Winterlong

by Mason Cross

  As far as we can tell. The words echoed in Stark’s head. Good to have certainties.

  Jennings completed the sweep and reported no other security on the approach. Stark saw him tapping out a short signal back to base, knowing that he was sending a simple one-word message: DARK.

  Almost instantly, the solitary light on the upper floor winked out. The big house lay before them, as black and uninviting as a freshly dug grave. Stark suppressed a shiver that had nothing to do with the cold. Murphy told team two to be ready to provide cover, before signaling for team three’s approach to begin. The pair of men east of them—Kowalski and Dixon—began the advance. Dixon hung back, covering the windows of the house with his rifle as Kowalski approached the house at a weaving run, his footsteps crunching softly in the deep snow.

  You could lay the groundwork as well as possible, you could make sure your firepower was overwhelmingly superior, you could confirm to within a ninety-nine percent probability that there were no hostiles, but an approach over open ground to a target location was always nerve-racking. Spacing out to present distinct targets meant that you would get advance warning of any hostile action, but that was of little comfort to the unlucky one on the receiving end of that action.

  Stark breathed out as Kowalski made the cover of the awning hanging over the north side of the house. Dixon covered the same ground just as quickly, and the two men paused before splitting and circling the perimeter.

  Stark waited until both men had vanished around the sides of the building before looking back to the spot where he knew team two was. He saw Jennings quickly, but it took him a second to find Usher, who was almost invisible in his cover spot. He glanced at Murphy, who was staring straight ahead, intently focused on the house as though he expected it to start moving.

  “South side clear,” came Dixon’s voice a moment later.

  Murphy spoke softly into the mic on his headset, and a few moments later two more white shapes split off from the tree cover and began to approach the house.

  Jennings and Usher gained the perimeter of the house quickly and moved into their assigned positions at the front entrance. As soon as the two called in their positions, Murphy and Stark left cover and approached the house. As the others had done, they split out in a widening V formation, headed for opposite ends of the north side of the house. Stark kept his AR-15 raised, his eyes on the window that had been lit. He knew it had been a security light to make the house look inhabited, but he had to focus somewhere.

  Stark made the shelter of the awning, in front of the big picture window of the living room. Peering through it, he could see by the meager light still in the sky that the room was sparsely furnished. Couch, television, books lining the entirety of the opposite wall. A door in the bookcase wall was closed, and he knew from the floorplans it led into the central hallway.

  Murphy joined him at the window, the two of them exchanging a glance that said, So far, so good. Murphy nodded toward the northeast corner of the house. They moved in single file toward the corner that would take them around to the front of the house, the side that faced the main driveway. When Stark saw a moving shadow, he called out the pass phrase in a low voice.

  “Tango.”

  “Disco,” came the reply, equally quietly. Stark rounded the corner and came face-to-face with Dixon. They passed by each other, and Dixon continued his circuit of the perimeter. When Stark and Murphy reached the wraparound porch and the front door, Usher and Jennings were waiting for them. Murphy tapped the square button on his earpiece again.

  “Kowalski, Dixon? Are you in position?”

  There was a pause before Kowalski answered in the affirmative. “Back door secure.” Dixon had completed his circuit and was with Kowalski covering the back door, just in case somebody was at home and tried to sneak out.

  The advance intel showed that the previous owner had installed an Axiom burglar alarm about a decade before. It was an expensive model. Battery backup, so it wouldn’t be affected by the power cut. There was no reason for Blake to have changed the alarm, other than extreme caution. Jennings was prepped for the Axiom. They examined the door. It was solid wood, maybe with steel behind it. The lock was six-point contact. Nothing out of the ordinary, but certainly secure enough for a normal household. It took Jennings thirty seconds to pick it. On standard ops like this, they wouldn’t bother with such niceties, but there was no need to blow the door, and this way would mean the house looked undisturbed. That would be important later. Jennings glanced at the others when he was ready. The others trained their weapons on the door as he turned the handle.

