End Game

by John Gilstrap

  It was time to draw down. As he reached for the .45, his earbud popped. “Scorpion, Big Guy,” Boxers said. “I’ve got signs of forced entry back here.”

  Just like that, everything changed. “Me, too. Are you prepared to crash the door?” Jonathan asked over the air.

  “Oh, yeah.” It was like asking a kid if he was ready for Christmas.

  “On my count,” Jonathan said. He gripped the Colt with both hands, thumbed the safety off, and poised it close to his chest, the grip an inch from his breastbone.

  “Three . . . two . . . one.”

  They needed a new car. The Mercedes was still drivable but it had been shot to shit—not suitable for being seen in public.

  “Here’s what we’re going to do,” Jolaine said.

  “You killed those people,” Graham said. His eyes were huge. His hands trembled.

  “I’m sorry you had to see that,” Jolaine said. “But we’ve—”

  “Don’t apologize.” He seemed appalled that she would even think such a thing. “You were friggin’ amazing. I mean, Christ, they were going to kill us, and you just mowed them down.”

  Jolaine appreciated the enthusiasm, despite knowing that after the adrenaline wore off, Graham would suffer from the reality of those images.

  Grateful that the streets were relatively empty, but fully aware that she and Graham were far from invisible, she whipped the Mercedes into an alley between two buildings that looked underutilized, if not abandoned. The windows had been soaped, and grass grew through cracks in the pavement. It was exactly the kind of industrial neighborhood that one would expect to be served by the Hummingbird Motel. She created her own parking space next to a bulging Dumpster.

  “We need to get out,” she said. “This car is too obvious.” As she spoke, she opened the door. “We need to walk.”

  “To where?”

  “Anywhere but here.” She placed the empty Glock back into its holster and covered it with her shirt. “This vehicle is a magnet for cops. We need to buy some time.”

  Graham pushed his door open as well and stood. “Time to do what?”

  “To live a little longer,” she said.

  “What about the rifle?”

  “Leave it. We can’t go walking around town with a rifle.”

  “But your pistol is out of bullets.”

  Jolaine made a circulating motion with her arm, encouraging Graham to move faster. “Maybe we can find some more. Meanwhile, we’ve got to get away from here.”

  He joined her, looking over this shoulder, back at the car. In the distance, the sirens continued. “Shouldn’t we wipe it down for fingerprints?”

  “It won’t matter,” Jolaine said. “Our fingerprints are all over everything—the car, the rifle, the motel room. When they find it, they’ll know that the car belonged to the people who rented the room. What we hope they won’t know is who we really are.”

  They walked behind a long line of industrial low-rises. The only business that seemed busy was an auto mechanic shop whose employees seemed to avoid eye contact. Jolaine wondered how many of them would scatter if the police came by. The whir of impact wrenches and the pounding of hammers on metal drowned out the sound of sirens. Jolaine considered that a good thing.

  “Where are we going?” Graham asked. He kept throwing nervous looks over his shoulder, and in general acting jumpy as hell.

  “I need you to walk as if nothing is wrong. The more nervous you look, the more attention you’ll draw to yourself. To us.”

  “That’s kind of hard when you know people are trying to kill you.”

  “Graham, everything is going to be kind of hard until this is settled. You need to trust me.”

  “I do trust you,” he said. Then, with a wry chuckle: “Not that I have a whole lot of choice.”

  The alley behind the low rises dead-ended at a street without a sign. Jolaine estimated that it ran roughly north-south. She turned right to head north, away from the main drag. Ahead, there was a patch of woods that would provide additional cover. She headed that way.

  “Do you know where we’re going?” Graham asked.

  “Toward the woods. We’ll be less readily seen there.”

  “Is that really a good idea? I mean, I’m not saying I won’t go, but aren’t they going to dispatch dogs or something pretty soon? If we’re just hanging in the woods we’ll get caught right away.”

  He had a very good point, Jolaine thought. She stopped and turned, colliding with Graham.

  “Whoa,” he said. “What are you doing now?”

  “You’re right,” she said. “We need a car. Come this way.” She started back toward the main drag.

  Graham trotted to catch up. “And where are we going to get a car?”

  She led the way to her answer. The easiest cars to steal—to hotwire and drive away—were of an older vintage, the older the better. It was damn near impossible to hotwire anything made in the past ten years or so—certainly that was beyond Jolaine’s limited ability. As luck would have it (it was about time for some good luck for a change), the ideal candidate sat parked along the curb outside a low-rent apartment building. It was an old Honda Civic that appeared to have the original paint job, which was to say very little paint at all. Call it red. Maybe brown.

  As she approached, Jolaine drew her Leatherman tool from its pouch on her belt and opened it up. In a second stroke of good luck, the driver’s door opened when she lifted the handle. That was often the case, she’d been told, when people parked their cars in poorer, crime-ridden areas. It was better to leave the car unlocked and let thieves find out for themselves that there was nothing worth stealing, than to make them break a window to discover the same result.

  Once inside, she wondered if the owner actually hoped that someone would steal these wheels. The gray cloth seats were worn nearly transparent in the spots where they weren’t torn, and the headliner drooped like old cobwebs from the ceiling.

