by Mason Cross
There was a click, a couple seconds of silence, and then Williamson’s bored Midwestern drawl appeared on the line. “Chicago.”
“Chicago?” Stark nodded. So they had been right to cover the destination of the Empire Builder. If only they hadn’t been spread so thin. There were only two men in Chicago, both stationed centrally, as near as possible to the main transportation hubs.
“Uh-huh,” Williamson agreed disinterestedly. “Location is showing up bright and clear. South Lafayette Avenue.”
“He’s not running a bounce?” Murphy asked.
“No way. This is crystal clear. Hasn’t moved in the last five minutes—I take it you just finished the call?”
Stark bit back the impulse to make a sarcastic response. What the hell else would they have done before calling Williamson? Go out for a leisurely breakfast? Instead, he quickly asked, “How close are Markham and Kowalski?” He was unable to keep the excitement out of his voice.
“Kowalski is five minutes away and closing, Markham a little farther. Only I haven’t sent him there.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s a Greyhound station on West Ninety-Fifth a quarter mile from the location. Markham’s headed straight there.”
“Nice work. Call me back as soon as anything’s confirmed.”
Stark hung up and looked out of the window at the frozen fields outside the motel room window. He turned his head back to Murphy.
“This could be it.”
Murphy wore a troubled expression, as though this was a setback instead of an opportunity. He shook his head. “He’s not that stupid, Stark.”
With that, he opened the door and headed across the hall to the other room. Whatever happened next, there was no longer any reason to stick around this place a moment longer.
Stark started packing his equipment, calculating how long it would take them to drive to the nearest airport. He knew Murphy was right to be skeptical, but he couldn’t help wondering: Could Blake have finally slipped up badly enough to let them catch him? A Greyhound station made sense, after all—another form of anonymous mass transit. Cash, no ID. A direct bus leaving Chicago now would get Blake to New York by tomorrow evening. Blake knew they would be able to pinpoint the phone’s location, of course, but perhaps he wasn’t banking on them having any kind of rapid-response presence in that particular city.
Of course, there was no way Blake would be in the same place by the time Kowalski arrived at the location, whether he made it there five minutes or five seconds from now. But Markham ... Markham might well arrive at the Greyhound station on Ninety-Fifth at the same time as Carter Blake. And then Blake’s trip would be cut short, one way or another.
56
CHICAGO
As soon as I hung up, I put the phone down on the table and headed for the door, checking my watch: 11:17 p.m. I had picked my spot after careful thought: the back room of a bar within easy reach of the Greyhound station. I knew they wouldn’t necessarily believe I was stupid enough to leave them a trail, but that wasn’t the point. I wanted to give them some more loose ends they couldn’t ignore, put some possibilities in front of them that would make them spread their resources more thinly.
I knew it was likely they would have somebody in Chicago—again, it was what I would have done. But unless that somebody happened to be standing right outside the bar, it wouldn’t do them a lot of good. Even then, I wasn’t leaving by the front entrance. That was the other reason I’d picked this spot.
Assuming they had started tracking the phone the moment they saw Kowalski’s number flash up, I estimated I would have a matter of minutes before they arrived, depending on how close they were. I opened the fire door and stepped out into the alley outside. It was deserted, just as it had been half an hour earlier when I had timed my route. I closed the door behind me until it locked, and then I jogged down the alley to where it opened on West Ninety-Third Street. I waited for a gap in traffic, and then I crossed the street and entered the alley across the street, heading north via alleys for another two blocks until I hit Ninety-First, where the black Toyota sedan Banner had provided me with was parked at the side of the street. I took the key she had given me in the coffee shop from my pocket as I crossed to the car.
I unlocked the door and got behind the wheel. My watch told me that I had made it here in less than four minutes. I had already covered twice the distance I could have had I been driving. If it were me, in the absence of any other information, I would ignore Kowalski’s phone and head for the nearest transport hub, which was the Ninety-Fifth Street Greyhound station.
Misdirection. They would suspect it, but they’d have to check it out, just the same.
I twisted the keys in the ignition and the engine grumbled to life. I pulled out into a gap in traffic and headed south and then east, scanning the road ahead and the mirrors for police cars or black SUVs. As the second hand hit the twelve to make it 11:33, I was on I-90 headed east, matching the brisk sixty of the other cars in my lane. The towers of Chicago reflected back at me in the rearview mirror. I hoped my pursuers would be there for a while yet.
FIVE YEARS AGO
CLEVELAND, OHIO
“How did you find me?”
Jake Martinez looked like a condemned man as he stood in the doorway of the unassuming suburban house on the outskirts of Cleveland. I simply stared at him for a while. I didn’t want to admit to myself how much satisfaction I was taking in his discomfort. Eventually, I spoke.
“This isn’t what you think,” I said. “I want to talk.”
He looked confused.
“I know about the senator. He sounded me out, too. I guess his mistake was to cast his net a little too wide. Murphy found out about it. I was marked before we shipped out.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“Because you’re still breathing?” I lifted my shirt from my belt, exposing the long, inexpertly stitched scar in my side. I winced as the fabric rubbed against the still-raw skin. “A retirement gift from Winterlong.”