  Before he had gotten it open two inches, the noise started. Deafeningly loud in the silence, a dog was barking within. Jennings’s gun jumped up in his hand. The four of them exchanged quick glances.

  “Nobody said anything about a dog,” Stark said, eyeing the door.

  “Shoot it?” Usher suggested indifferently. His gun was raised, and he was peering into the darkness within. The dog, wherever it was, had yet to come into the light.

  Stark shrugged and nodded. He liked dogs. He didn’t like them enough to get bitten trying to restrain one, or to waste time they’d need to deactivate the alarm.

  Stark, Usher, and Murphy trained their guns on the door as Jennings pushed it open. Stark’s eyes narrowed as they saw an empty hallway. But the barking continued, sounding as though it were right on top of them. It took a second to locate the source: a small speaker attached to the wall beside a keypad. The barking sound was obviously rigged to activate when anyone approached the door, or perhaps when the handle was turned. A cheap security device, more a novelty toy than anything else. The keypad beside it was the entry device for the real alarm, and Stark suspected that would be anything but.

  Jennings was examining it, shaking his head. A wire led from the keypad to a sealed white box on the wall.

  “This ain’t an Axiom.”

  “Can you turn it off?” Stark wasn’t too perturbed if the answer was no. If they could get in without leaving an obvious trace, so much the better, but the main thing was they now had access to the house.

  Jennings nodded, not looking happy. “Of course I can.” As he spoke he was shining some sort of black light over the keypad, presumably to check if Blake had made the classic mistake. He shook his head. “He taps the keys.” Meaning Blake either changed the code regularly, or he made a point of periodically tapping all nine number keys on the pad so that an intruder would not easily be able to narrow down the specific set of numbers that composed the code.

  Jennings reached into his pack and withdrew a couple of small handheld devices. Discarding one, he held the other up to the keypad and tapped a couple of keys. After a pause, the device beeped and a five-digit code appeared on the screen. Jennings’s fingers danced quickly across the pad on the wall, the red light switched to green, and the low electronic whine that was barely audible under the barking cut out.

  Irritated, Jennings reached up and yanked the speaker off the wall, silencing the barking noise. Absolute quiet descended, and the four of them took a moment to listen for any sounds from within the house.

  After a couple of seconds, Stark heard a series of soft clicks as the others turned on their night-vision goggles. The intelligence all but guaranteed they were alone, but intelligence can be wrong. Safer to clear each level of the building without flashlights to ensure they had an edge over anyone who could be lurking within. Stark and Jennings slid their additional packs off and left them in the hallway. They would unload the contents later.

  Relieved to be unencumbered by the pack, Stark slid his own goggles down over his eyes and clicked the switch at the side, blinking his eyes as they adjusted to the pixelated green wash that lit the darkened hallway up as bright as a summer noon.

  He moved his head from side to side, taking in the surroundings in the amplified ambient light. His breath caught in his throat as he saw movement out of the corner of his eye, from a direction away from the other three men
. He jerked his head around, raising his gun. A familiar figure duplicated his actions precisely. Stark smiled. He had been about to open fire on a hostile full-length mirror.

  He lowered his gun and let out a relieved breath as he took stock of the layout, ticking off comparisons to the schematic in his head. The hallway was large, three doors to the left, the farthest of which had to lead to the attached garage on the west side of the building. Ahead was the stairs to the second floor. On the right was the door to the living room. The floor was wood, looked like the original floorboards. The walls of the hallway were unadorned. There were no furnishings, beyond a coat rail by the door that held a raincoat and a leather jacket.

  “All right,” Murphy said. “We secure the building first. Then we see what we can see.”

  Stark realized he was holding his breath again as he approached the stairs.

