The Midnight Caller (Jack Widow Book 6) Read online

  Martha McConnell shut the door to the car, gently, not slamming it, which was what her instincts wanted to do, but she did not. She was mad at her husband, not her car. Next, she clicked the button on her key to lock the car doors.

  Unlike her husband, she locked her car every time she got out, even if she was only going a few feet away. Like at the grocery store whenever she had emptied her shopping cart and had to put it away. She locked the car doors first, and then she pushed the cart to the nearest bin.

  The alarm beeped once and the lights flashed and shut off.

  She stomped up the drive in her cheap Friday night pumps that she’d worn to her friend’s house. She stopped at her husband’s town car and waited for a low burp that passed through her throat and out into the air. She had a slight taste of chardonnay in her mouth.

  She continued to the front door and opened it. It was unlocked, as usually. McConnell never seemed to care if their house was ever locked. Which was another point that she constantly nagged him about.

  Martha stopped in the doorway with the door wide open and reached in to switch the light on. She found the switch and flipped it. Nothing happened. She repeated the process. Still nothing.

  The lamp that she had left on was off as well. She suspected that her husband had turned it off. He hated to leave lights on when no one was home. But why was the foyer light not working? She wondered.

  She tried it again. Nothing. She flipped it a fourth time. Same results. Nothing.

  The power was not out. She knew that because the light from the kitchen was on and working fine. The light was enough for her to see the silhouettes of her living room furniture and the dining room table and chairs beyond.

  She cursed under her breath and stepped into the darkness. She closed the front door behind her. Her shoes echoed in the stillness on the tile floor in the foyer.

  She dropped her purse on an end table near the door and stopped and took off her coat. She hung it on a hook and brushed their umbrella stand with her knee as she turned around.

  Her footsteps were soon soundless as she stepped on the rug just after the foyer at the beginning of the living room.

  The house was colder than she expected.

  She said, “Jo Jo? Why is the AC running so low?”

  No answer.

  “Jo Jo, what’s wrong with the lights?”

  No answer. She walked into the living room.

  “Jo? Where the hell are you?”

  He must’ve been in the garage, clowning around with his precious models that she couldn’t care less about.

  “Jo?” she called out again. She called it out loud enough for him to hear her from the garage.

  But there was no answer.

  She set her purse on an end table near the door and stopped and took off her coat. She picked up her purse and turned around.

  She dug around in her purse to find her cell phone. She swiped up on the screen and turned on the phone’s flashlight feature so she could see.

  The light was bright, but with a small cone of light that lit up the carpet in front of her first.

  She used it to see where she was stepping, not to search the room.

  She walked deeper into the living room, passing the TV, the sofa set, and the coffee table. But she stopped short of the armchair just before the kitchen because it looked like someone was sitting in it.

  A second later, she was certain that someone was sitting there because she kicked a man’s shoe. She twisted and turned to aim the cone of light onto the shoe and kicked it again. There was definitely a foot inside it because it was heavy to her kick, but the person did not respond. No reflex response at all.

  She kicked it again.

  “Jo? Is that you?”

  No answer.

  Abruptly she was attacked by panic and then fear.

  The light shook in her hand as she moved it up the leg of a familiar pair of shoes and then a familiar pair of pants and then to a familiar white shirt, only it was not white anymore.

  She saw his hands. They were duct-taped around the chair. The duct tape reflected the light with a blurry shine. It ran all the way around the man’s lap in thick layers of tape.

  There were violent waves and ripples in tape like the man had struggled hard to get free.

  Martha moved the light upward. Next, she saw trickles of red, dried fluid that were more accurately garnet red in color, and most certainly blood.

  The garnet-colored blood became more voluminous and syrupier and thicker as the beam of light shook in her hand, moving up from the man’s lap to his shirt until there was no more white left in the shirt. That was when she saw only the garnet red color of blood.

  Martha gasped at the sight of the neck that was also familiar and then the face that she knew better than her own. It was her husband.

  His neck was well past the point of gushing blood because the blood he had had in his body had gushed out much earlier. All that was left was a vicious-looking wound. It looked like someone had tried to decapitate him with a rusty hacksaw. Only he had not been decapitated. He had been strangled all the way to the bone.

  Martha looked on at her husband’s face. While she had known that face for many years, there was something brand new about it. His expression. She had never seen that expression on his face before. No one had.

  His eyes were wide open, staring into the darkness behind her. Only not staring because there was no life in them. Not even a sign that life had once occupied his body. There was no sign of anything but utter terror on his face. It was unlike anything that she had ever seen before.

  He was complete stone, like a marble statue made by some twisted sculptor.

  The whites in his eyes were completely bloodshot, but not with the garnet color that she had seen a second earlier on his shirt. This was a shade of purple that was almost eggplant. They looked like they were about to burst out of their sockets.

  It was horrifying.

  The phone trembled harder in her hand. She slowly reached out with her free hand. The tips of her fingers touched her dead husband’s forehead. Immediately, she recoiled because his skin was so cold that it felt like touching ice.

