Vortex

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.

And now he had The Chill.

The waitress said, “Here you go,” and Davey went to work on a steaming plate of eggs decorated by bacon and toast. He had forgotten to order milk but there it was before him anyway, meaning The Chill had been at work again. The waitress never knew what had hit her.

Of course with The Chill came The Vibes, and The Vibes were bad, scary. Davey had felt them first the day before yesterday during rush hour while wandering around Times Square and Forty-second Street. Something had made him stop dead and he’d looked up ahead at a corner and seen a car accident. Well, he hadn’t exactly seen it because it hadn’t happened yet. The Vibes showed it to him. And, as he stood with his sneakers frozen to the pavement, a tan Ford sped through a red light and bashed into the driver’s side of a blue Chevy — just the way he had seen it maybe a half minute before. Of course it could have been coincidence but Davey knew it wasn’t. And if he hadn’t known, what happened last night would have erased all doubt.

He was coming out of the movies down near Broadway, an old James Bond double feature with Sean Connery — his favorite — when The Vibes struck again. He saw something happening right in front of him, but he knew it wasn’t real because the scenery was all wrong, not the street he was on. So he watched the action unfold the same way he had watched celluloid images for four hours on the big screen.

A black man in a long purple coat slapped a white girl dressed in black leather pants hard in the face. The girl’s platinum blond hair tumbled over her eyes and she reeled back. Davey caught a glimpse of her features which were as white as her shiny blouse.

“No tramp holds out on me!” the purple shape with the black face shouted. And he moved for the girl with something glimmering in his hand.

Davey knew what was coming next but he watched it anyway, the same way you do in a horror movie, cowering to your seat and digging your fingers into the armrests.

The black man thrust the knife forward. Davey heard it thud into the girl’s stomach. She gasped horribly, sliding down the brick wall, her hands clutching the wound as if to hold her insides in place. Her eyes had already glazed over when her leather pants met the sidewalk. Her fingers slipped away, allowing the rest of her life to pour out and make a pool on the cement.

Then the image faded and Davey just stood there looking at the street as it really was, knowing the scene would play itself out again before long, only this time it would be for real. He walked on with no destination in mind, somehow ending up in a darkened section of Forty-fourth Street which looked strangely familiar because it was the setting he had just been shown by The Vibes.

A voice shouting, “No tramp holds out on me!” forced him to shrink back against the chain front of a closed fruit store. He couldn’t see much of what was happening down the street a hundred feet away, but he’d already seen it once and that was plenty. There was the sound of the knife parting the girl’s flesh and the dying gurgle which followed. Davey waited till he was sure the purple-coated black was gone before approaching because he had to know, had to be sure.

The girl sat propped up by the brick building, head tilted toward the gaping wound in her stomach and blond hair almost reaching it. Davey held his breath and looked down to see the pool of blood that was creeping toward the tips of his sneakers. He bolted off, stealing one last glance back, and somehow made it to the rooming house where he had spent the night and his last five dollars.

But it didn’t matter. The Chill would take care of him. He could handle The Chill but The Vibes were something he’d rather be rid of. It was no fun knowing when something awful was about to happen. Still, The Vibes would warn him if the Men were near and that warning was something he desperately needed.

Davey scraped his plate clean and moved to the cash register. The waitress took his check, the register jangled, and she read him the amount rung up.

“That’ll be $2.40.”

Davey smiled, made The Chill.

The girl handed him a five-dollar bill. “Please come again.”

Davey said he would and moved back into the street. It was still cold, freezing for spring, and Davey noticed he was the only one on the street without a jacket. That made him stand out, too easy for the Men to find, and besides he was shivering again. So he had to get a coat to keep the cold out and the Men away. Leather would be nice. He had always wanted a leather jacket. It would mean a walk to Seventh Avenue, but that wouldn’t be a problem, especially if he did it later during the lunch-time rush hour. In a million faces, the Men would never be able to spot him. Then he could ditch back to Forty-second Street and Times Square and melt into the scenery of hundreds of kids who looked pretty much alike. They’d never find him. And if they did, there was always The Chill.

What he really wanted to do was go home, especially now after two days on the streets. But The Vibes got scrambled when he just thought about that, as if they were telling him that was the wrong thing to do at this point. Davey listened.

He started to walk. Maybe he’d find a twenty-four hour movie theater to kill some time. Maybe he’d just walk….

Something made him stop suddenly. It was like The Vibes he had felt last night only a hundred times worse, a hot wind that buckled the cold and struck him in the face. His flesh turned to glass, started to break, to shatter. Then the heat nearly swept him off his feet. Woozy, he moved to a stopped bus and leaned against it. The weird feeling in his face was gone. Even if his flesh had turned to glass for an instant, none of it had broken so everything was okay.

But something was coming. Davey had felt it pierce the cold air just like the blade had split the girl’s stomach the night before. The strongest Vibes he’d felt yet, only this time he couldn’t see what they were trying to tell him. It was vague, hazy, distant. It was coming, though, and it was going to be awful. He didn’t know how he knew that, he just did; and, boy, he didn’t want to be around when it got there.

Shuddering, Davey pushed himself away from the bus and rejoined the flow of people.

Chapter Six

Bane arrived at Kennedy early for his meeting with Jake Del Gennio. Maybe that was why security had not been given word yet to clear him for entry into the tower. No matter. Bane had a way of appearing to belong wherever he wanted to. The guard’s resistance melted quickly, and he informed Bane that the briefing room where he was supposed to meet Jake was on the third level. Bane thanked him.

It was eight-fifteen so Del Gennio would surely be up there already. Bane found the briefing room easily and saw a man hovering over a cup of coffee in the corner. The Swan.

“Morning, Jake.”

The man turned. It wasn’t Del Gennio.

“Sorry, I thought you were Jake Del Gennio,” Bane apologized.

“I only wish I was,” the man said wearily. “Then I’d be home in bed instead of working two shifts out of three.”

“Del Gennio called in sick?”