  61

  UPSTATE NEW YORK

  I made pretty good time from Chicago, spurred on by the apocalyptic tone of the weather reports on the radio. I drove five hundred miles straight through the night, knowing that the heavy flurries of snow were merely a curtain raiser for the main event farther east. I was dead tired by the time the sky began to lighten, and a near miss with an articulated truck outside of Buffalo convinced me that I needed a break and a lot of caffeine. I pulled into the next rest stop and went into the diner.

  I took a booth and ordered French toast, bacon, hash browns on the side, and a large pot of coffee. While I waited, I wound my watch ahead for the hour I had lost on the trip: It was just after nine a.m. local time. I took out the phone Banner had given me and switched it on. I connected to the diner’s Wi-Fi and checked the weather again. It wasn’t looking good. I checked one other thing before the waitress returned with my order.

  I drank the first cup of coffee so fast that it scorched my tongue and took it easier with the second one, feeling my senses sharpen as the caffeine started to do its work. I poured a third cup before I started on the food. Half an hour later, I was feeling just about comfortable with the idea of being behind the wheel again.

  It was technically daylight by then, but not so you would know it from the sky. I had found a Coleman Hawkins CD in the glove box and listened to it on repeat for a hundred miles or so. As dark gray morning became dark gray afternoon, I switched back to the radio. The East Coast was on lockdown: All public transportation was to be suspended from five o’clock, all businesses closed. I took the news of the strict curfew after five with mixed emotions. It would keep the way clear for me, but it would also make it riskier to complete the trip. Then again, the curfew was focused on the big metropolitan areas, where a lone car on the streets would be far more noticeable. I had hoped to make my destination in daylight. Now I would be grateful just to get there.

  It was after four when I hit the outskirts of Wilston, and it was clear that the Toyota Banner had provided me with was going to be a poor match for the incoming weather. An SUV would have been better, but I reminded myself that beggars can’t be choosers. I pulled over and took Banner’s phone out again. No 4G, not even half a G. Coverage was patchy at the best of times out here, but in these conditions, you could forget about it. It had been more than an hour since I had been able to access the Internet.

  I pulled back onto the road, the tires spinning a little, struggling to get traction, and drove down Main Street. The deserted sidewalks behind the walls of plowed snow and the rows of shuttered stores on the main drag made me worry I’d left it a little too late. An hour ahead of the curfew, and barely one in five businesses on the street seemed to be open. I guessed most folks were headed home to batten down the hatches, or already there, relaxing in the warmth and watching the action on the news. I was starting to give up hope when I saw exactly what I needed—an outdoor supplies store. The only problem was, there was a guy outside pulling down the shutters. I pulled the car to the side of the road and parked. The five-foot-high frozen mound of plowed snow at the side of the road meant I was actually parking close to the middle of the road, but there wasn’t enough traffic for that to be a problem.

  I opened the door and yelled a greeting at the guy pulling down the shutters. When the figure turned around, I saw it wasn’t a man at all, but a woman wearing a bulky gray coat. Her pink face peered out at me from within the hood. She waved the hooked pole she had been using to draw down the shutters in the direction of the door.

  “Sorry. We’re closed.”

  I shut the door of the Toyota and hurried around to where there was a dip in the snow drift, half stepping, half stumbling over it. She watched me as I approached, shaking her head vehemently and gripping the pole in one hand.

  “I’m sorry ...” she repeated.

  “Come on,” I said, smiling and trying to look cold and desperate. It wasn’t difficult, a method performance, you might say. “It’s kind of an emergency.”

  She didn’t say anything. Her eyes looked me up and down from behind eyelashes that had caught some flakes of snow.

  “I need to get to my mother’s house before the curfew— she lives alone.”

  She remained tight-lipped.

  “I just need a proper coat and a couple of other things, I’ll be five minutes. If you want me to make it worth your while ... Well, I don’t have much extra money, but ...”

  She let out an exasperated sigh, and I knew then she was going to give me my five minutes. I hoped I could talk her into something else, too.

