by Mason Cross
Up until my meeting with the senator, it had been a job I’d enjoyed, been good at, and thought was worthwhile. We kept operations separate and secret out of necessity—because that was the way it had to be. But some of the rumors I had heard, some of the things I’d seen with my own eyes, had had me calling everything into question. The senator’s file had provided the other pieces of the puzzle.
Why hadn’t I quit before? For one thing, I knew deep down it wouldn’t be as easy as that. For another, I didn’t have anyone or anything giving me a compelling reason to quit. But that was the other thing that had changed in New York. Now there was someone. I realized at that moment that that was why I had suddenly felt so uneasy walking into that courtyard. Things were different now, and not just because of what the senator had said.
Things were different because I had something to lose.
FRIDAY, JANUARY 8TH
29
IDAHO
The motion of the train slowing roused me from a half dream. From the bunk above me, I could hear Bryant snoring softly. I looked out of the window and saw a single-side platform and an old station building with a covered waiting area out front. The blue sign above the door to the station building said, SANDPOINT, ID. I checked my watch. It was two thirty-five a.m., which meant we were still on schedule. I stared out at the platform. Aside from a Pepsi machine casting out its blue glow, there wasn’t a lot to see. Nobody getting off, nobody getting on. The train pulled out, and I settled back in the seat, closing my eyes. It would be three hours until we stopped again, after we’d passed into Montana, and I looked forward to getting a couple hours of uninterrupted sleep.
After twenty minutes, I gave up on that idea and sat up, gazing out the window as the freezing night passed by, thinking about what was behind and what was ahead.
If we were lucky, all we had to do was stay put until Saturday and Chicago. Leaving Bryant behind in Seattle would have made some things easier, but it hadn’t ever been an option. Winterlong would have found him, and as soon as they figured out he had no useful information, they would have killed him. If Banner could get Bryant to relative safety, it would be one less thing for me to worry about. But I would still have a long way to go from there.
The people who were pursuing me knew that eventually I would have to go back home. The only question was how long it would take them to nail down the location of home.
I thought about the precautions I had taken over the last five years and knew there were a few areas where they had been less than perfect. Inevitable compromises I’d had to make that could be exploited with the right information, the necessary skills, and a little luck. In truth, I knew I could have pulled off a perfect disappearance, if I had really wanted to, but that would have required a total withdrawal from the world.
From day one, I had known I was never going to open a repair shop or man the pumps at a rural gas station. The obvious reason was that I needed an income to live off the grid in relative comfort, unless I wanted to go the mountain man route. But it was more than that. When you find something you’re good at, it’s not so easy to walk away from it.
So, the best part of a year on from what had happened in Afghanistan, I began to test the waters. I contacted people I knew of who could put me in touch with the right clients. People like Coop, who specialized in finding work in the private sector for people like me. Beyond assessing that I had the requisite skills and experience, he didn’t ask about me and I didn’t volunteer anything. That wouldn’t have made me any different from the vast majority of his clients: former CIA and NSA and military intelligence types whose ex-employers might frown on their taking all of that expensive government training and putting it to uses that may or may not be approved of by Uncle Sam.
For a while I told myself that I was a needle in a hay-stack. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the subterranean market for secondhand spies and special operators was booming like never before. I knew it would be impossible for me to work without leaving any trail at all, of course, but that trail would lead back to Carter Blake, not who I was before. And Carter Blake was a cypher, a dead end. I hadn’t counted on my cover being blown by a run-in with the past.
I tried to think about how I would find me. I knew that air travel was the big hole in my cover. I had had no choice but to fly unless I wanted to drive everywhere, which wasn’t practical. The kind of jobs I was offered spanned the country: Florida one day, California the next. I had resisted the offers to work overseas so far, so that I didn’t need to worry about a fake passport. Because no one could tie the name Carter Blake to my previous life, I decided keeping the same ID for flying was within the realm of acceptable risk. If things got hot, I could discard the name and find another just as easily.
What I didn’t bet on was being nailed on national TV: my picture and my name broadcast across the country in association with a case in which Winterlong was already taking great interest, because it concerned another of their former operatives: Dean Crozier, latterly known as the Samaritan.
So now someone with the right skills and the necessary level of tenacity and access to data protection overrides could start to map the movements of Carter Blake over the past few years and begin to build up a pattern. I had made a point of varying the airports I used within reach of home. I had been careful, but I hadn’t been obsessively careful.
I realized now that I should have dropped the Blake identity after Los Angeles. Laid low for a while. But I had been complacent, relying on the fact I had leverage, or thought I did. I thought I would see them coming. In the end, it probably wouldn’t have made any difference. It would have been closing the stable door after the horse had bolted.
Again, I wondered what had changed. I had taken steps to make sure I was a hard man to track down, but my strongest precaution was my deterrent: the Black Book. Drakakis knew if he made a move on me and screwed it up, it would be the end for him. For some reason, whoever had succeeded him had decided the risk of leaving me in the game outweighed the risk of eliminating me.
