The Time to Kill

by Mason Cross

  The man with the scar on his face smiled, as though Bryant’s phrasing amused him. “That’s right. He was good at his job, too. Damn good. He used to help us track down targets. I guess he’s still doing that, although …” He looked Bryant up and down appraisingly. “Probably easier targets these days, huh?”

  Bryant said nothing. They sat in silence for another couple of minutes. The man with the scar relaxed his posture a little, though his eyes and the barrel of the gun never wavered from Bryant.

  “Did he tell you why we’re looking for him?”

  “He told me you’re trying to kill him.”

  The man shrugged. “That’s sort of up to him.”

  “Didn’t seem that way at the airport.”

  He smiled. “Sorry about that. You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Although … I guess you wouldn’t have been in that wrong place if you hadn’t taken what didn’t belong to you, would you?”

  Bryant swallowed, decided to ask the question. “Are you going to kill me?”

  The man with the scar seemed to consider that. “Depends how cooperative you can be.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How much did Blake tell you about where he’s going?”

  “I don’t understand. Your friends have gone to get him, right?”

  “Right.”

  “You don’t think they’ll catch him? He has nowhere to go.”

  “You’d think, wouldn’t you?” he said. “Trouble with Carter Blake is, he’s a hard man to pin down. And believe me, this is from personal experience. We should know soon either way, I guess. Either my two friends are going to come back with Blake, or they’ll come back with his body … or they’re not gonna come back.”

  “You don’t sound like you care either way,” Bryant said.

  “No point trying to second-guess fate. By the way, I noticed you didn’t answer my question.”

  Bryant hadn’t answered the question because he’d been trying to give himself time to think. This guy clearly thought there was a possibility Bryant could be of value to him, and that might the only reason he was still breathing. He had asked where Blake was going. That could be for the reason he had given: just in case they didn’t manage to catch him. Or it could mean the information was valuable in itself. The Black Book.

  He thought about Blake’s remark about the flash drive. These people didn’t just want Blake dead; they wanted a threat neutralized. If he could make the man with the scar believe he could be of value in finding Blake’s planned destination, perhaps he could keep himself alive a little longer. Another gamble, this one with life-or-death stakes. But what choice did he have?

  “He told me he’s headed back east.”

  The man with the scar shook his head and pointed at the window with his free hand to remind Bryant of their direction of travel. “That’s pretty obvious.”

  “He told me he needs to pick something up.”

  “Is that right?” An interested tone in his voice now.

  Bryant nodded. “A flash drive.” He paused and considered his words carefully. Just a bluff. You’ve done it a thousand times at the card table. “He didn’t tell me what was on it.”

  The man’s gray eyes narrowed. “That’s very fortunate for you.” He paused, and was about to say something else, when he was interrupted by a rap on the door.

  “Midnight,” he called out.

  “High noon,” came the response from the other side of the door.

  The man with the scar nodded, and Bryant surmised it was some kind of countersign, to make sure he was opening the door to the person he expected. The man with the scar got to his feet, keeping the gun on Bryant, and unlocked the door with his left hand.

  The man with glasses was in the corridor, along with another one Bryant recognized as the man Blake had fought a couple of cars down. The big, blond-haired guy. He had come away from that confrontation with a broken nose, the blood smeared across his top lip. He assumed this was the Kowalski he had heard the others talk about. Two things were obvious to Bryant right away: the redness of the skin on their faces and the flakes of snow on their coats told him they had somehow been outside, despite the fact the train was still very much in motion. The other thing was, Blake was not with them. Kowalski stayed in the corridor while the man with glasses squeezed into the roomette.

  “Where’s Stark?” the man with the scar asked.

  “Stopping the train.”

  “Blake?”

  The man with the glasses didn’t answer right away, his brow furrowed in consternation. When the one with the scar prompted him, he shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  He gave him a look that betrayed a hint of irritation, but when he spoke his voice was perfectly controlled. “Not for sure. Probably dead.”

