The End Game (38 page)

68

I was tired. Exhausted, actually.

My body was starting to flag. I hadn’t been too kind to it lately. It had been a pretty intense couple of weeks that had included hours when I was technically dead. But I couldn’t give up now.

I kept advancing, my legs moving on their own, carrying up farther and farther into the mountain, trying to avoid a fall or even a slip. Up here, right now, a damaged ankle or a busted knee would be fatal. And there’d be no Frankenstein machine to bring me back this time.

I heard the air move above me and glanced up to see a turkey vulture glide by. It banked, made a full circle over me, then with a flick of his wings, it was gone again, disappearing into the white mist. I wondered if that was a good omen. It had to be—for one of us, anyway.

There were more than a few blowdowns up here, maybe casualties from some recent hurricane. I either climbed over them or made my way around them, long bare trunks that were just making my advance more difficult.

And then I heard her, a call that echoed through the trees.

“Reilly! Reilly?”

It was Deutsch.

I almost shouted back, then I held back.

He had her.

Shit.

What was she doing up here?

I gritted my teeth to swallow my anger, then I summoned up more resolve and increased my pace, heading in the direction I thought her shout came from.

She hadn’t sounded too far—a hundred, hundred and fifty yards, tops, I figured. I was moving faster now, breathing hard, eyes focused intently ahead of me, acutely aware of a potential ambush.

“Reilly!”

Her voice rang out again, acting like a compass heading.

I kept going, my fingers tighter against the carbine. And after a long climb that left me almost breathless, something appeared out of the haze that was shrouding the mountain, something foreign to this desolate landscape.

It was Deutsch, standing in front of a large rock outcropping at the top of the ridge. Only she wasn’t alone. A figure was standing behind her, and he was holding a handgun to her head.

Roos.

I slowed my pace, swung my gun slowly so is was pointed in their direction, and kept moving until I was about ten yards away from them.

There he was. Gordon Roos. After all these months—after all these deaths, I was finally face to face with him.

I have to say, in the flesh, he was a disappointment. Mid fifties, give or take, I imagined, although he had to be older. Lean, short cropped hair, focused gaze. Seemed in pretty good shape. Nothing noteworthy, nothing particularly vile or evil in his features. No glass eye, no scarred face, no deformed fingers. My nemesis looked disconcertingly normal, and his face was very similar to the one in the drawing Leo and Daphne had sent me. They had really done a phenomenal job.

“Nice to put a face to the voice,” I said, trying to play down the fact that Deutsch and I were truly and genuinely screwed.

“I figured it was about time we met,” Roos said. “You’ve put enough time and effort into it.”

I wasn’t in the mood for games. “Let her go,” I said. “This is between you and me.”

“You’re such a Boy Scout, you know that? Like you just walked out of a Norman Rockwell painting or something. ‘This is between you and me?’ Seriously? Come on … What are you—Shane? When did that ever work in the real world? You think I’m going to roll around in the snow with you when I can just shoot you? Christ, I could have picked you off minutes ago, while you were still coming up here. But I wanted to see the look in your eyes when you realized you were screwed. When you realized you and this little bitch of yours were both screwed. That look on your face right now? That’ll keep me company for years to come. It’s moments like these . . . when they come around, you’ve got to grab them. They’re life’s fuel.”

And just like that, he calmly, matter-of-factly, raised his gun at me from behind Deutsch. I thought of shooting first, swinging my gun up quickly as I dived off to one side, but there was no way I was getting a clean shot off at him, not with Deutsch there in the way, not on the move and given how weary I was and how my hands were shaking.

Still, I couldn’t just stand there, and in that instant of deciding whether to duck left or right or charge ahead, something rushed down out of nowhere, a buzzing white flash that came out of the sky and smashed itself against the large boulders right next to them. Roos wasn’t expecting it—none of us were. But the split second of distraction from Kurt’s kamikaze drone was all we needed.

Just as Roos flinched sideways with surprise, Deutsch moved, fast as lightning, grabbing his gun hand with both hands and yanking him forward, almost over her shoulders, causing him to spin and topple over and slam into the ground. I was already charging at them and I covered the ground between us in a heartbeat and got there as Deutsch was wrangling the gun out of his hand. I dove in, hammering his face with a massive downward punch that just planted him in place and loosened his hold on the gun. I gave him another—unnecessary, but what the hell?—then Deutsch and I stepped back and took in our captured prey.

Gordon Roos was finally mine.

Now I had to decide what to do with him.

69

We marched Roos down the mountain.

He tried talking a couple of times, but I shut him down, first with a couple of words, then with another punch. I wasn’t ready to listen to him. I was still gathering up my thoughts and playing things out in my head.

We kept going until we got to a small clearing that was dotted with ghostly birch trees, within sight of the cabin. More snow had settled up here—two, maybe three inches. I knew the temperature was still hovering just below zero, but there was a mild wind blowing, which was what I needed.

I told Roos to sit down by the base of one of the trees. He did as told. I walked over and cuffed his hands around it.

I stepped back and turned to Deutsch. “Is the Crown Vic down there?”

She nodded. “Yes.”

