The Silent Places Read Free

and private, but
goddamn
, couldn’t they have picked a place that had some heat?
    The man he answered to was standing near the track with his hands in his coat pockets. His name was Dexter Troy. He was forty years old. A tall man, wide in the shoulders and narrow of waist.
    Dexter Troy panned the area, west to east. He rested his eyes on the east, imagining a Union Pacific steam train coming into the station. Part of him wished they were bringing John Reese on such a train. Bound by chains, guarded by Pinkerton detectives. They would take him off the train and put him in a cell and take him out to the gallows in the morning. Hanging would be a better death for a traitor. Let the public see what happens to such a man. Better that than doing it in secret, burying him in the woods.
    Like a lot of veterans of Special Operations Command (SOCOM), Troy had heard about John Reese. Reese was a veteran of the army and the CIA and the Cold War. A man from another time, another era. Younger men, men like Clu, would find Reese a curious, perhaps even pathetic, figure. They would find it difficult to believe that he had once controlled fortunes. When it slips away, Troy thought, it really slips away.
    Troy’s cell phone rang and he answered it.
    “Yeah.”
    “Dex,” a voice said. It was Clu, the team leader of this mission, second in command. From his tone, Troy knew he had bad news. He did.
    Clu said, “He escaped.”
    Troy closed his eyes, opened them. “Explain.”
    “He jumped out of the car while it was moving. Pulled Cody out with him.”
    “Cody?”
    “He’s got a concussion and his arm is broken. But he’s alive.”
    From his place on the bench, the young man watched and listened as Dexter Troy sighed.
    Troy said, “And what about the quarry?” He was hoping that he, too, had died in the fall.
    Clu said, “He ran into the woods. We’re still looking.”
    “Well, keep looking, you idiot. It’ll be daylight soon.” Troy said. “Have you reported this to anyone?”
    “Negative.”
    “Good. I’ll contact you later.”
    Dexter Troy clicked off the phone. Resumed his stare on the eastern sky.
    The younger man walked up to him and said, “What have we got?”
    “A manhunt,” Troy said.
    Reese continued south. He moved, but he had stopped running, because he knew after a time that it was not necessary and that it would be bad if he just ran himself to exhaustion. Running was panic. He moved at what he considered a quick walk.
    He had gone through survival school at Fort Benning thirty years before. They had trained him then to survive in different environments and to learn about where you were going. How to find food and water, how to travel through different kinds of terrain, how to doctor yourself. They had instructed him specifically that rest could be more valuable than speed.
    He had jumped from a vehicle that had been moving at a higher speed than he would have liked. He had tucked and he had rolled and he had used a man as a cushion, but his feet had hit the ground and then he’d tumbled and flown without control. He had maintained consciousness and, probably through sheer luck, not broken any bones. But when he put some distance between himself and his pursuers, he felt the pain from his head to his fingertips and he knew his legs and hips would be bruised purple and yellow by morning. Along with the bruises to his ribs.
    But he was alive and he was free. But now men were coming after him, and if they were mercenaries, they might have night-vision goggles and high-powered rifles that could take you down at eight hundred yards. Yeah, rest was more valuable than speed. Particularly after you’d had to jump from a moving vehicle. But men were coming after him. And if they were as well financed as they looked, they might get a helicopter, using searchlights and body-heat sensors. He had to keep moving.
    God, it was cold, though. He had only the clothes they had given him and a windbreaker, which had torn at