End Game

by David Baldacci

  “It helps if you know your Greek mythology,” said Robie.

  “Come again?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “You’re right. Nothing matters for either of you anymore.”

  He led them to the edge of the quarry. There was something large lying on the ground with a tarp over it.

  Fitzsimmons lifted the tarp to reveal Bender’s body perched on what looked like a seesaw. They noted there were chains and weights wrapped around the corpse.

  “Now, the disposal method. I think you’ll find it relatively straightforward.”

  “Wait!”

  They all turned to see Patti Bender striding toward them.

  She didn’t look at Fitzsimmons, Robie, or Reel as she passed by.

  She knelt down next to her dead half brother. “Give me some privacy,” she said quietly.

  Fitzsimmons nodded at the guards, who grabbed Robie and Reel and hustled them away. Fitzsimmons slowly followed, glancing back twice at Patti.

  From a distance Robie and Reel watched as Patti gently touched Bender’s face and crossed herself. Robie could see her lips moving but couldn’t hear what she was saying.

  She finally rose and walked over to them. She had on dirty jeans, a compression Under Armour shirt, and a parka. A Glock rode in a holster on her hip. Her boots were dusty. Her hair was tied back with a rubber band.

  She studied the ground for a few moments before looking up at Robie.

  “I will never forgive you for this,” she said. She glanced at Reel. “Both of you.”

  Reel said, “I didn’t shoot your brother, so I don’t think forgiveness is my problem. I think it’s yours.”

  She slipped a knife out of a holder on the back of her belt and held it against Reel’s throat.

  Reel looked down at her, her features relaxed. “That’s the easy way, Patti. I would expect better from you after coming up with your drug empire.”

  “We did have a plan, Patti,” said Fitzsimmons nervously. “And I think we should carry it out.”

  Patti put her hand up to Fitzsimmons and he instantly fell silent.

  Robie noted that the two guards had stepped back and would not make eye contact with the woman. It was clear to Robie that Patti Bender and not Fitzsimmons was running the show and had the respect of the guards.

  Patti slid the blade along Reel’s throat, drawing a bubble of blood a centimeter from where Reel’s carotid wobbled at the surface.

  She smeared the drop of blood along Reel’s throat before putting the blade away.

  “You came here for the truth?” she said.

  “Only reason we came to this place,” said Reel.

  “You won’t find it. Truth doesn’t exist.”

  “Your partner here has already tried to wax philosophical with us. But we’re blue-collar types doing a job. No ivory towers need apply.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” said Patti. “When I say truth doesn’t exist, it’s a fact, not a theory.”

  “So does this mean you’ve been sampling some of your product, because I’m not following,” said Reel.

  “I loved Derrick even though we had different fathers.”

  “I really can’t believe that, since you murdered him.”

  “The moment you brought him here you killed him. My brother was the law. This place is not about the law.”

  “Meaning he would have exposed you and sent you to prison. You killed him to avoid that happening. Doesn’t sound like love to me. Sounds like every selfish crook I’ve ever come across.”

  “I did what I did so he wouldn’t find out what I’d done. I don’t care about prison. I’ve been living in one all my life. But I didn’t want Derrick to know this about me. I couldn’t have lived with that.”

  “Well, you made damn sure that he couldn’t live with that, either.”

  “Where are the others?” said Robie. “Walton and the others?”

  “They’re here,” said Patti. “They’re waiting.”

  “Waiting for what?”

  “For you, of course.”

  With that she turned and walked back into the tunnel.

  Fitzsimmons stirred and said, “Well, now you know. You will meet up with your friend, Mr. Walton.”

  “He’s Patti’s father, did you know that?” said Reel.

  “Perhaps I did and perhaps I didn’t.”

  “Is that what this is all about?” said Robie. “She has daddy issues?”

  “I’m a chemist, not a psychologist. And I don’t really care.” He shook his head and grimaced. “To think that all of this started because that idiot Lamarre saw something in the back of a van that he shouldn’t have seen and then started blabbing. Every day it seemed like we had one more person we had to silence. It was like a virus mutating.”

  “Well, sometimes the virus wins,” said Reel.

  “And sometimes it doesn’t,” replied Fitzsimmons. “The key is quarantine. And then finding a way to kill the contagion.”

  Fitzsimmons motioned to two of the guards, who came forward and lifted up one end of the seesaw. Now Robie and Reel could see that it was actually being used as a slide.

  Bender’s body zipped right down the board and then off it.