“And the jerrycan? Still in the trunk?”

“Yep.”

“You’re wasting your time,” Roos called out. “I’m not telling you anything.”

I walked over to him. “I’d bet otherwise.”

“Fuck you,” he said. “You’re going to kill me anyway. At least this way I’ll enjoy knowing you’ll never clear your name and you’ll never know the full story about your dad.”

“We’ll see.” I turned to Deutsch. “If he makes trouble—try not to kill him.”

“I can’t promise.”

I left them and made my way to the cabin. The place looked like a war zone. The charred cabin, Tomblin’s shot-up Navigator, his mangled body still inside it. It looked, and smelled, like death.

I popped the trunk on the Crown Vic, got what I needed, then headed back up to the clearing.

Roos was still where I’d left him. He was fixing me with a long scowl, his defiant attitude coming through loud and clear. The bastard was solid through and through, no question. Still, you didn’t need to be the Amazing Kreskin to know what he was thinking. A desolate place where no one would hear you, a guy hell-bent on revenge. If he had any sense, some very uncomfortable images had to be spooling through his mind right now. Especially since my left hand was holding a five-gallon jerrycan.

I set it down and stepped across to him. Then, without saying a word, I bent down and yanked his shoes off his feet.

He started kicking around. “Hey, what the—”

I punched him hard to calm him down. “Shut up!”

Then I got back to it. I pulled his socks off, undid his belt, and yanked his pants and his shorts off too, in one go. Then I pulled out the tactical knife and held it in front of me for a couple of seconds, visibly fuelling more uncertainty in Roos. His eyes were just locked on the drop point blade, his forehead now bursting with sweat beads despite the bitter cold.

“I was in California last summer,” I told him. “An ex-girlfriend of mine called me up, asking for help. She was ex-DEA. Some guys were after her. When I got there, I found out I had a kid. A four-year-old boy. Turned out they were really after him, and she died trying to keep him safe.” I jabbed the blade in his direction. “She died in my arms. Because of you.”

“I wasn’t part of that—”

I held up the knife to silence him. He piped down.

“I know. It wasn’t your deal. But it wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t stepped in to make it happen. To do what you and your people—my money’s on Orford—did to my boy.”

I studied him for a moment, then I continued. “Still . . . the guy you were all after? Maybe you know this, maybe you don’t. He thought these bikers were dicking him around, so he came after them with his men. Shot them all up. All except their leader. What he did to get the truth out of him . . . I was there and I saw the result. It wasn’t pretty. He started with the fingers. After two of them, he got bored. So he moved on to somewhere different. The coroner said he bled out, and let me tell you, when you bleed out from that spot? Not the best way to go. But at least the cut was clean. One go. He had the benefit of using garden shears.”

I let that simmer for a moment while I tapped the blade on my open palm, then I added, “I don’t have any garden shears. But I have this.” I held up the knife. “It’ll have to do.”

I stopped talking for a moment, just staring him down, giving his imagination time to generate all kinds of horrific visions. Then, with Deutsch standing guard and aiming her M4 at him, I stepped forward.

He flinched and kicked back, like he thought I was going for it. I wasn’t. Instead, I used the knife to cut through his sleeves and the back of his jacket and a minute later he was totally naked.

In the snow.

With a light wind blowing.

I don’t care how fit he was. He was shivering now. Probably from a combination of cold and fear.

I moved back to join Deutsch.

“What?” he asked her, a disturbing leer on his face. “You see something you like?”

She ignored it as I glanced up at the sky, looked around the trees—then set my gaze back on him.

“I want to know
everything
. I want to know
who
the Janitors were.
What
they were. What they did. I know about Padley, Orford, and Siddle. I want to know about the others. I want to know what your role was in it, what Tomblin’s role was. I want to know who else knew about it. I want to know who you killed and who you had killed. I want to know who the guy was that you sent after me, the guy who killed Kirby and Nick. And I want to know about my dad.”

I stopped there, letting him process it for a moment. His eyes were locked on me, the defiance still there, but now I could see some cracks in it. He wasn’t going to break easy. I knew that going in. But we were getting there.

“You’re going to tell me everything I want to know,” I continued. “That’s a given. No way around that, trust me. I won’t kill you before I get what I’m after, and we both have enough training to know that it’s going to happen. The only question is what condition you’ll be in when we’re done. If you’re still in decent enough shape, I’ll hand you over to my friend here and she’ll take you in. I’ll need to make sure she doesn’t shoot you herself, because my partner, the one you had killed? That was her boyfriend. But we talked about it, and I think she’ll get more pleasure out of seeing you go through the humiliation of a trial before marching you into prison. Maybe. Or maybe you’re connected enough that your people will cut some kind of deal or find some kind of loophole and let you walk free. Me, I’d take prison. You wouldn’t want to be out here. Not with my friend and me here knowing what we do. So that’s option one. Option two is, you play hard-ass and I have to cut the truth out of you one piece at a time. In which case it’ll be hard for me to send you back without getting myself into trouble. Sensible move would then be to finish you off here and leave you for bear food. So it’s up to you, really. Crunch time. And just so you don’t feel rushed, I’m going to give you time to consider it. To think about what I said. To see if you reach the reasonable conclusion I hope you’ll reach. But, in the interest of speeding things up . . .”

