Louder Than Words

by Brett Baker

  Brett Baker

  Louder Than Words

  Copyright © 2019 by Brett Baker

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  First edition

  This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy

  Find out more at reedsy.com

  For my mom.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 1

  The man wore a plain black t-shirt. He sat in a booth on the other side of the restaurant, facing me, but too involved in a paperback—the pages of which he folded back onto itself—to notice me. He crossed his right leg over his left and let it dangle. Forty minutes prior, he’d ordered a monte cristo sandwich and a cup of split pea soup. When the food arrived, he devoured it without looking up from his paperback. Since then he’d nursed a glass of water. He stood up from the table once, and I looked down at my phone but kept one eye in his direction, not wanting to lose him. I’d begun to scoot out of my booth to follow him, but he walked left instead of right, and went to the bathroom instead of the exit. Upon his return his resumed his position. I envied his ability to concentrate on the book despite the constant drone of voices hanging in the air.

  I zoned out as I watched him and reviewed his file, which I’d studied so often it had become scorched into my brain. Martin Coulson deserved what I had for him. I was used to dealing with horrendous people, but Coulson upped the ante. Although my work with The Summit had multiple, complicated layers, it always came down to one simple idea: every mission should make the world a better place. We’d all be better off in a world without Martin Coulson.

  The mission couldn’t have been more simple or direct: eliminate Martin Coulson. No nuance. No attempt to squeeze information from him. No consideration of whether to try to take him alive. No recommendation to consider how his elimination would fit within a larger situation. None of it mattered more than taking him out.

  The waitress came with a pitcher to top off his water, and Coulson covered his glass with his hand, and said something to the waitress, who smiled and walked away. He looked around the café, not so much in search of anything, but more just to take in his surroundings. His eyes settled on me for a moment, and I looked back at him. I didn’t want to look away too quickly and arouse suspicion. If he sensed anything unusual in my gaze he didn’t reflect it back to me. I watched as he finished scanning the room and then returned to his book.

  Four minutes passed before he closed the book, took one last sip of water, and stood. I looked down at my plate, trying to project a sense of complete disinterest. Although I directed my head downward, my eyes veered upward, straining to see Coulson. He left some cash on the table and walked away. I waited until he exited onto the street, turned left on the sidewalk, and disappeared from my window before leaving my booth. As soon as I left the café, I saw Coulson stopped at the corner, waiting for traffic to clear. I considered ducking into a doorway, but to finish the job I’d have to make contact with him, so I figured it better to close the gap. Coming within a few feet of him while he was stopped at a corner didn’t raise any alarms. He didn’t even look back toward me as he looked left and right and waited to cross. As the last two cars passed us, a woman came from behind us, began crossing the street, and Coulson followed. A car beeped twice, and its headlights flashed as she unlocked the door, got inside and drove away.

  I let Coulson open a distance of two-dozen feet or so between us. The road along which we walked had few cars passing, and although I saw a handful of people on the opposite side of the street, we had our side of the street to ourselves. I’d already sealed Coulson’s fate, but I had no idea what would happen. One way or another he was near the end.

  After another block I saw my opening. A distant train horn blew as Coulson crossed another street, the other side of which led to a bridge over a set of orange line El tracks. I hustled across the street as well, just before the signal changed. I looked behind me and saw no one on the sidewalk, which matched the emptiness in front of us. On the opposite side of the street a young man and woman walked hand-in-hand, and every few steps he pulled her close to him and kissed her. All of the nearby traffic passed along the street we’d just crossed. Along our street, no cars waited or drove by, except for some cars at a red light three blocks ahead. As Coulson stepped onto the bridge, and made his way across, I looked to the right and saw the approaching orange line train beneath us. One last scan of the area revealed relative isolation, so I decided to act.

  I walked faster, closing the final feet between us. I stepped with great care so he wouldn’t hear me approach. The train whistle started to blow and helped hide my footfalls. He never saw me coming, so the booming blow I delivered to his right kidney came as a complete surprise. As soon as I connected I worried that I had hit him too hard. I wanted to incapacitate him, but I didn’t want him to fall to the ground. If he fell down then I’d lose the ability to act quickly, and he’d have a chance to defend himself. If I’d learned one thing from reviewing his file so many times, I learned that I wanted to avoid physical engagement with him at all costs. He had training that other agents had never seen before, and a resourcefulness that instantly gave him an advantage in any altercation. I had complete confidence in my own abilities, but every person who had ever battled Coulson came away saying the same thing: they’d never faced anyone like him. And that’s if they came away at all. So if Coulson fell to the ground, then it might mean the end for me.

