Exit Strategy Read online

  She didn’t move.

  “It’s okay,” Mason told her. “You can help him.”

  He focused on her face, her lips, her brown eyes, now filled with fear and worry. It had been her short brown hair that had first caught his eye the minute he walked into the pet shop to buy Max, the way it shouted youth and independence. A carefree life. But it was her honesty, her basic goodness, that ultimately drew him in, all those things about her that seemed to represent what he couldn’t have for himself.

  Quintero held the cotton gauze up to her. “Take it. Press it to his shoulder.”

  She took the gauze but did not kneel, her eyes focusing on the bulge showing through the back of Quintero’s untucked shirt. Mason could see the thought forming in her mind. She didn’t know guns. Hated them. But …

  “Just do what he tells you,” Mason said. And don’t try anything stupid.

  The spell was broken, any thought of going for Quintero’s gun gone. She got down on her knees and pressed the gauze to the wound, the pure white cotton turning instantly red and wet in her hand.

  “Harder,” Quintero said.

  Mason looked out the window at the darkness and the lone streetlight that burned high above the pavement. A blue light flickered, moving across the wall. A police cruiser passing by on the street below. Following the light, he reconstructed his drive here, from the Aqua to this apartment building, just around the corner from Wrigley Field.

  “My car,” Mason said. “It’s probably blown.”

  Quintero shook his head at him. “You were supposed to bring it to the shop.”

  Mason wasn’t going to argue the point. Nudging Lauren’s hand away, he tried to look at the wound, but it was too close to his neck to see.

  Lauren threw the blood-soaked gauze onto the floor. Quintero looked over to her, his expression cold and menacing. “Grab more cotton and get back down here.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Mason said to Lauren. “Just keep calm. He knows what he’s doing.”

  Quintero poured more of the peroxide into the metal bowl. After that, he dropped in a pair of tweezers and an X-Acto knife.

  “You.” He pointed to Lauren. “Forget the bandages. Get me your sewing needles. Thread, too. Strong thread.”

  That did it. Lauren stood up. “This is bullshit. I’m calling nine-one-one.”

  She pulled Nick’s cell phone out of her pocket, but before she could dial the first digit, Quintero was on his feet.

  “Look at me,” Quintero said, pointing at his own eyes. “You can help or you can let him die on your floor. That’s up to you. But the one thing you’re not going to do is call an ambulance. Understand?”

  Lauren nodded, but the phone was still in her hand. Three digits, she thought. She could dial them with her thumb. 9-1—

  Someone snapped his fingers. When Lauren looked up, Quintero had a gun on her. Her breath caught in her throat.

  He snapped again. Held out his free hand. “The phone.”

  “Give it to him,” Mason said, trying to prop himself up.

  Lauren handed Quintero the phone.

  “Needle and thread. Now.”

  “Nick …” She was looking at him, fighting back tears, refusing to give in to them.

  “Get him the thread,” Mason said. “It’ll be okay.”

  She shook her head and left the room. When she left, Quintero helped Mason back into a sitting position and took the tweezers out of the peroxide.

  “What happened today?” he asked Mason.

  “I got the target. Had some trouble getting out.”

  “You shouldn’t have come here.”

  “Don’t worry about her.” Mason didn’t even want to say her name aloud in front of this man. “Just get me out of here.”

  “You can’t move yet.”

  Quintero spread open the sides of Mason’s wound, poked the tweezers around inside the shoulder. The pain had Mason diving back down into the darkness. Quintero pressed his hand against the back of the shoulder.

  “No exit wound. The bullet’s still in there. Vest must’ve stopped it.”

  “So take it out.”

  “No shit. You think this is the first time I’ve done this? Just shut up and stay still.”

  Quintero dipped the tweezers in the bowl again. “This is gonna hurt like a bitch.”

  Mason clamped his eyes shut and waited. He felt the touch of cold metal and then the same electric jolt of pain, doubled now, then tripled. A welding iron cutting through his nerve endings, sending showers of sparks in every direction.

