Exit Strategy Page 5

  “I will kill you if I have to,” Mason said to him, letting himself imagine what would happen if he pulled the trigger. The problems he would solve. But then the other problems that would replace them.

  “Nick …” Lauren said. She was hyperventilating, barely able to speak. “Why is he here again?”

  He looked over at her for just a moment, long enough to see her leaning against the dresser. She was still holding the silver towel bar, now bent, in her left hand. Her face was drained of color. No longer a warrior, she was back to being the woman from the pet shop again.

  “Pack some clothes,” Mason said to her. “Anything of any value to you.”

  “What are you talking about?” Lauren said, fighting to catch her breath. “Where are we going?”

  “Just do it. Right now.”

  “You’re killing everyone you love,” Quintero said, still sitting on the floor. He put one hand on the back of his head, then checked his fingers for blood. “Her. Your wife, your kid …”

  “But you won’t be here to see it,” Mason said.

  Mason kept his eyes on Quintero as he heard Lauren moving behind him, opening drawers and taking out clothes. She went into the bathroom to change. That’s when Mason finally spoke again.

  “Here’s the official version,” he said to Quintero. “You came here. You took her away. You killed her and you disposed of the body. Nobody will ever find it. Do you understand me?”

  “You’re asking me to lie to Cole.”

  “I’m not asking.”

  He watched Quintero work that over in his head. Watched him do the math.

  “If she shows up somewhere …”

  “She won’t,” Mason said. “I’ll make sure of it.”

  Quintero shook his head. “You’re going to fuck both of us.”

  Lauren came back into the bedroom. “Where are we going, Nick?”

  “I don’t have time to argue,” Mason said. “Pack your bag right now. And get the carrier for Max. He’s going with you.”

  “Nick, I’m not—”

  “Pack your bag,” Mason said, letting a hard edge come into his voice. He didn’t turn to see the effect.

  “I’m not going anywhere without you.”

  “Pack. Your. Bag. Now.”

  She swallowed hard but didn’t move.

  “Look at him.” Mason nodded at Quintero. “Why do you think he came here?”

  “I’m not giving up on us,” she said. “Just because some—”

  “Are you listening to me or not?” he said, the anger and the menace in his voice sounding alien to his own ears. But this was the way it had to be. The time had come to burn the bridge, and the road on both sides.

  “Nick …” She looked lost now, still holding the towel bar. Quintero sat quietly and watched them.

  “I’m saving your life,” Mason said. “You’re leaving.”

  “What about us?”

  “There is no us,” he said. “Not anymore.”

  He hated to say it, hated everything that was happening, almost as much as he hated the thought of a bullet in her head, because he was stupid enough to believe they could have had something—a life, a future—together.

  Tears ran down her cheeks. He looked away, the gun still pointed at Quintero, while Lauren packed. A few minutes later, he heard the door buzzer.

  “That’s Diana,” Mason said. “Go let her in.”

  He heard her going down the stairs, then a pair of footsteps coming back up.

  “What the hell is going on?” Diana said, stepping into the room and seeing Mason sitting on the bed with Quintero on the floor.

  Mason didn’t have to see Diana’s face. He knew how much she despised Quintero. How much she feared him.

  “Take Lauren to the airport,” Mason said. “Stop at the restaurant first. There’s an envelope with ten thousand dollars in it taped under your desk. Give that to her. And when you drop her off, just leave. She’ll pick a flight and she’ll go. Neither of us will ever know where. Do you understand?”

  “No,” Lauren said. “First you cut my heart out, now—”

  “Diana,” Mason said, ignoring Lauren, “do you understand?”

  A long silence before Diana finally spoke. “Yes.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Lauren said.

  “Don’t move,” Mason said to Quintero. Then he stood up and went to Lauren. Her eyes were still red. She wiped her face and looked up at him.

  “You can’t do this to me,” she said. “We’ve been working so hard to be together.”

  “It was a mistake.”

  “Listen to me,” she said. “I’m not stupid. I already knew something like this was coming, okay? I already made my peace with it a long time ago. So I don’t care what you say. I’m not going to just—”

  “I killed a man last night,” Mason said.

  Lauren stopped short, like she’d just been slapped in the face.

  “I went into that building downtown,” he said, “the one that was on fire. I found the man I was looking for and I killed him.”

  She kept looking up at him without saying a word.

  “Last time, I killed a cop with a shotgun. I blew his body apart. Diana was there. She can tell you it’s true. Before that, I killed a man with a knife, cut his throat and watched him die while I was still holding him.”

  The tears ran down both of her cheeks again.

  “Wake up, Lauren. I kill people. That’s my life. You stay, you die, too.”

  She shook her head, still unable to say a word.

  “Diana’s going to take you now. Don’t come back here. Ever.”

  She stood there for a long time until Diana took her by the arm and led her out of the room. Mason watched her put together the rest of her things, close up her suitcase, and open up the spare room door to let Max out. She put a leash on him but he strained against it when he saw Mason in the bedroom. He got to within three feet of him before Lauren pulled Max back.

