End Game

by John Gilstrap

“I think they’re like the Army,” LeBron said.

  “You should see the shit they’ve got in their truck,” Georgie said. “It’s like a fort or—”

  Dawn turned on LeBron next. “Is that why you’re doing this? Is this about your dream to be a soldier?”

  “Excuse me,” Jonathan said to defuse what sounded like it could devolve into a long-standing, oft-repeated argument. “Remember what’s at stake here tonight. We believe that the men you describe have kidnapped a young boy after murdering his parents. There’s a young lady involved, too. We don’t know if she is dead or alive.”

  Dawn looked horrified. “Who would do that?” she asked. “How do I know that you’re telling the truth?”

  “You do know that I’m telling the truth,” Jonathan said. “I can see it in your eyes. And I can’t get into details.”

  “So, you are the government,” LeBron said.

  Jonathan surrendered. “Yes,” he said. “Well, not exactly, but essentially, yes. It’s complicated. But I can tell you this: If we don’t help that boy, the consequences will be awful. Not just for him, but for thousands of people.” He paused as the words sank in.

  “That’s a really shitty deal, I know,” Jonathan continued. Then, to Dawn, “Forgive my language. Some words are hardwired, but I promise I’ll try.” To the group: “I know I’m asking you to take a leap of faith, but I’m telling you exactly the way it is.”

  Sensing a crack in Dawn’s barriers, Jonathan rose, pivoted, and walked three steps to his ruck and pulled out the money satchel. “I have something for you here,” he said. With his back turned to the others, he counted off two banded stacks of hundred-dollar bills.

  He turned back to the room. “Here’s two thousand dollars for your troubles,” he said. “Again, you have my word that no harm will come to your house or your children. Consider this payment for your inconvenience.”

  Jonathan walked past LeBron and headed for Dawn. “Here you go, ma’am,” he said. “Thank you for your assistance. In advance.”

  Dawn’s eyes shifted from the money to Jonathan’s eyes and back again. “Who are you really?” she asked.

  “Honestly,” Jonathan said. “If I could tell you, I would. For now, I’ll just have to be Scorpion.” He’d been told by countless others that when he smiled, his eyes flashed in heart-melting ways. He wasn’t sure what that meant, but he’d learned to use the expression to get his way.

  Dawn reached out for the cash. “I’m trusting you,” she said. “And I don’t trust nobody.” Her eyes turned steely. “Don’t you dare let me down.”

  Jonathan crossed his heart. “Thank you,” he said.

  A loud noise drew their attention to the back door in unison.

  “Holy shit,” LeBron said. He was the only one in position to see what was going on.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Graham thought he remembered hearing in health class that once hypothermia sets in, the last thing that preceded death was that you stopped shivering. If that was true, then he had a lot of life left in him.

  He was beyond shivering. The trembling was near convulsive. He lay on his left side on the floor, back under his table and curled into a fetal ball, his knees drawn up and clutched against his chest. But for his constant, spastic movements, his shirt and his pants would have become part of the ice slick that was the floor.

  He couldn’t begin to imagine what the temperature was inside the locker, but he figured it had to be below zero. The cold had turned his skin cherry red. His fingers and toes burned. The nail beds on both looked pure white.

  “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I’m so, so sorry.” Though he had no idea what he was sorry for. Maybe for living. Maybe for dying.

  If he could just die, it would all end. The pain would go away. The fear would go away. He could be back together with—

  The locker door opened with a whoosh that created a warm breeze. Graham was dimly aware that he hadn’t heard the lock slide open this time. Did that mean he’d fallen asleep? Maybe he had in fact died.

  No, he prayed silently. Don’t let me be dead. If he was dead, then this was definitely Hell.

  He heard words, but he couldn’t comprehend them. He was aware that the words were in a language he couldn’t understand, but that didn’t fully explain his lack of comprehension. There were no consonants and vowels. He perceived no real words at all, not even foreign ones. The voices existed as part of a fog, like sounds heard from underwater.

