Counterstrike by Sean Flannery

Author:Sean Flannery
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

28

Moran was in New York.

It was just midnight when he got off the plane from San Antonio with the few others, trudged down the boarding tunnel, and followed the signs to the luggage retrieval on the ground floor.

He was tired, yet he was anxious to finish with his business this evening and be gone by morning before the New York City police or the FBI had a chance to react.

In many respects he knew that he was being foolish by coming here like this. He was indulging himself in a little game of fantasy in which he pitted himself against the entire law enforcement establishment: the local police, the FBI, CIA, and KGB, and even Interpol. Each time he was cornered he managed to extricate himself by dint of his superior intelligence. He’d never yet met a cop or intelligence officer who could find his ass with both hands. They were usually organization men, bureaucrats who spent more time protecting their positions than they did unraveling the data that streamed across their desks.

He had been on the go for more than forty-eight hours. This morning, after he’d left Torres’s house in Mexico City, he’d taken an Air Mexico flight up to Monterrey, where he’d gotten on a bus for the 150-mile trip to Laredo. The border patrol had not even asked for his papers, merely asking him where he was born. He’d told them Omaha, Nebraska, and he’d been waved on, that despite his slight accent. He’d rented a car there and had driven up to San Antonio in time for the six-fifty flight to La Guardia, checking his single piece of luggage all the way through to New York with the recap luggage service at the door.

A flight from Chicago had come in about ten minutes earlier, and the passengers were still waiting for their luggage. Moran lowered his eyes as he crossed the hall and positioned himself at the end of the carousel nearest the doors to wait.

An old woman looked over at him, nodded her head, and smiled.

Moran smiled back and mouthed the words, “God bless you,” and her smile deepened.

The luggage came a few minutes later, and he went over to the Hertz counter, where he paid for a car with an American Express credit card under his Father Tanner identification. A shuttle took him out to the parking lot. The car was a maroon Chevrolet Cavalier.

Rain fell in a steady drizzle, headlights, streetlights, and the lights from billboards reflecting in multicolored streaks off the slick pavements. There wasn’t much traffic at this house of the night, though the roads were not completely empty. New York, like any large city in the West, was never completely still.

It was late, nearly one o’clock by the time he passed beneath the East River through the Midtown Tunnel. He had reservations on the 7:15 A.M. flight to Montreal, which gave him a little more than six hours to find the woman, kill her, and then get free. Unless he got lucky immediately, he figured he would have to take a few chances.

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