  Diana was struggling with the big dog carrier in one hand, the suitcase in the other. Lauren stopped to look Mason in the eye one last time. She opened her mouth as if to say one last thing. But no words came out. Both women left.

  Mason sat down on the edge of the bed. Quintero stayed on the floor. He didn’t speak.

  “You’re going to take me to your shop,” Mason finally said. “I need a new car.”

  • • •

  LAUREN LOOKED OVER at the woman driving. Diana Rivelli. She had been the stranger Lauren found living with Nick Mason. With the dark hair and the dark eyes and the ageless beauty that she didn’t even seem to be aware of. She was just as much a stranger now, just as much a mystery, even after Lauren had found a way into Mason’s life.

  I have to go, Lauren thought. I have to leave the only place I’ve ever known.

  Why does Diana get to stay?

  “Was that all true?” Lauren said, wiping her face again. “The things Nick said, about what he does?”

  “We all do what we have to do,” Diana said, keeping her eyes on the road.

  “And I have to go.”

  “You get to go. Which makes you the lucky one.”

  “How am I lucky, Diana? My whole life is over.”

  “Your life is still yours. I’d trade places with you in a second. The man who owns Nick’s life … he owns mine, too.”

  “People can’t own other people.”

  “Tell that to the man who owns me,” Diana said. “I may live in a nice cage, but I’m still a slave.”

  “I don’t understand any of this,” Lauren said.

  “You just didn’t want to see it,” Diana said. “But you had to have some idea. What did you think he was doing when he had to leave you? Delivering flowers?”

  Lauren didn’t answer. They rode on in silence until they reached O’Hare.

  “Where am I supposed to go?” Lauren said. “Back home to my parents?”

  “No, don’t go there. Go somewhere nobody can find you. At least
for now.”

  Lauren looked at her, shaking her head in disbelief.

  They drove up to the terminal. The dog sat in the backseat, looking out the window. Lauren got out with her suitcase. An agent came over and helped her with the dog carrier. Max strained at the leash for a moment, then gave up and sat down on the pavement.

  “Promise me you’ll take care of him,” Lauren said, pausing at the door and waiting.

  “I have enough to do just taking care of myself.”

  Diana just looked at her. A car behind hers started to honk.

  “Promise me,” Lauren said again.

  Diana nodded. Lauren closed the door and walked away.

  She had no idea where she was going. Or what she’d do when she got there.

  The only thing she knew for sure was that she’d never come back.

  6

  Bruce Harper would remember Nick Mason’s face, as he’d looked down at them from his luxury town house, for the rest of his life.

  Never mind ruining the WITSEC Program’s perfect record, embarrassing four thousand U.S. marshals and deputy marshals all over the country, putting a black mark on Harper’s twenty-seven-year career. None of that really mattered.

  What mattered was the fact that, if Detective Sandoval was right, Nick Mason had killed a witness Harper was sworn to protect, injuring nine of Harper’s men in the process.

  And Harper couldn’t do anything about it.

  At least not yet.

  He was sitting across the desk from Rachel Greenwood, an AUSA—Assistant United States Attorney—for the Northern District of Illinois. Mid-forties, attractive in an all-business kind of way, hair pulled back tight, rimless glasses. Harper was meeting her for the first time, trying to take her measure. He glanced at the framed photograph on her desk, which might have been taken when she was a few years younger, with a husband who had the smile and the haircut of an attorney, probably in private practice. Two teenage kids, a boy and a girl. The whole family wearing white shirts and smiling for the camera on a bright happy day that was nothing like today.

  Harper had already checked in at the U.S. Marshals’ office on the twenty-fourth floor, next to the U.S. District Court. They had told him an AUSA was hot to see someone immediately, so Harper had come down here to the fourth floor himself. He wasn’t going to send anyone else to fall on the sword. He would answer for the Service’s failure.

  As he rode down the elevator, he thought about how many agencies were represented in this one city block on Dearborn Street—the DEA, the IRS, two U.S. senators, the Post Office—one of the greatest concentrations of federal power outside Washington, D.C. The last time Harper had come here, it had struck him how easy it would be for another Timothy McVeigh to hit the federal government—just roll a rental van filled with a fertilizer bomb down Dearborn Street.

  But now he only had one thing on his mind.

  “I appreciate you making the time to come down here,” Greenwood said from the other side of her desk. “I’m honored. The Assistant Director of WITSEC himself.”

  Her words were dripping with civility, even if this was the one day that being in charge of WITSEC was anything but a badge of honor. She knew it. And she knew that he knew it.

  “It’s not a good day,” he said. “I’ve got nine deputy marshals in the hospital.”

  “Plus one dead witness.”

  “That’s on me. I take full responsibility.”

  “What does your taking responsibility do for me, Mr. Assistant Director?”

  Harper was getting the picture. Greenwood didn’t want a pound of flesh. She wanted answers.

  “Nick Mason,” he said.

  “Is that name supposed to mean something to me?”

  “He works for Darius Cole.”

