Winterlong

by Mason Cross

  I heard the sound of Drakakis clearing his throat. When he spoke again, it was like he was spitting the words out through his teeth, with a gun to his head. In a way, he was. “You have a deal. And I take it it goes without saying you know what will happen to you if those files ever see the light of day? They won’t find us all. They won’t find me, no matter where I have to go. And I’ll hunt you down to the fucking ends of the earth and cut your heart out.”

  “I’m glad we see eye to eye.”

  I cut the call and dropped the phone in a nearby trash can. I walked two blocks south and then flagged down a cab. I told the driver to take me to an address in Hell’s Kitchen.

  The apartment was a sixth-floor walk-up. I had leased it as a precaution after my first meeting with the senator, paying six months’ rent in advance. I had a feeling I might soon be in need of somewhere in the city that was off the grid, held under a different name. I didn’t know how right I had been.

  As I approached the building, I tried to blank my mind, to not think about why there had been no e-mails from Carol. I had tried calling her cell several times over the last few days, as much to reassure myself that she really had gotten rid of it as anything else. Each time the call had gone straight to voice mail.

  I checked the mail slot downstairs. The key was gone.

  I climbed the six flights of stairs and took my gun out, holding it by my side. I stood to one side of the door and took my own key from my pocket and slid it quietly into the lock. I twisted it and pushed. The door swung silently inward on hinges I had greased two months before. There was a short hallway terminating in a window that looked out into the airshaft. Bathroom and bedroom on one side, combination kitchen and living room on the other. All three doors were closed. I stood in the doorway, listening for sounds.

  No footsteps, no springs settling on the couch. No TV noise. No cooking sounds. Nothing.

  “Hello?” I called. “It’s me.”

  There was no response. Either nobody was here, or somebody was here and was deliberately keeping silent. I held my breath and turned the handle on the nearest door, the bathroom. It swung open and I brought my gun up, checking the tiny, cramped room and shower cubicle. It was empty, but there was a pink disposable razor in the trash that I was pretty sure wasn’t mine.

  Bedroom next. The small double bed was made up more neatly than I’d left it, but there was nobody on it, under it, or in the miniscule closet. So far, so good. Carol had made it here, by the looks of things, and there were no signs of struggle so far. But I still had one room to check.

  I held my breath and twisted the handle on the living room door. The door swung in and I stepped into the room, covering the space with my gun.

  It was empty.

  I breathed out at last. I had been worried about finding evidence of a struggle, or worse. Instead, the place was much as I’d left it. Couch, television, bookcase, all of which had come as part of the lease. The tiny kitchen took up the westernmost quarter of the room, separated from the living space by a breakfast counter with two high stools. There was a sealed cream-colored envelope on the surface.

  I holstered my gun and walked across the room in three strides. I ripped opened the envelope, knowing in my heart of hearts what the letter would say. The message was briefer than I had anticipated, but I had guessed right. It was a single sheet of notepaper. Clear, concise. Carol had said it all with four words in her inimitable curling script.

  Don’t look for me.

  I took it to the couch and sat there for a half hour, occasionally reading the note again to see if it had changed. It never did.

  After a while I realized that the light in the room had changed as the sun sank below the skyline, and that time hadn’t really been standing still after all. I had done everything I’d come back to New York to do, and it was time to move on. I went into the bathroom and took a shower. I found a pair of scissors and my own razor in the cabinet and started to work on the beard that had grown back over the past few weeks. When I was done I looked like a new man. A man with no past and an uncharted future. I examined the new man in the mirror as I toweled off my face. I wondered what his name was.

  Then I locked up, walked back down the six flights and out onto the street. I walked a couple of blocks west and descended to the Fiftieth Street subway. I took the E line south to Penn Station, and then I stood below the departures board, watching the destinations flash up on the screen and deciding where I wanted to start my new life.

  63

  UPSTATE NEW YORK

  It took them what felt like a long time to clear every room of the house. It was somehow larger than it looked from outside. Perhaps there was some kind of optical illusion where the vastness of the sky and the woods and the hills outside somehow diminished the house itself. But the layout conformed to the plans they’d studied ahead of time. Three bedrooms, only one made up, a study with every wall lined with books, a living room with even more books, a large dining kitchen, two bathrooms, one upstairs, one down, an attic that was entirely empty, and a large, cement-floored basement. On the south side of the building was a small garage that contained a battered ten-year-old Jeep.

  The basement was accessed via a locked door and a set of stairs. There was a work desk and tools, some boxes full of stored junk, and a single, wide steel bookcase on the wall. Jennings examined the edges of it and knocked on the wall. He looked at Stark and Murphy, who were waiting for his verdict.

  “Could be something back there,” he said. “We can blow it to find out.”

  “Bad idea,” Stark said, examining the edges of the bookcase. “We don’t know if it’s rigged to prevent forced entry.”

  Murphy nodded in agreement. Stark knew he wouldn’t want to risk losing the contents within if there was another option. He tapped the square button on his headset. “Markham, bring our guest to the house.”

