A Soldier's Revenge: A Will Cochrane Novel (2 page)

The concierge glanced up from his computer, smiled, and walked from behind his desk directly toward me. He was carrying a clipboard and a small parcel.

He blocked my path, held up the parcel, and said, “This came for you in the early hours. Hand delivered. We were going to run it up to your room today. Still can, if you like. Or you can take it now.”

Nobody apart from hotel staff knew I was in the Waldorf. The parcel was a small cardboard box, though big enough to contain a bomb that would obliterate me. I wondered whether I should take the parcel far away from here and dump it in a deserted field. But somebody had dragged a woman into my room, shot her, and exited without killing me. He’d have killed me then if he wanted.

I opened the box.

Inside was a hardcover encyclopedia. I flicked though the first pages. Printed in 1924 by a publishing house I’d never heard of, almost certainly the book was long ago out of print. As I rifled through the book I came across the brief handwritten note.

The classifieds section of the
Washington Post
. Not available online; only print copies. Tomorrow’s edition.

“Just need you to sign for this.” The concierge handed me his clipboard and pen. “Hope you’re having a great day,” he added, his smile broadening.

I took the clipboard and wrote my name.

Will Cochrane.

CHAPTER 1

T
he Romanian cleaner was crying as she jogged down the nineteenth-floor corridor alongside the Waldorf’s head of security. She didn’t know the man by her side. He was serious, an ex-NYPD cop, she’d heard, and had the demeanor of someone who’d been waiting for a moment like this so that he could kick into action and do something other than hushing rowdy guests. She was in her cleaning apron and flat shoes. He was in a dark suit and had an earpiece, making him look like the Secret Service men she’d seen in movies.

They reached the room where the Do Not Disturb sign had hung on the door all day. It was only ten minutes ago that the cleaner had knocked on the door again, heard no response, and entered.

That’s when she’d screamed.

The head of security told her to stay in the corridor, used a universal swipe card to enter the room, and walked into the bathroom.

The ex-cop had never seen anything like this.

A
s the Amtrak train turned on a bend in the tracks, Philadelphia became visible in the distance. I’d disappear in the city for one night. Spending any longer here would be suicidal. Nowhere was safe.

I’d pretended to sleep for most of the journey in the full train car, head bowed low, jacket hood up, and arms folded as if I was hugging myself warm rather than keeping one hand close to the murder weapon I’d taken from the bathroom. A tired kid called Andy was sitting next to me. Mom was sitting opposite her son, her accent from North Carolina, I was sure; a patient woman who spoke to Andy in a noncondescending yet commanding tone.

Next to her was a jerk called Kevin, who was almost certainly hated by the U.S. Marine Corps, though he was a marine. Regulation marine haircut, a new tattoo on his sinewy forearm, and a mouth that blathered in all directions to other travelers. He was getting promoted to corporal, he told everyone, because he knew his shit. Discipline—he pumped his chest as he looked at Andy—was his savior. The Corps, God, America, ten Buds, and warm thighs made him tick, ooh-rah, y’all—in that frickin’ order, you get?

Single Mom clearly didn’t take to Kevin. “Please, young man. No language like that in front of my son.”

The marine wasn’t bothered. “Ma’am, your son hears worse at school. And he’ll hear a darn sight worse when he’s grown some balls.”

I opened my eyes.

No doubt Andy’s mom was worried. Kevin had a grin on his face and an unstoppable tongue. Mom glanced at the rear of the car, probably wondering whether she should grab her son and leave.

I leaned forward, silent because I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. But I stared at Kevin.

The action worked. It got the marine’s attention away from other passengers.

Kevin said, “Guys like you don’t know what it’s like to be in the Corps.”

I didn’t. But I did know how to do a HALO parachute jump from thirty thousand feet, run across snow-covered mountains with an orange boiler suit on and a hunter-killer squad with dogs on my trail, twist a man’s neck until his body becomes limp, and make a car explode.