  They watched it fall over two hundred feet, where it hit the mucky water and then slipped under the surface.

  Fitzsimmons explained, “We always slit the lungs so they won’t inflate when the gas builds up as a result of decomposition. And of course the weights and chains serve to keep the body at the bottom. It’s quite deep down there. And impossible to see anything in the depths.”

  “Why do I think that’s not the first time you’ve done that?” said Reel. It was clear from the revulsion on her features that if she could have gotten to Fitzsimmons, he would be a dead man.

  “Well, it’s not.”

  “And I guess that’s where we’ll be ending up,” said Robie.

  “I normally leave that up to Patti. But be warned, though I can kill in cold blood, I’m actually simply a humble chemist and genuinely a nice person. She’s far more dangerous than she appears.”

  “So are we,” Reel muttered under her breath. “So are we.”

  Chapter

  67

  “DO YOU THINK Blue Man is dead?”

  Robie didn’t answer Reel’s query right away.

  They were back in the same cell.

  “I don’t think so. Patti said they were waiting for us. Not that I have any reason to believe her.”

  “So she figured we’d end up here as prisoners, too?”

  “She seems to be a long-range planner,” replied Robie.

  “Where do you think those prisoners are coming in from?”

  “From the little I could see behind the blue scrubs, they looked to be young and mostly Hispanic.”

  “Are they snatching them from their hometowns?”

  “Maybe they’re runaways or they came into the country illegally. That might make more sense. You start snatching kids from homes, there’re going to be a lot of questions and people looking for them.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  “They might have sold them a story of good-paying jobs and a new life before putting bags over their heads.”

  “Some life.”

  Robie leaned back against the cinderblock wall. “I’m not sure how good our lives are looking right now.”

  “Well, I don’t see too many options.”

  He said, “We have to wait. And adapt.”

  “Story of our lives. What’s Patti’s motivation, do you think? It’s not like she’s living this rich lifestyle. She’s still here in her dirty jeans and boots.”

  Robie shrugged. “I mentioned she might have daddy issues. Maybe that’s it.”

  “Blue Man didn’t even know he had a daughter.”

  “That’s what Claire told us. Maybe she told Patti something else. Or she might have discovered it on her own.”

  “But that couldn’t be why she went into a b
usiness like this,” pointed out Reel.

  “Like Dolph—or Fitzsimmons—said, I’m not a shrink. I don’t know. All I do know is that we’re in a tight spot with very few options.”

  “They’re not going to let us sit here long. We’ll be reported as missing at some point.”

  Robie said sharply, “By who? Both of the cops in this jurisdiction are out of commission.”

  “The Agency. When we don’t get back to them.”

  “We can’t count on that saving our lives.”

  “I’ve never counted on anyone else saving my life,” retorted Reel.

  Footsteps along the corridor alerted them that someone was coming. They both sat up straighter and stared expectantly at the barred cell door.

  Patti Bender appeared there. They both noted that her fingers were tapping the butt of her holstered Glock. Then she reached her hand out of sight and jerked on something.

  A moment later Blue Man was standing in front of them.

  His clothes were dirty, his hair unkempt, and his face unshaven. Yet his eyes were clear and alert and his manner calm and unflustered. Like them, he was shackled.

  Both Robie and Reel stood.

  Blue Man said, “It’s good to see you’re both still alive.”

  “I was about to say the same to you,” said Reel.

  “Stop talking, please,” Patti said quietly.

  Blue Man glanced at her, and Robie noted something in his eyes that he never thought he would see in his superior.

  Fear.

  Patti nodded at something out of their line of sight, and a guard appeared. He unlocked the door and Patti pushed Blue Man forward, causing him to stumble as he crossed the threshold. The door was locked after him.

  “It won’t be long now,” Patti said ominously. Then she disappeared.

  Blue Man wearily sat on the cot against the wall while Robie and Reel hovered in front of him.

  He looked up at them. “I trust London and Iraq went according to plan?”

  “Not precisely according to plan, at least for me,” said Reel. “But the mission was accomplished.”

  “We found your drawing in the gun muzzle,” said Robie. “Atlas. We were just a little slow on getting to your actual meaning.”

  Blue Man nodded. “I knew that was a long shot, but I didn’t have much time to consider alternatives.”

  “How did you figure out what was going on?”

  “I didn’t figure it all out—only enough pieces, I guess, to make people nervous.”

  “We know you spoke with JC Parry and Holly Malloy.”

