End Game (10 page)

“Why would Maryanne lie?” he asked.

“I have no idea. I’ve only just begun my investigation into her.”

“Give me a theory,” Jonathan pressed. “Why would Maryanne, handpicked by Wolverine, want to work both ends against the middle?”

Venice counted off on her fingers. “Okay, there’s money, sex, secrets—”

“In other words, you don’t have a theory,” Jonathan interrupted. He went back to his bullets.

Venice explained, “Last night at the gala, Maryanne approached you at what, ten-thirty, eleven o’clock?”

Jonathan hitched his shoulders. “Sounds about right.”

“And that was maybe an hour after what happened in Indiana, right? If that?”

Jonathan saw it. “How did she know so many details so quickly?”

“Pretty well dressed at the spur of the moment, too,” Boxers added.

Venice touched her nose.
Bingo.
“More than that, how come she knew all that she knew, yet didn’t know anything else?”

Jonathan laid the magazine on its side on the table. He was fully engaged now. “Advance knowledge? It would have to be. This is really beginning to smell bad.”

Venice’s computer dinged, drawing her attention. She scowled as she jiggled her mouse and leaned in closer to her computer screen to take in whatever information was being delivered. “Huh,” she said.

Jonathan and Boxers exchanged looks. It was best to let Venice process information at her own pace. She’d share when she was ready.

“Now this is interesting,” she said. “I got a hit on a filter I set up through ICIS. There was an interesting incident last night on the outskirts of Napoleon, Ohio. Same general area as all the rest.”

“Another shoot-out?”

“No, more interesting than that. There was a potential statutory rape call.” She leaned into the screen again. “The Hummingbird Motel. Sounds like a place where you’d rent rooms by the hour.”

“And why is this interesting?” Boxers asked.

“Because it’s within a reasonable drive of Antwerp, Indiana,
and
Defiance, Ohio,” she said.

“I think Big Guy meant, why is a statutory rape call interesting?” Jonathan said. Venice’s mind was wired differently than other people’s. Asked to solve the arithmetic problem for the sum of two plus two, she was apt to investigate the origin of the word “two” and the reason why it has a silent
w
, and in the process still come up with the answer more quickly than a math major sitting next to her.

Her expression said,
Duh.
“Because it was all about a young woman and a teenage boy. I thought that might be our PCs.”

“Of course you did. And?”

She sighed. “And nothing. The police investigated, and their report says it was a sister and brother traveling together.”

“I recognize that look in your eye,” Jonathan said. “There’s more.”

“Maybe,” she said. She returned her gaze to the screen and started reading aloud, skimming and compressing information as she spoke. “The call was placed by the front-desk manager—he said he didn’t like the way she was acting, like she was trying to hide the fact that she had someone else with her. The ICIS file contains a security-camera image.”

“Jolaine?”

“Really close,” Venice confirmed. She tapped a few keys, and the image transferred from her screen to the larger one on the wall. “You know how the angles are on those cameras—always just a little bit wrong. But if you ask me, I think it’s her.”

Jonathan agreed. “Let’s finish up and pack, Big Guy. We’re deploying to Napoleon, Ohio.” He stood.

“I think that’s a mistake,” Venice said. And then she disappeared into her head and her keyboard while she attacked the keys. “Sit back down and give me a minute,” she said without looking up. “Please.”

Ninety seconds later, she fist-pumped the air. “Yes!” When she made eye contact again, she was beaming. “The chances of them still being in the motel aren’t very high, I don’t think. They’d want to stay moving, right?”

“But I don’t want to lose time hanging around in Virginia while the PCs are somewhere in the Midwest,” Jonathan said. “Particularly not with cops looking for them. What do the police have to go on, by the way? What are they looking for?”

“Just descriptions,” Venice said. “And pictures. They’re the same ones we looked at.”

“Do they have a license number for a car?” he asked. “Or a make and model?”

“Not that I know of,” she said, then she gave a triumphant whoop. “But I think
I
do. The Humingbird Motel uses ProtecTall Security for their alarms and video.”

