A Soldier's Revenge Read online

  Tess rolled in her basket, exposing her belly.

  James smiled, though he felt lost and alone. He breathed in deeply and called her hotel, asking to be connected to Sarah Goldsmith’s room.

  At the other end of the call, the receptionist typed fast on a keyboard. She stopped, telling James to hold, then she started typing again. She spoke inaudible words to a colleague before returning to the call. “Sir, your wife never checked in.”

  James frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “We had the reservation all booked. We were expecting her. She was a no-show.”

  “No-show?”

  “Didn’t turn up. Happens all the time. Probably she decided . . .”

  James hung up, his mind racing. Was she cheating on him, staying with a man? Revenge for her assumptions about his alleged night out in Edinburgh’s strip clubs? His hands shaking, he sent her another SMS.

  WHAT THE HELL’S GOING ON? I JUST TRIED YOUR HOTEL. THEY SAY YOU NEVER CHECKED IN.

  The headhunter who’d set up her job interview would know where Sarah was. Maybe the explanation was simply that she’d turned up at the hotel, didn’t like the look of it, and decided to stay in a nicer place. Yes, that was probably the answer. Nothing worse than that.

  He went to the tiny office she used when she worked from home. Though James would constantly rib Sarah about her meticulous filing systems, now he was grateful for her organizational skills. It took him only one minute to find letters from the headhunter, stored in a labeled drawer. He tried calling the number shown in the company address block on one of the letters. The voice mail said the office was currently closed. Silently cursing, he took the letter to his own ramshackle office, powered up his laptop, and entered the company’s Web site, hoping other contact numbers might be listed on the site. A message popped up on his screen saying the Web site domain no longer existed. He tried again, same message. Now he was starting to feel scared. The first contact with the headhunter had been the recruiter calling Sarah. The second, third, and fourth contacts had been via letters. Neither Sarah nor James had met the London-based man.

  James’s breathing was wheezy, always a sign he was panicking. He sucked on his inhaler a couple of times to try to settle his lungs. Not knowing what to do next was sending him into a tailspin of bewilderment. He was anxious and very concerned for Sarah’s welfare. But if there was a perfectly normal explanation for all this, Sarah would crucify him for interfering at such a crucial and delicate juncture of her job applications. It could be the final nail in the coffin if he did anything that might derail her efforts.

  Then again, he was her husband and had a duty to her. He wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he backed down from that duty simply because he was too scared to check on her. He had to put his mind at rest, and to do that he had no other option than calling the law firm she was being interviewed by.

  For thirty minutes, he was on the phone to them. They had 126 offices spread across the globe, each operating with different management structures and to all intents and purposes autonomous businesses within a worldwide brand. He was transferred to the head office, then to regional offices, then back to the head office in London. Finally, he was connected to the firm’s global head of human resources.

  She said to him, “Mr. Goldsmith—I can tell you with certainty that we have no record of a Sarah Goldsmith being interviewed by our company, or an authorized representative of our company, for any position in our firm. Something is not right. If I were you, I would alert the police.”

  The inhaler was now a permanent fixture in his mouth as the dread consumed him. This wouldn’t be an elaborate ruse by Sarah, covering her tracks of infidelity. His wife had far too much integrity to cheat behind his back. Many times, she’d made it clear that she would rather get divorced than sleep with another man while married. And there was the crucial matter that she loved her husband dearly. His biggest fear was that she’d fallen victim to an elaborate fraud, something far more complex and clever than the scheme that had earlier this year drained five thousand pounds out of her current account.

  He googled her name, unsure what he was looking for, yet beside himself with trepidation. He opened the BBC News site.

  And that’s when he saw the headline.

  SUSPECTED MURDERER WILL COCHRANE ATTACKS POLICE ON AMTRAK TRAIN

  Disbelief hit him as he read the news story that contained updates about the murder in the Waldorf Astoria, the manhunt in the U.S. East Coast, the incident on the train, the fact he was being pursued though his whereabouts were unknown, and the unrecognizable female victim in the bathtub.

