by Matthew Dunn
Gage didn’t buy that. “You saw the crush to Fox’s larynx. It’s massive. Whoever ended his life could have done so on a healthy three-hundred-pound WWE wrestler.”
“I agree. In my entire career, I’ve never seen such damage.” The detective inhaled slowly. “The cell phone’s on its way here. I’ve watched the video. The guy who ended Fox’s life looked like he was killing a child. But what he didn’t look like is someone who’d stop.”
“He’s killed before?”
“Without doubt.”
“Your assessment?”
The D.C. detective pondered Gage’s question. He said, “I’m used to dealing with perps who use guns or brawl or just go crazy. This is something else.” To Gage’s surprise the detective walked up to her and shook her hand. “This needs to be your case. I’m out of my league. When the cell phone arrives, take a look at his eyes.”
“His eyes?”
“Yeah. I can’t figure them out.”
Will reached his car and looked back at Fox’s decimated home. He pulled out his handgun and kept it low, scouring his surroundings. The four men who’d confronted him in the house exited. At this distance it was impossible for most men to fire a handgun and kill. Will could. He’d done similar in Bogotá, Hong Kong, and Mexico City. Dropped people like flies.
The men sauntered to their vehicles. They were officials, of that Will was in no doubt. But they weren’t bad guys, Will imagined. They were on the payroll of someone good. Even though they weren’t cops.
He replaced his gun and got in his car.
Marsha Gage watched the cell phone video and then paced back and forth in the D.C. detective’s room.
“See what I mean?” said the detective next to her.
“Shut up!” Gage didn’t care what anyone in D.C. PD thought right now. “Nine to get an outside line, yes?”
The detective looked quizzical. “Yes, but . . .”
“I don’t care.” She rang Bo Haupman from the detective’s landline. “I need everyone, and I mean everyone, who’s seen this video to be told by you to keep their mouths shut.” Her heart was beating fast. “I want them gagged. Nothing, repeat nothing, to the press or official. The last time we made that mistake we lost. He won.”
Haupman sighed on his end of the phone. “Is this what I’m thinking?”
Gage replied, “You better give me the goddamn resources I need. And I need my shooter.” She felt breathless. “This is the worst-case scenario. A CIA guy was killed in a D.C. park by a guy who we thought was dead.”
She glanced at the detective; his face was pale.
Chapter 8
Howard Kane answered his cell phone at 3:24 a.m. while in bed. “This had better be good!”
Jason Flail responded, “Me and my guys found a snooper at Fox’s place. Don’t know who he is. We pretended to be detectives. He saw through us.”
“What did you do?”
“We let him go.” The former special forces operative hesitated. “Actually, it was more complicated than that.”
Kane was fully awake now.
“What do you want us to do about it, sir?”
“Just keep an eye out for him. We don’t like snoopers, do we?”
“No, we don’t, Mr. Kane.”
Kane sat upright in bed. “The snooper’s description?”
“It was dark in the basement where we confronted him, so difficult to be precise. But he was a big guy. And . . .”
“And?”
Flail took two seconds to answer. “Mr. Kane, I’ve worked with a lot of tough guys. They still get scared when the shit hits the fan. We all do.”
“Get on with it!”
Flail said, “There were four of us. We had guns out. We knew what we were doing. We had the snooper cornered in a basement. No way could he get past us. But here’s the thing.”
“The thing?”
“The thing, Mr. Kane.” Flail sounded uncharacteristically uneasy. “The snooper wasn’t scared. Not at all. He just walked past us and left.”
Will Cochrane drove through the night amid a torrential downpour, his sidearm rubbing skin off his hip as he wrangled his vehicle to keep traction on the Virginia road that was surrounded by forests.
The constant specks of rain played havoc with his eyes, making visibility tenuous and plagued by a lack of discernible landmarks. He was like a skier who no longer knows if he’s moving due to the plainness of his white surroundings.
