The Time to Kill

by Mason Cross

  And Blake would be too cautious to take this for granted, of course. He knew that they would have other, more indirect ways to track him down.

  As though in answer to her thoughts, Williamson appeared above her, an expression of barely concealed glee on her face.

  “The house?”

  Williamson didn’t reply. She simply turned and walked back out into the ops room. Faraday followed, too excited to be irritated.

  “This was not easy,” Williamson said as she sat down at her computer. “I had to chase up every cash sale individually. I narrowed the list down to fifty potential properties purchased in Upstate New York in the last five years. Then I accessed power company records to look at billing patterns. Six of them show extended periods with minimal usage.”

  “Suggesting those are periods when the property’s empty,” Faraday said.

  “Right. Only one of them shows drops in power usage around the times we know Blake was in other places. Utilities are billed to a John Kirby. And guess what? On closer inspection, there’s one big difference between John Kirby and any of the other bill payers.”

  “Kirby doesn’t exist?”

  “Bingo.”

  Williamson punctuated the word by hitting a key that brought up a satellite image of a house set into a clearing, surrounded by dense woods on all sides. A narrow access road led out to a main road.

  Faraday took a breath to steady herself and leaned in over Williamson’s shoulder. “Where?”

  “It’s a few miles outside of a town called Wilston. About a hundred miles north of Albany.”

  For the first time in days, Emma Faraday smiled.

  58

  NEW YORK CITY

  “We go in, secure the house, find the Black Book.”

  Faraday looked up from the table screen in the ops room and raised an eyebrow. “You make it sound very simple, Murphy. What are you going to do with the rest of the day?”

  “If your people have the right house, we’ll do the rest,” Murphy said. “So I guess the real question is, how sure are you?”

  It was a good question. Faraday disliked issuing absolute guarantees, and Murphy knew it.

  “Sure enough that we’re having this conversation,” she replied. “It tallies with your interrogation of Bryant, doesn’t it?”

  “That it does.”

  When Murphy had revealed what Bryant had told him about the house and the bookcase, Faraday had been skeptical. Why would Blake trust a petty thief with his secrets? But when it emerged that Blake had held back some key details, it started to sound more in keeping with his reputation as a strategic planner. This in itself was a matter of concern. It suggested Blake really was considering leaking the contents of the Black Book. Not for the first time, Faraday wished that she knew exactly what information was on that drive. She had a pretty good idea, but no specifics. When Murphy had told her about Bryant’s description of a farmhouse in Upstate New York, she knew Williamson had found the right house. Too much of a coincidence for this not to be the place.

  From the moment Williamson had pinpointed the farmhouse, Faraday knew they would have to move fast. Luckily, the objective was not complicated, even if Murphy was making it sound easier than it was. They had had months to make plans for an assault on Blake’s home in the event it was located. All that was required now was to plug the new information into the plan.

  Their first priority was to secure the location and ensure that any sensitive material in Blake’s possession was reclaimed. It was likely Blake was headed for home, but the fact he was forced to travel by road meant they would beat him to the punch. The clock was ticking, though. With the knowledge of the location, they had narrowed down to several potential strategies, before deciding on an expedited ground assault timed to ensure they took the house before Blake could reach it.

  Faraday had convened a small group of the men who would be involved: Murphy, Dixon, Usher, and Stark. Murphy and Dixon outlined the assault plan, while Usher and Stark red-teamed it, coming up with holes in the strategy. Somebody referred to it as Operation: Homecoming, and since nobody could come up with a more apt name, it stuck.

  “Easier to come in on a Black Hawk, maybe two,” Stark said. “I know you don’t want to—”

  “Helos are out,” Murphy cut in, nodding at one of the screens, which was displaying weather predictions for the next forty-eight hours. “The blizzard is going to be bad and getting worse by the time we get out there.”

  “Which means satellite surveillance is out, right?” Usher said. “What about other comms?”