  The woman in the bathtub.

  James spat out his inhaler. “No, no, no, no!” he cried. His hands shook as he called the Scottish police emergency number. “Not Cochrane.” Tess was by his side, barking. “Anyone but Cochrane,” James said, before speaking to the police operator.

  “My wife . . . wife . . . her name is Sarah Goldsmith. She’s in New York City, supposedly for a job interview. I think she’s been murdered. She’s been murdered by her brother.

  “His name is Will Cochrane.”

  Chapter 8

  Thyme Painter and Joe Kopański were in Baltimore, grabbing breakfast in a diner a few minutes after it’d opened, at 6 a.m. They’d had no sleep and had come to Baltimore because everything suggested Cochrane was heading south. The night had been frenetic, with the detectives coordinating the manhunt and issuing instructions to local police units. But they’d found nothing. Cochrane had vanished.

  Now there was nothing else that could be done until Cochrane was spotted again. They were exhausted, famished, and pissed off.

  Kopański asked, “Why didn’t Cochrane kill me on the Amtrak?”

  Painter thought about this. “His mind might be broken, but maybe cop killing is a step too far for him. Soldiers, covert operatives, police officers—they’re a brotherhood. If he kills one of them, he’s killing his own. It would really be crossing the line.”

  “Still doesn’t reassure me. He put me on my ass. I’ve never come up against something like that.”

  Painter touched his hand. “If you’d opened fire in the train, it would have turned into a bloodbath. You made the right call.”

  Kopański looked at her hand. “I think you’re right. He doesn’t want to kill cops right now. My worry is, what happens if that changes?”

  Painter’s cell phone rang and she recognized the number as belonging to her Manhattan precinct. The officer at the end of the line said she had an important call to transfer from a firm of family attorneys in New York.

  “Yeah, patch it through.”

  Painter listened without speaking as the caller introduced himself as head of the firm. He said he’d been remiss in not calling earlier; he had been upstate on an urgent matter and had only just returned to the office at this early hour to catch up on what had been happening during his absence. He’d discovered that two days ago a man called Will Cochrane had been due to visit his offices to sign adoption papers. The matter was being dealt with by one of his junior attorneys, and unfortunately the employee hadn’t put two and two together and realized that the man who skipped his appointment was the same man being sought for questioning in relation to a murder. For that significant lapse, he was sorry. He gave Painter details about the intended adoption before concluding, “Ma’am, if any of the police officers Cochrane attacked last night had been killed, I’d have no hesitation in sacking my employee for being so dumb.”

  Painter hung up and told Kopański about the call. “I’m thinking two options: first is Cochrane stays away from the Granges. That’s no use to us, unless we—”

  “Entrap him by—”

  “Luring him there on a false pretext.”

  “Which is illegal.”

  “And unethical.” Painter added, “We could get the Granges’ cooperation. But a man like Cochrane would see through that. Second option is that Cochrane’s headed to the Granges’ without the need for e
ntrapment.”

  “To explain his side of the story.”

  “Or do something far worse.” She bowed her head, deep in thought. “It looks like that’s where he’s headed. Our job is to find him between here and there. But we’d better send a couple of Roanoke detectives over to the Granges to warn them about the situation and to camp in their home.”

  “I agree. But having two cops in the house for days, maybe weeks, can be frightening for young minds. The twins will be unsettled.”

  Painter smiled. Her tough companion, as ruthless as they get when he had the bit between his teeth, now and again surprised her. “The issue is whether the Granges will cooperate with us. Even with detectives there, if Cochrane calls the Granges they might try to warn him off.”

  Kopański said, “We could get Marty Fleet involved.”

  Painter eyed him. “Get a warrant from the attorney general’s office to monitor the Granges’ phones and e-mails?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that what you want?”

  “I don’t like it, but we’ve got no other option.”

