The Time to Kill

by Mason Cross

  I opened my eyes again and looked at Murphy, then beyond him at the burning heap.

  “Maybe.”

  “Anyway, enough talk.”

  Murphy raised his rifle, training it on my upper body.

  “Aren’t you going to tell me this is nothing personal?” I said quickly.

  A smile of recognition at the inside joke crossed his face. “Oh, it’s personal this time.”

  “You know what your problem is, Murphy?”

  He stopped and smiled. I had listened to his analysis of me, so fair was fair. “Enlighten me.”

  “You don’t have any friends left.” I raised my voice. “Shoot him.”

  Murphy had a split second to register a look of confusion before the spray of 5.56 NATO bullets ripped into him. His body jerked and danced against the hellish backdrop of the blaze as Bryant unloaded the full magazine into him from behind. I flattened myself on the ground until the burst finished and then looked up. Murphy was down, face-first in the snow. Bryant was still behind him, holding the rifle out in front of him with a dazed expression on his face. I got to my feet and covered the ground between me and Murphy in a second, ready to wrestle the rifle from him.

  When I got close enough, I realized there was no need. The armor on his upper body had absorbed some of the fire, but he had taken at least two in the head. Dark red blood pumped out into the white snow as his heart gave its last beats. I took another step toward Bryant, keeping out of the way of the barrel of the assault rifle. When I got close enough, I gently put a hand on the barrel and pushed it down. Bryant didn’t look at me, his eyes fixed on the man he’d just killed.

  “You did good, Bryant,” I said.

  I had been right—difficult to miss with that many bullets. I was glad I had made the decision to hand Bryant the AR-15 rather than the Glock after I got him out of the basement.

  “Click the safety off here. Point at the bad guy. Squeeze the trigger. Nothing to it.”

  “Blake, I don’t know how to …”

  “Safety off, point, squeeze. We don’t have time for a more detailed firearms course, okay? They’re wearing body armor, so make sure you hit the limbs or the head.”

  Not bad for a first timer.

  Murphy had been in the barn when he blew the house, so I knew he couldn’t have seen Bryant as he left via the front door. Of course, I didn’t know for sure he had gotten clear of the blast until I had seen a dark shape against the conflagration behind Murphy. I had kept him talking for another few seconds: just long enough for Bryant to get close.

  Bryant let go of the rifle and it dropped to his feet. He didn’t say anything for a minute. Eventually, he turned his eyes to meet mine. He shook his head as though trying to wake from a dream. “You okay, Blake?”

  I nodded. “I’m okay. You saved my life. Thank you.”

  The words seemed to have little impact on him. He nodded absently, as though I’d told him it looked like rain.

  “So what do we do now?”

  I didn’t answer. I crouched down and patted down each of Murphy’s pockets, hoping it was still there. I found it in the left breast pocket of his shirt, my fingers closing around the tiny flat nub of plastic. The Black Book.

  “First thing, we get the hell out of here. After that I’m going to need some of your technical expertise.”

  TUESDAY, JANUARY 12TH

  79

  NEW YORK CITY

  Faraday hit send on one last e-mail, closed the case of her tablet, and leaned back in the seat, watching the expensive storefronts of Madison Avenue as they passed by outside the car. The city had quickly returned to normal following the storm. There were still piles of snow neatly plowed to the sides of the streets, but the city had shrugged the storm off like it did everything else, and life was back to business as usual.

  “Long day, Ms. Faraday?” Hank called back, his eyes darting up to the rearview mirror.

  “You could say that,” she replied.

  It had been a very long day indeed. A day she looked forward to putting behind her. But there was one more thing to do first.

  The morning had started with a postmortem of the events at Hamilton Falls Farm two nights earlier. Only Walker had escaped unscathed. Faraday put this down to the fact that he, as lookout, had been some distance away for the duration of the action. Unfortunately, that also meant he was of limited use in piecing together the sequence of events. He had made it out in the remaining SUV with two injured comrades: Markham had been caught up in some kind of explosion, Stark he had found in the barn with a gunshot wound to the head. Assuming at first that he was dead, Walker was amazed to find a weak pulse. Against the odds, that pulse was still going, though Stark had yet to regain consciousness. Markham had not been so lucky, succumbing to his injuries before Walker was able to get him to safety.