  “Stay still,” Quintero said in a calm whisper.

  Mason was beyond hearing him. He kept his eyes closed, counting the seconds, until the pain suddenly eased and he could take a breath. He heard the slug ping into the bowl and opened his eyes.

  “Forty caliber,” Quintero said.

  “I need a better vest.”

  “Or don’t get shot.”

  “The target wasn’t in the right room,” Mason said, the anger replacing the worst of the pain. “Your source had bad intel.”

  “And you dealt with it,” Quintero said, picking up the X-Acto knife.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Got to clean the edges so I can sew you up.”

  Mason squeezed his eyes shut, felt the same surge of electricity shoot through him again as Quintero scraped and cut.

  Lauren came back into the room, carrying a spool of thread and a selection of needles. She held them out to Quintero. “Here.”

  He took one of the needles. Made a face. “This the best you got?”

  “I sew ripped jeans, not bullet wounds.”

  He ignored that and snapped off two feet of thread from the spool.

  “You’re not going to want to watch this,” Quintero said.

  “I’m not leaving,” she said.

  Quintero shook his head, reached into his shirt pocket, and pulled out a fold-up pair of reading glasses. They sat low on his nose. A strange moment of stillness as he carefully threaded the needle, this former gangbanger with the green-and-white La Raza tattoo on his arm and three rings in his ears, guiding the thread through the eye of the needle with the skill of a seamstress.

  Mason closed his eyes one last time as he felt the needle piercing his flesh. He tried and failed not to picture Quintero going down through all the layers of his skin, crossing the open wound, and up through the skin on the opposite side. Straight, then diagonal to come back, then straight again. He felt the pull as Quintero tightened the thread, the fresh sting as he paused to wipe away the blood and douse the wound with peroxide.

  “I need your help again,” Quintero said to Lauren as he began to pack the wound with bandages. “Rip that tape into foot-long pieces.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mason said, looking past Quintero at her.

  Sorry had never sounded so inadequate.

  Mason thought he saw a thousand things in Lauren’s expression. He hoped forgiveness was one of them.

  When Quintero was done securing the last piece of tape, he lifted Mason to his feet. He threw Mason’s left arm over his shoulder. “Now we go.”

  “Wait,” Lauren said, putting herself between them and the door. “Go where?”

  “Someplace safer.”

  “Safer for who?” she asked.

  “For all of us.” He looked at Mason. “Let’s move.”

  Lauren closed the door behind them and surveyed the bloody mess that was her front hallway. She collapsed to her knees, wrapping her arms tightly around herself. The rush of adrenaline was gone now, leaving her weak. But that’s not what started her sobbing. It was the thought that even if Nick Mason lived through this …

  She might never see him again.

  • • •

  QUINTERO LED MASON into the hallway and down the stairs. He gave the street a quick scan, opened the apartment building’s door, and walked Mason to his black Escalade parked half a block away.

  “My car …” Mason said.

  “Al
ready taken care of.”

  Quintero pulled out into traffic. The SUV stopped at a light, as a police car crossed silently through the intersection, blue light flashing.

  “You really fucked up,” Quintero said, easing the Escalade away from the intersection. “This is gonna come back on all of us.”

  “What do you mean,” Mason said, “all of us?”

  “You know the rules. Everyone’s in play.”

  After everything else he had been through that night, Mason needed a moment to let that sink in.

  “Your job was to take out the accountant,” Quintero said. “Mine was to drive to Elmhurst. Wait to hear from you … Or not.”

  Mason sat straight up in the car seat. Elmhurst meant two things:

  His ex-wife, Gina.

  His daughter, Adriana.

  It was a threat Mason had heard before: you fail, they die. A simple equation. But tonight, a bullet dug out of his shoulder, his blood all over Lauren’s apartment, the threat felt more real somehow. Tonight, he had come inches away from losing more than just a few pints of blood.