  Graham climbed in the opposite door. “Do we really have to be in this much of a hurry?”

  She ignored him. She folded out the flat-head screwdriver, jammed it into the keyway, and twisted. The engine jumped to life. That done, she stuck the blade into the gap between the steering wheel and the steering column to find the tab that would release the steering wheel lock. That was always the toughest part of this operation. It took a good twenty seconds, but when she found it, she pressed down and the wheel was free.

  “There,” she said, more to herself than to Graham.

  He gaped. “How do you know this shit?”

  “I used to hang around with tough people,” she said. In reality, she used to hang around with a former SEAL named Darrell, whose youth had introduced him to all levels of thievery. She’d held him in her arms until he bled out and died in some rocky village near J-Bad in Afghanistan whose name she’d forgotten.

  She pulled the transmission into drive, and they were on their way. She still didn’t know where they were heading, but north seemed right, so she swung a U-turn and headed wherever the road would take them. Canada, maybe, if she could figure out a way to get them some passports.

  “Who were those people?” Graham asked. “And why were they shooting at us?”

  “You tell me,” Jolaine said. She made sure her tone was leaden, devoid of humor.

  In her peripheral vision, she saw Graham’s head whip around. “What?”

  “You heard me,” she said. “You tell me why people are trying to kill us.”

  “How am I supposed to know?”

  She cast him a glance, then returned her eyes to the road as she navigated out into the country. Buildings were already becoming sparser. “How do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “What the hell is wrong with you? How did you become my enemy all of a sudden?”

  “The last thing I am is your enemy,” Jolaine said. “Tell me about the phone call you made this morning.”

  “I already told you about that.”

  “I h
ave it on good authority that you left out some good parts,” Jolaine countered. “What did you say?”

  “I talked to a creepy guy and I hung up on him.”

  “But why?”

  “I talked to him because my mom asked me to. I hung up on him because he was creepy. What aren’t you understanding?”

  Jolaine settled herself. Getting frustrated or getting angry would only be counterproductive. “Please try not to be obtuse,” she said. “You talked with the creepy guy, you said something, and then all of a sudden the world is trying to shoot us. Last night, they were shooting at your parents. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that your mother filled your head with some secret thing and a phone number, and now our lives are in jeopardy.” She paused and glared through his head. “What do you have, Graham? What justifies all of this?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Bullshit. You know I’m risking my life for you, right? I could drop you off on the side of the road and let you fend for yourself. No one wants to hurt me because of what I know. They only want to hurt me because of my association with you.” It felt good to utter the truth, even though she took no pleasure in hurting him.

  “Let me off, then,” he said. She’d triggered his defiant streak, always a mistake.

  “That’s not the point, Graham, and it’s not going to happen. You know that. My job is to protect you. And yes, it’s to protect me, too. But you owe me what you know.”

  “I promised my mom not to tell anybody but the guy on the phone.”

  “And how’s that working for you?”

  “I wasn’t supposed to tell him over the phone. It could only be in person.”

  Jolaine slapped the steering wheel. “Goddammit, Graham, whatever she told you is the reason we’re running for our lives.”

  “You don’t know that. Mom told me that the only way to escape alive was to follow the protocol.”

  “What protocol?”

  “I don’t know!” he shouted. “Okay? I don’t know what any of this is about.”

  “But you do know something,” Jolaine insisted. “The man on the ground outside his car—”

  He shouted, “3155AX475598CVRLLPAHQ449833 D0Z.”

  Jolaine reared back in her seat. “What?”

  “You asked me and I just told you,” Graham said. “That’s what’s on the piece of paper. That’s what Mom told me. Do you want to know the phone number, too?”

  No, she didn’t. What kind of code—

  “It’s completely random,” Graham said. “I don’t see any pattern, the repeats are insignificant. There’s no dictionary code that I can find, and while I was alone in the motel, I tried to find some kind of Bible code, but couldn’t. Did you know they have a free Bible in the nightstand?”

  Jolaine wasn’t interested in nibbling at the Gideon bait. “Say the code again,” she said.

  “Why? Would you know if I missed something?”

  There was the petulance that she’d come to know so well over the years. But he also raised a good point. “You mean, you really can remember all of that.”

  He repeated the code. “Ask me in three hours or five days, and it’ll still be the same.”

  “How?”

  “The shrinks at school say it’s my gift.” The way he leaned on that word told her that he considered it to be anything but. “I just remember every friggin’ thing. Numbers are easiest and names are hardest.”

  Jolaine processed all of that. At least, she tried to process it. “So, it’s numbers and letters,” she said. “What do they mean?”

  “I don’t know!” His voice squeaked with frustration. “And I swear to God I’m telling the truth. I asked her, and she told me not to worry about it. She said I didn’t need to know what it meant. I only needed to remember it. So, now I’ve got this shit in my head, and a protocol to follow—whatever that means—and people are trying to kill me. Are we having fun yet?”

  Something about his delivery made her believe him. He seemed genuinely bewildered by it all.

  “What did the wounded guy say to you?” Graham asked.