  Seven men dead, the house wiped off the face of the earth, and no Carter Blake to show for it. If there was one positive, it was the fact that the storm and the remoteness of the battle had kept it out of the public eye. As operations went, it was an unmitigated disaster. As PR problems went, it still ranked far below the shooting of the cabbie at the airport.

  Hank pulled to a stop at the corner of East Forty-Third Street, then turned in his seat and looked at her expectantly, waiting for instructions.

  “Wait here,” she said, and got out onto the sidewalk. She shivered as the icy wind channeled through the city’s canyons bit into the exposed flesh on her face. She pulled her hat down farther. It had been a long winter already, and it would be a long time yet until spring. She turned the corner and headed toward the west-facing entrance to Grand Central.

  She crossed Vanderbilt and passed under the red awnings beneath the Park Avenue Viaduct, entering the station. She moved into the cavernous space, lingering at the top of the stairs to watch as the crowds below traversed the marble concourse. It was late in the day, and the bustle down there wasn’t close to how busy it got during rush hour, but it was busy enough. Hundreds of people, lots of wide-open space. Lots of exits. Trains leaving every minute for all points on the compass. It made sense for Blake to have picked this location, back when he was offering a deal.

  It was five minutes to nine.

  “You don’t think he’ll show, do you?”

  Williamson had appeared beside Faraday, keeping a few steps away, not looking directly at her. An observer would have no reason to think they were speaking to each other. Just two people watching the crowds, perhaps waiting to welcome loved ones back to the city.

  She had never seen Williamson outside of the operations center before. It was disconcerting to see her in outdoor clothes, away from the glow of a computer screen. Faraday shook her head. “Not really. But I wanted to be sure.”

  “You’re flying to Washington tonight?” Faraday detected a minor undercurrent of sympathy in Williamson’s question, and ignored it.

  “The jet leaves at eleven thirty.”

  Williamson said nothing more on the subject, and they watched the crowds for another minute in silence. Faraday thought about that eight a.m. meeting tomorrow morning.

  “What do you think he meant?” Williamson asked, referring to the recording of Blake’s phone call to Stark and Murphy. “About how we didn’t know anything?”

  “Who knows, Williamson? Who knows.”

  She nodded and moved away from the top of the stairs. Faraday stayed put, watching for a few minutes. The big clock over the information booth on the concourse read four minutes past nine now. They had people on all the entrances, just in case.

  Faraday didn’t really believe Blake would show up. There was no percentage in it for him. Scott Bryant was missing—either safe or dead, and she was sure Blake knew which. Murphy’s play at the house had shown that they were only too willing to come for him in the night, so why would he trust them to make another deal? And he in turn had shown them that they couldn’t come after him without expecting to pay a high price.

  No, she decided. She wa
sn’t here because she expected Blake to show up. She was here because this felt like the time and place to draw a line under the operation. Blake’s trail ended at the smoking ruins of a farmhouse in Upstate New York. He was gone. In the wind, as someone had said the other day. Faraday was here because this was the last vestige of a lead they had on him. She was here just in case, and now that she was satisfied he wasn’t showing up, she could fly to Washington and face the music. Then, whether or not she managed to keep her job, she could go home and begin the long, fruitless task of trying to pretend this whole sorry episode had never happened.

  She watched the crowds, wondering how much thought, if any, these people gave to the kind of work people like her did to keep places like this safe. The things that had to be done under the radar.

  The clock read nine ten the next time she looked at it, but she stayed and watched the crowds below, searching in vain for a familiar face.

  At nine fifteen Williamson appeared at her side again. “What do you think?”