“That’s why I’m here.”

The man stood up and passed by Bane without saying excuse me.

Bane felt the familiar prickle of fear on the back of his neck. Something was wrong. That Del Gennio might have taken sick was certainly a possibility, but not calling him to revise their plan was simply unthinkable, not the Swan’s style at all. He was a detail man all the way, and the missing jet was too important for him not to make contact.

Bane moved through the narrow corridor toward a pay phone he remembered passing. Del Gennio’s number rang once, twice, three times, and after that Bane was sure there was no one home to answer. Still, he gave it another five rings and almost forgot to retrieve the dime in his hurry to get out of the tower.

He could make it to Jake’s apartment in thirty minutes tops, but his feelings told him it was already too late.

Jake Del Gennio lived on the twelfth floor of a typical Manhattan high-rise, one that advertised top-notch security and burglar-proof doors. In this case, the latter at least was far from true. The door was good all right but nothing a little patience wouldn’t solve. Bane had all three locks picked in under two minutes, and the fact that no chain greeted him when he finally got the door open convinced him beyond all doubt that Jake Del Gennio wasn’t home. The Swan took all precautions.

He felt something as soon as he entered, something cold. Passing the feeling off to nerves, he made a quick check of the apartment and found all three rooms were in perfect, lived-in order. A more thorough examination of the closet revealed that its contents had not been disturbed by a rushed packing job and the same held for the drawers. If Del Gennio had left in a hurry, he hadn’t taken any luggage.

The next check was the one Bane dreaded the most. Del Gennio might have lost a step and gained an inch over the years, but he was still careful and quick. He couldn’t have been taken or killed without a fight. A fight meant blood and blood meant washing and/or disposing of all evidence. Bane moved into the bathroom and pulled a file from his kit. First he carefully scraped the sink drain, found nothing. Then he scraped the underside of the toilet bowl and the drain. Again nothing. Finally he moved into the kitchen and made a similar inspection of the sink and garbage disposal with the same results.

Bane was puzzled. Del Gennio had called in sick, but he wasn’t home. If he had been taken forcibly, the principals behind it must have been damn good because they’d left no traceable evidence at all.

Of course Bane realized he might have been jumping to conclusions. There was nothing to indicate foul play, and Jake had indeed been acting strangely last night. He might have bolted.

Bane started to close the door behind him and then opened it suddenly again. He had realized something, something which sent slabs of ice sliding down his stomach. He checked the bedroom once more, and then the den. The evidence was present all right, not in what was there but in what wasn’t.

On the way out of the building, Bane stopped at the front desk to quiz the doorman. According to the security system coded in red and green lights, Del Gennio was safely upstairs and had been since eight-thirty the preceding night. For Bane, the smell of a professional’s work was even stronger.

The Swan was gone and wouldn’t be coming back.

Bane was back at the airport twenty minutes later.

“Am I to assume that this is a professional inquiry, Mr. Bane?” wondered Burt Cashman, a short, heavyset man with half-closed eyes and a title that made him Administrative Chief of Air Traffic Control at Kennedy.

“No, just a personal one.” Bane could have arranged to meet with a higher official at the airport but under such short notice that would have made his intentions too obvious. The cloak of personal concern would gain him the information he needed. “Frankly, I’m worried about Jake’s nerves. He’s seemed fidgety lately, under a lot of stress.”

“You served together in Vietnam,” Cashman stated.

“How did you know?”

“I knew Jake served, and since I was in Korea I can usually pick out one soldier’s concern for another. Not hard to put together really.”

“I see,” Bane said, trying to appear impressed.

“In any case, I’m glad you’ve come because quite frankly I’ve had the same fears about Jake for some time myself.”

“Really?”

“You know his age.”

“Forty. Maybe forty-one.”

“Closer to forty-two actually. Most controllers are finished by all practical considerations when they’ve reached thirty-five. We let Jake stay on, given his status as a veteran and his spotless record, but we lowered the number of his flight responsibilities. Put him on a reduction console. I didn’t think that was enough personally.”

“Did you speak to Jake about this?”

Cashman hesitated. “To be honest, not in so many words. It’s an extremely sensitive topic and one that’s not brought up routinely. I think he was expecting it, though. I could tell by his eyes. Deep inside he knew it was time to step down. He has a damn good pension to look forward to.”

“Jake isn’t the kind of man to look forward to a pension.”

Cashman smiled uneasily. “You know him better than I thought.”

“He called in sick today.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“He’s not in his apartment.”

“I’m not surprised. As I said, Jake knew he was reaching the end of his effectiveness. It was only a matter of time before he went somewhere and thought it all over. I don’t have to tell you what kind of job this is. It’s harder to get in, but it’s even harder to get out. The pressure and strain of the job will drive you crazy, but you can’t go without them for more than a week. Take a look at all the vacation time most controllers have stored up. Take a look at the low ratio of sick days they use.”

“Del Gennio used one today.” That got Cashman’s attention. It was time to get to the point. “I didn’t come here on a whim, Mr. Cashman. Jake looked me up last night for the first time in a while. He looked like a man on the edge of a tightrope, crazy with strain. Thought somebody was following him.” Bane hesitated, saving the best for last. To maintain the facade of his intentions, he had to lay everything out. Hold something back and before long whoever had taken Jake out would be onto him. “He kept babbling something about a jet that disappeared three days ago.”

Cashman sighed. “He turned the whole airport upside down that morning, screaming it had gone down and nobody could find it. Then he claimed it disappeared right before his eyes. I gave him the rest of the day off. He used it to go pounding on executive doors, the very top, mind you, of both the airport and the airline. Made a lot of people unhappy. My phone rang steadily until six. What could I tell them? Air traffic controllers have a code too, you know, and I piloted a console for twenty years before I started riding this desk. We don’t cover up our mistakes but we don’t give the asses of our people away either. If you don’t stick together this job will kill you. All you’ve got is each other because nobody in the real world has any idea of what goes on behind that monitor.” Cashman stopped suddenly. “I didn’t mean to ramble.”