But the reason they were coming for me was academic, when it came down to it. The stalemate of the past few years was over. The personal cold war between me and Winterlong had burst into life, and the next move had to be mine.
30
SEATTLE
The temporary op center in the Marriott had been a hive of activity all night, but Stark could sense the frustration building in the room as dawn began to break with no new leads since the airport. Where the hell were they? It seemed as though Carter Blake and Scott Bryant had dropped off the face of the earth after slipping the noose at Sea-Tac. Stark wondered what Blake had decided to do: stay put, or get out. After hours of monitoring the police search and chasing up fruitless leads throughout the city, his hunch was that it had to be the latter. Seattle obviously wasn’t home turf for Blake—he had only been there in pursuit of this Bryant guy.
In the absence of any better ideas, catching Bryant was their strongest lead for the moment. Blake would probably part company with him as soon as possible, and he would be easy enough to run down. He might be able to give them some idea of where Blake was headed. He surveyed the other three men in the room: Ortega and Usher, plus a relatively new addition to the team named Travers, who was monitoring police communications and keeping in touch with the four men they had around the city. For the moment it felt like he and the others were spinning their wheels.
Stark snapped out of his thoughts as he saw Travers stop whatever he was doing on the laptop and put a finger to the earpiece of his headset. He listened intently, nodding when he was sure of the message.
“They found the taxi.”
Stark crossed the room and stood next to him expectantly. “The police found it?”
“Yeah. It’s coming through over the scanner.”
“Finally. Where the hell did they dump it?”
“They’re saying ...” Travers called up a satellite shot on the laptop screen and indicated a spot on
the screen. “Here. About four miles from Sea-Tac. It was concealed. No sign of the suspects.”
Stark shook his head. “That’s just off the damn freeway. How the hell did they miss it for this long?”
“You know how it is—lot of ground to cover,” Travers said.
“No way they’re still in the city now,” Ortega said. “Blake’s in the wind.”
Ortega had an old, white scar down the right-hand side of his face. The scar wasn’t so noticeable when his features were composed, but it distorted his expressions a little when he smiled or frowned, as he was doing just now.
Travers looked up from the screen, looking at each of the two older men in turn, as though expecting a solution. “So what do we do now? Wait for another shot at him?”
Stark sighed. “That’s going to be difficult.”
“We tracked him down once,” Ortega reminded him.
“We used a one-time-only tactic. We’d been onto Cooper for weeks, waiting for the right time. We don’t get to do that again, for obvious reasons. We had one chance at the airport—we could have done it quietly, tailed him until he was cornered, but Usher had to start shooting.”
Usher, who had kept quiet until now, chose this moment to speak. “I told you,” he said quietly, “I had no choice.”
“Really?” Stark said, turning to look at him. “All he was doing was getting in a cab. We could have dealt with that differently, is all I’m saying. We could have tailed him. We could have waited and got a drop-off address from the cab company. But instead we were left behind explaining a dead civilian to Deputy Dawg while Blake left us in his dust.”
“He’s right,” Ortega said. “Blake was careful before. Now he’s going to be invisible. We had precious little on him as it was: a name, an MO, and, for a few hours, a cell number. Now the phone’s gone and he’ll ditch the name, too. He’s completely off the grid. We don’t have any fucking clue where he could be going.”
Stark slapped his palm down on the desk in front of Travers in frustration. He walked over to the wall where they’d hung the map of the city, finding the spot where the taxi had been dumped and placing it in the context of the whole area.
“Okay, let’s go back over it. At least now we know he didn’t drive out of the city, at least not right away, and we know where he was at about one o’clock yesterday afternoon. Cops are searching the vicinity, but if he’s smart”—he caught himself and gave a wry smile—“which we know he is, he’ll have gotten out of there immediately.”
He stood back and looked at the spot on the map, letting his focus creep out to the surrounding geography.
“There’s a stop for the light-rail airport link close by. That would take him right back into the center of town.”
“Doesn’t mean he used it,” Ortega said.
“Doesn’t mean anything at all,” Stark said. “But he was off guard. Improvising. It’s likely he would go with the flow. I think he headed back into the city, and there’s nothing else around there. We still don’t know if he’s holed up somewhere, or if he managed to get out of town.” He turned away from the map and looked at Travers. “Find out if the light-rail has cameras.”
Travers nodded and looked down at his laptop. Ortega joined Stark at the map, glancing in turn at the circled locations where they’d spread their resources. The air was closed to Blake, and he didn’t have a car. He couldn’t easily procure one, either—not without being unsure of whether he’d just tagged himself once again. Rental was out, and either stealing or buying one cash would leave another person with the knowledge of his mode of transport, if the link was made. That left public transportation, assuming he didn’t decide to walk or hitchhike. Because of Seattle’s isthmus-like geography, most of the transportation routes in the metropolitan area passed through the heart of the city. Taking the highways out of the equation, that left bus, rail, and ferry. With no trace of Blake since the airport until now, there had been too many options to narrow down in too long a time period.