I turned, picked up the jerrycan, and undid its top. Then I held it over him, watching him stare up at it in terror, shaking his head, mouthing, “No, don’t—” for me to stop, and I emptied its contents all over him, drenching him top to toe.

He went fetal and curled into himself defensively and shut his eyes tight and sputtered, then he stopped suddenly and shook it off his face and looked up at me with burning, angry surprise.

It wasn’t gasoline. It was just water.

Water, which, on naked skin, in snowy weather, would accelerate his hypothermia.

Dramatically.

“I think we’ve had some of the same training,” I told him. “I don’t know how much you remember about this stuff, but . . . I figure it’s about minus two or three out here, tops. And the wind is, what—ten, twelve miles per hour? Call it ten. Minus two degrees and a ten mile-per-hour wind gives us a wind-chill temperature of minus twelve degrees or so. Add the water and I’m betting you’re not feeling too comfortable right now.”

I stepped back and took in the sight of him there, tied to that tree. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone in such a pathetic, vulnerable state. Normally, I’d be the guy charging in to save someone like that. Here, I was responsible for it.

“That shivering you’re doing?” I said. “That’s stage one. Mild hypothermia. Your body’s trying to generate more heat to warm itself up. Soon, your hands and feet will start feeling numb. You’ll feel tired, and even the smallest effort will feel difficult. Another couple of degrees and you’ll be in moderate hypothermia. You’ll experience violent shivering and a loss of coordination in your muscles until that shivering stops because there’s no energy left to keep it going, which will make your temperature drop even further until you lose consciousness at around thirty degrees and slip into stage three: profound hypothermia. Which is around the time frostbite should start setting in. I’d give it half an hour, tops.” I looked around again, taking in the conditions. I figured it wasn’t far past midday, but the sun was very low this time of year, making the setting feel even bleaker.

“I’ll leave you to think things over.”

Then I nodded to Deutsch, and without another word, we headed down towards the cabin, Roos’s curses fading with each step.

We left him to stew there for twenty minutes, which was pushing it. I certainly didn’t want him dead. But I knew he was a tough son of a bitch, and I wanted this over today. Before the sun set.

We didn’t say much as we waited. I asked Deutsch about the gunfight down the mountain. She said it was no big deal. And that was it.

She could see I’d never done anything like this before.

I wasn’t a fan of “enhanced interrogation” or any other euphemism people came up with for torture. I wasn’t raised that way. It ran against everything I believed in, everything I thought our nation stood for. But I wanted him to talk, and I needed to scare the bejeezus out of him. I can’t say I was enjoying it, but to be perfectly honest with you, I wasn’t uneasy about it either. It had to be done, which, I know, is not a politically acceptable excuse. It’s the excuse everyone gives. But there was no way around it and all I needed to do to brush away the first semblance of a qualm, if it arose, was to picture any one of the people that I knew had died because of a few callous words that bastard and his cronies had whispered to their hired guns.

No qualms showed up.

We went back up there twice.

The first time, he was still playing tough even though he looked like shit. He was going through violent shivering and had lost a lot of his muscular coordination. He’d also peed himself. Exposure to this much cold reduces the blood flow to the skin’s surface. The body can only hold so much liquid and responds by ditching whatever it can. That’s usually the first to go.

At this stage, you’d expect him to lose the ability to make rational decisions. Mountaineers suffering from hypothermia sometimes just laid down in the snow to sleep, or failed to fasten the most basic of harnesses properly. I’m not sure whether spilling his guts to me constituted a rational or an irrational decision as far as he was concerned. I was hoping for rational: it might help him survive, even if he only thought that had a small chance of happening. When we’ve got our backs right up against the wall, our survival instincts take over. I hoped his would, before it was too late.

But he was still fighting it. So we left him again, for fifteen minutes this time.

When we got back, he was in really bad shape. His body had stopped shivering, having lost any energy to keep itself warm. His limbs were stiff, his heart rate and his breathing barely there. His skin was pale and icy cold to the touch. More importantly, his resolve had also frittered away. His mind was weakened, he was disorientated, and his speech was slurry. And he was in pain. Lots of pain. His body had also decided his internal organs were more important that his extremities, which were red and hurting. All of them. Frostbite was setting in, fast.

If we left him there, he’d start dying soon. A long, painful death. Eventually, he’d start having hallucinations, then he’d lose consciousness and drift off into oblivion.

I didn’t want that.

He didn’t either.

On my haunches close to him, I asked, “Are you ready to talk?”

To the extent that he could answer, he did.

He wanted to talk.

It wouldn’t just be for my own ears. This would be saved for posterity.

This time, we’d brought up a couple of blankets and a thermos of hot coffee from the cabin. We wrapped him up, let him drink, and waited until he had warmed up enough to become coherent. Then I pulled out the GoPro Kurt had bought in New York, turned it on, and aimed it at Roos. For added safety, Deutsch also took out her phone, switched its camera to video, and started filming too.