Winterlong

by Mason Cross

  “Excuse me?”

  “Thank you, Williamson. That’ll be all.”

  She nodded again and left. Faraday kept looking at the door for a minute after it closed, thinking about the tear-shaped bloodstain beneath the new carpet.

  She opened the secure file space on her desktop computer and started going back through, comparing the dates of the deleted files with the final classified AARs on her system. Every one of the deleted files corresponded with a logged AAR. Which meant that the files she and her superiors could see were not the whole story. She looked at the list, identifying locations just by the reference number. Baqubah and Mosul in 2009. Kandahar, 2010. And then she noticed that one of the files did not have a corresponding record on the official list. But the date was within days of the Kandahar mission. The mission on which Carter Blake had gone AWOL.

  54

  CHICAGO

  The bus from Saint Paul to Chicago was scheduled to take a little more than eight hours. Despite the weather warnings, the snow had abated for a few hours. It was like Mother Nature was taking a deep breath in preparation for the storm to come. At first I was sure I would be too wired to sleep, but as the bus joined I-94 and headed east, I began to feel drowsy. With some time to kill, I didn’t fight it. As I slept, we passed out of Minnesota and into Wisconsin. I awoke as the bus made a stop in Madison and then snoozed lightly for another hour.

  I forced myself to wake up fully at five o’clock. The sky had been dull and gray all day, a kind of perpetual twilight that now began to darken as night approached. The snow began to fall again, and all around us the traffic began to slow. I glanced at my watch and hoped we wouldn’t fall too far behind.

  Just after seven o’clock, we came into view of Chicago. The memories surged within me as I saw the skyline rising up ahead of us. All at once, it seemed like years since I’d last been here, and like yesterday. We made it into the city only a half hour behind schedule. The final stop was at Van Buren Street, but as the bus passed the Willis Tower, I got up and made my way down the aisle to the front of the bus.

  “Mind if I hop off here?” I asked the driver.

  “I mind a lot, pal,” he began, and then he turned his head and saw the hundred-dollar bill in my hand.

  I hopped onto the sidewalk on South Wacker and glanced around the street to make sure nobody was paying me any undue attention. I bought a map and a large black coffee from a 7-Eleven and worked out that my destination was only a couple of miles away. A quick ride in a taxi, but I had spent way too long sitting down. The walk would let me work the ache out of my legs and get some fresh air into my lungs. I headed west and south, making my way down to West Roosevelt Road and crossing the park. I reached my destination with two minutes to spare. The name on the sign had changed since last time, but there was still a coffee shop there. It looked like it was in the process of emptying for the night.

  The lights at the intersection turned red and I waited for the evening traffic to bunch up before I crossed the street and pushed the door of the coffee shop inward. I couldn’t remember what it had been called the last time I’d been here, but it was named McGrady’s now. The interior decor had changed: Dark wood was out; bright orange walls were in. I cast my eyes around the interior, seeing lots of empty tables. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw a familiar face in the back of the shop. Special Agent Elaine Banner was sitting with her back to the wall, with a good view of the doorway and the window looking onto the park. She had spotted me first, of course, and was looking at me with an expression that was hard to read. It wasn’t quite a welcoming smile.

  A waitress called out a greeting. I nodded and pointed at where Banner was seated to let her know I didn’t need to be directed to a table. As I pulled out the chair across from Banner, the waitress asked if she could get me anything, and I ordered another coffee. Banner had a bottle of sparkling mineral water in front of her, half of it poured into a glass. We waited for the waitress to leave, watching each other over the table. I was smiling; Banner still wasn’t quite.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi.”

  “You look great,” I said, meaning it. Banner was thirty-two years old, five eight, slim. Shoulder-length brown hair, styled slightly differently since I’d last seen her. Incredibly dark brown eyes that gave you the nagging sensation that she knew what you were thinking. She didn’t return the compliment, and although I hadn’t looked in a mirror in a while, I thought I knew why.

