Cold Silence

White Plague

Protocol Zero

Cold Silence

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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This book is an original publication of Penguin Random House LLC.

Copyright © 2016 by Bob Reiss.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Abel, James, author.

Title: Cold silence / James Abel.

Description: First edition. | New York : Berkley, 2016.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016004341 (print) | LCCN 2016011810 (ebook) | ISBN 9780425282977 (hardback) | ISBN 9780698407305 ()

Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Thrillers. | FICTION / War & Military. | FICTION / Technological. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.

Classification: LCC PS3568.E517 C65 2016 (print) | LCC PS3568.E517 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016004341

FIRST EDITION:
July 2016

Cover design by Anthony Ramondo.

Cover art: Artwork by Studio Liddell for aareps.com;
Red fused liquid
© Svetara/Shutterstock;
Biohazard symbol
© Miguel Angel Salinas Salinas/Shutterstock.

Interior art:
Deserted area
© by Anastasia Koro/Shutterstock.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

I'll never get out of here alive, thought Tahir Khan.

He backed away from the peephole in the Boca Raton penthouse apartment, as the quiet knocking on the front door continued. Across the room, bright sun flooded in through floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors that faced the blue Atlantic, dazzling and still, twenty-four stories below. In early January, seventy-degree air washed in from the balcony and he heard the ocean, vaguely, insistent as a hiss.

Khan looked around wildly, as if somehow, magically, an escape hatch would appear in the walls. But all was as it had been when he rented his hideaway. The place was costly but ugly and generic; hospital white walls and matching floor tiling, curving Naugahyde couch wrapped toward a giant TV. Bright lime green cushions topped wrought iron furniture. The same generic pastel beach paintings hung in a thousand rental condos from Key West up the East Coast, to New Jersey. Still life conch shells. Wind ruffling dune grass. Six-year-old children in bathing suits, wielding plastic pails.

Khan was tall and stick-thin and he wore a black short-sleeved
tropical shirt with a yellow once-festive and now sweat-soaked orchid pattern. He had underdeveloped muscles, soft hands, and big eyes. He thought, Call 911 for help? If I do that, I'll be arrested.

“Hey!” the friendly voice called through the door. “I know you're in there. Open up. I just want to talk.”

Khan peered through the peephole again and saw, magnified, like two spread fingers, air tickets, and then the tickets moved away and the smiling face was back, features exaggerated by the lens, ratcheting up his terror.

I'm trapped. I'm finished. He'll kill me, he thought.

He'd taken a bus here, because cheapo bus lines accepted nontraceable cash, changed his name on the lease, to Phillip Zahoor, and paid a pile of hundred-dollar bills up front for three months, plus a hefty damage deposit. He'd barely left the apartment for the last two weeks.

But they always found you. They tracked you down. They used computers and satellites, databases and old-fashioned footwork. It had been stupid to try to leave. He should have shut up and gone along and batted away his doubts.

“How did you get past the guard?” he called out.

Knock-knock-knock. The thin door looked as if it was caving in with each impact, however slight.

Fucking Florida construction. Fucking South Florida–quality work. South Florida, where planned obsolescence meant concrete spalled months after being poured, roofs leaked in storms, doors were as sturdy as on Hollywood sets. Appearance was everything. Quality was a joke. The voice sounded close, male, soft, and intelligent.

“Guard? I didn't see a guard.”

“I'll call security if you don't leave, Orrin.”

No answer. Then, as if the man felt hurt, “Aw, what do you want to say that for? And why'd you leave anyway? After four years? Things are finally about to pop, Tahir!”

Tahir Khan was a twenty-six-year-old ex–biology grad student from Pakistan, still legally in the United States, although he'd
withdrawn from the State University of New York at Albany. Family abroad. Cold sweat flowed from his bald head, shaved two days ago, and ran down his face, where he was trying unsuccessfully to grow a beard. It coursed past his glasses and down his ropy neck and sprouted inside his armpits. His throat was closing. He couldn't breathe. His head pounded. He'd heard the expression “knees going weak” but had never, until now, experienced it, and he wobbled backward from the door as if, any second, it would crash in. First thing on getting here, he'd called a locksmith to come, to install a deadbolt, and the hearty American voice on the phone had promised, “You betcha! We'll come today!” But no one had shown up. “Our guy got a flu. Sorry, sir.” So Khan tried a second place. “We can come next Friday. Is Friday okay?”

Friday was tomorrow.

Now the voice came again through the door and it was patient and soft but inside the patience was something dark. The voice was Midwestern, reasonable on the surface. It was confident. “If I wanted to hurt you, I could have done it last night at the fish restaurant. Or this morning when you walked on the beach, Tahir.”

Tahir felt hope stirring. “You were in the restaurant?”

“You ordered mahimahi. Me, I prefer lobster. With butter. And lots of dark beer.”

