“And what if I said I wanted him taken out?”
Trench smiled, or almost did. “In my profession a man must know the level of his limitations before those limitations consume him. Bane and I are equals. I don’t like the odds of a direct confrontation.”
“You said he was finished.”
“No, I said the Winter Man was finished. Not dead, mind you, just pushed beneath the surface. But push Bane too far and the Winter Man will return. We must avoid that now at all costs.”
“In other words, you’re not up to the task of eliminating him.”
Trench took one step forward. His eyes grew even colder. “Don’t bait me, Colonel. I’m too old and smart for the ploy to work. Bane burned himself out because everything became personal with him. I have always been able to remain detached. Success and failure are merely relative states of being, as are life and death. Emotions cannot be allowed to enter in because they are the true killers. At my level, you can only be destroyed by yourself.”
“Or the Winter Man …”
“Not if I don’t give him a reason … and you don’t.”
“Accepted,” Chilgers agreed. “But something will still have to be done about that air traffic controller.”
“That might spark Bane into action.”
“Handle it in a way that it doesn’t. A professional way, Trench. I’m sure you’re capable.”
The Second Day:
COBRA
Chapter Five
Davey Phelps crossed his arms to ward off the cold breeze of the early spring morning in New York. He had slept in a rooming house off Forty-second Street in a room shared with five others. He’d paid for it with his last five dollars which didn’t matter much, because so long as he had The Chill, money was just a formality.
By rights, he could have stayed in the flop house until noon but he wanted to get out early because the gnarled, angry thoughts of the five men in the room were unnerving, even scary. Davey could hear their thoughts as clearly as if they had spoken them. They came to him as sharp as voices over a radio you couldn’t shut off. He thought sleep might bring silence but instead his rest was continually disturbed by the vicious, frustrated dreams of these men, dreams which reached him as loud and strong as bloodcurdling screams in slice-’em-up horror movies. So Davey stayed in his jeans, legs curled up tight, on a bed against the wall, stealing whatever sleep he could.
When morning came, he slipped silently into his sneakers and tiptoed from the room back into the streets. The city felt calm and unforeboding at this time of the day. Davey walked off down the street looking for a place to eat, watching his breath dance before him in a cloud. For now he was safe. But the Men were closing in; he could feel them, so he’d have to stay on his toes.
A corner diner advertising bacon and eggs with toast for $1.99 had just opened. Davey stepped inside and chose a seat at the counter. A waitress took his order and he watched the cook drop his eggs onto a flat grill in full view of the counter. It was comfortably warm inside and Davey realized he’d been shivering with only his rugby shirt for cover. He’d have to get a jacket today, a real nice one, leather maybe. The Chill would take care of everything.
It had all started on the flight back to New York. He remembered the pilot announcing they were beginning their descent toward Kennedy and then there was nothing. He just blacked out. He came to with the terrible realization that he was already in the terminal building and didn’t remember getting there. He was standing by a drinking fountain using the wall for support, even though he didn’t feel dizzy or weak. In fact, he felt really strange, different. A big man in a suit was standing thirty feet away, looking at him, and Davey looked back.
Why’s the kid hanging around? He should’ve been on his way already….
Davey turned a bit to make sure nobody was whispering in his ear, found he stood alone. The words were in his mind, pulled from the man’s head. He didn’t know how, but he knew it. He could read the man’s thoughts, wished he could tell why the man was thinking about him. He gazed back in the man’s direction.
I’ve got to call headquarters. I’ve got to report this, I’ve got to report this right away….
Report what? Davey wondered. Why was the man following him? What had he done?
Davey felt scared. Something was very wrong here and having the man around only made it worse. He had to get rid of him, had to get out of the airport. He thought of running, taking his chances in the open. Then something happened to him. He felt his whole body quiver, the feeling that of a soft feather being dragged up his spine, a chill. He held the big man’s eyes and started moving away from the fountain, leaving a little bit of himself behind, and sure enough the big man’s eyes stayed glued to it.
That was the first time he had felt The Chill.
Davey left the airport feeling strange, powerful, and a little scared. He didn’t know exactly what had happened back there; he just knew that the last time he’d looked, the man’s eyes were still glued to the drinking fountain where Davey had been. But he knew there’d be more of the Men, lots probably, and he had to stay clear of them. He jumped into the first taxi he saw and told the driver to take him into the city, Times Square area specifically where there were always plenty of kids hanging out. They would provide a perfect camouflage to keep the Men from finding him.
By the time he reached his destination, the taxi meter read $21.90 and Davey realized with a shudder he didn’t even have half that in his pocket. So he handed the driver a pair of ones and made The Chill again.
“Keep the change,” he said a bit tentatively, waiting for the driver’s reaction.
“Thanks, kid,” said the driver, pocketing two bills he fully believed added up to twenty-five dollars.
The cab drove away. Davey started walking.
Didn’t that beat all?
He didn’t know what was happening to him but it was sort of fun and he wasn’t complaining. God knows he had plenty of other things to complain about. His father had run off a month after his mother had given birth to him on a transit authority bus headed for Manhattan. And to complete the circle she’d been beaten and killed in the subway on a gloomy night just before his fifth birthday. He’d drifted in and out of foster homes, some of them good, most not so good, and twice a year he’d flown out to San Diego to visit his grandparents who lived in a retirement community with strict rules against live-in kids. Not that he believed that changed things. His grandparents didn’t love him, at least not enough. They tolerated his visits as an interruption of their lifelong dream of easy living, realized in a two-story yellow townhouse set among a zillion other two-story yellow townhouses a good quarter day’s ride from the ocean. Davey long ago gave up trying to convince the aged couple to move elsewhere and take him in. He figured he was lucky they remembered who he was, though he often doubted that they cared.
So he had boarded Flight 22 to return to his latest set of foster parents, a nice enough pair who kept house for three others like him — middle teens, unadoptables society was doing its utmost to shove under the rug to be stepped on by the system. Davey had it easier than most. Passing into his middle teens had not robbed him of the boyish good looks that probably made him the only fifteen-year-old in the city who had trouble getting into R-rated movies. His hair was long and brown, stylishly unkempt. People who knew music told him he looked like a young Jim Morrison, the dead lead singer of The Doors. Davey liked his looks because tough-looking boys had much more trouble finding foster homes and then staying in them, so they ended up floating through reform schools and detention centers which hardened them beyond all reasonable bounds. Davey wasn’t tough and was often perceived to be too much the opposite by social workers who feared his looks might influence him to drift toward a life in the streets as a male hooker. Davey didn’t pay much attention to them because if they thought that about him, it showed they really didn’t know him. He was basically as normal as a boy could be, in spite of the circumstances of his upbringing. He liked sports, made friends easily, lived in jeans, and had mastered tucking just enough cuff into his untied sneakers or winter boots.