But he kept driving, no chance of stopping to relieve the tension on his eyes, his desire to get to Colonel Haden overwhelming.
Will had executed the Berlin job. And now he knew he’d killed a major terrorist so Colonel Haden could profit from the action.
Marsha Gage was back in her FBI office in D.C.’s J. Edgar Hoover Building. She hadn’t slept all night, fatigue writ across her face, sun rising and reminding her that she needed to call her husband and tell him that today was soccer day and both their kids needed to pack their uniforms before school.
She stared at the whiteboard above her desk, her head giddy from tiredness and excessive mental stimulation.
Everything on the board was about Will Cochrane.
And all the data on the board seemed cluttered and confusing.
Gage knew he was a killer whose body count was off the scale. And his intellect frightened her. But he wasn’t a psychopath and didn’t have any other mental disorders she was aware of. It seemed to her that it was inconceivable he’d gone on a rampage a year ago in the States and killed innocent civilians. And yet the evidence to the contrary was palpable.
And now it turned out he was alive.
She tried to understand how that made her feel.
Even if innocent of the alleged crimes, Cochrane was a massive conundrum for society. He protected people and served the West with distinction, and yet he was too highly trained and capable.
But she’d once looked into his eyes and saw a good man, while he charmed her by speaking fluent Latin. Why did he have that capability?
Agent Gage rubbed her face and decided she needed to reapply makeup and clean her Glock sidearm.
She wanted to look the part when she confronted Cochrane again and make a decision as to whether to pull the trigger.
It was seven a.m.
Thyme Painter and Joe Kopański were sitting outside of an internal affairs office in one of Manhattan’s precincts. They were wearing the same clothes they’d worn the night before: Kopański in his white shirt mottled with bloodstains; Painter in her black trouser suit that smelled of cordite.
Inside the office was an IA officer who was unshaven though dressed in a suit. He’d been woken an hour earlier and told to get to the precinct ASAP.
He put his head around the door and addressed NYPD’s finest detectives. “Get in here now.”
Kopański and Painter said nothing as they entered.
“Sit.”
They did so opposite the IA man, a desk in between them.
The IA officer briefly riffled through the reports that Painter and Kopański had written. He addressed Kopański first. “You killed the man who raped your daughter.”
Kopański didn’t respond.
The IA officer looked at Painter. “And you shot the woman who got the butcher his female victims.”
Painter was still, her eyes shining and defiant.
“You took the law into your own hands,” the IA officer concluded. “I’m suspending you both because I think you executed the butcher and his partner.”
Chapter 9
Four hours later, Marsha Gage was in Quantico. In the control center with her were three men: Bo Haupman, Jack O’Connor, and Pete Duggan.
Duggan was a team leader on the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team. A former SEAL Team Six operative, he was without doubt one of the best combatants in the United States. He was the shooter Gage had wanted on her team. Duggan and Gage had worked together before, when both had confronted Cochrane and lost.
O’Connor was as senior
in the Bureau as Haupman. He was head of the Critical Incident Response Group and was Duggan’s boss. HRT was CIRG’s last resort if things went south in a serious situation. When that happened, Duggan was always O’Connor’s first choice as the man who brought criminal matters to an end.
Gage was in control.
She pointed at Duggan. “Under the direction of the head of the Bureau, I’m requisitioning Duggan to be part of my task force.”
O’Connor didn’t like that one bit. “He’s one of my men!”
Gage’s expression remained neutral. “Sign this.” She slid across a sheet of paper. “It’s telling you to keep your mouth shut about what you’re going to hear.”
O’Connor read the formal document. He shrugged and put his signature at the bottom. “Guess I don’t have an option.”
Duggan said, “You need me to sign one as well?”
Gage shook her head. “You’re going to be a major part of the plan. Signing stuff won’t help.” She clasped her hands together. Her fingers were ringless, despite her being married for fourteen years. She hated that. But her job required her to have minimal personal accoutrements in case she was caught by perps and tortured. “Will Cochrane is alive.”