  His colleague agreed. “Cochrane’s desperate. He’ll be forced to do things he ordinarily wouldn’t.” Her phone rang again; it was NYPD forensics. Painter frowned as she listened. “Nothing? That can only mean she’s foreign, but that’s needle-in-a-haystack territory unless someone comes forward with information.” When the call ended, she said to Kopański, “Forensics has been thorough. They’ve run the victim’s DNA through our national databases three times, plus have been cross-referencing them to the archives of hospitals on the East Coast, in case for some reason her details weren’t transferred to the main database. Nothing. We have to assume she’s not an American national. Forensics is going to start liaising with foreign counterparts, starting with Europe, to try to identify her that way.” Painter stared out the adjacent window. Outside it was lashing rain and looked bleak. “The hostage said that Cochrane claims he’s innocent of the murder.”

  “Most murderers say stuff like that.”

  “What if he’s telling the truth?”

  “Well, if he’s innocent, he’s digging himself into a deeper and deeper hole.”

  She pointed at the dreadful weather. “If we don’t get him, it’ll only be a matter of time before he dies from exposure to the weather.”

  Chapter 9

  After Marty Fleet ended his call to Detective Kopański, he spooned pureed food into his wheelchair-bound sister’s mouth. The thirty-eight-year-old had glossy straight auburn hair that Marty had washed, blow-dried, and combed an hour earlier. They lived in Chevy Chase, outside Washington, D.C., in a big apartment building that had great views of the city and had been selected with care by the lawyer because it had excellent wheelchair access and elevators to the twenty-second floor where they lived.

  Her brain damage meant that while she would forget what had happened an hour ago, she still retained enough clarity to occasionally look at Marty with a heartbreaking expression that said she knew exactly what he was saying to her. He spoke to her constantly when in her presence. He believed it might keep her brain alive.

  “I’ve got to head off to work in thirty minutes. Before then, I made this specially for you, Penny. A new experiment: bacon, eggs, waffles. Let me know if it tastes like puke.”

  Penny smiled. It was one thing she could do very well, and it made Marty’s toil to look after her worth every effort. He did have help, in the guise of a home health aide who attended to Penny when he was at work, but when he returned, he always sent the aide home and took over her duties.

  “NYPD and Virginia State police are very close to catching Will Cochrane, but we had a serious incident on a train last night. He disarmed a detective and uniformed cop, put them on their asses, jumped the train, and escaped. My best detectives think it’s a warning, that he’s likely to turn cop killer very soon if we push him into a corner. Trouble is, we have to corner him. My officers want me to get the AG to issue a warrant to bug a house where Cochrane has family connections.”

  Penny emitted a sound.

  “That’s what I think. Still, we have no choice. It’s a shitty part of the job.” Marty continued feeding his sister her breakfast. “This is the first time I’ve been in a legal case involving a man with Cochrane’s background. See, he was a covert operative, worked for us as well as the Brits. The CIA pushed him too hard. I’m dealing with a dick there called Philip Knox. He doesn’t seem to care about what’s happened to Cochrane’s mind, though I can tell he and everyone in the Agency highly regard Cochrane. But they keep hanging guys like him out to dry. They squeeze them for everything they’ve got, then abandon them. I believe there’s something wrong with that.”

  Penny responded in her way.

  “Yeah. None of it makes any difference. Most likely Cochrane’s going to get the death penalty.”

  I clambered out of a hedgerow three miles beyond the outskirts of Baltimore.

  I’d stopped for an hour—the rest being not sleep, but rather a change of consciousness; eyes open, mind for the most part powered down but aware of sounds, images, and smells around me. During the preceding hours, I’d covered thirty-three miles on foot, my route erratic, zigzag, sometimes doubling back before moving off on a new tangent, all in open countryside, over fields, forests, rivers, under a cloudy, moonless night sky.