With a little luck, that was about to change.
31
NEW YORK CITY
After nearly twenty straight hours of dead ends, Faraday received the latest update from Seattle with cautious optimism. Her first instinct had been to help the information along a little by releasing Blake’s picture to the FBI, with strict orders not to share with the media. They would be able to call on the superior manpower of the bureau in locating their target, after negotiating that it would be them who made the final engagement, naturally.
But then Murphy had asked to see her in private, away from the noise and bustle of the ops room. And much to Faraday’s chagrin, he had a very good reason for not risking giving the FBI some help.
“Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”
Murphy was standing by the floor-to-ceiling window, looking out over the city. The late-morning sky was dark, heavy with clouds. Faraday stayed on her feet, too, sitting back against the edge of her desk.
“You’re right,” he said. “I should have told you. I just thought ...”
“That I didn’t need to know,” Faraday finished for him. “Is that what you thought?”
He didn’t respond to that, but his lack of a response was confirmation enough. Eventually he said simply, “I’m sorry, okay? I thought we could handle it quietly.”
“Join the club. When this is done, we’re going to have a talk about some of the men. Particularly Usher.”
He nodded, taking the scolding like a contrite student. It made Faraday dislike him all the more.
“So what exactly does this son of a bitch have on us, Murphy?”
“Specifically?” He shook his head. “I can’t tell you that, because I don’t know. Nobody really knows why Blake killed the senator, but we think it was a deal gone wrong. Carlson wanted dirt on Winter—” Murphy stopped dead as he saw the look on her face. He knew full well how much she hated the way some of them still used that old code name. Apart from anything else, it was a flagrantly unnecessary security risk. Code names changed for a reason. “Carlson wanted inside information on the organization,” he continued, using Faraday’s preferred nomenclature. “Blake liberated some potentially damaging information. A Black Book from an operation in Kandahar.”
A Black Book. Now she understood. That could be damaging indeed. Murphy saw the recognition in her eyes and continued.
“He was going to sell it to the senator. Something went wrong, and Mr. and Mrs. Carlson wound up on a slab. And we wound up with a hell of a cleanup job. You think Usher shooting up the airport was bad? Walk in the park.”
She ignored that. The previous twenty-four hours had not felt like any walk in the park. “So what’s our potential exposure?”
Murphy shrugged again. “I don’t know any more than you now,” he said. “But I know Drakakis was worried. And I don’t think we want to risk the feds finding out before we do.”
He was holding something back, Faraday thought. Or perhaps she was just wired to suspect that by this point; maybe he was on the level this time.
“So what do you suggest? Keep them in the dark and hope we find Blake before he has a chance to do us some damage?”
Murphy nodded. “Exactly.”
“And how do we know he hasn’t sent a copy to his lawyer or his favorite aunt? Instructions to release it if anything happens to him.”
“Those drives are protected by sunset scripts. Every time you view the data it gets closer to erasing—makes it very difficult to copy, and I don’t know if he could trust anyone to do the job. It’s useful as a deterrent, that’s all. I don’t think he’s ever thought about leaking it, because it wouldn’t do him any good.”
“I hope you’re right.”
Murphy turned away from the window and looked at her. She had a bad feeling about what he was about to say, and she was proved correct.
“I’m going out there.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Look, Faraday, Stark, and the others are m
aking progress. I hope they’ll get a line on where he went soon. But if anybody can track this bastard down, it’s me. I worked with him. I know how he thinks.”
Faraday circled around her desk and sat down in her chair. She looked him up and down appraisingly. “You scored two seventy-five on your last PFT, as I recall, Murphy. Are you sure you’re still cut out for the field?”
He moved across the room and put both hands on the desk, flashing one of his cocky quarter back smirks at her. “Minimum is two sixty.”
Faraday considered. Whether she liked it or not, Murphy had a point: He did know Blake. And perhaps someone closer to the action could keep a tighter rein on Usher.
“All right,” she said finally.
Murphy nodded and straightened up. Faraday spoke as he was turning to leave.
“This isn’t kill or capture anymore,” she said. “Is it?” Murphy was all business again. “Blake isn’t going to be taken alive.”
“I have no doubt you’ll make sure of that.”
32
NORTH DAKOTA
We kept to the roomette for the most part as the train wound its way east, crossing through Idaho and then into Montana during the night. I had had a restless sleep, partly due to the compactness of the accommodation and partly due to the fact I had been rousing myself every hour or two to watch the platform at each stop. It was dark again by the time we crossed into North Dakota, and an announcement over the train’s speakers reminded me to wind my watch forward to Central time.