Duggan frowned. “He killed himself a year ago.”
“He faked killing himself.” Gage stared at the table. “And now he’s been captured on camera killing a man who’d been injected with polonium.”
O’Connor asked, “He injected the victim?”
“I don’t think so. He placed a knee on the victim’s throat and squeezed the life out of him. If—”
“—he was the poisoner, why bother doing that?” O’Connor had to tread carefully with Gage. Though she was junior to him in the Bureau, she was way too successful in her job to be browbeaten by her seniors. Plus, he deeply respected her intelligence and lack of ambition. If, as predicted, she made it to the top of the Bureau, she’d be the first director who got there without a damn care that she was running the show. Power was not her thing. Getting the job done was. “We can’t have Cochrane loose on U.S. soil. I thought that had been tied up.”
“Apparently not.” Gage said to Haupman, “Bo, fill in some of the gaps for the benefit of Mr. O’Connor.”
Haupman felt uncomfortable being put on the spot. “You know about the killings Cochrane is alleged to have done near Roanoke and in Lynchburg. And you know some of his background—English/American; French Special Forces; Cambridge University; intellect through the roof; lead operator in MI6 then joint with CIA; left service two years ago. Came up against”—he glanced at Duggan—“Pete three years ago.”
“Not exactly.” Duggan was still. “I never met him face-to-face. All I saw was the wreckage he caused. The only Fed who confronted him was Agent Gage.”
Haupman nodded. “I stand corrected.” He undid the top button of his shirt, his flabby throat feeling constricted. “This is what you don’t know.” He eyed O’Connor and Duggan to make sure he had their full attention. “Among many other things, when he was an operative Cochrane saved the lives of Western and Middle Eastern premiers’ wives, plus three thousand child musicians, who were subject to an attempted bomb attack in New York; he prevented an unwanted war between America and Russia and a massive chemical attack against China that would have resulted in millions of dead civilians; caught traitors; stopped the Middle East from imploding; and”—he paused—“left all that behind him to do the honorable thing and adopt the twin boys of a fallen U.S. SEAL comrade.”
Everyone in the room was silent.
Haupman continued. “But Cochrane is a problem for us for three reasons. The first is he can outthink us all. The second is he has shown that he always does the right thing. Or so we thought. The final reason is he’s most likely the world’s deadliest killer.”
O’Connor smirked. “Don’t be melodramatic.”
Haupman was sweating because of the heat in the room and his overweight physique. “In many ways, I wish I was being melodramatic.” He looked at Gage. “Tell them what you told me. Your analogy.”
Gage hesitated. “It sounds silly to repeat it in this room.”
“It’s not silly. It’s the most accurate way I could think of Cochrane.”
Gage leaned forward. “We start with wolves. Their bite strength is ten times that of a dog. And there’s dispute as to whether dogs derive from wolves. Doesn’t matter. This is my analogy so I can tell it how I see it. So we domesticate wolves and turn them into dogs. But some of us want them to be wolves again. Idiots breed that back into them. So imagine the worst dog. What is it?”
Duggan answered, “A pit bull. They never let go when they bite. They’re designed to attack bears.”
“No.” Gage was worried about the impact of what she was about to say. The analogy now seemed absurd, yet so real. “Any dog is like a female lover. It’s loyal to the death providing you care for it. But if you turn your back on it, hundreds of years of breeding it to be domesticated don’t mean a thing. It reverts to a wolf in a nanosecond. Cochrane was a loyal dog. Any dog. But we turned our back on him. Now he’s a wolf.”
Duggan retorted, “But wolves are pack animals.”
“Not when they’ve been kicked out of the pack. MI6 and the CIA did that. And when that happens the wolf becomes infinitely more terrible. Its back is in a corner. It forages. Kills things it wouldn’t ordinarily kill. Its intelligence increases exponentially because it can no longer rely on others. It becomes a survivor and absolute killer.”
