End Game

by John Gilstrap

  “And a guard patrol?”

  “When did you become a reporter?” Boxers asked as he pulled the door closed.

  “Who would see this and not be curious?” Rollins said.

  “Which is a good reason to have a guard patrol,” Jonathan said. He motioned to the leather sofas and chairs near the fireplace. “Have a seat, Colonel. Suffice to say that things happen out here that are best not witnessed by curiosity seekers. Think of it as my company’s testing grounds.” He let the words settle in. “Can I get you something to drink?”

  Rollins shook his head and waved the question away. “No, I’m fine, thanks.”

  Big Guy was already halfway to the wet bar in the back corner of the dining area. “I’m not,” he said. “You want your usual, Boss?”

  “Please.” On his own, this would be the time of day for a martini, but since Boxers was tending the bar, that meant a couple fingers of Lagavulin scotch. Boxers didn’t have the patience for the delicate chemistry that was a good martini.

  Jonathan settled himself into a chair, crossed his legs, and locked in on Rollins’s eyes. “You know, Colonel, I don’t think either one of us wants the charade of small talk. What say you get right to what you have on your mind?”

  Rollins leaned forward in his chair and rested his elbows on his knees. “I presume you still remember Boomer Nasbe.”

  “Of course I do.” Boomer had joined the Unit shortly before Jonathan was on his way out, but it was a small, tight community. Plus, Jonathan had had some recent dealings with Boomer’s wife and son. “Is he okay?” The scotch floated over Jonathan’s right shoulder, clamped in Boxers’ fingers.

  “No,” Rollins said. “He’s gone rogue.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Boxers asked as he took the sofa for himself.

  “It means he’s killing off Agency assets.”

  “Bullshit,” Boxers said. “He was a good kid. No way would he do that.”

  “And yet he is.”

  “Why?” Jonathan asked.

  Rollins shrugged. “Why does anyone do anything like that? Something went crosswise in his head, and he started wasting people.”

  Jonathan and Boxers exchanged looks. “I’m not buying it,” Jonathan said. “I mean, I can imagine him whacking Agency guys—who among us hasn’t considered that a time or two?—but I don’t buy that he’s crazy. He’s got a reason.”

  “Lee Harvey Oswald had reasons, Dig,” Rollins said. “So did John Wilkes Booth and Charles Manson. But so what? Murder is murder.”

  “The Army is up to its nipples in shrinks these days,” Boxers said. “Somebody has to have wondered the obvious.”

  “You already know some of it,” Rollins said. “Those assholes who came at his family undoubtedly screwed him up at least a little.”

  “No,” Jonathan said. “Well, of course it was traumatic, but I spoke with Boomer not long after that. He was okay.”

  “His deployments, then,” Rollins said. With an acknowledging hand to Big Guy, he added, “Nipples-deep in shrinks as we are, there are no doubt hundreds of possible diagnoses, but none of them can be tested because we haven’t been able to talk to Boomer because we don’t know where he is.”

  “Why does it have to be Boomer?” Jonathan pressed. “You’ve got a couple of dead Agency guys—”

  “Three,” Rollins interrupted. “Three dead Agency guys, and they were all in the same AO as Boomer during his last deployment.”

  Jonathan recognized the acronym for area of operation. “So? After we punted on Iraq, Afghanistan was the only AO we had left. There have to be thousands of cross-links between the Agency dead and soldiers in country.”

  “And what makes you think they weren’t killed by the Taliban?” Boxers asked.

  “You’re both getting defensive,” Rollins said.

  “Of course we’re defensive!” Boxers yelled. Jonathan could tell he was spinning up to a bad place. “And why the hell aren’t you? Haven’t you turned your back on enough of your brothers over the years?”

  Jonathan extended a hand to calm his friend down. “Not now, Box.”

  “Screw you,” he snapped, and his face instantly showed horror. “Not you. Him. Not only do you lay this on your own Army, you have to lay it on our Unit brother.”

  “If you’ll calm the hell down, I’ll explain it all to you!” Rollins shouted. He could get spun up, too.

  Jonathan knew it was time to play peacekeeper. “Quit shouting, both of you. Colonel, I encourage you to make your case quickly, and with minimal bullshit, and as you do, keep in mind that you’re talking about a friend who’s given a hell of a lot for his country.”

  Some of the red left Rollins’s face. None of it left Boxers’.

  “Some bad things happened on Boomer’s last tour,” Rollins said. “I can’t go into details, but he’d been working a source for quite some time, and then the source disappeared. We think he blamed his CIA counterparts.”

  “Why would he do that?” Jonathan asked.

  “Because we blame the Agency for everything,” Rollins replied. “Some things never change.”

  “There’s a giant step between blaming and killing,” Boxers said. “What proof do you have?”

  Rollins looked to the ceiling and scowled, as if to divine his next words. “There’s proof, and then there’s proof. We don’t have any of the latter. What we do know is, he came home, walked away from his marriage, and disappeared.” His eyes bored into Jonathan. “And I mean disappeared. Off the grid.”