  The man with the scar’s eyes widened. He glanced at Bryant for a second, as though about to share a joke with him, then thought better of it and looked back at the man with glasses. “Probably,” he repeated.

  “I think we might have hit him. He fell.” He jutted his head in the direction of the ceiling. “From up there.”

  “You call it in?”

  He nodded. “Within two minutes, giving our coordinates. Should be enough to locate the body, if he is dead.”

  “If.”

  The one with the glasses gave no response. Instead he turned to Bryant, looking at his cuffed hands. His expression said Bryant was just one more problem that had to be dealt with.

  “We’ll have to take him with us.”

  46

  The only reason I knew I wasn’t dead was because I was pretty sure I would have ended up someplace warmer.

  I lay still for a few seconds waiting for the pain in my back and arms to die down and for the world to stop spinning. When I started to be able to breathe normally again, I rolled over from where I had landed and wiped snow off my face. It felt like I had lost some time, but the lights on the back of the Empire Builder a few hundred yards away told me it had been only a minute or so since I had fallen. The lights disappeared as the track curved into the trees and the sound of the engine and the wheels on the tracks slowly died away to nothing. All of a sudden, it was very dark, and very quiet. With some trepidation, I put weight on my arms and raised myself off the ground a little. Everything seemed to be in working order, nothing broken as far as I could tell.

  So how in the hell had I managed that?

  I drew myself up to a sitting position and looked around. I blinked a few times to acclimate my eyes to the darkness, until I could make out my surroundings more clearly. I was about ten feet from the tracks, in a pile of snow that was a little deeper than the rest of the surrounding area. I looked above me and started to piece together what had happened. The track was lined here by tall pine trees. The one directly above me had had most of its snow knocked off. I guessed that when I’d fallen from the roof, I had smashed into the soft branches of the pine tree. Lots of give, lots of kinetic energy absorbed. From there, I had fallen through the branches, which had absorbed more of my momentum, and landed in the deeper patch of snow beneath the trees. All told, it had been just enough to save my neck.

  I patted myself down and found I still had the phone I had taken from Kowalski, but not the gun. I remembered I had tucked it back in my belt before making the final run and wondered if I had lost it before or after I left the roof of the train. I looked around me and saw no trace of it.

  I got to my feet, giving myself another once-over for any injuries that might have remained unnoticed while I lay on the ground. Other than an ache along my right side where I had hit the ground, I was fine. I reminded myself that, for a couple of reasons, that was likely a temporary condition.

  For one thing, I probably didn’t have long before company arrived. Ordinarily, leaving a moving train at a random point cross-country in the dark would have been an excellent way of making a clean escape. But not with these guys, not with the resources they cou
ld call on. The men who had followed me onto the roof had seen me plunge from the train. They would be open to the possibility I’d been killed in the fall, but they wouldn’t be close to satisfied until they saw a body. The only thing in my favor was the thick clouds would make live satellite surveillance impossible. But that only reminded me of the other immediate danger.

  I was in the middle of God-knows-where at four in the morning in the middle of a blizzard. I cursed myself for leaving the gloves I had bought in Seattle in the roomette. Now that the immediate threat to life had passed, I realized how cold it was. I buttoned the coat and yanked the collar up to protect my neck from the freezing air. I rubbed my hands together to get the circulation going. From my extremely limited knowledge of the geography in these parts, I tried to work out exactly how dire my situation was.

  The last stop had been Detroit Lakes, scheduled for three ten. The luminous dial on my watch read just after three forty. Half an hour at roughly fifty miles an hour was twenty-five miles, which meant that the next stop was another twenty-five miles down the track. That information was academic anyway, even if it had been two miles. I couldn’t follow the track unless I really wanted to make things easy for my pursuers. I knew there were small cities and towns dotted throughout Minnesota, and I just had to hope I was within range of one of them.