  Jolaine sensed the turnaround was an honesty check, and she wondered if the boy had done it on purpose.

  “He said if you follow the protocol, all of this will end.”

  Graham shrank in his seat. “So, I should have just talked with him. But you told me—”

  “Don’t draw the wrong conclusion,” Jolaine said. “I’m not sure you did the wrong thing, and I’m really not sure that sharing that code—whatever it means—would do anything to take us off whatever hit lists we’re on.”

  “What are you saying?”

  Jolaine sighed again as she weighed the propriety of going where this conversation was leading them. Screw it. In for a dime . . .

  “I don’t want you to panic about what I’m going to say—”

  “Oh, crap.”

  “—or even overly stress. But think about it. Those numbers and letters—that code—are what the people attacking us want. If it’s worth killing for, then it’s worth killing to protect after it’s revealed.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Think,” she said. “You possess a code that people really want to have. That’s motivation to keep you alive. But once you reveal the code to the people who want it, that motivation goes away.” She pulled up at a stop sign, came to a full halt, and then moved on. Little towns were famous for speed traps and overzealous cops.

  Graham shook his head. “No, that can’t be right. Those people in the parking lot a few minutes ago weren’t trying to save me. They were trying to kill me.”

  “I’m not sure that’s true,” Jolaine said. “I think they may have been there to kidnap you. I think we surprised them by shooting back. In fact, I’m convinced of it.”

  “So, what does that mean?” Graham asked. “To us, that is.”

  Jolaine considered the question. “It means that we can’t trust anyone about anything.” She wasn’t sure that she could connect the dots verbally, but she gave it a try. “Whatever the code does—I assume it unlocks something secret and important, else why have a code in the first place?—it makes sense to me that it was as important to your parents to have it as it was for the shooters to guarantee that they didn’t get it.”

  “Or maybe the shooters wanted it for themselves,” Graham offered.

  That was good. He was on the same page as she. “Extrapolating out, then,” Jolaine continued, “whichever side wins in the struggle, the other side is going to want to destroy the code.”

  Graham leaned his head back into the headrest and closed his eyes. “And the code lives in my head,” he said. He lolled his head over to look at Jolaine. “This is really, really bad, isn’t it?”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  At this point in monitoring an operation, not much could pull Venice’s attention from her team’s radio traffic. The alert bell on her computer was one of them. The bell meant that based on the parameters she had established to track the actions of Jolaine Cage and Graham Mitchell, ICIS had found something worth reporting. She pulled up the screen, and her heart skipped. The police had been dispatched to a shoot-out in the parking lot of the Hummingbird Motel in Napoleon, Ohio. Multiple reports to the emergency operations center of machine gun fire with people dead in the street. Police were on their way.

  This was not the time to interrupt Jonathan with such a new development—if ever there was a time for uninterrupted concentration, it was when he was about to crash a door—but she needed more details.

  Generally speaking, ICIS ran five to ten minutes behind real time. It was a great way to dial in to fairly obscure events, but when something was this high profile, local television news was often the fastest route to a thorough overview. Reporters might not get the nuances correct in the early moments, but these days every station with more than ten kilowatts of power had its own fleet of helicopters, and they would shoot each other out of the sky to air the first live feed of a crime scene.
r />   A CBS affiliate had a bird near the scene. Other networks had franchises in the area, but she’d long ago hacked the code to access the live feeds for CBS—their video was transmitted in real time, in unedited form—so whenever possible, she went there first.

  At any given moment, dozens of live feeds flooded news networks from all over the world. They didn’t just beam from their own camera operations, either. Newsrooms monitored the feeds from every competitor, as well as those from Al Jazeera and BBC, and God only knew how many other news organizations. That required a fair amount of sifting, but she’d done this enough times before that she made fairly quick work of it.

  ICIS dinged again. Police units were on the scene, and they confirmed six dead, with several of the motel guests unaccounted for. Officers were in the process of interviewing witnesses.

  The no-coincidences rule lived on. Venice already knew who was on the other side of that gunfight, and because the original reports made no mention of a wounded child—always the headline, even for cops—she knew that at a minimum, Graham was well enough to not to have died on the spot.

  The video feed she’d selected showed images from too far away as the news chopper approached the scene and the cameraman sharpened his focus.

  Venice wondered if the police had connected the same dots that she had, that the suspected child abuse call from the previous night was linked to this incident.

  If so, it hadn’t gone up on ICIS yet. She assumed that she was ahead of the police, at least for now. The thought brought her comfort, if only for the bragging rights.

  In her ear, she heard Jonathan’s voice say, “The security plan is hot now.” Without looking, she tapped the button on the top of the digital timer that would count down seven minutes.

  She keyed the mike on her radio. “Speak up, Big Guy.”

  “Right here.”

  She turned back to her computer screens while Digger and Boxers discussed the logistics of their entry plan. First, she pulled up the police report from the suspected pedophile incident to verify the room number where it occurred. She wasn’t sure yet what to do with that tidbit of information, but she’d learned over the years that information collected one tidbit at a time eventually combined to be a chunk of useful stuff.