End Game (16 page)

“Here’s what I need you to do,” Jolaine said, “and listen carefully because we don’t have much time before they’re on us. When they come, do everything they say. Follow every order, and do not resist. They’re probably going to hurt you when they put the handcuffs on, but that will just be to get a rise out of you, an excuse to charge you for resisting. It’s a favorite trick when arresting kids your age. Do not give them the satisfaction. Just let them do what they’re going to do.”

Graham felt his breathing taking off like a steam engine. “But Jolaine—”

“Listen. To. Me. They’re going to ask you questions. I don’t have any idea what they’re going to be, but they’re going to ask them. Don’t lie, but don’t confirm or deny anything. I mean
nothing,
understand?”

Shit no, he didn’t understand. He didn’t have a goddamn clue about a single goddamn thing that was going on.

Jolaine didn’t wait for an answer. “I cannot emphasize that point enough. Everything that has happened since last night—everything at your house, and in the car and in the doctor’s place and at the motel—represents the key to everything.”

“Do they know that I know about the code?”

“I don’t think so,” Jolaine said. “These are local police. I don’t think that local police would know about that. The code would be more of a concern for the feds.”

Graham’s stomach flipped again. “Then it has to be about the shooting in the parking lot.”

“Maybe, maybe not. Say nothing about that.”

“I get it!” Graham shouted. “Don’t say anything about any—”

“We are not telling you again,” the cop boomed over the loudspeaker. “You in the passenger seat. Sit up straight and let me see your hands.”

“Look,” Jolaine said. The rhythm of her words had increased, almost to the point where they were indecipherable, like the guy who reads the disclaimers at the end of car commercials. “There are different groups of information. There’s what the police don’t know, what they do know, what they think they know, and what they want to know. You won’t be able to tell from them which is which. So your best bet is to say nothing.”

He found himself trembling. “Can I tell them my name?”

“Do you have identification on you?”

“No.”

“Then if they don’t have it, I wouldn’t give it to them.”

“So I just sit there and say nothing.”

“If you can get away with it, yes.”

“Isn’t that going to piss them off?”

She nailed him with her eyes. “First, you wanted me to start a high-speed chase, and now you’re worried about pissing them off with silence?”

He started to answer, then stopped. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” he said, and he sat up.

“I assure you that I do not,” Jolaine said.

“Hands in the air!” the cop yelled.

Graham did as he was told, pressing his palms into the roof liner. “What are you going to do about the gun?” he asked.

Her eyes softened. “Not touch it,” she said. “Oddly enough, in this part of the world, having the gun is one element of the law that we haven’t broken.”

Jolaine’s eyes darkened, and he could see that she was focusing on a spot beyond him. “Here they come. Good luck, Graham. Do your best.”

“At what?”

Graham’s peripheral vision caught sight of a uniformed cop just beyond his window, his gun drawn and pointed at Graham’s right ear.

The same voice as before boomed over the loudspeaker, “You are surrounded. We do not want to kill you, but we will not hesitate to do so. Do exactly as we say.”

Graham saw movement on his left now as another uniformed cop revealed himself. This one had a rifle pressed against his shoulder, with the muzzle leveled at Jolaine.

“Driver, do not move!” the voice of God commanded from behind. “Keep your hands where they are.”

Graham’s sense of fairness was offended by the fact that she got to rest her hands on the steering wheel while he had to hold his in the air.

“In the passenger seat, keep your right hand in the air, and reach with your left hand to open the door.”

It took Graham a few seconds to process the stage directions. “Okay,” he said aloud, “I can do this.” Keeping his right hand held aloft, he leaned to the left, across Jolaine, and reached for the driver’s door handle, which was at least five inches beyond his reach.

Jolaine pushed him away. “What are you doing?”

“Freeze!” He heard the command as a unison chorus from three different sides. “Sit up, asshole!” one of them yelled. “Sit up, or I swear to God I’ll shoot you in the head!”

Graham froze. What did they want him to do, freeze or sit up? Why were they yelling in the first place, when he was doing exactly what they’d told him to do?

“Good God, Graham,” Jolaine said.

“What? I’m doing—”

The passenger door opened, and a talon of a hand closed around Graham’s ankle. They pulled him feetfirst across the seat. The effect was to force him to fall back across the gearshift. As he felt himself sliding along on his side, he realized that very soon, his shoulders would be free of any support, and that gravity was quickly destined to become his enemy. He flopped over onto his back, figuring that having the back of his head flop down onto the concrete was a better option than going face-first. He’d spent too many years in braces to smash out all his teeth.

