Winterlong

by Mason Cross

  I braced myself like a runner on the blocks, put my weight on my right foot, and launched myself straight ahead. I made it two strides toward the next rung before the biting wind slowed my momentum, trying to steer me off the edge. I angled my body toward the next rung and dived for it, just catching hold with my right hand. I brought my left hand up to it, braced myself, and then risked a glance over my shoulder. Through a tunnel of flying snow, I saw the upper body of a man reaching over the end of the car, one hand on the rung. As I watched, I saw what he was doing with his other hand. Muzzle flare flashed twice, the suppressed noise of the gunshot utterly lost in the cacophony of the train and the wind. Instinctively I ducked, pressing myself down against the roof. One of the bullets smashed into the surface of the roof ten feet from my hands; the other was lost in the night. I had a minor advantage now, because his visibility facing ahead was worse than mine looking behind. I braced my legs and knees on the roof until I was confident of letting go of the rung with one hand, then reached into my coat and pulled out Kowalski’s Glock. Another muzzle flare and a third bullet hit the surface of the roof five feet from me this time. Getting closer. I trained the gun on the end of the car and fired four shots in as tight a grouping as I could manage, with the motion of the train and the wind spilling my aim all over the place.

  The upper body of the man vanished. Had I hit him? Absolutely no way to know, but I had forced him to duck back down at the very least. I turned my head and squinted into the oncoming snow, finding the third rung sticking up another fifteen feet away; just past the middle of the car. After the experience of getting from the first rung to the second, it looked a hell of a lot farther.

  Changing tactics, I positioned myself on the far side of the rung, my feet jutted forward, my hands reaching behind me to hold on. I took a breath and let go with my right hand. Another breath and I let go with my left again, lunging forward. This time, the wind knocked me down on my first stride. I felt myself being blown off course again so I dropped flat to the roof, spreading my arms and legs and making myself as small a target for the wind as I possibly could. Now I was spread-eagled on the roof, halfway between rungs, with no way to hang on but by the friction of my hands on the rough surface of the roof. Keeping my face down to the roof, I inched forward, praying I had taken out the first guy and that his compatriot hadn’t worked up the nerve to follow yet. I risked raising my head a half inch to look ahead and saw the next rung was almost within reach. Just another three pushes ought to do it. One ... two ...

  A bullet hole appeared in the roof next to my right elbow. I yelled a curse and ignored the urge to recoil. Then I gritted my teeth and inched along the rest of the distance, grabbing the rung and pulling myself along again.

  I heard the snap of another shot passing by my head. With all of the noise, it had to have been pretty close for me to register it at all. When I looked back, I saw that both of them were there now: One was on the roof already, the other maneuvering himself up from between the cars. I raised my gun and fired three more times in their direction. Again, impossible to tell for sure, but if I’d hit anything, especially from this distance, it was pure luck. Which was true for them, too, of course. But with two guns, they had twice as many rolls of the dice.

  I glanced behind me, squinting my eyes into the direction of travel. We were almost at the incline, and I knew the train would be slowing a little, even if it didn’t feel like it from my current position. Waiting for the optimum jump window wasn’t an option. There were two more rungs before the end of the car. I had to try to cover the distance in quick succession. The more space I could put between myself and the two men behind me, the better.

  I tucked the Glock into my belt. Then I got my feet in position again, trying to ignore the fact there were probably bullets in the air around me, and launched myself toward the next rung. The journey to this one felt easier, either because I was getting the hang of this, or because the direction of the wind happened to stay constant for that particular five-second span. I gripped the second-to-last rung and took a breath, not bothering to look back this time.

  I focused on the final rung, telling myself that all I needed to do was get to it and I could slide down between the cars and give myself the best possible chance of surviving the jump.

  I let go of the rung and took one stride, two ...

  And then my foot slipped. Maybe it was a patch of ice, or maybe I had misjudged the edge of the flat section of roof in my haste to complete the last lunge. I would never know the exact reason. All I knew was that suddenly I found myself tumbling toward the right side of the roof. My right foot twisted as it hit the more pronounced slope, and I tried to go flat again, anything to keep myself on the roof. And then the wind caught me full on and flung me toward the edge like a rag doll.

  My left shoulder slammed off the edge of the roof, and then I was in the air. White above and black below. Then black above and white below.

  FIVE YEARS AGO

  KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN

  My first thought was that I had the worst hangover in the world. As I started to pick up the feed from my other senses, I began to realize that this was something worse than just a hangover. I was lying on a hard surface, on my side with my arms around my back. Nearby I could hear the sound of somebody moving, working on something.

  I started to open my eyes a crack and immediately closed them again as the light stabbed into them. With an effort of will, I opened them and realized that the dazzling light source was nothing more than morning sunlight cast through the gap between the bottom of a panel door and the concrete floor. For some reason, the fact it was a panel door brought everything back to me. The stakeout on Ajmal al Wazir’s garages, the sudden alert from Collins, the empty alley, and then ... I was guessing the “and then” was the source of my headache. A stinging ache in my neck told me I’d been injected with something that had knocked me out for a while. The garage. I was in the Wolf’s lair. And I wasn’t alone.

