End Game

by David Baldacci

  “So what do you think we got here?” he asked as they walked up to Robie.

  “You tell us. Who owns this quarry?”

  Bender looked around. “Long time ago it was a company based in Nebraska. Then whatever stone they were hunting for here ran out.”

  “So no one’s been working it for a while?” said Reel.

  Bender shook his head. “Hell, it’s probably been decades.”

  “It backs up to the second Atlas silo site. A second site!” Robie added for emphasis. “Why didn’t you tell us about it? Did you know even about it?”

  “Yeah, most folks around here do. But I didn’t think it was relevant to anything. It was just an abandoned government site.”

  Robie said, “Why would somebody want to buy the site? And pay double what Lambert paid for the one he developed?”

  “I don’t know,” said Bender. “I didn’t even know somebody had bought it. But why are you so interested in it?”

  “There’s a door built into the rock wall about a hundred yards down that path. You can see where there’s a road cut through the trees.”

  “Hell, they cut roads all over the place up here when they were doing the quarrying. And I know the door you’re talking about.”

  “You do?” said Reel.

  Bender nodded. “When I was a kid me and my buddies would come up here. We weren’t stupid enough to dive down into the water at the bottom. There’s crap and stone and everything in there. That would be suicide. But we’d ride our dirt bikes up here.”

  “And the door?” persisted Robie.

  “There’s an old storage room in there.”

  “So you’ve seen it?” asked Reel.

  “When I was a kid, yeah.”

  “What was in there?”

  “Just crap. Old boxes, broken tools.”

  “How’d you get in?”

  “There was just an old padlock on it. We used a crowbar to pop it.”

  Robie handed him the night optics. “Come on. I think somebody might have upgraded security.”

  Robie led them back down the road and through the trees, drawing to a stop a hundred feet from the door.

  “Take a look and tell me if it’s changed from when you were a kid.”

  Bender put on the night optics and Robie powered them up.

  “Well?”

  “That door’s metal. The one when I was a kid was wood. And that lock looks pretty new.”

  “And pretty secure,” said Robie. “I recognize the lock on that door because my Agency uses something similar to secure its facilities. You’re not popping it with a crowbar or a stick of dynamite.”

  “So what does that mean?”

  “It means the purpose of that room has changed,” said Reel. “Tell us about the adjacent missile site.”

  “I don’t know much about it. It’s been abandoned forever. But nobody ever went near it. When we were kids we heard it was contaminated. You know, radiation. We didn’t want to start glowing in the dark. It wasn’t until after Roark built his out that anybody thought differently. And even then, we knew he’d spent a fortune cleaning the place up.”

  “Is there any way someone could have connected up that second missile site with whatever’s behind that door?” asked Robie.

  Bender rubbed his chin as he thought about that question. “Now that I think about it I remember Roark talking at a get-together at my mom’s about this site. He said he actually preferred it to the one he developed.”

  “Why?” asked Reel quickly.

  “It had more acreage for one thing. And he said it had more buildable space underground. So he could maybe sell more of those units.”

  “So more underground space presumably might mean that the site extends close to the ridge.”

  “Or, Robie, maybe it goes into the ridge,” suggested Reel.

  Bender said, “You know, that’s possible. And I remember that storage room from when I was a kid. It went really far back, but we never went that far in. No lights and too spooky.”

  “So it could be that with a little work a tunnel could have been dug connecting the two,” reasoned Robie.

  “What for?” asked Bender. “I mean if you bought the missile site you could use that door. Why mess with the hassle of connecting up with this place?”

  “The site is sort of out in the open. So you’d do that if you didn’t want anyone to know you were accessing the missile site. You’d come in this way instead and no one would be the wiser.”

  “But why all the secrecy?” asked Bender.

  Reel answered. “Well, if you’re bringing prisoners in here you wouldn’t want anyone to know.”

  “Wait a minute, you think those prisoners are being held in the missile silo?”

  “It would make sense of the drawing Walton left behind in the muzzle of his gun,” said Robie. “He obviously wanted to draw our attention to it.”