Jonathan felt a rush. ProtecTall was a premier low-end physical security company, with contracts for roughly half of the free world, and Venice had conquered their computer backstops ages ago.

“There were only a few cars in the parking lot last night,” she said. “One of them was a black Mercedes that happens to be registered to a Douglas Wilkerson from—wait for it—Defiance, Ohio.” An image of the car materialized on the screen.

“The shoot-out town,” Boxers said.

“Bingo.”

“And who is Douglas Wilkerson?” Jonathan asked.

“Give me a second.” Venice started typing again. Over the course of three minutes—enough time to load four mags—Venice’s face ran the full gamut from confusion to discovery and back to confusion. “I have no idea who Douglas Wilkerson is,” she announced. “Ask me why.”

Jonathan sensed that he already knew, but he played along. “Why?”

“Because he doesn’t exist.” They said it together.

“Yet there’s an auto registration,” Jonathan said.

“With a real physical address,” Venice said. “When you’re dealing with a motor vehicle bureau, real addresses are important. I did a search of the address and learned that the same fake citizen, Doug Wilkerson, is listed as the resident.”

Jonathan looked to Boxers.

“What the hell?” Big Guy said. “How bad can a place be when it’s named Defiance?”

G
raham peeked out of the curtains again.
Where the hell is she?

Jolaine was gone, and she’d taken the car and the guns with her. The note said that she’d gone shopping, but how long could it take to snag a T-shirt and a pair of shoes at Walmart?

Graham had been awake for nearly two hours now. It was going on ten o’clock, and according to the sign on the back of the door, checkout time was eleven. What was he supposed to do if it got to be 11:01 and Jolaine wasn’t back yet? What kind of coward must she be to disappear on him like this? She was supposed to be protecting him, for God’s sake!

He deeply wanted to take Jolaine at her word—take her note at its word—but after a while, when everyone you’ve known or loved is being shot at, faith is hard to come by.

Daylight made everything more real, and he hated that. Thinking back to the events of the past twelve hours made him dizzy. It was hard to differentiate reality from nightmare. If he were to believe the evidence, his father was dead, his mother was grievously wounded, and some undefined, anonymous entity was trying to make him dead, too.

It couldn’t all be true, could it? There had to be some semblance of his life left as it used to be. Otherwise, what had he done to deserve all of this? What had his parents done? The harder he thought about it, the less he could identify the holes in the fabric of his living nightmare.

Graham Mitchell was a nobody among nobodies. His parents went to work every day, doing whatever it was that parents did when they went to work every day. Then they came home and were boring. What could they have done to make the kind of enemies that would bring so much violence? Some of the awfulness had to have been imagined. He
had
to believe that.

His imagination couldn’t explain away the blood, though. Or the dying man in the foyer of his house, or the stream of men with guns, or the blood that he’d had to wash off his chest and hands and legs last night. He had the towels on the floor of the bathroom to prove the reality of that.

There was the reality of the hole in his mother’s stomach. The reality of the weird, twitchy doctor.

“Oh, my God,” he said aloud, bringing a hand to his mouth to stifle a sob that rose from nowhere.
I’m an orphan.

That thought shut down all others.

Tears streamed down his face, but he wasn’t aware of them until one of them tickled his nose. He wiped it away and tried to clear his eyes, but it didn’t work.

Dad is definitely dead.
He had to be, and for evidence, he needed only to remember that Dad had never left the house, and that when Graham had asked Mom about him, she had dodged his question.

Jolaine.

The mere fact of her presence in his life was testament to the fact that he’d been living in real danger for three years. Why hadn’t he put that together in his head before? Mom and Dad had told him that Jolaine was merely a security precaution, that he shouldn’t worry about anything. Hell, Jolaine had told him that herself. Had people been hunting them for all this time, and he’d just never known it? Was last night just a realization of the inevitable? Had the last peaceful months actually been the accident, and the shoot-out preordained?

He swiped again at his eyes. He couldn’t let Jolaine see him crying like a little boy. She had little enough respect for him as it was.

He needed to think of something else. Anything else.

