The End Game (14 page)

21

I felt like every muscle in my body was trying to rip its way out through my skin.

A raging, boiling centrifuge of blistering anger, bottomless grief and creeping dread had me unable to form a coherent thought beyond that brutal, soul-crushing realization, much less decide what to do next.

The doors slid open and Lendowski came in with a coffee and a sandwich.

“Gallo told me to bring you this,” he said. Because, of course, he’d never have done it without clear instruction from a superior. Like I didn’t know that.

He placed the coffee mug and sandwich down on the table.

I asked, “Any news on Nick?”

I could see him adjusting his attitude—partners were sacred, even if you had good reason to hate one half of said partnership. Plus he and Nick were gym buddies.

“Were”—not “are.”

Surreal.

“Still waiting on the postmortem,” he said, “but it sounds like he had a heart attack.”

I pulled the coffee toward me, tore off the lid and took a gulp, the burning sensation at the back of my throat dulling the deeper, more intractable pain, which had needle-sharp tentacles smothering every nerve ending.

I took another sip, fuming at the idea of his pointless death.

“He treats his body like a dumpster all these years, then, what, six months into this new gym routine and being more careful with his food, this happens?”

Lendowski shrugged. “When your time’s up, it’s up, right?”

I shook my head in disbelief. I’d heard about guys dropping dead after over-exerting themselves after years of doing nothing and it had always struck me as somewhat absurdly ironic. This was beyond absurd—it was just cruel.

Lendowski scratched his head. “You knew him much better than I did, but like you said, all that junk food, zero exercise and chasing tail, not to mention a high-stress job and a dick for a partner . . . It’ll catch up to you.”

He couldn’t resist the dig, and he smiled as he said it, unwilling to fight over Aparo’s corpse.

I wasn’t willing to do that either. “Not now, Len. All right?”

He seemed taken aback, then just said, “Sure.”

He turned to go, then turned back. “He was a good agent. The Bureau was built on guys like him.”

I nodded. “Yep.”

“There but for the grace of God, you know what I’m saying?”

I just shrugged and Lendowski keyed in the code and left the room.

I was hungry, not having eaten since the train ride down to DC, which was—how many hours ago? I’d lost track. Still, I couldn’t face that sandwich. Nick and I had been partners for more than ten years. Apart from all the life-and-death situations we’d been in, the times we’d saved each other’s lives, I’d also lived through some great times with him, lots of laughs, lots of long late-night chats, as well as suffering with him through his personal hardships—the problems in his marriage, the women, the divorce . . . and now it was all over, just like that. A friend, a partner, a vibrant man with a hearty appetite for life, a father, an eleven-year-old son’s dad, gone in the blink of an eye. Snuffed out.

Hard to accept.

I know, we’re all heading that way. The only question is when. I thought of Nick’s son, Lorenzo. Eleven years old. A year older than I was when my dad died. I knew what he’d be going through. I’d need to try to be there for him, when—if—I ever managed to get my life back on track. Lisa, his ex-wife, would need our help too. Despite everything, they’d still spent fifteen years together, twelve as husband and wife, eleven as parents, and that doesn’t go away, not unless there was a major hurt involved, and there wasn’t. She’d be hurting now, I was sure. It just made me angrier that I was in here, not there, with them, helping them through this.

Selfishly perhaps, it also made me think about Tess again. About our life together. About Alex and Kim. About whether or not I was really living the life I wanted.

The twister spinning inside me was throwing out all kinds of wild thoughts. What I couldn’t still get my head around was the timing of the shooter appearing in Arlington, as in: why kill me now? That had been their plan after all. Kirby was just collateral damage—fortunate collateral damage, at that. I mean, I’d been chasing after Corrigan for months, so why had it taken him this long to deal with me? Kurt and I had been treading water. No, something else must have forced Corrigan’s hand, and if that thing was mission critical enough to decide to send me to an early grave, it was unlikely anything would be allowed to screw with the plan—meaning they still needed me dead.

Even with Corrigan’s reach, his design was beyond the resource of one man. He had to have help beyond feet on the ground, someone inside the CIA. The question was, how many of them was I up against?

When it came to colleagues, the preference among spooks seemed to be either long-term allegiances or selling them out for short-term advantage, with nothing much in between. Corrigan’s inside man at the CIA could even be “Frank Fullerton,” his partner back in the day, according to the files Kirby had given me—or whatever his name really is. Kurt and I had got nowhere with Fullerton either. Maybe it was worth putting Gigi on his trail.

And then, something that had tugged at the back of my head since Deutsch had handed me her cell almost an hour earlier, started to crystallize more fully.

My “Deep Throat” not showing up at Times Square. The bearded man at Kirby’s. The CIA at Defcon One over an analyst, meaning they knew he leaked the files. And yet they’d waited until now to do something about it. What had changed?

The call from my “Deep Throat.”

That had to be what had them spooked. But he hadn’t yet given me anything.

Maybe they thought he had.

And then Nick dies. Just after he swore he was going to leave no stone unturned and push the Bureau into doing everything it can to help me. This made him more dangerous to them than I was, and two questions were clawing at me: one, could Corrigan have known just how dedicated Nick now was—I closed my eyes,
had been
—to tracking him down, and two, could they have killed him?

Impossible.

But the coincidence in the timing was hard to ignore.

I mean, if they’d poisoned him somehow, it would show up in the postmortem. But if they did, if they could kill Nick that easily, what was to stop them killing me where I sat? Especially without having him to look out for me?

I stared at the coffee, then at the sandwich, and decided to leave them where they sat.

I had to get out of here.

Deutsch could see the accident scene up ahead.

