Winterlong

by Mason Cross

  “What the—”

  Coop opened his mouth to respond, to tell him that they both needed to get the hell out of there, when he saw movement reflected in the glass of one of the picture frames on the wall. He ducked and ran for the open door into the hall as he heard a series of rapid cracks as bullets fired from a silenced pistol penetrated the glass door. He heard thuds as they punched into the drywall, following his path across the field of fire. Tom Mitchell’s blood splashed his arm as he made the door and tumbled into the hallway. Definitely no random home invasion.

  Don’t think. Don’t look back. Just move.

  Coop unlocked the front door and swung it open, diving out into the corridor, gun pointed back along the corridor in the direction of his own door. Whoever they were, they had extinguished the hall lights, but in the moonlight spilling out from his own open door, he could make out a dark-clad figure pressed against the wall outside. He didn’t bother to take aim, just fired three quick shots as he fell back in the opposite direction. The noise was deafening, shattering the silence of night. He hoped it would wake the place up, get them all dialing 911.

  If they had someone covering the door, they’d likely have people on the standard front and back exits from the hotel. He just had to hope whoever it was didn’t have the inside knowledge to be covering the sole remaining exit as well. He ducked through the door to the stairwell, wondering if he had managed to take out the man outside his door, at least. The bullet hole that appeared in the wall next to his head answered that question.

  “Shit.”

  Coop barreled down the stairs barefoot, keeping the gun trained at upper-body height as he rounded each corner. He hit the ground floor and kicked the door to the lobby open, before passing it by and continuing down to the basement.

  As he descended the last of the stairs he thought about the fact Charlie would be working the front desk. His final night shift of the week. They would kill him if he got in the way, like they’d just killed Tom. Maybe they’d kill him even if he didn’t get in the way.

  Can’t think about that now. Just run.

  The keypad lock on the door at the bottom of the stairs delayed him for about a second and a half. Charlie had supplied him with the four-digit code months ago, in return for half a bottle of Jim Beam. The basement was lit by fluorescent strip lights and cluttered with stacked boxes of catering supplies and sacks of dirty laundry. Coop closed the door behind him as quietly as he could and spent a second with his ear to the door listening, trying to keep his breathing steady.

  He heard footsteps reach the ground floor and the lobby door bang open again. They’d bought it—for the moment.

  He moved fast across the space to the east wall. There were long, narrow windows at ground level looking out onto the alley alongside the hotel. The windows were wire-mesh glass to thwart people from breaking in, but thankfully there was nothing to keep people from opening them from the inside.

  Coop forced himself to stop as he reached the windows. He scanned the narrow field of view. He saw nothing, but it was difficult to tell since the alley was lit only by the overspill from the streetlights out front. It didn’t really make a difference: This was it, his only chance.

  He unlatched the nearest window and pushed it up. It creaked and complained as it swung up. He placed his gun on the ground outside and hauled himself up and out, scraping his bare legs badly on the steel frame.

  He gripped the gun again and maneuvered himself with some difficulty to his feet, breathing really heavily now, the blood pounding in his ears. No time to think about heart trouble, just time to run. He forced himself to be still for a moment, letting his eyes sweep over the darkness of the alley, confirming he was alone. When he was as satisfied as he could be, he edged toward the street and flattened back against the wall when he reached the corner. He paused another second and then risked a glance around the edge.

  He could see lights on in some of the rooms. The results of the shots he had fired a minute ago. With any luck, some of the neighbors had already called the cops.

  The hotel entrance was sixty yards away, beneath a red awning that stretched out over the sidewalk. There was no one outside the entrance, which meant if he was in luck, there were only two of them, and they were still inside. Maybe they’d worked out that he’d headed for the basement. If so, that locked door wouldn’t hold up to a bullet. No matter what, he didn’t have long. Where the hell were the cops?

  Suddenly, he was aware of the ridiculousness of his situation: standing outside at four in the morning in his shorts, holding a gun and trying to work up the guts to make a move.

  The street was empty, so he heard the engine before the car made the turn two blocks away. Coop shrank back into the shadows but kept his eyes on the headlights as they approached. It was a taxi, the FOR HIRE sign lit up.

  He felt a surge of hope and suppressed it, reminding himself he still had to convince the guy to stop for an old guy in his underwear. Waving the gun was a no-no—even if he actually tried to use it to force the driver to stop, it would likely have the opposite effect. Too many cabdrivers had gotten shot in Orlando for the driver to take the risk of cooperating with a carjacking. For the same reason, he couldn’t try to conceal the gun behind his back. It would be a dead giveaway. The way he was dressed was enough of a strike against him.

  But the vehicle was only a half a block away now, just passing the hotel entrance and the red awning. He was out of options, and this was it. In another thirty seconds, the men with guns would come from the front door or through the basement window or from somewhere else.

  He made the decision. He dropped the gun and stepped out onto the street, raising a hand as the taxi approached.

  The taxi slowed and pulled in. Coop got in close and quickly opened the back door.

  “Warm out tonight, huh?” the driver said without looking back. So much for him not noticing.

  “Yeah,” Coop grimaced.

  “The husband come home early?”

