Trench was still a crack shot himself and remained almost as good with his hands as he’d ever been. It was the mental edge he’d lost, stealing a step from his quickness and an inch from his aim. The enjoyment he got from killing — the fulfillment — was gone. Retirement he did not even consider. Trench had nothing to retire to. So he lingered, not comfortable with his profession anymore but even less comfortable with the alternatives to it.
He climbed into the back seat of his car, the Twin Bears into the front. The COBRA operations chief went back to his duties. One of the Bears, the blue-eyed one, took the wheel. Trench picked up the phone which connected him directly to COBRA in San Diego.
“Yes.” Chilgers’ voice.
“This is Trench.”
“You have a report for me?”
“The Del Gennio matter has been handled. No further problems from that end.”
“Splendid. And the boy?”
“No pickup yet.”
Chilgers’ hesitation signaled disappointment. “I was told he’d been tracked down.”
“We’re close on his tail now, but the homing device went haywire again before we could pin him down.”
“Damn …”
“The equipment should become effective again tonight. We’ll have him by morning.”
“You’d better, Trench. His homing beacon is only good for another sixteen hours or so. After that, we’re on our own. Tomorrow morning you say?”
“Yes,” Trench acknowledged, and he almost told Chilgers about Lincoln’s face becoming Franklin’s but thought better of it.
“There’s something else,” the colonel told him.
“I’m listening.”
“Bane was at the airport this morning asking questions.”
“What kind?”
“About Flight 22. It was obvious Del Gennio told him everything, and equally obvious Bane’s suspicions stemmed purely from a personal angle.”
“Explain.”
“He didn’t hold anything back. He divulged everything he knew.”
Trench couldn’t help but laugh. “He’s a professional, Colonel. A professional often gives too much away to disguise his true intentions. If he already knows everything and spills it, you assume he’s not looking for more.”
“Well …”
“Don’t be fooled by him, Colonel. He’s onto something and he won’t stop till he digs the rest out.”
“Then take him out, take him out as I suggested when we first learned of his involvement.”
Trench considered the Twin Bears sitting before him. “That might turn out to be superfluous, even counter productive. With Del Gennio out of the way, there’s nowhere left for him to dig. Leave him alone.”
“You talk like he’s still the Winter Man.”
“Push him too far and that’s exactly what he’ll become. Right now he’s only a minor threat to us. Leave it at that, Colonel.”
“I’m not sure I agree,” Chilgers said, uncomfortable with being told what to do.
“Colonel, he knows Del Gennio has been erased, and he suspects it has something to do with Flight 22. The trail stops there … unless we leave more in his path.”
Chilgers sighed. “Then we’ll do it your way, Trench,” he said, contemplating alternatives of his own. “For now, I want you to concentrate your efforts on bringing in the boy.”
“By tomorrow morning, Colonel.”
Chilgers held the empty receiver by his ear for a second before returning it to its hook. He was unconvinced by Trench’s report; Bane was too much of a threat. He had to be sanctioned or the whole operation would be threatened. The Winter Man was a worry Chilgers didn’t need, and if Trench wasn’t up to the task of taking him out …
The colonel retrieved the receiver and dialed an overseas exchange. After two rings a beep sounded, and Chilgers waited until he was sure the tape was working before he left his message:
“Tell Scalia I require his services.”
Chapter Nine
How could they look so much alike?
Am I losing my mind?
“You say something, Josh?” Janie asked him.
“Huh? No, I guess I was just thinking out loud.”
Beyond the living-room window, night had entrenched itself on the New York skyline, buildings still lit by individual offices instead of floors casting an eerie glow on the streets beneath. Janie’s apartment was a four-room modern, counting a galley-style kitchen which rested against the near wall closest to the door.
“How ’bout dinner?” she asked.
“I’m not hungry,” Bane said. “Later.”
She moved behind him and began massaging his shoulders, her surprisingly strong fingers digging deep into the flesh, finding the root of his soreness immediately. Bane had gone to the King’s gym for a workout, direct from Rockefeller Center. Seeing that boy had shorted out his emotions. His failure to catch the kid wasn’t so much what bothered him as why he’d made the attempt in the first place. He went to the King’s to lose his anxiety in two hours of heavy pumping with the cold steel. But that had served only to make things worse, the realization he would probably never see the boy again clawing at him.
“God, you’re tense,” Janie told him.
“I think I’m going crazy,” Bane said distantly. “How could that boy have looked so much like Peter?”
“You said he was older than Peter.”
“By five years or so. And it was five years ago that …” Bane let the statement trail off. “When I was chasing him, I felt invincible, like nothing could stop me. But something was trying — I could feel it.”
“Then it took a man with no legs to finally bring you down.” Janie dug her fingers in deeper. “You’re chasing shadows, Josh.”
“Or ghosts.”
“Coincidence, love, nothing more.”
“I suppose.”
Bane sighed uneasily. His mind drifted back first five years and then beyond, to his return from the rice paddies and forests of Nam. The war was over, but there was still plenty of work for the Winter Man in the form of a hundred other Vietnams at various levels, each with its own independent importance to the concerns of the United States. Good intelligence services located threats before they could develop fully. And the greatest threats to American security were clever generals, socialist agitators, and men who knew too much and sold their allegiance for too little. These became the Winter Man’s new targets. He moved through more than a score of countries, forgetting the name of one as soon as he passed into the next. Some were frigid, most steaming.
Officially in these years Bane served under the powerful Arthur Jorgenson, director of the Pentagon’s top-secret Clandestine Operations, the same branch that had determined his assignments in Nam. Bane had long lost count of the number of men he had killed under orders from Jorgenson, nor was he bothered by what he’d done. Killing was a skill to be used like any other. He looked at his chosen victims no differently than a pathologist views a corpse, detached and cold.
Bane traveled to El Salvador during the late seventies in what was to become his final deep-cover mission for Clandestine Operations. His appointed task was to eliminate two rebel leaders responsible for the rising revolutionary movement with the help of a third rebel leader who had apparently come to see the American side of things.
Bane went to work methodically as always, living in the jungles, pinning down the men destined for his cross hairs. He picked a spot and time for both, within forty minutes of each other to maximize confusion. He learned too late that the whole episode was an elaborate setup put into operation by all three rebel leaders with the help of their Russian friends who very much wanted this Winter Man, who had caused them much hardship over the years, out of the way. Bane walked into an ambush of a dozen men.