Winterlong

by Mason Cross

  I tensed and jumped in, barely feeling the cold as the water covered my legs below the thighs. I splashed through the stretch of deep water until I reached the shallows on the other side. I started along the edge of the water. There were enough loose rocks and branches that the snow had fallen unevenly, making any tracks I left indistinct. My steps became more faltering as the freezing dampness bit into my legs, and a couple of times I almost stumbled headlong back into the water. When I had gone a reasonable distance from the spot I’d crossed, I started to look for a place where I could climb onto the bank. And then I saw the bridge.

  It was a narrow hump-backed bridge, its walls covered with snow. I hurried to the edge of the bridge and climbed up the bank. A narrow road led out from the woods, turning into a plain strip of white as it emerged from cover. I stopped at the side of the road for breath and listened. I could still hear the barking. It was a ways off, but getting closer. I hoped the stream would give them trouble following the scent, but I wasn’t betting on it. I steeled myself to keep going, but just as I was about to start walking again, I heard a sound. Different from the barking, more regular. A low, droning noise. An engine.

  I shrank back into cover behind the parapet and watched the road, considering my options. Could it be more of them? A pincer movement from the opposite direction? Anything was possible. On the other hand, I wouldn’t last much longer out here. A moment later headlights appeared through the trees. The engine was louder now. It sounded a little rough, in need of tuning. As I watched, a pickup truck appeared out of a bend in the road fifty yards into the woods. I could stay behind the bridge, or I could take my chances. The biting-cold wetness around my legs made the decision for me. I stepped out onto the road and walked forward, raising my hand as the headlights washed over me.

  49

  The pickup rolled to a stop beside me, the wipers working hard to clear the snow on the windshield. In the rainbow-shaped gap over the driver’s side, I could see an old man behind the wheel. He was the only person in the vehicle as far as I could make out. I approached the passenger door and glanced inside, seeing no one else in the car. The old guy nodded at the door impatiently. I pulled the handle and swung the passenger door open.

  “Thanks for stopping,” I said, hearing my voice stutter through chattering teeth.

  “Well, don’t just stand there, son. You’re letting the cold in.” I was reassured when I heard the unmistakable Minnesotan accent—lots of long vowels.

  Gratefully, I slid in beside him. The heat blasting from the dash felt incredible. I was chilled to the bone, so I wouldn’t feel full the benefit for some time, but already my face was beginning to regain some of its feeling.

  “So what the hell are you doing out here on a night like this?” he demanded as I shut the door. His voice was caught between annoyance and curiosity. I guessed he was in his early seventies. He was wrapped up warm, and his wrinkled face was covered by a straggly gray beard.

  “Car broke down.” Three words at a time was about all I could manage, which was good, as it saved me coming up with a more elaborate excuse.

  “Jesus,” he remarked. “Ain’t you heard of Triple A?”

  I grimaced and shook my head.

  “Flat tire?” he asked. “I got a jack if you need. How far down the road you parked?”

  I shook my head. “Think I broke ... axle. Go back in morning. Can you g ...” I kept stuttering around the G, but he caught my drift.

  “Give you a ride?” he nodded. “Reckon I can do better than that, son. Maybe only a little better, but better. My place isn’t too far. Hell, I let you out up in Stockton right now, might as well put a bullet in your head. No place to shelter this time of night. First bus doesn’t leave until seven on a Saturday, and that one don’t come back this way.”

  “I’m grateful,” I said.

  “Name’s Preston. Sam Preston.” Sam took his right hand from the wheel and held it out. I took it with some difficulty. He shivered at the coldness of my hand, and his brow creased in concern. “Damn, son.”

  “Jerry Robinson,” I said.

  Sam turned in the road and started back the way he had come. After we’d gone a little way and I’d started to regain the power of speech and warmed up a little, I asked him what he was doing up this time of night.

  “I’m a light sleeper, son. Don’t sleep much these days. And I heard those dogs.”

