by Frey, James
“At least you’re honest,” I tell him.
He smiles. “That’s not a word many have used to describe me.” There is a long pause; then he says, “So, Mr. Boone, what do we do now? I assume the Minoan or Ott has removed Brecht from here. Or perhaps he fled on his own, although I doubt that.”
“Meaning I have everything I need,” I say.
“Except, as I’ve mentioned before, Brecht’s daughter and grandson. And please don’t try to tell me that you don’t care what happens to them. As I’ve already pointed out, your devotion to family is a regrettable flaw in your character, at least as far as your position in this game is concerned.”
“Maybe I’ll surprise you,” I say.
“I would enjoy that,” Kenney says. “But before you decide, I should also tell you that you might not have as much as you think you do.”
I don’t understand, and this must show on my face, because Kenney grins. But before I can ask him what he means, the door to the apartment across the hall from the one Kenney has exited opens and a man comes out carrying a bag of trash. The door and the man block Kenney from my view. The man, looking up and seeing me holding a gun, swears loudly in Russian and throws the bag at me as he turns and ducks back inside. I knock the bag aside, but now Kenney is running down the hallway away from me. He reaches a door and goes through it as I start to chase him.
The doorway opens onto a stairwell. Steps go both up and down. I listen, and hear clanging above me. Kenney is headed up. I follow.
I burst out the door at the top of the next flight of stairs, and find myself on the roof. Kenney is also there, standing on the edge and looking around, as if he’s hoping he can somehow escape from me. Hearing the door open, he turns and looks at me.
“It must have occurred to you that you retrieved the weapon and the plans rather easily in Crete,” he says. “Have you asked yourself why?”
It has occurred to me. Even though Ianthe followed us, it did seem unlike the Minoans to leave such an important thing unguarded.
“The plans you have are fake,” Kenney says. “A reproduction. You were allowed to take them, and the pieces, because we wanted you to have them, so that you would feel confident locating Brecht and liberating him. Also, it was a test of their former Player, to see where her loyalties truly lie.”
I think about the tube with the plans, which even now is sewn into the coat I’m wearing. Are they really fakes? I want to believe that he’s lying to me, but I don’t think he is. It all makes too much sense.
“I’ll admit that Ott contacting me was an unexpected development,” Kenney says. “It would have saved a great deal of time had he done it earlier, or if I had been able to find him to suggest a partnership myself. Although admittedly it was easier to let you and his associates do the work of infiltrating Taganka. That was indeed impressive.”
“If you knew the plans were fake, and you knew Brecht was here, then why come to the meeting in Gorky Park at all? Why not just take Brecht and deliver him to the Minoans?”
Kenney sighs. “I’m afraid I let my pride get the best of me,” he says. “I wanted to get the girl as well. Oh, not for the same reasons that you want her. As I said, the Minoans allowed her to escape with you as a test. A test she failed. Now there’s a bounty on her head. I meant to collect it along with the reward for delivering Brecht to them.”
I despise the way he’s speaking about people as if they’re just things to be bought and sold. I think about how he’s killed people who got in his way, or who couldn’t give him what he wanted. He might not be playing Endgame, but he’s playing a game nonetheless. However, his goal isn’t the salvation of a line; it’s money.
“I will return to my original question,” he continues. “What do we do now? Assuming the girl has Brecht, which I think is entirely likely, that means you have one half of the puzzle while the Minoans have the other half. You also have something else they want very badly.”
“Ariadne,” I say.
“Indeed. I can see that what you would like most is to kill me. However, perhaps our interests would be better served if you allow me to broker a deal.”
“Deal? What kind of deal?”
“The girl’s life in exchange for the scientist.”
“I give you Brecht, and the Minoans let Ariadne and me go?” I say.
Kenney nods. “I’m sure I can convince them to agree to that.”
“Maybe the weapon is more important to me than she is,” I say.
He laughs. “Maybe,” he says. “But I don’t think so.”
He’s right, but the way he seems so sure of himself makes me angry. “I’m a Player,” I say. “I’ll do whatever it takes to win.”
He laughs again. “Yes, you’re a Player,” he says. “Just not a very good one.”
I shoot him. When the bullet hits him, a look of surprise flashes across his face, but only for a second. He stumbles backward. At the edge of the roof, he teeters for a moment. Then he falls, disappearing into the night.
Ariadne
The body falls out of the sky, descending like an angel whose wings have been broken and are now useless. It hits the ground with a dull, flat sound. By the time I reach it, blood is already staining the snow around it.
It’s Kenney.
Although the fall itself would almost certainly have killed him, I see that he’s also been shot. I look up at the roof, and see someone looking down at me. Although I can’t see the face, I’m sure that it’s Boone. I wave, and he waves back.
I kneel and search Kenney’s body. In the inside pocket of his coat I find a small leather-bound notebook. I slip it into my own pocket and continue looking, but find nothing else of interest, just some money and, curiously, a handkerchief with the initials JEK embroidered on it.
Behind me, Ott and Oswald Brecht stand gazing over my shoulder at the body. I stand up and say, “Let’s go back to the apartment.”
