Endgame Novella #5

by James Frey

  “Either way, we don’t really know what we’re doing.”

  “For all the training we’ve gotten, all the weeks of shooting and fighting and shadowing, we’re still just normal people. I’m a PR assistant. You’re a student.”

  “And barely that.”

  Kat came out of the hotel a few minutes later, saw us, smiled, and took a different route. Barbara and I stood up and headed back to John. When we got back, Kat relayed the number of the room Raakel had gotten.

  During that day we saw all the Players arrive except the Aksumite, and all the squads came back except for squad five—the one that was Rodney, Jim, and Julia, going after the Aksumite. It took two days, but Douglas managed to get forged press credentials to access the Ethiopian Olympic team. They had just won bronze in the 10,000-meter, and Douglas got a chance to sit down with the team’s governmental delegate. The delegate was not familiar with any bombing in Addis Ababa. We had to assume that Rodney, Jim, and Julia were not coming back.

  Mary arrived alone. She told me that in the lead-up to the bombing, Bruce had gotten some kind of virus. He was in a hospital in Veracruz and was in no condition to fly, let alone stand up and help with the bombing. Mary had laid the thermite on the Olmec’s expansive lawn and set it burning. She’d had to place the bomb, too, by herself.

  I was so happy to see her that I kissed and hugged her before I even knew what I was doing.

  But then my mind flashed back to Kat and what had happened between us after Istanbul.

  What was I doing?

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  On the morning of September fifth we rose at four a.m. We split back into squads. Kat looked angry. I couldn’t blame her. I had shared a bed with Mary back at the safe house. We didn’t do anything, but it still was wrong.

  I didn’t know what to do about that. But now wasn’t the time.

  Kat and I had been assigned to Raakel first this morning. We had to give her the talk. We had to hope that Raakel would be receptive to our message and not just kill us on the spot.

  We entered the hotel, our pistols concealed beneath T-shirts and jackets. We had a walkie-talkie with an earphone so we could use it without the rest of the hotel hearing it.

  We’d had a word of warning from Agatha that we needed to be perfectly accurate—the Players would scatter at the slightest sign of a trap. None of them knew what to expect; no living Player had ever gone to a Calling like this, and she said they wouldn’t immediately start killing one another. They’d be waiting for a sign. But a hail of bullets was not that sign. They would scatter: they’d assume that one of the lines was breaking the rules by killing everyone before the Players could start Playing. Agatha said these Players were lightning fast, dangerous, and brutal.

  I followed Kat through the Hilton lobby, walking across intricately cut marble floors. There was a stairway marked NUR AUTORISIERTES PERSONAL—Kat told me it meant “authorized personnel only.” We went to the fourth floor, and then Kat led me back out to the hallway. We waited down the hall from Raakel’s room for the call to go in.

  “I don’t like being exposed like this,” Kat whispered.

  “I’m sure it’ll only be a minute.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “Where will you go when this is over?” I asked, to cut the tension. “Switzerland? France?”

  “I want to go home,” she said, kneeling in position, but resting her Winchester on her legs. “If I make it out of here alive, that’s where I’m heading.”

  “Go back to your job? That’ll be some awkward explaining to do.”

  “I’m so good at telling lies now,” she said with a sad, defeated tone. “I’ll make it sound okay.”

  “About Mary,” I said. Kat looked at me sharply. “What should I—”

  She cut me off. “You’re a big boy, Mike. You can figure it out on your own.”

  “No, I need to tell you. Nothing happened last night. It’s over. There’s nothing real about it. There never was. But you and I—that’s something special. I’ll go back with you to your job. Or we can go somewhere else—anywhere. I mean it.”

  Kat frowned. “You’re so young, Mike.”

  “What’s five years?”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  Walter came on the walkie-talkie—I turned the volume down very low, even with the sound coming through the earpiece. “Something’s going on. We’re seeing a larger police presence than we saw when we did recon yesterday morning. Over.”

  “Are they on to us? Over,” I said.

  “I’ll get back to you,” Walter said. “I’m going to try a police channel. I’ll need Kat to translate. Over.”

  I looked to Kat. “He wants you to translate.”