Kevin had the look of a man who thought he’d won the day. That was all I needed. He was pacified. Calmer. A guy who thought he dominated everyone around him with his masculinity. I wanted that for the sake of the folks next to me. The alternative would have been to punch him in the throat and leave him gasping for breath. I’ve done that many times to men far bigger than Kevin. But I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. More important, the kid next to me didn’t need to see the results of that action.

The train stopped. I watched Single Mom and her son exit, then picked up my things and stared at Kevin. I smiled as I towered over him. He was silent. I knew why. He now realized he was out of his league. I got off the train and walked through the station.

T
he Waldorf Astoria’s room 1944 was officially a crime scene.

The hotel’s head of security was loitering in the corridor. In the room were two forensics officers, head to toe in white coveralls, masks over their mouths, rubber gloves changed each time they touched something. It was only ten minutes ago that they’d let Detectives Józef Kopa
ń
ski and Thyme Painter back into the room.

Always in a bleached shirt and immaculate suit when working, Kopa
ń
ski—a rangy man with silver hair and not an ounce of fat on his imposing frame—had a face that was half handsome and half mutilated from nitric acid, and callused hands, the size of shovels and as strong as clamps, that could quickly put any bullet where it needed to be. Joe Cop Killer, his colleagues called him behind his back but not to his face, a nickname derived from the time he’d entered a house alone and with pinpoint accuracy shot a dangerous sheriff who was strung out on meth and was pointing a gun at his wife’s head.

Compared to Kopa
ń
ski, whose parents were impoverished immigrants, Painter’s background couldn’t have been more different. Her parents were investment bankers and she was a graduate of Stanford. She’d had options on Capitol Hill, but went to West Point and graduated at the top of her class. Three years later, she was a helicopter Night Stalker for the 160th SOAR. Her career ended when she’d offloaded five DEVGRU SEALs in Afghanistan and saw that another chopper on her six had been locked on by a SAM. To save the other helo, which contained more SEALs, she’d flown into the path of the missile. Doctors saved her life but not her leg. She joked that the stress of having an artificial limb kept her weight down.

Both single, Kopa
ń
ski and Painter formed a tireless unit who broke more murder cases than the rest of Manhattan’s precincts combined.

The forensics team told them that the blood prints in the bathroom matched prints elsewhere in the room, meaning it was almost certain that the guest staying in 1944 was the murderer; the prints would be sent off for analysis along with all other samples.

Kopa
ń
ski moved left and said nothing as Painter leaned in from behind him and placed her face by the bloody handprints on the bathroom wall. She moved from one place to another, silent, shooting only the quickest of occasional glances at Kopa
ń
ski to let him know she was on the case and getting signals, as she called her methodology. She saw a powerful man, grip as strong as Kopa
ń
ski’s, holding the victim with one hand, pumping bullets into the back of her skull with the other.

Painter touched Kopa
ń
ski’s shoulder.

The big Polish American sensed the killer in the room, an electric feeling of immediacy that heightened every nerve-shredding instinct. He had been here. He’d kill you now if he still were. The murderer had washed in the bathroom, cleaning himself up after the death of an innocent woman. Killers are two a dime, serial killers a slight notch up only because their deranged personalities and get-away-with-it track record hold fascination. But this killer was different—he’d killed with brutal efficiency, yet had been sloppy by leaving his prints and DNA all over the crime scene.

According to the hotel, the room occupant was an English guy called Will Cochrane.

Both detectives wondered if he was a pro who didn’t care whether the world knew he’d gone mad.

T
he taxi dropped me outside the Holiday Inn Express in Penn’s Landing, Philadelphia. When the car was out of sight, I turned away from the hotel, walking through the city, which was wet and cold despite the last vestiges of summer lingering in the air. I stopped by an ATM, withdrew the maximum limit allowed by my bank, and moved on until I found a cheap hotel on Spruce Street, near the center of the city. After paying for a room up front in cash, I went to my room and held my head in my hands while sitting on the bed. It seemed only minutes ago that I’d sat on my Waldorf bed and stared at my bloody hands.