“What about the body?” Brecht asks.
“Leave it,” I say. “This is Moscow. Nobody will notice one more body on the street.”
We go inside and climb the stairs. When we reach the apartment, Boone is inside, waiting for us.
“You got here before me,” Boone says, glancing at Brecht.
Despite the situation, I smile. “You know I don’t like to lose a race,” I say.
He grins. “I’m afraid our friend Kenney had a little accident.”
“So I noticed.” I take the notebook from my pocket and toss it to him. “I found this on him.”
Boone catches the notebook. He opens it, flipping through the pages.
“Anything interesting?” I ask.
He nods. “Very interesting. He has names and contact information for at least seven lines in here.” He looks at a few more pages, then shuts the notebook and tosses it back to me. “He told me he wasn’t Cahokian. That doesn’t surprise me, but I wonder how many other lines he’s been playing against each other.”
“And how many know about the weapon,” I say as I look at the pages. As Boone said, there’s a lot of information. Many people would kill for the intelligence Kenney has scribbled in his book.
At the mention of the weapon, a shadow passes over Boone’s face. “That’s another thing,” he says. “He claimed the plans we have are forgeries.”
I look up. “Really?”
“He says it was all a Minoan trap to test your loyalty. You said it felt too easy. Maybe you were right.”
I think of Ianthe confronting me on the dock. I told her that my taking the plans wasn’t about disloyalty to my line, but it was clear she didn’t believe me. Still, she surely would have relayed my message back to the others. Would any of them believe what I said about wanting to use the weapon for a greater good? Would Cassandra?
“You have the plans with you?” Brecht’s question interrupts the storm of thoughts raging in my head.
“Yes,” Boone tells him.
“May I see them?”
“Will you be able to tel
l if they’re fake?” I ask.
He nods. “Most likely.”
I look at Boone, who says, “Can I borrow your knife?”
I reach into my boot and remove the knife, which I hand to him. He uses it to cut the stitches on the lining of his coat, then gives it back. He slides the tube holding the plans out of its hiding place and gives it to Brecht.
Brecht sits on a sofa, opens the tube, and tips the plans into his hand. He unrolls them and places them on a coffee table in front of him. He looks at them for a moment, running his fingers over them.
“The paper is not the same,” he says almost immediately. “And the writing, while very similar to that on the originals, is different.”
“You remember them that well?” I question him.
He nods. “I’ve studied these plans in great detail,” he says. “Sometimes I even dream about them.” He looks up and smiles sadly. “It’s not every day you discover something this important. Evrard and I devoted much of our lives to deciphering the plans. I suspect either of us could have re-created our half from memory, although now I don’t know.”
“Your half?” I say, not understanding.
“He didn’t tell you?” says Brecht.
“Tell us what?” Boone asks.
“The plans were in two parts,” Brecht says. “They were kept separate to prevent anyone from getting the full set. Evrard had only one half.”
“Where’s the other?” I say.
Brecht rolls up the set of plans on the table and places them back in the tube. “Cappadocia,” he says. “Hidden. We never found it.”
“Cappadocia?” Boone says.
“We believe so.”
“Why didn’t you find them?” I ask him.
“If the device is really as powerful as we think it could be, Evrard and I didn’t want the people we were forced to work for to build it,” he says. “We kept the existence of the second set of plans a secret between us.” He looks at me. “Do you have the pieces as well?”
“Yes,” I say. “Although those may be forgeries too.”
He waves a hand at me. “That wouldn’t matter. We re-created those pieces from the plans.”
“They’re not original?”
Brecht shakes his head. “The pieces we found were damaged. Evrard and I built the ones that were in the box. May I see them?”
He cannot. The box with the pieces is still hidden in the basement of the apartment building where Tolya and the others lived. At least, I hope it is. If Tolya was correct, Kenney didn’t find it.
“The box is safe,” Boone says. “We just need to retrieve it.”
“Then we should go,” says Brecht.
“Not so quickly,” Ott says. He’s been silent throughout the conversation. Now we all look at him. “Kenney threatened my family. And yours,” he adds, looking at Brecht. “He might have been lying, but if there’s any truth to what he said, we need to find out.”
“There are addresses in the notebook,” I tell them. “He at least knew where they lived.”
“But there are a lot of addresses,” Boone says. “Including my family’s and Ariadne’s family’s. Kenney was obviously a collector of information. But who knows what he actually did with any of it.”
“I need to contact my wife,” Ott says. “And Lottie.”
“Can you do that?” I ask him.
“With the radio back at the apartment, yes,” he tells me. “Or I can at least try.”
“And then what?” I say. I look at Boone. “We need a plan.”
“We can talk on the way to the apartment,” Boone answers.
We leave, getting into the car Boone has stolen. As we drive back to the apartment building, we continue our discussion. I’m not entirely comfortable talking in front of Ott and Brecht, but we have few options.
“If my line has the authentic plans, and they don’t know about the second set, we still have an advantage,” I say.
“Also, they don’t have Brecht,” Boone reminds me.
