Cold Silence Read online

  BERKLEY TITLES BY JAMES ABEL

  White Plague

  Protocol Zero

  Cold Silence

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  This book is an original publication of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Copyright © 2016 by Bob Reiss.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Abel, James, author.

  Title: Cold silence / James Abel.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Berkley, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016004341 (print) | LCCN 2016011810 (ebook) | ISBN 9780425282977 (hardback) | ISBN 9780698407305 ()

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Thrillers. | FICTION / War & Military. | FICTION / Technological. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3568.E517 C65 2016 (print) | LCC PS3568.E517 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016004341

  FIRST EDITION: July 2016

  Cover design by Anthony Ramondo.

  Cover art: Artwork by Studio Liddell for aareps.com; Red fused liquid © Svetara/Shutterstock; Biohazard symbol © Miguel Angel Salinas Salinas/Shutterstock.

  Interior art: Deserted area © by Anastasia Koro/Shutterstock.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  CONTENTS

  BERKLEY TITLES BY JAMES ABEL

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  I’ll never get out of here alive, thought Tahir Khan.

  He backed away from the peephole in the Boca Raton penthouse apartment, as the quiet knocking on the front door continued. Across the room, bright sun flooded in through floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors that faced the blue Atlantic, dazzling and still, twenty-four stories below. In early January, seventy-degree air washed in from the balcony and he heard the ocean, vaguely, insistent as a hiss.

  Khan looked around wildly, as if somehow, magically, an escape hatch would appear in the walls. But all was as it had been when he rented his hideaway. The place was costly but ugly and generic; hospital white walls and matching floor tiling, curving Naugahyde couch wrapped toward a giant TV. Bright lime green cushions topped wrought iron furniture. The same generic pastel beach paintings hung in a thousand rental condos from Key West up the East Coast, to New Jersey. Still life conch shells. Wind ruffling dune grass. Six-year-old children in bathing suits, wielding plastic pails.

  Khan was tall and stick-thin and he wore a black short-sleeved tropical shirt with a yellow once-festive and now sweat-soaked orchid pattern. He had underdeveloped muscles, soft hands, and big eyes. He thought, Call 911 for help? If I do that, I’ll be arrested.

  “Hey!” the friendly voice called through the door. “I know you’re in there. Open up. I just want to talk.”

  Khan peered through the peephole again and saw, magnified, like two spread fingers, air tickets, and then the tickets moved away and the smiling face was back, features exaggerated by the lens, ratcheting up his terror.

  I’m trapped. I’m finished. He’ll kill me, he thought.

  He’d taken a bus here, because cheapo bus lines accepted nontraceable cash, changed his name on the lease, to Phillip Zahoor, and paid a pile of hundred-dollar bills up front for three months, plus a hefty damage deposit. He’d barely left the apartment for the last two weeks.

  But they always found you. They tracked you down. They used computers and satellites, databases and old-fashioned footwork. It had been stupid to try to leave. He should have shut up and gone along and batted away his doubts.

  “How did you get past the guard?” he called out.

  Knock-knock-knock. The thin door looked as if it was caving in with each impact, however slight.

  Fucking Florida construction. Fucking South Florida–quality work. South Florida, where planned obsolescence meant concrete spalled months after being poured, roofs leaked in storms, doors were as sturdy as on Hollywood sets. Appearance was everything. Quality was a joke. The voice sounded close, male, soft, and intelligent.

  “Guard? I didn’t see a guard.”

  “I’ll call security if you don’t leave, Orrin.”

  No answer. Then, as if the man felt hurt, “Aw, what do you want to say that for? And why’d you leave anyway? After four years? Things are finally about to pop, Tahir!”

  Tahir Khan was a twenty-six-year-old ex–biology grad student from Pakistan, still legally in the United States, although he’d withdrawn from the State University of New York at Albany. Family abroad. Cold sweat flowed from his bald head, shaved two days ago, and ran down his face, where he was trying unsuccessfully to grow a beard. It coursed past his glasses and down his ropy neck and sprouted inside his armpits. His throat was closing. He couldn’t breathe. His head pounded. He’d heard the expression “knees going weak” but had never, until now, experienced it, and he wobbled backward from the door as if, any second, it would crash in. First thing on getting here, he’d called a locksmith to come, to install a deadbolt, and the hearty American voice on the phone had promised, “You betcha! We’ll come today!” But no one had shown up. “Our guy got a flu. Sorry, sir.” So Khan tried a second place. “We can come next Friday. Is Friday okay?”

  Friday was tomorrow.

  Now the voice came again through the door and it was patient and soft but inside the patience was something dark. The voice was Midwestern, reasonable on the surface. It was confident. “If I wanted to hurt you, I could have done it last night at the fish restaurant. Or this morning when you walked on the beach, Tahir.”