  Sam asked me a few more questions about my breakdown as we drove, and I answered as nonspecifically as possible, hoping he wasn’t trying to catch me out. He lived in an old farmhouse a couple of miles from the bridge. As we got out of the car, I heard the barking of the dogs again, from much farther off now. I tensed at the noise. I saw Sam watching me with interest. I covered my reaction by rubbing my arms, pretending they had stiffened during the car journey.

  He told me I was welcome to use the shower and found me some of his old clothes to borrow, both of which I received gratefully. The fit wasn’t perfect—he was an inch or two shorter than me and a little thicker around the waist—but all in all I’d been very lucky. It was only now, in the stove-heated warmth of the house that I realized just how lucky. If Sam hadn’t happened by at that moment, it was a dead cert that either the cold or the dogs would have done for me.

  “You can rest up on the couch tonight, I reckon,” he said, indicating a well-loved brown leather couch that had been patched multiple times. “Tomorrow we’ll call Dave Marshall over in Stockton and see about getting you towed.”

  The couch looked inviting, but I knew it wasn’t to be. I had a rendezvous in Chicago in a little less than fourteen hours, and I didn’t want to miss it. I would need Banner’s help if I was to get back home before Winterlong caught up with me.

  “Actually, Sam, I’m in kind of a rush. I’m grateful for the offer, but I need to get back on the road.”

  He said nothing, waited for me to continue. As though I would need a better excuse than that.

  “Kind of a life-or-death thing, in fact.”

  He said nothing for a minute, his eyes unwavering in the flickering light from the wood burner. “You know, that road hits a dead end half a mile from the bridge. A hundred years ago, it used to go all the way to Greenville, I guess, before the railroad cut through. No way to get onto the road coming from that direction. Your car didn’t really break down, did it? And your name’s not really Robinson.”

  I shook my head slowly.

  “I’m sorry I misled you.”

  “I may be old, but I’m not senile. Who’s chasing you, son?”

  “How do you know somebody’s chasing me?”

  “It’s the only reason you’d pass up a warm couch on a night like this. And besides, I told you I heard the dogs. A pack of ’em. Trained, hungry. Huntin’ dogs. Not much to hunt out there in weather like this. Not anything really. ’Cept maybe for you.”

  I smiled ruefully. “I’m sorry, Sam. You’re right about the dogs. Somebody is chasing me, somebody I don’t want to risk leading to your door. It’s not the cops, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “Figured that. Nearest prison is fifty miles away, and you don’t got the look of an escaped con. I wasn’t sure at first, but ...” He looked me up and down again. “Well, when I saw the shape you were in, I decided I was on the side of the man runnin’, not the men huntin’. Does that make sense?”

  I nodded.

  “And, truth to tell, I make up my mind about a fellow pretty quick, and I’ve decided you’re an okay guy, Robinson. Or whatever your name is. But that doesn’t mean I’m about to let you walk back out there.”

  I opened my mouth to protest, but he waved a hand to stop me. “Stockton’s ten miles away. There’s a bus station. Can you get to where you’re headed from there?”

  “I think so.”

  “All right. The bus for Saint Paul leaves at seven. You take my truck, you’ll have plenty of time to make it. Just park it by the general store and put the keys through the mail slot. I can get them
back from Eppie Davis in the morning.”

  He tossed me the keys and I caught them. I stared down at them in my palm, still red from the cold. “Why?”

  “Because Eppie delivers my groceries on a Saturday, and she can take me back into town.”

  I shook my head. “Why are you helping me?”

  Sam looked as though he hadn’t considered the question until now. He thought on it for a second and then shrugged. “Good to be neighborly. And like I said, you seem like an okay fella.”

  Two hot cups of coffee later and I was behind the wheel of Sam’s pickup. He’d told me the road only went one place, so I followed it at a steady thirty miles an hour, taking care in the snow and constantly checking the landscape for men with dogs and flashlights. I saw nothing for the whole ten miles. If I was lucky, the dogs would have lost my scent at the river. Perhaps the men chasing me would think I’d fallen in and been carried downstream. Either way, if the dogs picked the scent up again, it would be lost at the point I got into the pickup, and the tree cover meant there were no tracks in the snow. Sam’s house was outside any realistic search area for a man on foot, so I didn’t think he would be troubled tonight. Later, I would make sure they knew I was out of the area, but for tonight it would be better if they thought I was dead.

