End Game (14 page)

“And how’s that working for you?”

“I wasn’t supposed to tell him over the phone. It could only be in person.”

Jolaine slapped the steering wheel. “Goddammit, Graham, whatever she told you is the reason we’re running for our lives.”

“You don’t know that. Mom told me that the only way to escape alive was to follow the protocol.”

“What protocol?”

“I don’t know!” he shouted. “Okay? I don’t know what any of this is about.”

“But you do know something,” Jolaine insisted. “The man on the ground outside his car—”

He shouted, “3155AX475598CVRLLPAHQ449833 D0Z.”

Jolaine reared back in her seat. “What?”

“You asked me and I just told you,” Graham said. “That’s what’s on the piece of paper. That’s what Mom told me. Do you want to know the phone number, too?”

No, she didn’t. What kind of code—

“It’s completely random,” Graham said. “I don’t see any pattern, the repeats are insignificant. There’s no dictionary code that I can find, and while I was alone in the motel, I tried to find some kind of Bible code, but couldn’t. Did you know they have a free Bible in the nightstand?”

Jolaine wasn’t interested in nibbling at the Gideon bait. “Say the code again,” she said.

“Why? Would you know if I missed something?”

There was the petulance that she’d come to know so well over the years. But he also raised a good point. “You mean, you really can remember all of that.”

He repeated the code. “Ask me in three hours or five days, and it’ll still be the same.”

“How?”

“The shrinks at school say it’s my
gift.
” The way he leaned on that word told her that he considered it to be anything but. “I just remember every friggin’ thing. Numbers are easiest and names are hardest.”

Jolaine processed all of that. At least, she tried to process it. “So, it’s numbers and letters,” she said. “What do they mean?”

“I don’t know!” His voice squeaked with frustration. “And I swear to God I’m telling the truth. I asked her, and she told me not to worry about it. She said I didn’t need to know what it meant. I only needed to remember it. So, now I’ve got this shit in my head, and a
protocol
to follow—whatever that means—and people are trying to kill me. Are we having fun yet?”

Something about his delivery made her believe him. He seemed genuinely bewildered by it all.

“What did the wounded guy say to you?” Graham asked.

Jolaine sensed the turnaround was an honesty check, and she wondered if the boy had done it on purpose.

“He said if you follow the protocol, all of this will end.”

Graham shrank in his seat. “So, I should have just talked with him. But you told me—”

“Don’t draw the wrong conclusion,” Jolaine said. “I’m not sure you did the wrong thing, and I’m
really
not sure that sharing that code—whatever it means—would do anything to take us off whatever hit lists we’re on.”

“What are you saying?”

Jolaine sighed again as she weighed the propriety of going where this conversation was leading them.
Screw it. In for a dime . . .

“I don’t want you to panic about what I’m going to say—”

“Oh, crap.”

“—or even overly stress. But think about it. Those numbers and letters—that code—are what the people attacking us want. If it’s worth killing for, then it’s worth killing to protect after it’s revealed.”

“I don’t understand.”

“
Think
,” she said. “You possess a code that people
really
want to have. That’s motivation to keep you alive. But once you reveal the code to the people who want it, that motivation goes away.” She pulled up at a stop sign, came to a full halt, and then moved on. Little towns were famous for speed traps and overzealous cops.

Graham shook his head. “No, that can’t be right. Those people in the parking lot a few minutes ago weren’t trying to save me. They were trying to kill me.”

“I’m not sure that’s true,” Jolaine said. “I think they may have been there to kidnap you. I think we surprised them by shooting back. In fact, I’m convinced of it.”

“So, what does that mean?” Graham asked. “To us, that is.”

Jolaine considered the question. “It means that we can’t trust anyone about anything.” She wasn’t sure that she could connect the dots verbally, but she gave it a try. “Whatever the code does—I assume it unlocks something secret and important, else why have a code in the first place?—it makes sense to me that it was as important to your parents to have it as it was for the shooters to guarantee that they didn’t get it.”

“Or maybe the shooters wanted it for themselves,” Graham offered.

