Winterlong

by Mason Cross

  The ground floor was mostly taken up by the cosmetics department. I crossed the floor through an atmosphere composed of a thousand mixed scents, noting the positions of the store cameras. Another good thing about a department store of this kind: the building had been renovated, extended and refitted time and again over a century or so. Plenty of camera blind spots. I found a perfect such blind spot in an alcove that led into a choice of two routes. I pulled the coat off, balled the light fabric up in my hands, and stuffed it behind a large potted plant in the corner. I waited a few seconds for a group of senior citizens to pass by, and then tagged along with them as they headed for the elevators. It would be far from impossible for someone to piece together my movements from the different cameras later, but it would take time. I left the group at the elevators and took the stairs to the sixth floor, which I noted from the store directory held both the menswear department and customer restrooms.

  I passed through the AV department on the way. Some of the display televisions were showing news channels, with footage from the airport. I tried not to stare at the screens, but was reassured that I didn’t see my own face or Bryant’s. The on-screen text looked pretty vague: SHOOTING AT SEA-TAC.

  I selected jeans, a flannel shirt, a winter coat, gloves, and a pair of boots, together with cheap hair clippers, batteries, and a pair of nonprescription glasses. I paid cash and headed for the restrooms. There was one guy washing up at the row of sinks, taking his time. I waited for him to leave, then took his place at the sinks. I took a second to examine myself in the mirror, running my fingers through my hair. It had been getting a little long, anyway. I inserted the batteries into the clippers and set the cut length to a number one—just short of an induction cut. I got to work.

  Five minutes later I’d flushed the clumps of my hair down one of the toilets and changed into the new clothes in the cubicle. I stood on the toilet seat and lifted one of the ceiling panels. I stuffed my suit, shirt, and shoes into the crawl space. I tried not to think about how much I had paid for that suit.

  I put the glasses on, unlocked the door, and made for the stairs again.

  When I reached the Fourth Avenue exit, I thought at first that Bryant had taken the option to run. Then I realized that he had done a pretty good job of changing his look himself. He wore a long black overcoat, a green sweater, and a beanie hat.

  I thought again about John Stafford, expecting the two of us in California in a couple hours’ time. He was going to be waiting a while longer.

  “What now?” Bryant asked.

  I looked across the street and saw a road sign directing traffic toward King Street Station. “Now,” I said, “we get the hell out of town.”

  26

  NEW YORK

  Faraday drummed her fingers on her desk as she waited for the connection.

  She disliked waiting for a call to be put through to one of her operatives at the best of times, and this was far from the best of times. And then the quality of the silence on the other end of the phone changed subtly and she knew he was there.

  “Tell me what the hell went wrong at the airport, Usher.”

  “I don’t think anything did go wrong.”

  “David Mendez begs to differ.”

  Usher mulled that over for a second, as though it were a trick question. “Who’s David Mendez?”

  “The taxi driver who wound up dead in the middle of the road.”

  Usher didn’t continue along that line of discussion. “We located the target. He could have been anywhere in Seattle, but one of our surveillances paid off. I’d say we made very good progress. Had we had a little more notice ...”

  “Then what? You wouldn’t have shot up a civilian airport and still managed to let your target escape?”

  “I decided—”

  “This was supposed to be sub rosa, Usher. I’m not popular with Homeland Security or the Pentagon right now. Seattle PD are pissed, and I expect the FBI will be, too, when they find out they can’t touch this. I’m investing time and favors keeping a lid on something that should have been taken care of quietly. I thought you were good at quiet.”

  There was silence at the other end of the line. Faraday could feel herself beginning to lose her grip on her temper and wondered if there was anything she could say that would rattle Usher. In many ways he was the model operative. He followed instructions to the letter, always doing exactly what was asked with single-minded, sometimes brutal efficiency. But for some reason, Faraday worried about him. She wondered what would happen the day they gave him an order he didn’t like. Most of the men in the unit were killers—they had to be—but she could honestly say that Usher was the only one who made her uneasy. And that was unacceptable.

  She made a mental note that a tougher line would have to be taken with him. He would have to be kept on a tighter leash in the future. But not until Carter Blake was in custody, or in the ground.

  “Usher? Are you still there?”

  When he spoke again, his voice was level, reasonable. “We had a shot. The decision was made to take it.”

  The decision was made. Like it was out of his hands. Faraday sighed.

  “I don’t want to have to clean up any more messes, all right? There’s only so far you can push need-to-know. When they autopsy that driver, they’re going to want to know why they can’t speak to the shooter.” Usher said nothing. Faraday sighed inwardly, wondering what solution she’d expected him to suggest that would make this all better. “Okay. You’re in touch with the rest of the team?”

  “We’ve rerouted everyone back to base.” He was referring to the temporary operations center they’d set up in a Marriott hotel downtown. “We’re IDing potential search zones right now. News says the police have no trace of the taxi.”

  “Thank God for small mercies.”

  “If they do pick up Blake, we’ll need to extract him from custody, of course.”

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, but not without my authorization. Is that clear?”

  “It’s clear.”