  The tall pines lined both sides of the tracks. On my side, I could see lines of trees marching back until the darkness became absolute. On the other, I could make out slivers of snow between the trees. Open ground, perhaps somewhere I could see more of the lay of the land. I spent a few seconds kicking loose snow over the depression I’d left in the ground, knowing I could do nothing about the noticeably snow-free branches of the pine directly above it. Perhaps enough fresh snow would have fallen to disguise it by the time anyone else found the spot.

  When I had made my landing zone blend in as closely as possible to its surroundings, I climbed the slight incline back toward the tracks, scuffing my feet to obscure the footprints. I stepped across the tracks and jogged down the incline into the woods on the opposite side. The air was slightly warmer in the shelter of the trees, but my breath was still visible in clouds. The stand of pines extended about a hundred yards or so, and then I emerged at a field that sloped upward gently. I stopped before I hit the open, snow-covered ground at the far side of the wood and jogged along the line of the sheltered patch for a couple of minutes. There was no way to avoid leaving footprints, but it wouldn’t do any harm to prevent my entrance and exit points lining up.

  When I had gone as far as I thought would make any difference, I stepped out into the field. It was hard to orient myself in the darkness, with the snow falling all around, but then a gap in the cloud cover passed under the moon and I got enough of a glimpse of my surroundings to get me started. The field was bounded by pines on three sides. On the fourth, it sloped upward to a near horizon.

  I started up the hill, the deep snow making each step ten times harder than on the dry ground in the forest. The effort of lifting my feet and the all-pervading cold seemed to sap my energy the way driving a car with the pedal to the floor will drain the gas tank. What had looked like a five-to-ten-minute hike to the top of the rise seemed to be taking me all night. The ache in my side faded into a painful stiffness as the bruising started to set in, making the going even tougher.

  Finally, as I got closer to the crest of the hill, I saw my first promising sign of the night. There was a slight orange glow in the night sky: the reflection of streetlights on low clouds. The sight was like a shot of adrenaline. I redoubled my pace, forging ahead to the crest of the hill. A couple of minutes later I’d made the crest and my hopes sank again. The land dropped into a wide valley. All around were fields and lines of trees. There was a town ahead—I could make out the small cluster of lights—but it had to be at least ten miles away. I estimated it had taken the best part of half an hour to cover a mile to this point, and I hadn’t been as cold or as tired when I had started out.

  But the town ten miles away was all there was. So I crossed the crest of the hill and started walking down toward the valley, keeping the distant glow of salvation within sight.

  47

  MINNESOTA

  With Blake gone, there was no need to maintain their anonymity on the train. As soon as they had gotten Kowalski back on his feet, Stark had simply walked to the head of the train, knocked hard on the driver’s door, and demanded, with the help of his Homeland Security ID, that the train be stopped.

  The driver, a small, dark-haired woman in her late forties, was so surprised and intrigued by the break in the routine that she had gone along with the order with only the most minor of questions, questions that Stark answered easily and with an authoritative air of irritation. They were hunting a pair of suspects who had been passengers on the train. They had already taken one into custody, but the other one had managed to jump from the train, and they needed to go back to the right spot.

  He covered all of this in the time it took the train to slow to a gradual halt, probably a couple of miles down the line from where the driver had started applying the brake, and four or five from the area where Blake had jumped. That was all right, though. Others were on their way.

  “Does this thing back up?” Stark asked.

  The driver grinned indulgently and shook her head. “Not unless you have a couple hours to spend, Officer. And you’d have to make the call to my boss. And no offense, but you’d need more than that little ID card.”

  Stark left her and turned to head back down the train to Ortega, Usher, Kowalski, and their prisoner.

  “Whoa, hold on there,” the driver called after him. “What do I do about this? Who do I call?”

  Stark shrugged. “We’re good here. You can get on your way.”

  She looked suddenly suspicious. “What department did you say you were from again?”

  “Thank you for your cooperation,” Stark said with finality, and headed back to the others.