  Several times I’d crashed into trees and other foliage, tripped on uneven ground, stopped with my hands on my knees to catch my steaming breath, before moving onward at a pace that alternated between a fast walk and a run. It was only when I was convinced I wasn’t being pursued, had put enough ground between me and the Amtrak train, and simply didn’t have the energy to put another foot forward, that I allowed myself the luxury of rest.

  Shivering as my body heat began to evaporate and sweat made my skin cold, I’d sat alone, my hands and head smarting from grazes and cuts from branches and twigs. Now I had to get into Baltimore, because out here I was too visible. But I worried about my physical appearance and my hunger.

  I reached a river that flowed through woods and crouched for ten minutes, motionless, as I observed my surroundings. No other creatures were moving, the air and trees also still above water that was shallow yet running fast over boulders. There was significant risk in doing so, but I had to do something about my disheveled and grimy appearance.

  Stripping naked, I stood in the river using water and clumps of grass to clean mud off my outer garments and boots, and thoroughly rinsing my underwear. I washed, grime and blood flowing down my body and into the river. The developing beard on my face was a good thing, but I needed to clear it and my hair of grease. Nothing in the wild could do that, only a man-made surfactant; which is why I’d stolen a small bottle of Ferragamo soap from the Waldorf.

  After I was clean, I wrung out my underwear and put it back on. I dressed in the partially wet outer garments, donned my boots, jacket, and backpack, and walked to Baltimore.

  Chapter 10

  In a boardroom in the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency, Philip Knox presided over a meeting with the heads of the Agency and the NSA, and their deputies.

  The room, functional and businesslike, contained TV monitors that could be linked to any other senior intelligence chief in the United States and its allies, as well as Capitol Hill. Knox was acutely aware that he was not the most senior person in the room, though right now he held most sway on all matters Will Cochrane.

  He began his address as if he were a judge summoning up his findings after being presented with the case for the prosecution and defense. “Mr. Cochrane is no longer one of us.” He paused to see if there was any dissension on that point, while observing his colleagues over the top of his half-rim spectacles. The room was silent, watching him. “Perhaps we should conclude that he was never truly one of us.”

  “Now, hang on . . .” the head of NSA interjected.

  But Knox held his hand up and continued. “We would do well to think that way i
n order to distance ourselves from his circumstances.”

  “Circumstances?” Knox’s boss in the CIA ordinarily wouldn’t have broken ranks with one of his own, but this was a place where opinions were allowed to be expressed openly and loyalties were momentarily shelved.

  “Yes.” Knox picked up a pen and jabbed it in the air toward each member. “At what point must we worry about this?”

  His senior responded, “People like you created the monster.”

  Knox said, “Yes and no. But this is now about national security.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s about a man on the run.”

  Knox didn’t reply.

  “Our best operative is scrabbling about the East Coast, hunted.”

  “And rightly so.” Knox wondered if the others in the room had the balls to enact what he was thinking. He decided no one but him did. “He butchered a woman.”

  “Maybe he didn’t.”

  “Do you honestly believe that?”

  No one answered.

  Knox stared at them. “Cochrane’s got brutal capabilities. A woman was murdered in his hotel room. Clinically dispatched. That leaves us all in no doubt that he’s the killer. Why? Open to discussion. Circumstance? Who gives a fuck after the fact?”

  Knox’s boss was more tentative when he asked, “Do you have any ideas about what should be done?”

  Knox weighed up his response carefully. This was the reason for today’s meeting. But he was taking a professional risk with what he was about to say. “I told Marty Fleet of the attorney general’s office that I thought it was a good idea that the two NYPD detectives maintain the lead in capturing Cochrane, even if he commits crimes in other states. Why give it to the feds, I asked him, when they won’t do a better job? That was true. These detectives are the best for the job. But there’s another reason I want them right at the front of the game. I need to have at least one cop constantly involved in the investigation.” He looked at the head of the NSA. “I believe it’s in all of your interests not to ask me why I’m requesting this. But it would be extremely helpful if you could supply me with a cell phone that intercepts every call and SMS sent from and received on the phone belonging to Detective Thyme Painter.”