  I made Stockton at half past six. It was a one-stoplight town. The bus station was a bench at the side of the road with a schedule fixed to a post. I kept going and found the general store a little farther ahead. I turned into the lot, parked the truck, and wiped the steering wheel and the gearshift down. Then I locked up and put the keys in the mailbox of the general store as Sam had asked.

  Thirty minutes later, I boarded the bus to Saint Paul. The only other passenger was a teenage girl with a backpack who kept her headphones on and her eyes pointed out of the window at the dark predawn landscape. The heating was lousy, but it was a lot better than being out there. I wrapped my coat around me like a blanket, put my head against the window, and let myself drift off to sleep with the motion of the bus.

  50

  Bryant didn’t know how long he had been locked in the small, dingy motel room. He was exhausted, but the combination of the hard plastic chair and the flickering fluorescent light seeping through the blinds conspired to deny sleep.

  He didn’t know exactly where he was. All he knew was that somehow, his situation had actually gone downhill since the point where he was facing a lengthy jail sentence. After the forced march back along the railroad tracks, he had been handed over to another two men with clothes and demeanor similar to that of the four on the train. He was bundled into a black SUV with one of the men sitting in the back with him while the other drove them cross-country until they hit a dirt track. The track led to a small country road, which led to a larger country road, which led to a highway, which eventually led to a town, and then another.

  From the signs they had passed, Bryant knew they were still somewhere in Minnesota. They sped through a series of small towns, before slowing their pace and pulling into the parking lot of a beat-up motel. Before he had time to draw breath, the door had been flung open by another man and he had been hustled inside. He only had time for brief impressions: an almost-deserted parking lot covered in a blanket of snow, a red, white, and blue neon sign with some of the letters missing. The rooms were arranged in a row facing the lot. The two men took him to the room at the far end and locked the door behind them. Boards had been securely screwed over the front-facing window, and even the small window in the bathroom.

  And now he was alone with his thoughts, wondering how in the hell he was going to get out of this situation. Nobody in the world knew where he was. He realized with grim humor that this very same thought had comforted him just a couple of days before. But this was different. Now it was looking likely that no one would ever know where he was again. He wondered what Jasmine would think, as the months and years passed. Most likely she would assume he had simply disappeared with his illicit retirement bonus. Alyssa would grow up believing that her father hadn’t cared enough to stick around, or even to contact her again. Thinking about that future scenario was more painful even than the contemplation of his imminent demise had been. Instead, he tried to focus on the here and now.

  He considered the men in whose custody he suddenly found himself. He already knew they wouldn’t hesitate to use lethal force. Blake hadn’t been particularly chatty about these guys. Either because he didn’t want Bryant to know too much for his own good, or because Blake just wasn’t a particularly chatty guy.

  Except for that brief period back on the train, of course, when he’d opened up a little. Bryant had been wondering about that. After keeping him well and truly in the dark for more than a day, Blake had given him a couple of interesting pieces of information about himself and his plans. He wondered now how far Blake would get. He found himself hoping that he would make it all the way.

  The sound of a key in the lock startled Bryant, and he stood up from the chair. The door was opened and a man he hadn’t seen before stood in the doorway. The man was definitely one of them, so he knew not to raise his hopes. He was around six feet. Older than the others, but a toned physique was evident beneath the suit and shirt.

  “Sorry to keep you,” he said.

  Bryant guessed that was an attempt at humor.

  The man in the suit stepped into the room and carefully locked the door behind him. Bryant tensed, his mouth suddenly dry. He tried to swallow, thinking of something to say. Was this it? He saw the next few moments in his mind’s eye like some kind of grisly home movie, the man in the suit pressing the barrel of a gun to Bryant’s forehead and pulling the trigger twice. His body being discovered in the morning by some maid, hours after the men in the dark clothes had vanished into the night, as though they had never existed.