  “What happened to your friend?” she asked, her eyes flicking to the street outside and then back to me.

  “We ran into some problems. We got separated. I’m trying to fix that.”

  Banner shook her head. “Jesus, Blake. Do I even want to know? Every field office got a want sheet today with a composite on it that looks very familiar.”

  She slid a sheet of paper in front of me. The same facial composite I had seen on the news in Saint Paul.

  “No name?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Very vague. You’re wanted for questioning in connection with the airport shooting, and there’s a national security implication. You’re not believed to be a live terrorist threat, which has to be the nicest thing anyone’s said about you lately.”

  “I do my best.”

  Banner sipped her glass of water to cover up a smile and then looked at me expectantly.

  “Thank you for doing this,” I said.

  “Not a problem. I don’t think we should leave here together, so I’m going to give you an address. It’s an apartment we used for witnesses. It’s not on the regular rotation, and I trust everyone who knows about it. You can hide out for a couple of days, give yourself a chance to ...”

  I shook my head. “The safe house was for Bryant. I have to keep moving.”

  “Blake, whoever is after you means business. No offense, but you look like shit. You need to lie low for a while, get some rest.”

  I glanced down at the worn clothes I had borrowed from Sam Preston and slept in and ran my fingers over the three days of stubble on my face. She wasn’t catching me at my best.

  “I can’t do that. Chances are they’d find me, and it can’t come back to you. I need to finish this.”

  She shook her head slowly, and a frustrated smile appeared on her face. “You know, I had this conversation in my head before I got here, and a couple of times while I was waiting for you.”

  I returned the smile. “How’d it go?”

  “Pretty much exactly like this. More small talk first, though.”

  “I’m sorry. How’s Annie?”

  Her smile became warmer at the mention of her daughter. “Ten going on forty-seven. She’s doing well in school, almost never has nightmares anymore. Work’s good. Donaldson is retiring next year. I’m very busy, thank you. Yes, it has been a mild winter up until now, but how about this weather? There. We’ve caught up now. We’ll skip the part where you tell me nothing about yourself.”

  “Are we at the part where you threaten not to help me?”

  “Will it do any good?”

  I shook my head.

  She sighed and sat back in her chair. “All right, then.” She reached down and picked up a backpack by one strap, handing it to me under the table. I took it and glanced behind me to make sure the waitress wasn’t hovering around before I unzipped it and examined the contents. A change of clothes: jeans and a sweater. An envelope with five hundred dollars inside. A cell phone. And a Glock 19 with three spare magazines. I closed the zipper and put my hands back on the table.

  She had laid two keys on the table.

  “That one’s for the safe house,” she said, indicating the one on the left. “Are you sure?”

  I put my hand down on top of the key on the right. “Thank you,” I said. She put her hand on top of mine.

  “I can’t go any further down this road, Blake.”

  “I know that. I don’t want you to.”

  “Are you sure about this? That it’s the only way?”

&
nbsp; I sighed and thought about my answer for a minute. I had to be honest with her. I owed her that much. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe not. Maybe I could go to ground, spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder. It might not be the rest of my life, even. Things change. Priorities change. Maybe in time they would forget about me.”

  “If you decided to disappear, I think you could manage it pretty well,” Banner said quietly. “Perhaps it’s worth a try.”

  “I thought I disappeared before and they found me. Because I was out there. Eventually you have to stick your head out of the door and see the world again. I could hide for a while, but eventually I’d be back in the same position. I had a friend who thought he was safe. He went to the ends of the earth, pretty much literally.”

  “Des Moines?”

  “Siberia. They found him and they put two bullets in his head, and now he’s another unclaimed body that nobody misses. That could be me in a year.”

  “You do it your way and it could be you tomorrow.”

  “That’s the difference, Banner. It would be on my terms.”