  Someone placed hands on him, but he didn’t know who. He thought he might have seen a face, but like the noise, the faces appeared through a kind of mental gauze. He was floating now, and the cold was falling away.

  Time passed. Minutes perhaps, but certainly seconds. Maybe hours. He was flying and he was getting warmer, and he didn’t care.

  Warm became warmer. Warmth rushed up and surrounded him like a hot bath—the same hot bath he’d prayed to God to feel again when he was in the throes of his frigid muscle spasms.

  Did an answered prayer mean that he was dead after all? It was all so confusing.

  He heard water. More specifically, he heard splashing—but he heard it in the same way he’d heard the voices. All mushy and far away.

  There. He heard it again. Definitely water. Definitely warm water, definitely a bath. But was it his—

  “Graham, wake up.”

  That time, the voice was clear. Couldn’t have been clearer, in fact.

  “Wake up now, son.”

  Dad? Was that his father’s voice? Was that possible? He might have recognized the voice, but his head was so full of stuff—snot? Cotton? Concrete?—that he couldn’t be sure.

  No, that wasn’t possible because his dad was—

  “Graham!” The voice was loud this time. Angry. Frightening.

  A hand landed on his shoulder. It squeezed him and shook him. Hard.

  “What?” That time Graham recognized the voice as his own, and his tone was even louder than that of the man who’d shouted at him. As his eyes opened and consciousness returned, he saw that his fantasy was true. He sat fully clothed in a tub of hot water. It came up nearly to his chin. When he moved, a wave broke over his lower lip.

  “Welcome back.”

  And he was back. Back in the awful place with the awful people. Graham recognized the voice before he recognized the face it belonged to.

  “Life is such a capricious thing, is it not?” Teddy said. “This is among my favorite words, capricious. We have no equivalent in my language. Capricious. One moment we suffer terrible agony, the next we are bathed in comfort and warmth.”

  It all came back to Graham in a rush. The cold, the pain. The pleasure Teddy took from inflicting it. With the memories came the fear.

  “Please don’t hurt me anymore,” Graham said.

  Teddy smiled. “There we go,” he said with a big smile. His teeth were yellow. “Finally, the boy comes to his senses.”

  Graham’s tub was not a bathtub, not really. It was a stainless-steel container that was three times the size of an average bathtub. He didn’t want to know what its real use was. Five people stared down on him, all of them armed with rifles, and all of them looking very pissed.

  “Why are you doing this?” Graham asked.

  “Please do not waste our time by asking questions to which you already know the answers,” Teddy said. “That makes everything so much more difficult. More difficult for me, and much, much more difficult for you.”

  Graham started to speak, but then stopped himself. He’d already told them lies, right? At least he thought he had. Before he said anything more, he needed to remember what the previous lies were. He needed to be consistent. He tried to stall.

  “I told you I don’t remember anything,” he said.

  Graham hadn’t realized that Teddy was squatting to be face-to-face until the man stood up. Teddy folded his arms across his abundant chest, creating a set of man-boobs. “This is why I love my favorite word so much,” he said. “We make ch
oices, we live with the results.”

  Panic started to bloom. “But I—”

  Teddy held up a hand to command silence. “You need to choose your words carefully now, Graham. I don’t want to hurt you more than I have to.”

  Graham’s mind screamed. No more pain. Please, please no more pain. “Can I ask you a question?” he said.

  Teddy smiled. “A question.” He looked to the other men who stood nearby. “Certainly. Ask your question.”

  Graham took a deep, settling breath. “If you were right—you’re not, but if you were—and I really did remember the code thing that you think I know, why wouldn’t you kill me after I gave it to you?”

  The question seemed to intrigue Teddy. Maybe even entertain him. “Ah,” he said. “The hypothetical question. If A is so, what must be the result of B?” He laughed. “All right, I will play your game in kind. Let us say that I believe that you are lying about not remembering the code, and let us say that I would do everything and anything to get that information from you. Are you with me so far?”