  They left Bryant’s hands free, on the understanding that any attempt to run would only result in a bullet in one of his kneecaps, and the five of them disembarked the train and started to backtrack. It took them a few minutes just to draw level with the rearmost car of the train, which still showed no signs of getting underway again. Getting everything reset to start up again was probably a job for twenty guys, Stark thought, knowing that the driver was probably cursing him right now as she thought about explaining to her boss why she had stopped the train for a random guy waving an ID card.

  Usher checked the GPS coordinates and informed them they had a five-point-two-mile walk ahead of them in the snow. Ortega grabbed his phone and checked in with the second team, who had been en route to the next stop. They were thirty minutes away from the location where Blake had jumped or fallen, maybe a little longer, depending on how much the weather slowed them down and how far off-road they had to go to reach the exact spot.

  The snow on the ground alongside the track was shallower and lay on top of gravel, so it was relatively easy going. They moved at a quick clip, just below a jog. Bryant moaned about the pace a couple of times, before Ortega slapped him across the back of the head and reminded him he was low on options.

  In the end, they made the coordinates only ten minutes behind the second team, who had had to backtrack a significant distance to find a route through the woods. Their two cars were parked alongside the tracks, the headlights dazzling in the darkness. Stark heard the barking of the dogs from a couple hundred yards away as their handler finished removing them from the off-road vehicle. As Stark and the others approached, the passenger door of the nearest vehicle opened and a tall figure in a long coat got out. It took Stark a second to recognize Murphy, silhouetted against the lights and the falling snow.

  “What kept you?”

  “I like to be fashionably late.”

  They second team had already identified the landing area: one of the tall pine trees at the side of the track had its snow
cover noticeably depleted, as though a very discerning gust of wind had hit it hard recently, while ignoring all of its brethren. With that signpost, they found that the snow directly beneath showed signs of impact and of an attempt to cover tracks.

  There was no blood.

  The pair of black Dobermans strained on their leashes, their eyes on the woods across the tracks.

  Murphy watched the dogs with interest. He bent down to look one of them in the eyes, baring his teeth in a grin. The dog emitted a low, pissed-off growl. He straightened up and looked across the track to the woods beyond.

  “Let’s run this rabbit down.”

  48

  I had been walking for about an hour when I reached the stream. It bounded a line of trees ahead of me, cutting diagonally across my path. It was too wide to jump, and I didn’t relish the idea of wading through the freezing water. I was shaking underneath my coat as it was. My hands were jammed into my pockets, but I had lost the feeling in my fingers. I knew I was in trouble. If I gave into the screaming urge in my joints to stop walking, to sit down and rest, it would be fatal.

  So I started to walk along the bank, in the direction of the flow. Perhaps the stream would narrow farther along. Or maybe there would be a bridge. Where there was a bridge, there would be a road.

  How far had I come? It was impossible to say. The snow continued to fall, making it difficult to judge the ground I’d covered. The only sounds accompanying me for the last hour had been my breathing, the sound of my footsteps in the snow, and the noise of my pulse thudding in my head. When a new sound echoed across the landscape from far behind me, I thought it was my imagination at first. A trick of exhaustion. But then I stopped and listened.

  Barking. Not the barking of a single guard dog at an isolated farmhouse. Hunting dogs.

  I looked at the water. It would be freezing, would hasten the onset of hypothermia. But I didn’t have a choice.

  I tensed and jumped in, barely feeling the cold as the water covered my legs below the thighs. I splashed through the stretch of deep water until I reached the shallows on the other side. I started along the edge of the water. There were enough loose rocks and branches that the snow had fallen unevenly, making any tracks I left indistinct. My steps became more faltering as the freezing dampness bit into my legs, and a couple of times I almost stumbled headlong back into the water. When I had gone a reasonable distance from the spot I’d crossed, I started to look for a place where I could climb onto the bank. And then I saw the bridge.