Winterlong

by Mason Cross

  I was on my feet already as I acknowledged. “Say again?”

  “Just get to secondary position. Now.”

  I didn’t know what the hell was happening, but I guessed it couldn’t be good. I turned and jogged toward Ortega’s alley. What the hell was happening? Whatever it was, getting me to cover was more of a priority than explanations. I hustled across the road and into the alley, expecting to see Ortega waiting for me.

  The car was still there, but Ortega was gone.

  The narrow alley stretched forty yards between two stucco buildings. At the far end was a main road.

  I put a finger to my ear. “This is two, at secondary. Where the—”

  I stopped as I heard a whisper of movement behind me, from the direction of the street. I started to turn and felt a sharp pain in the side of my neck. My vision started to blur, and I felt arms around my upper body. And then the walls seemed to be flowing around me like stone waterfalls and everything went gray and finally black.

  38

  With no small amount of difficulty, I roused Bryant and told him I was going to check something out.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know yet. Maybe nothing. Stay in here and don’t answer the door to anybody. When I come back I’ll knock five times.”

  “Blake, that doesn’t sound like nothing.”

  I didn’t reply. I opened the door and stepped out into the corridor, closing it quietly but making sure the lock clicked home. Quickly, I moved down the corridor. The main lights were off this time of night, but the thin light strips along the floors provided enough illumination. I crossed into the next car, which was coach: all seated. Lighting at minimum in here too. Sleeping passengers hunched in most of the seats, a few night owls watching movies on their laptops with headphones plugged in, or reading books using little page lights. From my excursions to the lounge car, I knew the rest of the train was just as full as this car. It would take them a while to search the train, particularly at night.

  I passed through to the end and exited through the sliding door into the join area between the cars. In the next car, there was a restroom area, the pod sticking out into the corridor and blocking the line of sight ahead. I hesitated a second, hoping none of the four men were heading this way yet—if we ran into each other at the door, there would be no going back. I stole a glance around the corner and saw nobody coming. Emboldened, I stepped forward and proceeded. This one was seated also. Most people sleeping, some on laptops and reading. I slowed as I approached the doors to the next car and peered through the window. At the far end of the next car, there were two men standing in the aisle.

  I pulled back before either of them happened to look in my direction. I thought about how I would run the search. Four men searching a train packed with hundreds of people. Twelve cars, two locomotives at either end. A mixture of coach and sleeping, plus two baggage cars and the lounge. Their odds were improved by the fact they could visually ID both me and Bryant. They had to anticipate I’d taken one of the roomettes, for exactly the reasons I had done so. But there was still the possibility that I might be among the seated passengers, and those would be easier for them to check, particularly at night. Just quietly walking up and down the aisles, checking the sleeping faces, would allow them to eliminate a large portion of the passengers with relative speed.

  But all four of them trying to do it all at once would likely attract the attention of the Amtrak staff. So they would probably take turns. One at a time, taking maybe one or two cars, then a break. Then another of them checking another two cars. They’d still be able to eliminate everyone traveling in the seated cars reasonably quickly. They had almost an hour until we reached the next stop. I thought about waiting until then and then trying to leave the train undetected, but quickly dismissed the idea. If I were them, I would put a man out on the platform at every stop. Two men leaving the train at a small-town station at four a.m. would be just as noticeable as four men boarding. And even if we could slip past them, we’d be stuck in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night with no transport. If we were going to stand a chance at leaving without being noticed, it would have to be later, with a crowd. St. Paul, perhaps. Even then, it was unlikely they would miss us.

  I chanced another look and saw one of the men had sat down while the other had disappeared. They would have had to buy designated seats, so I guessed they had split the team over multiple cars. They’d attract less attention as a group that way, and they could keep an eye on four different locations without leaving their seats.

  I made my way back to the room and knocked softly, five times.

  Bryant opened the door at once, like he’d been waiting behind it. He was wide-awake now, his eyes betraying the strain of the last few days and hours.

  “Problems?”

  “I think so. They must have traced us to the station back in Seattle. Four men got on at the last stop, I think they’ve already started making the rounds.”

  “Shit.”

  “My thoughts exactly.”

  “So what do we do?”

  39

  NEW YORK CITY

  A quiet knock at the door awoke Faraday from a light sleep. Her eyes snapped open, and she needed no time to orient herself or to remember why she was sleeping on one of the ready cots. She got up off the thin mattress and stood up. Although it was freezing outside the building, the room was overheated and dry. She opened the door to see Williamson. Williamson’s half-lidded, disinterested stare could have been blamed on the hour, were it not the expression she affected at all times.

  “Did they get Blake?” she asked immediately.

  Williamson shook her head. “Uh-uh. Or at least, not as far as I know. They intercepted the train at Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, on schedule. Nothing since then, but there are a lot of cell black spots out there.”

  Faraday nodded. After checking in at the station, they wouldn’t contact central command unless there was something to report. When there was something to report, they could use the satellite phone.

  “Did Murphy rendezvous with the second team yet?” The second team was shadowing the route of the Empire Builder by road, as closely as possible. Murphy was going to rendezvous with them at the next available point.