The impact to the back of his head wasn’t as bad as he’d feared, but it was hard enough to ignite stars behind his eyes. On his back now, on the ground—it felt like the street, actually—he held his hands up and splayed his fingers. “Dude, look,” he said. “I’m not fighting.”

“Gun!”

Someone must have seen the pistol on the floor. It was important enough for a kick into Graham’s ribs, propelling the air out of his lungs and launching a lightning bolt of pain from his pelvis to his jaw. He yelled.

“Shut up,” someone said as they rolled him onto his face and pulled his hands behind his back just a few clicks further than his shoulders were designed to accommodate. “You ain’t felt nothing yet.”

Something cold and hard impacted the sweet spot between his thumb and his wrist bone, the nerve that apparently connected his thumbnail to his elbow, because that was the path the lightning bolt took. He heard the ratcheting sound of the handcuffs, and he understood that Jolaine had been right on the money. Then he wondered how she could know such things. Had she been arrested before?

The process of shackling his left hand hurt less than his right, and fifteen seconds later, Graham Mitchell was completely immobilized. Despite his efforts to keep his head arched up away from the black pavement, he was certain that there’d be road rash on his cheeks, chin, and lips.

“On your feet, kid,” someone said, and his arms were pulled tight behind him. The pulling continued until he was leveraged up to his knees. From there, they gave him five seconds or so to find his balance and stand.

On the other side of the car, Jolaine lay pressed face-down over the hood, her arms behind her and cuffed. One of the beefier cops kept her pressed against the metal hood with the pressure of a horseshoe grip around the base of her skull. To his right, at the head of the vehicle, a cop—good God, where did they all come from?—displayed Jolaine’s pistol like a friggin’ Stanley Cup trophy, holding it aloft so that everyone could see it.

Graham heard light applause from somewhere, but he had no idea who it was or where it was coming from. All he knew was they were happy, and he was terrified.

When Jolaine looked up and made eye contact, she was crying.

“S
corpion, Mother Hen.” Venice’s voice in his ear startled him.

“Go ahead.”

“We have a problem,” she said.

“Of course we do,” Jonathan quipped. Murphy—of Murphy’s Law—was a prophet. Whatever could go wrong would in fact go wrong at precisely the worst possible moment. “What is it?”

“I just got a hit on ICIS that Jolaine Cage has been arrested in Lambertville, Michigan.”

Jonathan’s stomach fell. The day had just become vastly more complicated. “What about the boy? About Graham?”

“Also in custody,” Venice said. “He’s at a police station, but that might only be until he can be transferred to a foster home.”

“That
might
be the case, or it
is
the case?”

“As of now, all we know is that he’s in custody at the police station.”

Jonathan was interested in dealing only with facts. Conjecture was the same thing as wild-ass guess, and soothsaying had never been his long suit. “What was the arresting agency?” Jonathan asked.

“Local police. No charges have been filed.”

“Stand by,” Jonathan said. He stepped into the elevator. The corpses would be just as dead three hours from now as they were right now. The arrests, on the other hand, were a dynamic, developing situation that needed immediate attention.

Plus, he could talk on the phone outside the doctor’s house, and avoid the stink.

“I don’t understand,” Jonathan said as he stepped into the foyer. “How can she be arrested but not charged?”

Venice explained, “At least no charge has been entered into the public record. Maybe because it was a federal warrant. Interstate flight to avoid prosecution.”

“Do we know yet what prosecution they’re allegedly avoiding?”

“No.”

Jonathan considered the moving parts. Since he wasn’t a cop, he didn’t have intimate knowledge of the procedures used for taking people into custody, but he knew when something didn’t feel right. In the context of people trying to kill other people, it was a feeling that often spelled tragedy.

“I don’t like this,” Jonathan said. “Download the coordinates of both locations to my GPS. We’re going to—where is it?”

“Lambertville, Michigan,” Venice said. “What are you going to do when you get there?”

“I have no idea,” he confessed. “But being closer is better than being farther away.” He leaned back into the elevator and yelled, “Yo, Big Guy! Finish up. We gotta go.” Back on the air, he said, “When you get the photos Big Guy is sending you, I’ll need you to process them quickly.”

“Is one of them Sarah Mitchell?”

“That’s what the smart money says, but I need you to verify and get the info back to me. And to Kit.”

Venice’s silence reiterated her displeasure at trusting Maryanne. She asked, “When you leave, do you want me to call the police to clean up the bodies?”