  He stumbled, but didn’t fall. My punch did what I had hoped it would do. It shocked him, surprised him, and overwhelmed him with a stunning, unexpected pain that provided a few seconds of daylight during which I could capitalize on my fleeting advantage. He grabbed his back, stood straight up, and then arched back, sticking out his chest, and let out a scream heard by no one except me, thanks to the train’s whistle. As he turned around to face me, and see who had attacked him, I grabbed him by the shoulders, spun him back around, and used my momentum to guide him toward the side of the bridge. A concrete railing provided a buffer from the drop-off to the tracks, and as we approached the raili
ng, I gave him an extra push in the back. All at once I worried that the railing was too high, that I’d miscalculated in the two seconds during which I devised a plan and worked out the obstacles, and that Coulson would end up with nothing more than a bruised hip from colliding with the railing. I yelled “Gollyfuck!” at this realization, and prepared to follow with another assault, but then I watched as Coulson’s hips hit the railing, and the momentum of his upper body carried him head-first over the railing, his feet following. He flipped once on the way down so that he was upright, almost completely vertical, as if walking on air, when the train obliterated him. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect. He didn’t hit the ground, he didn’t hit the top of the train. He fell in front of it at the precise second that it emerged from under the bridge, and it crashed into him, sending his body forward down the tracks, his right arm torn off, flying on a slightly different vector.

  I spun around on the sidewalk, walked back to the corner, and turned right, never looking back to see if any unnoticed witnesses decided to follow me. I flagged a taxi, got in, and gave a random intersection on the north side of town. As he pulled away I scrunched down in the backseat, even though I didn’t think anyone saw me push Coulson.

  With an assist from the El, I’d finished the job. Coulson was dead. The world was better.

  Chapter 2

  For thirty minutes I wandered the north side, darting here, cutting there, doubling back and ducking behind, all to ensure no one followed me. After sitting on a park bench for ten minutes without anyone showing any interest in me, it seemed safe to go to the Roost.

  The Summit operates around the world, but has no stations or bases. Chicago police have 23 stations spread around the city. The Summit doesn’t have that. Instead, safe havens called Roosts provide a space where agents can retreat when they’re on a mission and need a place to take cover or plan or consult with Polestar, the intelligence gathering branch of The Summit. It’s rare to encounter another agent at the Roost. It’s a secluded spot for a temporary respite from the outside world, so by definition no one stays long. I’d become very familiar with the Roost in Chicago, having lived there, but I’d found Roosts in Peru, and Denmark, and New Zealand, and everywhere in between.

  Situated in a non-descript four-story building that permitted quick access to all parts of the city, the Roost blended in with its surroundings. To gain entry, agents had to walk down a narrow alley that led nowhere, and proceed past a large brick wall that acted as a barrier and provided a shield for the heavy steel door. The absence of a handle on the outside of the door made it appear to be an exit-only door, but each agent knew to reach into the gap at the bottom of the door, curl their fingers upward, and slide the metal bar from two pins and drag it beneath the door. The bar acted as both a key and a handle when inserted into a small rectangular hole on the outside of the door.

  The Summit sealed off the third and fourth floor of the building, but inside the metal door a set of stairs led up to the second floor. With the security of the exterior metal door, a large wooden door at the top of the stairs remained unlocked, held closed only by a standard doorknob.

  A non-descript apartment spread beyond the door. Anyone who had entered without seeing the secure metal door outside would have never known of its top-secret existence. Furniture with no character, along with a twin bed in each of the two bedrooms at the back of the apartment gave the place a depressed, sterile feel. Somehow, two-dozen fresh red roses appeared every few days to help alleviate the general melancholy of the place. The roses didn’t help though. I still hated the Roost. I tried to spend as little time there as possible.

  Even though the Roost provided a reprieve from the outside world, most agents appreciated the telephone more than anything else. Despite advancements in communication technology around the globe, communication with Polestar still took place from a phone connected to the wall with a cord. The Summit developed the phone to provide a platform for secure communication between agents and Polestar. Criminals and law enforcement constantly seek ways to out maneuver each other. Often criminals devise new uses for technology or new patterns of operation, and law enforcement has to catch up. Although it looked outdated by twenty years, the corded phone inside each Roost provided secure communication technology so advanced that the rest of the world didn’t even know that such technology existed, let alone how it worked. So unless agents communicated with each other and Polestar face-to-face, all sensitive exchanges had to be conducted through a Roost phone.

  I dialed my Polestar access number and a woman answered in a hurried, annoyed voice. “This is Kathleen. Is your message urgent, Mia?”

