Winterlong

by Mason Cross

  “We lost him.”

  She kept her face composed. Another setback, just when they thought they were in the endgame. “What happened? He had nowhere to go.”

  He shook his head. “He definitely survived the fall from the train. The dogs picked up the scent clear at the jump point. We tracked him a couple miles cross-country until they lost the footprints and the scent. Like he vanished into thin air. He could still be out there, holed up somewhere—there’s a lot of woodland about. Weather’s still a mess; otherwise we could get a bird in the air with thermal imaging. Until that changes, we’re working old-school: dogs and flashlights. And we’ve already taken a casualty.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ortega ran into some trouble in the woods. He slipped on a concealed verge, broke his leg. He’ll be fine, but we’re a man down.”

  Faraday said nothing. She trusted Stark could guess her thoughts on this latest disaster.

  “Anything on Kowalski’s phone?” Stark asked, keen to change the subject.

  Faraday looked over at Williamson, who was tapping away on her keyboard, working on her third can of Red Bull with two empties standing at attention. Faraday turned back to the screen and shook her head, noticing how tired she herself looked in the smaller rectangle at the bottom right.

  “He switched it off on the train. If he still has it, he’ll be too smart to turn it back on in range of a cell tower.”

  “I guess it was worth a try,” Stark said with zero conviction in his voice.

  “We have another complication, which you may not be aware of,” Faraday said. “There’s a chance Blake may have some leverage over us.”

  She explained about the Black Book, not mentioning that she had only become privy to this information a few hours before. Stark took the information in without comment. It didn’t really change things from his point of view—they still had to find Blake.

  Faraday thought for a minute and then came to a decision on something she’d been mulling over for the last couple of hours. “We’re going to release an image of Blake to the FBI. Not a photograph. We’ll go with a facial composite. We need some more eyes on the ground.”

  “That’s an excellent idea,” Stark said at once. He had been pushing for her to release more information on Blake all along.

  “I’m glad you approve,” she said, not overdoing the sarcasm. “Now, what’s happening with Bryant?”

  Stark considered the question and shook his head. “I don’t think Blake would have told him anything useful.”

  “So what the hell do we do with him?”

  Had it been Usher or Ortega she was having this conversation with, it would have been a question she would never have asked, because she probably wouldn’t like the solution they would come up with. In reality, there was no need to do anything drastic. Bryant could probably be debriefed and safely dumped at a bus station with a warning not to talk. If Stark was right, if Blake had told him nothing, he would have no idea who they were. He would have no proof even if he did. Her instinct said it was too early to make any firm decisions in that direction, though. Stark’s expression seemed to say the same thing.

  “Murphy’s talking to him now. He thinks we can use him.”

  Faraday was confused. “Use him how?”

  “He thinks Blake will deal if we let him go.”

  “You don’t sound convinced.”

  Stark nodded. “That’s because I’m not. This guy was a target. A job. Why would Blake give a shit about him?”

  She thought about it. It would certainly have been easier for Blake to cut Bryant loose back in Seattle. Why hadn’t he?

  “I don’t know, but Murphy might have a better insight. See where it goes. We’re working on the big picture back here. There have been some ... promising developments.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “When you need to know, Stark. When you need to know.”

  FIVE YEARS AGO

  KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN

  The man who was not called Ahmad opened the door. When he saw my face, his dark brown eyes filled with anger, turning to shock when he saw my bloody, handcuffed hands clutching the hole in my side. He glanced around the alley outside the door and then jerked his head to tell me to come in.

  A minute later, I was in the same back room where, just a few days before, I had exchanged money for information. It was too uncomfortable to sit down, so I leaned against the desk while he gave the hole in my side a cursory inspection, shaking his head.

  “I’m going to patch you up so your insides stay in, but after that I don’t ever want to see you again. Is that clear?”

  “Don’t worry about that. I’ll make it worth your while. This—” I said, indicating the wound with my free hand, “and one other thing.”

  “You push your luck, American. Whatever else you want, we discuss after we deal with that little scratch.”

  I shook my head firmly. “No. First.”

  He persisted for a minute, insisting that my wound needed immediate treatment. He was right, but I knew the hole in my side could wait just a little longer. At last he shook his head and gave me what I wanted, leaving me in the back room with a fresh burner cell as he went to fetch his first aid kit. I dialed the number from memory. Carol’s personal cell, not her work one. I held my breath as I waited for the call to connect between continents and then held it a little longer as I heard one ring, two, three. The pain in my side was utterly forgotten. The only thing in the world for me was that crackly electronic buzz.

  On the fourth ring, the call was picked up.

  “Hello?”

  “Carol, it’s me.”

  There was a pause, and I realized I hadn’t thought through exactly what I was going to say. While I was coming up with something, she spoke again.

  “Where are you?” Her voice sounded a little strange, out of it. Then I remembered it was late in New York, going on midnight.

