’ve never heard of Scott Bryant. And I assume you won’t be relaying this conversation either to him or to his employers. Whoever he or they may be.”

  I pretended to think it over for a second before nodding in agreement. “You assume correctly.”

  “I don’t have much of a choice, do I?”

  “I don’t see that you do.”

  “Eleven a.m. Wakey’s Diner. First Avenue. It’s across the road from the bus station.”

  I took out my phone and tapped the address in. It existed, which was a positive sign.

  “What if he doesn’t show?” Kelner asked.

  I answered without looking up from the screen. “Then I guess I’ll just have to think of something else. But I think he’ll show. That is, unless anyone tells him not to.”

  His lips straightened into a thin, humorless smile. “I don’t think there’s any danger of that.”

  “Good. Then we have nothing to worry about.”

  He put a hand on the doorknob and twisted it down, pausing before opening it again. “I won’t see you again, will I?”

  I affected a look of polite confusion. “Won’t see who again?”

  He nodded understanding and opened the door, stepping back inside and closing it firmly without another word. I looked down at the address I’d typed in. The date and the time tallied with what I knew, and the location across from the bus station made sense. Bryant would want to make the exchange and get as far away as he could, as quickly as he could, and leaving as little trail as he could.

  I walked back down to the main road and waited a couple of minutes until my cab appeared at the corner. I got back in and told him to take me back into the city, to the nearest hotel to the bus station on First Avenue. I was looking forward to a night’s rest before I attended my appointment with Mr. Bryant.

  Halfway into the journey my phone rang and turned the prospect of a restful night into an impossible dream.

  13

  The call showed up as a withheld number. I toyed with the idea of ignoring it and then decided to pick up. It was Coop. That surprised me, because we both liked to keep communications to a minimum. At first I thought he had some new information on Bryant, but I knew it was something else when I heard his voice. There was a tone I had never heard from him before, and it took me a second to work out what it was: confusion.

  Coop had received an e-mail a half hour before. The sender’s address was a generic Gmail account. The subject line read simply, For the attention of J. Cooper. That got his attention right away, because this was the e-mail address through which prospective clients contacted him. Without exception, those clients knew him only by a pseudonym. He told me he had opened the e-mail and found a very brief message and a PDF attachment titled Martinez. I felt a tingle at the base of my spine at the mention of a name I hadn’t heard in years, but I kept listening as he relayed the content of the message:

  WHAT HAPPENED TO JAKE MARTINEZ?

  CARTER BLAKE WOULD WANT TO KNOW.

  And that
was it. No sign-off, no instructions, no hints as to the identity or motives of the sender. Coop had double clicked to open the PDF and had known immediately that he would have to tell me about this.

  “What is it?” I asked, though I had a pretty good idea already, and I knew I wasn’t going to like it.

  “It’s a scan of an Interpol black notice,” he said. He didn’t need to translate the lingo: I knew all too well what a black notice was. “Looks like it was circulated three weeks ago on a male Caucasian body found dumped just outside of a town called Tyumen in Siberia. No identification, but the labels on his clothing were mostly American and European, and he was carrying a pack of Marlboros. No ID on his prints, and no one locally has come forward to claim him.”

  I cleared my throat and tried to keep my voice level. “Cause of death?”

  “You knew him, didn’t you?” Coop said. “I can hear it in your voice.”

  “How did he die?” I repeated, annoyed at Coop despite myself.

  “Executed. Two nine-millimeter bullets in the head, one in the gut. They beat him first, by the looks of this. Broken fingers. Dog bites, too.”

  I closed my eyes and rubbed the bridge of my nose, picturing the body in my mind’s eye.

  “You still there?”

  “Yeah. Send it over.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Sorry. Yeah, I knew him. We worked together.”

  “I guessed that. This isn’t good, is it?”

  “Certainly not for Martinez.”

  Coop forwarded me the e-mail and the attachment. There were two pictures at the top of the Interpol document. The first was a computer-aided composite of a man in his mid-thirties with brown eyes and dark brown hair. The second showed the same person, apparently. It was a graphic close-up of a dead man lying on a bloodstained patch of snow. Evidently, he had been there long enough to freeze solid. The two holes in his head looked like black marks, as though he were the victim of some kind of medieval plague. The face was distorted by the gunshot wounds and the cold, but it still looked human enough for me to be sure that this was Jake Martinez. What was left of him, anyway.

  I remembered something Martinez had said, the last time I saw him: All we’re doing is delaying the inevitable.

  There were a lot of reasons why Martinez, or anyone in our former line of work, might show up dead. There was only one reason why somebody would have gone to the trouble of contacting me through Coop to tell me about it.

  Winterlong.

  Martinez and I had come to an arrangement with them five years ago. A mutual understanding that we would leave each other alone. The picture of Martinez dead in the snow told me two things: That arrangement was now null and void, and they would be coming after me next.

  14

  SEATTLE

  Something had changed.

  I thought about an abandoned house in the Santa Monica Mountains. The man with glasses. The eerily calm face I’d seen several times since in my nightmares. What he’d said:

  Drakakis isn’t here anymore.

  Perhaps I had been fooling myself for the last few years, thinking that if I only kept my head down and stayed out of their way, they would let sleeping dogs lie. Even as I thought about it, I knew I had never truly believed that. The Samaritan case had put me back on the agenda for them, as I had feared it would. Covering up Dean Crozier’s history with Winterlong would have been expensive and resource-intensive. They wouldn’t risk having to do that again, particularly with two loose ends who might decide to start talking at any moment. Better to tidy up quietly, on their own terms.