“There’s pressure behind a desk too.”

“Well, if I could do my job half as good as Jake Del Gennio does his, I’d be happy.”

“Did you check the cockpit tapes?” Bane asked him.

“Absolutely. I went over them once things settled down.” Cashman shook his head. “Nothing. Just Jake’s voice, like he was talking to himself.”

Bane felt Cashman was telling the truth which meant that if the Swan really did see a jet vanish, the cover-up started higher.

“So how do you explain what happened to him?” he asked.

“Well, Mr. Bane, a controller spends all his working hours avoiding crashes and all the rest dreading them. Sleep is the worst. On bad nights you keep seeing the same scene over and over again in your dreams. A midair, takeoff, or landing crash you’re powerless to prevent, so you just sit there behind your console in the dream and watch it happen. Sometimes a controller lapses behind the board and the dream takes over. His greatest fear comes alive right before him, and because he’s right behind the console when he comes out of it, he’s convinced it’s real. It wasn’t real in Jake’s case because Flight 22 landed forty minutes later, almost ninety minutes behind schedule.”

“Why?”

“First the flight was delayed thirty minutes in San Diego because some extra freight had to be loaded and then the pilot reported engine trouble an hour out of Kennedy, leading, he expected, to an additional delay of twenty minutes.”

Bane calculated. “That still leaves forty minutes unaccounted for.”

“The pilot erred.”

“When did you next hear from him?”

“When he was ready to make his approach two hours later. It’s on tape.”

“Nothing in between?”

“By procedure, there wouldn’t have to be. Except for standard communications, channels are used almost exclusively when something’s wrong.”

That made Bane think of something else. “You say Flight 22 was held up in San Diego because of extra freight loading?”

“It arrived late at the airport. Government priority as I recall.”

“Government?”

“It’s nothing out of the ordinary. Strictly routine.”

Cashman was holding nothing back; that much was obvious. There were certainly inconsistencies in his story but nothing to indicate he was part of the cover-up Bane was beginning to strongly believe had taken place. Why else would someone have arranged for Jake Del Gennio to disappear? And now the government had been drawn into the scenario.

They can erase the tapes, Josh, but they can’t erase me.

Wrong, Jake, Bane thought.

“Thank you for your time, Mr. Cashman,” he said, rising.

It was time to visit the Center.

The Center was once precisely that: a fulcrum around which important government decisions were based and policies were made. It had existed in virtual secrecy since the Kennedy days when the young president, eager to be aware of what all government-funded organizations were doing with their grants, created a watchdog unit to oversee the spending of the hundreds of billions passed out annually.

In the early days, the Center had occupied three floors of a major Washington office building, under an innocuous cover that proved to be just deep enough to hold. Headquarters had been moved to New York during Watergate when things really heated up in the capital and high-level minds felt the Center could accomplish more from outside Washington than from within. These were the years when the organization enjoyed its finest hours, freely interpreting its somewhat ambiguous charter to make sure in all cases that a group using government funds to get from point A to point B took no detours along the way. Center operatives researched, infiltrated, developed a chain of informants, checked, double-checked, and generally rode herd on the hundreds of organizations who regularly cashed rather large treasury checks.

But the Reagan years brought with them a new direction and a new mandate. The Watergate scare was over and somehow fewer checks seemed to mean better balances. The Center was phased out gradually, reorganized so that its responsibilities were subdivided among a number of more traditional Washington organizations all of which could be found in the blue pages of any phone book. America’s watchdog lost its bark, then its bite, and was finally sent to lie down and linger cursorily in an old brownstone on Eighty-sixth Street. Four full office floors of activity were reduced to twelve Victorian rooms. A staff of fifty in the office and a hundred in the field was reduced to six and twelve respectively. Instead of an investigative unit, the Center became no more than a clearing house where all government grants were inventoried and occasionally spot-checked. Another faceless element in the great bureaucracy.

Strangely, in a technical sense Joshua Bane was part of this element. He may have retired from the Game officially but the government couldn’t let him officially go. When a man knew the kinds of things he knew and had done the kinds of things he’d done, they couldn’t let him slip free from their grasp. There was no such thing as retirement, so on paper Bane worked for the Center and arrived there every other week to pick up a rather hefty check amounting to a premature pension. The government could afford to pay him generously because there was no one else of his kind left on the payroll. The life expectancy of someone in the Winter Man’s position was usually quite brief. Of course, Trench had outlived three decades of pursuit and no one had any idea of how old Scalia was. It came down to a question of luck: when yours ran out, that was it. Except his never had, not really. The same held for Trench and Scalia, though they still played the field while Bane for better or worse had retired to the sidelines.

But Jake Del Gennio claimed he had seen a jet disappear and subsequently he had disappeared too. It was all too neat, too clean, too … professional. And all of it made Bane thirst for the life he’d thought was gone forever, the action and the heightened use of senses he needed now to find out what the hell was going on.

Bane climbed the seven steps leading to the Center’s front entrance, knowing his moves were being followed by a camera which broadcast its picture onto a series of television monitors before the desk of the building’s one, nearsighted security guard. The elaborate security measures were more token than necessary. There was little in the building worth stealing or even worthy of espionage. Bane rang the buzzer. There was a chime, followed by an earsplitting buzz. The door swung open.

“Good morning, Mr. Bane,” greeted Charlie, the nearsighted guard who never loaded his gun.

Bane swung through the alcove into what years before might have been called the sitting room, where a woman who had seen the lighter side of fifty was streaming along on a typewriter.

“Morning, Millie.”

“Morning, Mr. Bane. I’ve got your check right here.” Center employees never questioned the checks he received with no apparent services rendered. They were, after all, government employees first and foremost.

“I’ll grab it on the way out. Tell Janie I’m here.”

“Janie already knows.” The voice came from the foyer.