“Negative. If we can verify that one of our targets is among the dead, pass that along to Wolverine. She’ll want to use her own cleaners.” Corpses posed a difficult problem in the covert world. You couldn’t just let them fester and rot, but you also didn’t want to get local authorities spun up with a lot of difficult questions. Among the cadre of specialists who took care of things in that world were people who specialized in the removal and disposition of bodies.

“And just so you’re prepared,” Jonathan said, “some kids are involved.”

Anton Datsik stood at the corner of Wisconsin and M Streets in Georgetown and considered his options. A turn to the left would take him uphill toward the residential sections, and a right would take him downhill to the Potomac River. When the light changed, he decided to continue east—straight ahead—past the restaurants and chain stores that had ruined the most prime real estate in Washington, DC. This part of the city had evolved into a college town, pandering to the shallow tastes of trust-fund adolescents. He was old enough to remember the days of the Cellar Door and the Crazy Horse, trendy nightclubs that featured the most cutting-edge performers in an environment that was at once sleazy and trendy. Now, it had all turned to plastic.

His job this afternoon was to remain invisible as the events in Indiana and Ohio played themselves out. Any day that could be spent away from his office in the embassy of the Russian Federation was a good day.

Datsik had always admired the United States and its people. Compulsively friendly, they also seemed willfully naïve, a combination that resolved to charming. Unlike his bosses, he’d never wished them harm, but he was certain that harm was inevitable. Once fierce and self-reliant, they had evolved into a passive culture that valued politeness over victory. Such cultures always collapsed under the oppression of aggressors who valued power over peace.

The light turned, and he headed toward Thirty-first Street, Northwest.

Datsik considered himself a professional—not political—and he believed that it was not possible to be both. Professionals stayed focused on things that were important—what Americans liked to call the Big Picture.

Being of a certain age, Datsik had witnessed personally the speed with which political priorities can change. He’d witnessed the implosion of security services in his Motherland as the Soviet Union collapsed into disarray. He’d watched as the void of leadership seeded the grounds where the
Bratva
and the
Organi-zatsiya
flourished with a brutality that exceeded anything meted out in Russia after the reign of Yuri Andropov.

After Gorbachev and that fat drunk Yeltsin rolled over and gave a big blow job to successive American presidents, these so-called Russian mafia organizations grew fat and powerful skimming their shares off the billions of dollars the United States pumped into the new Russian Federation. Datsik never ceased to be amazed by the naïveté—the intentional myopia, it seemed—of the American public. Surely they did not believe that the great democratic experiment they were able to launch in 1776 was somehow relevant to the modern world.

Those US dollars created monsters of unspeakable cruelty, and those monsters were able to buy and sell politicians like the commodities they were. To do what the oligarchs wanted was to become wealthy beyond imagination. To cross them was to find oneself and one’s extended family tortured to death.

Those had been Datsik’s formative years. He’d been an officer in the KGB for five years when the KGB ceased to exist. He was not senior enough to know how the transition actually happened in the historical sense, but to him, it happened literally overnight. He went home one night as an officer, and then when he reported to work the next morning, he discovered that work no longer existed.

Throughout the former Communist states, every agency that once was responsible for keeping order either disappeared or dissolved into some weak imitation of its former self. For more than a few men and women less fortunate than he, the transition meant death at the hands of the angry mobs who stormed headquarters buildings and dragged the occupants out into the street. He’d witnessed no such violence himself, but he’d heard stories from multiple sources. It was all far too reminiscent of Benito Mussolini.

Being nonpolitical didn’t mean he couldn’t work a roomful of politicians. He sensed early on that those who lost power would soon grow hungry for that power to return, and he aligned himself with as many of them as he could. Hungriest of all, it turned out, were those who were ousted from the security services. Theirs was a special kind of power that was rooted less in money—although there was plenty of that—than it was in information. The kind of information that could make a man or ruin him.

The current leader of the Russian Federation came from that very group, and Datsik was pleased to find himself on the president’s good side when the dust settled and the flow of blood slowed.

The KGB became the FSB, the oligarchs who spouted democratic thoughts were ripped from power and stuffed in prison, and even the organized crime syndicates were finding it easier to operate elsewhere. Like all criminals, they thrived here in the United States and in the United Kingdom, where the fear of offending trumped the strict rule of law.

In the middle of the block that separated Thirtieth Street from Twenty-ninth Street, an overweight couple in their sixties made eye contact with him and the husband pulled a map from his back pocket. “Excuse me,” the man said. “Are you a local?”