  The man was watching him with amusement, seeming to read his thoughts.

  “Relax. We’re not going to kill you yet.”

  “Yet? Is that a joke? That’s a joke, right?”

  The man ignored the question. He examined the duvet on the mean single bed carefully, swiped his hand across it as though removing dust, and sat down opposite Bryant. “We didn’t find Blake yet.”

  “Okay.”

  “I am sorry about the rough treatment,” he said, sounding almost sincere this time. “My boys get a little overzealous sometimes. My name’s Jack Murphy. We’re going to need to keep you around for a while.’’

  “I told your men, he didn’t tell me where he was going. Believe me when I say I wish I’d never met the guy. Two days ago I was set up for a two-million-dollar payoff and a sweet retirement. Thanks to Blake, I’ve been shot at, dragged halfway across the country, and now I’m being held who-the-fuck-knows where by a CIA death squad or something.” He paused and reconsidered. “No offense.”

  Murphy waved away the comment amiably. “The man’s got a way of endearing himself to people. I’ll give him that.”

  “What did he do, anyway? You people have to want him bad, to go to all this trouble.”

  “You could say he broke a promise,” Murphy said. “Or ... he broke a confidence, at least. The other thing is, he took something that didn’t belong to him, and I’d like to get it back.”

  He was talking about the Black Book. The flash drive Blake had told him about. Bryant made sure not to show any reaction, but he picked up on the way Murphy had said “I,” rather than “we.”

  He shrugged and held his hands up. “So what do you need from me?”

  Murphy considered the question. He put his hands on his knees and leaned forward. “Blake left you behind on the train.”

  “I noticed.”

  “I mean, it’s not like he had much option. But if I know him like I think I do, that’s going to bother him.”

  Bryant snorted. “Hardly. Blake doesn’t give a shit about me. He was going to turn me in to my old boss.”

  Headshake from Murphy. “That may be the case, but he went to an awful lot of trouble t
o keep you with him. He wanted to keep you alive, is what I’m guessing.”

  “He wanted to keep his chance at a paycheck alive,” Bryant shot back, though he knew Murphy was right.

  Murphy straightened up and folded his arms, staring at him appraisingly. “Ortega said you mentioned an item that we’re interested in. A flash drive Blake has stashed somewhere.”

  Shit. Bryant had completely forgotten he had let that slip. He said nothing, and Murphy waited a minute before nodding.

  “That’s right, so he did tell you something. But what else did he tell you?”

  “That was it. He said you wanted some files he took, nothing else.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “I’m sure.”

  Murphy looked at him for a long moment, the good-humored smile slowly draining from his face until there was nothing but a dead-eyed stare. “That’s disappointing. I wonder if we can jog that memory, Bryant.”

  Bryant shivered involuntarily and opened his mouth to say something. He closed it again when he realized his mind had gone utterly blank.

  Murphy got to his feet and took a step toward him. “You’ve probably heard stories. ‘Enhanced interrogation’ is the official term. It’s got its uses, I have to admit. But I’m kind of old-fashioned.”

  Murphy reached into his coat and then there was a pistol in his hand. With one smooth motion, he raised it and pressed the barrel against Brant’s forehead.

  “You’re scared, right?”

  Bryant nodded.

  “But your head’s clear. No pain distorting your thinking. No physiological desperation to tell me exactly what you think I want to hear. Just the certain knowledge that I will pull this trigger if I think you’re lying to me.”

  Bryant’s eyes met Murphy’s. His expression was calm, patient. It was Bryant’s turn to talk now.

  51

  NEW YORK CITY

  Faraday sat down in front of the monitor screen and clicked on the icon to pick up the video call. The little clock in the corner told her that it was 8:56 a.m., and an hour earlier in Minnesota. More than four hours had passed since they had lost Blake, and with each minute, it became less likely the news from the team was going to be positive. The screen went black for a second, and then Stark’s face appeared. He looked tired and pissed-off, his face reddened from the cold.