  Tahir felt hope stirring. “You were in the restaurant?”

  “You ordered mahimahi. Me, I prefer lobster. With butter. And lots of dark beer.”

  Tahir risked the peephole magnifier again, saw Orrin’s plain and forgettable face. There was absolutely nothing memorable about the man. He seemed composed of a collection of bland features. Height just short of normal. Face, almost
round but not, nose, one of those computer-generated combos showing common features of humans, two holes for breathing in a functional pasted-on knob. He was a genetic mix of average. You could see him straight on and forget him if a breeze distracted you. The skin was tanned. His tropical shirt, worn loosely, featured a racing cigarette boat pattern. The baseball cap said MARLINS, as it did on ten thousand people walking around here. The left hand held up Delta tickets again. Orrin’s smile looked genuine. It always did. But Tahir had seen the kind of damage the man could do. The doughy body was an illusion.

  “See? One ticket for you. One for me. What are you going to say if you call the police anyway? You know what they will do to you? Open the goddamn door and let’s go.”

  Tahir considered it. His two-bedroom penthouse sat above a concrete patio on the beach side, three blocks from the inland waterway in the west. At this height, any tourists walking on the beach would be beyond earshot if he screamed, and his next-door neighbor, a snowbird psychiatrist from Manhattan, was away for the weekend at his daughter’s wedding on Long Island.

  Tahir thought, I should have gone back to Pakistan.

  Tahir was in Florida for the first time and the only human being he’d had contact with here for more than five minutes had been the real estate agent. I need to rent something today, he told the man. He’d paid cash at Best Buy, for a TV, which he’d sat staring at for days, waiting with dread for the BIG NEWS to break, the thing he’d been working on. Cash in the supermarket, where he’d stocked up on food. Cash to the cabbie who’d brought him here.

  No motel for him. No lodging where he had to sign a registry book, even with a false name, because handwriting could be tracked. He’d been drilled on techniques. The people looking for him would check hotels and motels. They’d bribe desk clerks. Watch security tapes. Send phony tourists to sidle up to other guests and start conversations. They’d sit in cars in front of hotels.

  So after he rented this place, other than a daily walk on the beach, to keep from going crazy, or that one restaurant meal, he’d stayed inside and watched TV. Sometimes waiting for the BIG THING, sometimes just eyeing mindless fluff: Judge Judy. Wife Swap. Anything to keep him half sane as he tried to figure out what to do next. Tahir Khan had become one more anonymous figure trudging the Florida tide line, watching porpoises offshore at sunrise, and other fins, bigger ones. Less-benign life looking for something smaller to eat. Tahir among the handful of sleepless retirees, young lovers who had been up all night making impossible promises, sunburned tourists giving one last longing look at a beach before boarding the plane back to gray Newark or Pittsburgh. And among them, one fugitive, running from the biggest mistake of his life.

  The plan had been to sit here for a few weeks, get distance, and decide when to try to get out of the country and sit out the disaster that was about to begin.

  But now the doorknob turned and Orrin Sykes somehow just stepped into the apartment. How could he have a key? The private security guard downstairs was “here twenty-four hours a day,” the rental agent had promised. Khan had pushed it, demanded, “What happens if someone gets past security,” and the beefy guard behind the desk had laughed, nodded at video monitors showing elevator interiors, and said, poking his chest with pride, “Ex-ATF,” as if that guaranteed that no intruder, no stranger, not even a ninety-year-old cripple would pass his station without proper ID.

  But Sykes was a ghost, and now the man stood just ten feet away, same distance as the phone. For an instant Tahir flashed back to a film he’d seen in freshman biology class, too many years ago. It had been called Animal Camouflage. It had featured creatures—a certain frog, a moray eel, a crab—all of which looked beautiful, and rarely moved, and then with sudden shocking aggression would lunge. A tongue would flick out. A mouth would open. Whatever life form had been innocently feeding nearby a moment before would be gone, and the killer would be sitting there again.

  “Come on, Tahir. Pack a bag. Let’s go home.”

  “Really?”

  “What do you think, I’d hurt you? You’re valuable.”

  He started to feel relief. The sweat flow dissipated to a trickle. Was it possible? He began to babble, as he moved backward, toward the bedroom, toward his ratty suitcase in the back closet, all the time watching for Orrin to lunge.

  “I didn’t tell anyone. Who would believe it, right?”

  Sykes nodded. “You had doubts.”

  “I admit I thought about calling a reporter. Or the FBI. I did. I considered it. But I didn’t do anything. I just wanted to get away. For a little while. To think.”

  “Think.”

  “Everyone needs time to think.”

  “I know I do,” Sykes agreed, nodding.

