by James Frey
“What’s that?” I asked, as she led me to a picnic table.
“A sewing kit,” she said, sitting down and opening the small packet, revealing thread, needles, and a couple of buttons. “You’re going to stitch me up.”
CHAPTER TWO
We had a first aid kit in the backpack and she opened it and took two painkillers. I opened an alcohol swab and wiped the vicious gouge. The Turkish blade had cut cleanly—a straight cut through the sweatshirt, skin, muscle, down to the bone. I lit a match to sterilize the needle and then tried to follow Kat’s instructions to stitch the wound up cleanly. It took me a few minutes to get the hang of it—I was timid at first, knowing how much pain she had to be in—but I soon figured it out. It was going to be an awful-looking scar, but she said it had to be done.
While I worked, she got on the walkie-talkie and called to report in.
She had the earphone in, so I couldn’t follow most of the conversation.
“We had to kill her,” Kat said. “Yes . . . No, there was no other choice. . . . No. No. At least I don’t think so. . . . Yes. Mike is stitching me up, but I’m not going to be able to use my right hand. It severed the muscle and tendons I think. I need a hospital. . . . We’re in a park across from the hotel. . . . Okay. We’ll see you.”
There was a long pause, and she looked down at the slash. She was far more comfortable with blood and being stitched up than I was. I didn’t know what kind of pain pills she’d taken, but they must have been strong. She’d been the one to make the first aid kits, and I’d have been willing to bet that she’d taken the pills from the clinic where she worked—these weren’t over-the-counter medications.
“How are we going to explain this to a hospital?” I asked. “People don’t normally stitch themselves up.”
“You’d be surprised what people do,” she said. “Lots of patients self-medicate, and do crazy things like try to remove teeth with pliers or try to close a wound with superglue. That one’s not so crazy. It works pretty well for small stuff. Medics use it in Vietnam. I don’t know if it’s been studied for toxicity, though.”
“You’re not going to be able to use your hand?”
“No, since you’re not suturing the tendons. That’s going to need a hospital.”
“Then what good is stitching?”
She smiled through her pain. “It stops the bleeding.”
“What did John have to say?” I asked, gesturing to the walkie-talkie.
“Mary and Tyson had to kill their Player too. The Koori. Tyson took a bullet, and they’re in the hospital. Walter is off meeting with the Cahokian. He thinks he’ll be able to reason with him, since they know each other.”
I concentrated on the last little bit of the wound, as Kat instructed me how to close it and tie the thread off. When I finished, I took her injured hand in mine. She moved her fingers a little, just to see what they could still do.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought that I could draw my gun faster than she could attack.”
“It’s okay,” Kat said.
“You know what, though? I honestly thought she’d be a lot harder to kill. I thought she had some kind of trick up her sleeve. Walter and Agatha really made these guys out to be worse than they are.”
“I don’t know. You’re not the one who got hacked with a sword.”
I laughed a little. “Fair point. You know what’s weird? No police are going to the hotel. We fired, what, five shots? Six? And nobody is there to investigate.”
“Maybe they came and they just don’t have their sirens on. I can’t see the entrance to the hotel from here.”
I nodded. They could be going room to room with a SWAT team, searching for bullet holes, looking for bodies. They’d find Raakel and her sword and that would be that. It would be a puzzle that they never solved.
At least I hoped they’d never solve it. No police department would ever believe in Endgame, would they? Not even when they found Raakel and the Koori.
“What are we supposed to do about the Aksumite?” I asked, suddenly worried about everybody. “Rodney and Jim and Julia never came back from Ethiopia. Agatha never spotted the Aksumite Player. I think we have to assume he killed them?”
“Maybe the bomb went off too soon and killed them.”
“Either way, that’s a loose end we need to tie up.”
“Maybe.” Then she stopped. Her face grew even paler than it already was. “Wait. Mike. Did you get the pages off the floor—the Brotherhood of the Snake stuff?”