  “What? I had five years of German but haven’t touched it since high school. I’m pretty rusty.”

  “You can do this.”

  Kat took the walkie-talkie. “This is Kat. I’ll help if I can. Over.”

  “Walter says go to channel sixteen. There’s a lot of static, but something is going on,” I told her.

  I unplugged the earpiece so we could both hear. What came next was five minutes of German chatter. I kept waiting for Kat to translate it, but she just shook her head. This was coming fast, from multiple people, probably using radio lingo she didn’t know.

  She flipped back to channel 23—our channel. “There’s been a shooting in the Olympic Village. I’m really missing a lot of this. Something about Israeli team members and . . . a hostage situation? I’m not sure. They keep using a word that must mean ‘terrorism.’ Terrorismus. And they’re activating everybody. But I don’t really know. I don’t have the vocabulary for this.”

  I looked out the hallway window to the street below at the entrance to the hotel. No one was moving.

  “Keep listening, Kat,” Walter said. “Over.”

  She switched the radio to the police channel, then back again.

  “Shots are being fired in the Olympic apartments,” she said after a moment. “Switching back. Over.”

  There was more chatter on the police channel, and we started to hear sirens, first to our east, but soon they were all around us, speeding to the Village.

  Kat looked at me in horror as she switched channels again. “It’s a group called Black September. They’re armed, and they’re murdering the Israelis in their beds. A guy managed to escape. He said they’ve killed at least two people, both coaches. Someone jumped out his window and alerted the authorities.”

  There were policemen everywhere now, combing the plaza.

  I took the walkie-talkie. “Walter, this is Mike. Should we go ahead with the plan? Over.”

  “There are more and more cops here at the plaza,” Molly broke in on her radio. She was watching the starburst spiral plaza. “And they’re jumpy. If we stay here and if the Players come, it’ll be a suicide mission. It’ll be a shootout with police, and we don’t have an escape route other than the way we came in. Over.”

  “Okay,” Walter said. “All teams move out. Execute Plan Bravo. Over.”

  Plan Bravo. We weren’t just staking out Raakel. We were going to knock on her door. It was going to be us versus her, and we had to convince her that she’s wrong about everything she’s worked for her entire life. And if she didn’t agree, we were supposed to kill her.

  “It’s time,” I said to Kat.

  We double-checked our guns, made sure they were loaded, flicked off the safeties, and headed down the hall. We were either going to convince the Minoan Player or we were going to have to kill her. This was it. We stopped at room 412.

  Ready? Kat mouthed.

  I nodded.

  I knocked on the door.

  Excerpt from ENDGAME: THE CALLING

  SEE HOW ENDGAME BEGINS:

  MARCUS LOXIAS MEGALOS

  Hafz Alipaa Sk, Aziz Mahmut Hüdayi Mh, Istanbul, Turkey

  Marcus Loxias Megalos is bored. He cannot remember a time before the boredom. School is boring. Girls are boring. F
ootball is boring. Especially when his team, his favorite team, Fenerbahçe, is losing, as they are now, to Manisaspor.

  Marcus sneers at the TV in his small, undecorated room. He is slouched in a plush black leather chair that sticks to his skin whenever he sits up. It is night, but Marcus keeps the lights in his room off. The window is open. Heat passes through it like an oppressive ghost as the sounds of the Bosporus—the long, low calls of ships, the bells of buoys—groan and tinkle over Istanbul.

  Marcus wears baggy black gym shorts and is shirtless. His 24 ribs show through his tanned skin. His arms are sinewy and hard. His breathing is easy. His stomach is taut and his hair is close-cropped and black and his eyes are green. A bead of sweat rolls down the tip of his nose. All of Istanbul simmers on this night, and Marcus is no different.

  A book lies open in his lap, ancient and leather-bound. The words on its pages are Greek. Marcus has handwritten something in English on a scrap of paper that lies across the open page: From broad Crete I declare that I am come by lineage, the son of a wealthy man. He has read the old book over and over. It’s a tale of war, exploration, betrayal, love, and death. It always makes him smile.