  “That’s good. Now, tell me you’re making better progress than our friends in the police.”

  “Blake is still in the area. He can’t have stayed on the freeway long in that car, so we’re working off the first couple of exits as a starting point. I think he’ll try to lie low. If he wants to get out of Seattle, he has limited options. He can’t rent a car without his license, and he certainly can’t fly. That narrows down the options a little.”

  “Good. It’s just unfortunate that he knows how close we are now.”

  Usher said nothing.

  “Okay,” she said after a minute. “Get to it. And, Usher?”

  “Yes?”

  “Try not to kill anyone else.”

  27

  SEATTLE

  If I had been in any doubt when I received the e-mail showing Martinez’s body, the shoot-out at the airport had cleared it up. I was on Winterlong’s kill list, and it didn’t look like they were choosy about when or where it happened. Or who got in the way.

  I knew why they wanted me dead. It was because I possessed something that could, perhaps, take down the whole organization. Five years ago, that had been my bulletproof vest. Now it seemed it was no longer enough to protect me. Martinez had had the same bargaining chip after all, and it hadn’t kept him alive. That meant they had found him and somehow forced him to give up what he had. Or maybe they had taken a gamble, decided he wouldn’t have trusted anyone else with knowledge of where he had stashed it. It was the same problem I had faced: As soon as anybody else knew about it, it lost its value.

  One thing was clear: I needed to get my hands on that bargaining chip. If I couldn’t stop them from coming after me, I could make damn sure they’d have too much on their plate to worry about me. The only problem? The Moonola assignment had taken me about as far away from home turf as it was possible to get without leaving the country.

  Flying or renting a car were both now out of the question. Stea
ling a car would only make it more likely we’d be picked up by the cops—which almost sounded like a good idea, except that the police would hand us over five seconds after somebody waved the Patriot Act in their faces. I needed a way to cross the country as quickly as possible without having to show identification or otherwise draw attention to myself. We didn’t have time to hitchhike, so that limited our options to the bus or the train. A bus would be too small, with too few passengers and nowhere to hide. That left one option.

  Amtrak ran seven long-haul routes out of King Street Station every day. The eastern-bound service, which was called the Empire Builder, ran over two thousand miles to Chicago across the Rockies, taking almost two full days to reach its destination. Chicago would get us close to where I needed to be, and perhaps even allow me to get Bryant to something like safety.

  The plan wasn’t perfect, by any means. The unavoidable fact that my travel options had been so curtailed meant that this mode of travel could be predicted. I just had to hope that the man in glasses and his friends would be spread thin enough to give us a chance. The train would give us some important advantages over a bus or any other kind of mass transit: personal space. We could hole up for the two days, eat meals in quarters, and be on the lookout just in case.

  King Street Station wasn’t far from Macy’s. Its hundred-year-old redbrick tower stood out from the more modern skyscrapers that towered over it. We were in luck: The Empire Builder’s single departure for the day was scheduled for four forty, in just over half an hour.

  The ticket desk stretched around one corner of the large, high-ceilinged waiting area. There was a bank of screens in the middle of the concourse, some of them displaying departure and arrival times, one tuned to a news channel. I gave in to my curiosity, slowing my pace a little as I passed. I tried not to look too interested, but then again, there were plenty of other travelers grouped around the screens. Some were watching the news with interest. Just as many were more concerned with whether or not their train was going to be delayed.

  There was no sound, just the same few camera angles refreshed in a cycle. I guessed some were live, and some, like the footage of an ambulance unhurriedly leaving the scene, were from earlier in the day. The views alternated between some stony-faced cops guarding crime scene tape, a wide shot of passengers staring resignedly at departure boards, and a shot of the airport drop-off area from farther away. Thanks to the restricted airspace around the airport, the only image missing was a helicopter view of the crime scene.

  The ticker along the bottom of the screen provided the basics of the story on a loop. The heading had changed to, TERROR AT SEA-TAC?

  I liked the question mark—it suggested that nobody knew exactly what had happened. Nobody who was cooperating with the media, anyway. The bullet points scrolling by hadn’t been updated much in the last hour: One dead in shooting; Police seeking two unidentified male suspects; Air traffic disrupted.

  I watched the updates and the images for long enough to be satisfied that, even if the police knew our identities, they had not released them to the press. Otherwise there would be names and pictures on the screen. Winterlong was keeping us to themselves for the time being. I didn’t know whether to be grateful or not.

  The news changed to another story then: the weather alert in the Northeast. There was a big blizzard due to hit New York State and surrounding areas at some point in the next two days. Emergency planning was in full effect. I hoped that wouldn’t cause me any problems.

  I examined the ticket desk. I could see security cameras covering each of the stations. The one at the far end was a little smaller than the others, and a cluttered shelf meant there was a partial obstruction in front of the cam. I picked that one, and asked for two Chicago-bound tickets on the Empire Builder. The bald, bespectacled guy behind the desk barely glanced at me, tapping away at his keyboard.

  “Coach seats?”

  “Do you have any cabins left?” I wasn’t sure of the exact terminology, but I needed a door I could lock at night.