Bane turned toward the main stairway, into the gaze of Janie Finlaw, chief of Center operations. They had met one day while he was picking up his check and had begun a casual affair which had grown and deepened until there was seldom a night when they didn’t share each other’s company and bed. Bane knew he didn’t love her, not in the traditional sense anyway, but at times he found himself bonded to her by something even stronger since she had pulled him from the emotional depths he’d plunged into following the tragic deaths of his wife and stepson. She had brought warmth back into his life at a time when he had all but rejected any hope of feeling it again.

Looking at her descending the staircase, Bane considered himself most fortunate. She was extremely attractive, if not stunningly so. Her dark hair, auburn really, smothered her shoulders and rested upon the upper part of her firmly muscled back. Her eyes were the lightest shade of brown Bane had ever seen and her smile was captivating, subtle enough to allow for both vulnerability and strength. Janie had stayed single because she’d wanted to, and she’d made a rapid rise through government levels until she was now in charge of all Center activities, however curtailed. The future for her was bright, a cabinet-level position in the offing, even though Janie would have preferred something in intelligence. Secretly, she harbored a dream of being the first woman director of the CIA.

“Got a few minutes?” Bane asked her.

Janie feigned disappointment. “And I thought you came here to ask me for lunch.”

“At eleven o’clock in the morning?”

“I had an early breakfast, remember? Oh well, I guess you might as well come upstairs.”

The staircase was carpeted and Bane followed her up it into a modest office that was more functional than anything else. A computer terminal dominated a desk cluttered with papers and reports, as if it belonged to someone perpetually behind. In fact, Janie was always trying to get ahead, hence the clutter.

“I ever tell you about the helicopter pilot who helped me in Nam, guy named Jake Del Gennio?”

“Not that I remember.”

“Well, until this morning he was an air traffic controller at Kennedy.”

“What happened?”

“He’s gone.”

“Gone?”

“Somebody lifted him.”

And Bane proceeded to relate the events of the past sixteen hours since he’d met the Swan at La Maison and first learned about a 727 that vanished.

“That’s quite a story,” Janie told him at the end, no longer smiling. “But how do you know he’s gone for good? He might have panicked, run off.”

Bane shook his head. “I was in his apartment. Somebody went to great pains to make sure the place looked normal, somebody very professional … There were no imprints in the rugs.”

“Imprints?”

“Every footstep makes an imprint in the kind of carpeting Jake had. Not much but there if you know what to look for. Vacuuming lifts them out. The only imprints in Jake’s place now are mine because somebody wanted very much to disguise how many people had been there before me.”

Janie’s eyebrows flickered. “I see the point. But how can I help?”

“Something Jake’s boss said this morning stuck with me.”

“The connection of the vanishing jet with the government?”

“Right, but which branch of the government? Think you might be able to dig that up for me on those wonderful computers of yours?”

“Shouldn’t be much of a problem.” Janie hesitated. “You think this branch might be connected to what happened to your friend?”

“At this point, I’m grasping. Which leads me to my next request: the passenger manifest from Flight 22. Think you can round it up?”

Janie frowned, shook her head. “Sorry, Josh, I can’t help you there. My computer lines don’t have access or clearance to mess with civilian ones. More streamlining of Center operations. I guess I could arrange to tap into I–Com-Tech’s lines but—”

“I–Com-Tech?” Bane interrupted.

“That’s right. We share occasionally. So?”

“So you just lost your lunch date, sweetie. I–Com-Tech’s where the Bat hangs his hat these days.”

“Harry Bannister?”

“None other.”

“Sounds like old home week for you, Josh.”

Bane’s face became grim. “Except Jake Del Gennio’s gonna be missing the festivities.”

Chapter Seven

Many say that the expansive Rockefeller Center is a prime cornerstone of Manhattan, functionally as well as aesthetically, and Bane agreed with them. With almost 200 shops and businesses contained in the complex, not to mention headquarters for a score of major corporations, it was difficult to argue otherwise.

The International Communications Technology building was actually an extension of the Exxon structure, sharing the fountain pool that was a close cousin to the Time & Life version across West Fiftieth Street. Bane took a cab from the Center and had the driver drop him on the Avenue of the Americas, a couple blocks from I–Com-Tech so he could walk the rest of the way and check for tails. Not that he expected any. Couldn’t be too careful now, though.

The entrance to I–Com-Tech was off West Fiftieth, and Bane approached it by way of the fountain-pool fronting the Exxon building. He flirted briefly with the notion of tossing a penny in and making a wish, and would have done just that if he hadn’t been counting on Harry the Bat to grant his wish instead.

I–Com-Tech housed the largest computer facilities on the East Coast, including many of Washington’s most important programs and much data. Noble minds had long ago decided that for strategic reasons New York should be the technological center and storing house for the country, not the capital. So, little which passed before important eyes did so without first passing through New York in general and I–Com-Tech in particular.

The government had stowed Harry Bannister in a cubicle on the ninth floor of the mirrored building after a shattered spine had rendered him unfit for duty in the field. Though Bane had lost personal contact with the Bat, he had maintained close knowledge of Harry’s progress in his new career, always stopping short of the phone call or visit he had promised himself.

But today was different. Today he had a reason, and besides, the difficult part of the reunion had happened yesterday at the rally.

“Well Lord fuck a duck, if it isn’t Joshua Bane,” Harry roared when Bane appeared outside the six-foot, enclosed square he worked out of. “Twice in two days. Pinch me, I must be dreaming. Or maybe I just died and went to heaven.”

“When you die, Harry, it won’t be heaven.”

The Bat laughed and wheeled himself toward Bane, who reached down and took his extended hand. Then Harry noticed the grim look etched over his features.

“What’s wrong, Josh?” he wondered.

“Jake Del Gennio’s dead.”

The Bat went white. “Dead? Shit, how?”

“I don’t know. That’s the problem. Somebody very professional lifted him. He won’t be coming back.”

“Any idea who the bastards are?”

“Not yet, but I’ve got some leads.”