  “I’m assured they should hold up,” Faraday said.

  Stark said, “What’s Blake’s ETA, assuming he really is coming home?”

  “He’s coming home,” Murphy asserted.

  Faraday tapped on a tab at the bottom of the screen to switch to a map showing the ground Blake had to cover. “We have a last fixed point of Chicago at midnight Eastern. Almost nine hundred miles, assuming he’s able to take the most direct route. Even if he has a car—and not accounting for traffic, bad weather, or needing to sleep—the fastest he could possibly get there is two, three o’clock this afternoon. Realistically, we’re talking tomorrow evening.”

  “By which time we’ll be bedded in and ready to welcome him back,” Murphy said.

  Stark tapped another tab and brought the satellite image of the farmhouse back up. He stood back and examined the knot of buildings. “What about security precautions he may have taken?”

  “Nothing we can’t handle. We’ve taken way more heavily defended places than this,” Dixon said.

  “What if he doesn’t live alone? What if the house isn’t empty?”

  “Then we’ll take prisoners,” Murphy said smoothly. “Or we won’t. Depends what the welcome is like.”

  Faraday looked at the group of buildings: the house and a series of outbuildings. They looked like Monopoly houses from above. She looked at the timeline. She looked at the weather reports. They would have to go soon, if they were going to go.

  “Anything else?” she asked the four of them. “If somebody’s thinking about something we haven’t already gone over a dozen times, now is the time to say it.” She looked at the four men in turn. Nobody said anything. Murphy was watching her with a weird intensity. Dixon simply shook his head. Usher was staring back at her impassively.

  “Stark?”

  He said nothing for a moment and then shook his head slowly. “I think we covered everything.”

  She turned back to Murphy. Once again, she wondered if he knew what was in those missing files Drakakis had purged. She had come close to calling him in to ask him about it, deciding against it. Whatever Murphy knew, it could wait.

  “How many in your team?”

  Murphy answered immediately. “Other than the four of us? We’ll need Markham. Kowalski wants in on it—he owes Blake a bloody nose. Three more: One to set up on the main road and look out for Blake, two to babysit Bryant and the cars. Ortega’s out of action, so I’ll take Walker and the twins.”

  Faraday’s eyes narrowed. “Abrams, Jennings, and Walker, then. And you’re set on taking Bryant along?”

  Murphy nodded. “He’s on the level with what he’s telling us.”

  “You think he could be holding anything back?”

  Murphy thought about it. “I’m not sure. That’s part of why I want him there. This thing with the bookcase is interesting. Besides, if Blake shows up, could be handy to have him around.”

  Faraday moved on. “Nine men. You don’t think you need more, given how much trouble this particular subject has already caused us?”

  Murphy put both palms on the edge of the horizontal monitor and leaned over it, as though surveying a pool table before a break. “You don’t need an army for this kind of job. You just need the right team. Small footprint.”

  Faraday said nothing, surveying the four men as they waited for her word. She turned away from them and looked at the clock on the wall. The seconds ticked
past, like a countdown.

  “Then I guess you had better ready your team, Murphy. Let’s all hope this goes as smoothly as you expect.”

  59

  UPSTATE NEW YORK

  The Northeast was bracing for the worst. The governors of New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island had ordered states of emergency in advance of what was being called a potentially historic blizzard. In New York State, a curfew of five o’clock was instituted. All vehicles had to be off the road or their owners would face arrest. All businesses, schools, and government offices up to the Canadian border were closing. Air traffic was grounded. Emergency services were on high alert. The entire region was on lockdown.

  Emergency preparation plans had been put into action, the various services coordinated to respond quickly to weather-related incidents. Thousands of municipal workers dug in for a long shift, gritting their teeth and thinking of the overtime. Everyone else shut the doors, closed the drapes, and settled in to make the most of the unexpected confinement. There was a holiday atmosphere for most, a tense, game-time feeling for those who were working to maintain the most vital infrastructure. The freezing air sang with the invisible trails of a hundred million phone calls and e-mails and text messages and public service tweets.