  “But, Robie, he asked to take a tour of Lambert’s silo,” Reel pointed out. “Not this one.”

  “He may not have known at which place they were being held. But if it were Lambert’s there would have to be a lot of people in on it, and that sort of widespread conspiracy just becomes too unrealistic. But that’s not the case with this Atlas site.”

  “And it could be that if he was brought here the other missing people were, too,” added Reel.

  Bender glanced in the direction of the door. “So what do we do? Get a warrant and search the place?”

  Robie shook his head. “That’ll take too long, and tongues seem to wag here, so word might get out and the prisoners, if they are in there, might get moved. Besides, I don’t even know if we have enough probable cause to get a warrant. What do you think, Bender?”

  The deputy looked uncertain. “Well, I’ve found judges around here aren’t too fond of the Fourth Amendment. They like people to be able to keep their property free from unnecessary searches. And I saw all the NO TRESPASSING signs when I was coming up here. That’s technically what we’re doing, trespassing.”

  “Well, that answers that,” said Reel.

  “Can you open that door?” asked Bender.

  Robie looked at Reel. She patted the duffel she had taken from the truck and said, “I brought some stuff that will handle it. The question is are we prepared for what might be on the other side of that door?”

  “We’re going to have to be,” said Robie. “Because the only other way in is through a blast door, and I don’t think you have anything in your duffel that will crack that one.”

  She looked at him. “So what about not liking bull runs?”

  “I think time is running out for Blue Man.”

  “Who?” said Bender.

  “Never mind,” said Reel, keeping her gaze on Robie.

  He held out his hand for the duffel and added, “And sometimes people are worth dying for.”

  Reel and Robie held gazes for a moment longer before she broke it off and handed him the duffel.

  “So let’s run with the bulls,” she said with finality.

  Chapter

  64

  ROBIE HELD POINT.

  Bender had his right flank.

  Reel covered them both with her long gun as they approached the door.

  Robie knelt in front of the lock and took out a small bag. He inserted the squirt end of a bottle into the lock and squeezed the plastic. Some liquid from the bottle was injected into the lock. He next ran a length of fuse into the lock and unspooled it onto the ground. He struck a match, lit the twine, and moved back as the fire moved along the fuse toward the lock. When it reached the lock, there was a flash of fire and a puff of bright, white light. A smoldering smell reached their noses.

  Robie crept forward, waited about sixty seconds, and, being careful not to touch the doorknob, inserted a tool into the lock and cranked it to the right. The doorknob turned easily.

  Bender joined him. “What was that stuff?”

  “A mixture of magnesium and some other elements. It burns at such a
high heat, over five thousand degrees, that it’s melted the inner workings of the lock.”

  “Damn. You guys have lots of tricks like that, I would imagine.”

  “I think we might need a few extra tonight.”

  Robie opened the door fully and shined his light inside, while keeping his gun trained in front of him.

  Bender did the same.

  Reel moved up to within a dozen yards of them, her gun making sweeps left and right.

  Robie and Bender stepped into the room and peered around.

  Bender had pulled out a powerful mag light and was making sweeps with it, too.

  The space was full of stuff, old boxes, crates, and rusted tools.

  “Looks like it did when I was a kid,” said Bender. “Are you sure you’re on the right track here?”

  “Keeping it the same here is intentional. It dissuades anybody with enough balls to breach that lock from thinking that anything has really changed. But they couldn’t hide the fact of the new door and the fancy lock. Nobody would go to that trouble to keep this crap secure.”

  “Down that way,” Bender said. “The room continues.”

  They made their way down a long, dark corridor. Unlike the room, this space was clear of debris.

  The walls were stone and had been smoothed out by whoever and whatever had managed to dig this tunnel.

  Reel had followed them in and was using her optics to see past the area of light.

  “There’s a door down there,” she said. “At the end. Rest of the way is clear.”

  They picked up their pace and reached it about ten seconds later.

  “It’s got mag locks,” said Robie, studying the metal door’s exterior. “I don’t see any surveillance cameras. I’m not sure why not. If I’d gone to the trouble of securing this tunnel like they had, I’d have some type of monitoring in place so I’d know if the place had been breached or not.”