  Martha jumped back, but she was stopped dead in her tracks by a brick wall.

  No, not a brick wall, a man. A powerful man.

  She heard a subtle voice say, “Where are your children?”

  A question that he already knew the answer to, but he liked to be reassured.

  As if she was answering a gameshow question in the lightning round, Martha said, “They don’t live here.”

  The man smiled.

  She didn’t turn around.

  The man behind her asked, “When was the last time you spoke to them?”

  Martha trembled even harder, which the man in black knew because the light from her phone danced across the wall, across McConnell’s lifeless body.

  “It’s been at least a week. They’re busy.”

  The man in black smiled in the dark. He did not really need to ask her that question. He would know soon enough when he checked the phone log in her cell phone.

  He just liked the feeling that he felt just before she died. The anticipation before he killed her. It was the best part. Other than the struggle his victims gave him, of course.

  In a fast, violent, well-practiced exertion, the man in black whipped out a garrote that he had been holding, holding it tight until the wire rippled and echoed lightly in the stillness. The wire went over her head to her neck and jerked straight back. The sharp edge of the wire nearly cut through the skin on her neck without much force. A second later, it did break the skin and blood misted out as she tried to scream.

  No sound escaped from her lips. No breath came out of her lungs.

  Martha instinctively dropped the phone and grabbed at the wire around her neck with both hands. Desperately.

  She fought violently to pull a fraction of slack out of it. But there was none to be had.

  The man in black was
too strong. He remained still, like a tree planted in the ground with roots dug down deep. Nothing would move him. Nothing would budge him.

  She struggled and struggled. When that did not work, she drummed on his gloved hands. And she gagged and retched and heaved, dryly. She made all the faces imaginable under the circumstances and then she duplicated her husband’s dead expression.

  The man in black still did not move. He was much, much stronger than her. He breathed in, calmly. This was his favorite part.

  She fought and fought until she felt weak and suddenly, feeble. She fought until fighting turned into barely moving.

  The pain was beyond anything that she could imagine. It was worse than childbirth. It was worse than that time she nearly drowned at Lake Mead, a family trip, a better time.

  She continued to struggle weakly against him until she was blind, until she could no longer move.

  It made no difference.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE MAN IN BLACK used his burner phone to call, but first he dropped his garrote in the McConnell’s kitchen sink. He ran cold water over the wire and the dual handles and watched as blood and skin and even bits of sinew washed off the razor-sharp wire.

  Plenty of evidence was left all over the living room floor that the McConnells had been brutally murdered. It did not take a forensic technician to see that, but he was not concerned with any of it. None of it would lead to him. And even if it did, it would not matter after Sunday.

  One thing that might lead to him, eventually, was the security gate that he had had to pass through just to get into the neighborhood. They had him on camera at the gate where he pretended to be visiting someone who lived in the neighborhood.

  The man in black had infiltrated maximum-security installations all over the western world. A minimum wage crew of security guards and the low tech of a rising boom gate were not going to stop him.

  The security camera had his face because he had to raise the visor on his helmet so the guard could match the photo on his fake driver’s license with his face.

  Normally, he would destroy the video from the camera somehow. But that did not matter.

  Once the operation that he was protecting went off, none of it would matter.

  The man in black finished cleaning the garrote and then called the Listener, the person who had sent him to kill the McConnells. The Listener was the boss.

  After he dialed the number, the phone did not ring even once. The time counter for the call showed two seconds of connecting on his end but there was already a voice on the other line.

  The man in black said, “He’s dead.”

  The Listener asked, “The wife?”

  “Also dead.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  “You wanted her dead.”

  “I know.”

  The man in black said nothing, but wondered how close the Listener had been to the McConnells.

  The Listener said, “Get out of there.”

  “What next? How are we going to get to Karpov?”

  “Farmer has found a way.”

  The man in black had no opinion on the guy named Farmer. He barely knew him. They ran in the same covert circles, with two very different occupations.

  The Listener said, “It’s actually quite brilliant. And simple. And a total act of fate.”

  “How so?”

  “We found Karpov’s daughter.”

  “Daughter?”

  “She’s in New York,” the Listener said, and chuckled, which was audible enough for the man in black to hear him.

  “Really?”

  “And get this. She’s a local operator for the FSB. She’s been here under our noses.”

  The Listener had used the word “operator” which did not mean the telephone kind. He had meant that she was a spy.

  The man in black said, “You’re kidding?”

  He smiled and almost caught himself joining in the chuckle. It was quite a stroke of luck.

  “Get to New York. We don’t need you here anymore. We might need you there.”

  “Of course. I’ll leave now.”

  “Good,” the Listener said.

  “What is Farmer’s plan?”

  “I’ll explain when you get there. You’re only going to be there for disposal and back-up.”