  Graham nodded as his stomach churned more.

  “Very well,” Teddy said. “Because that is indeed the case. Rather than asking if I would want to kill you after you gave me what I seek, you should ask yourself what would be your desire to live in terrible pain?”

  Graham’s heart hammered.

  Teddy continued, “So far, you have merely been uncomfortable. You have been cold. But your fingers and toes have not yet been broken. Your knees have not yet been shattered and your testicles have not yet been crushed. Hot wires have not yet been inserted into your eyes. I have done all those things to others, and there is no reason why I would not do the same to you. If you give me what I want, and if I kill you after, I give you my word that it will be quick.” He looked to his gang and they all laughed.

  Graham stared. Whatever they saw in his face made them laugh harder.

  “You are frightened,” Teddy said. “It’s good for you to be frightened. I will make a deal with you. Stay here for a while in the warm tub. You think about what I say, and about what you want. We will walk away for a little while—not long, but for a while. We give you time to decide which you like more, comfort or pain. Is fair, no?”

  Graham nodded because it was the only thing he could think to do.

  “Good,” Teddy said, and he clapped Graham on the shoulder. “You give me your answer when I come back. Then life becomes capricious again.”

  Jonathan walked to the kitchen archway to see if Boxers needed help with Security Solutions’s latest toy. The long gray box that looked like it might contain a set of golf clubs in fact contained an RQ-11 Raven UAV—unmanned aerial vehicle, a drone. The man-portable aircraft, when assembled, had a fifty-five-inch wingspan and weighed a little over four pounds. Propelled by an electric motor, the Raven could stay airborne for over an hour at a cruising altitude of five hundred feet at a distance from the controller of six miles and change. It was the most expensive model airplane that Jonathan had ever bought.

  The container in Boxers’ other hand was a bit smaller, but much heavier. It contained the electronics, the antennas, and the various support equipment that were necessary to control the aircraft. Once it was over the target, Raven would transmit high-definition images back to the command post from its tiny but amazing camera.

  “You okay there, Big Guy?” Jonathan asked.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “I’ve got it.”

  “What is all that crap that you’re bringing into my house?” Dawn asked. While the money had opened her home, her heart apparently remained disengaged.

  “Some very cool technology,” Jonathan said.

  His earbud popped as it broke squelch. “Scorpion, Mother Hen.”

  Jonathan pressed the transmit button on his vest. “Go ahead.”

  “Who are you talking to?” Dawn demanded.

  LeBron reached out and touched his wife’s arm. “Dawn,” he said.

  Jonathan ignored her and focused on the voice in his ear. “I’ve been able to pull up some details on the building in question. Are you in a position to receive?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “Give me five minutes.”

  “Who are you talking to?” Dawn demanded again. “And what happens in five minutes?”

  “I’m talking to the folks back at home.” Jonathan moved to his ruck as he responded, and ripped open the Velcro on the main pouch. He lifted out his heavy-duty laptop computer and a collapsed satellite antenna.

  “And where is home?”

  “You have no need to know,” Jonathan said. He had neither the time nor the desire to engage in small talk. His hands working from muscle memory, Jonathan unfolded the tiny antenna and placed it on top of the television set, pointed out the front window.

  “What’s that for?” Georgie asked.

  “A signal for my computer,” Jonathan replied. He hooked up the cable and began the boot-up process.

  “We have wireless Internet,” Georgie said.

  Jonathan shook his head and smiled. “Not for this, you don’t.” He wasn’t going to attempt to explain the complex encryptions or other tech speak because, quite frankly, he didn’t understand it very well himself.

  When he was booted up and ready to go, he pressed his transmit button. “Okay Mother Hen, we’re set.”

  LeBron laughed. “Mother Hen? Really?”

  “She doesn’t like it much, either,” Jonathan said.

