End Game

by John Gilstrap

  “There,” the gunman said. “Now it doesn’t matter what you told them.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Venice pressed the transmit button. “Scorpion, Mother Hen.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “PC Two was just picked up at the jail by a team claiming to be federal agents. I don’t have access to their names, but the car they’re driving is registered to Emin Zakaev of Detroit, Michigan. That happens to be the same person who lives at the address called from the Hummingbird Motel just minutes before the shoot-out in the parking lot.”

  In the pause that followed, Venice imagined Jonathan and Boxers discussing the importance of the disclosure. After fifteen seconds, Scorpion’s voice came back, “What do we know about the owner?”

  “Really, not very much. Not yet, anyway.” As she spoke, she continued to plow through whatever data she could pull up. Sometimes, it was difficult to decide which was the better move when delivering news to her boss. Should she deliver the headline by itself, or should she wait until she had the whole story? In this case she went with the headline simply because of the speed with which everything was changing.

  “Roger,” Jonathan said. “Get back to me when you know something.”

  Venice owed an answer, and she was going to find it. Every person on the planet had some kind of past, and for every past, a record existed somewhere in cyberspace. Maybe it was an application to a zoning board to put an addition on their house, or maybe it was as simple as a driver’s license. Each of those documents—and thousands of variations of tens of thousands of different possibilities—opened a door to other information, and if one were talented enough in the business of wrangling ones and zeroes, most of those doors could be opened. She often thought of herself as a digital burglar. Armed with a unique set of lock picks, she could enter spaces where she was not welcome and peek into the most private parts of people’s lives.

  She assumed that Emin Zakaev was a pseudonym of some sort. In the short term, that meant that she wouldn’t be able to dig up much about his past that would be relevant to her right now. Tracing aliases was not especially difficult, but it was outrageously time consuming, and time was the commodity of which she had the least.

  She decided to treat the name as if it were real, thus ignoring his past and concentrating on the present. If he used the same pseudonym to register his car and pay his phone bills, there were likely a lot of other things he did with the same name. People rarely thought about the width and depth of the footprints they left every day simply by going through the motions of life. The e-mail address you use to read the New York Times is the same one you use to order toys off the Internet. The credit card you use for cable television is the same one you use to eat at restaurants. Once Venice was able to break into one usage of a credit card, and was able to learn the password, a person’s entire life lay right there, spread out for her to explore.

  As was often the case, the phone company records proved easiest to breach. Armed with Emin Zakaev’s MasterCard and his password, she was able to gain access to every expense he had charged over the past three years. Most of it was useless to her—at this stage, she didn’t care what food he preferred or what books he read, though that could prove important later.

  For the time being, she just wanted something. More often than not she didn’t even know what the something was until she stumbled upon it. In a perfect world, the something would somehow lead her to—

  “Oh, my God!” she exclaimed. It came out half as a shout and half as a laugh. “SecureTrace!”

  It was her first real break, and it was a giant one. SecureTrace was a GPS-based subscription tracking service that automatically called the police if the car’s airbag deployed. Operators responded to calls for directions, or, in the most advanced and expensive versions of the program, would provide a kind of valet service to help lost drivers find their way to a particular location.

  As with ProtecTall Security, SecureTrace was the most common service of its kind, and as such, Venice had penetrated their firewall ages ago, in support of a different case. Since then, she’d been careful to leave no traces of her occasional visits. As long as a company had no idea that their security had been violated, they had no reason to make substantial changes. Fewer changes, in turn, meant continued easy access, and that, boys and girls, was the Holy Grail of hacking.

  SecureTrace was even kind enough to put customers’ account numbers on their credit card invoices. They used that same account number internally. Once inside their system, all Venice had to do was type in the account number, and she’d be able to find the precise location of the enrolled vehicle, written in longitude and latitude. A simple conversion from there would give her a satellite view of the location. The view wouldn’t be real time, of course—in fact the satellite photos could be years old—but at least she could find it on the map and relay directions if needed.

  In this case, Emin Zakaev was on Route 474 headed north toward Detroit.

  “I got you,” she said with a grin.

  Jonathan never had much respect for the law enforcement community. He thought that too many cops put their careers ahead of matters of right and wrong—a trait that was trumped three times over by the prosecutors who saw every indictment as a political statement, the next rung in the ladder of their electoral aspirations. During his days as a hired gun for Uncle Sam, he’d run into a few such careerists in the Army, but precious few of them within the Unit.

  Disdain for the profession notwithstanding, he had to respect their ability to pull stakeout duty. Boxers and he had been sitting in the car watching for Peter and Anita Markham for over an hour. It was a pleasant little street in a pleasant little neighborhood, which roughly translated to being a boring as hell spot in the middle of the American nightmare called suburbia.

  “How do we know when we’ve waited long enough?” Big Guy asked.

  “When they get here, I guess. How long can it take?”

  Boxers started to answer, but stopped and dipped his forehead toward a spot ahead of them. “Looks like we might have friends,” he said.

  A copper-colored van with tinted side windows approached headlong from the opposite end of the street and took up a position on the other side, about equidistant from the Markham residence. In the dark, he couldn’t make out any other details.