He glanced at the wound and then opened the door wider.
A couple of minutes later, I was sitting on the couch while Martinez brewed coffee in the small kitchen unit. I took my phone out for the millionth time and tapped into the new e-mail account I had set up: nothing. I didn’t want to be here. I wanted to be in the apartment in New York, confirming that Carol was safe and well. I had e-mailed her as soon as I’d managed to get back into the country. I had told her that I would be there as soon as I could, but there was something I had to do first. Something that could keep us all safe.
The first few stages of the long journey home had been fraught with close shaves. Only once I reached the border with Pakistan did I let my guard down enough to start looking into what had happened stateside. On the plane out of Karachi, I had caught up on the stories via half a dozen newspapers, reading between the lines of each one. The senator had died a few hours after his wife, following a last-ditch attempt at lifesaving surgery. It had been a charity dinner: nothing particularly newsworthy. Until a concealed gunman took the Carlsons down with three shots: two in the senator’s head, the other hitting Elizabeth Carlson in the chest, rupturing her aorta. It was assumed she was collateral damage, but I knew better. It was a message.
The hunt for the perpetrator hadn’t taken long. An Iraq veteran with a long history of mental health issues named Evan Froelich had been found dead in his apartment shortly after his fingerprints were found at the scene of Carlson’s murder. He had had some kind of grudge against the senator, as a file full of angry letters from him had attested. The story was he had lain in wait, killed the senator, gone home, and shot himself. Open and shut. And nobody seriously questioned it but the conspiracy nuts, who busied themselves blaming Mossad or the Lizard People.
I was looking at my blank inbox again when Martinez spoke from the kitchen. “So if you’re not here to kill me, why did you take the trouble to track me down?” It was the first thing he had said si
nce inviting me in.
“I didn’t have that much trouble, Martinez,” I said. “Which means after we finish this conversation, you need to get the hell out of here and go somewhere you didn’t spend successive vacations in 2002 and 2003.”
He nodded. “My grandparents lived out here. If there’s a consolation, I know they’ll be a couple days behind you. As usual.” He came back out from behind the service island and put a mug of coffee down in front of me. “Black, right?”
I nodded. The mug was red, with a picture of Pac-Man on it.
“So why are you here?” he asked. “Not that I don’t appreciate the warning, you understand. But I’m guessing this wasn’t on your way.”
I took a sip of the coffee. “I want to know what you took from the safe house. There was only one reason you would have vanished in the night, rather than waiting out the mission. You didn’t know they were onto me, so the only reason you would have risked attracting attention was because it was the only chance to get your hands on something you needed.” .
“Interesting theory.”
“Senator Carlson told me he needed evidence that would give him Drakakis and the others. That was what you took, wasn’t it?”
He drank his coffee, considering. “It’s over now. Carlson’s dead. That’s what happens to people who mess with them. We’re not going to bring him back by risking our own necks, too.”
“I know that. But we can split the risk. If Drakakis knows we both have the goods on him, we can make a deal.”
“What kind of deal?”
“The only deal open to us right now, as far as I can see. Forget we ever existed.”
“It won’t work,” he said, shaking his head.
“So what’s the alternative? Sit here and wait for them to come and get you? I’ll do the talking. I’ll make Drakakis understand. He’s a pragmatist, and I’m not going to give him any choice.”
Martinez stared out of the window at the quiet suburban street outside. A trio of kids sailed by on bicycles, wrapped up well against the cold.
“We’re dead men, you know that?” he said, not looking at me. “All we’re doing is delaying the inevitable.”
“We’re all delaying the inevitable, Jake,” I said. “Doesn’t mean it’s not worth the effort.”
When he didn’t respond, I asked him the question that had been niggling me since Afghanistan. “Why me?”
“What do you mean?”
“It had to be you who told the senator he could trust me. What made you so sure?”
He shrugged, as though it was the first time he had considered the question, though I knew that couldn’t be true. “I know people. You were the only candidate. And later, over there, when the others were discussing detonating those car bombs and you talked them out of it, I knew I had the right guy.”
Martinez put his mug down. He got up and walked through to the hallway. I stayed put and listened as he ascended the creaking stairs. A couple of minutes later, he reappeared. He held out the palm of his hand, in which there were two tiny black flash drives.
“It’s called the Black Book. Offline orders for operational commanders. There’s a sunset script that lets you access it five times before it’s wiped. One of these drives has two more access windows left, the other only has one. It may be technically possible to copy it, but it’s beyond my skills, and I can’t risk taking it to a third party.”
“I take it you’ve viewed them?”
“Yeah, and I took screen prints, for what they’re worth. Without the metadata, they don’t prove anything. But it’s more than I expected. Between them, they have the details of the hit on Carlson, together with a profile for Froelich, the guy they framed. Date stamps will confirm this was all planned out way in advance of the assassination. You’re right. This is our ace in the hole.”
He handed one of the drives to me.