  62

  NEW YORK CITY

  Williamson called Faraday over without looking up from her screen. ’’They’re in. No resistance.”

  Faraday nodded. The update had to have come in on the sat phone. There had been a tense few minutes when the communications had gone offline on the team’s approach to the house. The storm had knocked out cell towers across the region, so they had had an hour or so to get used to not having standard phones. It was frustrating. She had run operations on the other side of the world with far greater real-time information than what she had access to this time.

  “Is Murphy on the line?”

  “Stark,” Williamson replied.

  “Put him on.”

  Williamson handed her the headset and she addressed Stark.

  “Talk to me.”

  “House is secured. Security was as expected, and we’ve finessed it. Nothing bent, nothing broken. No welcoming committee.”

  “Excellent. Come back to me if anything develops.”

  Stark signed off, and Faraday handed the headset back to Williamson. The adrenaline rush of the approach to the house was over; it was a waiting game now. She would receive hourly updates unless one of two things happened: the team found the Black Book, or Carter Blake arrived home.

  FIVE YEARS AGO

  NEW YORK CITY

  Martinez and I laid out a plan of action and each of us took one of the Black Books. We shook hands outside of the little house in Cleveland, and I knew I would never see him again.

  On my trip back to the city, I prepared a short video presentation, which I sent by secure e-mail to Drakakis’s address. I laid out the salient facts in the video. The first point was indisputable: I was alive and well, and so Murphy had screwed up in his task of killing me. I knew they would suspect that anyway, given that no bodies had been found at the scene.

  Second, I confirmed what I imagined were their worst fears. Martinez had gotten out of Afghanistan, too, and we had been in touch. I didn’t talk about where I was, where he was, anything like that. I simply held up the black drive Martinez had given me so the viewer could take a good look at it, and then I switched to a series of screen grabs from the data on the file. I had had to burn one of the two remaining view windows to take these, but that was unavoidable. I ran through various screen grabs as a slide show. I didn’t talk over this part: The slides told the story for themselves. The real story of the Carson assassination.

  I finished the clip with the camera back on me.

  “I’ll talk to you soon.”r />
  I gave Drakakis half an hour to sweat after I sent the e-mail, and then I dialed his number on the burner cell.

  “I’m speaking to a dead man,” he said, in lieu of a hello.

  “I got that message back in Kandahar,” I said. “Somebody ought to have told you that threats work better before you fail to follow through on them.”

  “I want that fucking drive back.”

  “Be more reasonable. Otherwise you get it back via the front page of the New York Times.”

  “You wouldn’t dare.”

  “Why not? What have I got to lose?”

  There was a pause, and his voice was more controlled when it came back. “What do you want?”

  “You already know what I want. Forget I exist. Forget about Martinez, too. As far as you’re concerned from this moment forward, we never came back from Afghanistan. Which is just the way you planned it, of course. As long as you leave us alone, we’ll keep quiet. But if I get a hint that you’re trying to come after either of us, or anybody else connected to us...”

  “If that information comes to light, you’ll be jeopardizing—”

  “I don’t think you realize the severity of this situation, Drakakis. You made a bad situation a hundred times worse. You turned a worst-case scenario of bad publicity and a career setback into a grade-A clusterfuck. You ordered the murder of a United States senator and his wife. I leak this file, and you and your friends aren’t just fired or going to jail. Remind me, is it the gas chamber or lethal injection at Leavenworth?”

  He didn’t say anything for a minute, trying to calculate a way out of this that didn’t involve him having to trust the word of a man he’d just tried to have murdered. There wasn’t one.

  “You’re lucky I’m offering you this deal, Drakakis,” I said. “You think this sits right with me? You think I want to let you get away with this? The only reason we’re having this conversation is because I know the only course of action that makes sense is stalemate. Like the old days: mutually-assured destruction. Neither one of us is going to win this war. You walk away; I walk away. Clear?”