  “Something like that.”

  Coop asked to go to a cheap, anonymous hotel he knew on International Drive and hunched down in the seat, keeping an eye out the back as they pulled away. As he watched, a figure appeared at the door, staring intently at the taxi as it pulled away.

  Shit. Had he gotten the license plate? How long would it take them to get to their cars and follow? He turned back to face front, addressing the driver.

  “Actually, I’ve changed my mind. You know O’Shaugnessy’s Bar?”

  The driver made no indication that he had heard. Through the half-open window next to him, Coop heard sirens at last. Thank God. That would give the bastards something to keep them busy. Just as Coop was about to ask the question again louder, the driver answered.

  “You got an address?”

  “You don’t know it? It’s on Poinciana Boulevard.”

  Jimmy O’Shaugnessy’s establishment officially closed at two, but it was a rare night Jimmy didn’t stick around until dawn shooting pool with the regulars behind locked doors. Coop would be able to borrow clothes and money. That was another point—his wallet was still in the back pocket of his pants in the hotel, which meant he had no way to pay for the ride. This driver was going to have to continue to be understanding, and Jimmy was going to have to be in.

  He kept glancing at the road behind them as he tried to plan his next movements, at the same time as trying to process the ordeal he had just narrowly survived. It had to be something to do with the dead man in the snow. It had to be. And that meant it had to do with Blake. He had to get ahold of Blake. Blake would know what to do.

  So many competing thoughts crowded his head that he didn’t notice the driver was headed in the wrong direction for a good couple of minutes. He didn’t snap out of his own thoughts until the cab made a sharp turn down a blind, unlit alley. The headlights lit up a seven-foot-high corrugated iron fence as the car slowed and stopped. And then the driver switched the lights off, plunging them into darkness.


  “Hey, what are you—”

  Coop froze as the silhouetted man in the driver’s seat turned around and raised a gun, a pistol, elongated by a suppressor. He was still thinking about the gun he’d left behind, thinking that he wouldn’t have had time to reach for it anyway, when the muzzle flash lit the interior of the car up.

  The last thing he saw was the cold disinterest in his killer’s eyes.

  16

  “Did you have to kill him?” Stark hissed as soon as he got close enough.

  He holstered his weapon as Abrams opened the door and got out of the taxi, still holding the Glock. He glanced at the corpse in the backseat as though confirming the veracity of the complaint before responding and then shrugged. “Kill or capture. Wasn’t me who let him get away, Stark.”

  Stark let that one pass. He had been concerned that a three-man team was insufficient for this assignment. Not that there was any question of the target getting away for real, of course, but with more men they could have achieved their goal without killing anybody. Of course, if Usher hadn’t taken so long on the goddamn lock, it might have helped, too.

  Instead of taking the bait, he leaned down so that his eyes were level with the nearest window that looked in on the backseat. He surveyed the aftermath. The old guy was definitely out of competition. He was sprawled across the seat, his still-open eyes staring upward. There was a neat circular hole in the center of his forehead. Blood and chunks of gray matter were splattered all over the back window.

  Stark shook his head. The guy was in his underwear, for Christ’s sake. It was ... undignified. He couldn’t help admire the old guy. He had made a solid attempt at giving them the slip, and from a standing start, too. They should have brought more than three of them to cover all exits. If Abrams hadn’t been circling the block ...

  A horrible thought occurred. “Jesus, what did you do with the real driver?”

  Abrams looked up, his eyes narrowing. “I wasn’t supposed to kill him either?” He held the look for a moment, then chuckled. “Shit, Stark, lighten up. I took it from a gas station two miles away. We’ll be long gone before the cops think to look in this particular alley.”

  “You better hope so. This isn’t Mogadishu, Abrams. Rein it in.”

  “Whatever you say, boss,” Abrams said evenly. Stark got the distinct impression he was enjoying this. Even knowing the importance of discretion, he was comporting himself with all the restraint of a drunk looter during a Super Bowl riot.

  “Let’s hope Usher got what he needed,” Stark said.

  They rendezvoused with Usher half a mile from the alley. He had brought the van and was sitting in the front, the light from a laptop screen illuminating his face. He glanced up at their approach and unlocked the doors. Stark and Abrams climbed in. In the distance, they could still hear sirens.

  He looked at Stark and Abrams in turn. Stark had already brought him up to speed with the results of the chase via the in-ear comms equipment they all wore.

  “Cleanup?”

  Abrams gave a thumbs-up. “I left the car at the bottom of an alley. You’d need to go deep in there to even see it, and even then it’s too dark to see the body until you get up close.”

  Usher nodded and looked back at the screen as the progress bar completed, the screen double-reflected in the lenses of his glasses. “The man I killed in the hotel will keep their attention for a while.”

  Stark didn’t comment on that. More collateral damage. If this was their idea of restraint, he hated to think what these two had been like going after Martinez in the ass-end of Russia.

  Usher had connected a portable hard drive to the USB port of the laptop and was watching another progress bar at about two-thirds of the way to completion.

  “How long do you need?” he asked.

  “Another minute. He left this.” He handed Stark a cell phone. “Last call was two hours ago, and an e-mail a minute later.”