Traveling between New York and Philadelphia had kept me preoccupied with the urgency of fleeing and hiding. My next destination was eight hundred miles southwest, the home of twin ten-year-old boys. They were the reason I was in the States. Their parents were friends of mine and had been murdered. I’d planned to adopt the boys and start a new life in America. After months of preparation, today I was supposed to visit a law firm in NYC to sign adoption papers. I’d intended to have a new life, give the boys the security and love they so needed, start working as a teacher at their school, and be a parent. Their father was a former SEAL who’d worked with me. Many times he’d saved my life. It was my duty to look after his remaining family.

I opened the encyclopedia and reread the note. Tomorrow I’d get a copy of the
Washington Post
and scan the classifieds section. Focus on that, I told myself. The note had been written by the murderer, of that I was in no doubt. I’d know what my opponent was made of in a few hours. If he revealed his hand and implicated himself, I’d mail the
Post
and encyclopedia to the feds, telling them I was an innocent man who couldn’t give himself up just yet.

I clung to the hope that it would pan out that way.

CHAPTER 2

A
t seven fifty-five the following morning, Painter and Kopa
ń
ski walked quickly across the Waldorf Astoria’s palatial lobby, focused but tired. The night had been intense and sleepless.

Despite the early hour, the hotel was brimming, much as it would have been when the occupant of room 1944 escaped. But today, approximately forty people in the hotel weren’t guests or staff; they were journalists, some homegrown, broadsheet and tabloid, others representatives of foreign press organizations. All of them were heading to the lobby-level Empire Room, where Lieutenant Pat Brody of the Office of the Deputy Commissioner, Public Information, was about to read verbatim what Kopa
ń
ski and Painter had written an hour earlier.

Kopa
ń
ski had wanted to stage the NYPD press briefing somewhere more public in the hotel. News coverage of the briefing needed to show the hotel in order for the crime to become real in people’s minds and for potential witnesses to unlock vital information hidden in their memories.

Journalists agreed, though for different reasons. This was hot press material, not because there was yet another killing in New York, but because it had taken place somewhere as swanky as the Waldorf. They wanted the Q&A to be held in front of the hotel or in the lobby. Understandably, hotel management didn’t take kindly to the prospect of their hotel being advertised as the site of a brutal crime. They insisted on a discreet meeting room so the press briefing wouldn’t scare off guests.

Brody took the podium. Journalists were in their seats in the Empire, lined up, chomping at the bit. Painter and Kopa
ń
ski stood at the back of the Edwardian room, eyeing its crystal chandeliers, drapes surmounted by gold swags, ceiling spot lamps, and brown carpet in the pattern of a maze.

“Ladies and gentlemen, good morning.” Brody was in uniform; he had been on the force for twenty years.

Murmurs from the press.

Brody read out the detectives’ script: short sentences, written with precision by the detectives so there could be no misinterpretation.

“The night before last, a murder took place in room 1944 of this hotel. The victim was shot twice in the back of the head with an MK23 pistol. Probably the pistol was sound suppressed, though we can’t be sure at present. The murder weapon was not left at the scene. The identity of the victim is still unknown, though we’re certain she’s not a hotel guest or member of staff. We’re running traces on her DNA and fingerprints in our national databases. We’ll know soon who she is. We have one suspect: the occupant of room 1944. An Englishman. Forty-five years old. Estimated height six feet, four inches. Athletic build, according to this hotel. Short-cropped, graying blond hair. One eye green, the other blue. We’ve got information packs for you all at the table by the door. In there are hotel scans of the suspect’s passport when he checked in and his photograph. Also a description of the clothes he was last seen wearing. You have our permission to replicate and print anything in the pack. We have an ongoing murder investigation. It’s complex. Motive is unclear. Details about victim and suspect are needed. Rest assured: the detectives in charge of the investigation have moved very fast. The city is on alert, and all East Coast police and sheriff’s departments are cooperating in the manhunt. Are there any questions?”