“But if they have our families, they have a bargaining chip,” Ott remarks.
Only if you’re willing to make the bargain, I think to myself. Although I do not want to see Ott’s family or Jackson’s family hurt, they ultimately have nothing really to do with me. I know this is my Player mind reacting to the situation, but it’s how I’ve been trained to assess the situation. I wonder if Boone is thinking the same thing, or if he’s thinking about Lottie and Bernard.
“Excuse me,” Brecht says from behind me. “But what is your plan for the weapon if it can be built?”
This, of course, is the big question. How much Brecht knows about Endgame, or the Makers, is unclear to me. Will he understand, or believe me, if I say we want to use the weapon against its creators, to try to stop humanity from being almost entirely wiped out? It sounds ridiculous even to me.
However, the way I answer him may determine whether or not he continues to help us. After all, what incentive does he have for helping to build the weapon? Maybe, like Sauer, he would rather see it lost forever. Although I don’t think so. If he did, he wouldn’t have mentioned the second set of plans. Perhaps he has other motivations, though, ones that work counter to ours. This is a tricky situation, and I’m unsure how to proceed.
“We want to use it to stop bad guys,” Boone says in his typically brash manner.
“Ah,” says Brecht. “In that case, I suppose the question I should be asking is, who do you think the bad guys are?”
“We can talk about that later,” Boone says. We have arrived at the apartment building. Boone looks at me and says, “Maybe just Ott and I should go in. I can get the box, and he can try to radio Lottie or his wife.”
I know what he’s doing. He’s leaving me to talk to Brecht. I still don’t know what I’m going to say, how I’m going to explain the situation we’re facing, but I say, “All right. Be quick.”
The two of them leave, and Brecht and I are alone. Before I can decide how to begin, the scientist says, “You cannot trust Tobias.”
It takes me a moment to realize that he means Ott. “No,” I agree. “I don’t think we can.”
“He’s not a bad man,” Brecht continues. “But he is an angry one, and that makes his thinking unclear.”
I turn around and look at him. “What about you?” I ask. “Aren’t you angry about what’s been done to you?”
Surprisingly, he smiles. “I’m a scientist,” he says. “I’m trained to look at situations impartially.”
“That’s easier to do in a laboratory than in a Soviet prison cell,” I remind him. “Are you telling me you never think about revenge?”
He shrugs. “What’s done is done.”
His voice is calm, but I don’t know that I believe him. “And what about your daughter?” I say. “Would you not do anything to save her and your grandchild?”
This time, he is slower to answer. When he does, it’s a simple “yes.”
Then he looks into my eyes. “So let us hope no one has taken them.”
I appreciate his honesty, although it does nothing to make me feel better about what might happen later on. I say nothing, but sit silently and wait for Boone and Ott to return. This game has become crowded with players, each of us with our own motivations. Yet we are all going to have to work together, at least temporarily.
A few minutes later, the doors open and Boone and Ott get back into the car. Boone is carrying the box. “Right where we left it,” he says, handing it to me.
“What about Lottie?” I ask. “Did you reach her or Greta?”
My question is met with silence. Then Ott says curtly, “No.”
“That doesn’t mean something has happened to them,” Boone says. “Just that we weren’t able to get through.”
He and I exchange glances. This is going to be a problem. If Ott thinks his wife and child are threatened, he’s going to be even more on edge. And dangerous.
“We need to return to France,” he says.
“May
I see the box?” Brecht says before anyone can reply to Ott.
I turn and hand him the box. He holds it on his lap and opens it. He looks at the pieces inside.
“Are they forgeries?” I ask.
“If they are, they’re very good ones,” he says. “But it doesn’t matter. Only one of them is truly important.” He selects one piece and picks it up. “This one.”
“Why that one?” Boone asks him.
“Because,” Brecht says, “this is not part of the weapon.”
“What is it?” I say.
“A key,” he answers.
“A key to what?”
“If I am correct, to the place where the second set of plans is hidden.”
“In Cappadocia,” I say.
“Yes.”
Our problem has now become more difficult. France and Cappadocia are in different directions from Moscow. Getting to either one will take several days. I know everyone in the car is thinking this.
“If we get the plans, we’ll have something they want,” Boone says.
“It might be too late by then,” Ott counters. “They already think they have everything.”
Again we’ve found ourselves between Scylla and Charybdis. I’d like to think that Boone and I are in control of what happens next, but the truth is, it’s Brecht who is commanding the ship. If he refuses to cooperate, going to Cappadocia will be useless. And if he chooses to go there instead of France, we will have to deal with Ott’s reaction.
Boone looks at the scientist, who is still holding up the key and looking at it. “Well?” Boone says. “What do you think?”
Brecht closes his hand around the key. “I think I want to see my daughter again.”
Boone
The town we are walking into isn’t on any map.
All around us, volcanic rock formations tower to the skies, many of them ending in rounded points, like giant stone mushrooms growing out of the earth. The surrounding landscape is harsh but beautiful, rocky and treeless, covered in a thin blanket of snow that crunches beneath our boots as we ascend a hill. It feels like we’re walking on the moon.