The Bat’s features tightened. “I got a couple weeks vacation coming to me. How ’bout I put in my voucher and we track the bastards down together?”

Bane shook his head. “No, Harry, it’s too early for that. Somebody offed Jake because of something he saw three days ago. And whoever it was, they were damned efficient.”

“What did Jake see three days ago?”

“He claimed a 727 vanished into thin air. That’s what he wanted to see me about yesterday.”

“And did it?”

“Maybe. Nobody’s talking.”

“Except Jake….”

“Not anymore,” corrected Bane.

“Jesus Christ, this feels like the old days, Josh.” The Bat cracked his knuckles. “So what do you need? What can my magic keyboard obtain for you?” Harry smiled. Bane hadn’t made the request yet but there were some things that didn’t need saying.

He didn’t hesitate. “The passenger manifest from Central Airlines Flight 22 of three days ago.”

“It would seem a whole lot easier to obtain from the airline.”

“I want to keep this in the family, Harry. If I get the manifest from the airline, whoever offed Jake would know I was interested.”

“It may be dangerous, then.”

“It already is.”

The Bat slapped his dead thighs. “Well Lord fuck a duck, I was hoping you’d say that.” His face glowed, vital and alive. The bitterness Bane had sensed the day before was gone. “Of course, in view of the danger I feel entitled to ask for something in return.”

“Just name it.”

Harry wasn’t quite ready to yet. “Funny thing about this computer of mine. I can get you information on just about anything. I’ve got access to almost every tape that travels on commercial or government lines … except one: intelligence, the one I need the most.”

“So?”

“So the Center can get access, at least eavesdrop, on all the tapes I can’t reach.” Now he was ready. “I want you to get me the latest on Trench.”

“Harry—”

“Lay any shit on me, Josh, and I’ll kick your balls with one of my dead feet. I want Trench and you want the passenger manifest from Flight 22. Fair trade, I’d say.”

“Leave it alone, Harry.”

“I can’t, Josh, don’t you see that I can’t? I think about the bastard every day when I’ve got to sweat buckets just to make it out of bed. Christ, Josh, you ever try to ease yourself into shitting position without legs? That bastard even took a normal squat away from me.”

Bane was about to argue more until he remembered be was as much to blame for what had happened to the Bat as Trench was.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said softly.

The Bat’s eyes were cold. “Tomorrow morning, Josh. I give you the manifest, you give me the latest on Trench. Deal?”

“Deal,” Bane managed reluctantly.

“So are you gonna tell me what you want the manifest for?” the Bat asked after a pause that seemed longer than it was.

“If something really did happen to that plane, I figure the passengers will be able to tell me what. Whoever’s behind it couldn’t cover up something that includes sixty-seven people.”

“Jake could’ve cracked, Josh. It happens.”

“If he cracked, he’d be home safe now.”

The Bat smiled knowingly. “Well, if this don’t sound like the old days, I don’t know what does.”

Bane looked away, something tugging at him. “I handled it all wrong last night,” he confessed. “I knew Jake was telling the truth but I didn’t cover him, didn’t take the right precautions.”

“You know what they say about hindsight.”

“Doesn’t matter. I don’t plan on making the same mistake twice. You carrying, Harry?”

The Bat winked and tapped a pouch concealed beneath his sweater. Metal clanged lightly against metal. “Never wheel myself an inch without my knives,” he assured him.

“That’s good,” Bane said.

Davey was looking at the fountain fronting the Exxon building when The Vibes struck stronger than ever.

He had walked here directly from a Seventh Avenue clothing store which featured an assortment of leather jackets in the window. Davey chose the one he liked best, a bomber style, used The Chill, and walked out with it hugging his shoulders tight. He loved the smell of the fresh leather and decided to challenge the unusually cold spring by hiking across town. This part of the city was fun, what with all the interesting thoughts he was able to tune in on. Davey wondered how all the problems he glimpsed were going to be worked out. Would the blue-suited executive make the switch to another company? Would the man with the striped tie and sunglasses keep his appointment with a high-class hooker instead of taking his wife to dinner? Would the repair shop have the nervous-looking woman in white’s car back to her today, or would she have to brave another day of public transportation? The questions went on and on. After a while Davey got bored considering them and stopped peeking into people’s heads.

He was staring thoughtlessly at the pool when The Vibes came, driving him off the bench to his feet. He didn’t see anything, not yet, but he knew it was coming. Then something scraped his spine like fingernails down a blackboard and he shuddered, dragging his hands to his ears. His knees started to wobble and after a few seconds his whole body joined in, his eyes bulging at the sight The Vibes showed him.

The pool erupted in a burst of steam, its cement mold cracking, splitting, shattering. He saw people running about screaming and gagging for breath. Their fingers scraped the air, gave up, and then held their bodies as if to hold themselves together, but it was no use, because suddenly their flesh was being peeled back like an orange rind. Davey saw knobby skeletons for just an instant before the bones went up with a quick poof! … and then there was nothing, nothing at all except blackness. Davey wanted to scream but suddenly he was alone, no one to hear him. Everything was gone, over. He tried to catch his breath, but there was no air to draw in.

Then The Vibes faded. The fingernails scraped back up his spine and left him cold. The shuddering ceased but he was frozen, his feet held to the cement by some cosmic glue. He looked at the fountain-pool, through it, glad it was back.

And then not so glad.

Because a man stood on the other side watching him, a big man with thick brown hair just starting to creep back over his scalp. Davey regained his thoughts and the shudders started all over again, for the thoughts were jumbled like broken pieces of china and Davey couldn’t put them together. This was not one of the Men but whatever he was scared Davey just as much. Suddenly the man was moving forward, his pace rising to a trot, and all Davey could do was try to dig his feet out of the cement before the big man reached him.

Bane left I–Com-Tech feeling hungry and realized for the first time he had skipped breakfast. The lunch-hour rush would make most places totally intolerable. People squeezing against each other, shouting orders, and sweating out a frenzied rush back to the office played hell with the defenses. Too easy for someone in the crowd to jam a gun against your ribs, or drive a blade between them.