  “I’ll tell you later. This is really important. I need you to get out of your apartment and—”

  She said my name, and all of a sudden I realized that it wasn’t the time zone or the quality of the connection that made her sound off. She had been crying.

  “I’m not in my apartment, I’m on my way to ... I thought you were calling about ... about ...”

  “About what?”

  “Haven’t you seen the news?”

  “The news?”

  “It’s on every channel. The senator’s been shot. His wife’s dead. He’s in surgery, but it doesn’t look ... Wait a minute. What do you mean I need to get out? Why were you calling if you didn’t know?”

  The words caught in my mouth. I didn’t know what to say or how to say it.

  “Are you still there?”

  “I think I know the people who did this. I think you could be in danger, too. There’s a—”

  “What the hell did you do? Who are you?”

  “Listen to me. I’ll explain later, I swear. The people who did this just tried to kill me, too. They know about you and me. I don’t know if they’ll come after you, but we can’t take the risk. You have to disappear. Just for a little while.”

  “This is your fault. Oh my God. This is ...” She sounded dazed, like she’d been hit a second time while reeling from an initial blow.

  “Carol!” I yelled. “Listen to me. You can hate me later, but right now we’ve got to get you someplace safe. Where are you right now?”

  “I’m with Clare, from the office. We’re on Eighth, headed down to the office. It just seemed like—”

  “Have her drop you off. Tell her to go home.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I gave her the address of an apartment building in Hell’s Kitchen, made her repeat it back to me.

  “Get into the lobby. The mail slot at the far right on the bottom row is unlocked. There’s a key taped to the roof of the slot. The key is for apartment six-two. Are you getting this?”

  “What are you—I’m not going anywhe
re. John would—”

  “You can’t help him right now. I need you to listen to me. The people who did this are very dangerous, and the office is the last place you should be right now.”

  I thought about Carlson’s file. The pictures, names, and dates. They would make sure that disappeared, coordinated with the hit. They had probably visited the office already, but I wasn’t taking the chance.

  Carol started to protest more, and I cut her off. “You don’t ever have to see me again. You don’t ever have to speak to me again. But do this one thing for me.”

  There was a long pause. I heard a female voice in the background. Are you okay? Carol didn’t answer. With an effort of will, I gave her time to think without saying anything else. Eventually she spoke.

  “Okay, this one thing.”

  I felt a surge of relief. “Thank you. Tell your friend to stay away from the office too—get the police to clear it first. You remember the address?”

  “I’ve got it.”

  “Tell me again.”

  “I’ve got it.”

  “Good. Get rid of your cell and go there now. Try to stay put until I get back.”

  “Back from where?”

  “I’ll tell you—”

  “No.” Her voice suddenly lost its dazed quality, and I felt the full force of her anger directed at me. “Not later. Tell me now. Where are you? Who the hell are you?”

  I took a breath. “Afghanistan. It’ll take me a few days to get home.”

  She made a noise that sounded like she was trying for a sarcastic laugh, but it came out more like a sigh. “You didn’t answer my other question.”

  It was a good question. Who was I, anyway? “Maybe I don’t know the answer right now,” I said. “I’ll see you in a few days. Stay safe.”

  There was silence for a moment, as though she was thinking of something to say, and then she settled on a simple, “Goodbye.”

  As the line went dead, I took the phone from my ear and looked at the blank display. Then I glanced down at the bloody mess of my shirt, my left hand clutching the wound in my side. Now that the message had been delivered, the pain rushed back with a vengeance. I looked up and saw Ahmad had returned with bandages and disinfectant.

  “You look even worse than you did a couple minutes ago.”

  I nodded. “Feels that way.”

  52

  ST PAUL, MINNESOTA

  The bus got into Saint Paul just before half past nine in the morning. I had managed to sleep for most of the journey, although somehow that had made me feel even worse than I had at the outset.

  I got off the bus with the rest of the passengers who had accumulated during the trip from Stockton. After checking the options for the next leg of my journey, I put some distance between myself and the bus station. I was still four hundred miles from Chicago, and I had less than a hundred dollars left. I invested some of that in buying another pair of gloves and a baseball cap. Then I used the last ten bucks to buy coffee and a cheeseburger and fries at a bustling travel diner. The calories helped, replenishing my energy after the long night, and I started to go over the next few moves I had planned.

  I would need more money. There was no getting around that. I didn’t think Winterlong would have been able to make any link between me and the backup checking account I could access with an ATM card, but I wasn’t a hundred percent certain, either. There was only one way to find out.

  I had almost finished eating when someone changed the channel on the TV attached to the wall of the diner. I stopped chewing when a familiar-looking face appeared on the screen. The caption said SEA-TAC SHOOTING, and above that was a computer-aided artist’s impression of my face. The pic had clearly used my driver’s license ID photo as a starting point, but I knew they had deliberately not used the picture itself. That would have made it too easy for a helpful police or federal facial recognition expert to match it to my DMV record, get my name, and start to unravel the whole thing. With my newly close-cropped hair and three days of stubble, I didn’t look a whole lot like my computer-generated avatar, but still, it was not an encouraging development.

