The End Game (34 page)

SATURDAY

59

NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, Manhattan

Gordon Roos.

My nemesis was called Gordon Roos.

It didn’t even end up costing me any money. The anonymous informant on the other end of Gigi’s fiber-optic Internet link only seemed too happy to rat him out without bothering with the ten thousand dollars we’d offered. This guy just said he owed Roos some payback without specifying what it concerned, and said that if fingering him caused Roos grief, that was reward enough. He told us where we were likely to find him, then he disappeared. Given the way Erebus was set up, if he didn’t want to us to be able to contact him or trace him, we wouldn’t be able to. He’d popped up, given us his good cheer, and sunk back into the murky bowels of Daland’s creation.

Kurt and Gigi had run a check on his name, of course, to see if it was genuine. They had to dig a bit deeper than they would have with your average Joe, but they tracked him down to a house in Ocracoke, North Carolina through, of all things, a pilot’s license. They didn’t turn up the cabin up in the Blue Mountains that our mystery informant had told us about, but that didn’t surprise me. It probably wasn’t registered in his name. Which made perfect sense—given what they intended to use it for.

I looked around the hospital room at my assembled avengers and I’ve got to say that we didn’t exactly look invincible. There was me, just barely back from the dead, still with a couple of IV lines pumping magic potions into my veins and monitors giving out reassuring little beeps that I was still alive. Kurt, who looked like he’d sprinted into a brick wall, what with the broken nose in splints and the black eyes. Although the splints and the strips across his brow and over his upper lip did have something vaguely superhero-esque about them and he did wield some potent superpowers at his computer, he was far from a lethal weapon out in the field, which is what this was going to turn into to, without a doubt. Gigi, also damaged and still nursing the aftershocks of a concussion and a noticeable bulge on her skull. Deutsch was intact—so far. I was determined to keep it that way.

Deutsch said, “It’s a trap.”

The light outside was fading fast, courtesy of us being just two days away from the winter solstice, and the encroaching darkness was mirroring the somber mood on her face.

“Of course it’s a trap,” I said. “That’s what I was hoping for.”

“You were hoping for a trap?” Kurt asked, his emotive range limited by the gauze socks stuffed up his nostrils.

“They’re watching,” I told him. “They’re watching everything. Even Erebus. Especially Erebus. This was bound to generate a rise in them. It had to. It was always going to be more likely than getting a shout from someone real who knows them.”

Kurt, despite his cloaked face, still managed to convey deep concern. “So . . . you’re not going to go, obviously?”

I looked at him like he was speaking Urdu.

“You’re going to go?” he asked, incredulous.

“There’s a difference between going in blind and going in prepared,” I told him. “I don’t intend to go in blind.”

“But surely you don’t need to.” He swung his look over at Deutsch. “Why don’t you call it in and get a SWAT team up there and arrest the guy? You’re FBI. You know what’s going on. You know the whole story. You’re a witness to all this. That’s got to count for something, doesn’t it?”

“Calm down, Snake” Gigi said. “She may know the whole story, but it doesn’t mean it counts for squat in terms of evidence. Which, from what I gather, is nonexistent,” she said, turning to Deutsch.

“Correct,” Deutsch said. “All they have right now is Reilly,” she told Kurt, “wanted for murder, with a lot of evidence to support that.”

“Everything else, everything about Roos,” I added, “it’s just a story, a fairy tale—my overactive imagination. Any court-appointed defense attorney with a mail-order law degree would walk all over it in the opening seconds of a preliminary hearing, assuming we ever got that far. Assuming they let any of us live that long.”

“So you’re going to go after him,” Kurt said. “In your current condition. Knowing it’s a trap.”

“Like I said. I don’t plan on going in blind.” I looked over at Deutsch. “And I think we have a couple of surprises we can use to our advantage.”

“You’re nuts,” Kurt protested. He flicked an outraged glance at Deutsch. “He’s nuts, right? And you’re OK with that? You need to do something.” He turned back to me, gesticulating wildly now. “I mean, look at you. You just had a heart attack, for Christ’s sake.”

“‘Sudden cardiac arrest,’” I corrected him with a half-smile. I straightened up. “Look. I didn’t start this. Hell, I didn’t even know I had a son until they came after him and maybe, in some perverse sense I can actually be grateful for that. But I’m not. He was living happily with his mom and they took that away from him. Then they killed a lot of people, ending with my own partner. So I don’t care if Annie here said she had enough evidence to bring Roos in. We’re past that. Besides, even if we had a halfway decent case, there’s no jail that’s going to hold these people. They’re connected enough to make some kind of deal or get some kind of pressure applied and they’ll be back out there in no time, with us all in their crosshairs. Which I’m not comfortable with. No, there’s only one way this is ending, and that’s with me making sure they get what they deserve and they don’t live to bother any of us or anyone else for that matter, any more.”

I glanced around the room.