Bane couldn’t stomach such crowds. That part of the Winter Man had never died. And if he was being followed, a crowded lunch room was hardly the ideal location to spot a tail.

So Bane opted against Lindy’s or a similar establishment in favor of the relative quiet of Charley O’s Irish Pub on West Forty-eighth. He’d lunched there before and the food never failed to satisfy.

The perimeter of the fountain-pool before the Exxon building was crowded now with people brown-bag lunching and drinking soda from cans. Bane cut between them, close to the fountain’s edge, and froze all at once. Standing forty yards before him near the right outer rim of the pool was a boy in a leather jacket and jeans, long shaggy hair covering his forehead.

It can’t be …

Bane took one step forward, then another. The ghost from his past didn’t change form or vanish. His eyes weren’t playing tricks on him, though he wished they had been.

He was staring at an older version of his stepson, a vision of what the boy would have looked like now if he had lived!

Bane’s thoughts scrambled. The past mixed with the present, and he forgot where he was. But the boy was still there, standing motionless in his tracks. Their eyes finally met and Bane felt something reach into his head. A dull throb rose behind his eyes, followed by a brief flash of spectral color. Then Bane found himself in motion, incredibly quick and sure. The boy was moving too now, though, stealing a glance behind him into the crowd and locking immediately on Bane.

Bane skirted close enough to the fountain pool to feel the cold spray lifting off. Nothing else mattered: not his hunger, or the missing jet, or Jake Del Gennio, or the passenger manifest. There was only the boy and he had to catch him, had to know if …

If what?

Bane picked up his pace, pushing by those bodies he couldn’t slither through. He saw the gap closing and that was the final fuel he needed for the burst that would close it altogether.

Davey knew the big man was after him and slowed his pace twice to use The Chill. But the man was too much for it, or maybe he needed total concentration to make it work. Davey felt the thoughts exploding from his pursuer’s head but pushed them aside because they frightened him in a way different from any others he’d tuned in on yet. He tried to read the big man and had read enough to know that he was like no other person in the city, not even close.

Davey leaped to the sidewalk and collided with two men in expensive coats. They shoved him aside, and he lurched across the Avenue of the Americas in a diagonal, leaving a symphony of screeching tires and enraged horns behind him. He reached West Fiftieth Street, swung by a line of people waiting at the Radio City Music Hall box office, and headed for construction sounds. Steam rose from a new underground furrow and hissed at the cool air. Davey darted by two men with jackhammers, felt cement chips spit into him, and slid between a section of scaffolding reducing his pace only slightly.

He cut across Rockefeller Plaza till it became West Forty-ninth Street and chanced a rush across against a DON’T WALK sign, coming close enough to a few screaming fenders to smell heated metal. He made it across with a last leap to the sidewalk, ignoring the thoughts people nearby turned on him.

Davey looked back long enough to see the big man following almost directly in his wake, zigzagging between cars without slowing. One car skidded to a halt in his path and it looked to Davey as if the big man hurdled over its hood in a single bound, actually hurdled, and landed on the same West Forty-ninth Street sidewalk Davey had crossed just seconds before, hotter on his trail than ever.

Davey slowed. His wind was gone and his legs felt like somebody had wrapped tight tape around them. His new jacket was sweat-glued to his shirt, and he noticed small gray specks marking spots where the cement chips had found their mark.

The big man was still coming, thirty yards away now, tops. Davey turned and faced him, trying for The Chill.

Bane felt as if he had crashed through a glass door placed in his path but he kept going.

Then Davey saw the legless man pushing himself across the sidewalk on a skate-wheel platform. He found his mind, made The Chill, felt the now familiar quiver roll up his spine.

The legless man suddenly altered the route of his platform, picking up speed in an incredibly brief period of time.

Bane thundered forward.

The skate-wheel platform sped into his path too late to be avoided. His legs were pulled from under him and he was airborne, tumbling over on his way to the ground, landing hard.

Bane lifted himself back to his feet with the help of a few surprisingly concerned bystanders. He brushed himself off, shrugged off further assistance, and noted the patches of his flesh that were scraped, raw, or bleeding. He gazed up the street at where he had last seen the boy, where the hot blast had come from an instant before the legless man had sent him sprawling.

The boy was gone.

Chapter Eight

“We got a fix on the boy this morning and traced him to this area,” the COBRA operations chief was saying as Trench closed the door to the car behind him. “It took a few hours but we finally pinned him down to that clothing store across the street.”

The operations chief led Trench across Seventh Avenue to a nest of stores tucked neatly into a single building, their fronts all but obscured by scaffolding which enclosed the entire sidewalk.

“I thought you’d like to talk to the clerk yourself,” the COBRA man continued. “Something strange came up.” The man’s attention shifted back and forth from Trench to a pair of hulking giants who stayed right in his shadow.

Onlookers first thought they were seeing double and then cringed at the sight. Trench had worked with Twin Bears before. Huge, fantastically strong, loyal men who were, in fact, biological twins, each with a shock of flaming red hair which sat atop heads nearly seven feet from the ground. One twin, though, had brown eyes while the other’s were, incredibly, blue. Their names were Pugh and Soam and even Trench couldn’t keep them straight in spite of the eyes. Not that it mattered. One was very much like the other with respect to duties. They seldom spoke and obeyed his every word. Trench had insisted that they accompany him east after Colonel Chilgers had issued his assignment. Having the Twin Bears around heightened his sense of security. He liked moving between two men who could just as easily rip a door from its hinges as pass through it.

The clothing store, featuring leather jackets, was called Looking Good. Trench left the Twin Bears at the front door and followed the COBRA operations chief inside.

“This the guy you told me could straighten things out?” a sales clerk charged, accosting them.

“Say hello to Mr. Trench,” the COBRA man said.