  He knew that would stop her, because Darius Cole was the most important person in AUSA Greenwood’s life right now. It was Greenwood who helped send Cole to prison for life in the first place, after offering deals to both of the witnesses who eventually testified against him. Harper wasn’t surprised, now that he was sitting in her office. He’d met AUSAs all over the country—some of them were overmatched by the job, some were bright and ambitious but clearly on their way to something else. And some were born to represent the United States in court, even if that meant carrying too many cases, working too many late-night hours, for not enough pay and no recognition at all. Some of the best, Harper knew, were women. They had a special talent for putting together a case, for closing the deal, for turning co-defendants into cooperating witnesses by slipping right by a man’s defenses, appealing to him on a primal level that goes all the way back to the cradle: I’m on your side. I want to protect you.

  She’d been second chair at the original trial and now she was lead on the upcoming retrial. Which made her life this morning almost as fucked up as Harper’s.

  “Mason was doing time with Cole at Terre Haute,” Harper said. “Cole got him out.”

  “I remember this now. There were problems with the original testimony. The detective came forward and admitted that he—”

  “It was a lie,” Harper said. “Cole orchestrated everything. He wanted Mason on the outside, to work for him.”

  “Work for him as in killing witnesses?”

  “Among other things.”

  She took a beat to process that. “How do you know this?” she finally asked.

  “The homicide detective who put him away. Frank Sandoval, partner of that detective who admitted to planting the evidence. He drove me by Mason’s town house an hour ago. He’s going to help me nail him. Or I’m going to help him. Frankly, I don’t care who gets the credit on this one.”

  “Can Sandoval connect Mason to last night?”

  “If he could, we’d be putting Mason in handcuffs right now.”

  She wrote down the name on her legal pad. “Nick Mason,” she said. “Local guy?”

  “Sandoval says he comes from a place called Canaryville.”

  She let out a breath and shook her head. “Figures.”

  “Colorful part of town, I take it?”

  “My grandfather was a cop in this city back in the Prohibition days. He met all the big gangsters. Al Capone, Bugs Moran. Used to tell me stories about them when I was a little girl. But the worst of the bunch, he said, was a man named Gene Geary. The most ruthless killer he ever met.”

  “Let me guess,” Harper said. “Canaryville.”

  “That’s where all the stockyards were,” she said. “My grandfather said you could walk down the street and smell death in the air.”

  Some things never change, Harper thought. He wasn’t going to say it out loud, not to a woman whose life was dedicated to trying to change them.

  “It was a mistake to bring McLaren here for the deposition,” Greenwood said. The subtext hung in the air: It was a mistake to assume the Service would be able to protect him.

  “It shouldn’t have been a mistake,” Harper said. “None of this should have happened.”

  “But it was and it did,” she said, then moved on. “Just one man did this?” More subtext: One man against how many again?

  “We believe so, yes.”

  “How did he find out where you were keeping McLaren?”

  “We don’t know that yet.”

  She shook her head. “We were doing okay right up until then.”

  “What are you—”

  She held her palms up to stop him. “Come on. You’ve already suggested that Cole compromised a detective to get Mason out of prison. You know and I know he got to someone in the Marshals Service.”

  Harper took another moment. He tried to remember what his late wife had told him about counting to three before answering a tough question.

  He didn’t even get to one.

  “No,” he said, “that’s not possible. Not in my office.”

  “Yet apparently it is.”

  Harper didn’t want to say it: The leak must have been local. The one and only time the Service is compro
mised and of course it was someone from the city that turned corruption into an art form.

  “Look,” Harper said, making himself take a breath, “we’re on the same side here.”

  “Not if you’re more interested in covering the Service’s ass, we’re not. I’m just trying to make sure I have at least one witness left when we get to this retrial.”

  “How the hell did Cole get this retrial, anyway? I thought that would be almost impossible.”

  “It should have been,” Greenwood said. “But Cole did something pretty goddamned brilliant. If you remember that original trial, we filed for an anonymous jury …”

  “Like Nicky Barnes’s trial.”

  “Barnes was the first, yes. But there are two things about anonymous juries … One, they sometimes backfire. Like John Gotti’s first trial …”

  “The hung jury.”

  “With the foreman who had connections to the family. If that jury hadn’t been anonymous, the connection would have been exposed and he would have been thrown out. But the second problem is where Cole makes his case for retrial … Because the Appeals Courts already have a standing prejudice against anonymous juries based on the built-in presumption of guilt. So they end up setting these ridiculous fairness standards for the deliberations. Very tough to meet. It’s a weakness nobody ever exploited before. Not even Gotti in all those motions for retrial he filed.”

  “I don’t understand,” Harper said. “That trial was twelve years ago. How could Cole—”

  “Out of nowhere,” Greenwood said, “twelve years later, one of the original anonymous jurors supposedly finds Cole’s attorney and tells him they deliberated improperly. They went over details of the case in the hotel, talked about how Cole must have been guilty if they were being locked away in a secret location. It was the one bomb that couldn’t be ignored.”

  Harper looked at her, exasperated. “You don’t believe this shit …”

  “I didn’t hear the motion,” Greenwood said. “The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals did.”

  “So, step one,” Harper said, “get the retrial. Step two—”

  “Start killing the key witnesses.”

  Harper thought about it for a beat. “And now we’ve only got one left.”