  Bender looked around and said quietly, “Do you think there’s something else they’re using? Trip beams, maybe? We could have already triggered one of them.”

  “We could have,” said Robie. “Which means they may already know that we’re here. So let’s keep moving forward.”

  “Use the magnesium,” said Reel. “To breach the door. The magnesium solution should work.”

  Robie pulled out the squirt bottle, matches, and a length of fuse. He used the same process as before, then stepped back as the fire wound its way into the lock.

  The puff of brilliant white smoke occurred a few moments later.

  Robie used the same tool to open the door. A long, darkened tunnel confronted them.

  “It’s running right towards the missile site,” observed Robie.

  “You think it connects up?” said Bender.

  “I’m about to bet my life that it does,” replied Robie. He looked back toward Reel. “Things are probably going to start getting dicey at this point.”

  She nodded. “I expect they will.”

  The three of them started to move forward. The tunnel began to narrow substantially so that they had to walk single file along it.

  “Stay alert,” he whispered to Bender. He didn’t feel the need to tell Reel that.

  Bender nodded and gripped his pistol more tightly.

  They had traveled what seemed to Robie to be about a quarter mile when they came to yet another door.

  “Shit,” muttered Robie.

  There was no doorknob, only an electronic pad.

  “It’s a biometric reader,” he observed. “Like the one that Lambert uses to access his silo.”

  Reel drew closer and looked at it as Bender took a step back so he was behind the both of them.

  “Our magnesium brew won’t work on that,” noted Reel.

  “No, it won’t.” Robie felt the door. “Solid metal. I’m guessing three or four inches thick, steel hinges set right into the rock. We’d need an RPG round to make a dent.”

  “We’ve got one back in the truck,” said Reel.

  She looked back at Bender, who was staring at her, his gun pointed in front of him.

  “No!” screamed Reel, when she saw the red dot flicking around him. She launched herself but it was too late.

  The round slammed into the back of Bender’s head and stayed there.

  He stood there teetering in his boots for a second before toppling forward face-first, his pistol dropping from his dead hand.

  The door they were going to break into swung open, and ten guns were pointed at them along with blinding lights.

  Dolph emerged from behind the armed men.

  He smoothed down his uniform jacket and said, “I think this is where you lay your weapons down. Or we’d be perfectly fine with shooting you right here.”

  Robie and Reel laid their weapons on the ground.

  From down the tunnel they heard footsteps approaching.

  Out of the darkness a silhouette appeared.

  And then it emerged into a fuller, more solid form.

  Yet it was only when the person used a flashlight to illuminate her features that she became recognizable. The rifle with the laser scope and heated barrel from the just-fired round was held in her other hand. It had been the red dot from the scope that Reel had seen.

  Reel gasped, “You just killed your brother.”

  Patti Bender looked down at the body and said, “Actually, my half brother. So it really doesn’t count, does it?”

  Chapter

  65

  THE AIR WAS stale and warm, with a chemical odor permeating throughout.

  Robie and Reel sat in a small concrete block room behind a barred door. They had been stripped down to their underclothes, searched, and shackled. Their phones and weapons had been confiscated.

  “I’m sorry, Robie.”

  Robie glanced at her. “For what?”

  “I didn’t secure our rear flank.”

  “Well, considering we had about a dozen guns on our forward flank, I don’t think it mattered. If it’s anyone’s fault it’s mine. I did a bull run and screwed us.”

  “You didn’t have much choice.”

  “People always have choices. I made the wrong one. And now Bender is dead.”

  “I didn’t see Patti being in on this.”

  “Neither did I. But maybe it’s starting to make sense.”

  “How so?”

  Before he could answer, someone appeared at the doorway. It was Dolph.

  Robie looked up at him.

  Dolph said, “Well, there is justice after all, even for people like me. I had you as prisoners before and I do again. This time the result will be very different. There will be no Apostles to aid you.”

  Reel said, “So what’s the game, Dolph? Hiding out in an abandoned missile silo? Afraid to come to the surface and fight it out mano a mano? Going for the angle of the cowardly Nazi?”