That was good. He was on the same page as she. “Extrapolating out, then,” Jolaine continued, “whichever side wins in the struggle, the other side is going to want to destroy the code.”

Graham leaned his head back into the headrest and closed his eyes. “And the code lives in my head,” he said. He lolled his head over to look at Jolaine. “This is really, really bad, isn’t it?”

A
t this point in monitoring an operation, not much could pull Venice’s attention from her team’s radio traffic. The alert bell on her computer was one of them. The bell meant that based on the parameters she had established to track the actions of Jolaine Cage and Graham Mitchell, ICIS had found something worth reporting. She pulled up the screen, and her heart skipped. The police had been dispatched to a shoot-out in the parking lot of the Hummingbird Motel in Napoleon, Ohio. Multiple reports to the emergency operations center of machine gun fire with people dead in the street. Police were on their way.

This was not the time to interrupt Jonathan with such a new development—if ever there was a time for uninterrupted concentration, it was when he was about to crash a door—but she needed more details.

Generally speaking, ICIS ran five to ten minutes behind real time. It was a great way to dial in to fairly obscure events, but when something was this high profile, local television news was often the fastest route to a thorough overview. Reporters might not get the nuances correct in the early moments, but these days every station with more than ten kilowatts of power had its own fleet of helicopters, and they would shoot each other out of the sky to air the first live feed of a crime scene.

A CBS affiliate had a bird near the scene. Other networks had franchises in the area, but she’d long ago hacked the code to access the live feeds for CBS—their video was transmitted in real time, in unedited form—so whenever possible, she went there first.

At any given moment, dozens of live feeds flooded news networks from all over the world. They didn’t just beam from their own camera operations, either. Newsrooms monitored the feeds from every competitor, as well as those from Al Jazeera and BBC, and God only knew how many other news organizations. That required a fair amount of sifting, but she’d done this enough times before that she made fairly quick work of it.

ICIS dinged again. Police units were on the scene, and they confirmed six dead, with several of the motel guests unaccounted for. Officers were in the process of interviewing witnesses.

The no-coincidences rule lived on. Venice already knew who was on the other side of that gunfight, and because the original reports made no mention of a wounded child—always the headline, even for cops—she knew that at a minimum, Graham was well enough to not to have died on the spot.

The video feed she’d selected showed images from too far away as the news chopper approached the scene and the cameraman sharpened his focus.

Venice wondered if the police had connected the same dots that she had, that the suspected child abuse call from the previous night was linked to this incident.

If so, it hadn’t gone up on ICIS yet. She assumed that she was ahead of the police, at least for now. The thought brought her comfort, if only for the bragging rights.

In her ear, she heard Jonathan’s voice say, “The security plan is hot now.” Without looking, she tapped the button on the top of the digital timer that would count down seven minutes.

She keyed the mike on her radio. “Speak up, Big Guy.”

“Right here.”

She turned back to her computer screens while Digger and Boxers discussed the logistics of their entry plan. First, she pulled up the police report from the suspected pedophile incident to verify the room number where it occurred. She wasn’t sure yet what to do with that tidbit of information, but she’d learned over the years that information collected one tidbit at a time eventually combined to be a chunk of useful stuff.

The news feed on her other screen had settled down to something viewable. She saw two SUVs arranged in a kind of haphazard formation in the middle of the motel’s parking lot. Their doors were all open, and bodies lay on the ground next to the vehicles. As was frequently the case with the early moments of video news collection, the camera operator zoomed in as tightly as he could on the faces of the victims and their wounds. These were the more prurient details that the general public would never see, and she wondered if newsroom personnel secretly grooved on the gore.

Venice had hoped that the location of the victims relative to the PCs’ motel room would provide some insight, but that turned out to be a disappointment. The layout of the place was such that about half of the rooms were all more or less equidistant from any one spot in the parking lot.

So, she thought, what could she do with the room number before the police could? What would they want to check? Obviously, they’d do all the physical forensics stuff—fingerprints, DNA, et cetera—but that had to be done on-site. What could she do from—

“The phone.” She said it aloud and grinned. She could check the phone records! Okay, it was a long shot because they’d be out of their minds to use a hotel phone. But in the years she’d worked with Jonathan, she’d lost track of the number of forehead-smack dumb things people had done. There was always a chance.