  Which was exactly what the man in black wanted to hear. Disposal was what he did best. All that espionage, intelligence gathering, and talking to people, making friends, earning trust, he was more than happy to leave to the career schemers like Farmer. It did not interest him in the least.

  The man in black listened a little longer. The Listener spoke, telling him where to go and what to wait for.

  The operation may not even need his services anymore, but it was better to have him around as a backup in case something went wrong.

  After the Listener was done explaining things to him, the man in black said goodbye and hung up the phone. He took one more look over the McConnells’ house, saw nothing left that needed doing, nothing left that needed his attention, and he walked out, down the drive and down the street to where he had parked his motorcycle.

  He looked around casually until he was satisfied that no one was watching him. He slipped on his helmet, lowered the darkened visor, started the engine, and in a burst of exhaust, rode away into the darkening night.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE CITY OF NEW YORK or New York City?

  He wasn’t quite sure.

  Jack Widow had heard it called both before. He knew that one was the official title of the area that people sometimes simply called New York. With no “City” in the title. As if the state of New York did not exist. Only the City mattered.

  What was the official title of the city again? He couldn’t remember. Which was a scary prospect for a guy not old enough to have Alzheimer’s disease. But grown-up enough to know the name of the City.

  He didn’t have amnesia. Did he?

  No. Not quite. The reason that Jack Widow couldn’t recall the name of the City, not at that particular second, wasn’t because of the five guys standing around him. Not all five, anyway.

  It was only because of only one.

  The one that stood directly in front of him. The one with the massive bulk.

  He wasn’t the biggest of the five guys. But he was the one to worry the most about because he had that look on his face like he knew how to throw a punch.

  More than just the look on his face was his face itself. It was not a normal face and far from the kind of face that one would call attractive.

  It was the kind of face that showed off the ability to take a punch. It showed that off because it had taken punches. Hundreds. Probably, more, Widow figured.

  The guy with the face wore a street cap, made from cotton or maybe wool. The kind of tattered street cap that looked like it came right out of the nineteen forties, just after the Great Depression.

  It was the kind of thing that was cheap to find back then and it kept the head warm. It was a functional garment. Not now. These days this kind of cap would go for a pretty penny in a department store in New York City.

  The guy wasn’t wearing it to stay warm. It was a fashion choice.

  Times had changed. Certainly. The Great Depression. Another time. The nineteen forties. Or was that the nineteen thirties?

  Widow couldn’t remember that either.

  The guy’s face was rougher than a four-hundred-year-old map of the world and softer than the side of a tree. Widow saw the advantage of having such a face. On the one hand, it terrified most people, intimidating even the most capable street fighters, like Widow.

  On the other hand, there was a disadvantage about it, which Widow made the mistake of mentioning to the guy.

  He said, “With a face like that, you must hear constant laughter from women every time you propose that one of them go to bed with you.”

  Not the drollest insult that Widow had ever hurled, but not the dumbest either. It did the trick, which was to piss the guy o
ff. Not a tactical decision on Widow’s part. It was more of a need, the kind of need that Widow liked to have satisfied when he was squaring off with five guys with a woman and a gun present.

  After the insult was hurled and the verbal shot was fired, you couldn’t take it back. Suddenly, Widow wished that he could.

  The guy with Map Face scoffed with an unintelligible grunt that wasn’t even in the realm of sounding like an English word, probably because it was slurred out in a thick, Irish accent. Widow didn’t get the chance to decipher it because the map-face guy punched him right in the cheek for the second time.

  Hard. It felt like being hit with a battering ram exerting enough force to bang through the castle doors.

  Suddenly, the words “blunt force trauma” sprang to Widow’s mind and he blacked out, standing. It was only a second to the five guys and one woman standing around him. But to Widow, it felt like an eternity of black.

  His mind wandered for that long moment. And his long-term memory seemed to be working. He thought back to a long, military career. Once, he had been undercover, working for the Naval Crime Investigative Services. He had been a Navy SEAL during the last stretch of that career. Although, not really because he was technically an NCIS agent, which is a civilian.

  They assigned him to an undercover unit where he went on missions with the SEALs, as one of them. To them, he was one. No one knew that he was really an NCIS agent.

  He lived a double identity.

  Most SEALs knew him as one of them. They trusted him with their lives. They treated him like a brother, but he wasn’t one of them. Not really. Not honestly. He had always felt hollow inside knowing that truthfully, he was an undercover cop, sent to spy on his brothers. There was a word for that. Rat.

  And sometimes he felt like a rat. But only sometimes. Because the truth was ninety-nine point nine percent of SEALs and Marines were heroes—patriots. These were good men. It was lying to them that made him feel like a rat.

  But then there was that point one percent. They were the ones who had stepped out of line. He had found that less than one percent to be traitors, murderers, terrorist enablers, and even flat-out spies for foreign governments. And then there had been foreign agents who weren’t in the US Navy or Marine Corps. Many of them he had had to take down in his career. Taking them down was more satisfying because he didn’t have to face an American who had gone too far over to the dark side.