by Erik Carter
Glover’s lips quivered, and his eyes went wider, filled with tears. He knew what was about to happen. His hands were still held protectively over his face, and he extended them toward Silence, pleadingly.
“Whoa, man!” Glover said. “I gave you what you want. I swear that’s all I know! Let me go.”
Silence took deep breaths. Through his stomach, not his chest. Diaphragmatic breathing. Proper breathing. C.C. had taught him this.
A flash of sweat chilled his forehead. His skin prickled. The hair on his forearms stood up.
He raised the Beretta, slowly, moving away from Glover’s knee, tracing up his body.
Then a strange look came to Glover’s face.
Recognition.
Glover’s eyes moved over Silence’s body, leaving his face, skittering back and forth, like a typewriter, moving down, assessing all the details before snapping back up to his face, locking in on him again.
“It’s you, isn’t it?” Glover said in a tiny voice that wavered with his rapidly accumulating tears.
Somehow Glover had figured out that this tall figure before him was the man he’d known as Pete Hudson. Glover had seen through the plastic surgery, through the difference in eye color.
Silence didn’t reply. He continued to slowly raise the Beretta until it was aimed at Glover’s head.
He stopped.
“Why are you doing this?” Glover screamed.
Silence stared at him.
And he lowered the gun, glanced at the floor as he remembered it again.
Glover had laughed. He’d laughed as he kicked C.C. to death.
Silence’s eyes went to Glover’s, which peered out at him from the gaps between the fingers of his shaking, outstretched hands.
“For Cecilia,” Silence said.
He raised the Beretta, lined it with Glover’s forehead, and fired twice. A double tap. Just like Nakiri had taught him.
Glover’s body didn’t spasm. There was nothing particularly dramatic about his death, nothing on par with its significance. Just a bright red double-hole in the plane of flesh at the top of his head along with a splatter of blood and brain on the floor and the broken boards behind him.
Silence observed the stillness.
He holstered the Beretta and knelt beside the body, then took his notebook from his pocket and crossed Glover off the list.
Cobb
Gamble
Hodges
Knox
McBride
Odom
Glover
Burton
Seven down; one to go.
Silence savored the thought for only a moment. Then he refocused on the larger task.
He glanced at his watch. It was almost five. Three hours to figure out what Burton was doing with terrorists and where Silence would need to go to stop him.
And he hadn’t the slightest clue where to begin. There was a connection, somewhere in all the information he’d gathered from this assignment. He just couldn’t see it. Not at all.
C.C. always told him to schedule his time, another way for him to organize his tumultuous brain. He would need to plan his three hours carefully.
He would call Falcon and report the intel he’d gathered from Glover. Then he would grab some beer, something to help calm his mind—one drink, nothing that would inebriate him. Then he’d go home, drink the beer, and get in his brand-new sensory deprivation pod for the first time. If the rumors were to be believed, this would be the key to opening his mind.
But first, one more task in the warehouse before he left Glover behind.
He flipped to a clean page in the notebook and started writing.
Chapter Sixty-Three
Two hours later.
Tanner grunted as he stared down at the body—hunched in on itself, two bullet holes in its forehead, a half inch apart, the tight grouping of an execution-style murder.
The body was Clayton Glover.
And his death was a piece of macabre modern art, an exercise in juxtaposition. Ten square feet of the squeaky-clean warehouse’s efficient design and purposeful organization disrupted by jagged boards in a blast pattern surrounding a corpse, all of it haloed by a massive pool of blood.
There would be an investigation. Of course. But Tanner knew who’d killed Glover.
Jake.
Damn you, Jake.
The first responding officer had said that the warehouse was dark when he arrived, but since then, the business owners had been contacted, and now the massive lights in the ceiling were ablaze, flooding the space with blue, sterile light that illuminated the lofty pallet racks and glistened on the highly polished floor.
Tanner liked that the place was so isolated. No gawkers. No press. No weeping family members. Just the crime scene unit diligently milling about in their blue windbreakers, swapping college words in hushed voices as they scribbled notes, took photos, and nodded at each other.
And Tanner and Pace—standing to the side, hands in their pockets, suit jackets tucked back, staring at the body.
One of the windbreaker-wearing technicians was crouched in front of the body, taking a measurement. Glover’s unblinking eyes stared into the steel rafters far above. His head was tilted slightly to the left, and a motionless stream of dried, black blood snaked out of the extra holes in his forehead, feeding the puddle on the polished floor.
“We got something here,” the tech said. He wore latex rubber gloves, and pinched between his thumb and forefinger was a small piece of lined notebook paper, folded in thirds. The tech gently unfolded it, then frowned at it for a moment before looking up at Tanner, perplexed.
Tanner scowled at him. “What?”
“It’s addressed to you,” the man said.
Tanner felt Pace’s eyes upon him, and he turned to look at the annoying fed. For once, Pace wasn’t being annoying, though. His face was pinched with concentration.
The technician put the unfolded paper it in a clear polyethylene evidence bag, which he sealed and handed to Tanner without standing.
Two words were scrawled on the side facing Tanner. He could see, through the paper, a longer note on the other side.