Duggan unfolded his arms. “And you want me to go after him?”
Gage hesitated. “When I’ve tracked Cochrane to a place where he can be cornered, I need a hunter by my side who can go in to finish it.”
Duggan glanced at O’Connor. O’Connor said nothing, his head bowed.
Gage added, “But I can’t lie about the risks. I’m not setting up a big task force. This has to be under the radar. Pete, you and I both know that the more visible this manhunt becomes to Cochrane, the worse it gets for us.”
“You want me to go after Cochrane? With no backup?”
Gage considered the question. “There will be four of us hunting him. No more, no less.”
Duggan imagined coming toe-to-toe with Cochrane. “Agent Gage, I—”
“Are you accepting the assignment or not?!”
Duggan never swerved from his duty. “Of course, ma’am. But who are the two other members of the team?”
Gage prodded the nondisclosure document O’Connor had signed. She said to the head of the CIRG, “Not one word to anyone, you hear?” She addressed Duggan. “To get to Cochrane we have to understand his motives in Roanoke and Lynchburg. You’re the heavy hitter. When it comes to a head, you go in and put him on his ass. And you have my authority and the authority of the attorney general to shoot first and ask questions later. But to get you there, I need detectives. There are only two in the States who are capable of helping me. Don’t underestimate them. They pull triggers too. And their minds are as sharp as scalpels.”
Chapter 10
Agent Gage knocked on the door of the house in New Jersey.
Joe Kopański opened the door. “Miss Gage.”
“Mrs.”
“I don’t give a shit whether you’re hooked up or not, or a dyke, or some dumb feminist who doesn’t want to be labeled. Come in.”
Gage entered the house. It was clear it was once a family home—pictures of Joe and his daughter and deceased wife everywhere, the place immaculate, floral scents in the air, an overall ambience that a wife and daughter would be returning soon. Four cats were in the living room, emaciated and with patchy fur.
Kopański gestured at them. “Hope you don’t mind these guys and girls. I’m rehabilitating them. Found them on the streets. Trying to give them some life back. I tell myself that I’ll release them when they’re fit. But I know I’ll keep them.”
Gage sat on the sofa, the cats on either side of her. “When’s she arriving?”
“When
she damn well likes.” He pointed at the cats. “Like them, she doesn’t take orders. You want coffee?”
Gage nodded. “I’ll have it with milk and—”
“I make it black. Take it or leave it.”
Kopański disappeared into the kitchen and returned a few minutes later with a mug that he placed next to Gage.
He sat opposite. “So let’s get this out of the way. I shot a woman’s husband. She was strung out and pissed off when I tried to arrest her. She threw nitric acid over my face.”
Gage hadn’t wondered about Kopański’s face, but she played ball. “Where did she get the acid from?”
“Hardware store, I guess.” Kopański placed his tremendously strong hands on his immaculately pressed trousers. “But you didn’t care to worry about my face.”
“No, sir. I didn’t.”
“It doesn’t frighten you?”
“I’ve seen far worse.”
Kopański believed that. “Why did you join the FBI instead of proper law enforcement?”
Gage was motionless. “When I was a girl I read a book about the Pinkertons. That’s all.”
“Then you should have joined the Secret Service. Protection and anticounterfeiting are all they do. Much like the Pinkertons. You made the wrong choice in career.”
Gage smiled. “Detective Kopański, are you deliberately trying to antagonize me?”
“No. Today’s the anniversary of my wife’s death. It means I’ve got other things on my mind.”
Gage hadn’t anticipated that. “I’m sorry.”
“You have nothing to be sorry about. You didn’t invent cancer.” Kopański sighed. “I’m not busting your balls.”
The doorbell rang. Twenty seconds later, Thyme Painter was sitting in the room. “I’ve heard of you, Gage. On the fast track apparently. Are you trying to be a man? Beat them at their own game?”
“No, Detective Painter.”
“Then what are you doing?”
“I’m trying to raise two kids.”