“That’s the one with the Senator Carlson material. It’s also the one with two windows remaining—you’ll need to use one when you talk to Drakakis, as proof.”
“What’s on your drive?” I asked.
“Everything else.”
I held it between thumb and forefinger, wondering if this was the right thing to do, or merely the best thing to do in a bad situation. In the end I decided saving my own skin was better than going out in a futile blaze of glory. I told myself I couldn’t change anything anyway. Even if Winterlong was shut down, it would only be replaced by something just as bad.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said.
SUNDAY, JANUARY 10TH
57
NEW YORK CITY
It was four o’clock in the morning when the car dropped Faraday off directly outside the anonymous office building on West Fortieth. Hank was her driver again. Hank had three ex-wives and five kids. This was more personal information than Faraday retained about anyone else in her working life. Unlike the other two drivers, Hank liked to talk. He was entirely unintimidated by her and chatted away like a cabbie while he drove. Faraday had been irritated by him at first and had come close to having him reassigned. But gradually she had warmed to his constantly upbeat attitude. Occasionally, she even engaged him in conversation. But not tonight.
Tonight, even Hank had seemed to sense that silence was what was required. As he opened the door for her, he offered a smile.
“Hope you have a good day, Ms. Faraday.”
She murmured a “thank you” and hurried through the main door to escape the chill wind cutting down Fortieth. She nodded to the security guard at the desk and swiped her pass to get through the barriers. She waited for the priority elevator and, once she was inside with the doors closed, withdrew a second pass, which allowed her to access the twenty-seventh floor.
She had been away only long enough to go back to her apartment, shower, change into fresh clothes, and consume part of an uninspiring meal of sea bass and wild rice delivered hot to her door by Dean & DeLuca. When she realized she was far more interested in the fact her phone had not rung than the meal, she had scraped the remainder of it into the trash and called for a car. As she waited, she thought about black books and black boxes.
Four hours on from the call from Kowalski’s phone, and it had become abundantly clear that Carter Blake had managed to pull one more disappearing act. The phone had been found exactly where Williamson had pinpointed it during Blake’s call. Kowalski had made the scene within minutes, eager for a rematch with the troublesome target who had broken his nose. It was a bar, quiet for a Saturday night. It had a back room that was empty of customers. On the table nearest the entrance was Kowalski’s phone, placed carefully on top of a note that said, See you soon.
Naturally, there were no cameras. The barmaid looked up from her magazine long enough to answer a couple of Kowalski’s questions. She vaguely remembered a guy in his thirties with a crew cut buying a coffee, but she couldn’t say when he’d left. There was a fire door in back, which meant Blake could have gone that way, or just as likely, he could have left by the front door without the barmaid noticing.
Meanwhile, Markham had arrived on scene at the Ninety-Fifth Street Greyhound station. It was busy, but not so busy that he wouldn’t have noticed Blake arriving in a hurry. The bus terminal was a long strip beneath a canopy. Markham had been able to position himself where he could see the passengers joining the various buses and the ticket booths. After twenty minutes had passed, there was still no sign of Blake. He called Kowalski, confirming he had retrieved his own phone from where Blake had discarded it.
On Faraday’s instructions, Kowalski had gotten back in his rented Ford and made circuits around the streets near the bar, while Markham kept watching the bus station, gradually becoming more and more certain he was wasting his time. They called up a list of the buses leaving the station within the window before and immediately after Markham had arrived on the scene, just in case he’d narrowly missed Blake, and found only two possibilities, headed for Memphis and Columbus, respectively. Faraday arranged for men
to meet the two buses at their next scheduled stops and give them the once-over, putting a four-man team on the Columbus bus as the most likely option. She suspected it was a red herring, but a bus would be considerably easier to check than a train, at least.
The elevator doors opened and she crossed the corridor, tapped the code into the keypad, and entered the ops room. Aaron Kent, one of the three deputies beneath Murphy, was staring at the main display, satellite feeds showing various areas of the country. He turned when the doors opened, and Faraday looked at him. She didn’t need to ask a question. Kent shook his head. No developments. Had there been any, she would have been contacted.
She walked across to her office, leaving the door open so she could hear any changes in atmosphere from the ops room, and sat down behind her desk.
No developments, four hours on.
She had ordered all of the technicians except Williamson to access security cameras around the general area of the bar. Unfortunately, the neighborhood was camera-light, which was undoubtedly another reason Blake had selected it. There was nothing covering the front entrance to the bar, nothing covering the alley out back. With all of the resources at their disposal, the only thing they had established for sure was where Blake had been up until 11:17 p.m. Chicago time.
Where had he gone after that? Thin air.
Which was exactly the point. Of course he hadn’t been stupid enough to tell them exactly where he was without first making sure he had a guaranteed exit strategy. But equally, he knew they would have to take the bait. They would have to waste time and manpower making sure. Meanwhile, Blake was in a stolen car, or hitching a prearranged ride, or in a taxi, already miles from the city. Or perhaps he was holed up somewhere safe in Chicago, knowing they were faced with a dead end on his movements. Perhaps the business about trading the Black Book for Bryant had been another ruse, another misdirection.