The television in this dump of a motel room sucked, both the machine itself and the programming it showed. At this hour, the broadcast networks were all about shows that attracted consumers of erectile dysfunction medicine, and there were no cable programs to speak of—unless you wanted to listen to a bunch of screaming newsreaders, or watch people cook or fix houses.

He pressed the power button and killed the set.

The silence brought demons.

Graham was tired of depending on everybody else for his survival. He was supposed to trust Jolaine, but where the hell was she?

“You made a promise,” he said aloud. Hearing the words made it real.

Follow the protocol.

How many times had Mom said it in the last hour that they were together? She was his
mother,
for crying out loud. And Jolaine was only a . . . whatever the hell Jolaine was. A nanny with a gun. If Mom hadn’t thought that that number was important, she wouldn’t have made him memorize it. And if it wasn’t important for him to deliver it, she wouldn’t have made him
promise
to do just that. No way did Jolaine outrank that.

Graham turned his head to look at the phone on the nightstand. He knew without searching that Jolaine had taken her cell phone with her. Just as well, because cell phones were traceable. He’d seen on television that as long as you didn’t stay on a landline for more than a few minutes, calls made from them couldn’t be traced.

Jolaine’s words rang in his ears.
Everything but doing nothing is a risk.
Did she know things that he didn’t know? Was she a better judge of what was the right thing to do? Maybe better than him, but not better than Mom.

Follow the protocol.

Until today, he didn’t even know what that word meant—he still didn’t, if he really thought about it. All he knew was it had to do with something his parents had been planning for a long time. Follow the protocol meant follow the plan.

Graham sat back down on the bed and he picked up the phone. He hesitated. Then he dialed.

“Two nine four one,” the voice said through the phone.

Graham opened his mouth to speak, but found that his vocal cords were hesitant. He had no idea what he’d been expecting when he called the number, but it had been more than that.

He heard the tentativeness in his own voice when he said, “Um, hello?”

“Two nine four one.” There had been urgency in the man’s tone before. Now it was joined by annoyance.

The protocol.

Mom had made him practice this part. If ever there was an emergency, he was to find a phone and follow the protocol. She’d made him recite the phrase. Now all Graham had to do was remember what the hell it was. “Um, Billy Bob Seven Nine,” he said. They were the correct words, but he had no idea what they meant, or what weight they might carry.

“I copy Billy Bob Seven Nine,” the voice said. “What is your status?”

Graham hesitated. He didn’t know what to say.

“Billy Bob Seven Nine, what is your status?”

There might have been an accent. While Graham had never been to Chechnya himself, he thought he recognized that in the man’s voice, the same accent as his father’s. “I don’t know what you want me to say.” When all else fails, he thought, go for honesty.

The annoyance in the man’s voice magnified. “What is your status? Are you hurt?”

“No,” Graham said. “I’m fine.”

“And others?”

“I don’t know.”

A pause. “You are calling a panic number,” the man said. “Why?”

“My mother told me to,” Graham said. “If anything bad ever happened, this was the number I was supposed to call.”

“Are you alone?”

“I am now.”

The man on the other end of the phone sighed deeply. “Try to think past the words and listen to the message. Were you alone five hours ago, and will you be alone five hours from now?”

He got it. The guy was really asking if Jolaine was with him. “I have Jolaine,” he said.

“And your parents?”

Just like that, Graham found himself without enough air to speak. “No,” he said. It was the best he could do.

“I need details,” the man said.

What could he say? How could he describe the awfulness of what had happened? “They attacked our house,” he said. “Men with guns. My mom was shot. I think my dad was . . .” He couldn’t complete the sentence.

“Killed?”

Graham didn’t answer.

“What is your location?” the voice asked. “And where is . . . your friend?” He seemed hesitant to say Jolaine’s name.

“I think she’s out shopping,” he said. “She wrote that in a note.”

“A note? Where are you?”

Graham felt a flash of uneasiness. This whole conversation had been far too one-sided. “Where are
you?
”

“Right where I’m supposed to be,” the man said. “You, however, seem to be in trouble. How long do you want to continue playing games?”

“This isn’t a game,” Graham said. “This is my life. This is our lives. Why are people trying to kill me?”

“That’s complicated,” the man said.