The whole southbound freeway was closed and would be for at least another hour. Surprisingly, it seemed that Aparo was the only fatality, though she’d heard that occupants of a few of the other vehicles involved had suffered some superficial injuries and one broken leg.

She left her car at the cordon, flashed her badge and hurried toward a cluster of smashed-up vehicles, Highway Patrol cars and ambulances, one of which headed off noisily as she approached, ferrying more injured to the ER at White Plains Hospital.

A striking woman with curly blond hair was sitting on the tailgate of a Westchester EMS ambulance, an ice pack against her head. An EMT had just finished checking her over and a state trooper stood a few feet away, talking into his radio. It looked like he was waiting to take the woman’s statement.

From the author photographs on the dust jackets of her books, Deutsch knew this was Tess Chaykin—and she could see why Reilly had fallen for her. Even after living through the past couple of hours, there was a poise and self-possession about her that seemed almost otherworldly. A poise she needed to regain herself.

She showed her badge to the state trooper. “Give me a couple minutes, will you?” The trooper nodded, and Deutsch walked over to the woman. “Miss Chaykin?

Tess looked up, and Deutsch immediately noticed her warm green eyes. She pictured her and Reilly and felt a quiver of jealousy, then chastised herself as she remembered that the woman’s partner was languishing in a holding cell and suspected of murder.

“Tess,” the woman replied.

Deutsch held out her hand.

“I’m Annie Deutsch. We talked on the phone.”

Tess shook her hand. “You’re the agent with the jackass for a partner, right? At a bar the other night.”

Deutsch found the stirring of a smile. “Yes. Reilly was very . . . chivalrous. How’s your head?”

“Sore, but the EMT says it’s not a concussion.”

“That’s something.”

An uncomfortable silence settled over them for a moment, then Deutsch asked, “Where have they taken Nick?”

“He’s on his way to White Plains,” Tess told her.

Deutsch nodded, staring into the distance, following the ambulance’s ghostly wake. “They’ll need to do a postmortem.”

Tess looked crushed, the finality of Aparo’s death clearly still hitting her hard.

Deutsch asked, “What happened?”

“I don’t know. One second he was fine, then he just . . . went.” She paused, then said, “I need to see Sean.”

“I’m here to drive you back, but before we go,” Deutsch said as she gestured at the waiting patrolman, “they need you to give a statement.”

Tess nodded, then repositioned the ice pack on her head. “I’ll make it quick.”

It wasn’t the best plan I’d ever come up with, or the safest.

In fact, it was definitively one of the craziest, borderline demented ideas I’d ever thought up.

Right now, I had nothing else.

So I took a deep breath and called out for Gallo.

Two minutes later, a junior agent who’s name I couldn’t remember brought me a phone and sat across the table from me to wait till I was done.

I called Tess’s cell. She answered immediately.

“Sean?”

“Are you OK?”

“I’m fine. Sean . . . God, it was horrible. I can’t believe he’s—” I heard the dam burst and she started to sob.

I let her feel it for a few seconds.

“Tess, I’ll see you soon. Annie’s going to bring you over. OK?”

“Lisa . . .’ she said, referring to Nick’s ex-wife. “Someone needs to tell her. And Lorenzo . . . my God.”

“I’ll take care of it,” I told her. “I’ll call her. You’ve been through enough for now.”

“OK,” she said, her breath catching.

I gave her a moment to regroup. I needed her to get what I was going to say.

“It’s all just,” I finally said, “crazy. It’s like the stars are aligned against me lately. Like what you were saying, the other night. About karma and our past lives. Remember?”

I heard Tess hesitate and was silently willing her to get it—given that we hadn’t talked about anything like that anytime recently.

Please, Tess. Focus. Be my wingman on this.

“Of course I do,” she said.

Good girl. Great girl.

“Maybe I did something in the past that I’m paying for now. I mean, how else can you explain all the crap that’s been happening to us?” I paused, more to add a bit of drama for the junior agent’s benefit than out of need. “I wish I could go back and find out. You know what I’m saying?”

It took her a couple of seconds, then she said, “You think that would be useful?”

She was reading me.

“I think it would. Big time.” I thought I’d add an extra hint, just to make sure. “It’s like what Nick always used to say—”

I heard the confusion in her tone. “What?”

Almost imperceptibly, I slowed my words, subtly altering my tone—not so the junior agent could notice any change, but enough that someone I’d spent thousands of hours with would notice.

“He used to say: ‘Close, but
no cigar
.’ Well, that’s me right now. No cigar. And with Nick gone, I need every
grain
of help I can get . . .” I slipped straight back to normal speed and tone. “I need that cigar, Tess. Doesn’t have to be a whole cigar—just a couple of puffs, to give me hope.” I paused. “You understand what I’m saying, right?”

I could hear the cogs in her brain engaging, spinning around and clicking into place.

“You know where that expression comes from, don’t you?” she said, her voice shaky. I knew this was all for Deutsch’s benefit, because Tess was now—I hoped—covering for the fact that she knew exactly what I was trying to tell her. “They used to hand out cigars as prizes at fairgrounds. Back when the games of strength were for grown-ups. So when you slammed the giant hammer down on the metal plate and the bell didn’t ring, the guy would say ‘Close, but no cigar!’”

“You should put that in your next book.”

“Maybe . . . OK, I’ll see you shortly—I just need to go back to the house first. I . . .” her voice softened and got a bit muffled, as if her mouth was closer to the phone now. “I need to change. I kind of messed myself up during the whole thing. Do you mind if Annie drives me home first?”

I felt a small twinge of relief as I pictured her saying that while looking at Deutsch, who’d be nodding sympathetically.