  He steps out of this vehicle, Mason said to himself, the entire scene coming to him at once. He walks up to the front door. It’s locked, but that barely slows him down. One foot against the door, just next to the dead bolt. By the time everyone wakes up, he’s already up the stairs. Maybe Brad has a gun, maybe he doesn’t. It doesn’t matter. As much as he wants to protect his wife and stepdaughter, he has no idea how. Not against a man like Quintero.

  He takes the first bullet in the forehead.

  Gina is screaming. In another room, down the hallway, a room Mason has never even seen before, his daughter Adriana is sitting up in her bed.

  Is she crying? Does she try to hide? Try to run?

  Mason stopped the movie in his head before it could go another frame.

  “Don’t you ever threaten my family again,” Mason said. “Ever!”

  “Don’t give me a reason,” Quintero said, keeping his eyes straight ahead, “and I won’t have to.”

  From the moment Mason had walked out of that prison, he’d been thinking about what it would take to break free from this second life he’d found himself in.

  He’d been watching. And waiting.

  But on this night, as Quintero drove him down the dark streets of Chicago’s North Side, Mason knew that the watching and waiting was over.

  I am going to burn you down, he thought. You. Darius Cole. Everyone else who works for him.

  I am going to burn you all down.

  4

  Less than five hours after being awakened by a phone call in the middle of the night, U.S. Marshal Bruce Harper stood seven hundred miles away from home, looking at the greatest failure of his life.

  Harper wasn’t just a twenty-seven-year veteran of the United States Marshals Service, the USMS—he’d spent the last ten years as the Assistant Director in charge of the Witness Security Program, or WITSEC as they called it in Arlington, overseeing hundreds of deputy marshals in ninety-four districts across the country. Earlier in his career, Harper had worked directly for Gerald Shur, the original founder of WITSEC, and still talked to him at least once a week. He was already dreading the next call with Gerald because in almost fifty years of the Program’s existence, over eighteen thousand WITSEC clients had been protected and no client—at least no client who followed the Program’s rules—had ever been killed.

  Until now.

  Their first murdered witness.

  And it happened on Harper’s watch.

  As he walked through the firebombed hallway of the Aqua’s twenty-first floor, the scence like something out of a war zone—the walls blackened and three doors in a row blown out and lying haphazardly on the floor—he tried to piece it all together.

  Harper went into the room where the incendiary devices had been placed. A dozen paint cans had been smuggled in, all sealed tightly, with diesel fuel inside. The marshals were cooperating with the FBI on the investigation, and Harper had been told that they’d already found the security feed showing two painting contractors bringing up the cans. They were chasing down the list of approved contractors working on this floor, compiling a list of all employees, but Harper didn’t hold out much hope.

  Whoever had brought them up here, the cans were stacked with great care to go off in a rapid chain reaction, with one central fuse activated by a digital timer. Harper went to the balcony where the window had been blown out, twenty-one stories above the streets of Chicago. The morning traffic on the Loop was heavy now. Everyone going to work, already forgetting about last night’s big news from downtown …

  This is not my city, he said to himself. He’d never lived here, never worked here, had never spent more than a day at a time here—although he had a strong feeling that was about to change.

  How did this happen?

  It was the first question he had asked when the phone call came, had been asking himself ever since. But now that he was here to see it in person, that question was replaced by another:

  How did none of my deputy marshals die?

  He had enough injuries to fill a ward: four deputy marshals with severe burns—they were all mostly sheltered by the fireproof doors when the explosion went off on the floor—another three found incapacitated on the stairwell, two with abdominal trauma and a third found unconscious, apparently choked out. The young deputy marshal on the forty-third floor, the one who’d been stationed at the decoy door, was another abdominal case, with separate muscle trauma in his left thigh. He was young enough, he’d probably be walking again in a couple of weeks.

