Winterlong

by Mason Cross

  I took one of the stools at the lunch counter and looked at the menu printed on boards above the window. I had gotten there early to make sure I was in place for Bryant’s arrival, but it would be an efficient use of the time to eat as well, since I had skipped breakfast. Ever since Coop’s phone call at midnight, my appetite had taken a leave of absence. On my way to the diner, I had stopped at a coffee shop to check my e-mail. The coffee shop had tablets bolted to each table, so you could browse the Internet over a cappuccino. There had been nothing from Coop.

  A burly cook wearing a white short-sleeve shirt and a backward ball cap approached and asked for my order. I ordered a steak sandwich and a black coffee and watched as he prepared the sandwich filling on the griddle in front of me. As he mixed peppers and onions into the pile of chopped steak, I savored the aroma and turned on my stool so I could survey the rest of the clientele. Six other people besides me. An elderly couple taking their time over their food, chatting to each other; three teenage girls, all with heads down, staring into their phones; and a big guy in a plaid shirt occupying one of the booths on the far wall.

  I wondered if this diner had been selected for the meet because it was quiet. Maybe Kelner had picked it, or perhaps the choice had been Bryant’s, drawing on the experience of his sojourn in the city.

  I turned back around just in time to see the cook plating up the sandwich. He slid it in front of me in a smooth, practiced motion. While I ate, I kept a discreet eye on the three areas I’d selected my spot to ensure I could see: the door, the street immediately outside, and the entrance to the bus station across the road.

  I finished the sandwich and started on the coffee. The old couple finally finished up and asked for the check. One of the teenage girls looked up from her phone long enough to tell her friends she was leaving. Her two compatriots glanced up from their screens for a second to smile their goodbyes. Two guys in suits came in, took the next booth down from the plaid shirt guy, and opened their respective MacBooks.

  At five to eleven, I asked for another coffee and the check, in case I had to move quickly. The cook came back with both at the same time. I laid cash down on the plate and was starting on the second coffee when a familiar face passed by. Scott Bryant was on the street outside, glancing into the diner and straight through me as he walked. He paused a second at the door, as though psyching himself up, and then pushed it open.

  Bryant stopped again inside the door and surveyed the interior. He had made some effort to alter his appearance. He had shaved the beard and ditched the glasses. He wore a long black overcoat and one of those hats with flaps at the sides. A good choice: It covered his hair and his ears, and it was certainly appropriate to the climate—I had seen a dozen passersby wearing hats like that in the time I’d been in the diner. He gripped the handles of a canvas laptop bag in his left hand. The bag also fit right in, but I knew it was functional. Nobody was going to hand over a substantial amount of cash for a five-dollar flash drive without first making sure it contained exactly what they expected it to.

  He let his gaze sweep around, taking in the guy in the plaid shirt, the remaining two girls, the MacBook guys, and me, and deciding none of us was a threat. Satisfied, he made his way to the booth nearest the door, which was unoccupied. He took the seat facing the door and removed his hat, keeping the coat on. From my position behind him, I was able to watch him for a while, enjoying his nervous mannerisms as he drummed his fingers on the table and hesitantly ordered a beer, before changing his mind and asking for a mineral water.

  I gave him a couple more minutes, just to let him really start to worry that no one was going to show up. I was about to make him wish nobody had.

  I drank the last of the coffee and got up. I walked across the parquet floor to Bryant’s booth. His head snapped around as he heard me approach. He couldn’t have looked guiltier if he’d had the word thief scrawled across his forehead in marker. Before he could make a move, I put my left hand on the back of the seat and my right on the table, positioning myself so he would have to get physical if he wanted out of the space.

  “You’re really not very good at this, are you, Bryant?”

  He backed a couple of inches further along the booth seat. The leather upholstery squeaked as he moved. He looked up at me, barely concealed panic in his brown eyes. “Who the hell are you?”