  He didn’t look up at me, just said, “A Superliner Roomette?”

  “Does it have a door?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, then.”

  He kept tapping away and then told me how much it would be. I got a reaction at last when I slid nine hundred-dollar bills across the desk. I waited for him to tell me they only accepted credit cards, like the woman at the United desk, but then he shrugged and counted the bills out, before pushing my change back along with the tickets. Cash purchase, no ID. Maybe I would travel this way in the future. If there was a future.

  I made my way back to where Bryant was waiting.

  “So where are we going?”

  “East,” I said.

  “Specific. Nice.”

  “We’re headed to Chicago first. I know someone there who might be able to help.”

  “Chicago’s cold this time of year.”

  “Well, we have two days to acclimatize.”

  We waited until the last possible moment to board the train, climbing on to the coach car next to the front locomotive, three cars ahead of the one we were booked onto. The hum of the idling engine kicked up a notch as soon as the doors closed. Brakes hissed and metal squealed as the lumbering behemoth slowly started to break free of its inertia. The train swayed as it picked up speed and we crossed through the next couple of cars: the first fully-seated, the next containing sleeping roomettes. The cars were double-decked. I checked the number on the ticket as we passed into the next one and found our roomette, in the middle of the lower level. The door opened onto a small space, no more than four feet deep by seven wide. There were two seats facing each other that converted into a bed, along with another bed, which folded down from the wall for the top bunk. A picture window almost the full width of the room showed the last of the platform passing by as we moved out of King Street.

  I heard Bryant whistle skeptically behind me as he caught up and surveyed the roomette. “Tell me you don’t snore.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “We won’t be sleeping at the same time.”

  I ducked under the low doorframe and stepped into the tiny space. It would be a long two days. I had no gun, no phone, and virtually no money left. But at least I was reasonably sure that nobody besides Bryant and me knew exactly where we were. Dusk was already beginning to fall. I sat down on the nearest seat and watched as the train passed by the towers of Seattle, headed east. Into the cold.

  28

  We rolled on at a steady fifty miles an hour. Once we had cleared the city, Bryant announced that he could use a nap. He pulled down the top bunk and climbed up into it, grunting as he adjusted his body into the tight space. I sat down on the seat underneath, watching as the world rolled past outside.

  It was the first time I had just sat and looked out of a window for as long as I could remember. I had no laptop to work on, no files to read, no phone. I didn’t even have a book to read. I had no easy way of checking on the news or anything happening in the outside world. In a way, I savored it. Of course, the circumstances were not of my choosing, but it felt like a gift: an opportunity to take stock, to plan my next move.

  I like to work alone. It’s not just part of the sales pitch—I’m at my best when the only person I know I need to rely on is me. However, there are times when you need someone else to help out, and my current situation dictated that this was one of those times. I needed to get Bryant somewhere safe, and that somewhere had to be away from me. The question I kept asking myself was, was it right to endanger yet another person—one of the few people I cared about—even if I needed their help badly? I counted the people who had died already, either because they could provide a lead to me, or just because they’d gotten in the way. Martinez. Coop. The taxi driver at the airport. I didn’t want to add another body to the list.

  The suburbs of Seattle were soon gone, and then we were out on what was once called the Great Northern Railway. We pushed east across Washington State
, passing through Edmonds and Everett as the sky became fully dark, reaching the long tunnel through the Cascade Range sometime after six o’clock. Once we’d passed through nearly three miles of darkness at the heart of the mountain range, we emerged into what seemed like another season again. Snow blanketed the ground, the rolling landscape of white seeming to emit a soft luminescence in the dark.

  I made up my mind. Our eventual destination was serendipitous—it seemed like fate was offering an opportunity.

  Bryant was still sound asleep in the bunk. I got up and opened the door. The passageway was empty in both directions. I checked I had the key and pulled the door shut, listening as the lock clicked into place automatically.

  The lounge car was five cars down. It was lined with windows that curved upward into the ceiling, where passengers could hang out during the day and take in the view. At the far end was a wall-mounted pay phone, which, naturally, didn’t take coins. There was a small shop, and I picked up sandwiches, two bottles of water and some fruit, as well as a prepaid phone card. There were some paperback novels on sale, so I bought the latest Stephen King and a couple of other books with interesting covers. Staring out of the window was all very well, but I might as well take full advantage of this impromptu vacation.

  I used the phone card to dial a number from memory. I hoped the person I was calling hadn’t changed her cell number. I smiled when the ringing stopped and a familiar voice answered.

  “Hello?”

  I cleared my throat and tried to sound as casual as possible. “Hey, remember me?”

  There was an uncertain pause, and I wondered again if I’d made a mistake.

  “Blake?” Special Agent Elaine Banner sounded surprised to hear my voice. I didn’t know whether it was a good or a bad surprise. We hadn’t spoken since I had helped her track down a prolific serial sniper named Caleb Wardell in Chicago. In the course of that job, I had saved Banner’s daughter’s life and Banner had saved mine. That’s the kind of experience that builds mutual trust. Or so I hoped.