James Abel
Cold Silence
PROLOGUE
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.