Deutsch’s expression was focused and grim. She held my gaze and looked like she was about to say something, then seemed to decide against it and just gave me a slight, reluctant nod. Kurt and Gigi didn’t have anything to add either. They just looked at me with settled eyes and even expressions that told me they understood what I had to do. It also told me they were prepared to do what they could to help me.

I pulled the sensors off my chest. The monitors started beeping. Then I reached over to the IV bags, and slipped them off their stand. “Let’s go.”

I swung my feet off the bed and pushed myself to my feet. I felt dizzy—I’d been laid out for more than two days. I steadied myself against the bedside table, shut my eyes, and sucked in a few deep gulps of air. I let it go deep into my chest, and again, several big lungfuls, enjoying the sensation despite the tingling around my rib cage. Then I opened my eyes and padded over to the electrical socket and unplugged the monitor just as the nurse came rushing in.

“What are you doing?” she asked, her shocked eyes like saucers.

“National Security,” I told her, using Deutsch’s new favorite catch-all, get-out-of-jail-free card. I gave the nurse a dead serious look to make sure it sunk in, then I gestured at the IV bags that I was now holding. “I’ll keep these in as long as I can, but I’ll need whatever else you can give me as pills or injections to keep me going. Enough for forty-eight hours, tops. Then I’ll be back here and I’ll stay as long as you need me to. Deal?”

60

Nelson County, Virginia

Almost four hundred miles southwest of the hospital the Cessna Skyhawk broke through the low cloud cover and banked left as it positioned itself for a landing.

There was no tower here at Oakridge Field Airport. In fact, there was no airport either. It was just a privately owned tract of farmland on which an eighteen-hundred-foot landing strip had been fashioned out of the flat turf, and nothing else. To get to his hunting cabin, Roos normally flew in and out of the Eagle’s Nest Airport in Waynesboro, which was fifteen miles south of there. That was more of an actual airport than Oakridge, with an asphalt runway—cracked, but still more of a runway than the trail he was about to land on. It was also just as near, by road, as Oakridge was to the remote corner of mountain that was home to Roos’s retreat. Eagle’s Nest had no tower either, of course, but at least it offered hangars and tie-downs if the weather turned nasty. It also had a wind indicator, which would have been useful at Oakridge, given the crosswind that was currently buffeting the small prop plane. For today’s purposes though, Roos preferred a more discreet arrival. He knew the owner of the Oakridge strip and had called him to make the arrangements. He knew no other aircraft would be there and knew the man was solid enough to keep Roos’s being there that day a secret. If all went well, he’d soon be flying out of there without incident very soon, in time to settle back in and enjoy a quiet Christmas Day’s fishing out in the Gulf Stream.

If all went well.

As he approached the strip, he could feel the crosswind coming from the northwest and he scanned the ground to look for clues that would tell him if the wind direction on the ground was the same as it was up there. He spotted a thicket of trees swaying under the wind’s influence and quickly compared it to what the dial on his instrument panel was showing. They were more or less similar.

He drew on his considerable experience to maintain his wings level while keeping the plane’s nose facing the wind at a skewed angle to the runway’s centerline. It was disconcerting to watch—an aircraft crabbing its way down to a runway with its nose pointed off to one side, almost like it was flying sideways. The runway, he could see, looked like it was mostly clear of snow. The field’s owner had cleared enough of it to allow him to land. It looked like someone had run a razor down the white field that surrounded it.

Just before the flare, Roos applied opposite rudder to correct the crab while using opposite ailerons to keep the wings level. The plane aligned itself just as its wheels touched down with a barely audible squeal.

He taxied to a stop by the old farming warehouse where three black SUVs and eleven hard men were waiting for him. He killed the aircraft’s single engine and, without more than a nod, he got out, walked over, and climbed into the back of one of the cars.

If all went well he’d soon be driven back to his Cessna with one less major worry on his mind. He’d greet the New Year in a state of calm, his mind free to focus on new opportunities.

If all went well.

Which, given that it concerned Reilly, was—Roos knew—not at all a given.

SUNDAY

61

New York City

We had shopping to do.

Some of it was Kurt and Gigi’s doing. They had some ideas—good ideas, ones that would help us. They went out to stock up, mainly at the B&H Superstore by Penn Station, and came back to Deutsch’s place with a couple of large bags. Given what I knew about them in terms of their love of tech toys I was surprised they didn’t bring back a GoPro and a selfie stick. But what they did bring back would come in handy, no doubt. We needed all the help we could get.

Deutsch, on the other hand, went to a different kind of superstore: the armory at Federal Plaza. She finessed her way into signing out a small arsenal for me, which was now stored in the trunk of her car. When she got back I followed her down to the parking garage of her building to check out her haul, and that’s when I noticed the problem.