  “You know, we’re trained to do that, right?” Jonathan said. “In fact, we’re paid to do that when we’re in hostile territory.”

  “But domestically? Who would do that?”

  Jonathan waited for him to get the absurdity of his own question.

  Rollins acknowledged with a nod. “Okay, other than you, who would do that?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Within a few days of his disappearance, the first of the Agency guys was killed, shot with a five-five-six round from a long ways away. Over a hundred yards, as I recall. He was on his way to his car in the driveway, and it was a perfect head shot.”

  Jonathan felt tension in his chest. That wasn’t the kind of a shot an amateur could make.

  “Three days later, the second agent was taken out as he exited a coffee shop outside of Fredericksburg, Virginia, not far from your stomping grounds. Five-five-six again, center of mass, hollow-point round. Perfect shot and no one heard it.”

  Boxers’ ire had transformed to concern. “Was this a coffee shop he went to regularly?”

  Rollins nodded. “Every day. How did you know?”

  “Was the first guy—the head shot—a hollow point?”

  “No.” Rollins smiled. He saw that Boxers got it.

  “He was worried about collateral damage,” Big Guy said. He looked to Jonathan. “He’d studied the guy’s routine and used HPs as a safety.”

  “What about the third?” Jonathan asked.

  “Another head shot,” Rollins said, “again from long distance. The interesting thing there was that the shooter showed great patience. The agent had been standing for ten minutes with his kid at the end of the driveway, waiting for the school bus.” He looked to Boxers. “Like before, this was a daily routine. He waited till the little girl was on the bus, and the bus was on its way before he shot. No one heard or saw anything. By the time his wife woke up and noticed he was missing—and then found the body—he was already stiff.”

  Jonathan took a pull on his scotch as he pushed the pieces into place. “That still doesn’t mean Boomer did it,” he said. Even he heard the weakness of his words.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Rollins said. “The Agency thinks he did, and they’ll move heaven and earth to find him and take him out.”

  “What about due process?” Boxers asked.

  “Where have you been the past few years?” Rollins countered. “The alphabet agencies stopped caring about due process when the regime changed. That was about the sa
me time when beat cops started riding around in tanks. This isn’t your childhood America anymore.”

  “So, we’ve got a lot of conjecture and assumptions,” Jonathan summarized. “Cut to the chase, Colonel. Why are you here?”

  Rollins cast a nervous glance to Boxers as he said, “We want you to find Boomer and bring him home.”

  “Well, that’s not gonna happen,” Boxers said. “I don’t hunt down my friends.”

  Jonathan said, “By ‘bring him home,’ do you mean alive or dead?”

  “Preferably alive.”

  “But dead would be okay, too?” Boxers growled.

  Rollins worked his jaw muscles. “No, dead would not be okay, Box. I’m not the monster you pretend I am. But don’t forget that every wet-work contractor for the CIA is out looking for this guy. If they get him, he’s toast.”

  “Then why not just leave it to them?” Jonathan asked.

  Rollins recoiled from the question. “Now who’s being the monster? You said it yourself, Dig. He’s family. Boomer deserves better than a bullet. I don’t care what he did, he deserves better than that. If you can get to him first, maybe you can talk him down. If he hears that you’re the one hunting for him, maybe he’ll surrender. This is serious shit.”

  Jonathan leaned back into his seat and crossed his legs. The math here wasn’t working for him. “You said bad things happened to him over there on his last tour. I won’t even ask you for those details—at least not yet—but if the bad stuff is traceable to specific interactions with specific Agency assets, then I presume the remaining assets have become much harder targets.”

  Rollins looked to the floor.

  “Are there any more targets, Stanley?” Boxers asked.

  Rollins took a deep breath. “No,” he said. “All the targets have been eliminated.”

  Jonathan exchanged a confused look with Boxers. “Then what’s done is done,” he said. “Good reasons, bad reasons, that’s for others to decide. I’m not a cop. I’m not going to traipse all over hell’s half acre to bring a colleague into custody.”

  “It’s more than that,” Rollins said. “The killings are real—they really happened—but that’s not the punch line.”

  “Good Christ, Stanley,” Boxers said with a derisive laugh. “Can’t you just for once in your life deal from the top of the deck? Why does everything—”

  “He’s a traitor, guys,” Rollins said. “He’s selling secrets to the world.”

  Something stirred in Jonathan’s gut. “What kind of secrets?”

  “The most damaging kind you can think of,” Rollins said.

  Photo by Amy Cesal

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JOHN GILSTRAP is the acclaimed author of High Treason, Damage Control, Threat Warning, Hostage Zero, No Mercy, Six Minutes to Freedom, Scott Free, Even Steven, At All Costs, and Nathan’s Run. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. An explosives safety expert and former firefighter, he holds a master’s degree from the University of Southern California and a bachelor’s degree from the College of William and Mary in Virginia. He lives in Fairfax, Virginia. Please visit him at www.johngilstrap.com.

  PINNACLE BOOKS are published by

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  Copyright © 2013 John Gilstrap, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-0-7860-3021-7

  First electronic edition: July 2014

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7860-3022-4

  ISBN-10: 0-7860-3022-4