  Her dark brown eyes fixed on mine and held them for a long minute. This time it felt like the other way around. I knew what she was thinking: that she should volunteer to come with me, to help. But I knew she wouldn’t, just like she knew I wouldn’t let her. She had a daughter, a career. Things I wouldn’t jeopardize even if I thought her coming with me would make any difference. She was putting her neck on the line enough as it was. We had spent only a short time together and hadn’t spoken since, but all the same, we knew each other too well and respected each other too much to indulge in the meaningless bullshit of that phony discussion.

  She lifted her hands from mine. I curled my hand around the key, palmed it, and slipped it into my pocket. I left the other key, the one for the safe house, where it was.

  “Take care of yourself, Blake.”

  I felt a sudden chill. Elaine Banner didn’t know that that was pretty much the last thing I had said to Coop, three nights ago. And I answered in the same way.

  “I always do.”

  55

  MINNESOTA

  Stark’s cell phone rang just after eleven p.m. He and Murphy were in one of the two rooms in the motel. Ortega was in the adjoining room guarding Bryant. They had made the decision to stay put for the night, just in case they got a lead on Blake—or his body—in the vicinity of his last-known location. The rest of the Minnesota team had split. Half of them were headed for the biggest urban conurbation in the area: the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. The others had gone straight ahead to Chicago. In the absence of any other information, it made sense to cover the intended destination of Blake’s train.

  Stark reached for his phone and looked at the display, his eyes widening when he saw what was on it. The number of the caller, the first few digits denoting a cell rather than a landline, plus a single letter: K.

  Kowalski’s phone.

  Murphy looked up from the small desk, where he was in the middle of his tenth game of solitaire. A jack of spades poised in his hand, midway to the table. “Are you going to answer that?”

  “It’s him. On Kowalski’s phone”

  Murphy said nothing, but a satisfied grin appeared on his face. He tossed Stark the compact digital recorder they had ready for this occasion.

  Stark caught it one-handed and switched the recorder on. He turned away from Murphy, put the call on speaker, and answered with a curt, “Hello.”

  There was no immediate answer, but he could tell someone was there. While he waited for a response, he looked back at Murphy, who was tapping out a message on his own phone, no doubt telling central command that Blake was calling.

  They would be able to pinpoint his location in real time. Unless Blake had done something creative, which was always a possibility. Either way, Blake had made a deliberate decision to contact them using Kowalski’s phone, which meant he was doing it for a reason.

  “Am I speaking to Mr. S?” the voice on the other end of the phone asked quietly.

  Stark glanced at Murphy. The phones they used were burners: always discarded following a mission. They contained only the numbers of the other field ops, plus a generic number that automatically rerouted to central command. Because the numbers changed so frequently, there had to be a simple way of identifying them, so each was listed according to initial. Kowalski’s phone would have contained four numbers: O for Ortega, S for Stark, U for Usher, and H for home. It wasn’t exactly an impenetrable code, but it didn’t need to be. He considered his next words carefully. Negotiation is easier when both parties have names.

  “I’m here, Blake. Call me Stark. Where are you?”

  “Bora-Bora. You?”

  “What a coincidence, that’s where we are. Buy you a drink?”

  “Some other time. Who else is listening in, Stark? Anyone I know?”

  Murphy smiled and spoke in the direction of the phone. “Long time no see, hoss.”

  “Murphy,” Blake said after a second. Stark caught an undercurrent of cold burning anger in his voice that hadn’t been there a moment ago. “Wish I could say I’ve missed you.”

  “Likewise.”

  Stark cleared his throat. “Thanks for calling. I take it you want to discuss terms of surrender? Smart move. It’ll go easier for everyone.”

  “New on the team, huh?” Blake said, a hint of amusement in his voice.

  “Not exactly.”

  “Then you’ve been around long enough to know why I’m not going to give myself up. I have an aversion to being shot in the back of the head.”

  “Come on, Blake. It doesn’t have to go that way.” In the corner of his eye, Stark saw Murphy smile as he said this. He ignored it, listening as Blake started talking again.