Tahir risked the peephole magnifier again, saw Orrin's plain and forgettable face. There was absolutely nothing memorable about the man. He seemed composed of a collection of bland features. Height just short of normal. Face, almost round but not, nose, one of those computer-generated combos showing common features of humans, two holes for breathing in a functional pasted-on knob. He was a genetic mix of average. You could see him straight on and forget him if a breeze distracted you. The skin was tanned. His tropical shirt, worn loosely, featured a racing cigarette boat pattern. The baseball cap said
MARLINS
, as it did on ten thousand people walking around here. The left hand held up Delta tickets again. Orrin's smile looked genuine. It always did. But
Tahir had seen the kind of damage the man could do. The doughy body was an illusion.

“See? One ticket for you. One for me. What are you going to say if you call the police anyway? You know what they will do to you? Open the goddamn door and let's go.”

Tahir considered it. His two-bedroom penthouse sat above a concrete patio on the beach side, three blocks from the inland waterway in the west. At this height, any tourists walking on the beach would be beyond earshot if he screamed, and his next-door neighbor, a snowbird psychiatrist from Manhattan, was away for the weekend at his daughter's wedding on Long Island.

Tahir thought, I should have gone back to Pakistan.

Tahir was in Florida for the first time and the only human being he'd had contact with here for more than five minutes had been the real estate agent. I need to rent something today, he told the man. He'd paid cash at Best Buy, for a TV, which he'd sat staring at for days, waiting with dread for the BIG NEWS to break, the thing he'd been working on. Cash in the supermarket, where he'd stocked up on food. Cash to the cabbie who'd brought him here.

No motel for him. No lodging where he had to sign a registry book, even with a false name, because handwriting could be tracked. He'd been drilled on techniques. The people looking for him would check hotels and motels. They'd bribe desk clerks. Watch security tapes. Send phony tourists to sidle up to other guests and start conversations. They'd sit in cars in front of hotels.

So after he rented this place, other than a daily walk on the beach, to keep from going crazy, or that one restaurant meal, he'd stayed inside and watched TV. Sometimes waiting for the BIG THING, sometimes just eyeing mindless fluff:
Judge Judy. Wife Swap.
Anything to keep him half sane as he tried to figure out what to do next. Tahir Khan had become one more anonymous figure trudging the Florida tide line, watching porpoises offshore at sunrise, and other fins, bigger ones. Less-benign life looking for
something smaller to eat. Tahir among the handful of sleepless retirees, young lovers who had been up all night making impossible promises, sunburned tourists giving one last longing look at a beach before boarding the plane back to gray Newark or Pittsburgh. And among them, one fugitive, running from the biggest mistake of his life.

The plan had been to sit here for a few weeks, get distance, and decide when to try to get out of the country and sit out the disaster that was about to begin.

But now the doorknob turned and Orrin Sykes somehow just stepped into the apartment. How could he have a key? The private security guard downstairs was “here twenty-four hours a day,” the rental agent had promised. Khan had pushed it, demanded, “What happens if someone gets past security,” and the beefy guard behind the desk had laughed, nodded at video monitors showing elevator interiors, and said, poking his chest with pride, “Ex-ATF,” as if that guaranteed that no intruder, no stranger, not even a ninety-year-old cripple would pass his station without proper ID.

But Sykes was a ghost, and now the man stood just ten feet away, same distance as the phone. For an instant Tahir flashed back to a film he'd seen in freshman biology class, too many years ago. It had been called
Animal Camouflage
. It had featured creatures—a certain frog, a moray eel, a crab—all of which looked beautiful, and rarely moved, and then with sudden shocking aggression would lunge. A tongue would flick out. A mouth would open. Whatever life form had been innocently feeding nearby a moment before would be gone, and the killer would be sitting there again.

“Come on, Tahir. Pack a bag. Let's go home.”

“Really?”

“What do you think, I'd hurt you? You're valuable.”

He started to feel relief. The sweat flow dissipated to a trickle. Was it possible? He began to babble, as he moved backward, toward the bedroom, toward his ratty suitcase in the back closet, all the time watching for Orrin to lunge.

“I didn't tell anyone. Who would believe it, right?”

Sykes nodded. “You had doubts.”

“I admit I thought about calling a reporter. Or the FBI. I did. I considered it. But I didn't do anything. I just wanted to get away. For a little while. To think.”

“Think.”

“Everyone needs time to think.”

“I know I do,” Sykes agreed, nodding.

The bedroom lay down a short hallway from the living room, and the walk gave Sykes a view of all the other rooms in the condo. Kitchen, empty. Bathroom, empty. Guest bedroom, empty. Master bedroom.

“No one really here,” Sykes said.

“I told you that.”

“I was just checking,” Sykes said.

Tahir opened the mirrored sliding closet door with shaking hands. He reached up for his suitcase. He actually felt Orrin move before, it seemed, the reflection did in the three mirror panes. Tahir did not have time to turn. In the mirrors three meaty arms circled three skinny throats and three Tahirs were lifted bodily off the carpet. There was an awful cracking sound and he watched his head spin around. Orrin's face remained expressionless.

In a freshman biology class at SUNY, Tahir had heard a professor say once that after a human being is killed, the brain keeps functioning for a few more moments. Now his brain processed that he was being carried back into the living room, and that he was hanging over the patio railing. Wow, I am dead, he thought, falling, the concrete flecked with shiny mica, its squares forming a chessboard, the empty squares coming up fast.