  “Still en route. Weather held him up.”

  “Then what do you have for me?”

  “Not an address yet, but I think I found Blake’s neighborhood.”

  “Seriously?”

  Two minutes later Faraday was back in the ops room. The giant screen on the south wall was divided into different windows: one was a live satellite view of the operation area. Fully a quarter of the live screen was obscured by clouds. The weather was starting to close in. Faraday hoped that wouldn’t cause delays on the track—it would be one more variable to consider.

  A larger window on the big screen showed a clear view from earlier in the day of the same geography. A barely discernible thread crossing the middle of the screen horizontally was the Great Northern Railway. Superimposed lines and labels marked out the state boundaries and population centers currently invisible on the live feed. She knew the weather was another factor Blake might be able to exploit. As things stood, it would be easy to check the handful of people leaving the train at night stops. Less so if the train was forced to come to a halt between stations, or canceled at the next stop. She just had to hope Blake was operating under the illusion he was in the clear.

  She shelved those considerations for the moment and turned her thoughts toward the promising new avenue that had opened up. There were three banks of monitors, but only one station was in use. Williamson sat down in her chair and unlocked the screen.

  “Talk to me,” Faraday said, as her eyes scanned the screen. It displayed an array of times and dates and numbers. It took Faraday a second to realize what she was looking at.

  “The flight records?”

  “That’s right. You told me to work with the known and suspected dates and locations Blake h
as been over the last five years. We didn’t have much to go on. We started out with Crozier in LA, and looked at everything around that. Lucky for us, the FBI had already done some of the work for us. When Blake was briefly a suspect in the Samaritan thing, they looked into him, as far as they could.”

  “Which would have given them nothing, right?”

  “Right. But they did ID the flight he took into LA. He came in from Fort Lauderdale with a stop-off at Fort Worth.”

  “Cooper was in Florida. Does that mean Blake—?”

  Headshake from Williamson. “I think he was on a job down there. He appears on another flight inbound to Lauderdale, this one from Newark.”

  “Okay.”

  “Then we go back to October of the previous year—and this is what really put me on track. His prints were run by the police in Fort Dodge, Iowa.”

  The date and location chimed in Faraday’s head. “The Wardell case—it was him.” The Wardell case had been one of their possibles for Blake’s involvement. Officially, the FBI had tracked down the deadly serial killer, but given what they knew now about Blake’s operations since leaving Winterlong, it was highly likely the case bore his fingerprints. And now, it appeared, it literally did.

  “How the hell did we miss this?”

  “We didn’t. Homeland Security flagged the request, hit the local cops with a DR-17 and passed it onto us.”

  “Who was it escalated to? Drakakis?”

  “That’s right. The trail was almost purged from the system.”

  “Almost?”

  Williamson answered that with a low chuckle. Under normal circumstances, Faraday would have answered with a barb to tell Williamson not to be so cocky, but she let it go. She was far more preoccupied with who had purged the fingerprint hit, and why.

  But that would have to wait for the moment. She listened as Williamson carried on talking, too absorbed in the pleasure of finding the discrepancy to care about the whys and wherefores. “Anyway, Wardell was caught and killed November 2nd. Blake evidently stuck around a couple of weeks, or he came back for some reason—he flies back east on the 16th.”

  “Newark again?”

  “JFK.”

  All roads seemed to lead back to New York, or at least somewhere on the East Coast. This was the one chink in Blake’s armor—he couldn’t fly without leaving a trail, and he had to use a consistent name for ID, unless he wanted to take the risk of maintaining multiple identities. And up until recently, there had been no real need: They didn’t know he was calling himself Carter Blake until LA, and even if they had, it wasn’t exactly a unique name. Only now that they had been able to build up a picture of his movements could they make the connections that suggested an area of home turf. And even then ...

  “Okay, New York area, that’s good. Cuts it down to millions of locations rather than hundreds of millions.”

  “Definitely in the area,” Williamson said. “And his record says he had an apartment in the city when he was with us.”

  Faraday massaged her temples. New York City? Was Blake really headed in their direction? Something told her that wasn’t quite right.

  Williamson continued. “So you’re an ex-operative with no past, and you’re looking for a place to stay. Somewhere you won’t be found. What’s important?”

  “No paper trail. Rent, mortgage, insurance,” Faraday said. And then she thought about something else, something that would be hard to come by in the city. “Privacy.”

  “Right. So I’m looking at cash buys over the period. These are getting rarer, particularly when you cut out the millionaires.”

  “He won’t be in the city,” Faraday said. “Someplace quiet. Rural or small-town.”

  Williamson thought about it. “Makes sense. Cuts the job down a little, if you’re right. So do you want me to stay on this or go back to monitoring the ever-enthralling police bands of Seattle?”

  She considered it for a moment. “Stay on this, Williamson. And keep me posted.”

  40

  MINNESOTA

  I told Bryant why I was pretty sure they were on the train because of us. With no weapons and few places to hide, I came to a simple conclusion—somehow, we had to get off the train before they found us.

