“I’m on my way.”
He ended the call. Then he pulled out the M9 that Angela had given him. He checked the load. It looked like the clip had been full when she had fired it at him. So with one round in the chamber, that left him fifteen.
Fifteen shots.
31
As Mason looked down into the depths of the enormous quarry, he was already standing in the crosshairs of a high-powered sniper rifle. His friend Eddie Callahan was waiting in his vehicle by the gate, a Precision Pro 2000 trained at Mason’s back.
It felt like he was standing at the edge of the world. There was a four-hundred-foot drop straight down this sheer wall to the quarry’s floor. A thin line of cars ran along the highway on the northern rim, tiny pinpoints of light like distant stars. The space between here and there just empty darkness.
They’d been taking limestone from this place for almost a century, grinding it into powder, using it for roads, for cement, to build the skyscrapers of the city. He could taste it in the air as he scanned the canyon for any light, for any movement, for any sign at all that would tell him where they were. Where Diana was.
He had come through at the southeast corner, had gotten out of the car and unlooped the gate’s chain. The padlock had been unlocked, as Bloome had told him it would be. He had driven through the swirling dust to the edge, where a vehicle could start the long descent down the narrow shelf cut into the wall.
Mason took a breath and tried to clear his head. His plan was simple. He was going to save Diana. He was going to kill everyone else. Everyone he could find.
The hesitation he felt at the motel, that would be gone. The horror he felt at the strip club, that would be gone.
He would take all of the violence that had been forced into his life by Darius Cole and he would turn it all back on these men.
This is why he chose me, Mason thought. It finally makes sense to me. He didn’t want some premade killer from the cellblock. He wanted to make his own.
He saw the raw materials in me even then, sitting across the table from me in a prison cafeteria. Everything he’d ever need.
And now here I am.
Mason shook out his hands and took one more breath. Then he went back to his car.
As he drove down, crossing the city line, he had gone over everything he knew. He knew these cops wanted the black box that was sitting on his backseat. They needed to protect themselves. Once they had that, then they would kill him. They had to eliminate this threat, this soldier Cole had sent to fight in this war.
And then they would kill Diana. No other way to see it. Not only would she be a witness, even more important, she would be the one way they could strike back at Cole. She was his only weakness.
They couldn’t touch Cole directly, not if he was sitting in a federal prison two hundred miles away. They could kill Mason, they could kill Quintero, they could kill any man Cole sent to Chicago. Cole would just send someone else.
Diana was the one person in the world he cared about. The one person who couldn’t be replaced. Kill her and you’ve taken the war right to him.
Mason couldn’t imagine where the war would go after that. But he knew he’d be a part of it.
And you don’t go to war without someone covering your back.
“Where are you?” he said as he touched the Bluetooth headset in his left ear.
“I’m stopped at the gate,” Eddie said. “I see you.”
“I’m going down. Hang back until I tell you.”
Mason had remembered what Eddie had told him when the two of them were catching up over beers in his garage. How he still got to the range once in a while even though he’d been out of the Army for years.
He just hoped Eddie could still hit anything inside a thousand yards.
“You’re too far away,” Eddie said in his ear. “Too dark to cover you.”
“Do your best,” Mason said. “Don’t get too close.”
He was inching his way down the shelf. You couldn’t call it a road. It was too steep a drop, with no rail on the side. One slip and the car would go over the edge and fall for five seconds before finally hitting the bottom.
He was glad Eddie was trailing behind him in a four-wheel-drive Jeep.
“Hey,” Mason said, gritting his teeth as he kept the wheels dead straight. “While I got a chance . . .”
“What?”
“Shoot anybody you want. Just not me or Diana, okay?”
He heard a nervous laugh on the other end.
Mason came to a place where he had to make a tight turn and head in a new direction. He could see nothing past his headlights. When he finally crawled all the way to the bottom, he stopped for a moment and got out of the car to take a look around.
The quarry floor was mostly flat and empty, with dark mounds of broken limestone scattered in the distance. As he looked up, he could barely see the thin line of cars on the highway that passed along the north rim.
He had just driven into his own grave.