  I let the question hang for a moment, then indicated the seat opposite him with my hand. “If I sit down, you’re not going to do anything stupid, are you?”

  He thought about it, glanced past me at the door as though considering making a break for it, then shook his head slowly, keeping his eyes fixed on mine. I believed him.

  I dropped my arms and slid into the seat across from him. We watched each other across the table for a minute.

  There are a lot of ways it can go when you finally come face-to-face with a subject, dependent on a number of variables. If at all possible, you want to close out the business in hand without any kind of physical confrontation, although for obvious reasons, sometimes that’s impossible. I try to plan the encounter out in advance, but in most cases you don’t really know how it’s going to go until you see the whites of the subject’s eyes. Sometimes not even then.

  I was looking at the whites of Scott Bryant’s eyes now, and I knew I was in a good position. If he had been inclined to use violence, it was likely he’d have done so immediately. If he had a plausible get-out-of-jail card, he would have been talking it up already, or at least acting confident. The man across from me looked like he knew it was all over, and I had barely spoken to him.

  That’s why I knew silence was the correct technique. He didn’t have a clue who I was, how I’d found him, or what I was about to do. He knew why I was here, of course—to intercept him before he sold MeTime to Kelner or one of his staff. Beyond that, nothing. He didn’t know if I was a cop or a federal agent or a bounty hunter. He didn’t know if I was carrying a weapon. He didn’t know if I had orders to take him to jail, or to put a bullet in his head. I wanted all of these possibilities to swim around his head for a while before I got down to business.

  Eventually, he broke the silence.

  “You’re not ...”

  “Kelner?”

  “Who I was expecting.”

  “That’s pretty clear.”

  He let out a sigh that had an uneven timbre, like he was trying not to shiver. “So what now?”

  “Do you have the software?”

  He said nothing for a moment, perhaps hoping I would give more away, and then nodded when he saw I wasn’t going to. He reached into his inside pocket and removed a small white envelope. He tore the top off and put his hand inside, removing a small blue flash drive between his thumb and forefinger. He took his eyes off me for the first time and looked at it like an alcoholic regarding a drink he’d just been ordered to pour down the drain.

  “Any other copies?” I asked.

  “No.”

  I didn’t believe that, but it wouldn’t make any difference.

  “Put it down.”

  He hesitated, then did as instructed, gently laying the drive on the polished wood of the tabletop. I left it there, sitting back in my seat as though the main business was concluded and we could both relax now.

  “Stafford?” he asked.

  I nodded. “You must have known he would come after you.”

  “I didn’t think I had made it that easy. Who told you?”

  “No one told me,” I said. “I do this for a living.”

  He stared at me for a moment, as though trying to decide whether I was lying.

  “I don’t suppose you’re going to let me just walk out of here.”

  I shook my head. “It doesn’t have to be as bad as you think, though.”

  He almost smiled. “What, he’s going to give me a slap on the wrist and say no more about it?”

  “Probably not,” I admitted. “But you’re in luck. No harm done yet, so if we go back now with the software, it doesn�
�t need to mean jail time.”

  He shook his head firmly. It was the first decisive movement I’d seen him make since I laid eyes on him. “Uh-uh. No way. I’m not going back.”

  I reached over and plucked the flash drive from the table, holding it up to the light. “Amazing things, aren’t they? Twenty years ago you’d have needed a half-ton of floppy disks to store this much data. Now you can keep it in the watch pocket of your jeans.”

  “Do you have a name?” His tone had gained a little steel, now that he was resigned to losing his meal ticket and, in all probability, his freedom.

  “When it suits me.”

  “Okay, Mr. Man-With-No-Name. You got Stafford’s data back. I’m sure he’ll be very pleased with your work. What do you need me for?”

  “You know what I need you for. The data isn’t enough. He needs to make sure you can’t sell this to somebody else from the copy I know you’ve made.”