  “They’re not even subtle,” Boxers agreed. “How do you want to handle it?”

  Jonathan shrugged. “There’s nothing to handle yet. They’re just a couple of guys out for a drive. Just like us.”

  “It’s that just-like-us part that I worry about,” Boxers said.

  The driver of the other car killed his lights. No one opened a door.

  Jonathan brought binoculars to his eyes. “Copy down this license number.” He read off the Michigan plate number.

  “Got it,” Boxers said. He’d written it on a page of the notebook he’d pulled from a pocket on his thigh.

  Jonathan was reaching for the transmit button when his radio broke squelch and Venice said, “Scorpion, Mother Hen.”

  He looked over at Big Guy. “Okay, that was scary.” He keyed the mike. “Go ahead, Mother Hen.”

  “I have virtual eyeballs on Emin Zakaev,” she said.

  Jonathan sighed. “I’m tired, Mother Hen. What do virtual eyeballs look like?”

  She explained about SecureTrace and revealed the physical location of the vehicle. “That’s only about a thirty-minute head start from you,” she concluded.

  “Zakaev has PC Two,” Jonathan said, referring to Jolaine. “She’s substantially less important to us than PC One. What do we have on the boy?”

  A pause. When Venice’s voice returned, it was heavy with concern. “Nothing that I haven’t already told you. Has he not shown up already?”

  “Negative,” Jonathan said. “But we have some friends who have. Tell me when you’re ready to copy a license plate number.”

  Tracing plates barely qualified for Venice 101. “Ready when you
are,” she said.

  Jonathan read the number that Boxers held up.

  Seconds later, Venice announced, “That number traces to a Kathryn Kennison out of Muncie, Indiana. It’s a Prius.”

  Boxers chuckled. “Did you know that Prius means ‘little penis’ in Latin?”

  Jonathan laughed. He had no idea what Prius meant, but he was nearly certain it wasn’t that. “That’s not the vehicle I’m looking at,” he said over the radio. “I’m assuming there’s no report of the Prius being stolen.”

  “That’s almost always the headline of motor vehicle reports,” Venice said. “I don’t see anything like that.”

  “Stand by,” Jonathan said. He looked to Boxers. “Any thoughts?”

  “I defer to the brains of the outfit,” Big Guy said. “I just drive and break things. You think all the lofty thoughts.”

  Jonathan smiled. Reading through the bullshit, he understood that Big Guy had no better idea of the next step than he did.

  “I’ll tell you something that bugs me,” Big Guy said. “As far as I know, this dance has only two sides, the bad guys and us. Those guys in the other car are bad guys by default. The Markhams are way late getting here, and that’s not good. If ‘not good’ happens to the good guys, it has to be at the hands of the bad guys. So, how come the bad guys are watching the same house we are?”

  Jonathan was impressed. It was a very good point. “You know what?” he said. “I think we should go out and have a little chat with—”

  “Break, break, break,” Venice said. There was a new edge to her voice, something close to panic. “Emergency traffic. Scorpion, are you there?”

  Jonathan punched the transmit button. “Go ahead,” he said.

  “This is bad,” Venice said. “I just got an urgent update from ICIS. There’s been a multiple shooting on the road between the police station and your location. Two people shot, a man and a woman. The notice uses the phrase ‘execution style.’ ”

  Something twisted in Jonathan’s gut. “Is it the Markhams?”

  “No names yet,” Venice said. “The investigation is just beginning. All I know is that the victims are young, and they were driving a car that matches the description of the Markhams’ car.”

  Jonathan closed his eyes. This was bad. “Any mention of a teenager?”

  “Negative.”

  Jonathan slammed the dashboard with his hand. He looked to Boxers and keyed the mike at the same time. “You know this means they got him, right?” he said.

  “That means they’ve got both of them,” Boxers said.

  “And they’re split up,” Jonathan noted. “I don’t know that they knew what they were doing, but that’s a smart move. We have to choose our targets.”

  “We’re choosing the kid, right?” Boxers asked.

  “In a perfect world we would,” Jonathan said. “But we don’t know his whereabouts. We do know where the girl is.”

  “She’s not the primary target.”

  “That’s why we have secondary targets,” Jonathan explained. “When the primary is unavailable, you go for second best.”

  Boxers shook his head. “No,” he said. “We’re not choosing a trained professional over a helpless kid.”

  “We’re not choosing anything,” Jonathan corrected. “We’re playing the only hand we were dealt. In Column A we know something—it’s not much, but it’s a GPS tracking point. In Column B we know zip. It makes no sense—”

  “Then let’s learn something,” Boxers said. He opened his door and stepped out into the night.

  “What the hell—” Then Jonathan got it. Big Guy was going to confront the men in the other car. “Box, no!”

  Too late. Big Guy was already striding toward the van.

  “Shit,” Jonathan spat. He opened his own door and stepped out to cover his friend. “If you’ve got a plan, this would be a good time to clue your boss in on it.”

  “Just gonna chat,” Boxers said. He moved with surprising grace and speed. For the Big Guy, chatting and head-breaking were often synonymous.