  Faraday closed her eyes and took a deep breath through her nose. She listened to the murmurs and happy squeals from below. “I think we’re waiting for a ghost.”

  She told Williamson she was leaving and asked her to tell Hank to bring the car around. Walking back down Forty-Third, she turned her thoughts to the meeting with the National Security Council subgroup tomorrow morning. Questions would have to be answered. Questions about why the decision had been made to terminate a former operative on United States soil. Questions about how they had managed to let Blake slip through their fingers and what their likely exposure would be. She didn’t have any good answers for that, and she suspected the one man who could have given them to her was lying in a body bag right now. Goddamn you, Murphy, she thought.

  She stopped in the middle of the block where there was a clear parking spot and glanced back down just as her car rounded the corner. It pulled smoothly to a stop beside her. She opened the door and slipped into the backseat.

  “JFK, Hank. You can take your time.”

  The car pulled out into traffic, turning right onto Madison. As the car picked up speed, she heard a weird tapping sound, like something was loose on the car.

  “What’s that?” she said, but Hank didn’t seem to be listening as he passed through the intersection, switched lanes, and turned right on Forty-Sixth.

  She listened more intently and decided it wasn’t something loose on the car: That would have produced a more regular sound, in time with the movement of the vehicle. This was more like the noise of somebody knocking on the door. Except that it was coming from behind her.

  Somebody was in the trunk.

  Her head snapped back around and she looked properly at her driver for the first time since she’d gotten back in. Underneath the back of the hat, she saw dark hair instead of Hank’s smooth bald skin.

  “What the hell—”

  The driver put his foot down as they sped east on Forty-Sixth, covering half a block in seconds, before slowing abruptly and making a sharp turn into an underground parking lot beneath one of the buildings. They rolled down a ramp and into the lot, which was dimly lit by spaced-out strip lights. Faraday felt her heartbeat pounding in her chest.

  The car stopped far away from any of the other cars, and the driver turned around, removing the hat. This man wasn’t Hank. Hank, she presumed, was in the trunk. The man looking back at her from the driver’s seat was a man in his midthirties with dark hair shaved close to his scalp. He had green eyes and a cold smile that didn’t reach them. She had seen the face before, had spent a lot of time over the last few days and weeks looking at it on screens, but this was the first time she’d seen it in the flesh.

  “Carter Blake.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” he said. “I believe you’ve been looking for me.”

  Faraday started to reach into her coat for her cell phone, and Blake shook his head. “I wouldn’t.”

  She released the phone and slowly withdrew her hand from the coat. “Are you going to kill me?”

  “I ought to. I had a deal with your predecessor.”

  “A deal he should never have made.”

  Blake just looked back at her with the unmistakable expression of someone who could see all the cards in the deck.

  “Why did you come after me?” He asked the question like he had only a passing curiosity in the answer.

  “You know why. After the Crozier mess, we got a lead on you for the first time. As director, it has been incumbent on me to clean up the historical mistakes of this organization. That includes rogue former operatives like Crozier. And you.”

  Blake listened, a thoughtful look on his face, and then reached into his jacket with his right hand. He produced a small black flash drive, holding it between his thumb and index finger. The Book, she assumed. The leverage Blake had used on Drakakis. It hadn’t been destroyed at the house. Unless he was bluffing, of course.

  “You took quite a risk,” he said. “Gambling you could retrieve this as well as taking me out of the action. Gambling I wouldn’t get upset enough about you trying to kill me to go ahead and leak the contents.”

  Faraday smiled for the first time. It had been Murphy’s gamble, of course. She hadn’t known about the Black Book until later. But there was no reason to let Blake know that. “Things have changed, Blake. Maybe what’s on that drive doesn’t concern me as much as it did Drakakis.”

  “You don’t know what’s on the drive,” Blake said. The way he said it, it was as though it was a mild surprise to him. Maybe he really did know something she didn’t.