Accessing said records could be a challenge, but what was life without the occasional challenge?

Jonathan didn’t even bother with the knob. He knew at a glance that the lock was demolished, that the door was held in place only by inertia. With his weapon poised, he gently shouldered the door open and let it drift in of its own momentum. Elsewhere in the house, presumably from somewhere in the back, he heard a giant crash and knew that Boxers had taken a less subtle approach.

“I’m in,” Big Guy said in Jonathan’s ear.

“Me, too,” Jonathan said. “Report everything you see.”

“How about what I smell?” Boxers said. “I don’t see any flies yet, but they can’t be too far behind.”

Jonathan smelled it, too, and it was a stench unique to death. Sweet in the most awful, perverted form of the term—like rotten meat, but with hints of shit and piss. To the uninitiated, it was a smell that triggered a gag reflex. Sadly, Jonathan thought, he’d smelled it often enough that it was no more offensive than charred wood, gun oil, or any of the dozens of other pungent smells that were part of his professional world.

Dead was dead. If no one touched a corpse, it would eventually turn to dust right where it lay, never posing another threat to anyone. What
was
a threat, however, was whatever person or thing had caused the dead person to die.

Jonathan knew that the bad guy was already gone in this case. The strength of the death smell made it certain that the killings had occurred hours ago. Still, he refused to lower his guard. In his experience, complacent operators died younger than paranoid ones.

The house showed no sign of violence, at least not yet. The owner of the place was clearly of significant means, though the interior was far more impressive than the exterior. Somehow, what appeared to be maybe twenty-five hundred square feet from the outside felt more like five thousand once he was in. Maybe it was all the marble and polished wood. Certainly, this was not the home of a man who wished to fly under the radar. In Jonathan’s world, plain vanilla equated to survivability.

“The foyer is clear,” Jonathan said as he swept the area with his pistol. Without looking, he used his foot to push the front door closed again. Behind closed curtains, the lights were on, so the main floor remained brightly lit. Did that mean that the violence here happened at night?

“I’m stepping into the main hall,” Boxers said. Jonathan heard it simultaneously over the radio and through reverb against the walls. That was Big Guy’s way of making sure Jonathan didn’t shoot him.

“I’m checking the front rooms,” Jonathan said. The first room to the left off the marble circle was the dining room. Keeping his weapon in play, he stepped in and pivoted like a gun turret, his .45 poised and ready to shoot. No targets showed themselves. “Dining room’s clear,” he said.

Beyond the dining room lay a butler’s pantry and beyond that, he assumed, a kitchen. He heard Boxers moving around in there, so Jonathan stayed to the front and crossed the foyer to what he imagined they called a living room. Maybe a parlor in this part of the world. A sofa and two chairs flanked a very traditional fireplace. It, too, was clear, and he announced it as such right after Boxers declared the kitchen to be clear of bad guys.

Jonathan returned to the central hallway to head deeper into the house. “I’m coming your way, Big Guy,” he said.

The death stench skyrocketed as he passed the massive stairway to the second floor, causing him to pause and look around more. Where the hell was it coming from? He saw no blood on the floor, no signs of a struggle.

He moved on. Past the stairway, the foyer gave way to a cross hall, where Jonathan and Boxers joined together to clear a warren of rooms that showed no signs of people or violence. As time went on, Jonathan felt progressively safer. He didn’t reholster the .45, but he eased his stance to low-ready.

“I believe this is what we call a McMansion,” Big Guy said. “Or what you would have called the servants’ quarters growing up.”

They found a back stairway to the second floor, climbed it, and explored the bedrooms.

Up here, things turned ugly. There were no signs of struggle in the master bedroom, but the other two bedrooms were wrecks. Both bore the standard décor and detritus of mid-grade children, one a boy and one a girl. Covers were strewn across the floor, as if their occupants had been dragged out of bed. In the boy’s room, the entire contents of the top of the dresser—a lamp, a television, a bunch of action figures—had been pulled to the floor. In Jonathan’s mind, he could see a kid trying to grab hold of the dresser and being pulled along anyway.

