Exit Strategy (A Nick Mason Novel, Band 2) - Softcover

Buch 2 von 3: A Nick Mason Novel

Hamilton, Steve

 
9780399574405: Exit Strategy (A Nick Mason Novel, Band 2)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0399574409 ISBN 13: 9780399574405
Verlag: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

In the stunning follow-up to the New York Times bestseller The Second Life of Nick Mason, the remarkable hero fights to take back control from the crime lord who owns his life, as he races to complete a daring and dangerous new mission...

Nick Mason has been given a true mission impossible: Infiltrate WITSEC, the top-secret federal witness-protection program that has never been compromised, locate the three men who put his boss Darius Cole behind bars for life, and kill them.

But first he has to find them—they’re ghost prisoners locked down around the clock in classified “deep black” locations by an battalion of heavily armed U.S. marshals charged with protecting them—and the clock is ticking. Cole is appealing his conviction, and these witnesses are either his ticket to freedom or the final nail in his coffin. If they testify, Darius Cole will never step foot in the outside world again. If they are killed, he will walk out a free man. 

As he risks everything to complete his mission, Mason finds himself being hunted by the very man he replaced, the ruthless assassin who once served, then betrayed, Darius Cole. Rather than waiting to be Mason's next victim, he has escaped witness protection to hunt down and kill Mason himself.

In an action-packed journey that leads from a high-security military installation in the Appalachian Mountains to a secret underground bunker hidden far below the streets of New York City, Nick Mason will have to become, more than ever before, the lethal weapon that Darius Cole created.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Steve Hamilton is the New York Times–bestselling author of twelve novels, most recently The Second Life of Nick Mason and Die a Stranger.  His debut, A Cold Day in Paradise, won both an Edgar and a Shamus Award for Best First Novel. His standalone novel The Lock Artist was a New York Times Notable Crime Book and won an Alex Award and the Edgar Award for Best Novel. He attended the University of Michigan, where he won the prestigious Hopwood Award for writing, and now lives in Cottekill, New York, with his wife and their two children.

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1
You kill one person, it changes you.

You kill five . . . it’s not about changing anymore.

It’s who you are.

Quintero knew this. He’d seen it in other men. Had seen it in himself. He saw it now as he watched Nick Mason prepare, remembering the day he picked him up at the gates of the federal prison in Terre Haute.

Remembering Mason’s first job, in the motel room. The look on his face afterward—blank, bloodless—when he brought the Mustang to the chop shop.

When he said he’d never do it again.

Until the next phone call.

That was the unwritten contract Nick Mason had signed. Twenty years of his life back in exchange for his service to Darius Cole. On call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. To do whatever was asked of him.

No matter what it was.

Mason stripped off his shirt to reveal the lean, hard muscles of a welterweight and pale white skin with no tattoos.

Even after five and a half years inside, he had come out without one drop of jailhouse ink on his body. Cole had made sure of it. Mason strapped on the soft armor tactical vest, thick enough to stop anything up to a .44 Magnum, then he pulled on the black turtleneck over that. With the black pants, the black rubber-soled shoes, it was the uniform of a professional. He took the black balaclava, formed it into a skullcap, and put it on over his close-cut hair. He pulled down the mask, adjusted it across his eyes, took one look in the mirror. Satisfied, he rolled it back up.

Quintero took the black canvas bag from his shoulder and put it down on the table. Mason unzipped the bag and looked inside.

“Everything you’ll need is in there,” Quintero said. “You have to remember, these are high-end guys. Top shape, know how to use their firearms.”

“How many of them?”

“Between ten and twelve,” he said. “Not enough to stop you.”

Mason shook his head as he tried on the scuba gloves.

“What’s the most important thing I told you?” Quintero asked.

“Stay off the twenty-first floor,” Mason said. “At exactly ten o’clock, it’s going to blow.”

“Once that happens, you’ll be able to walk right out of there.”

Mason nodded.

“Tell me the plan again,” Quintero said. “Step by step.”

“The delivery truck,” Mason said. “It enters the parking garage at exactly nine thirty-five p.m. . . .”