  Nobody paid much attention to the brief, three-sentence communication instructing all personnel to keep clear of a series of roads within a five-square-mile area of Upstate New York. If things hadn’t been so hectic, somebody might have been curious enough to ask for more information. There might have been speculation about why a particular stretch of country with barely any homes and no obvious danger spots should be temporarily put off-limits; and whoever was doing the speculating would probably conclude that there was some sort of military operation underway. Moving equipment or sensitive material from one secure location to another, maybe. Or perhaps some sort of drill. That would make sense, in the severe winter conditions, after all. But everyone was too busy to have time for such speculations, and so the road crew responsible for that particular grid sector simply shrugged and crossed one more problem off their list.

  So it was that the team assigned to mount the incursion on Carter Blake’s house found themselves entirely alone on the stretch of State Route 73 after the intersection with highway 9A. They traveled in two black SUVs. Each vehicle carried five men. Stark drove the lead car. Dixon sat alongside him, Usher, Kowalski, and Walker in the back. The rearmost car was driven by Abrams and contained three other operatives—Murphy, Jennings, and Markham—and one reluctant passenger, Scott Bryant.

  The snow had been coming down on and off all day, and if the National Weather Service was right, it was about to get a lot worse. The storm front approaching from the east was about to drop up to thirty inches of snow across the area, with conditions being particularly bad north of Albany.

  Stark glanced up at the darkening sky again. The sun had been concealed behind storm clouds all day, and night was on its way. The drive had taken much longer in the conditions. He was actually glad that an approach by helicopter had been ruled out.

  The road conditions were getting worse and worse, not just because of the new snow falling, but because the farther north they got, the more severe the conditions had been earlier. At times the convoy had to slow to walking pace to negotiate big drifts blocking the road.

  Stark thought about the briefing back in the city, going over all the information they had on the house. It was another of the advantages about working stateside: They had a lot more data to work with than they were used to. This wasn’t some compound in a war-torn corner of the Middle East, something that had been built in secret and had to be surveyed using satellite images and educated guesses.

  The house had a name: Hamilton Falls Farm. It had been built at the end of the nineteenth century and owned by the same family until the last descendant had died in the nineties and the property had lain empty for a few years, quietly going to seed. It had been restored following a small fire in 2008. This was a lucky break for them, because it meant they had access to the architect’s plans, lodged with the county before the refurbishment project began. There were even photographs of most of the interior rooms, albeit from a few years before, when the house was last on the market. There were full details of utilities and phone lines to the house. With one signal to central command, they could cut the house’s life support: no lights, no phone, no Internet. But that would likely be a mere precaution. All available intelligence suggested that the owner of the house would not be at home. Not yet, anyway.

  There were two objectives to the incursion. The primary objective was to go in fast and secure the house. With luck, and Bryant’s help, they would find the Black Book and Blake’s one remaining item of leverage would be gone. There were only two possible outcomes to that objective: They would find it, or they wouldn’t. Either way, the secondary objective would be the same: to dig in and wait for their unsuspecting target to make it to what he almost certainly believed was the safety of home plate. And then there would be nowhere else to run.

  They passed by the access road to Hamilton Falls Farm and continued for about a mile. There was a logging trail that entered the woods off the main road. It was just a dirt track, entirely covered by the snow. Stark only found it because he was looking carefully and identified the gap in the trees. The lead car made the turn and bumped onto the track, the four-wheel drive getting them over the initial snowbank and coping easily with the trail once they made it beneath the partial tree cover. Even so, the snow was still finding its way through the canopy. The black and white verticals of the forest created a strobe effect in the headlights.