  “Can I ask you something? Why now?”

  “I don’t have to tell you anything,” Stark said.

  Blake spoke again immediately, his voice breezy, as though politely dismissing a sales call. “Well, good luck. It was nice talking—”

  “Wait,” Stark said quickly. “Why did you call?”

  “I wanted to make a deal.”

  The two of them exchanged a glance. Murphy’s grin widened at the confirmation of his theory.

  “No deals, Blake,” Murphy said, his voice resolute, giving no hint that this was exactly what he wanted. “You’re coming with us. Your call if you want to be vertical or horizontal.”

  “It’s not as simple as that, though, is it? You don’t just want me. You want the Black Book as well.”

  Stark looked at Murphy again. The amusement had drained out of Murphy’s eyes at the mention of the Black Book. So he did have it.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Stark said.

  “Cut the bullshit,” Blake said. “I don’t have time for this.”

  “We’re listening,” Murphy said.

  “Good. But before I talk about the Book, you’re going to tell me why this is happening.”

  “No mystery about that, Blake,” Stark said. “You’re a rogue element. You need to be taken out of circulation. One way or another, just like you said.”

  “We had an arrangement.”

  “Change of management,” Stark said. “We do things differently now. It doesn’t look good to have an assassin running around, putting the unit at risk.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Blake, are you there?” Stark asked.

  “I don’t suppose it would do any good to tell you whatever they told you about me is a lie? I’m talking to you now, Mr. S. I know Murphy knows it’s bullshit. I didn’t kill the senator.”

  Stark glanced at Murphy, who was rolling his eyes again.

  “That’s right, Blake. You’re a poor innocent victim,” Murphy said. “None of us are Boy Scouts, but you crossed the line and you’re on the other side now. It’s nothing personal—you know that.”

  Now it was Blake’s turn to sound amused. “I’ve heard you say that before, remember
?”

  “You mentioned a deal,” Stark said, cutting in.

  “Let Bryant go, back off, and I hand over the Black Book.”

  Stark opened his mouth, but Murphy got in first.

  “We can talk about Bryant. And maybe we’ll give you a head start, if you tell us where the Book is.”

  Stark fixed Murphy with a stare that he hoped conveyed the message, What the hell are you doing? If Murphy noticed, he didn’t acknowledge.

  Stark said, “We’ll discuss it, then call you back in an hour.”

  “I’ll take that as a joke,” Blake said. “Because if I didn’t, I’d have to assume you’re insulting my intelligence.”

  “Wait a minute. You can’t—”

  “New York City, Tuesday night,” Blake said, talking over Stark. “Bring Bryant to Grand Central at nine p.m. Just one of you. I’ll be able to pick your people out of any crowd. You know it; I know it.”

  “Blake,” Murphy began.

  “Grand Central, Tuesday, nine p.m. See you there.”

  The line went dead, and Stark and Murphy looked at each other.

  “New York,” Murphy said. “Fits with our intel. Looks like we’re in the right neighborhood.”

  “What intel?” Stark said. It was the first time he’d heard the city mentioned in relation to Blake.

  “I spoke to Faraday a couple hours ago. One of her pet cybermonkeys thinks they’ve narrowed down Blake’s base to somewhere in New York, probably upstate.”

  Stark bit his tongue against the urge to make a comment about need-to-know. Instead, he focused on what this new development meant.

  “If he’s serious about making the trade, he’ll need the Black Book first. If he told Bryant the truth, he’s stashed it at home, which means he’s going to need to swing by en route to the city.”

  Stark considered the new information. They had two locations: one a wide search area and one a very specific location, and a rough time frame in which Blake would need to hit both over the next three days. But in the meantime, they could find out where he was right now. Stark dialed H, got the switchboard, and asked to be put through to Williamson. Murphy tapped him on the shoulder, and he remembered to put the call on speaker again.