My heart dropped. “No. And that’s my only copy.”
“That’s our only copy,” she said. “But that’s not what I’m worried about. Our fingerprints are all over that thing.”
“They’ll be all over the table and chairs too,” I said.
“Yeah, but there will be a thousand fingerprints on the table, from everyone who has stayed in that room. But those papers lead directly back to us—just our prints and Raakel’s. We’ll get put into a database from Interpol or something.”
“But they can’t connect us to anything,” I said. “Right?”
“What about the gun store robbery? The bank robbery? Both our prints were at the bank.”
“There’d be no reason why a shooting at the Olympics in Munich would ever be connected to a bank robbery in California. No one would make the connection. No one would compare the prints.”
She pulled the robe closer around herself, as if she was cold. “Except that there’s some kind of terrorist attack going on at the same time we’re killing people in their hotel rooms. And how many witnesses saw us come out of that door?”
“We can’t just go back there,” I said. “There’s no way we can get them back. We’re screwed, Kat.”
“Yeah,” she agreed. “We need to talk to John and Walter. They’re all coming here, after Mary gets done with Tyson.”
“Why here?”
“It’s kind of a central location. We’re all going to meet up and try some new tactics.”
I nodded. “Good. Because Raakel was totally unswayed by our arguments.”
Kat stood, but she was a little unsteady on her feet. “You okay?” I asked. Kat was stronger than most people I knew, but everyone had a limit. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t reached mine yet.
“Let’s get to a more concealed part of the park.”
“Right. And you need to get out of that bathrobe.”
“Everyone else is in robes,” she said, gesturing to the hotel guests who had filled the street after the alarms went off. “You wear it.”
“But we don’t want to look like we came out of that place.”
Kat set her face in a grimace. “You need to get in there, fast,” Kat said, with a slight slur. “Go now, while everyone is outside and the police haven’t arrived yet. I’d go with you, but I think I’m not fit for service right now.”
I helped her down on a park bench, farther from the street now that it was getting light.
“Stay here,” I said.
I took another look at the slice in her arm and my poor, uneven stitching. She was definitely going to have a scar—but hopefully she’d regain the use of her fingers. At least the bleeding had stopped.
She took a pouch of something out of the first aid kid—some kind of antibacterial something—and squirted it all along the cut.
“Can you help me with the bandage?” she said, pulling two-inch squares of gauze from the first aid kit.
She held the cotton down with her left hand, and I taped it on. I was no surgeon—I wrapped a strip of tape all the way around her arm twice.
I took the robe from her and put it on myself. I left her gun with her, in the backpack. The robe was snug, but no one else looked particularly well dressed. They’d been awakened by a fire alarm early in the morning. The fact that my robe had blood on it seemed to go unnoticed by anyone in the crowd. There was a lot, but it mostly stained the inside of the fluffy material, not soaking through.
Despite the fire alarm and t
he noise of bullets, there were only two fire trucks—no police at all yet.
“Absurd,” a man next to me said in a proper English accent. “To be awakened at this hour is absurd. They don’t even know what they’re looking for. I don’t see any smoke. Do you?”
“No,” I said. “And I have to get inside. If there is a fire, I have documents in there that can’t be destroyed.”
“Good luck. The concierge is turning everyone away at the door.”
I hadn’t had a good look at the entrance, so I bade good morning to the man, and walked around a fire truck, the word FEUERWEHR emblazoned on the front. There was a single man at the top of the stairs—a balding man in a suit and tie, who was giving his assurances in English and German to the guests that everything would be fine. He said it was likely a false alarm.
“Wait to go in,” a voice behind me said.
I startled and looked back. It was John.
“How did you get here so fast?”
“I was only down the street at the Staatlich hotel. Say good-bye to the La Tène.”
“I thought that Agatha was going after the La Tène?”