Lieutenant Tanner
Tanner recognized the print immediately.
He looked at Pace. “This is Jake Rowe’s handwriting.”
He flipped the bag over.
Sir,
I’m going to kill Lukas Burton. 8 p.m. He’s had business dealings with international terrorists and will be attempting to meet them tonight. It would be wise of you to contact the FBI.
This will be the last you hear from me. You’ve always been good to me. And I appreciate it.
—Jake
Shit.
Tanner sighed.
Jake, dammit. What are you doing?
He reluctantly put his finger under the letters FBI, and pointed it out to Pace.
The smartass grin returned to Pace’s lips. It hadn’t left for long.
“It’s been three months, and Jake’s still on his killing spree,” Tanner said, tilting his head toward Glover. He gave the note a little shake. “Even confessed it. This isn’t heat-of-the-moment passion. No temporary insanity here. Jake’s a coldblooded killer now.”
Pace took the evidence bag from him, glanced over the note, looked up, said nothing.
“And I’m not letting him get away with another murder,” Tanner said. “We’re stopping this son of a bitch. Tonight.”
Chapter Sixty-Four
Laswell had never been to Pensacola, Florida. As he stepped out of the Learjet, down the airstairs, a blast of thick, moist air struck him.
Holy hell, Suppressor was right. He’d told Laswell—via a series of abbreviated, gravelly sentences—to be prepared for the brutal humidity of the Florida Panhandle. Laswell hadn’t felt stickiness like this since the last time he was in New Orleans, which made sense, given New Orleans was only a few hours due west. As Laswell understood it, the two old cities also shared architectural similarities—features such
as downtown balconies with filigree ornamentation.
A jetliner roared overhead as he stepped onto the concrete, and a warm gust of wind buffeted the chain-link fence a few feet away. Pensacola International wasn’t a large airport, so while they’d taxied to a private hanger, the main terminal was just ahead, brightly lit, lush with a variety of palm trees. Welcome to Florida, the trees seemed to say as their fronds tossed in the strong breeze.
Laswell had noted that Florida points of entry were both welcoming and proud of the state’s reputation. The Interstate highway welcome centers offered incoming travelers free orange and grapefruit juice. He’d always found that detail quite charming.
The sun was far in the western sky, and the horizon was starting to fade from gray to pink. The flight attendant waited for him at the bottom of the stairs, smiling broadly, blonde hair tossing, one outstretched arm gesturing grandly toward an idling limousine.
Nice.
SkyTrail Aviation was a real class act. Such a pity he’d never see them again.
Laswell nodded at the flight attendant, stepped past her to the limo, then nodded at the suited limo driver—a twenty-something guy, also wearing a massive smile—who held the rear door open for him and introduced himself as Ricky.
Laswell squeezed through the doorway, into cold air conditioning, and plopped into another comfortable leather seat.
A moment later, the limo eased to a smooth, crawling start, and Ricky’s voice came through the intercom.
“You’re heading to Bayfront Auditorium, correct, sir?”
“Correct.”
Back in Virginia, Laswell had probed Suppressor for locations in Pensacola where he could go should he need to make a trip down south. Pensacola Bayfront Auditorium, he’d been told, was a massive building that sat at the very end of a pier downtown, right in Pensacola Bay, surrounded by water on three sides. It was a very public spot, and located right in the thick of things. A perfect Watchers location. Hidden in plain sight.
“Very good, sir,” Ricky said. “But please understand that since that’s downtown, it’s going to take us quite a while. A lot of traffic. We got the Tristán Festival tonight.”
“I’m in no hurry.”
But, really, there was a time concern. A big one. Massive. He checked his watch. It read 7:47, which made it 6:47 there in the Central time zone.
A little over an hour until Burton’s deadline.
He took his cellular phone from his pocket, flipped it opened, and dialed Suppressor. One ring, then a message.
Your call has been forwarded to an automatic voice message system. To leave a message—
He flipped the phone shut.
The bastard had turned his phone off.
Off!
An hour before all hell broke loose.
Laswell’s fingers curled into fists. And he thought of Briggs, the older man’s insistence that Laswell was making a huge mistake with Silence Jones.
He pushed the thought from his mind and dialed Nakiri.
“Yes?”
“Where is he?”
“Don’t know. Tried him twenty minutes ago, and the call went straight to voicemail.”
“Same here. Shit!” Laswell sucked in a breath, forced it back out through flared nostrils. He thought for a moment, and decided that the best thing to do was stick with the plan. Rationality always trumped emotion.
“You’re an observer tonight, Nakiri,” he said. “Assets don’t work in pairs. If Suppressor can’t finish the job, you finish it for him. But if he gets himself in trouble, that’s his own damn fault. Understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Be prepared.”
He hung up and looked out the window. The limo was moving a steady click down a four-lane thoroughfare lined businesses and lush with trees. The traffic issues Ricky had mentioned were not yet apparent, but from the maps Laswell had studied, he knew they were still a few miles outside downtown.
In the distance, the pink streaks in the sky grew brighter. What had evidently been a gray, miserable day was going to have a magnificent sunset.
And possibly a calamitous ending.