  Our low profiles and the probability of us maintaining our silence had kept us safe until now, but Martinez’s face on the Interpol black notice told me that period of détente was over. There was no doubt in my mind. The mention of my name in the accompanying e-mail could mean nothing else. It was them, and I was next.

  The only question was, how long did I have?

  No one in the world knew where I was, since even I hadn’t known I would be going to Seattle until a few hours previously. My name would show up on the passenger manifest flying from San Fran to Seattle, but that would be a needle in a haystack unless they knew where to look or were prepared to bring in other agencies. I didn’t think they would want to do that if they could avoid it.

  That brought me back to thinking about the reason I was here: I had a job to do, and I was close to completing it. I had the time and place of the buy, and in a matter of hours, I would have Bryant. After that? Once I had returned the stolen software to Stafford and secured the balance of my fee, I could go to ground.

  I would head east, to the place I was keeping the very thing that Winterlong wanted.

  I thought about Martinez, an unidentified body in the Siberian wastes. I thought about the small suburban house where I’d last seen him, about our agreement. We hadn’t expected to hear from each other ever again. I thought about why Coop had received the e-mail and knew that they expected it to flush me out. Did they expect me to come after them? Charge blindly in to get revenge for Martinez? If so, they had the wrong guy.

  I dialed Coop’s number again.

  “Trouble?” he asked, not wasting time on a hello.

  “You could say that. How did they get your e-mail address?”

  “I don’t know, Blake. And I can’t say I like it.”

  “I’m sorry. It might be a good idea to clear out, lie low for a while. And after this call—”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll get rid of the phone. And I think you’re right. I think I’ll make arrangements to be someplace else as of tomorrow.”

  “That’s a good idea,” I said. “E-mail when you get settled. We’ll work out the Moonola thing.”

  “You on the right track?”

  “I’m getting there.”

  “Always a pro, no matter what.”

  I smiled. “I’ll talk to you soon. Be careful, Coop.”

  “I always am.”

  I hung up and stared at the screen of the phone. It wouldn’t hurt to take the same precautions I’d advised Coop to take. I switched the phone off, removed the battery, and put it back in my pocket. A second later I changed my mind and asked if the driver minded if I opened a window. I tossed the phone out as he turned the next corner.

  It was after midnight when the cab drew up in front of a budget hotel on First Avenue.

  “You in town long?” the driver asked. I figured he was making a last-ditch effort for a good tip, having been unable to lure me into a conversation for the length of the trip.

  I shook my head. “Not long.” I handed over the fare, plus ten. As I stepped out of the car, the rain began again.

  THURSDAY, JANUARY 7TH

  15

  ORLANDO

  Coop’s eyes opened gradually. It was still dark. He had fallen asleep facing the digital alarm clock on his bedside table, so he didn’t have to move a muscle to know that it was 3:57 a.m. He didn’t think he had been having any kind of disturbing dream, and he hadn’t woken naturally before eight o’clock in any of his fifty-nine years, as far as he was aware. So what had woken him?

  He kept his eyes on the luminous digits and listened. The low hum of the air-conditioning. The distant hum of the traffic on the 408. Too early in the year for crickets. A dog barked somewhere, blocks away.

  But then … something else.

  A scratching noise coming from the hall. From the front door. From the lock of the front door.

  Coop, still hazy from the deep sleep, snapped fully awake. He hopped out of bed with a dexterity that belied his years and physical condition and moved quickly across the carpet to the partially open bedroom door. There was a lock on the door, activated by a twistable knob on the inside. One of the many benefits of living in a hotel suite rather than a place of his own. He used to keep the door locked at night, a precaution he had neglected recently. But then, if the door had been fully closed, he would never have heard the scraping from the front door.

  He cl
osed the bedroom door, holding down the handle so that the catch wouldn’t make a noise, then gently released it and twisted the lock. Assuming whoever was working on the exterior door knew what they were doing, this one wouldn’t trouble them much, but it would buy him another few seconds.

  Just as the lock clicked softly home, he heard an answering click from outside as the front door finally surrendered. He stepped back into the room, circumnavigated the bed, and took the Colt .45 from the top drawer of the bedside table. He clicked the safety off and then opened the sliding glass door that led out to the balcony. No time to get dressed, so as he stepped out onto the concrete in his shorts and vest, he gave thanks that he lived in Florida and not in New Hampshire.

  The balcony was a solid chunk of rough concrete, with a four-foot-high wall guarding the two-story drop. The balcony extended along the front of the building, and all of the rooms and suites had doors that opened onto it. This time of the year they would likely all be closed and locked, but perhaps he’d get lucky.

  As he calculated his next move, his mind was working on the identity of the person or persons who had just infiltrated his suite. He was a couple of decades past being as careful as he used to be, but that didn’t mean he could afford to write this off as a simple burglary. After all, he maintained contacts that many people would kill for. He had in excess of three million dollars in his various bank accounts, not counting the transactions he held temporarily for some of his contractors. There were plenty of reasons why this home invasion could be very personal. And then there was Blake. That e-mail he’d sent him earlier. The dead man in the snow.

  Coop moved quickly along the row, trying his neighbors’ sliding doors one after another. All were locked, and all were in darkness but one, the last on the row—Tom Mitchell’s place—was casting the flickering blue light of a television onto the balcony. Tom was forever falling asleep in front of The Late Show. Coop heard a click from behind him that he knew was the sound of his own sliding door being unlatched, and prayed to be lucky. He reached out and grabbed the handle of Tom’s door.