“Agatha talked to the La Tène last night. But he wouldn’t get on board. Agatha left him for us—he wouldn’t agree to stop Playing, and she said she wasn’t going to kill anyone.”
“You had to kill?”
He nodded, his lips forming a thin line. “I think we’re going to have to kill more today.”
I sighed and shook my head. “The Minoan got Kat pretty good,” I said. “I had to kill her—” I laughed tiredly. “Kill the Minoan, not Kat.”
“I knew what you meant. Where is she?”
“In the park. I stitched her up, but she won’t be using her right hand anytime soon.”
“Damn.”
“Yeah. And I left evidence in the room. I’ve got to get in there.”
“What did you leave?”
“The Brotherhood of the Snake papers.”
“Some good they did, right?”
“Yeah,” I said, annoyed by how casual John was. He was always like this. Walter was the one who barked orders. John just talked like a normal person. He talked like a peacenik half the time, and I’d rarely seen someone get a rise out of him.
“Who says you need to go back inside and get them?”
“Our fingerprints are all over them.”
“It’s a risk we have to take. You can’t go back in there.”
“But they’re what’s supposed to convince them to join us,” I said, my panic rising. “We only have so many copies.”
“Mike,” John said, “I think it’s time that you face the facts. Negotiation hasn’t worked. We need to just get in there, eliminate them, and get out.”
“We can keep trying,” I said.
“Mike,” John said, grabbing my arm. “You didn’t really ever expect that to work, did you? These Players are trained killers. Their whole lives have been built on the idea that Endgame is real and they’re saving their entire line—that everyone they know and love will be killed if they don’t win. Negotiation was idealistic, and it’s not working.”
“They’re not that good,” I said. “You made them out to be half kung-fu master and half gunslinger. And so far we’ve killed the Minoan, the Koori, the La Tène, and the Cahokian. These Players aren’t what we expected them to be.”
“We haven’t heard from Walter on the Cahokian yet. Barbara and Douglas haven’t called in yet from the Olmec, either. Tyson took a bullet. We haven’t heard from Larry, Lee, and Lin, either, or Molly, Henry, and Phyllis. Bakr too. Don’t make the mistake that this is going to be easy.”
“Mary’s okay?” I asked.
“She’s fine. Cuts and bruises.”
“We need to rethink this. We’re not getting any of the results that we set out to get. This is going to turn into a bloodbath.”
“Yes we are, and it already is,” John said, with a fierceness in his eyes that I hadn’t seen before. “Tell me you never thought that this was going to end peacefully. We warned you: the Players are trained killers, not diplomats. They’re here to do one thing: kill everyone who stands in their way. We need to move to Plan Charlie.”
“Plan Charlie? Go in guns blazing? What about Bravo? What about talking to them?”
“We’re losing,” he said. “We’ve killed three or four of them, and they may have killed as many as half of us. And it’s barely even dawn.”
My head was swimming. I couldn’t think straight through the panic. “Just let me get back inside and get those papers. John, please. My prints are all over them. I can’t be connected to this. I can’t.” Kat had reached her limit; maybe I was reaching mine.
John grabbed my shoulders and looked me dead in the eye. “Mike, have you been following what’s going on here today?”
“What do you mean? The shooting at the Olympic hotel?”
“It’s not just a shooting. It’s terrorists. Black September, a faction of the PLO. You know the PLO, right? Blowing up buses in Jerusalem and hijacking planes. Do you remember two years ago—the big hostage crisis when those airliners were held full of passengers? Three hundred and ten people on four jets, out in the desert?”
“Yeah, I remember.” My vision was blurring. I couldn’t take in all this information right now. This was getting so far out of control.
“It’s those guys. This morning a number of them—some say as many as twenty; nobody’s sure—they barged into the Israeli hotel rooms. One guy, a wrestling coach, was able to escape through a window, but that’s all we know so far. There have been gunshots.”
“They’re going after the athletes?”