Nick Mason watched the truck turn into the parking garage from Columbus Drive. It stopped at the large metal door while the driver waited for the man at the window to slide the door open. This gave Mason twenty seconds to climb under the truck, grab on to the exhaust system brackets, and lift his body’s weight from the concrete, the canvas bag looped tight to his back.
The scuba gloves were thin and flexible, giving him a good grip and protecting every surface, even the underside of this truck, from fingerprints.

The truck rolled a hundred yards until it came to a stop, and the door slid shut behind it. When the truck was turned off, Mason lowered himself to the ground and stayed there, the canvas bag next to him.

It was 9:37 p.m., most of the business offices on the ground floor closed, the dinner rush at the restaurants over. Mason waited for the driver to get out of the truck, then followed a dozen yards behind him. He was inside the building.

The Aqua. Eighty-two stories high, one of the most distinctive buildings in downtown Chicago, on the north side of the Loop, with undulating balconies that wrap around the building on all four sides like rippling water. Inside, the theme continues through all of the decorations, from the blue-and-green color scheme to the saltwater fish tank in the lobby.

Mason moved quickly, without rushing, knowing exactly where to find the freight elevator. The target was on the forty-third floor, so he hit the button for 42, then used the fireman’s override to take him all the way to his floor without stopping.

When he got to the forty-second floor, Mason stepped out of the elevator into the empty hallway. He spotted a room service tray on the floor outside one of the rooms, picked that up, and emptied it of all of the items except for the silver plate cover. Then he went to the stairwell at the end of the hallway and took the stairs up to forty-three.

Mason cracked open the stairwell door and scanned the hallway. The marshal was sitting in a chair outside the door, seven or eight doors down. Young, maybe thirty. Stocky. He looked more bored than vigilant. Mason opened up his canvas bag, took out the Mossberg 500 shotgun. Pistol grip model, with the shorter barrel. Six shell capacity. It was loaded with what the manufacturer artfully called a crowd control munition, silicone plugs that they said would cause “nonlethal but incapacitative trauma” upon impact.

Incapacitative trauma.

In other words, it would only make you wish you were dead.

“You need to get over this,” Quintero said to him. “Killing one man and leaving everybody else alive.”

Mason didn’t answer. He loaded the plugs into the shotgun.

“That gun in your hands, you think it cares who’s on the other end?”

Mason looked up at him.

“You gotta be the same way,” Quintero said. “Before this bullshit gets you killed.”

Mason took the H&K USP semiautomatic from the bag and put it in his belt. The cartridge held fifteen nine-millimeter rounds, with a sixteenth already chambered. Finally, he took out the stun baton and hooked it to his belt. Eighteen inches long, three pounds of reinforced aluminum, with a “police force level” rating of twelve million volts that would shut down a man’s entire neuromuscular system. One more piece of insurance.

Mason dropped the empty canvas bag to the floor, put a pair of low-profile plugs into his ears, then took one final moment to breathe, to focus on what was about to happen, because once it started it would all flow quickly, one movement after another, without a single beat of hesitation.
He opened the stairwell door and moved down the hallway. The room service tray hid the semiautomatic in his belt—positioned at eleven o’clock for a right-handed cross draw—and also hid the baton and most of the shotgun.

The marshal stood up and said, “Hey! You can’t be here!”

That moment of indecision as the marshal reached for his radio. Mason dropped the tray and leveled the shotgun at the man’s chest, had just enough time to see the young man’s eyes go wide as he pulled the trigger and sent the silicone plug into his abdomen, just below the tactical vest.

The marshal went down, curled up in a ball. He wouldn’t be getting back up, not without a lot of help and some pain medication. Mason pulled the balaclava down over his face as he approached him. The man looked even younger up close—a kid who had no business being stationed here alone. Mason reached into the man’s jacket and removed the Glock from his holster, along with his radio. Then he took out the pen from his own pocket—the tip had been replaced by a DC adapter and the barrel contained a circuit board that would read the 32-bit hotel code and repeat it back to the card reader in less than a second.

He knew the clock was ticking now. Somebody had heard that shot, was already calling down to the front desk.

“The marshal inside the room is the leader of the team. He’s an iron...

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Verlag
G.P. Putnam's Sons
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0399574409
ISBN 13 
9780399574405
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Buchbär
info@buchbaer.de

Weberstr. 67
Osnabrück
49084
Deutschland

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