  Trying not to make any noise, I turned my head. I saw wooden crates and cardboard boxes full of parts and junk. I saw that there was only one other person with me. His back was to me, as he leaned over the sidewalls of a flatbed pickup truck. He wore combat pants, an olive green T-shirt, and a pocketed assault vest. He looked almost like ...

  “Murphy?” I said out loud, before I had a chance to think it through.

  Murphy turned and squinted at me through what, to him, probably felt like half-light. When I saw the guilty expression on his face, I knew I had been too quick to speak. I also knew why I was lying on my side, and why my arms were in such an unnatural position. I didn’t need to try to separate my wrists to know they were cuffed, but I tried it anyway. Sometimes I hate it when I’m right.

  “How long you been conscious?” he asked. I noted the word he had used: conscious. Not awake.

  I started to speak, but no sound came out. My throat was as dry as the desert. I swallowed to try to moisten my mouth and tried again.

  “What the hell is going on?” I said, intentionally slurring my voice a little.

  Murphy picked up a rag and wiped his hands. I was suddenly aware of the smell of the place. My nose isn’t up to sniffer dog standard, but I’m familiar with the distinctive aroma of C-4 in large quantities.

  With an effort, I managed to haul myself up into a seated position. My eyes were getting used to the relative light now, and Murphy’s features had come into focus enough so I could see an expression of genuine regret on his face. I knew exactly what was happening, and why.

  “I’m sorry, man.”

  I jiggled the cuffs again, the chain clinking against the concrete of the garage floor.

  “Take the cuffs off,” I said.

  He shook his head. “No can do, compadre. Orders.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  He shrugged. “No point in playing dumb, not now.”

  I stared back at him, waiting for him to continue.

  “You and Martinez
. We know about it. He got away, for now. We can’t make the same mistake with you.”

  “I don’t know what—”

  “You know, all right. Maybe you didn’t know we knew, is all. Your little meetings with the senator. Getting pretty friendly with those folks. Especially that little blonde. Nice work, by the—”

  “Don’t fucking talk about her.”

  He shrugged. “Fair enough. We’re not interested in her. Not unless you were stupid enough to tell her anything, which, personally, I don’t reckon you would have been. Or am I wrong?”

  I quelled the anger rising up in me, stamped down on the urge to haul myself to my feet and rush him. With my hands bound behind me, it wasn’t like he would let me get close enough to tear his throat out with my teeth. That didn’t stop me from thinking about it, though.

  “You’re not wrong.”

  He nodded, looking pleased. “So. Here we are. I guess you know what happens next.”

  “You’re making a mistake. I didn’t even speak to Martinez. I didn’t even know he was the one.”

  “Ain’t my mistake to make. This comes all the way from Drakakis. He wants to cut the cancer out. And unfortunately for you, that includes present company.”

  “Killing me won’t make any difference. The senator has—”

  He cut me off. “We’re taking care of the senator, too.” He held his wrist up to the light and squinted at the dial on his watch. “You might just outlive him, in fact.”

  “You can’t do this.”

  “Do what?” Murphy asked, affecting confusion. “This never happened.”

  He walked around the back of the truck and slammed the tailgate. I knew the flatbed would be packed with explosives, together with whatever extras Murphy had just finished hooking up. I wondered how long he would give himself to get clear of the scene.

  He cast his eyes over the flatbed again, just to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything, and then walked back across the garage. He crouched down, gripped the edge of the panel door, and yanked it up. The panels concertinaed up into the space above, letting the full glare of the morning sun in. Murphy took a step outside, paused, and turned back to me. He was silhouetted against the glare, his face unreadable.

  “Sorry, hoss. You know this is nothin’ personal.”

  And then he took another step back and hurled the door back down again. I heard it rattle again as he padlocked it behind him.

  I didn’t waste any time on a comeback. I needed every iota of energy I could muster. With all purpose in my life reduced to the basic survival impulse, my head cleared and the aches in my body seemed to vanish. I knew the odds of me making it out in one piece were slim, so I didn’t think about the big picture. Break it down into stages and focus on one thing at a time.

  Stage one: Get my hands into play. I tugged on the cuffs again to check the give and thought there might just be enough. I sat back on the chain, worked it down as far as I could manage on the backs of my thighs, and then brought my knees up to my chest, straining until I managed to pass my wrists under my feet. With my hands in front of me, I took a second to get a look at the cuffs and confirmed I wasn’t doing anything about them in here. There were no hacksaws in sight, and even if there had been, the high-tensile steel would take me twenty minutes to cut through. I was betting Murphy had left a lot less than twenty minutes on the clock.

  Stage two: I crossed the room to the back of the truck and brought my hands up to open the tailgate. I saw exactly what I had expected to see. Blocks of standard-packaged C-4 explosive and a detonator. If it had been a movie, there would have been a helpful digital clock with red numbers telling me how long I had to defuse it. Instead, I had a small black detonator wired up to a smaller block of C-4 and a gut feeling for how long Murphy would have given himself to get away. Two minutes, max. I wasn’t sure I could do anything helpful in that time.