  “Can’t we just stay in here, wait it out? I mean, there’s no way for them to know we’re in here, right?”

  “We could try,” I said. “But if it doesn’t work, we would have nowhere to go. Besides, if I were running this search, it wouldn’t help. I’d check the easy options first—give the seated passengers the once-over. My guess is, that’s what they’re doing right now. Then I’d move on to the sleeper cars.”

  “They couldn’t get in without breaking the door down. And like I said, they don’t know which room we’re in. They’re not going to break down a hundred doors.”

  “They don’t need to,” I said. “They just need to knock on a hundred doors. Law of averages says not even that many. They’d get to us sooner or later. They could say they were Amtrak staff, that they’re looking for a missing kid or something. At three in the morning, nobody’s going to argue; they just want to get back to sleep. Of course we would stay quiet and ignore the knock, but by the time they’ve finished, they would have narrowed it down to a few rooms they haven’t managed to eliminate. Then they watch those rooms and wait us out. By that time, it’s too late to do anything but sit and wait for the inevitable.”

  “When you put it that way ...”

  “Doesn’t sound so good?”

  Bryant nodded. “Okay. Then how the hell do we get off this train?”

  I estimated the time since the last calling point. “Next stop is in about forty-five minutes, give or take.”

  Bryant nodded at the window. “I’m not so sure about that.”

  I looked outside. The snow was flying past much more thickly now. And was it an optical illusion of the swirling flakes blowing past, or were we moving a little slower than we had been? I could see ice on the window outside our climate-controlled bubble and knew it was well below freezing out there.

  We had one advantage at least: minimal time required to pack. I stood at the door and listened for a second, and twisted the handle. I stuck my head out in the corridor and looked both ways. Empty. The noise of the train rocking back and forward was louder out here.

  We turned left, because it was the opposite direction from where I knew the four men had joined the train. There were four cars that way against nine in the other direction, and if nothing else, I wanted to get us in a position where we could be attacked from only one direction. We made it to the far end, where there were the same transparent sliding doors leading into the join between cars and then another set of the same doors with an airlock to keep the noise and the cold out of the interiors. We passed through the first set of doors and the temperature dropped twenty degrees. I stepped across the join and hit the button to open the next door. It was another sleeping car, like ours. A narrow corridor about a foot and a half wide, with doors along the left-hand side, windows along the right. The snow outside whirled and sparkled in the dim light from the strips along the floor.

  Bryant spoke behind me, keeping his voice low. “What do we do when we run out of train?”

  “I’ll let you know when we get there.”

  I was heading for the front of the train because I knew there had to be a staff-only area near the driver’s cabin. It would be a better place to hide out than in the passenger areas, and it might provide some other options. I didn’t relish the idea of leaving the train while it was in motion at fifty or sixty miles an hour, so it would be nice to evaluate alternative courses of action. Then again, maybe the front of the train would be full of Amtrak staff who would turn us back the way we came. I hated having so little idea of my next move, but as I had told Bryant, doing something was better than doing nothing. Or so I hoped.

  One car down, three to go, I thought as we reached the next set of doors. We passed through another cold spot and this time into one
of the seated cars. We walked quietly through the dozing passengers, the occasional light sleeper or reader glancing up curiously as we passed. Another set of doors. We stepped over the join and into the next car. Another sleeping car. Same row of doors on the left side, same windows on the right, same floor lights. Everything the same, except one thing.

  There was a big guy in a black parka standing halfway along the carriage.

  41

  He was around six two with a wide, muscled frame. He had short blond hair. He had his back to us when we entered, but turned fast at the sound of the door opening. For a nanosecond, both he and I froze.

  And then we sprang into motion. I charged down the narrow corridor, yelling at Bryant to get back to the room. I didn’t have time to glance behind me to check he was doing as he was told, because I was focused on the man in front of me going for his gun. It took him a split second longer to reach for it than it would have done had he not been wearing the bulky parka, giving me just enough time to cover the three strides between us and slam into him before he had a chance to aim.

  A stray shot escaped as I fumbled for his wrist, going for the gun. It pierced the floor of the car without much fuss, just a muzzle flare and the thump sound as the attached suppressor did its job. He used his free hand to grab for my throat as I forced his gun hand down again. I ducked backward, grabbing the wrist of his gun hand with both of my hands, pulling him off-balance, and then used his momentum to beef up a head-butt. He grunted in pain and got a couple of good shots into my ribs with his left while I twisted his right hand until the gun dropped to the floor.

  Slipping out of my grip, he hit me a couple of times hard on my left side again, while bringing his right around toward my head. I blocked it with my forearm and then another from the left. He was fast—had already gotten in several blows to my one. I ducked under another swing and wrapped both arms around his midsection, slamming him hard against the wall and down to the floor of the car. His head cracked off the surface, and as he was lifting it again, I planted the palm of my right hand in the center of his forehead and slammed it back down again, hard. I gripped as much of the short hair on his scalp as I could and tried the same again, but this time he managed to twist his head and I lost my grip midway to pounding his head against the floor one more time.