Boxers made a growling sound.

“Yeah,” Jonathan agreed.

Beyond the signs of violence, and a couple of spots that might have been blood on the walls and the carpet, the second floor was empty. They holstered their weapons more or less in unison and headed back to the first floor via the main stairs. Here, the putrid smell was at its worst.

Jonathan stopped. “Where’s the basement?” he asked. “I never saw steps to the basement.”

“Maybe there isn’t one,” Boxers said, though clearly he didn’t believe that to be true.

“Gotta be,” Jonathan said. “I walked on those floors down there. Those hardwoods are not on a slab.”

“Scorpion, Mother Hen,” Venice’s voice said in his ear. Scared the shit out of him. “There is definitely a basement.”

The two men exchanged smiles and continued to the first floor. “Found the building plans, did you?” he said, stealing her thunder.

“I did,” she said. “According to the drawings, there’s a door to the basement in the wall under the curved part of the main staircase.”

“And to think we missed something so obvious,” Boxers said.

“That was sarcasm, wasn’t it?” Venice said.

“Yeah, just a little bit.”

On the main level again, Boxers and Jonathan stood together at the spot where the door should be, but a decorative bench sat crosswise at the spot, under a huge painting of red flowers against a black background. The painting was maybe five feet wide by eight feet tall, and now that he looked at it—really
looked
at it, as opposed to noticing it through his peripheral vision—Jonathan thought that it looked out of place.

“Damn, that’s a big painting,” he said.

“Almost big enough to be a door, isn’t it?”

Together, they dragged the bench out of the way to gain better access, and saw why the bench was there in the first place. It disguised the bottom two feet of what was most definitely a door.

Jonathan ran his fingers down the back side of the left edge frame, expecting to find some kind of latch, but when none was there, he pulled. He felt some give, so he pulled harder. On the third tug, he heard a
thunk,
and the picture floated away from the wall, suspended by a recessed hinge on the right-hand edge.

“Look what you did,” Boxers said.

“The door is masked by a painting,” Jonathan said for Venice’s benefit.

That door led to a second door immediately behind it, but the second door was locked.

“Step away,” Boxers said. “I can open that.” He took a preparatory step back, prepared for a kick.

“Stop!” Jonathan said, raising his hand. “Look.” He’d found the buttons for the elevator, recessed into the jamb. This was definitely a custom-built job, much larger than most household elevators.

Boxers looked disappointed that he didn’t get to kick anything. They both drew their pistols again.

The instant Jonathan pushed the button, the elevator began to hum, and the floor vibrated. Together, through shared instinct, the two men flanked the door. It never made sense to stand in front of a closed door.

“We’re going off VOX,” Jonathan said, and he flipped the appropriate switch on his radio. This was a time of high concentration. He didn’t need the distraction of knowing that he was broadcasting live.

Jonathan could tell from the hissing of the mechanism that the elevator operated on hydraulics, and that the basement was either very deep, or the elevator moved very slowly. A bump announced the car’s arrival on the first floor.

“How do you want to handle it?” Boxers asked.

“You pull and I’ll shoot,” Jonathan said.

Since Boxers was on the hinge side of the door, it made sense that he would nab the knob and pull it toward himself while Jonathan took a position in front of the expanding opening. Jonathan prayed that all he’d see was empty elevator car.

His prayers were answered. But the stench of decay, driven by the breeze of the opening door, hit him like a wall. Blood smears painted the floor of the car. And when he looked behind him, back into the foyer, he could see evidence that someone had cleaned blood from the floor out there.

Boxers recoiled from it. “Ah, shit. I’m gonna have nothing but nightmares, aren’t I?”

With a growing sense of dread, Jonathan led the way into the elevator car, closed the door, and pressed the down button, triggering another bump and another hum. Jonathan found himself breathing through his mouth as they descended.

“I don’t expect to find any threat,” Jonathan said. “But—”