  “The black notice?”

  That had been Murphy’s idea. The action had two aims: to flush out the target and to spook him. Stark hadn’t been sure about it for that very reason. All else being equal, he preferred his targets not to know when the wolves were on their tail until it was too late. But then, Murphy had an extra insight into this target. Besides, every other suggested method of tracking down Carter Blake would take a lot longer. They couldn’t be certain that Cooper, or his files, would lead them to Blake, but they could rely on Cooper contacting him.

  It had already taken them months following the revelation that Blake was still active to identify this one link to him: Jefferson Cooper, a specialist agent in this field who brokered deals between those with difficult assignments and those willing to undertake them. Cooper—Coop to his close contacts—was ex-CIA. Cooper had left the agency in the late nineties, spent some time as a consultant for some civilian military companies, and was now earning a nice little living as a man who knew people. He was careful, both to stay below the radar himself and to ensure he didn’t keep anything to tie him to the various contractors he was in touch with. His address book, if he had one, would be full of ex-spooks for hire. But Blake was something a little different.

  Stark thumbed through the recent calls on the phone. None of them had names. Some were saved in the phone book as single initials and numbers. The last call in the log was to a number saved as “B2.”

  “What was the e-mail address he sent it to?” he asked Usher.

  “Very generic. He made that call, and then he forwarded the picture. No additional text from him in the e-mail.”

  It had worked. The name and the picture had triggered Blake’s curiosity.

  “It has to be Blake, right?” Stark said. “He calls him, tells him about the black notice, and then Blake asks him to forward it. That means we have his cell number.”

  “Which means we have him, in about two minutes,” Usher agreed.

  “What are you gonna do, call him?” Abrams asked.

  Usher’s eyes narrowed, as though he couldn’t work out if the other man was making a joke. He tapped away on the laptop, paused, then tapped a few more keys in. “He’s switched his phone off, but we have the last ping from a cell tower a couple of hours ago.”

  “Where?” Stark asked.

  “Seattle.”

  “Figures. Around the corner would have been too convenient.” He looked through the windshield. “Let’s get the hell out of here. We know where he is. Now let’s clip his wings.”

  Usher went around into the back. Stark followed, while Abrams jumped into the driver’s seat and twisted the key in the ignition. They rolled out onto the road and headed toward the freeway.

  17

  SEATTLE

  Stark’s team was in the air before the blood had dried. A chartered jet waiting on standby took them directly to Seattle.

  Thanks to Abrams, they had no need for the equipment they had in place for the restraint and sedation of a prisoner, which at least removed one potential headache. They touched down at Sea-Tac a little after seven a.m. local time.

  Stark had managed to sleep for most of the flight, jolting awake only when the wheels hit the ground. He was grateful—he had made good use of downtime, while avoiding dwelling on the fact of being thirty-six thousand feet in the air in a metal tube. The chartered flight was faster than a commercial service and just as quick as a military jet would have been, with the advantage that there was no need for an official paper trail. Faraday was keen that this operation, like the Crozier op, attracted as little attention as was possible. Stark suspected Abrams hadn’t received that memo.

  They disembarked from the jet and Abrams picked up a rental car. Stark sat in the back as they headed for downtown, watching the sun come up over the Emerald City. Blake was out there somewhere. The last ping from his cell had been around midnight local time, not long after he had spoken to Cooper.

  Fifteen minutes later, Abrams pulled into the basement garage of a downtown Marriott. They took the elevator straight to the
tenth-floor conference suite. The entire floor had been booked for three days, at what Stark assumed was great expense. But again, it was off the books.

  They joined the forward team, who had flown in a couple hours earlier. They had already fully established the field ops room. Laptops, maps on the wall, strategic area priorities already mapped out in neat bullet points on one of the wall-mounted whiteboards.

  Dixon looked up as they entered. The big man made a show of standing to attention.

  “Welcome to Seattle,” he said. “Business or pleasure?”

  Stark ignored that, eyeing the whiteboard. “Anything on his cell? Any e-mails back to Cooper?”

  “That’s a negative,” Dixon said. “Let’s hope he’s still here.”

  Stark was certain he would be. They had let Blake know they were onto him, but he couldn’t know just how close they were. And he would find it more difficult than expected to leave town, in any case.

  “All right. First thing, somebody needs to point me in the direction of the coffee. Second thing, he’s not going to find himself.” Stark looked at the whiteboard again, mentally prioritizing the locations and dividing them between the ten men in the room.

  18

  SEATTLE

  By ten thirty, Wakey’s was in the quiet lull after the breakfast crowd and before the lunch crowd. It had an old-time feel that set it apart from the chain places. Parquet flooring, lots of dark wood and red leather upholstery on the booths. There was a lunch counter running the length of the place, facing windows that looked across First Avenue to the bus station. I wondered if Scott Bryant had bought his bus ticket already.

  I assumed the deal was a cash buy. Anything involving bank transfers would be too traceable for either party. Industrial espionage had come a long way in the past century, from folders pilfered from locked filing cabinets to gigabytes of data on a piece of plastic smaller than your thumb, but the preferred payment method hadn’t evolved at all in that time.