  Running according to the plan, they followed the trail for almost two miles, angling northeast away from the house at first, before curving south to bring them within a half mile of the house cross-country. The two SUVs came to a stop at the prearranged drop point: a clearing beside a ramshackle wooden bridge. The bridge crossed the river marking the boundary of the land that belonged to the house. Although they were reasonably sure that Blake lived alone, no one had given any consideration to simply driving up to the main entrance. Even if, as they expected, the house was deserted, there was no telling what defenses or early-warning systems Blake might have put in place. And besides, if, as the intelligence suggested, he was headed back here, they wanted to extend him a surprise welcome.

  They debarked from the SUVs and prepared to move. Abrams and Markham were positioned with the cars to guard Bryant until they’d secured the house, as well as to make sure no one else approached from this angle. Walker headed back out to keep eyes on the main road. The men pulled on white snow-camouflage winter combat jackets and gloves. They checked their equipment: night-vision goggles, AR-15 assault rifles, flash-bangs, and incendiary grenades. Stark checked the coordinates on his GPS tracker: across the bridge and then half a mile due south through the trees. When the preparations were complete, there was one last thing to do. Abrams opened the back of the second SUV, and Stark and Jennings collected two additional loads: backpacks weighing around twenty pounds. Stark grunted as he hefted the additional weight. He was grateful that this extra load would only have to be taken on a one-way trip.

  Carter Blake had tried to leave the war behind a long time ago. Now it was time for the war to come home.

  60

  Stark had been walking for five minutes when he saw the slivers of open ground between the trees ahead, and he knew they were in reach of their goal. The trek through the woods was hard going in the darkness, with the snowfall filtering through the branches above. The snow on the ground helped by amplifying ambient light, but hindered by obscuring deadfalls and, on one occasion, a small stream.

  The men, although more used to enduring the heat and dust of desert warfare, adapted themselves quickly to the terrain, and they made swift progress. They had split into three two-man teams, approaching the target in triangle formation, with team one, Stark and Murphy, taking the apex of the tria
ngle. They slowed as they reached the edge of the woods. Although it was just after three-thirty in the afternoon, it felt like dusk had already fallen. The buildings of the property lay ahead across a large expanse of level ground: a barn, some unused stables, and the house itself. The house was a sprawling structure: two floors and an attic with a sharp pointed roof in the center and a series of jutting outposts where the first floor had spread out for comfort. It was almost completely in darkness, except for a single light burning in a room on the second floor.

  Stark hunched down and cast his eyes left and right until he saw the other two pairs get into position, equally spaced across the edge of the open ground. One by one, each man called in his position over the open channel on their headsets. Team two—Usher and Jennings, their signals op—were roughly west of Stark and Murphy’s position.

  Murphy addressed Jennings, not needing to raise his voice above a whisper, though the other man was thirty yards away: “Welcome mat?”

  Stark could see Jennings’s head was down, scanning the screen of the device in his hand. He responded in an equally quiet tone, his voice carried to the rest of the team crystal clear over headsets. “Motion sensors at twenty yards out. Looks clear otherwise.”

  “Can you jam the sensors?” Murphy responded.

  “Already done.”

  Murphy turned his eyes to Stark and nodded. Time to go. “Okay, let’s just hope the son of a bitch doesn’t have land mines.”

  Stark didn’t think he had been addressing that to anyone in particular, but Jennings responded anyway. “Negative on that. As far as we can tell.”

  As far as we can tell. The words echoed in Stark’s head. Good to have certainties.

  Jennings completed the sweep and reported no other security on the approach. Stark saw him tapping out a short signal back to base, knowing that he was sending a simple one-word message: DARK.

  Almost instantly, the solitary light on the upper floor winked out. The big house lay before them, as black and uninviting as a freshly dug grave. Stark suppressed a shiver that had nothing to do with the cold. Murphy told team two to be ready to provide cover, before signaling for team three’s approach to begin. The pair of men east of them—Kowalski and Dixon—began the advance. Dixon hung back, covering the windows of the house with his rifle as Kowalski approached the house at a weaving run, his footsteps crunching softly in the deep snow.