  “I’m aware that some of the activities of this organization include things that we’d rather keep quiet. But guess what, Blake? We can live with it. What’s the worst that would happen? A front page in the Times, some manufactured outrage for a week? Maybe two weeks. However long it takes some celebrity to do something newsworthy and stupid and wipe us right off the agenda. The president will order an inquiry and maybe we get a slap on the wrist. A month later, everybody leaves us to get on with it again.”

  “You don’t know what’s on the drive,” Blake said again.

  Faraday felt a flush of anger. “Oh, what—you think people really care, Blake? Nobody will care. I know what’s on that drive. I know what we’ve done to people nobody cares about in places nobody can find on the map. I didn’t walk into this job with my eyes closed—I know what went on. I know that some things happened that shouldn’t have, and I know that some people worked for us who shouldn’t have, present company very much included.” She paused and gathered herself, lowering her voice. She was too angry to feel scared now. If Blake was going to kill her, he was going to kill her. She would go out defiantly. “Nobody will care, Blake,” she said again firmly. “We do what needs to be done, and if things went a little too far in the past, then too bad. Shit happens. Nobody will care.”

  Blake waited until he was sure she was finished before speaking. “They’ll care that Drakakis ordered the assassination of a United States senator and his wife.”

  The words hit Faraday like a bucket of ice water. Drakakis had ordered the Carlson hit? That couldn’t be true … could it? All of a sudden it made a terrible kind of sense. Why else would he have made this deal with Blake? Why would he have purged the fingerprints hit in Fort Dodge? Why else but because he was implicated. And maybe Blake had the proof.

  “You’re saying Drakakis ordered you to kill John Carlson?” She tried to infuse her tone with a mocking, disbelieving edge, but she knew she wasn’t pulling it off.

  “No. I’m saying Murphy tried to kill me, and Drakakis ordered Usher to kill Carlson. He was going to shut Winterlong down, and Drakakis didn’t want that to happen. And with all due respect, Ms. Faraday, you don’t know the half of what went down.”

  He glanced back at the flash drive, as though surprised to find himself still holding it, and then started to put it back in his pocket. Faraday took a sharp breath, wanting to tell him to wait a second. She tri
ed to hide the instinctive reaction, but Blake noticed. He smiled.

  “All right, you can get to the point,” she said. “I take it you want to blackmail me the way you did Drakakis? You want me to call off the dogs?”

  “Exactly how many dogs do you have left?” Blake snapped back, all humor suddenly absent from his tone.

  Faraday said nothing, suddenly feeling the urge to avoid his stare. Blake gazed at her until she looked away and then continued talking.

  “I’m not here to make a deal,” he said. “I tried that before, and look how it turned out. We’re way past deals. I came here to give you a warning: Don’t come after me again.”

  “And what about the Black Book?”

  “That’s the other reason I came here. As of five minutes ago, that drive is worthless to either of us.”

  “What the hell do you mean?”

  Blake’s eyes left hers for the first time and glanced at the tablet beside her on the seat.

  “Front page in the Times. That was what you said, wasn’t it?”

  Faraday felt a sinking sensation in her stomach. She kept her eyes on Blake, resisting the urge to pick up the tablet. He had to be bluffing. Had to be. Except that Blake had followed through on every one of his promises up until now.

  “I hope you don’t mind, but I gave it to a few others as well. Washington Post, USA Today, Wall Street Journal … the Guardian, Le Monde, Die Zeit. CNN. The BBC. I forget the complete list.”

  Faraday couldn’t take it any longer. She grabbed the tablet and flipped the case open, switching it on.

  It was all over the Internet. It was the big story. The only story. Government Death Squad. Carlson Assassinated by US Intelligence Agents. Conspiracy. Faraday swiped from site to site, scanning a few lines of each devastating article, every headline drilling into her soul a little more.

  “Maybe you can get ahead of this, if you’re smart,” Blake said. She looked up, realizing she had almost forgotten he was there. “You weren’t there for most of that, after all. Maybe you woke up at night sometimes, wondering if you were doing what you should be.”