  I angled my body over to look at the device, forcing myself to be thorough. It didn’t look like there was anything fancy, no booby traps. This wasn’t my area of expertise, but I had a rudimentary knowledge of demolitions. I tried the most obvious thing first, disconnecting the wire that fed from the battery. The lights stayed on, meaning that, as I’d expected, there was an integrated battery backup. I glanced around, hoping to see a screwdriver, or anything with a point small enough to fit the screws in the back, and came up with nothing.

  Shit. This thing was going off any second now, along with the car bomb and the bombs in the adjacent garages, and there was nothing I could do about it. The car bomb was overkill, of course. Just the block of C-4 attached to Murphy’s detonator would be more than enough to ...

  And then an idea occurred to me.

  I picked up the detonator and its smaller block of C-4 and ran with it over to the door. I jammed it in the farthest corner from the pickup, right at the half-inch gap where the door met the ground. It wasn’t even half a chance. The likelihood was the blast would be enough to ignite the explosives in the car and level the whole garage, along with most of the neighborhood. But if I could shore up enough junk around the device, and if the panel doors gave way immediately ...

  I stopped thinking, started moving the crates of parts and any other junk I could lay my hands on in front of the device, hoping that the crates weren’t full of anything explosive. I was hampered by the cuffs, and I had to put all of my weight on my hands to push the crates across the floor. At the back of my head, I started to calculate how long since Murphy had left. There were a couple of layers of crates in front of the door now, and it looked hopelessly inadequate. I’d started to push the final crate over when I heard a short beeping sound.

  I scrambled to my feet and hurled myself across the garage as the gaps between the beeps reduced to a single monotonous tone. I slammed myself to the ground behind the rear tire of the pickup. I covered my ears, opened my mouth, and jammed my eyes shut. I had a split second to note the irony of taking cover behind a giant car bomb when time ran out.

  I registered a wave of fierce heat and blinding light before the pressure wave hit like an express train.

  When I opened my eyes again, the world had gone silent this time, instead of dark, but I was comforted that there still appeared to be a world. The entire opposite side of the garage had disappeared—a loose flap of corrugated iron hanging down where there used to be a wall and a door and a pile of crates and assorted junk. I got to my feet and circled the pickup. It was blackened on the other side and the windows had all blown out, but the explosives hadn’t detonated. Obviously.

  I started to move toward the hole in the wall. I had to get the hell out of here. Murphy wouldn’t be coming back to inspect his work, but that blast would be attracting plenty of other attention, and I didn’t relish the idea of explaining to the first responders what a dazed American was doing setting off a bomb in a suburban garage. And then I felt a stab of pain and realized there was an even more pressing problem. There was a deep gash in my right side. A sharp wedge of wood, shrapnel from one of the crates, was embedded in my side.

  I reached down and moved it. It hurt like hell, but it didn’t seem to be in too deep. I hoped that meant it looked worse than it was. I took a grip and started to pull it out. A couple of inches of crimson-stained wood slid out of the hole in my side. I bit down on my bottom lip hard enough to draw more blood in an effort to stifle the yell as I pulled the wooden blade out of my stomach.

  Pressing my still-cuffed hands hard against the wound, I headed for the hole in the wall and out into the light.

  45

  MINNESOTA

  Bryant kept his mouth shut and his eyes focused dead ahead on the sign two inches in front of him that said NO SMOKING. This was it—this time, it really was it. He was going to die in a cramped airless box, looking at a fucking no smoking sign.

  But then the man with the scar on his face started talking. He pressed the barrel of his gun a little harder against Bryant’s neck first, and chuckled as he winced.

  “I bet
you hadn’t planned on this when you got out of bed yesterday,” he said.

  “No kidding,” Bryant said.

  The man with the scar drew the gun back a little and yanked Bryant around by gripping the collar of his shirt. He nodded his head at the seat by the window, indicating that he should sit down. The whole time, he kept his pistol trained on Bryant.

  Bryant took two careful steps across the small space and sat down, keeping his eyes on the gun. He was no firearms expert, so he had no idea what make it was. He had seen enough cop shows to know that the cylinder on the end was a silencer, meaning that the man with the look of sadistic amusement in his eyes wouldn’t need to worry about making too much noise. He could empty the gun into Bryant’s head while the passengers mere inches away on either side continued their peaceful dreams uninterrupted.

  Bryant was as scared as he had ever been in his life. Even as this crossed his mind, he realized that the exact same thought had occurred to him at least three or four times in the previous twenty-four hours. Each time, it had been no exaggeration, but each time, that level of terror had been quickly superseded.

  When he had passed through the doors and seen the man with the gun approaching, the man who so clearly recognized him, he thought he was dead. When he had been forced to identify the roomette he and Blake had shared and then been bundled through the door, he’d assumed that his stay of execution would expire as soon as they caught Blake. He had remained convinced of that during the brief questioning. They had asked him where Blake was, and he had replied that he didn’t know.

  And then the other two had left: the one with the close-cropped reddish hair and the creepy one, the one with glasses who had stared at him the whole time without saying a damn word. But now the demeanor of the one with the scar had changed slightly. He had been the most aggressive around the others, but now he was sharing a joke, letting Bryant sit down.