  Murphy’s instincts had been right about Blake offering to deal for Bryant. Maybe he would be right that Bryant could help them open the secret door, if there was one. While they waited for Markham to escort Bryant from the cars to the house, Stark left Murphy and Jennings downstairs and made another tour around the above-ground floors, spending more time to take in the details, the little things about a dwelling that told you about the owner.

  Books aside, it was striking how Spartan the house was. There were no pictures on the walls, no ornaments, no interesting kitchenware beyond the basic implements. It was so devoid of clutter that Stark might have described it as a show home, except that a show home would have been artfully dressed to suggest more of a personal touch. He supposed it made sense. Blake was a man used to being on the road. He had carried this aesthetic with him when he’d left Winterlong, maybe even without realizing it. This was a place to disappear from the world when he needed to. To relax and recuperate, hence the books. But not a place to live.

  Before they found the bookcase, Stark had started to worry that Faraday and Murphy had miscalculated. They had banked on Blake’s homing instinct bringing him back here, to where he would think he was safe. But what if they were wrong? Maybe Blake would simply drop off the face of the earth, cash in his chips, and start again with a new name. He had done it before, after all.

  The next few hours would give them the answer to that. Taking Blake’s last-known position in Chicago as a starting point and extrapolating using various scenarios—excluding flying, of course—Blake would be getting here at some point in the next few hours. The weather and the official curfew might have chased him off the road, of course, but Stark doubted it. A little heavy weather wouldn’t dissuade a guy like Blake, not when he had a self-imposed deadline at Grand Central on Tuesday night. The one unknown quantity was the Black Book—if Blake had it on his person, he could head straight to New York City, might be there already, in fact.

  But that was unlikely. Something so valuable would be stored safely, not carried around on every job, where it could be lost or stolen or damaged. It made sense that it w
ould be here, and the bookcase in the basement existed, just as Bryant had described. In a little while they would get their answer.

  64

  Bryant sat in the back of the SUV and watched the snow come down outside. The last of the daylight filtering through the tree cover had vanished. He had shelved any ideas of going anywhere long ago. The doors were locked, the safety mechanism engaged so they could not be opened from inside. Even had they been unlocked, he knew there would be a bullet in his head before he could fully open the door.

  It had been more than an hour since the other men had left for the house. Again, he felt guilty for talking, for telling Murphy about the bookcase Blake had spoken about. But then, they’d evidently known about the place already. It wasn’t as though Blake had given them an address. When he’d talked about the farmhouse in Upstate New York, he realized he was just confirming something they already knew. Providing that information had kept him alive, for now at least.

  One of the two men who had stayed behind was in the driver’s seat. He hadn’t spoken more than two words the whole time, answering Bryant’s early attempts at making conversation with a stony silence. The other one had drawn the short straw: He was outside in the cold keeping watch.

  He thought about the house and what the men were going to find there. Did they have the right place? Was Blake there already? Was Blake even still alive? For the past hour, ever since the other men had headed for the house, his unease had been growing. Whatever they found in there, it meant one thing. They were about to find out how useful, or otherwise, he was.

  Back at the motel in Minnesota, Murphy had seemed satisfied that Bryant was telling the truth about what Blake had told him. And it mostly was the truth. All about how Blake had some information on them on a flash drive and that he needed to retrieve it, and that it was stored behind a hidden door in a bookcase in a place out in the middle of nowhere. That was the trick to a bluff, though. You had to be believable, but you had to hold something back. Bryant had claimed he couldn’t remember the names of the books that would unlock the door, couldn’t remember if Blake had even told him. And therefore Murphy had decided he was just useful enough. Bryant assumed Murphy was the leader, at least on the ground. Although none of them seemed to wear insignias denoting rank, the other men seemed to defer to his authority.

  As though to illustrate the point, the man in the front seat suddenly stiffened. Bryant could tell he was listening to instruction through the earpiece in his right ear. He had a pretty good idea of who was giving the instruction. After a second, he acknowledged, saying, “Copy,” and turned around in the seat to look directly at Bryant for the first time.

  Bryant’s mouth went dry as he stared back at the man in the driver’s seat, wondering exactly what he had just been instructed to do. After a second, he spoke.

  “Looks like you got an invite to the party.”

  Ten minutes later, after a grueling hike through the woods at about twice the pace he was comfortable with, Bryant was standing in the basement of a big house that was almost entirely in darkness. All except for the flashlight beam playing over the wide steel bookcase that looked strangely out of place in the basement.

  “This looks like what he talked about,” Bryant said.

  Murphy turned the beam of the flashlight toward him, deliberately aiming it in Bryant’s eyes to dazzle him.

  “You remember the books that open the door?”

  “Why can’t you just pull them all out until it opens?”

  Murphy reached a hand out and tugged at one of the books; it came out an inch and then stopped, obstructed by something.

  “They’re all like that. The books have to be pulled in a particular combination. And you know the combination, don’t you?”

  Obliging, Bryant looked over the spines on the shelf. He felt Murphy’s eyes on him and wondered if he could tell he was looking for specific titles. He tried on a confused expression.