  What Marcus wouldn’t give to take a journey of his own, to escape the oppressive heat of this dull city. He imagines an endless sea spread out before him, the wind cool against his skin, adventures and enemies arrayed on the horizon.

  Marcus sighs and touches the scrap of paper. In his other hand he holds a 9,000-year-old knife, made of a single piece of bronze forged in the fires of Knossos. He brings the blade across his body and lets its edge rest against his right forearm. He pushes it into the skin, but not all the way. He knows the limits of this blade. He has trained with it since he could hold it. He has slept with it under his pillow since he was six. He has killed chickens, rats, dogs, cats, pigs, horses, hawks, and lambs with it. He has killed 11 people with it.

  He is 16, in his prime for Playing. If he turns 20, he will be ineligible. He wants to Play. He would rather die than be ineligible.

  The odds are almost nil that he will get his chance, though, and he knows it. Unlike Odysseus, war will never find Marcus. There will be no grand journey.

  His line has been waiting for 9,000 years. Since the day the knife was forged. For all Marcus knows, his line will wait for another 9,000 years, long after Marcus is gone and the pages of his book have disintegrated.

  So Marcus is bored.

  The crowd on the TV cheers, and Marcus looks up from the knife. The Fenerbahçe goalie has cleared a rainbow up the right sideline, the ball finding the head of a burly midfielder. The ball bounces forward, over a line of defenders, near the last two men before the Manisaspor keeper. The players rush for the ball, and the forward comes away with it, 20 meters from the goal, free and clear of the defender. The keeper gets ready.

  Marcus leans forward. Match time is 83:34. Fenerbahçe has yet to score, and doing so in such a dramatic way would save some face. The old book slides to the floor. The scrap of paper drifts free of the page and slips through the air like a falling leaf. The crowd begins to rise. The sky suddenly brightens, as if the gods, the Gods of the Sky themselves, are coming down to offer help. The keeper backpedals. The forward collects himself and takes the shot, and the ball blasts off.

  As it punches the back of the net, the stadium lights up and the crowd screams, first in exaltation for the goal, but immediately afterward in terror and confusion—deep, true, and profound terror and confusion. A massive fireball, a giant burning meteor, explodes above the crowd and tears across the field, obliterating the Fenerbahçe defense and blasting a hole through the end of the stadium grandstand.

  Marcus’s eyes widen. He is looking at total carnage. It is butchery on the scale of those American disaster movies. Half the stadium, tens of thousands of people dead, burning, lit up, on fire.

  It is the most beautiful thing Marcus has ever seen.

  He breathes hard. Sweat pours off his brow. People outside are yelling, screaming. A woman wails from the café below. Sirens ring out across the ancient city on the Bosporus, between the Marmara and the Black.

  On TV, the stadium is awash in flames. Players, police, spectators, coaches run around, burning like crazed matchsticks. The commentators cry for help, for God, because they don’t understand. Those not dead or on their way to being dead trample one another as they try to escape. There’s another explosion and the screen goes black.

  Marcus’s heart wants out of his chest. Marcus’s brain is as hot as the football pitch. Marcus’s stomach is full of rocks and acid. His palms feel hot and sticky. He looks down and sees that he has dug the ancient blade into his forearm, and a rivulet of blood is trickling off his hand, onto the chair, onto his book. The book is ruined, but it doesn’t matter; he won’t need it anymore. Because now, Marcus will have his Odyssey.

  Marcus looks back to the darkened TV. He knows there’s something waiting for him there amidst the wreckage. He must find it.

  A single piece.

  For himself, for his line.

  He smiles. Marcus has trained all of his life for this moment. When he wasn’t training, he was dreaming of the Calling. All the visions of destruction that his teenage mind concocted could not touch what Marcus has witnessed tonight. A meteor destroying a football stadium and killing 38,676 people. The legends said it would be a grand announcement. For once, the legends have become a beautiful reality.

  Marcus has wanted, waited, and prepared for Endgame his entire life. He is no longer bored, and he won’t be again until he either wins or dies.

  This is it.

  He knows it.

  This is it.