“I want it to stop,” Graham said. “Can you make it stop?”

The man on the other end paused. “Do you have information for me?”

Warning bell. “What kind of information?” He was hedging, seeing how much the guy on the other end already knew.

“I think you know,” the man said. “How about a string of numbers and letters?”

So he knew.

“What do they mean?” Graham asked.

There was a smile in the man’s voice when he said, “So, you do have them.”

Graham felt a flash of anger. He wasn’t ready to give that away yet.

“Your mother did well. I need you to give me that code.”

“So it
is
a code,” Graham said. It felt like a victory to turn it back on the man. “What’s it for?”

“You don’t want to anger me, young man. Graham, isn’t it?”

Graham didn’t respond.

“You want me as a friend, Graham. More important, you don’t want me as an enemy. Your mother asked you to do her a favor, didn’t she? She asked you to make this phone call. You’ve been a good son. Now why don’t you continue being a good son and tell me that code.”

His mind raced, trying to find a way out. He knew he should just hang up, but he couldn’t make himself do that. He didn’t know why. He understood now what Jolaine had been trying to tell him. This man was not his friend. If anything, he was the enemy.

“I don’t have it anymore,” Graham said. “I lost it.”

The man laughed. “Now you’re lying to me, Graham.”

“No, really, I’m not.” He didn’t like the way this asshole kept using his name. It was creepy. “I had it, but I lost it.”

“Then why are you calling me?”

“To tell you that.” Graham was proud that he manufactured that lie so quickly. “My mom told me to call and she gave me this piece of paper. But in all the stuff that happened last night, I lost the piece of paper.”

“Liars go to hell, Graham. You have what they call a photographic memory. Less than one percent of the population of the world can do what you do. Your mother brags about that a lot.”

A glimmer of hope. “You know my parents?”

“Of course I do. How would I know so much about you if I didn’t know them?”

Now who was lying? It was something in the man’s voice, like he was making fun of him.
Sure, I’ll tell you anything if it’ll get me what I want.

Graham’s eyes shot to the clock radio. How long had he been talking? Was it long enough for them to trace the call?

Goddammit, why hadn’t he looked at the clock before dialing?

Shit!

He dropped the receiver back onto the cradle and brought his hands to the sides of his head. What had he done?

“Shit, shit, shit.” He said it aloud with brittle emphasis. “Ah, shit.” When he brought his hands down they were shaking.

A noise beyond the draped window pulled his attention to the left. The noise sounded like a car, and it sounded very close. Very,
very
close.

Graham jumped to his feet. Christ, how could they be so fast? They must have been waiting for him. His pounding heart was the loudest sound in the room. He glanced down at his chest—past the downy patch of dark hair that had begun to decorate his breastbone—and he could see his flesh pulsating with each stroke.

This was it. He fought the urge to rush to the window and look out, because he knew with certainty that a man with a gun stood on the other side, waiting for him to do that very thing. It would be a man with murder in his eyes, and he’d be committed to inflicting upon Graham the same fate that he’d inflicted on his parents.

God
damn
that Jolaine! Why hadn’t she left him with a gun? Or a knife or a frigging brick—anything that he could use to defend himself? He’d shot a gun before, after all. At Boy Scout camp, he’d shot .22 rifles and he was damn good at it. Why had she taken all the guns with her? Why had she left him defenseless? Even if he didn’t know how to shoot and he totally screwed it up, so what? Dying in a fight beat the shit out of dying with your hands in the air in a crappy motel begging for mercy.

Graham braced for a fight, a physical fight to the death that he knew he was destined to lose. He weighed a hundred thirty-five pounds after a big meal, and he’d never actually been in a fight—not a real one, like the ones on television. He had no idea what he’d do if a guy with a gun actually did kick open the door, but he was for sure going to do
something.

Just please, God, let it be something other than dying a painful death.

The engine shut down. If something was about to happen, it was going to happen soon. And probably fast. In sixty seconds, Graham Mitchell would know if checkout time would see him dead or alive.

As terrifying as that thought was, he found it invigorating.

He braced himself.

Someone knocked on the door.