  “I’m sorry. It’s difficult to—”

  Murphy stared at him for a long moment. Then he shifted the position of his gun, bringing the barrel up a little closer to Bryant. He didn’t point it at his head this time. He didn’t need to. Bryant remembered what it had felt like, the cold metal of the muzzle against his skin.

  “Need help jogging your memory?”

  Bryant swallowed and shook his head. “I think I remember now.”

  Murphy smiled. Bryant stepped forward and regarded the books on the shelf. After a moment’s thought, he selected one on the far left of the top shelf and one in the dead center of the middle shelf. The Great Gatsby and All the President’s Men. He pulled out one, then the other. There was a click, and the door swung open, revealing an unlit cavity in the basement wall.

  Even though he had followed the instructions perfectly, Bryant was surprised when the door opened. Blake had been on the level. He had really trusted him with this information, and now Bryant was selling out that trust for another couple of minutes of life.

  Murphy turned his flashlight on the space so that they could see it was a space about ten feet deep and three feet wide. On either side, leaving just a narrow space in the middle, were stacked long white cardboard boxes. They looked like they might contain files. Murphy played the beam of the flashlight around and saw nothing but those boxes. Six on either side, a dozen in all. He exchanged a glance with the man who had brought Bryant from the cars.

  Murphy touched a finger to his headset and said, “Stark, get down here.” He looked back at Bryant and directed the beam of the flashlight over the nearest stack of boxes. “Bring them out.”

  Bryant hesitated a second, then selected the top box on the left-hand side and hauled it down, grimacing at the weight. He placed it on the ground. It was about two feet long. Murphy cleared his throat impatiently, and Bryant lifted the lid off the box. At first Bryant thought he had been right about files. The box was filled with small plastic-wrapped documents, all of them shaped the exact width and a little less than the height of the box. He knelt down and pulled a handful from the front. Murphy took a step forward and directed the beam of the flashlight. It took Bryant a second to realize what they were.

  And then he knew they’d all been played.

  65

  By five o’clock, it was full dark, and it had been a long time since I’d seen another set of lights on the road. I was pleased that the Toyota was just about holding up. I had been starting to wonder if the full force of the storm front was going to miss us after all, when the blizzard kicked up a notch. The snow started to come down in clumps, blotting out the windshield faster than the wipers could cope with. It was like attempting to drive through an avalanche. I slowed to ten miles an hour, then five. The road seemed to have been plowed a few hours before, which meant the car was having to contend with six inches of snow and building, rather than a couple of feet. At this rate, it wouldn’t take long until the difference was academic.

  I knew I was close. I had driven this road a hundred times in the past few years, but the snow turned it into an alien landscape. Everything in the lights ahead was snow: falling, lying, dancing in the air. Visibility was down to about twenty feet in front of me. I kept my foot on the gas, feeling the car skid occasionally as the tires began to really struggle with the snow.

  Under my breath, I coaxed the old Toyota to carry on. It had brought me this far; it could take me another mile or two. I once read that you should always name a car. It’s good feng shui or something, means the car is more likely to treat you nicely. I had dismissed that idea at the time. Now I was wondering if I should have christened this old heap at the outset of the journey with a name like Ethel or Martha or something. Or Susanne. Maybe the car was a Susanne.

  “Come on, Susanne,” I said.

  Perhaps sensing a lack of seriousness in my plea, Susanne picked that moment to give up the ghost. The tires caught on a deep drift of snow and started to spin. I shifted down to first gear and revved the engine. The car groaned and tried to lurch forward, b
ut the wheels lacked any traction. I eased off, then slammed my foot down again, gripping the wheel, hoping this was just an uneven patch that could be surmounted.

  Nothing. I eased off, tried again. Still nothing.

  Leaving the keys in the ignition and the engine running, I opened the door and stepped out into the freezing night.

  Immediately, I knew the car wasn’t going any farther when the snow came up to my knee. The blizzard was so intense that I had to use my hands to make a tunnel around the hood of my coat in order to properly see the wheel that was two feet in front of me. The car had grounded in the snow. Looking back down the road for as far as I could see, which wasn’t far at all, I could see twin grooves cutting deep into the snow. It was a miracle I had made it this far.

  I climbed back into the car, savoring the dry warmth of the interior for the last time, and pulled the pack Banner had given me out from the backseat. I checked the contents one more time, partly because it was always good practice to make sure, but mostly because it would buy me another minute in the warmth before I had to abandon the car. In addition to the other contents, I had picked up a few items in Wilston: a thicker coat, variable-glare-resistant snow goggles, thin thermal gloves, and a six-inch serrated hunting knife. In all honesty, I had been prepared to have to walk much farther. Getting this close was a bonus. Finally, I took the gun Banner had given me from the glove box and placed it at the top of the pack before zipping it closed.

  I pulled the hood back up on my coat, opened the door, and took a deep breath.

  I left the Toyota where it had grounded and continued down the road on foot. The snow was coming down even harder and the wind was kicking up, turning the world into a howling white haze. I kept the line of trees on my left-hand side, the only way I could be sure I was still on the road. It was hard going, but at least this time I had the right clothes and equipment.