  CHIYOKO TAKEDA

  22B Hateshinai Tri, Naha, Okinawa, Japan

  Three chimes of a small pewter bell awake Chiyoko Takeda. Her head lolls to the side. The time on her digital clock: 5:24. She makes a note of it. These are heavy numbers now. Significant. She imagines it is the same for those who ascribe meaning to numbers like 11:03 or 9:11 or 7:07. For the rest of her life she will see these numbers, 5:24, and for the rest of her life they will carry weight, meaning, significance.

  Chiyoko turns from the clock on her side table and stares into the darkness. She lies naked on top of the sheets. She licks her full lips. She scrutinizes the shadows on her ceiling as if some message will appear there.

  The bell should not have rung. Not for her.

  All her life she has been told of Endgame and her peculiar and fantastical ancestry. Before the bell rang, she was 17 years old, a homeschooled outcast, a master sailor and navigator, an able gardener, a limber climber. Skilled at symbols, languages, and words. An interpreter of signs. An assassin able to wield the wakizashi, the hojo, and the shuriken. Now that the bell has rung, she feels 100. She feels 1,000. She feels 10,000, and getting older by the second. The heavy burden of the centuries presses down upon her.

  Chiyoko closes her eyes. Darkness returns. She wants to be somewhere else. A cave. Underwater. In the oldest forest on Earth. But she is here, and she must get used to it. Darkness will be everywhere soon, and everyone will know it. She must master it. Befriend it. Love it. She has prepared for 17 years and she’s ready, even if she never wanted it or expected it. The darkness. It will be like a loving silence, which for Chiyoko is easy. The silence is part of who she is.

  For she can hear, but she has never spoken.

  She looks out her open window, breathes. It rained during the night, and she can feel the humidity in her nose and throat and chest. The air smells good.

  There is a gentle rapping on the sliding door leading to her room. Chiyoko sits in her Western-style bed, her slight back facing the door. She stamps her foot twice. Twice means Come in.

  The sound of wood sliding across wood. The quiet of the screen stopping. The faint shuffle of feet.

  “I rang the bell,” her uncle says, his head bowed low to the ground, according the young Player the highest level of respect, as is the custom, the rule. “I had to,” he says.
“They’re coming. All of them.”

  Chiyoko nods.

  He keeps his gaze lowered. “I am sorry,” he says. “It is time.”

  Chiyoko stamps five arrhythmic times with her foot. Okay. Glass of water.

  “Yes, of course.” Her uncle backs out of the doorway and quietly moves away.

  Chiyoko stands, smells the air again, and moves to the window. The faint glow from the city’s lights blankets her pale skin. She looks out over Naha. There is the park. The hospital. The harbor. There is the sea, black, broad, and calm. There is the soft breeze. The palm trees below her window whisper. The low gray clouds begin to light up, as if a spaceship is coming to visit. Old people must be awake, Chiyoko thinks. Old people get up early. They are having tea and rice and radish pickles. Eggs and fish and warm milk. Some will remember the war. The fire from the sky that destroyed and decimated everything. And allowed for a rebirth. What is about to happen will remind them of those days. But a rebirth? Their survival and their future depend entirely on Chiyoko.

  A dog begins to bark frantically.

  Birds trill.

  A car alarm goes off.

  The sky gets very bright, and the clouds break downward as a massive fireball bursts over the edge of town. It screams, burns, and crashes into the marina. A great explosion and a billow of scalding steam illuminate the early morning. Rain made of dust and rock and plastic and metal hurls upward over Naha. Trees die. Fish die. Children, dreams, and fortunes die. The lucky ones are snuffed out in their slumber. The unlucky are burned or maimed.

  Initially it will be mistaken for an earthquake.

  But they will see.

  It is just the beginning.

  The debris falls all over town. Chiyoko senses her piece coming for her. She takes a large step away from her window, and a bright ember shaped like a mackerel falls onto her floor, burning a hole in the tatami mat.

  Her uncle knocks on the door again. Chiyoko stomps her foot twice. Come in. The door is still open. Her uncle keeps his gaze lowered as he stops at her side and hands her first a simple blue silk kimono, which she steps into, and, after she’s in the kimono, a glass of very cold water.