If Laswell’s brand-new Asset putzed out.
What the hell was Silence Jones up to?
Chapter Sixty-Five
Silence floated in nothingness.
The skin-receptor-neutral temperature; the entirely dark environment; the buoyant water; the potent earplugs—all of it had come together to do its job.
He’d truly been deprived of his senses.
And sucked out of reality.
Images had come and gone, his mind flipping through the slideshow of the last year of his life. Trying to stay on track, to focus on the task at hand. But he kept seeing slides of C.C.
And often the same slide.
The one that showed her lying dead in a pool of her blood.
He forced the image away. There was an objective he was to conquer. Stopping Burton.
So he had to stay focused.
The solution to the issue was in his mind. Somewhere. A detail in the fog. A whisper of a memory. It had to be there.
His mind went to New Orleans. How he, as Jake Rowe, had foiled Burton’s plot there, the beginning of Burton’s deeper hatred for him—the hatred, Jake feared, that had led to C.C.’s murder.
But did it have anything to do with the task at hand, with stopping Burton’s plans with the terrorists?
He didn’t think so.
No. No, it didn’t.
Stay focused.
What would C.C. say he should do?
She would tell him to focus.
Focus, love.
Burton. The smile, always there, smeared on his face, framed by locks of his dark hair. Nothing about him was real. Always hiding something. The twitching energy in the eyes.
Silence was back in the chair. Tied down. Burton’s living room, facing the projector screen. His view alternated between two Burtons at once—the flesh-and-blood one at his side and the video image on the screen, both of them grinning, four dark eyes twinkling. C.C.’s screams. The group of men closing in on her. Odom twirling his blackjack.
Focus.
Charlie had warned him. Charlie Marsh, the overgrown kid brother, waves of hair flopping down into his eyes. He’d told Silence—had told Jake—that he shouldn’t have crossed Burton in New Orleans, that Burton’s plan was huge.
Charlie looked up at Jake, standing by his side in the warm opulence of the Farone mansion.
Charlie wasn’t a smart man, but he was intuitive. And he was right. More right than he’d known.
Before the bullet had crashed through his skull. In that dark alleyway.
Jake had been in the passenger seat. The musty smell of Charlie’s Taurus. Ambushed. Set up. Burton had led them to a trap. He’d taken Charlie from Jake. Insignificant compared to taking C.C., but a loss still. Burton had taken so much from him, and—
Focus, love.
Focus. Yes. Refocus. Breathe. He took in a deep breath, through his stomach, a diaphragmatic breath, exhaled.
His body bobbed in the water, his toe brushed the back wall, and he left the trance. He was back in the pod.
For only a moment.
Then he was with Charlie again. In the mansion.
I’m telling ya, Pete, it’s coming soon, Charlie had said. Burton’s gonna take over the operation. What are we gonna do?
Burton had done more than take over the Farone crime syndicate. He’d done more than destroy half the family.
He’d moved the operation down avenues it would have never ventured on its own—first by funding anarchists and then by conspiring with international terrorists.
Charlie vanished. C.C. took his place. A different area of the mansion. The library. A look of dread in C.C.’s eyes, telling him she had a premonition about the Roja hit, making him promise her that he wouldn’t go.
He promised her.
Then he’d broken the promise.
In the Grand Prix. Later
that night. The tape player in his hand. Shaking. Listening to the message.
C.C.’s voice playing from the scratchy speaker—crying, betrayed. He’d broken a promise to her. Angry at him, only the second time ever. Screaming her last word at him: Asshole!
The last thing she’d ever say to him. Anger. A swear word. He fell to the steering wheel and wept. For the longest time, he’d—
Focus, love. Focus.
Exiting the library, right after he’d given C.C. the promise that he would soon break. Walking down the sconce-lined hallway, about to leave the mansion, his shoes sinking into plush carpeting. A silhouette appeared at the end of the hallway, close to the foyer, where Jake was headed. It was Burton.
Grinning.
That goddamn grin.
Silence who had been Jake who had been Pete stopped a couple feet in front of Burton, a smaller bubble of personal space than one would normally give, letting Burton know he wasn’t intimidated.
Then Burton spoke in riddles.
Two things are going to happen. One is going to happen tonight, Burton had said. The other is going to happen down the line. Soon enough, though. A chance for me to reconnect with my roots, with Daddy. A real homecoming. Know what I mean?
The first thing that Burton was referring to was C.C.’s murder. Clearly.
The second…
Tonight? The terrorist plot?
Was this the connection Silence was seeking?
Is this it, C.C.? Is this the connection? Babe, is this it?
Focus, love.
There was something about what Burton had said then, in the hallway. His malicious smile had been even darker than usual.
He hadn’t just been taunting Silence about his plan to murder C.C. There was the second thing too, the thing that was going to happen “soon enough.”
Burton had said “Daddy.”
A chance for me to reconnect with my roots, with Daddy.
Of course. Joey Farone. Burton had killed Joey Farone, someone who had taken Pete Hudson in, who had blessed his relationship with his daughter.
And it had happened well after C.C.’s murder, after Burton had wiped out all vestiges of the Farone family. It had happened “down the line.”