The salesman eyed Trench only briefly before launching into another tirade. “I could lose my job for this you know. I hope you’re gonna put that little bastard where he belongs. The son of a bitch tricked me somehow.”

“Tricked you?”

“Shortchanged me. Played some kind of game with the bills.”

“Tell him everything you told me,” the COBRA man instructed.

“Well,” the salesman began, “the leather jacket the kid bought cost $99.99. So he hands me a hundred-dollar bill to pay for it, right? And I check it like I check all the others and put it under the cash drawer with the rest of the big bills. It was the only hundred I got today so I couldn’t have missed it. But when I lifted the drawer to get the deposit ready for the bank, the hundred was gone and a five was in its place. I figure the kid must’ve been some kind of magician or something. Hey, I’ll bet that’s why you’re looking for him. He’s pulled this stunt before.”

“Something like that,” Trench said.

“Well, do me a favor. When you find the little fucker, nail his ass to a cross. I’ve had my fill of kids like him.”

Trench forced a shrug. “By the way, do you still have the bill?”

“The five the kid left me? Sure. I stuck it right on top. I was just on my way to the bank to make the afternoon deposit when your friends came in.”

The salesman hit a combination of buttons on the electronic cash register and the drawer slid open. He passed a well-worn five dollar bill to Trench.

“The little shit cheated me out of ninety-five bucks,” he lamented.

But Trench didn’t hear him. His eyes swept across the bill and focused on Franklin’s face instead of Lincoln’s. He blinked rapidly and focused on the bill again. Lincoln was back in the center as he must have been the whole time. Except Trench was sure he had seen Franklin, almost like someone was forcing that impression upon him. Just for an instant. The bill trembled in his hand. He shook himself from the spell and handed the salesman a fifty in its place.

“Now you’re only short fifty,” he managed, tucking the mysterious five into his pocket.

“Hey, thanks. You’re a real gentleman. Too bad there aren’t more classy guys like you around. World would be a helluva lot better place.”

Ordinarily Trench would have smiled at such a remark, but today he just wanted to get out. He left Looking Good and moved his still-agile frame between the Twin Bears, allowing them to hover over him like a pair of umbrellas warding off a rainstorm. He had hit fifty longer ago than he admitted to anyone and now left the physical demands of his trade to people like the Twins, men not unlike he had been a generation or so before and men who would be lucky to see their thirtieth birthdays. Trench was still in the Game because his nerve strings frayed evenly instead of just in the center as the Winter Man’s had. The key to maintaining your level of proficiency, he was convinced, lay in not expecting to. In fact, he lived by this credo. Thus, the Twin Bears. They had killed often and well for him. Simple-minded, tight-lipped, and steel-spined, the brothers were his equalizer against any and all threats. Their abilities were seldom wasted. They had been put to good use most recently in disposing of the Del Gennio problem, and now Trench was struck by the distinct feeling they would be seeing more action before this was over.

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.

They sprang from nowhere, one with the trees, rifles blasting. Bane felt the heat of the bullets ripping into his side and back but maintained his calm. The ambushers had expected to take him with the first burst. The need for a second gave Bane an advantage he was not about to squander. He cut down four as they stood, and another three while they reloaded. Two others rushed him with bayonets leveled. Thanks primarily to King Cong, though, that was hardly the way to take out the Winter Man, even from the front and rear simultaneously. Bane averted their charge with a deft move to the side once their move was made. He slit their throats with a single thrust of his knife, never taking his eyes from the clearing in case the other three soldiers who had fled reappeared.

How he’d then dragged himself five miles through dense jungle despite a half-dozen bullet wounds, Bane never remembered. Only figments and fragments of what had transpired remained in his memory. He couldn’t reach most of the wounds to stitch them as he’d been taught, so he left the bleeding alone, to stop on its own. When he wandered out of the trees white and dazed, children ran thinking he was some kind of ghost. They were not far off. There was no clinical reason for him to be alive.

Three weeks later Bane was transferred to a Washington military hospital where he lay supine all day and ate out of tubes. His nurse was a brown-haired beauty named Nadine, and what followed was a storybook romance. Bane fell in love with her, deeply and hopelessly. He had never considered himself capable of feeling any emotion so strongly. But necessity had forced him to expose himself to Nadine, both physically and emotionally. She was his physical therapist as well, and they shared the long, painful hours during which he struggled to regain his strength and mobility. Each session would end with her rubbing out his tired muscles, inevitably tracing the lines of his many scars both new and old. Her smile was alive and warm, and she had a peculiar laugh which Bane always focused on in the moments before sleep, hoping to dream of her.

He learned that her last name was Fisk and that her husband had been a paratrooper killed in Vietnam. She had a son named Peter, nearly ten, who took an immediate liking to Bane when Nadine brought him to the hospital one afternoon after school. The boy was painfully shy but flashed his mother’s smile often enough to tie Bane’s emotions in knots. Soon Bane was walking with a cane and then without, his recovery miraculous even by the most liberal standards. The months had passed, slow and long, and during them a bond had formed between him and Nadine that Bane could never imagine himself breaking. She was closer to him than any other person he had ever known and he didn’t want to lose that feeling, once avoided but now sorely required. He moved Nadine and Peter into a Washington brownstone with him two weeks after being discharged from the hospital. He married her before the month was out, in a simple ceremony with Arthur Jorgenson serving as the best man.

Bane laid the Winter Man to rest.

But it didn’t last. He moved his new family to New York after a few months to escape the governmental overtones of Washington. Once away from them, he hoped the urge to get back into the Game would diminish. It didn’t, despite the long workouts he started at the gym the King had opened with Bane’s money, or the love of the family he had found. Finally, after lying in bed three nights in a row in a cold sweat, he flew to Washington for a meeting with Arthur Jorgenson. He wanted to be the Winter Man again, on different terms now and not all the time.