  He said nothing, waiting for me to continue. I explained my proposal: Stafford would get the software back, plus a signed statement admitting to how, when, and why Bryant had stolen it, and confirming he hadn’t given a copy to anyone else.

  “It’s the only way he can be sure MeTime’s protected,” I finished. “If anybody hits the market in a few months with a reverse-engineered version of the software, he can prove exactly where it came from.”

  The resigned look in Bryant’s eyes had changed while I’d been talking, because now he saw the out for himself. Now he was thinking, calculating.

  “But he would need me to cooperate. Testify, if it came to it.”

  “That’s right,” I said, sensing I was getting through to him. “But only if you already gave a copy to someone else. Did you?”

  He shook his head.

  “But you made a copy.”

  The corner of his lip curled upward a little, despite himself. “Of course I made a copy.”

  “So, by a stroke of luck, you’re in a reasonably advantageous position. In return for no jail time, you sign a sworn statement saying the software has gone no further. He knows you’re on the level, because you’ll go to jail if it shows up somewhere else. But he needs that guarantee. If he presses charges, you have no reason to cooperate.”

  Bryant picked up the glass of water for the first time. He tilted it back and drank it in one, his throat muscles working as the liquid went down. When he was finished, he wiped his mouth and stared back at me.

  “And what if I don’t believe you? What if I just get up and walk out of here?” He glanced from side to side, taking in the rest of the clientele. “You going to stop me, with all these people about? I’ll yell ‘kidnap.’”

  “Go ahead. They can call the cops. I’ll explain the whole situation to them. What’ll happen then?”

  He was silent for a minute, trying to think of every way out and knowing there was only one possibility.

  “You can make this happen?”

  I nodded.

  “Why should I trust a man with no name?”

  A fair question. “My name’s Carter Blake. You bring MeTime back with me, and there’s no jail time.”

  I was making a promise that I hadn’t cleared with Stafford, of course, but I knew Stafford was a pragmatist, and he wouldn’t be able to dispute the logic. The only reason for him to turn down this deal was pure vindictiveness. And a man would have to be pretty vindictive to jeopardize two billion dollars.

  “Okay, Blake. You have a deal.”

  He held his hand out. I shook it.

  “I wish I could say it was nice to meet you,” he added.

  FIVE YEARS AGO

  NEW YORK CITY

  Given the way our conversation had been occupying my every waking thought over the last couple of weeks, I was surprised by how much I wasn’t thinking about Senator Carlson. Carol and I were in Central Park, walking at a leisurely pace through the zoo on the Park Avenue side. The leaves of the trees had already started to turn brown and drop, but a sudden upswing in the temperature had arrested the onset of fall for a brief moment. We had both removed our coats, and Carol smirked as I draped hers over my arm along with mine.

  “An officer and a gentleman, huh?”

  I stopped midstride and affected a concerned look. “You’re right. How sexist of me. Here.”

  Carol ignored the coats offered in my outstretched arms and kept walking. “I’ll let it slide just this once.”

  “Very understanding of you.”

  “That’s me, very understanding.”

  An officer and a gentleman. The choice of words hadn’t been accidental. I thought about our first date: the way she had held out to the end of the main course before really starting to question me, guessing a little too accurately about my background.

  “You’re definitely military,” she’d declared, after I’d politely evaded another of her questions about what I did for a living. “My dad was in the military. It’s difficult to hide it completely, though you do a pretty good job.”

  I just smiled. “Interesting. Tell me more.”

  “Why don’t you tell me yourself?”

  “I’m more interested in your version.”

  She had pouted her lips theatrically and then risen to the challenge. “You’re recently back from overseas.”

  “But I already told you that.”

  “I haven’t finished. You shaved when you came back. I can tell from the tan line.”

  I’d taken another drink and motioned for her to continue.

  “So your hair’s a little long, too. That and the fact you had a beard tells me you’re not regular army or navy, which means ... some kind of special ops?”