  The screen on Jonathan’s laptop flickered once, and then it was filled with a daytime image of a rectangular industrial building and its immediate surroundings. “This comes from a commercial mapping company,” Venice said in his ear. Commercial mapping company translated to illegal tap into our friends at Fort Meade. “Before we go any further, is this the facility you’re talking about?”

  “Hey, look!” Georgie said, pointing to the screen. “That’s our house.”

  Jonathan pressed Transmit. “Affirmative. That’s the location.”

  “Is that Google Maps?” LeBron asked.

  “Like that,” Jonathan said off the air. “Look, I’m going to need a little space, okay? If you want to watch, watch, but try to keep the talking down.” He didn’t bother to look back at Boxers. If it were left to Big Guy, the family would be gagged and locked in the closet where they couldn’t see anything. Jonathan understood his point—the only way to maintain operational security is to reveal the least amount of information to the fewest people—but sometimes the nature of the operation required including others. Jonathan was confident that their lack of official identity would provide them with adequate backstop against any details of this evening that LeBron and his family might leak to their friends.

  Jonathan’s screen changed to reveal a highly detailed street view of the same property, which now clearly was a factory. The sign over the door read Excalibur Meatpacking Enterprises, Inc.

  “That’s amazing,” LeBron said. “You can count the bricks in the wall. How can you get that kind of detail?”

  “Was ‘try to keep the talking down’ really that complicated an instruction?” Boxers asked.

  “Don’t you get bossy in my house!” Dawn snapped.

  Boxers said, “Yes, ma’am.”

  Jonathan smiled at that exchange. Deep down inside, Boxers had always been moderately terrified of women. It wasn’t something they talked about, but Jonathan had long suspected that Boxers had grown through an odd childhood.

  Using a tiny button of a joystick, Jonathan was able to manipulate the image for a 360-degree walk-around tour of the entire plant. “Come take a look, Big Guy,” he said. Two seconds later, a shadow loomed behind him. Over the course of the next five minutes, they noted the main routes of ingress and egress, the location of the loading dock, and other details that might be important, such as the height of windows and the nature and locations of structures on the roof.

  Jonathan pressed the transmit button. “Okay, we got that.”

  The computer displa
y shifted to a blue background with white lines and words, clearly a digital rendering of an old-style blueprint. “I got this from the Department of Public Works,” Venice explained. “The graphics aren’t optimal, but it’s the best I could do in the limited time window.”

  “What’s the date on this document?” Jonathan asked. The labels appeared to be handwritten, which he hadn’t seen since the advent of computer-aided design rendered traditional draftsmen irrelevant in the late 1980s.

  “Nineteen thirty-two,” Venice said.

  Boxers gave a low whistle. “What do you bet they moved a few walls since then?”

  “He can hear, too?” Georgie said. “That’s not fair. Why can’t we hear?”

  “Shut up, Georgie,” LeBron said.

  “Be nice to your brother,” Dawn said.

  Venice explained, “The basic bones of the place should be the same. I did a quick but thorough search of building permits in the last twenty years, and nothing showed up.”

  Jonathan transmitted, “Of course that assumes that they would necessarily file for permits instead of just building stuff out themselves.”

  “I think that’s a good assumption,” Venice said. “Hoping to find a trail to something more recent, I also scoured the fire inspection records, and saw no mention of structural changes.”

  Jonathan looked to Boxers, who shook his head. “I don’t know how the hell she thinks of this shit,” Big Guy said. Then he shot a glance at Dawn. “Pardon my language.”

  “Page four gives you the best overview of the floor plan,” Venice said.

  Jonathan clicked his way to page four, which revealed a plan view for a manufacturing facility that looked like every other manufacturing facility. The offices lined the front part, while the much larger processing area featured labels that included an offal room, a bleeding pit, and a head washing station. These in addition to storage rooms, a pre-cooler, a cooler, and a freezer.

  “That’s disgusting,” Boxers said. “Almost makes you want to be a vegetarian.” For Big Guy, almost was the key word there. The amount of red meat he could consume at one sitting made him legend among his fellow Unit operators back in the day.