  “JC is a good man, who knows a bit of my history. He came to me with this most incredible story of prisoners in hoods. That’s what started all of this.”

  “How did you get onto the silo?” asked Reel. “I mean this one, the second silo?”

  “I knew about the Atlas missile sites from growing up here. I knew there were two in the vicinity. By coming back here over the years, I knew that Roark Lambert had turned one into a doomsday safe haven for the affluent. But the other one had lain fallow all this time. But when Holly told me what Lamarre had told her, I started doing some digging. Where could you hide prisoners here? I knew of the neo-Nazis and white supremacists in the area. I knew of the Apostles, although they struck me as being rather innocuous.”

  Reel looked at Robie but neither of them spoke about King’s actually being an FBI undercover agent. They didn’t know if the cell they were in was being bugged or not.

  Blue Man continued, “But I couldn’t think of a reason why any of them would be bringing in prisoners. And they really didn’t have the facilities to discreetly keep a group of people against their will. Word would have eventually gotten out.” He paused. “But I had something else working to my advantage that perhaps others here didn’t. I knew from reports that had crossed my desk that somewhere in this general vicinity it was suspected that there was a large-scale illicit drug-manufacturing center. Both DEA and ICE had internally reported on it to us. Though we can’t operate domestically, the Agency still conducts joint task forces with our sister agencies. And there seemed to be an international element to this operation, which did bring it within our purview. But no one had been able to pinpoint the location in this country besides believing it was in a general six-state quadrant. That was far too large an area to do any type of concentrated search or investigation.”

  “Yes it is,” agreed Robie.

  “But one day I was taking a drive towards the old rock quarry. There are some good streams to fish in nearby. The quarry was in operation when I was growing up here, though it closed a long time ago now. But I had passed the second silo site on my drive, and it occurred to me for the first time how close the two sites were. I don’t know why I had never noticed that before, but now I did.”

  “It took us a while to make the connection too,” admitted Reel.

  “I had the benefit of having toured this facility several times on some of my trips back many years ago. It’s quite the labyrinth.”

  “We know you also toured Lambert’s place,” said Reel.

  Blue Man nodded. “I wasn’t sure what was going on or who was behind all this. I felt I had to look at all possible options. I knew Lambert through Claire. I got the tour so I could see the lay of the land. See if it was possible for them to be holding prisoners here. But it would have been problematic for Lambert to have prisoners at his silo. Too many people would know. This place is different. Thus, it didn’t take a great deal of conjecture to come up with a possible solution to the problem of where one keeps prisoners clandestinely.”

  “Did you know they were going to take you here when you left the clue in your gun?” asked Reel.

  “When I heard them coming, I thought they were going to either kill me or kidnap me.”

  “Have you seen the others? Lamarre or Parry? Valerie Malloy?”

  “The sheriff? She was taken?”

  “Just recently.”

  Blue Man shook his head. “I haven’t seen anyone. They’ve kept me in a cell by myself.”

  “Patti Bender shot and killed her half brother,” said Reel.

  Blue Man looked deeply shaken at her words. “Derrick is dead? Does…does Claire know?”

  “I doubt it. It just happened. They dumped his body in the quarry.”

  Reel looked closely at Blue Man. “Claire talked to us…about Patti. That she’s…she’s your daughter.”

  Neither one of them had ever seen Blue Man dumbstruck before. Neither had seen him out of control.

  Until now.

  He slumped over and put his head in his hands. A quiet sob escaped from his lips. “I never knew,” he said hoarsely. “Oh my God. Patti.”

  Reel sat down next to him and placed a supportive hand on his quivering shoulder. “That’s what Claire told us. And I don’t think Claire knows anything about what’s going on here.”

  Robie stared down at him. “We all have family issues, sir. You know that about us better than most.”

  Reel nodded as Blue Man slowly regained his composure and his gaze rose to meet Robie’s. “We do, some perhaps more than others.” He paused and took a deep breath and rubbed at his eyes. When he looked up the calm that they both had always associated with the man had returned. And his features seemed resolute. “I suppose you were sent out here to find me?”

  Reel nodded. “The Agency can’t lose you.”

  “Well, the Agency can’t lose you both, either. More so than me, actually. And so I’m very sorry that you two had to be brought into this.” He looked around at the cell and then down at his shackles. “They’re very well organized.”

  “Which means it won’t be easy,” replied Reel, reading his thoughts.

  “Did they show you what they’re doing here?” asked Robie.