  I grinned. I remember being surprised at how much I was enjoying her company and how much I didn’t mind the interrogation that would normally make me uncomfortable.

  “I can see why Carlson keeps you around.”

  “How’d I do?” She looked serious, like the competitive part of her really had to know.

  “Not bad. But I’d rather talk about something else, if you don’t mind.”

  She cocked an eyebrow. “And what’s that?”

  I held her gaze for a moment. “Coffee or dessert.”

  She didn’t hesitate. “Both.”

  She had been content to let me keep my cards close to my chest on that first night. Maybe she had even enjoyed the mystery. But I could tell from her periodic digs—like the officer and a gentleman crack—that my reticence was beginning to niggle her.

  We walked in silence for a couple of minutes, soaking up the unexpected warmth of the November sun and watching the other people doing the same: the joggers and the families and the nannies with high-end prams walking the offspring of some of the residents of the rarefied apartments that overlooked it all. This was the fourth time we’d been together since my first meeting with Carlson, and we had already established that neither of us was the type to be concerned by a lull in conversation. Fourth date, but all of a sudden I realized there was a different feel to this one. For the first time, we hadn’t arranged to go to dinner or a movie or any other approved date activity. This time we had just decided to go for a walk because spending time together seemed to be what we did now. I wondered if that subtle difference had occurred to Carol.

  The realization felt good but quickly brought with it a stab of apprehension. Because the more time we spent together, the more she and I became “we,” the quicker we would reach that point where we had to talk about where this could go, rather than just enjoying the moment.

  And just like that, I was thinking about Carlson’s office and Winterlong. I had made it the best part of an hour. Definitely a new record.

  I was still awaiting the next assignment. My phone had been quiet for weeks, and I was beginning to wonder if the unease I was feeling about that was more than just paranoia. I had been thinking about what would happen after I made my move, if and when the opportunity arose. There would be no question of me sticking around waiting for Winterlong to hunt down their
turncoat. I would have to disappear for good, leaving everything behind. Everything and everyone.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  Carol was looking up at my face as we walked, and I realized my expression had given away the fact I was brooding on something.

  “Nothing in particular,” I lied. “Just thinking.”

  “Thinking about when you’re going to tell me what you’ve been talking to the senator about?”

  That caught me by surprise. She had asked me about the meeting over dinner on the first night, and I had deflected the inquiry with something vague about my work overseas being of interest to Carlson. She hadn’t pressed me that night, and she hadn’t asked again. Until now. And the way she said it revealed she knew the senator and I had spoken on more than one occasion.

  “Don’t look so worried,” she said, while I was still trying to come up with a response. “Need-to-know, huh?”

  “Something like that,” I said. “He’d have to tell you himself.” Not exactly a lie, but a disingenuous response. I knew there was no way Carlson would share our conversation with Carol or anyone else. Not yet, anyway.

  “I figured,” she said. “Hey, isn’t that creepy?”

  “What?”

  Carol had stopped walking and was looking up at the little animatronic figures emerging from the clock tower above the three archways that lead out of the zoo and back into the park. The clock was chiming while an off-key tune tinkled away.

  “It is creepy,” I agreed, grateful that she had chosen to change the subject.

  She kept looking at the clock for a moment as the song played and the tourists and the nannies and joggers passed us by.

  “It’s getting late,” she said.

  We left the park and got the subway at Fifth and Fifty-Ninth, heading down to Carol’s apartment in the East Village. It was a one-bedroom walk-up, which would have been a cheap place to rent for a folk singer or a poet in the sixties, but I guessed nowadays it would absorb the bulk of her salary.

  We’d talked on the way about where to eat, then decided it would be fun to stay in and cook. Carol wasn’t much of a homebody. This was her first day off in three weeks, and she apologized that she wouldn’t have much in the cupboard. We picked up some supplies at the Italian grocery store on the corner and took everything up to her place.