Datsik smiled. It was the structure of the question that amused him. He in fact knew this city as well, if not better than, most locals, but the instant he opened his mouth to speak, they would hear the accent, and that might trigger questions he had no desire to discuss.

He said nothing, and kept walking.

Among the problems that remained in his Motherland were the Georgians and the Ukrainians. Among the former Soviet states that sought their independence, the Chechens in particular had focused on brutality as the best means to an end.

The hatred between Chechnya and Russia spanned generations, a mutual loathing so innate that it might have been genetic. Animals that they were, Chechen terrorists didn’t care who died in their attacks that were designed to slaughter by the hundreds or the thousands.

Now those animals were
this close
to having access to nuclear warheads, all because of a scheme devised by academicians in the hierarchy of American security to eliminate terrorists by arming them.

As a professional, it was his job to keep that from happening. And he was getting ever closer to his goal. Two of the Mitchells were dead, and the third would soon be found. Given the resources that Philip Baxter had promised to dedicate to the task, no one could remain invisible for long.

Mitchell.
Did they really think that they could pull off such a quintessentially Middle American name? So desperate were the desires of Daud and Lalita Kadyrov to assimilate into American society that they studied the language and the customs, and, with some help from the United States government, they thought they could just shed the bonds of their past.

With Chechen pigs, that level of change was impossible. Their fellow separatists embedded here in the United States would never have allowed that to happen. Their plan was doomed from the beginning.

And now here was Datsik, cleaning up yet another mess—doing that at which he was best.

When his cell phone rang, he checked the number, and he knew that the final stage had begun. “Yes?” he said.

A female voice said, “I’m afraid there’s been a major complication.” She didn’t bother to identify herself because that would have been a waste of time for everyone. “It seems that our enemies got to the targets first.”

Datsik spat out a curse. “You told me that you didn’t know where they were. You told me that no one knew where they were because they were impossible to find.” This was devastating news.

“It’s not as bad as it might have been,” she said. “There was a gun battle, but the Mitchell boy seems to have gotten away.”

This made no sense to Datsik. “A gun battle? How is that possible? The pigs want the boy alive. He’s useless to them dead.”

“I can only assume that it was a kidnap attempt,” the woman said. “No other motivation would make sense.”

“How big a team did they send? And what kind of amateurs could lose—”

“Datsik, I keep telling you not to underestimate the abilities of Jolaine Cage. You insist on referring to her as a maid or as a nanny, and I’ve told you from the very beginning that that was a mistake. Now you understand why.”

Though anger boiled in his gut, Datsik nonetheless felt admiration for the young lady he’d never met but about whom he’d heard so much. The Chechens fielded professionals for missions such as this. He could only imagine that they, too, had underestimated their opponent. “What was the damage done to the assault team?”

“Six dead. I don’t know if any got away.”

“And how were they able to find them when you and the entire United States government could not?”

“What’s done is done,” she said. “What difference does that make now?”

“It makes a great deal of difference,” Datsik said. “It comes down to an issue of competence, doesn’t it? An issue of trust. Wasn’t
trust
what this was all about in the first place? Isn’t that what you told us?”

“I don’t know what went wrong,” the woman said. “I think it’s clear that the Chechens had access to information that we did not.”

“I think more than that is clear,” Datsik said. “I think that you must find a way to become more intelligent, and that that needs to happen quickly. I have people working on this as well, you know. If we find the boy first, there will be no need for you. As we have discussed before, you do not want to become irrelevant. Irrelevance shortens lives.”

He clicked off without waiting for a reply. In situations like this, it was always best to keep the other party on edge. People achieved remarkable feats when they understood that the alternative was death.

He’d spoken too long as it was. Whenever on a cell phone or on any broadcast device, he made it a point to speak in single syllables whenever possible, and always as short a time as possible. While his phone was untraceable, he had no doubt that the American security services were listening in, cued by a voiceprint that was buried in the database.

He needed that boy, and he preferred to have him alive. It was troubling that young Graham knew what he knew, but that was a problem to be solved with a single bullet. More troubling was the fact
that
he knew anything in the first place. Datsik and his superiors needed to understand the flow of that information. They needed to know at least as much as the Americans knew, and that could take time. Taking custody of the boy would cure the problem of the codes—if, in fact, he even had them, as Datsik’s sources had alleged—but extracting additional information could take both time and patience. And quite a lot of discomfort.

Datsik wished that he disliked such things, but the truth was quite the opposite. One could not excel in a skill if one did not enjoy the practice of it. He found hurting children to be distasteful, but sometimes it had to be done.