  “The shooter was wearing a black mask,” the deputy marshal had told him. Harper had stopped at the hospital first to interview him before coming here. “Brown eyes, mid-thirties maybe. And he was a Southsider.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I’ve lived here my whole life. I know a Southsider when I hear one.”

  That left the deputy marshal who was stationed in the room itself: Greg Davis, a man with almost as many years in the Service as Harper. Harper would have trusted him to guard his own kids, along with his retirement fund, but Davis had been shot with another of the six silicone plugs recovered in the building. He had also been both shocked and hit in the head by the stun baton they found in the hallway, not far from the Mossberg 500 shotgun.

  This guy had no problem killing McLaren, Harper said to himself, looking at the fire-blackened HK USP nine-millimeter semiautomatic they had found. But he went to a hell of a lot of trouble not to kill anyone else. Even if that meant carrying extra weapons.

  What kind of man does that?

  Harper was dying to catch him, so he could ask him that question in person. And he would catch the man. It was only a matter of time.

  He went up to the fifty-third floor, where the marshals had kept one of two secret apartments. This apartment wasn’t even known to most marshals in the local district office. Unless you were actively guarding a high-value client here, you had no reason to know it existed.

  He walked into the main room of the apartment. There were barely any furnishings beyond the immediate functional needs of the client who’d stay here for a night or two, maybe a week at the most. A small kitchen and a table to have meals on. Television hooked up to basic cable. A couch and coffee table, now reduced to scrap wood. Deputy Marshal Davis had been found on the floor nearby, unconscious. On the other side of the room, next to the now destroyed television, they had found Ken McLaren. He’d been shot three times—twice in the chest, once in the head—with the semiautomatic.

  Harper had walked past a dozen other men, all doing their jobs, when he’d first arrived. Feds, fire investigators, more marshals from the Northern Illinois District of the USMS. But now he stood alone in the room, a moment of stillness in the chaos of this day, looking down at the exact spot on the floor from which the body had been taken away. A splatter of blood arced across the wall. The carpet was stained where the blood had soaked through. As he
turned, he was startled to see a man standing in the room with him. He was a few inches shorter than Harper, a few years younger. Dark coloring, watchful eyes. A coiled energy, even as he stood still. He wasn’t a deputy marshal, or one of the FBI agents Harper had met on the way in, but the scuffed dress shoes and the dark blue sports jacket that needed a good pressing screamed law enforcement. Unless he’s a first-rate undercover, a cop only looks like one thing: a cop.

  Harper looked the man in the eye. “This better be important, Officer …”

  The man took out his star. “Detective Frank Sandoval. Area Central Homicide.”

  “If you’re here to gloat over the Feds fucking up, you’ve had your look. The door’s behind you.”

  “I left a message for you two days ago. You should have returned my call.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I was trying to pull your coat.”

  “About what?”

  “About this,” Sandoval said, flaking off a piece of wallboard. “This clock was already ticking as soon as Darius Cole got his retrial. I’m surprised it took this long.”

  “Bullshit. How could you know that?”

  “If you took my call, you’d have your answer.”

  Harper took a beat to calm himself. “Mr. McLaren was in the Program for almost twenty years. During that whole time, he had never had any contact with any past associates or—”

  “Yeah, I know how it works. Leave your whole life behind, start a new life in a new place, nobody will ever find you, right?”

  “Not if you follow the rules.” Harper had read every word in McLaren’s file that morning while he was sitting on the plane. This man who once worked as a forensic accountant for the IRS, who would later help Darius Cole move millions of dollars in dirty money back and forth between the U.S. and a dozen other countries without paying any taxes. This same man who was relocated from Chicago to Asheville, North Carolina, after testifying against Cole in the original trial. He was given a one-bedroom apartment and a job at a strip mall doing walk-in tax returns for people who couldn’t wait to get their two-hundred-dollar refunds, with a federal probation officer looking over his shoulder to make sure that was the most creative thing McLaren ever did with other people’s money.