  “I need to report a completed mission, and await further instruction.”

  “I’m listening,” Kathleen said, as if inconvenienced by our conversation.

  “Martin Coulson has been eliminated.”

  “You’re confirming this?” Kathleen asked.

  “Yes. I’m responsible. I watched it happen. He’s dead.” I heard papers rustling on the other end of the line, and a long pause as Kathleen reviewed the relevant information.

  “According to this file that’s the end of the mission. There are no additional objectives.”

  “So I just sit tight then?” I asked with bated breath. With no other missions on my radar, if The Summit had nothing for me then I faced the prospect of some downtime. Agents always understood the value of downtime. It’s not unusual to pursue a mission non-stop for weeks or months at a time, so downtime was at a premium.

  “Not so fast,” Kathleen said. “There’s an associated mission.”

  “Associated in what way?” I asked.

  “That’s your problem. All it says here is that after Coulson is eliminated the responsible agent should direct resources toward Dixie County. We’ve been tracking Coulson for years, and he made more trips to Dixie County than anywhere else in the country. We need to find out why.”

  “What does it matter? He’s dead.”

  “Our agents encountered Coulson all over the world, while working all sorts of cases. We’ve analyzed the information we have about him, but we’ve been unable to detect a pattern. He made so many trips to Dixie County that we need to make sure that he wasn’t receiving orders down there. If there’s a person or an organization directing him, we need to know who it is, and what they’re doing. Coulson might not be the only one.”

  “Okay, but why did we wait until after Coulson’s dead before starting on this? Wouldn’t it have been easier to ask him? Or follow him? Where’s Dixie County anyway?”

  “Florida. Gulf coast.”

  “Maybe he’s got a vacation home down there. People go to Florida all the time.”

  “Coulson never seemed like a vacationer. You read his file. You know what kind of man he was. Safe to say he didn’t go to Dixie County for sunbathing and fishing.”

  “What am I supposed to do when I get down there?” I asked. “I’m sure it’s a big county. Where do I start?”

  “You’re the agent aren’t you? Start at the beginning and go from there.”

  “And if I can’t find the beginning?”

  “Dixie County is the beginning,” Kathleen said. “That’s all I can tell you.”

  “That’s all you know, or that’s all you can tell me?”

  “We’re not holding back anything on Coulson. If you read his file then you read everything you need to know about. And you also understand why the main point of the mission was to eliminate him. Then we can worry about why we had to eliminate him. But we couldn’t let him continue. He’d already done too much damage.”

  “Damage to whom?” I asked. “This sounds personal to you. Is he connected to The Summit somehow? Is that why he was such a threat?”

  “Again, Agent Mathis, it’s your job to find that out. You have all the information we have, including the large price Coulson exacted from numerous agents of The Summit. Not only have you helped to save anyone who might have come into contact with Coulson i
n the future, but you’ve helped exact revenge for all of those people you read about in his file. That’s not nothing.”

  “Of course it’s not nothing,” I said. “But I’d like to know if there’s something else there.”

  “Then you better get to work,” Kathleen said.

  I hung up, and paced The Roost. Agents always had full access to all information within a file, so I had no reason to think that Polestar held anything back when they gave me Coulson’s file. However, hearing the animosity in Kathleen’s voice as she talked about him made me think there might have been some close professional attachment in this instance. She seemed to lack the detached, analytical sterility typical of most members of Polestar. But everyone within The Summit understood that agents had to be well-informed to complete missions.

  So if Kathleen assured me that I had all the information available and I had to put together the pieces, then I had no choice but to believe her.

  Chapter 3

  The next morning I flew into Tampa International Airport and rented a car for the three hour drive up to Dixie County. I followed U.S. 98 through the sprawl north of Tampa, past the coastal swamps, and into the logging region, where I passed through a town called Inglis, whose mayor banned Satan in 2001. If the ban worked, it didn’t extend beyond city limits, because just north of Inglis evil deeds are afoot, as evidenced by the fact that two support posts on a logging truck failed, and I was almost crushed beneath dozens of tons of cypress. I’d just come upon the truck from behind, and flipped my signal to show my intent to pass, when I saw the first post begin to bend away from the truck. Instinct told me to back off, so I braked and watched the second post fail and the pile of trees roll off the back of the truck, which spun out with the sudden discharge of weight. I’d never seen a tree bounce before, but those logs bounced as they hit the ground and then rolled away. When the truck and the logs came to rest, I crept along the opposite shoulder, checked on the driver, who was just a bit shaken up, and then continued on my way.