  After I finished eating, I crossed the street to a branch of Western Union and presented the card to the smiling clerk, asking how much I could withdraw in cash today.

  As I watched her tap on the keyboard to call up my account, I had a flashback of the airline ticket clerk’s sudden change of demeanor when she typed the name from my driver’s license into the computer. It would have been safer to use the ATM outside, I guessed, but it would also have limited me to withdrawing a couple of hundred. At least this clerk wouldn’t be typing the name Carter Blake.

  “You can withdraw one thousand dollars standard today, Mr. Grant, or up to ten thousand with two forms of ID.”

  I shrugged as though that was no problem. “Go for the thousand,” I said. “I don’t have my license with me.”

  She smiled. “Certainly, sir,” and quickly produced ten crisp hundred-dollar bills, sliding them under the glass partition.

  Twenty minutes later I was looking at another face behind glass at another counter, this one at the Union Depot Transit Center. This face was male, middle-aged, and unsmiling. He acknowledged my request with a curt nod and provided me with a one-way ticket on the Megabus to Chicago. I waited until the driver was behind the wheel before I got on, watching the bus ramp for anyone who seemed too interested in the other passengers. I took a free seat at the back and pulled the brim of my cap down low. The bus started to pull out exactly on time. Twenty-four minutes to eleven.

  53

  NEW YORK CITY

  “You wanted to see me?”

  Williamson hovered by the door, her eyes pointed at the carpet. She looked a little uncomfortable away from her natural element. Faraday didn’t make a habit of inviting people into her office. Murphy was generally the only regular visitor.

  Faraday looked up. “First of all, I wanted to thank you for the work you’ve been doing, particularly over the last couple of days.”

  Williamson nodded. “I’m making progress with the house. I just need—”

  “This isn’t about that.”

  Williamson stopped. She looked up for the first time, waiting for Faraday to continue.

  “This is about something else, and it goes without saying it is not to be discussed with anyone outside this room. That includes Murphy.” Especially Murphy, she thought.

  “Okay.”

  “The fingerprints hit in Iowa that was deleted. Is there anything else like that in the system?”

  Williamson looked confused. “Any other fingerprint hits?”

  “Anything that’s been purged.”

  Williamson smiled. “You’re asking me to find things that aren’t there.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  Williamson thought it over. “It’s a challenge. The DR-17 was a lucky break. I had to reverse-engineer the trail, go back to the deletion. I could only do that because I knew what wasn’t there. So the first question I’d need to ask is, what else isn’t there?”

  Faraday considered. How did one find something that no one knew was missing? The fingerprint hit was an unusual event. It had allowed Williamson to trace the deletion, and that deletion had suggested a pattern of behavior. If Drakakis hid that, perhaps he’d hidden other things. “Look at the patterns. Eyes-only reports for the director. Look for anything different. Anything that looks like a gap.”

  “I don’t have—”

  Faraday typed a password into her computer and stood up, offering Williamson her seat. “You have full access now. Level twelve.”

  Williamson’s eyes lingered on Faraday for a second and then dropped to the screen. She sat down and began to hit the keys.

  Ten minutes later, Williamson sat back from the screen, her brow furrowed.

  “Well?”

  She shook her head. “If you need details, files, I can’t give you anything.”

  “But you can give me something.”

&n
bsp; She shrugged. “Dates. File sizes. There was a subfolder in AAR restricted to Drakakis’s user ID. Someone with level-twelve access purged everything from it a year ago.”

  “When, exactly?”

  “December thirty-first.”

  The date of Drakakis’s suicide. It had been his last act—the opposite of a suicide note. Instead of leaving a last testament behind, maybe he had erased one.

  “How long will it take you to recover the deleted files?”

  Williamson shook her head. “Can’t be done,” she said firmly. Faraday was taken aback. She had never heard Williamson say that before. Generally everything could be done; it just required time and resources.

  “What do you mean? You retrieved the fingerprint hit.”

  “That was different. That came through the main server. It left a trail. This was completely local to Drakakis. Technology-wise, it’s as close as he could get to keeping it in a notebook, then burning it. We’re lucky he carried out the deletions in this office. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to see that there was once a folder. Everything’s gone, purged.” She hit a couple of keys and an exported CSV file appeared on the screen. Columns showing creation dates and file sizes and deletion dates. The date was identical in every row:

  20141231 23:37

  This was important. Important enough that a man who was about to die had cared about it.

  “You say this ... ghost folder was in the local AAR file?”

  Williamson nodded.

  After-action reports. It was customary for these to be edited, polished, before they went anyplace else, even at the classified level. But this was another level even more locked down.

  “This is what really happened,” Faraday said to herself.