“They are. And it’s going to be a huge disaster. It might derail the whole Olympics. And you have to think about it: these guys didn’t come to Munich because they thought they were going to escape. This is a suicide mission, and they have the whole Israeli team. This could be the start of a war.”
“But what does that have to do with us?”
“You haven’t seen police response like we’re going to have here. It’s going to make the protests at People’s Park look like a picnic.”
“Then all the more reason for me to get up into the hotel and get those papers. They’re the only clue we left in the room, and when the police find them, they’re going to dust them for fingerprints.”
“Are your fingerprints on file?” he asked, looking over my shoulder at the concierge at the entrance to the building.
“Yes. It was part of becoming a park ranger.”
“But you’re not on some national fingerprint list, are you? Who is going to compare those papers to fingerprints in southern California? You’re panicking, and you’re not thinking straight.”
I ran my hand through my hair. “The more time we talk, the less likely I am to get safely into the room.”
“You’re not going back in there, Mike. I’m sorry, but I can’t let you do that.”
“You can’t let me?”
He pulled back his jacket a little, flashing just enough of his gun for me to get the idea.
“I can’t let you,” he repeated.
I couldn’t believe what was happening. Peaceful, hippie John was threatening me. Maybe he wasn’t really into peace and love and all that. Maybe that was just a ruse, and this was his real personality. It was like half the training we’d gone through had been a bluff to trick us into thinking we were more than just assassins.
“I’m going in,” I said. His hand grabbed my arm, but I wrenched free and ran inside.
CHAPTER THREE
At the top of the stairs, the concierge stopped me. “You can’t enter,” he said in heavily accented English. “Sie können hier nicht reinkommen.”
“I will only be a minute,” I said.
“But sir, it’s not safe. Sie sind in Gefahr. Achtung!”
“I’ll be right back,” I said, pushing past him.
“Sir!” he called after me. “Sir!”
I turned a corne
r and raced up the stairs. There were still no police here, only firemen. Even so, I switched my gun from the back of my pants to the large pocket of the robe. It was heavy and made the bathrobe sag. I moved quietly and swiftly up the steps until I reached the fourth floor. We had done so many runs up the mountains at Mary’s ranch that I wasn’t even winded when I got to the right door. I knew the room was down the hall about forty yards. I didn’t relish seeing Raakel again. Her face was stained into my memory now too. Her brains and blood were sprayed across the blankets. I would never be able to unsee that.
I could see the door. It wasn’t closed all the way, but there were no firefighters, no crime-scene tape. I pulled out my M1911 and moved quietly to the door.
I shouldn’t have felt so afraid. Kat and I had gone head-to-head with a trained killer, and we’d won. It was a complete victory, with the exception of Kat’s arm injury. But stepping into the dim room made it look like a disaster. There was blood everywhere. It wasn’t like a shooting in the movies, not a simple hole in the forehead and a pool of blood under her body. No, she had slumped down, her face turned toward the floor, and I could see the enormous holes in the back of her head. There were tufts of hair and scalp on the bed, and the blood had spilled onto the blanket, soaking and spreading into a wide patch.
I could see the sheriff, but this was worse than the sheriff. He’d been a middle-aged fat guy carrying a gun. Raakel was a 17-year-old elite athlete. Sexy. Armed only with a Turkish sword. And I’d talked to her. I’d pleaded with her. This hadn’t been a simple execution. It had been a negotiation. I hadn’t realized how quickly it would escalate, but it had, and there was nothing I could do about it now.
I should have been less hopeful. It had been my hope to be able to talk her into a peaceful resolution, and I’d stuck to that so firmly that I hadn’t realized I had lost. It was my fault that Kat got injured.
The papers were lying on the floor, with only a spot or two of blood. I bent down to pick them up.
“Don’t move.” An American accent. I heard the sound of a gun cocking.
My heart sank. I hadn’t heard the door, hadn’t seen a shadow. But the voice was close behind me.