  The bedroom lay down a short hallway from the living room, and the walk gave Sykes a view of all the other rooms in the condo. Kitchen, empty. Bathroom, empty. Guest bedroom, empty. Master bedroom.

  “No one really here,” Sykes said.

  “I told you that.”

  “I was just checking,” Sykes said.

  Tahir opened the mirrored sliding closet door with shaking hands. He reached up for his suitcase. He actually felt Orrin move before, it seemed, the reflection did in the three mirror panes. Tahir did not have time to turn. In the mirrors three meaty arms circled three skinny throats and three Tahirs were lifted bodily off the carpet. There was an awful cracking sound and he watched his head spin around. Orrin’s face remained expressionless.

  In a freshman biology class at SUNY, Tahir had heard a professor say once that after a human being is killed, the brain keeps functioning for a few more moments. Now his brain processed that he was being carried back into the living room, and that he was hanging over the patio railing. Wow, I am dead, he thought, falling, the concrete flecked with shiny mica, its squares forming a chessboard, the empty squares coming up fast.

  ONE

  Lionel Nash’s plea for help went unanswered because I could not reach my ringing satellite phone. My hands were occupied, gripping the steel fuselage in back of a C-130 Hercules, to keep me from sliding out of the plane. One engine had failed but the other three held altitude. I was strapped by bungee cord to the wall, six hundred feet above southern Sudan, as the big transport went semivertical, nose up, rear ramp open. I heard, over ringing, the high-pitched scream of wind, and the prop engines. Through that open door, I glimpsed six thousand starving Dinkas below, waiting for our life-giving cargo of Kansas-grown grain to fall.

  There had been some mechanical problems over the last couple of weeks when it came time to release food. I’d insisted, against Eddie’s objections, on riding in back today to see if I could find the snag. It had been small. I’d fixed it. Drop the food and let’s go home, I’d told the three-man crew up front.

  The ringing stopped as we hit drop-angle. Not many people had my number. That the phone was ringing meant there was an emergency. In this part of the world, that could mean any number of things.

  It could be a government attack on rebels. Disease. Aid workers injured. The whole continent is a basket case.

  I was the only person in back; no seats here, just the steel cave, and centering it, a track on which sat wooden pallets piled with 110-pound burlap sacks, filled with sorghum. From the outside, our blue UN markings were supposed to protect us if Sudanese MiGs showed up. Sometimes precautions worked. Sometimes rebels or government troops shot at relief planes. Sometimes planes—rattletrap workhorses to start with—failed and fell to the savannah below.

  The phone began ringing again.

  Below, men, women, and children had been waiting for food for days, sitting on their haunches, a silent crowd an eighth of a mile deep. Some had walked a hundred miles to reach the huge field, an arbitrary rectangle of grass. Looking up at us was a sea of hungry faces smeared with chalky dung powder, natural protection against sand flies. Twelve thousand eyes watched this afternoon’s lone co
ntribution to the bucket brigade of aid planes feeding four hundred thousand Africans at the junction of Kenya, Somalia, and Sudan, amid drought last year, flooding this year, and a thirty-year-old civil war.

  Gravity did the job. The bags began to slide down the track, sluggish at first, then faster, food going down a gullet. The palettes and sacks tumbled out to separate and drop like bombs toward the veldt, where UN food monitors kept the crowd and a crew of TV journalists from running onto the drop zone, for a better shot, or for the food.

  Last week a news show host from Copenhagen had done just that, stupidly had run onto the field to be on camera when the sacks hit the ground. Too late, she realized the bags were falling directly toward her. She tried to run, but her high heels snagged and a bag smashed her legs, and Eddie and I helped to amputate them back at the base.

  She’d been airlifted home, a twenty-five-year-old blond beauty who had only weeks before appeared in Scandinavian magazine ads, and now would be fitted with artificial legs, who had considered Africa a form of entertainment or career advancement, and had come to see that it represented a more basic role than that.

  What happens here threatens the world.

  The ringing started up again as the plane stabilized and the remaining inboard port engine coughed. We limped toward home. I answered and went still, shocked when I heard who was calling. I’d thought today’s mission was over. But what was starting would turn my world—the whole world—upside down.

  —

  My name is Joe Rush and I’m a medical doctor, all right, but also a retired Marine colonel who occasionally goes back on duty to do jobs for my old unit in D.C. My records have been sheep dipped, given selective truths. Kid from a Massachusetts town, that part is true, as is the ROTC training and Parris Island and later assignments in Indonesia, the Philippines, Iraq. Marksman, the file says, capable of running a field op. True. Forty-one years old. Divorced by a wife who got tired of secrecy. I live alone now in the town where I grew up and I advise the Wilderness Medicine group at Harvard two days a week on medical work in “difficult” areas of the world. The file looks complete, to an outsider.