She’d managed to bring all the items we’d talked about: helmet, vest, gloves, night vision goggles, stun grenades, M4 carbine with suppressor, CCO optical gunsight, Springfield .45, extra mags for both weapons, spike strip, Smith & Wesson folding knife, comms package. Everything, in fact, short of an MRAP truck—a heavy armored Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle, which would have been ideal, given what I imagined I’d be facing—though it might have raised eyebrows if she’d requisitioned one.

What she’d chosen wasn’t a problem.

The problem was that she’d brought two of each.

Standing there in the garage, I turned to her quizzically a second after she’d popped the trunk.

She cut me off before I spoke. “I’m going in with you.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Sean. I’m coming.”

I felt my insides contract. “Annie. I’ve had enough people around me die because of these pricks. I’m not letting that happen again. It’s not your fight.”

She didn’t flinch. “It is.”

“Annie, this isn’t Bureau business anymore—”

“Screw the Bureau, Sean. This is about me. And you. And Nick.”

She held my gaze, and for a second there, my eyes scoured her face for a better understanding of what she meant—then it sank in. Nick’s Tinder booty call had been nothing of the kind.

“You . . . and Nick?”

She didn’t react for a breath, then she nodded.

“The night I ended up at his place, after the shooting,” I asked. “He was with you?”

She nodded again. “He was going to spend the night, but he’d messed up his shirt with some pasta sauce and, well, you know how the guys at Twenty-six Fed can be total dicks.”

I pictured him walking in, his surprise at seeing me that night. “So you and—”

“Two months,” she said, anticipating my read, given Nick’s dating history. “We’d been seeing each other for two months. No one knew. Once we both got comfortable with what we were doing, with being together, he said he was going to tell you. I guess he never got the chance.”

All I could say was, “I wish he had.” I flashed back to Nick and I outside Daland’s house, all those long nights, and how he hadn’t spent those hours swiping through his Tinder, and I felt bad that I’d missed it, that I hadn’t realized he and Annie had a thing going and that we hadn’t had a chance to talk about it.

“It doesn’t matter, Annie. I can’t have you do this.”

“And I can’t have you do it alone. It’s that simple, Sean. It really is.”

We just stood there for a moment, in the dim light of the garage, face to face, a trunk-load of SWAT weaponry at our disposal.

I couldn’t object. I had no right to object.

She was in.

I waited till we were all set to go, then I called Tess using the safe Viber protocol. It was killing me not to have her here, not to be able to see her and hold her tight against me and kiss her before setting off, knowing the dangers ahead, what we were going up against—but it was better this way. It would have been hugely tough on us both to say goodbye face to face and it was still too risky to have her come down here again, for both of us. It was also better to keep her at a distance from it all, knowing she’d have serious objections over what my makeshift crew and me were about to do. Which, sure enough, didn’t take long to materialize once I had her on the line.

“Sean, you know who these people are,” she said, her exasperation growing with every word since the beginning of the call. “You know what they’re capable of, you know what resources they have to draw on. This is nuts.”

“Tess, please. Like I said—”

“Just take a night to sleep on it,” she interjected forcefully, “to think it all through again. Maybe you’ll see something you missed.”

“We’ve been over it, Tess. I know what I’m doing. And this is the way it has to be.”

“It’s a trap, you said so yourself.”

“Yes. A trap
we
instigated. They’re playing into our hands, Tess. We’ve got to strike before they have too much time to think things through.”

She went quiet for a moment, just a long, leaden exhale. I could just picture the way her face would be all crunched up with frustration, the way her eyes would be set, all fierce and fired up.

“I won’t be able to talk to you until it’s done,” I added, breaking the heavy silence.

“I know,” she said, subdued now.

“It’s going to be fine. I know what I’m doing, Tess.”

“I damn well hope so.”

We’d said all that needed to be said. It was time to go.

“I love you,” I said.

“I damn well hope so too,” she said, her tone cracking a bit.

“Give the kids a kiss from me. And I’ll see you . . . soon.”

“OK.”

Then I hung up.

We drove out of New York City that evening after putting the finishing touches to the plan of action I had proposed while cleaning out some takeaway Chinese at Deutsch’s place.

Four of us, in Deutsch’s Crown Vic: me, her, Kurt and Gigi. Our minds were all busy playing out what we imagined the next day would bring. We’d already gone over what we were about to do several times and the fact that, during the whole drive down, the only time one of us spoke up was to question some aspect of our plan aloud just showed how it was all any of us was thinking about.

The traffic was fluid heading out of the city on a Sunday night, and with no major roadworks to impede our progress and the snow not strong enough to cause problems, we passed the signs to Philadelphia around two hours later and skirted Baltimore an hour after that. An hour more, and we were checking into a Marriott at Tysons Corner, west of Washington DC and almost exactly halfway between Vienna, Virginia and the CIA’s headquarters at Langley. Two rooms, one for Deutsch and me, the other for Kurt and Gigi.

We all needed a good night’s rest, although I wasn’t sure we’d be sleeping sound.

We had an early start tomorrow if we were going to catch the first of our worms.