  To their credit, the guys in the van read the situation for what it was. They pulled away from the curb and drove off. In a hurry. At first, they seemed to be heading directly toward Boxers, but when Big Guy didn’t dodge out of the way, they swerved around him.

  “Do not draw down on them!” Jonathan commanded. Boxers hadn’t made a move for his Beretta, but Jonathan knew the man well enough to anticipate.

  “Cowards,” Boxers grumbled.

  “What the hell was that?”

  “They’re bad guys,” Boxers said. “They know where Graham Mitchell is.” He glared after the van as it disappeared down the residential street and turned the corner.

  “No, they don’t,” Jonathan countered. “We just discussed this. If they were scoping the place out, then they didn’t know that the Markham vehicle was hit.”

  Boxers shifted his eyes and looked down at Jonathan. Realization dawned. “Well, shit,” he said. He started walking back toward their vehicle. It was as close to an admission of a mistake as Boxers was capable of making.

  Jonathan pressed the transmit button on his radio. “Mother Hen, Scorpion. I need you to send me the coordinates for PC Two’s location, and a probable intercept point.”

  In all the years Jonathan had been plying his trade, he had never lost a precious cargo. He wasn’t starting now.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Graham’s world had no meaning. After shooting the Markhams, his captors had descended upon him. It was five against one, maybe more. He couldn’t resist as they shoved some kind of cloth into his mouth and sealed it in with a long strip of what looked and felt like duct tape. They passed three loops around his head, and then he was silent. He’d tried screaming, but the sound went nowhere. Next, they pinioned his arms behind his back. They wrapped something—rope, maybe, but it felt wider than that—around his wrists, and then they wrapped more of it around his elbows.

  With his mouth and arms taken care of, they’d pressed lumps of what felt like moist clay against his eyes and wrapped them in place. Then they did the same thing with his ears. The final step was to bind his knees together, and then his ankles. He was blind, deaf, and dumb. As time passed, and his limbs fell asleep, he was also paralyzed.

  He’d lost all track of time. Someone could have told him he’d been wherever he was for hours or for days, and he wouldn’t be able to argue. All he knew was that he was in a vehicle of some sort, and he only knew that because of the constant bouncing movement. He also smelled the faint aroma of gasoline. Nothing strong or nauseating, but definitely there.

  There was also the stink of his own sweat and his own fear. He didn’t think he’d pissed himself, but the smell was definitely there.

  God, it was hot. He was soaked through with sweat. He’d hoped for a while that the sweat on his face would loosen the tape around his mouth, but he’d had no such luck. Not yet, anyway.

  His nose was clogging up, and he was terrified of suffocating. He kept blowing out hard and then trying to inhale easily. God only knew how much snot he’d blasted all over himself and his surroundings.

  These people wanted him dead.

  Or did they? Killing him would have been the easiest thing in the world to do. They didn’t hesitate for even a second before killing the Markhams. How difficult would have been to shoot him in the head just as they’d shot Peter and Anita?

  The Markhams, he thought. I killed them. If it hadn’t’t been for me, they’d still be alive. Even as the thought formed in his head he knew that it wasn’t true—not completely, anyway—but it was true enough not to be false.

  How many more people had to die because of this ridiculous code? What could possibly be so important, so vital, that a stupid, random string of numbers and letters was worth killing for? And what had the Markhams done to deserve being shot and left in the grass to be found by animals?

  Out of nowhere, images of wolves and buzzards appeared in his head, tearing and pick
ing away at the Markhams’ dead bodies. He tried to will the images away, but they wouldn’t go. He knew that wolves didn’t even live in this part of the country, but that didn’t stop the horror-movie footage from playing in his brain. They rooted deeply into Peter Markham’s gut, pulling out intestines and—

  The car hit a huge bump, big enough to make him bounce, and it seemed to be slowing. In fact, there were a lot of bumps, making him wonder if they’d gone off-road.

  Oh, shit. No one will ever find my body!

  Graham shook his head and thumped it against the floor. He had to quit thinking things like that. He needed to become more like Jolaine, more logical. Not everything was a huge crisis. Not everything spelled his imminent death.

  “Settle the hell down,” he said, though the words came out as a muffled, jumbled mess. He remembered Jolaine’s words: Always think, and wait for an opportunity to take action.

  But what action could he take when he couldn’t even move?

  That couldn’t last forever, could it? Sooner or later, they were going to have to at least free his mouth. They wanted information from him, after all. If he couldn’t speak, there wasn’t a hell of a lot for him to say, was there?

  He decided that the first and only thing that he would say was that he wouldn’t say anything until they untied him. He’d heard that arms and legs could get gangrene or some such thing if they didn’t get enough circulation, and gangrene meant getting the arms and legs cut off. Well, that for damn sure wasn’t going to happen to him.

  The motion stopped.

  Graham didn’t know whether he’d felt the vehicle stop, or if he’d just noticed the stillness for the first time. He sensed movement, and then hands were on him and he was being lifted. Unable to kick his feet, he tried an inchworm motion that seemed to loosen their grip, but only for a second before someone got a good hold on his bound knees. From there, he was destined to go wherever they decided to take him.