Jorgenson was skeptical but relented and in the end his greatest fears were realized. Bane had something to lose now and he uncharacteristically bungled assignments and botched up standard procedures. What’s more, in the months he had been out of the Game more had changed than just his attitude. There were more codes, different ones, and worse, additional accounts to be made for all unsanctioned actions. Bane was confused, bothered. He missed his contact code once, and Harry the Bat flew to Berlin in his place to track down Trench and ended up getting his spine blown apart. Bane flew out after him to pick up the pieces.

He was walking through Kennedy Airport after his return flight when a New York state trooper approached him with the tragic news that his wife and stepson had been killed by a drunk driver on the interstate. Bane took the news with silence instead of tears, while inside he was ripping at the seams. His gut shook with fear. Death had struck him close to home and all at once his own mortality was obvious. He had, briefly, had something to lose, had lost it and all motivation as well. He wasn’t invincible; no one was. Death wasn’t pretty. He had caused enough, seen enough.

Bane mourned Nadine, Peter, and most of all himself. He grew tired, alone, and for the first time being alone bothered him. He spent long nights going to movies by himself, sitting through the same feature three, maybe four times. The only similar period of his life had followed the murder of his father. Then, though, he had thrown himself into his desire for revenge. Now there was nothing to revenge, nothing to throw himself into. He had exhausted everything. He withdrew into a shell, went to Arthur Jorgenson to be let out all the way, and was told in so many words that in his line of work that was impossible. They had to keep hold. It was the price you paid. Bane didn’t care, just plunged into his workouts at the King’s and picked up his check every other week at the Center.

Then Janie came into his life. Their relationship was slow to develop, with Janie having to pick and choose the moments to delve into Bane’s mind and his hurt. She was sympathetic, understanding, and above all patient. And Bane accepted her because she knew when to leave him alone. He didn’t love her and wondered seriously if he would ever be capable of loving anyone again. Janie understood and accepted this, hoping to heal the emotional wounds that had lingered long after the physical ones had closed.

Of course, fuller minds in Washington regarded Bane’s plight in a different way. His file described him as “traumatized and nerve shattered. Severe emotional handicaps brought on by overexposure to violence and acceptance thereof. Unsalvageable for field.” The file went on to say that the deaths of his wife and stepson had only speeded up an inevitable process.

The machine had become obsolete.

Until this morning.

Somebody had killed Jake Del Gennio and all of a sudden Harry the Bat was a part of his life again. Then seeing that boy at Rockefeller Center … Peter at fifteen …

The past might not be catching up but it was certainly making a determined surge. Bane felt different, changed, and it took him a while to realize he was moving forward in reverse, growing by going backward.

So as Janie rubbed his shoulders, he felt the old strength, the old senses coming back and he knew they hadn’t been dead at all — just dormant, in need of rest to recharge. They stirred slowly and Bane felt himself coming alive again.

“Any luck in pinning down the government group responsible for delaying Flight 22?”

Janie hesitated. “I was hoping you wouldn’t ask that.”

“I did.”

“What do you know about COBRA, Josh?”

Bane felt Janie release his shoulders. He turned to face her. “Not much, besides the fact that their stamp goes on half the sophisticated hardware that makes up our defense system.”

“Half is a conservative estimate,” Janie corrected. “To begin with COBRA’s letters stand for Control for Operational Ballistic Research and Activation. And let me tell you, every bit of ballistic research worth a damn for this country has come out of their base in San Diego.”

“Where Flight 22 originated …”

“Anyway, COBRA may technically be a government-funded installation but that funding is strictly blank check. The organization’s become more powerful than even NASA was during the peak of the space program. The Joint Chiefs lap up everything Col. Walter Chilgers has to say.”

“Chilgers?”

“Korean war hero who built COBRA from the foundation up. Well, more accurately he started from the top down with some of the greatest scientific minds in the world. Even Einstein was there in the very beginning I’ve heard.”

“Any idea what COBRA’s working on now?”

“Probably a hundred different projects, and it wouldn’t be hard for them to keep any number secret from even the White House.”

“A blank check,” Bane muttered. “What else can you tell me about them?”

“Not an awful lot. They’re way out of the Center’s jurisdiction and even farther out of our league.”

He held her eyes briefly. “There’s something else I need — the latest intelligence file on a free-lance agent named Trench.”

“I haven’t got clearance.”

“Get it.”

Janie considered the problem, then nodded. “It’ll mean a bit of eavesdropping off government discs, but what the hell. Why do you need it?”

“To give Harry in trade for the passenger manifest of Flight 22.”

“Trench was the man in Berlin,” she remembered.

Bane just looked at her.

“What happens when you get the manifest?”

“I start checking. The passengers must’ve seen or felt something….”

“If there’s anything to all this, that is.”

“You don’t believe Jake’s story.”

“It is a bit much.”

She was right, of course, and Bane didn’t bother pressing the issue. He sensed a separation, a gulf, between them that was more his doing than hers. He knew she could never understand that part of him that was the Winter Man, that part which had become active again. It had been a different man she had pulled from the emotional depths two years before. Their relationship had been built on factors which suddenly no longer seemed to exist. He still loved her in his own way, would be eternally grateful for all she had done for him, but at the same time he no longer felt he needed her. And without need, could there be love? Worse, he was using Janie, using her for the access she provided. That made him feel dirty, and yet he found it easy to rationalize his decision.

They made love that night, Bane playing his role mechanically, half as payment for services rendered and half as a mask for the emerging thoughts within him. But Janie was no fool. Bane could feel her detachment and sense of loss, the certainty of it, and he avoided her eyes so as not to see the empty glaze that filled them.

He squeezed her to him, trying to lose himself in her beauty. His pace was measured and even, his hands teasing and surgical. She clung to him tightly, digging her fingers into his back as her pleasure surged. Bane felt his peak as well, but when it was over there was nothing soothing or even comforting about the act. It was simply another task completed, lost among the many others which remained to be done.

Eventually they slipped off to sleep, grateful for the peace it might bring, while only a few miles away Davey Phelps shivered in a cold hotel room, the covers pulled over his face to shut out the presence of the Men who were drawing closer.